Lessons in Loss
by Sandrine Shaw

"I just want us to be a family again."
ﾠ
Niklaus never seems to tire of saying those words, over and over again, and every time Finn hears it, something inside of him breaks.
ﾠ
If he were a less controlled man, he'd lash out at Niklaus and crush every bone in his body for using a word he obviously doesn't understand.
ﾠ
Finn clenches his fists at his side and refuses their mother's warning gaze, imploring him to be patient. The truth is, he hates her more than he hates Niklaus. He hates her more than anyone, but he also needs her to put an end to this atrocity. So he closes his eyes and takes a deep, unnecessary breath, forcing himself to relax.
ﾠ
"We have always been a family, no matter what happened," he says. The words taste ashen on his tongue.
ﾠ

ﾠ
He had a family, once.
ﾠ
As the eldest son of Mikael, he was married shortly after they arrived in the New World. Her name was Rachel, the daughter of a craftsman who had made the journey across the seas with them. Finn had known her since he was a boy, and he cannot remember a time when he had not loved her. Tall, fair-haired and willowy, Rachel was a beautiful woman. More than that, she was quiet and thoughtful and kind, never raising her voice or losing her temper. He loved her with all his heart.
ﾠ
A little boy was born to them a year into their marriage, Daniel. Times weren't easy, but they lived a good life. They were happy.
ﾠ

ﾠ
Finn was twenty-and-seven winters old when his mother made the fateful choice to bestow what she thought was the gift of immortality on her children. Daniel was barely five then, and Rachel was only just two moons away from delivering their second child.
ﾠ
The curse Esther placed upon them tore his life apart from one night to the next. Unlike his siblings, so naive in their youth, he had known it right away, from that very first moment he had awoken and Mikael forced the blood of the peasant girl down his throat. Nothing would ever be the same again.
ﾠ
When he returned home to his wife and son, he was not the man who had left them. Pale, his skin burning in the sun, as yet unable to master his features from shifting into a grotesque grimace, he had become the monster of the childhood stories he used to tell his son. Daniel was shying away from him, and so was Rachel.
ﾠ
The thirst drove him to madness, and yet he tried to withstand it as long as he could. He lasted three days. It all happened in a blur, and when it was over, the neighbor family - kind people, whom he used to call friends - were lying dead at his feet.
ﾠ
When he came home splattered with blood and smelling like death, Rachel screamed and Daniel cried.
ﾠ
"You cannot stay here," his wife - his beautiful, soft-spoken, gentle wife - told him, standing protectively in front of her son and clutching a bundle of vervain in her hand like a weapon she was ready to wield. "You cannot be with us. I don't know what you are, but you're not the man I married. You're a monster."
ﾠ
He begged her for another chance to prove himself, to show her that he was still the man she loved. And Rachel being Rachel, she forgave him. But something had broken that couldn't quite be mended, and after that night, she never looked at him the same way again.
ﾠ
His daughter was born five weeks before her due date. She didn't survive a day. Rachel never told Finn that she blamed him, but he knew she did. It didn't matter. He blamed himself enough for both of them.
ﾠ
Wrapped in his own personal drama, he barely paid attention to the one unfolding at his parental home. Esther's betrayal, her desperate attempts to rectify it by placing a curse upon Niklaus, her death at the hands of Mikael. When Elijah came to Finn and asked him to join him, Niklaus and Rebekah and leave their town, Finn turned away from him without a single word.
ﾠ
His life was here.
ﾠ

ﾠ
Rachel died young, never having quite recovered from the death of her youngest child.
ﾠ
The years they had together, she and Finn, were quiet ones. His... condition was never again mentioned in their household, but they spent so much time not talking about it that it was always with them, an uncomfortable constant in their lives, like an unloved relative who had settled in as a houseguest and refused to leave.
ﾠ
Finn watched his wife grow frail, watched her hair turn gray and her soft features turn hard and lined. She looked like an old weathered woman when she died. He still looked twenty-seven.
ﾠ
Daniel grew up to be a strong, serious man. For the entire fifty-eight years of Daniel's life, Finn always wondered if his son blamed Finn for what had happened to their family and if he despised him for it. If he did, though, he never gave the slightest inclination.
ﾠ
When Daniel was on his deathbed, Finn was at his side, watching a burly woman who was his granddaughter but looked at least a decade older than him holding her dying father's hand.
ﾠ

