A/N: Hello, and welcome to the final one-shot in this series. Yes, you read that correctly- WE'RE HERE, BITCHES. PRAISE THE LORD AT LONG LAST THE END IS NIGH. Now, we still have to keep this in perspective- it's me, so this last fic will probably be, oh, approximately 12 million words long. So if you're not ready for the series to be over, sigh a little in relief and think about how many ridiculous updates you still have coming your way. If you think I have dragged this out way too long but you're still here because Klaroline or gay sex or these bitchin' author's notes, sigh a little in exasperation, pinch the bridge of your nose, and maybe get a drink.
The title is from Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', one of my favorite poems.
Rebekah is dancing in Giselle; my descriptions are based on the Royal Ballet version. I picked through an inordinate amount of the internet trying to get a timeline of which ballets might have been performed in 1916 Russia and pretty much came up with shit all, so I settled on Giselle because it is an awesome ballet, and also because it was first performed in 1841 and the choreography we see today was staged by Marius Petipa during the late 1800s/early 1900s in St. Petersburg (here named as Petrograd; the name was changed during WWI because St. Petersburg was felt to be too German), so since the Russians were responsible for its revival, I figured it was a pretty decent choice. Also, my sister may have rolled her eyes and said I was being way too much of an anal freak about trying to hunt down exact dates on early 19th century ballet performances and to just goddamned pick one.
The play Kol is 'auditioning' for is Julius Caesar.
Also, shout out to Cindy, my favorite engineer, for the many IM conversations re: our Enzo headcanons (and most importantly: our Enzo/Klaus headcanons).
Let's kick this off.
2014, Cairo
He looks well-fed, and handsome, does Nik. The systematic oppression of the masses always did perform wonders for his complexion.
The sun, in its most dramatic throes, touches one of the fortress' turrets, and for a moment suffers Christ-like impalement; it oozes slowly down the mortar into the water. On Nik's head, the remains of it relax in a temporary coronation.
He puts his numb hands in his pockets.
He could say something snappy: he could do that. To what do I owe the pleasure, darling; and the players assume once more their cues, and all is right with his brother's smile.
From here, his brother's heartbeat is audible. It beats not dissimilarly to his human homecomings, when with fresh-salted beard, and newly-pinked sword he'd brace for a moment before the arms came open: one day, you could see on his face, father is going to win, and the younger brother who circles him as any body orbits its sun will look, and see, and turn away.
You could almost say he's regretful.
You could almost say he's frightened.
Nik, Nik, Nik, he thinks, not with derision.
He's tired.
He's waited too long.
He is, he thinks, at long and painful last, done.
Nik steps forward.
He turns round, and walks off into the sunset.
Kol lets himself into her hotel room while she is idly perusing some magazine or another she nicked from Caroline's room; she has hardly noted the cover of it.
She turns three pages, very leisurely, before she deigns to notice him.
He looks terrible.
You can see, for perhaps the first time, he isn't nineteen at all: there is dust and death on his shoulders. The eyes are bagged as though he has for each of his thousand years suffered every mortal affliction and the body has with clock-like stubbornness merely ticked on. There are at least three days of stubble on the face which generally he shaves smooth; she suspects his boyfriend prefers it that way.
He sits down on the edge of her bed.
She has for long enough toiled this mortal coil to know when a moment is one which is destined for the schoolbooks and when it is simply another of Time's belt notches.
There's something denser about it: the precise slump of his shoulders and the duck of his head and the shush of the air through his nostrils which ought not to sound any differently than normal but has, indeed, an unusual resonance.
The magazine shivers in her hands.
Through the hotel window, Alexandria begins to live in a way which a city does not truly know till the sky has shut itself off like a snuffed lamp and from the shops and the cars and the barges which litter the river blaze artificial sunrise; the curtains are briefly displaced by a fleeting breeze.
"I don't want to be a part of this family anymore," Kol tells her.
She smooths the pages in her hands, and lifts her chin loftily. "Welcome to my world. You'll get over it."
But he turns to her with his bloodshot eyes and the bangs in disarray on his suddenly lined forehead and oh, Nik what have we done to him, she wants to know: you cannot save that many pieces for yourself and expect forever unending reserves.
She's forgotten how to reach him.
So he runs his hand over his face alone, he says, "Nik's here", he says: "I think it's too late, Bekah."
He was waiting, you see.
And you just-
He doesn't need to finish that.
"You're not serious, Kol," she says in her meanest voice, because she knows he is. "You never are."
"You're right," he replies hoarsely, and smiles the way a dying man might. "That's me, darling."
She closes the magazine slowly.
He lowers his eyes, so she can see just the thick lashes tipped in chestnut, and she remembers how he did that when a thousand years ago that little cow stomped his poor human heart and he couldn't let you see it, because it wasn't his lot to be sad.
Some men are natural jesters, Nik said once, and ruffled his hair affectionately. They are not made to feel life profoundly, as his lesser contemporaries suffer it; for him there is but shallow comprehension, and superficial passions.
"I'm tired. Can I stay here for the night?" he asks, and she reaches out to touch his hair and something in his face shifts and she thinks he's going to cry, but of course he doesn't- of course he doesn't, not Kol, to whom that right never belonged, he just lays his head down in her lap like he's given up.
Tim finds him in one of the Montazah Palace's alcoves two, perhaps three days later, morosely sighing over what mediocrity he has managed to fish out of the abysmal depths of this twenty-first century cesspit of illiteracy.
Shakespeare was, himself, an uneducated nonentity, peddling to the masses; and still his pen managed a staggering oeuvre yet to be replicated. And the masses of today, darlings, cannot even manage an unmangled recitation of his tamed first folios, gently dumbed by accommodating scholars.
Tim takes the cigarette packet out of his pocket, and taps it twice on his palm; the cigarette he shakes loose is inserted slowly between his lips, and not lit. In the mute language of a man who lets most others do the talking for him, it means he understands the delicacy of the moment, and the layer which is underneath his smile. Roughly, in Tim Speak: Sorry you're hurting, lad. I'll just tiptoe round it, then, if your dignity is all you've left.
"Klaus is back, then," he says rather than asks, and takes out his lighter.
"Yes."
"Do you want to leave?"
"No. Do you?" He doesn't look away from his 'actors'.
"Ah. Nah. I said I didn't want him to have that sort of control." He offers the cigarette.
"That's a crap brand, darling. No thanks. I have better taste."
"Ah, well, fuck yourself." He blows a long ring toward the gardens. "Have you been here the whole time?"
"How else am I supposed to whip them into shape? It's quite the process, let me tell you." He gestures with his hand to one of the men lined up before him. "From the top, darling."
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," the most promising of them begins.
He leans back against the railing beside Tim, who presses their shoulders companionably together.
"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus hath told you that Caesar was ambitious; if it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar answer'd it."
He wrinkles his nose; the man fumbles the next line.
"No," he says, and seizing him by the throat, tosses him over the railing; his broken neck ends his scream.
"Jaysus, that was awful," Tim says, flicking his cigarette after the man. He thrills just a little at that distortion of Christ's name; he remembers how it crept round beneath that lousy American accent, and from time to time reared itself when he was particularly worked up in either bed or anger, and you could hardly from that international muddle parse what he was saying.
If he were to confess that he finds the poor grammar Elijah despises, and the slangy brogue at which Rebekah sneers (colloquialism is, after all, a mark of the peasantry) rather cute, he would appreciate the confidence such sentimentality begs.
You don't know how it might be used against him.
He throws up his hands. "I can't get Antony cast. I'm going to have to start all over. He's the absolute hinge upon which this play swings, let me tell you, darling."
"Well, let me propose something less frustrating. How about you come to the club, and we'll have ourselves a night? I'll even drink enough to dance in public. On me mother's grave."
He leans into Tim's shoulder, cocking his head at the three remaining men from which, let's be honest, he's not going to wring a performance approaching even the lowest barrel bottom of acceptable. "That's a fine line, darling. If I don't get you drunk enough, you'll sit at the bar and laugh at me. If I get you too drunk, you'll be preoccupied with giggling."
"Ah, come on. Could we call it something else? Manly guffawing. The fuck-it chortling of a warrior making his final charge."
"Well, it's not any of those things, I'm afraid to say. It's very…what's the word…ah, yes. Womanish."
"Do you have to poke at me frail masculinity?"
He smiles sideways at Tim, and motions the three men forward. "Yes." And to the men: "Jump off the railing, please. I can't be bothered with you anymore."
