A/N - New story alert! I know I keep promising that I won't start a new story until all my other ones are finished, but think of this as my belated Christmas/I'm-sorry-for-being-such-a-crappy-updater present. I promise, one of my New Year's resolutions is to update at least one story every fortnight until I've finished them all. Then I can start on some new stories ;)
I've had this idea for a while, but it's only with my recent obsessive OUAT obsession (for those of you who haven't seen it, just know that I'm glaring cyber-daggers at you right now. Captain Swan are my babies and really kinda remind me of Klaroline, and Regina is Katherine Pierce's cross-fandom sass-twin :D). Anyway, the point is, the whole 'True Love's Kiss' thing really got me thinking, and thus, this story was born :) please enjoy! Let me know if I should continue, or if it sucks and you hate it, you know the drill.
Oh, and this is the prologue, so it's supposed to be quite stiff and formal-ish (think Sleeping Beauty fairytale-style). The language will loosen up next chapter, I promise!
*MIKAEL WAS NEVER AN ORIGINAL!* because no one wants to wake him with true love's kiss :)
Disclaimer - I own TVD, all the characters in it, and you know, just the world in general, because I, with my laptop and DVD box sets and overly-sad obsessive knowledge of fictional stories and characters, have that much power. Not.
Once upon a time, there was a large family of settlers who lived in a small village of what would in later times be known as the town of Mystic Falls, VA. They were peaceful people mostly; the mother apprenticed with the village healer and go-to witch, becoming a powerful witch in her own right. The father provided for them by hunting, and fighting when necessary. He was a fearless man who was strong and confident, but saved a entirely different character for his middle son, who he often beat severely, leaving the boy's adoring younger sister to pick up the pieces and put her brother back together with a damp cloth and soothing words to clean his sores and the colourful bruises that adorned his body.
The family (and especially the children) were very close nonetheless, and so when tragedy struck the family one night when Niklaus and his youngest brother Henrik went to watch the wolf-men transform under the full moon, and Henrik, barely thirteen years of age, was attacked and killed. It was an awful thing to befall upon the family, and they were never quite the same for it.
It was soon after Henrik's death that Esther, determined that she would never lose a child again, began to work on a way to protect her children from any sort of harm for the rest of their lives, much to the disapproval of Ayana, her mentor. Alas, for Esther did achieve her goal of making her five remaining children along with her husband completely immune to wounds and conditions that would kill an ordinary person, but at a price. They could no longer walk outside during daylight hours; they were more prone to aggression and their normal diet was no longer enough to satisfy them. Now, they had to drink the blood running through the veins of the villagers to survive, and drink it they did. Within a week of becoming what would later be known as 'vampires', they had massacred the entire village with no restraint, brutally killing people they had known as friends out of sheer thirst for their bloodlust. Their bloodlust blinded them, especially the middle son, Niklaus a, whose first kill had triggered his body to transform like those of the wolf-men on the full-moon, revealing his mother's secret indiscretion twenty-three years earlier. Esther was determined to stop her children though, and so she collected the ingredients for a spell that would put all five of her children into a deep, deep sleep. They would appear dead to the world, because much as she hated what she had made her children into and what they had done, she knew that she could never kill them. They were, after all, still her children, even if they had become monsters that she didn't even recognise.
And so Esther mixed together the ingredients, pouring a vial containing her oldest son, Finn's, blood into one pot, and doing the same with four other pits and four other vials containing a sample of each of her children's blood. She added in a few drops of the remaining doppelgänger blood she'd saved from when she turned her children into vampires, into Niklaus' pot, in order that Niklaus, in his slumber, would not be affected by the full moon.
"They won't awaken," she told her husband afterwards. "The only thing that will break them out of their sleep is a true love's kiss, which they shall never be given, for who could love a monster?"
She placed her children's bodies on stone pedestals upon sheets of satin, and concealed them inside a stone room Esther constructed with her magic near their home. The magic meant that only those who meant them no harm, with the purest of hearts, as well as herself, could enter. She covered the outside walls of the room with rock, and hid it against the rock face to pass it off as part of the caves, and covered the thick wooden door and its heavy metal latch with ivy to disguise it.
She took a last look at her five children lying serenely on their make-shift deathbeds, their skin grey and being and their features cold and still, and sighed, stroking her daughter's long blonde hair and smoothing down her youngest remaining son's sleeves.
"I do wish it didn't have to be this way," she told them. "But no one will find you here, and you will never wake up. You will never hurt anyone again." She turned away from them and, closing her eyes, moved her hand in a circular motion above her head, watching as the magic fused into the stone walls. She'd made it so that only those who were capable of changing her children for the better; back into the innocents that she'd once known them as, would be able to enter through the invisible magical barrier she'd placed on the door.
All in all, in the end, her children would be changed by people capable of loving them, or else would never wake at all.