ﾠ
He'd buried three generations of descendants before he realised that he had barely any ties anymore to this family that once had been his.
ﾠ
Bitter and lonely, he was prepared to face a life in solitude when Niklaus found him.
ﾠ
Niklaus, who had grown even more erratic and moody in the years they'd been apart, talked about loyalty and family and choosing a side.
ﾠ
"Mikael is trying to kill us all," he told Finn. "You're either with us or against us."
ﾠ
It had never been Finn's fight, though, and he told Niklaus as much. He had no intention of allying himself with Mikael, whom he despised for forcing this grotesque shadow of an existence on him in the first place, or Niklaus, who seemed little more than a spoiled child who would lash out whenever he didn't get his way.
ﾠ
As it turned out, it was the wrong answer.
ﾠ

ﾠ
After Elijah pulled the dagger from his chest, there was a moment of confusion, hazy memories of who he was and what was happening.
ﾠ
The one thing in his mind that wasn't clouded, the single memory that felt real, was his pain over losing Rachel and Daniel.
ﾠ
He had a family once. He watched them grow old and die while time left him unscathed, and now, he had nothing.
ﾠ

ﾠ
"We must part ways for now, my dear loyal boy," Esther tells him after the failed spell.
ﾠ
He doesn't object. She will not stop looking for ways to right the wrong she created, and if she needs his help he has no doubt that she will find him again, but he is glad to be rid of her company.
ﾠ
It leaves him oddly aimless and without a purpose, free (except not truly) and without ties to anyone - a wandering child in a world he doesn't know or understand. He could go anywhere, be anyone, but it's all meaningless to him.
ﾠ

ﾠ
Elijah finds him, weeks later, in the crowded streets of the city that has risen on the land where they once started out, before they set out for the New World. He doesn't recognise the place anymore. The home he once knew is gone, like everything else he held dear.
ﾠ
His brother, at least, is a rare familiar face amongst all the strangeness this new world holds for Finn. There is something different about Elijah though, a new kind of bitterness, a bone-deep sadness that resonates deep within Finn.
ﾠ
"I understand why you were helping her," Elijah offers. "I don't blame you. But brother, this is not the way."
ﾠ
Finn is tired of this argument before it has even begun. Elijah's understanding of his motivation is limited and inherently flawed. Both he and their mother think that Finn is only seeking death, for himself as well as all of them, as a punishment for their deeds.
ﾠ
"There's so many things to live for out there," Elijah continues. "We might not be worthy of them, but it is still in us to try to change."
ﾠ
Elijah talks about things, but Finn knows what he really means is people. He has seen the way his brother looked at the doppelganger, the wonder, the admiration.
ﾠ
He shakes his head. "Don't you understand? No matter how hard we try to be good, everything that's worth living for will always run through our fingers. Buildings decay, civilisations fall, people fade away and die, and all we can do is sit back and watch them die or force them to share our curse, effectively robbing them of everything we love about them." He wrenches the words from his throat with effort, as if it physically pains him to get them out. "How can you want that? How can you want that for anyone?"
ﾠ
For all his wisdom, Elijah has no answer to that.
ﾠ

ﾠ
Irony wills it that, at the end, after all the battles are fought, he is the last one still standing.
ﾠ
He buries the ashen remains of his siblings, as he once buried the bodies of his wife and sons. There is nothing of Esther left to bury, but he doesn't have enough energy left to feel either saddened or joyful about this. If there is a justice in her fate, it demanded too much innocent sacrifice.
ﾠ
"People say that our curse is blood. The violence, the need to kill. But they're wrong. This is the real curse." Losing people. Burying loved ones while he lives on and on.
ﾠ
Standing behind him with her arms crossed protectively over her chest, hugging herself, the girl makes a derisive sound, like she doesn't think much of his self-pity. Her voice is bitter, but surprisingly, it lacks reproval.
ﾠ
"You don't have the monopoly on loss, Finn. You've lost people you love. So have I. So has everyone around here. That's life! You lose people, you mourn them, you pick yourself up and go on. It doesn't really matter if you're a vampire or human. As long as you feel anything, it's always going to be hard. That's a good thing. It means you still care."
ﾠ
"But when you're a human, it ends. For us, it's forever. The loss and the pain and the suffering, it's never over."
ﾠ
She raises an eyebrow and pointedly looks at the graves at his feet. "Until it is." Her voice is flat, her mouth a hard line. He knows she wanted Niklaus dead, but the expression on her face and the way she holds herself make it plain that she is less than happy with the outcome of this battle.
ﾠ
He follows her gaze to where he has piled up fresh soil on the ashes of his siblings. The sharp pang of emotion that grips his heart could be survivor's guilt, except he feels jealous instead of guilty. But there's no piece of wood left from the white oak that killed the others, and the tree has been burned to the ground. It could be centuries until there'll be another one, if ever.
ﾠ
Here, now, all that's left for him to do is go on.
ﾠ