They land noisily; one does not die upon impact, and in garbled Arabic begins to shriek about his immeasurable pain. It's rather annoying.
Tim looks at him with a sigh, and leans over the railing to finish him off with his pistol. "What do you say?"
He looks down at his hands, pursing his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches as the breeze dishevels that tuft of hair which is ever present beneath Tim's cap.
"On your mother's grave, Timothy," he says, sternly.
Tim keeps his word.
Someone puts on 'Ballroom Blitz', and he whirls Tim through a hyperactive approximate of the lindy which destroys three tables and one unfortunate couch, but management is not terribly arsed about it; he assumes a vampire clientele has never been particularly sympathetic to the décor.
Tim is laughing so hard he nearly falls over, but when they unclasp hands he does mirror him reasonably well; they acquit themselves like coordinated morons, grab for one another again, and Tim spins him twice under his arm, which is far easier than trying to get his own arm over Ireland's own lanky Goliath.
Caroline is thrown into the mix by Enzo, who tosses her with a screech to him; he catches her round the waist, and spins her twice. Tim and Enzo wildly spin and dip one another; Tim's hat is sacrificed to this drunken carousing, but rescued by Caroline, who wears it for her solo. It's a new style, he assumes, not terribly innovative, or in much necessity of actual skill, but it does involve particular emphasis on her very nice ass, which thrusts back and forth with no concern for rhythm whatsoever.
"It's called booty popping!" she yells over the music, and tries to show Tim how to do it.
"No, no, no, no," he laughs, staggering back with a shake of his head. "I'm not doing that."
"You promised to make a jackass of yourself, darling," he points out.
"And I've done that," Tim insists, pointing at him; his depth perception has been slightly compromised by the alcohol he never has been able to carry very well, and he nearly has his eye put out. "I've well fulfilled me end of the bargain, Kol Mikaelson."
He pulls Tim closer by the finger. "You can never make too much of a jackass out of yourself, in this age of instant youtube gratification."
"Fuck you, anyway. I've already one embarrassing video floating round the internet." Tim tries to kiss his nose; he shuts his eyes so the inebriated lips graze lid rather than ball.
"You idiot," he says, and his fondness for a moment seals his throat, and because the dumb smile they share gathers in him this hard knot of sudden nerves and there is inside him the brimming over of things he is not often allowed and only half understands, he breaks the moment by seizing Tim's hands and jolting him through a dizzying reenactment of the third class dance from Titanic. Tim is, of course, on account of his indignant hatred, made to dance Leonardo DiCaprio's role; they level three other couples who are only foundlings anyway, and could be shattered at a blow from Tim's pinkie, so there's hardly any concern over the resultant brawl.
They have to nearly carry one another back to the hotel, and keep stopping to kiss in between bouts of pissed laughter, which shocks passersby into momentary statuary. It is all mostly uncoordinated spit at this point; Tim finds this hysterical, and, after wiping drool from the dimple in his chin, smears it across his mouth, working it in heartily.
He bites Tim's hand.
They destroy, as far as he can recall, at least one building corner with a playful shoving match; he is afterward conveyed to the hotel by piggyback, Tim loping diagonally toward the hotel and by a wide foot missing the front door upon his first attempt at entry.
"You've got to- you've got to turn sideways," he squeezes out in between laughs.
"What? Have you got fatter, all of a sudden?" Tim demands, bouncing him, but obliging, and trying to navigate by his peripheral vision as they stagger inside and he attempts the stairs sideways, nearly falling.
"No. I just wanted to see you be an absolute jackass about it," he says, and leans out to wrap his arm round the banister of the staircase, just to fuck with Tim.
Tim yanks; the banister creaks menacingly, and splinters. "Ohohohohohohoh, fook!" Tim yells, his drunken laughter awkwardly stuttering the first word. "Fuck!" he yells again, and staggers into the wall.
The manager appears at the bottom of the stairs to smile painfully, and to convey, in his nearly perfect English and his politest tone, that the other guests would prefer their two a.m. slumber blissfully uninterrupted.
"Sorry; sorry," Tim apologizes, too loudly.
"He's not sorry," he stage whispers.
"I think we're going to have sex now, the lad and I. Will that bother them?" Tim asks in complete earnestness, and he nearly pitches off his back, he's laughing so hard.
"You're really fucking drunk, darling."
The manager blinks.
"Oh, shit. We're going to be caught out for homosexuality now, aren't we? You know, I didn't mean that. I just, I am very drunk. He's right. I don't even like men. Breasts." He points at the man; his hat slips down into his eyes. "Breasts, yeah, that's what I like," he continues, tipping his head up so he can see the man rather than sliding the brim back out of his eyes.
"No, no, Tim, it's all right. We're from America," he tells the manager, remembering to sound as inbred as possible. "It's legal there now. Like he and I could get, like, married. Even if we were brothers."
"We're not brothers. Do you mind it if we're not brothers? And what the fuck are you talking about? You can't get married if you're brothers."
"Yes you can. How else do you explain that Honey Boo Boo show? Inbreeding, darling. It's what's for dinner. Or something like that."
Tim's accent has thickened so he can tell the manager is having trouble following him. "Look, I'm sorry about this. This Bombay shitehawk- you know, I'm wrote off the map, let me tell you. The craic, though, that was fuckin' ninety. But me friend- me friend, let me emphasis -emphasize- I'm not, you know, we're not, humping the beast's backs. Sure you don't need to be after ringing the coppers or anything like that."
"It's 'making the beast with two backs', darling."
"Right." Tim pats his head. "That's what I said. Anyway," he says, so loudly the manager flinches back a bit, "we're going. I'm sorry. Tell anybody I woke up, I'm sorry. And tell them we're not brothers. I'm Catholic, like, you see, and I have enough things I have to confess."
"You haven't confessed in years, darling."
"That's true," Tim concedes, and with a shake of his head the manager slinks off to leave them careening up the rest of the stairs. He is beginning to sober; Tim is still in that particularly suggestible state of drunkenness, and is, with impressively little prompting, goaded into a rather nice rendition of 'Fuck You, I'm Drunk.' He is sure the other guests will applaud this skilled if not ideally timed performance.
"That's very nice, Tim," he says as the door is fumbled open and he slides at last off Tim's back. "Are you trained?"
"Oh, yeah. I was in a choir, didn't you know?"
"No; I'm not sure I've ever heard you sing before, actually." He pushes Tim back onto the bed, and leans over to take off his boots. One of the uncoordinated hands makes a grab for his collar; he deftly dodges it.
"Aren't we going to make beasts?"
"Not right now, darling. I'm sobering up. We'll wait twenty minutes or so, till you've metabolized your evening. I wouldn't want to take advantage of you. Or have you vomit on me."
"I want you to take advantage of me," Tim insists, but flops the hands back on the bed beside him, and consents to have his boots untied and slipped off, taking down his suspenders and untucking his shirt. The vest is unsnapped one-handed. "Fuck," he blurts out. "I forgot it's not a snap. I've just fucked all me buttons." He flings an arm up over his eyes, and sighs. "Jaysus, I am drunk."
He laughs and crawls up the bed to sit beside Tim's head, leaning back on one elbow and with his other hand brushing some of the hair from Tim's forehead. "If it's any consolation, you're a very entertaining drunk."
"Thanks a million." Tim grabs the hand from his forehead; there is a wet kiss placed on his wrist.
"Why don't you nap it off? I'll sit with you."
"Ah, I can't; I'm wired."
"Do you want me to read to you?"
"Would you?" Tim asks, and the head shushes across the sheets to re-position itself in his lap. "Your voice always puts me to sleep."
"To quote this one very eloquent man I know: fuck you." He leans over the side of the bed, careful not to disrupt Tim, and from the rucksack Tim has left, as Caroline would lament, like a 'freaking pig' randomly on the floor, he unearths the first book his hand alights upon. There are two generically pretty men on the cover, the one with his smooth chest bared to the heavens, and his shorn hair gentled by an obliging wind, so that he is dashing rather than disheveled.
He clears his throat with a theatrical ah-hem. "'Do you want me to mount you now?' Evan asked," he reads, and Tim bursts out laughing.
"It's like he's a fucking horse. Do you want me to mount you now, Kol Mikaelson? Give me a neigh, would you, there's a good lad," Tim says in an absurdly low voice.
"You have to do the sound effects, Tim."
He whickers obediently, snorting rather ungracefully in his mirth.
"That was terrible. Anyway: Adam opened his mouth to say no, but he didn't say that, couldn't say that. What he said was, 'Yes. Now. Yes. Hell, yes.' Swiveling his hips, Evan slid his linen covered cock around the outer borders of Adam's bulge, but not quite touching." He cocks his head at the book. "So he's not touching him, he's just…drawing an invisible box round Adam's cock with his own cock? I don't believe I've ever tried that one."
"Oh, I've heard the lads just go crazy over it. There's nothing sexier than invisible cock boxes." Tim tilts his head back and laughs up at him.
He flips forward a few pages. "Here we go: Then Evan tilted his head while his eyes blazed a near brilliant blue, caressing Adam's cock as he thrust out his tongue and licked the air, once, twice, three times." He flicks his tongue in imitation. Tim groans exaggeratedly. He sneaks a hand under the shoulder where he knows Tim is most ticklish, and gets a yelp and a "Fuck off!" out of him.
They slap at one another for a moment, and then he leans back against the headboard, and pages his way through one atrocity after another in pursuit of the best of them all.
"I love you," Tim says into the silence, and he freezes.
The blue eyes stare soberly up at him from beneath the brim of the cap. He thinks, somehow, in this Egyptian summer, his hands have died that impersonal demise of frostbitten January; the pages close sans sensation on his fingers.
He reaches down and slowly takes off Tim's hat.
There's a small scar next to his left eyebrow; you hardly ever see it, beneath this permanent fixture of battered tweed. He touches it with the tips of his fingers, and lets the rest of his hand settle back against the warm forehead.
"I know you're not comfortable with that. I just thought I'd say it this once, with your brother back."
This silly, drunken twit.
But, ah, yes, the Return of Nik, upon which the whole world turns, and the grasses themselves feverishly breathe not, and the desert winds cease to sigh. Nik who divides Time, Nik who divides affections, Nik who is the hallowed keeper of Before and Beyond, who walks his light snowfall steps to the nape of the neck and there whispers his sacred arrival.
Nik who was, for both boys who took their first tottering steps from his arms, All and Sundry.
He forgets, sometimes, Tim must once have loved him too.
With the flawed worship of a child, surely, who knows anything, twenty-one and freshly dead, but you reach out for what you can.
And do you still think it's nice, love, it isn't something which is dangled and torn away, you don't win it after all the long wars of human fickleness have passed and passed again, and lose it to a random twist of temper?
This is what he always feared, darling.
Nik isn't really his brother anymore.
When he died-
When he died, it was supposed to be different.
They were supposed to grieve at his feet and hug him round the legs and not conduct themselves perfectly, of course not, but he was going to be…noticed. Top billing.
He leans back against the headboard and touches one of the pale cheeks.
"You don't have to say it back," Tim tells him. "It doesn't bother me, if you can't, or you don't want to. I only thought you should know. For certain sure. I don't know if that's enough, me not being your brother and all."
He swallows.
"I know you're never sure where you stand with them, except that you're last. So I thought you should know exactly where you stand with me. And for anything I've done, and for everything they've done that made you feel like all the places inside of yourself you can't describe, I'm sorry."
Oh, the untidy poetry of the inebriated, who slosh their words not nearly so sloppily as they ought.
He cocks his head down at the unbearded cheeks, and the earnest eyes, and he touches the scar beside Tim's eyebrow again and inside him roars up everything that is unnameable. In all of humanity's tangled Babel Nabokov flirted with it, and Longfellow nearly captured it; and still longer did Hugo court it, and Dante pluck its prehistoric roots from purgatorial fogs to be thoroughly flensed.
But grief belongs to the dumb shrieks of the bestial genus. You can capture it at its sharpest point, when you are insensate with it, and only dissect it at its dullest, when suffering has lost its poetry, and you must settle for a clumsy poking of the reader. But to explain, oh, here was a brother, he loved me like a silly folk tale, when men laid themselves down for an egg- you can't distill that into something plebeian as words.
If a language could clarify it, you wouldn't keep scratching away at it.
"He's not Nik anymore."
That's it.
That's as close as he can get.
This man is something called 'Klaus', of whom you may have heard the whispers, and never once to yourself thought: there is a man who sung his brother to dreamless sleep.
"I don't- what if I'm too tired of that now, Tim?"
"Listen," Tim says gently. "Listen to me. It's not selfish to take yourself away from something that's hurting you. That's not what love's supposed to look like. It doesn't matter how old or crazy you are."
She is dancing with Enzo when she spins back toward the bar, a little drunkenly, and freezes utterly.
Klaus is sitting on one of the stools, hands laced on his knees, face serenely murderous. He does not look at Enzo's hands on her waist, but you can feel all his attention homicidally concentrated on that one small point of contact, the thick callused fingers with their fine black hairs that squeeze her in just a little closer, the pale dizzying waver of the knuckles which dip in and out of human notice as the lights jolt against and then pass over them.
"Please. Continue," Klaus says.
"Ok. I will," she snaps, and whirls away from him, once more into Enzo, who stumbles back just a little, she bumps him that hard.
"Ah. The ex?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow.
"Excuse me?" Klaus demands tightly.
She can sense the dramatic descent, how the stool is a sort of pedestal from which he can pose for a minute, surveying his peons, until the bated moment when he at last allows this floor scrubbed by equally graceless and worthless hands to touch the designer boots, and support the Michelangelo molded knees.
"I didn't get your name, mate," Klaus says, edging into her peripheral vision with his hands behind his back, and the eerie smile that lifts the hairs at the nape of her neck.
"Enzo."
"I didn't ask."
"I have something new for you to try: not being a jerk. All the cool kids are doing it."
The brow softens when he looks from Enzo to her; she notices that immediately. He is head over black heart: you can see it the very instant he turns to her, and it's like everything in him suddenly ceases to revolve around his ego, and has instead a new sun to kneel before.
She's never quite ready for what it does to her stomach.
"Do you mind?" she asks crisply. "I was having fun."
"I apologize," Klaus replies, in that mild voice which is only a split second warning: he flashes to one of the stools, and back to Enzo before all her instincts have stopped belling their clamorous Oh Shit.
The legs penetrate his stomach; the seat is snapped off and resets his jaw.
Enzo sinks to his knees with a gurgle, spitting teeth.
"What the hell is your problem? He's my friend. You can't just stab him Klaus, oh my God."
"It's all right," Enzo wheezes as she helps him pull out the stool legs, and as gently as she can snaps the jaw with an ugly crunch back into place. "I've had worse. Gorgeous," he says with a little smirk on the last word, holding Klaus' eyes, which have at this moment probably cartoon sprung from his head, and quiver now in baffled astonishment at this man's steel-testicled audacity.
She pulls Enzo up by the elbow, slipping herself between the two men. "Get out."
"Caroline-"
"Get out, or behave yourself. Those are your options, jackass."
He licks his lips nervously. "I understand you're still upset, sweetheart-"
"Don't call me 'sweetheart'. Don't call me 'love'. You can just shove all those little fancy British endearments up your ass. I cannot believe you. First you sic some werewolves on your own brother's boyfriend, who almost died, by the way, not that you care, I'm sure; then you trick me out of New Orleans instead of just letting me in on your plans like a freaking normal person; then you try to start a war with literally everyone; and then, months later, you just waltz in here and when I don't lick your butt, you stab Enzo."
Enzo slumps a little into her, and around her waist goes his arm, and the head lolls a bit on her shoulder, the soft hair grazing her neck. He lets his knees buckle a bit, probably just for dramatic effect, because good freaking God every single one of these assholes is such a freaking drama queen, but she supports him anyway, just in case, and most definitely not because Klaus' jaw has acquired that particularly murdery tightness he does not dare act upon.
"I made sure Tim got the cure," he protests.
"That's all you have to say? 'Ok, sure, I made him endure hours of agonizing pain and also totally betrayed your trust and everything, but OMG, Caroline, what are you complaining about, it's not like Tim died died.' I want to kick you in the face."
"Not the most vulnerable or renowned part, gorgeous," Enzo stage whispers helpfully into her ear.
"This is a private conversation!" Klaus snaps, taking a step forward so he can against Enzo silently dick measure, and assume with smirky assurance he has once more come away superior. He cocks his head dangerously; the necklaces shift against his collarbones, and she is so totally not contemplating the taste of his neck, and how the tendons twitch beneath her tongue.