ﾠ
He stays because he has nowhere else to go.
ﾠ
He has no interest in traveling the world and starting over, meeting people he becomes attached to and grows to care about only to lose them again. Staying, however, holds just as much pain. For all that this town has changed within the past thousand years, it is still a constant reminder of his life as it used to be. There is the forest where he kissed Rachel for the first time. The meadows where Daniel used to play with his friends. The road to the neighbor village, now three times as wide and paved in asphalt, they traveled each month to trade goods.
ﾠ
Every step he makes in this town reminds him that this is not his home anymore, not his world anymore.
ﾠ
The mansion is vast and lonely without his siblings, but he doesn't mind the quiet.
ﾠ
The library proves to be a never-ending distraction, as is the internet, once he masters modern technology. He catches up on what he's missed in the eight-hundred-seventy-something years he's spent in a coffin. As it turns out, humanity - for all their inventions to make life more comfortable - hasn't evolved much. It doesn't exactly surprise him.
ﾠ
When he's not studying history, he watches the people in this town, but always from the outside, a mere observer rather than an active member of their little society. He watches the Salvatore brothers continue fighting over the doppelganger, who grows more and more uneasy between them. Her blonde friend leaves with the hybrid, declaring the need to see the world. A pack of werewolves attacks. People die. The witch tries to find a spell to cure her mother from being a vampire (there is none). The human boy Rebekah brought to the ball gets married. The doppelganger leaves for college, telling her suitors that she wants a normal life.
ﾠ
She comes back a few months later, except it's not her at all but a vampire with her face who sends the town into a frenzy. Her name is Katherine, Finn learns. He hates her on sight because she reminds him of Niklaus. When he tells her this, she recoils as if he had physically hurt her.
ﾠ
Katherine talks the younger Salvatore into leaving town with her. His brother rants and rages and disappears for days, and when he turns up again, he smells of blood and booze and his eyes hold a crazy gleam. He and the witch face off at the Grill, where he throws her into a table and she makes his brain explode. Not one of the other patrons bats an eyelash or even interrupts their conversation for a moment.
ﾠ
New vampires come into town. Some leave, some stay, most end up with stakes through their hearts. The history teacher dies and dies again and always comes back, until one day he doesn't.
ﾠ
Elena returns the day after.
ﾠ
There is a funeral. Damon is very drunk and he clutches Elena's hand so hard that even from the distance, Finn can see the bruises forming. He doesn't know what happens after they left the graveyard and went back to the boarding house, but he imagines that Damon, at this point, must have decided that he was not going to lose any more people he cares about, and he probably did not consult Elena's opinion on the matter.
ﾠ
Finn can't really blame him, except he does, because if he could stand by and watch his beloved wife and son grow old and wither and die, then Damon Salvatore should be able to grant the same favour to a girl who didn't even want to share her life with him.
ﾠ
Either way, the next time Finn spots Elena, she is not human anymore. She holds herself rigidly, as if she were a broken china doll who would fall to pieces if she let her control slip for only a moment. As if she felt Finn's gaze on her, following her, she turns around and their eyes meet.
ﾠ