Look. Look: she hasn't been laid in a while.
"It's not a private conversation. We're not having a conversation. I'm leaving. Come on, Enzo."
"Ah, well, mate. That's how it goes sometimes. I'll be sure to see her safely back to the hotel," Enzo assures Klaus, and winks.
They are, predictably, blocked at the door by Klaus and his big fat head that she did not miss at all.
"Excuse us."
"We aren't finished, Caroline," he tells her, in his best low and menacing I Am God Hear Me Roar, and she is so abruptly furious she shrugs Enzo's arm off her shoulders, and shoves him behind her, and she can puff her chest and fluff her hair and to her voice conjure the same ominous promise, buddy, so you can just zip up your pants and step away from the freaking ruler.
"Yes. We. Are. Because I said so," she tells him half an inch from his nose, not thinking, of course not thinking, of how his chest grazes her own, and the fine blonde down on his cheek catches the lights, and there is in his eyes the predatory gleam to which she was drawn and the strange lurking tendernesses for which she stayed.
She thinks for a moment he might eat her.
And then the eyes light up and the dimples are genuinely flashed, not for the unholy contrast of boyish man, godless monster, but because he's just so happy to stand in this same stale summer air where she exists, and he reaches out for her cheeks and his bashed up poet-warrior's hands touch her so, so softly, and he says, "You're beautiful when you're angry, love," and she grabs him by the wrists.
For a moment, she does think about it: how much distance a quick yank of her hands would end.
"I am not flirting with you. Freak," she snaps, and shoves him away.
"Tah," Enzo says, flourishing an imaginary hat as they sweep out the door.
She grabs him by the collar as soon as the door has shut behind them. "Run. He's going to be really pissed."
"So I should abandon you to him when you've just infuriated him, gorgeous? That's not very gentlemanly."
"He won't hurt me. Go find Kol or something. I'll handle him."
"He's probably busy snogging Tim."
"So? Join them or something. They're weirdos. They'll probably like that. Just leave now. Or I castrate you."
"All, right; I'll trust your judgment, gorgeous," he says, and kisses her on the cheek. He flashes across the street, and waves cheerfully. "But if he murders you, I'm going to take really terrible revenge in your name."
And he does blow through the doors like Zeus descending, thunderbolt in hand, sending the doorman flying, and when the poor man gets up to stop him, snatching the heart from him before his flustered immortal senses can probably even detect the hand in his chest.
He throws it onto the sidewalk. "I'm trying to apologize."
"Good job!" she screams.
"There's no need to make this so difficult."
"And there's no need for you to be such an ass!"
"Don't be unreasonable, Caroline, I was protecting you-"
"No. No! This was about your ego. This was about you controlling everything. This was about reassuring yourself that you still could, because the Great and Powerful Klaus actually fell for somebody, and that just opens up a whole can of freaking worms, doesn't it? What next? You might actually respect people's autonomy and stop sticking them in coffins every time they do something you haven't pre-approved? What would the world come to?"
His mouth tenses, and the furrow between his eyebrows deepens; she can feel his fury even here, with a good three feet of pavement between them.
"You are such a coward sometimes," she says more quietly. "You can't let your family be happy. You can't let yourself be happy. You are just a sad, sad little man, who can't get over Daddy."
She can tell how that's struck him.
He lived a thousand trenches, and charged a thousand guns.
And you couldn't kill him. You poured your whole generation of raw patriot-children into the gaps at Somme, and the sludge of Passchendaele, and you couldn't kill him.
If you could see him reeling here.
She turns on her heel, and walks off.
He spies for a while on his brother, who is tired, who has a thundercloud on his brow, and yet is laughing.
He looks like he hasn't slept in all thousand troubled years of his existence, poor Kol.
But he is lying beside Tim on the disheveled bed, and laughing over some book they are passing back and forth, so hard he has to cover his face, or weep into the side of the boy's neck, clinging with hysterical joy to the lanky body.
There is, judging by their tones, some sort of dramatic reading at play here, but he tunes his ears carefully so it is beyond him, and watches the reactions sans their context.
Kol, Kol, faithful devotee of his youth, when there was nothing worth a glance.
He leaves them both alive.
Bekah is napping, hair coiled beneath her cheek.
And Caroline, Caroline-
She jerks the window open and says, less maliciously then perhaps he deserves, "Don't stand outside like a creeper."
He keeps his hands carefully behind his back, and hunches a little into himself, so she can see, he isn't here to preen or challenge, he is not, as she probably assumes, quite so callous as the carefully-ordered curls, and the casually fastidious shirt might suggest.
She looks up at him through the curls and this Judas heart of his thumps, lifts, is altogether quite pathetic, he thinks oh, love, love, and kneels at her feet.
He does not understand how else to apologize.
To lay his power and his prestige at her feet, to grip the knees in their dusty jeans and lean his cheek upon them, to say as well as he is able, here is…everything I am- before what other mercy can such a creature prostrate himself?
"Did you see your brother?" she asks, not touching him.
He takes a shaky breath. "I went to him first. He walked away from me."
"You deserved that."
But she touches the crown of his head, not to thrust him away, but merely to rest the fingers, to feel for the first time in six months which have stretched themselves with an eon's elasticity the familiar hair, the slope of the forehead which she has luxuriously explored through so many sleepless nights, when lovers repose in their own regenerative adoration.
He turns his face toward it, lets the fingers run along his stubbled jaw to the indent of the chin and the tender underside of the bottom lip, feels with careful mouth the inside of the wrist, and the fine nap of the peach hair along its outside, brushes with his nose the knuckles he has commemorated in insufficient charcoal.
"Have I lost him?" he asks, and it's Caroline, it's Caroline- of course he need not bother to puff himself up, and pretend to either of them that everything does not hinge upon this-
"I don't know. If you have…you have. And you're going to have to accept that."
"But I don't know how to be without him," he whispers, and turns his face back into her leg.
"And I don't know how to be without my mom. And you probably didn't either, when it first happened. He died, Klaus. You were going to have to figure it out anyway." She strokes her hand down his head and into the nape hair, where it comes to rest against his spine. "I'm not ready to forgive you yet. I will be. Just not now. So here's what you're going to do," she says. "You're going to leave him alone. He's going to come to you, if he wants to. You're not going to hurt Tim. You're not going to hurt Enzo. You're not going to take any of this out on Rebekah. You're going to give me time, and I'll come find you when I'm ready."
She lifts his face, so he can see how she means it. "I will be, Klaus, I promise."
She hears the sloppy pre-sex sounds of pretty imminent copulation beyond their door, but it doesn't sound particularly romantic, just good old-fashioned doing it, so she taps politely on the door, and then bursts inside.
"Hey, are you guys busy?"
Tim immediately jerks away from Kol's mouth, lifting himself on an elbow and blinking at her with this sort of startled deer bewilderment, but Kol, one hand buried in his hair, just keeps going, kissing at his neck and collarbones.
"Fuc- stop it," he says, hitting Kol with a pillow.
"If she wants to watch, let her watch, Tim. What are you embarrassed about? She wouldn't be the first."
"Hello? Are you guys busy?" she repeats, because they have kind of rudely erupted into this little married squabble and are completely ignoring her.
"Not at all," Tim replies in this voice that is almost verging on pissy.
She rolls her eyes. "I meant aside from doing it, duh. You guys do that all the time. Do it later." She flings herself knees-first onto the edge of the bed.
"Jesus Christ," Tim says, and rolls off Kol, covering himself with a pillow. "Would you turn your back for a moment?"
"Why? So you can put on the pants I've already seen you out of?" She gives him a little pop on the ass as she crawls up between them. "Nice underwear."
"Kol-"
"Oh my God, Tim, what is he, your mother? Get over yourself; I've seen guys in their boxers before. You're not creepy-looking or anything. Good leg to hair ratio. Just calm your…testicles."
Tim turns bright red.
Kol scrunches his nose. "Is that the right term?"
"Well, technically it's 'calm your tits', but he doesn't have boobs, so. Anyway!" She claps her hands together, once. "What were you guys doing pre-erections?"
"Could you please- I just-"
"Oh no! I know about that thing where when you're sexually aroused your penis stands up! Like, it's not a big deal. You have no idea how many guys in school I saw pulling the old backpack-in-the-lap move-"
"Would you stop laughing, you flaming eejit?" Tim hollers at Kol, who isn't even bothering with the courtesy of trying to sputter into his palm. "Caroline, you have to knock. You can't just come barging in here-"
"I did. I'm not a barbarian." She is actually just a teensy bit offended- she was, after all, a teenager in that murky independence of pre-apartment cohabitation, when a mother might happen at any moment upon your struggling adulthood, still in its first tender years of discovery.
"You knock, we tell you you may enter, and then you come in."
"Okaaaaay. But you were busy."
"I'm quite proud of this, actually. Under my excellent tutelage, clearly her understanding of and respect for boundaries is slowly being utterly obliterated." Kol smiles at Tim over her head. "Don't make 'I hate you' eyes at me, darling," he says, something secret in the curve of his mouth.
And it's kind of cute, he does soften, he looks at them both with this sort of fond exasperation, rolls himself carefully out of bed, pillow still in place, and squirms with as much virgin awkwardness as she has ever seen a man that old wrestle himself into his pants, the pillow carefully shielding everything.
She snatches it away from him, and tosses it to Kol. Tim is still in the process of buttoning his fly, and in his surprise, slips out an accented shit that sounds something like 'shite'.
"I see London, I see France!" she singsongs.
"Is that the one about his underpants? I like that one."
Tim blurs and comes up with something in his hand she doesn't see; he hurls it at Kol, who dodges it easily.
Being boys gets the better of them or something, because Kol gets tackled off the bed and they start wrestling on the floor, only half-seriously, so she picks up the book from the nightstand on what she assumes is Tim's side of the bed and flips to the bookmark.
"This man has a hot dog in his butt!" she shrieks, covering her mouth.
"That's Tim's smut," Kol says from the floor, where Tim has pinned his arms with both knees.
"Oh my God! Is this, like, the gay guy's version of Fifty Shades of Grey?"
"What- no! I'm not reading it seriously! I mean, I'm not- I'm not having one off to it or anything."
"You should see the one we were reading earlier tonight. One of the men gets a 'banana job'. It's exactly what it sounds like."
"Can I borrow this?"
"No."
"He's stingy with his books."
"That's because when I do loan them out, they come back with the front cover missing and the first half of the book totally ruined by blood."
Kol, still pinned, shrugs. "You murder one man with The Brothers Karamazov and suddenly you've got a reputation."
"It was War and Peace, you gom. Brothers Karamazov you were playing Olympics with."
"Discus throw," Kol clarifies for her. "Anyway, he's terribly pissy about his books. You might want to be careful even touching that one. You might smudge the cover and then he'll really lose it."
"You're a terrible pain in me arse, Mikaelson."
"Only when you want it rough, darling."
"TMI," she says, trying to determine whether or not she can smuggle the book out in her bra.
Kol flips Tim off him and scrambles back up onto the bed, which dips pretty violently beneath his sudden weight, and totally invites himself half onto her lap, one of his legs slinging casually over hers, his head settling on her shoulder. He is, thankfully, in only the most preliminary stages of nakedness, missing his shirt and nothing else. "What are you doing here anyway?"
She smooths her hand over one of the pages, and does not think about how Klaus looked when she lifted his chin and she told him, as gently as her anger allowed, that he might have to leave for a very long time. "I just…didn't want to sit all alone in my room. Not right now."
"Ah," Kol replies, and with him it's all you have to say.
There is someone in his room.
For a moment his heart is born aloft on that bright and feeble hope, Caroline- but it is a man.
And this allows within him the germination that it is Kol, that frail seed hope which supersedes all base and common senses.
But a monster denounces his follies far faster than a man; he shakes off the cobwebs; he sees the world through his roseate fiction for only a moment, and restores it to its common shades of gray.
The cologne is not his brother's, and the breathing neither; and Kol, in the boredom which for him strikes anytime he is made to wait for his confrontations or his mischief, will cross the ankles and jog them impatiently. The man in his room is more patient; you hear merely the carotid thumping of the heart, and the sighing of the faint breaths which touch the nostrils briefly.
He opens the door casually, as though he has not noticed.
He does hope this man is here to kill him.
What daylight's sunny vales gentle darkness menaces, and so he leaves off the lights and lets the shadows converge as they will on any beast of fantasy, who jars not nearly so many children from their safe and slumberous mists.
It's the Enzo creature.
Lounging unconcerned on his bed with his hands behind his head, and the sandy boots on the sheets.
He rifles through his monologues. Yes, the one he gave that uppity Maharaja back in, oh, perhaps the 1600s- that was quite the eloquent send-off, and you'll excuse his plagiarism; there is no better a wit for him to reproduce.
He wets his lips. "We are beholden so to nature, that-"
"I thought I recognized your face, mate," the creature interrupts.
"Excuse me?" He drops his voice. The eyes acquire their deadly yellow tinge. He was speaking, mate.
"You were stabbing me at the time, so I couldn't be sure. But it is you."
"Do we know each other? I apologize; I don't have much recollection for the rabble."
The man smiles, smugly, as is the only way he appears capable of accomplishing anything. He does hate smugness; it's unbecoming in one who has absolutely nothing upon which to congratulate himself. "The 11th Sherwood Foresters."
Something kindles in his breast, a distant recognition.
"You were that twat officer."
He tilts his head; his stomach churns, and the heart gives a sudden lurch, back through all his eons of memories he sorts, throwing aside the faces which have become irreparably blurred, and the decades which are almost entirely blank-
No.
"I'm quite hurt you don't remember an old army buddy, mate."
He feels that blind rage seize him by the throat which no feeble half-wit such as this ought to exercise over any man whose greatness will forever eclipse his generations upon generations of lessers, and clasps his hands behind his back.
"Private St. John? I used to outshoot you in training exercises all the time. We'd have a great laugh about it."
"I'm sorry, was that your name? I'm afraid your aggressive mediocrity must have buried it under things of actual import," he snaps. "And it's not very gentlemanly to lie, mate."
The smile broadens. It makes his hairline look like it's receding.
Also he got fat.
The sandy boots stir on his bed, and streak the crisp new sheets, and the head lolls back, so casually, against the headboard, the eyes are simply blasphemous, scrutinizing him as they do, as though this pissworm has any right to pass judgment upon his untouchable deities.
"Listen, old chum, you tell yourself whatever you need to. We all have our fantasies."
"Would you like to beg for mercy or anything like that now?" he snaps. "I'm not going to make it quick either way, but you're welcome to try and appeal to something deeply buried within me."
Enzo does not so much as blink. "But what would Caroline say?"
"I'm confident your death will make just as much an impact as it did the first time round. Pity; the Germans should have been a bit more thorough with you."
Enzo stretches his legs, sweeping the boots once more over the sheets, and being sure to give them a good scrubbing with the soles. He'll need to burn the whole lot now, of course. "I think Caroline will be rather put out with you, mate. She did order you to stop stabbing me, after all. I just wouldn't want you to get in any trouble."
"Caroline is not my keeper!" He remembers at just the last moment to soften the edges of this, so this bloody idiot doesn't give himself notions that he's affected him somehow, no more than a man might notice how his boots crush not merely field grass but all that wriggling myriad of soiled life which burrows in the plough grooves.
"My mistake, mate. I thought I spotted her leash round your dick. You know, Klaus, I've heard about you, of course; we all have. Something something Katerina Petrova something something ultimate doom. You know how dramatic vampires can be. Anyway, I thought you were going to be taller. Maybe a little more muscular. If I'd known you were that whiny little bitch from the trenches I'd have let everyone know to not worry."
He blurs across the room.
He slams Enzo's head through the plaster wall, cracks the skull, splits the forehead skin, and the man is laughing, there are genuine tears in his eyes, he is that jovial with his current situation-
"Like this, this is the bloody Scourge of the Monsters-"
He grabs the feeble neck in one hand and hurls Enzo across the room, into the door which breaks his shoulder and cracks one of the ribs and he just bloody stands back up, stretching his neck to either side while he waits for everything to slowly link by link knit itself whole.
"You're not going to kill me," Enzo tells him. "And trust me, mate- you can't hurt me."
"That sounds like a challenge, sweetheart," he says, and grasps the neck once more, with the frail tendons twitching beneath his fingers and the body at least secure in the knowledge of what this man's thick head cannot wrap itself round-
But Enzo smiles once more, and brings both hands up to cup the cheeks he sacrificed to his razor after a couple of days in this bloody heat, and he leans in so their noses are nearly touching, ignoring the hand round his neck. "You better treat her like the treasure you most definitely didn't earn and don't deserve, or I'll find a way to make you pay. You've clearly already hurt her once, so I'll be back. Sir."