ﾠ
"I didn't want this," Elena says, sitting down on the bench next to him, sullenly staring off into the distance. There's frustration in her voice, but Finn isn't sure whether it's for him and his disapproving looks or for her predicament. Elena is as much of a mystery to him now as she was the day he first approached her at the ball. She keeps surprising him. It's the way she puts others above herself, in the way she holds her ground when she should be shying away, in the way she bends when he expects her to break.
ﾠ
He frowns a little, unsure why exactly she is telling him this. "Are you asking me to kill you?"
ﾠ
Her rejection is firm and quick, despite the fact that she still won't look at him. There's no hesitation there, no second guessing herself. "No. If I wanted to die, I'd take off that stupid ring and take a walk in the sun."
ﾠ
"If you permit me the question, then... why don't you?"
ﾠ
She doesn't reply for so long that he thinks that he won't get an answer at all. When she finally starts talking, her gaze remains fixed at some point on the horizon. "I thought about suicide once, shortly after my parents died. I sat on my bed with a kitchen knife. I must have fallen asleep at some point. When I woke up because the knife had cut into my leg, and there was blood all over my sheets, I decided then that I wanted to live."
ﾠ
Turning to him, she adds, "I still do."
ﾠ
"This is not life. It's the opposite of life."
ﾠ
Elena sighs. "The opposite of life is death, Finn. This is... I don't know. It's whatever we make of it, I guess."
ﾠ

ﾠ
That night, alone in the mansion with only Niklaus's paintings and Rebekah's dresses for company, he feels lonelier than ever, and the walls seem to close in on him.
ﾠ
As he walks through the deserted streets of the town, he notices that the lights in the Gilbert house are still on. It is quarter past midnight when he rings the doorbell, too late by any means to pay a neighborly visit, but he doesn't think these sort of rules apply for vampires.
ﾠ
Elena opens the door. There's no one glowering at him over her shoulder, so Finn assumes that she's alone. She seems somewhat surprised to see him, and he wonders if she expected someone else. Damon, most likely, who she may or may not have forgiven for turning her without her consent.
ﾠ
"You could just have come in," Elena says, sounding somewhat bewildered. "Everyone else does, and it's not like an invitation is still necessary because I'm technically not alive anymore."
ﾠ
He frowns at her. "I must confess that I'm still rusty about modern day etiquette. I thought it would be bad manners to just appear in your room without announcing myself."
ﾠ
Her lips twitch into a smile. "Well then. Why don't you come inside, Finn Mikaelson?"
ﾠ

ﾠ
Finn leaves Mystic Falls in August, almost exactly four years after the day his siblings died. He has packed up their belongings in the mansion, putting them all in storage. On the front lawn, there is a "For Sale" sign.
ﾠ
Standing in front of the house and taking a final look at the property, he doesn't feel a pang of loss.
ﾠ
"Are you sure you don't want to keep it?" Elena asks, misinterpreting his appraisal for nostalgia.
ﾠ
He shakes his head. "There is no reason to. That house has never been my home, and it will always remind me of unhappy times."
ﾠ
Turning towards Elena, he buries his hands in his pockets, suddenly uncomfortable and awkward. Goodbyes of this kind are new to him, and he isn't sure how to handle them, how to walk out of someone's life of his own accord, a separation not prompted by death and tragedy.
ﾠ
"Well..."
ﾠ
Suddenly, Elena wraps her arms around his shoulders and squeezes. She's a lot stronger than she looks, but he knows that's not the reason why he feels the breath catch painfully in his chest. "I'm going to miss you," she tells him, with her head buried in the crook of his neck and her breath ghosting over his skin.
ﾠ
He finds himself returning the hug before he has consciously made up his mind how to react.
ﾠ
"I... share that sentiment," he replies, a bit stiffly and gruffer than he means to be, but he knows that she gets it when her hold on him tightens momentarily.
ﾠ
It takes a longer time and more of an effort than it should to untangle themselves from each other. Finn wryly remembers how he once vowed that he would never let himself care for anyone ever again.
ﾠ
"Don't be a stranger. And let me know if you find anywhere worth staying at," Elena tells him when he gets into the car, one of Klaus's prized possessions that, Finn suspects, has spent the last few decades only being brought out on special occasions. In a way, he supposes, this counts as a special occasion too.
ﾠ
He smiles at Elena and he squeezes her hand through the open window, and he promises to keep in touch. Then he floors the gas, speeding off into the distance.
ﾠ
Onwards.
ﾠ

ﾠ

End.