And then one naked cheek is condescendingly patted and the numb fingers which he has practically forgotten round the deserving throat are peeled away, and he is left, dumbstruck, in the middle of his room.
1916, Petrograd
She does love a good backstage: the nervous perfume of the humans' brows, and the dozen shrewd spotlights which the anxious eyes apply to her, the next scene's solo and gifted luminary.
And of course, the boots poor Hilarion has removed to air between acts his labored feet. What lashed beasts of burden they must be, following such a vigorous first act; what cool waters she has for you to chill the weeping things.
She uncorks her vial, and washes the insides of the boots down with a good dousing of her concoction. Nik showed it to her, rather proudly; some invention of one past and sordid acquaintance or another. Etc. etc. She had a reflection to admire rather than a lecture to attend. And anyway, Elijah, who doesn't want the show spoiled prematurely, helped her calculate the dose she will need to penetrate his tights, to convulse the bewildered limbs at just the precise height of dramatic climax, to ensure he is a credit rather than a burden to the scene.
He doesn't entirely approve, of course.
The arts should never be so endangered by petty revenges.
She corks the vial once more.
Silly brother.
There is no such beast as an unnecessary revenge.
The heavy curtain parts.
She perches for a moment in the wings, letting the first gentle strains of the orchestra touch and lift the audience, who see, some through moistened pocket squares, the lone grave against its painted backdrop. You will find its trees of brooding menace in your heavier fables, which dress in their unchallenged shadows the witch and her mortar bones. See, perhaps, her flitting between branches, where the sun is, far-off, a reminder: somewhere is a day untouched by poets, who know not how to render such light as this with the most talented of pens.
But oh, sweet audience, not here.
You who shall see the lovely face and the hair left romantically about her shoulders, and walk with bated hearts in her delicate footsteps-
She does pity you.
The gilded boxes, the bright satins foaming over demure legs, the fashionably low necklines, these snowfalls of perfumed breasts which hover nervously- on the privileged smiles only the sun, and never his December foil.
Isn't that so, pets?
She smiles.
Oh, to have her brother out of his silly mud and guts.
He always does know how to shake a sleeping aristocracy.
She glides onto the stage, floating from out of the trunks which have been dressed and poised on the sides of the stage.
The veil lifts at its hem. Her dress of fine white tulle drifts afterward.
Here the music is barely present: a soft accompaniment, so the eyes, the ears, the entirety of the dumb human senses are hardly aware of anything beyond this figure in white, this ethereal being with her tiny slippered feet and her long graceful arms, pale as the dress.
Gently, she tiptoes offstage, and pauses so the veil can be discarded, and the audience left to wonder: was this creature merely a figment of this wood from which any manner of fabled beast might spring?
And back she drifts, the arms in soft swan fannings out to either side.
You want them to wonder about this apparition. The powdered face, the graceful leg which lifts the dress, the arch of the supple spine: soft Death, the music suggests, with such aching beauty as only strings can convey to the listening hearts. No living maiden touches one like this, and pounds compassion back into such an audience, fat with gold.
The stage is cool beneath her toes, and the little cross which she carefully tiptoes her way toward aglow with strategic lights.
Up and up she ripples the arms, the dress floating silently round her, spuming out from the pirouettes, and then the sprigs of oak are gathered into her hands, and first to the wood she twirls her way, with a soft pat pat pat of the slippers, and back to the cross, where she holds her poses statuesquely.
Round and round the stage, the audience silent, the music swelling, the sprigs beckoning their little come hither flicks-
She dips gracefully toward the stage; the sprigs are flourished toward the towering wood, and then, to one side of the stage, jauntily tossed.
She covers her lost distance in a leap; the ankles touch gracefully mid-air, with no elephantine clacking of the bones; you might say she floats into the jump: here gravity holds no court.
Up and up and up spirals the music; there is a joy now in the wooded instruments which playfully inform her next turn or leap. Death is for no one so pretty a convict chain; the audience relaxes its hold upon that tense expectation of doom which Death is supposed to herald.
There is a spike and another and another in the accompaniment, and one pirouette, two, three, the skirt frothing round her, the toes carrying her through each perfect spin, that dizzying anticipation of the end hold, which must be timed precisely, out she snaps the arms, and raises the chin, unsmiling, so the crowd can look upon her and know: something looms in her eyes.
She gives them a moment to applaud, to reassure themselves as she steps out once more, delicately, why, she's only a wood sprite, prettier, thinner, superior to any mortal imagination can carve from wildest dreams, of course, but see how the little feet carefully pick their way, and the arms sway, the skirts gesturing afterward-
And then the veiled corps from silent backstage creep.
Three to a line, and another three after them, silently they come, gliding from either side of the stage, and at ankle height the sudden surge of cold mists, which the audience must feel now down its startled spine-
1916, France
It is a morning which no poet could have dreamed from his effusive pen.
The sky has, perhaps, known a more perfect blue, but not in his memory. At this hour of dawn, there is yet a distant cloud of mist, which the sun, fat as any painter could hope from his brush, struggles through.
The British barrage screams over his head, and Jerry responds with his lusty Whizz Bangs; the ground is, appropriately, tremulous before such technological rage. The children which unscrupulous recruiters have allowed into this morass of what any experienced eye ought to perceive as almost certain death flinch into their older comrades.
But there is, for the most part, a silence either nervous or simply anticipatory in this dugout. Some neighboring commanders have allowed their men early into No Man's Land, where they lie now a few yards closer to the German trenches; his own men cluster round the ladders, waiting.
Zero hour crouches over them all.
In all war there are a few who cannot tolerate these uncertain final moments, when there is the wind of Death on the neck, and the gleaming of glory somewhere beyond those barbed miles of Hun wire. There are two reports in his own platoon: one lad has shot himself in the knee, and the other, whose rum has perhaps spoiled his aim, in the groin; both have got their Blighty wounds, anyhow, and are carried off in pale-faced triumph.
He checks his watch; the first mine is to be blown at 7.20, which tiptoes at its leisure toward the waiting men.
That insufferable private is in the corner chatting at some nervous bloke: it'll be all right, Billy, nothing to concern yourself about, hasn't command said it's to be a walk over, etc. etc.- the usual platitudes, he supposes. He can't be bothered to listen.
"How are the nerves doing, old boy?" the private asks him next, and claps him on the back, with purposeful force, so that if he were a mere man, he might be knocked into the trench wall. There is an affected lilt to the voice, which he knows the ant intends to mock him. The human's God forbid he be unashamed of his education and his experience, of which this workhouse trash hasn't an inkling. Perhaps he walked past Oxford once, or pressed his dirty nose to the hallowed windows, and to himself pondered the strange mechanics of those papery boxes with the alien scribbles inside.
He does hope this offensive kills him slowly.
He tightens his jaw and does not grace the man with so much as a look.
A few lucky shots which an easily impressed human might attribute to some actual genius of marksmanship and this twit gives himself airs.
His watch has reached the minute marker; he informs the dugout.
The boy beside him, with hair the color of Kol's, and that same familiar dimpling of the chin, wants to watch the explosion from the firing step.
"You'll want a good grip on something," he warns, and the boy looks toward this smug private with his ragged scrap of trench beard, dirty as he is assuredly used to being, and lights up when the private nods him toward the step.
"The Jerries ought to be busy with our bombardment. Just be careful, all right, mate?"
"Thirty seconds," he says.
The boy mounts the firing step.
There is a tremendous rumble.
The earth forms a sort of hurricane some 500 yards off, one vast column of chalk and dirt which climbs as a mighty wave might before a feeble prow; there is one breathless moment of silence in the trench, and then the shock wave strikes it, and jerks the entire thing from side to side, knocking the boy off the step and the private, whom he deftly sidesteps to avoid any unconscious assistance, to the ground.
The Germans are for perhaps a few minutes still with their own awe; and then the heavy guns start up, unceasingly, as though suddenly a great slumber has been shaken off, and the enemy is freshly awake and raring.
"We've fucked it," the private murmurs, looking a bit pale round the lips.
To assume every Boche gun has suddenly roared to life is perhaps no grim embellishment; there is a Biblical hail overhead which sings and pops against the dirt, whistling through the wire and into the men who already are bellied out in No Man's Land awaiting the first wave of the morning offensive; he has to carefully tune his ears so the thunder does not send him screaming to his knees.
He helps the boy, pale-faced, into his pack, and adjusts the helmet on his head.
The mist, still low-lying in some places, is disrupted by both bombardments, and when the bullets hit flinches its bulk as a lake might shrug off a thousand stones. He has, in all his years of aloft saber, smoking musket, bloodied spear, never seen anything quite like it.
At 7.28, the other mines are blown, and the whole earth moves once more. There is no Homeric epic which may conjure such a scene: Troy's chariots suffered no such deific threat as this. Fearless Achilles, for whom there was no sense in cringing before a death hour already told, would surely have kneeled before it.
And indeed, the boy is terrified; he is seventeen; to what extent has Death even familiarized itself with such a youth; what does he know, what can he imagine of how the hot screaming lead will sever him from everything he knows, and perhaps send him aimlessly drifting into what black yonder he doesn't understand and where he knows none, loves none, is perhaps to flounder forever in man's greatest fear, when all the earth has shut him out and says aught, though he goes screaming along all its open doors seeking its hearths-
Shh, shh, he says, and cradles the nape of the boy's neck in his hand. It'll be all right, Kol.
So are such little slips overlooked.
When the British bombardment at precisely 7.30 lifts and is re-positioned, there is an eerie silence. The German guns have unthinkingly paused as well, and to the chirping birds given a sudden spotlight.
There is a perfect sun overhead, and not a cloud. Down his neck goes that whiff of what will be an unseemly hot day. The boy's hair is completely wet beneath his helmet.
The smarmy private has the half-moons of unvoiced nerves beneath his arms.
There is, for a moment, the bewilderment of a thousand thousand expectations, which hoped, perhaps, for something momentous, for something which would clearly mark the end of that interminable wait, when men are driven to madness and drink by unperturbed clocks.
This is a disappointment, the sinking hearts realize, and the medals are to be unclaimed, and the fame unrealized: for what government will hang a man with bronze who sauntered unchallenged from his trench and leisurely loped to the littered death of a long-vanquished enemy?
And then the guns find their next target, and all round him he hears the whistles blowing, and blasts his own.
"Over the top, men!" he hollers, and clambers up the ladder.
The silent white figures converge on her.
She smiles.
They do make a lovely picture, all those beautiful white skirts, and the mist foaming round the tiptoes, which carry this silent hoard to the edge of the stage, where the audience is to admire their synchronization and to be charmed by the veiled faces which have long since seen and parted from sweet pink youth, but retain still that maidenly crispness-
They have first to surmount the British wire, but the men have regained their courage: there is a friend at either shoulder, an officer before him, the lines dressing themselves and then pushing forward, forward over the chalk and the dirt and those disrupted patches which have been shifted by the bombs-
And then one of the German buglers yanks the men from their dugouts and into the trenches and the machine guns open their throats and now these lines upon lines of men are suddenly funneled through Dante's infamous gates; a bullet slams his helmet; there is a ringing in his ears; to either side of him are the shrieks of wounded men, dying men, men in every throe of agony: and the guns chatter on.
Where the ground is marshy from earlier rains that softened the fields, slowed the guns, sank the ambulance bearers, men flounder, and are fatally delayed.
One of the Whizz Bangs catches a nearby platoon sergeant in the throat; his head vanishes in a puff of red.
The gunners target the gaps in the wire, where the British troops are trying to squeeze their way through, and to this task add the mountainous difficulty of the newly dead, who catch their feet, blunder their steps, block their openings, and wholly clog the gaps with even newer dead.
And on the lines come, their rifles across their chests, the bayonets shining, and in the sky the birds trying to out-sing the guns.
She stands in their midst like a director, and gestures the girls line by line, and occasionally dancer by dancer, into their next shapes. The creamy slippers catch the light, and the veils float gently round them, the legs lifting and kicking and all those lines upon lines of delicate white arms fluttering so they are merely one entity-
The endlessly talking, talking Jerry guns are relentless; they fell wave after wave, whole clumps of men falling together, and behind them the wounded many taking cover in their death or crawling into what rare shell hole can be found-
When the wave is once traversed, the guns track back over it, picking off the survivors.
He sees the private jerk, cry out, keep walking.
On and on into the firestorm the British are fed; one might think they are immortal as he, the way they walk calmly into their certain demises, an entire army of soldiers who can be felled once, twice, thrice, and still the guns must consent to murder them once more-
But, no, he smells death all round him, he sees the young boys crying, and their friends still against the chalk, his helmet is once more struck, to his right a man goes down shrieking, on his left another falls silently, and then suddenly the earth lives beneath his feet once more: there is a great rumbling, and then a geyser: a column of chalk soars and soars, and then slowly it tips, onto the line of men away to his left, who are swallowed by this massive wave. He sees them disappear beneath earth and rock and flame, some who will not go silently, and scream until they are smothered, some who are taken unawares, and slip noiselessly into this frothing maw- but this delayed mine has blown the German posts, or badly damaged them, and there is the sudden benediction of a nearly empty sky-
"Move!" he screams. "On the double, lads, on the double!" And there is a surge: the survivors are newly buoyant with this messy success, and sweep toward the first German trenches.
The batteries, which their own bombardment HQ assured had decisively destroyed, begin firing. The earth geysers and smokes and all around him men cry out or merely disappear; the boy forgets to address him properly and screams out "Nick!" and then one of the shells bursts and he is splattered everywhere.
The smoke stings his eyes and the shells hurt his ears and through this strange Armageddon he proceeds, screams all around him, the ground rumbling and the birds still singing and that oddly inconsistent sky cheerfully blue, a picnic sky, he thinks idly, and in front of him another man is cut down by machine gun fire but does not die; he wants, in this precise order, water and his mother.
Behind him, the waves continue to advance, the men walking as though they are strolling in the woods. He has seldom witnessed such courage in this rather twitchy race; even the wounded stagger on so as not to let down their friends, and are cut down or faint into the ragged dead-
Giselle enters during her next solo and begins prancing about, as though anyone cares about that twit whose legs are not nearly so long, and whose form does not remotely approach her mastery. Around and around she flails, and then out again sail all the girls in white, sans their veils this time, who part obligingly for her and in the center of the stage form a wide area for her to display her myriad talents.
She leaps and lets the skirt fly prettily round her, highlighting the strong calves, and the delicate feet, the music with its little trills and high peaks and then the lively announcements of the orchestra which introduces the plucky cavorting of the girls, who are quite lovely, when they're not hogging her spotlight. Not a foot moves out of time, or an arm wave out of sync, there is before this gloomy forest the whole ethereal bunch of them, flying and hopping and with simply otherworldly grace gesturing the arms and to each burst of the instruments soaring a little higher-
The German wire has not been cut.
He can see the private could with his bare hands kill every officer who promised easy entry, who assured them the bombardment would snip the tangles, and leave the Jerry trenches vulnerably open, but he keeps his head and forces himself through where he can; but equipment is a hamper rather than a savior in such cases, and he is hung up on the wire.
"Good luck, mate," he says, and smiles.
He lets himself through a gap he has found, taking several German bullets and continuing on cheerfully.
Giselle and Albrecht have their touching little pas de deux.
She supposes.
If you can call that dancing; the girl lands her jumps like a hippo.
But never mind her undeserved moment of notoriety.
Albrecht and Giselle exit.
The girls line up one after another, each with one arm out in front of her, and into their midst dashes Hilarion, who appears quite sweaty about the upper lip, and pale beneath his makeup.
Just lovely.
Back and forth he runs and leaps as the girls flood the stage, like a little panicked animal.
The music swells.
He is struck in the shoulder, the knee, the abdomen, and for a moment he hunches beneath this onslaught; his rifle is knocked askew in his hands; the helmet is now worthless, and cast aside. The bullets sizzle into the dirt and the grass ripples round him and chalk blows itself sky-high and somewhere down the line another shell bursts and carries several screaming into the next life. He can see one of the Scottish units snared by their kilts in the wire, flailing or hanging silently or with Christ-like serenity peering skyward.
That unbearable private has untangled himself somehow from the wire, and rushes miraculously alive into the brunt of the fire.
He has gone mad, or settled on his death as a certainty, and has decided to meet it headfirst, rather than cringing in some hole or another awaiting imprisonment or the decisive bullet.
The shells miss him and the machine guns somehow sweep harmlessly past, and he runs on, cradling his rifle, the helmet dented but not defenseless, several stragglers joining him as they see those first trenches within reach and, so close they might touch it, their objective looms suddenly before them, with an enemy they can finally strike, with soft flesh they might at last reap their revenge upon-
That little worm is not about to beat him to the German front line.
He rolls his shoulder which has a moment before taken another hit, and takes off at a dead sprint.
Round and round the poor man twirls and pirouettes and leaps as the white sea foams about him, his landings only slightly shaky, his tumble still purposeful and not a failing, the girls soaring after him, leaping in tandem, all that endless white upon white circling round him as he huddles on the stage, no longer miming his pain, but struggling to maintain his professionalism-
Private Who Bloody Cares Anyway reaches the first trench, and with his little ragtag bunch of survivors converges on the Germans, who like the wire have not been vanquished, but wait in great numbers to repel this rush of howling madmen-
In the center of them he spins and staggers and clutches at his stomach, that circle narrowing and narrowing and narrowing-
The trench is an asylum of frothing men who gnash rabid teeth and sink to their knees, bayoneted, or from the crush rise to bash a jaw or knife a stomach: to join it is to throw oneself directly into the hurricane's eye, which this fool private has done with the sort of abandon which is the sole domain of the brave or the stupid.
He will lay his pounds on the latter, of course.
But the man pushes forward and pushes forward and slowly the khaki has begun to overtake the grey, there is the singing of bayonet on bayonet and the whistle of the shells overhead and beyond them the fresh geysers of newly-tilled earth-
The girls line up patiently, wave upon wave of them, arms extended to await her command as she circles and leaps about Hilarion, who twirls not nearly so gracefully now, whose colorless cheek reveals his torment, and the pinched lips confirm-
He fights off one of the Germans with his rifle, and shoots another with his pistol.
He is flecked with blood of all nationalities; the day has indeed delivered its hellish promise, and steams the sweat off his neck. In the trench is the stink of death, the stench of the underarms and the unwashed hair and those beards with all manner of trench creatures in them and into one of the soft stomachs he jabs the bayonet, and out again into the next, blood spraying, entrails spilling, the ground gone treacherous beneath his boots, oily with death, but the Germans are retreating, some of them tossing down their guns to assume that age-old position of surrender and others crawling from the trenches to run, screaming, into their own barrage-
Hilarion spins and spins and spins, wobbling now, and the girls form up again, into one long line which stretches toward the audience, toward the painted wood, she leads them forward in this graceful march of the endless white wave as he stumbles back, back, the line advancing on him-
With a gesture of her arm he spins, falls, cowers back, sweating, and the corps in unison lifts each of the hands facing him and pops onto its tiptoes to flutter in place, the little feet going, going-
He thinks the private will make it over the lip of this trench and into the stretch of ground between the next.
But his luck has not held, or the gunners have improved.
The first round harmlessly strikes his helmet, and the second shreds the top of his pack.
And then the third, fourth, fifth thrust him back, he drops his rifle, bleeding from his hand, his side, his neck-
He can barely walk as he stumbles along the line, seeking mercy, and the hands are once more held out, and the two girls on the end separate to lurk near the gravesite and await their orders-
Incredibly, he keeps his feet.
He picks up his rifle and he staggers forward.
The side of his left knee fountains; he buckles-
And now the two grasp him by either arm and haul him, his feet going limp, and the legs failing rather dramatically, toward the menacing wood, toward the little grave, he flails with either pain or performance, his face terrible-
The private takes another bloody step, for God's sake, but the knee will not support him, and the return barrage takes him now as he lurches forward onto one knee, and suddenly he is tossed and spun nothing like those propaganda films would suggest-
She steps out to the side of the corps, which snaps its arms up jauntily, to meet that final flourish of the instruments, and smiles.
She can smell him dying offstage.
The audience, enraptured, bursts into applause.
She does hope Elijah will be pleased with that; she thought it was quite inspired.
How authentic the death throes, the audience will say. This double threat of dancer and actor will not soon be replaced when retirement at last claims his youthful bones.
No, she doesn't think so.
What a pity.
She floats her arms out to graceful first position and smiles more brightly.
Nik returns in September, when autumn is well under way, and the Neva each evening is foggy with her wintry portents. The men have shuttered themselves inside thicker coats, and the women's hats have sprouted soft fur round the rims. She can smell the trees dying, and that boletic underlayer of the fallen leaves which perish anonymously somewhere underfoot.
That silly war is still raging; she hears about it occasionally in society circles when she has not chosen carefully enough and her companions are consumed by such stupidity. Yes, yes, humans square off over one bit of land or another and plink away with whatever technological marvel weapon's manufacturers have lately thrust into their hands; it's happened before, she quite assures you. History is dull like that. Humans are perpetually inventing, yet never novel.
She has Nik settled into the Youssopov's Moika Palace where Finn and Kol can be stored with sacrosanct anonymity in the cellar, trims his hair, takes down the horrid trench beard to the tolerable stubble which the twit imagines gives him that pirate-like air of 'dashing' and before which the mortal and immortal alike prostrate their keen genitalia.
"You're an idiot," she says crisply, but will now condescend to be seen in public with him.
He wears a natty great coat and turns heads all through the prospekts and, arm in arm, escorts her to a production of Eugene Onegin where they meet up with Elijah, who engages Nik on the topic of his adventures in France. She yawns rudely. "How fascinating. You rolled round in some mud for half a year. Very farmyard animal of you."
"Sweetheart, the men are talking," Nik says, because he knows it will infuriate her.
She breaks his opera glasses and hurls them at the head of some woman to whom he has been paying attention in between positively fascinating diatribes of billets and machine guns.
Poor thing; right through the skull. He won't be yanking on those pretty curls anytime soon now, will he?
"Bekah," Elijah scolds.
"You've been here half a bloody day and you haven't said a word about my dress," she snaps at Nik.
"I don't care for that color on you," he replies, and Elijah grabs her arm and says "No," firmly, before she can send him after the glasses.
The production is halted by this unexpected death and the guests left to mill and exclaim while the policemen puzzle her crushed skull, and somewhat appeased when Nik takes her hand and dimples at her, she smoothes the yellow silk over her knees and fusses for a moment at the low neckline. Elijah amuses himself with the sound of his own voice; he can pontificate on any ridiculous topic which is of no relation to her even longer than Nik. Listen, then, to him stir up these corpses of bygone dust whose eloquence outlasted their scrolls and which brats must be made to yawn over in those interminable school years when Homer supersedes Poirot. There is a Sophocles at least once a century, and an Ovid in the next, and each sharpens his pen a little more, and from the shoulders of his successors farther penetrates the horizons of man.
And to sit, and quibble over his poetry, to hotly consider meter, rhythm, and the fastidious placement of his Os and his thines.
She rolls her eyes.
She touches Nik's arm. "There's your host," she leans in close to tell him, discreetly indicating Prince Felix, who is impeccably suited, and sans his wife. "That's the Youssopov heir, Felix. Interesting man. Rumor has it he likes to dress up in his mother's clothes and will wet himself in anything with a hole in it."
Nik cocks his head.
She can tell by the way he studies the man that the long lashes have intrigued him, and the soft pink cheeks aroused him; there is a languid air to the prince which suggests opulence, that close cousin of the vice. He is hatless, the dark hair slicked back from his face so you can admire it from every angle.
She leans in once more. "The man beside him is the Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich. He's in love with our friend Felix. In the carnal sense." She smiles. "You might want to pull on a few threads somewhere in that general area. The Romanovs will feel the reverberations all the way in their cushy little Winter Palace."
She sits back in her chair, and drapes her hand lightly over Nik's forearm with a smile.
A/N: The battle Klaus and his dear friend Enzo are fighting in is the first battle of the Somme (in fact the first day of that battle), which was an unmitigated clusterfuck for the British forces. My descriptions of the battle are largely drawn from Martin Middlebrook's 'The First Day on the Somme' and the firsthand observations detailed therein.
Also, the quotes from Tim's terrible, terrible erotica are taken from Olivia Outlaw's 'Tempting Duty: An Isle of Bliss Romance'. No, I will not stop working in as much bad porn as is humanly possible.
Up next: more Klaus vs. Enzo, Caroline begins teaching again, Kol/his bats (the greatest love story of this entire series, truly), and more of what is going to be a long flashback that I hope you're all prepared for, because let me tell you, I have read a lot of Russian literature and have rather a major boner for not only this time period, but Russian culture in general, so prepare yourselves for Jenn's Giant Russian Boner.