A/N: Ok, so you might notice that I have deleted the warnings about the unhappy-ish ending and also changed the total chapter count from 2 to 3. It was getting way too long again and I felt I had a good enough cut. I've already finished the story, though, so I should have an update faster. And I have a new finale, by the way. Lol I'm so weak. Decided to change it. I still think it's bittersweet, but it's not sobby like the original one (which I might post at some point, maybe on tumblr or something, just because I liked it so much).
As always I must ask that you forgive any mistakes and typos you might find. The story isn't beta'ed and my grammar corrector is kinda sucky.
Thanks so much to everyone who took their time reading and reviewing this. 3 Means a lot to me. Let me know your thoughts on this chapter as well! =)
Maybe we could make it alright
We could make it better sometime
Maybe we could it happen, baby
We could keep trying but things will never change
So I don't look back
Still I'm dying with every step I take
But I don't look back
Just a little, little bit better
Elijah came to him as a train rushing towards a man tied to the tracks.
It was a rainy Saturday, like every other Saturday had been that March, and a 16 years old Klaus was walking back home after an afternoon of having his nose buried in books at the library. That's how he'd been spending most of his days: studying tumors. Klaus had done a pretty extensive job already in his previous life, progress had been made, but his greatest challenge was figuring out how to adapt his knowledge of future techniques to present day technology. Klaus would certainly end up getting some Nobel prizes for advancing the war on aggressive brain tumors with visionary work that wasn't exactly his. It was both theft and also not the kind of spotlight reborns usually want to attract, but screw it. If that meant giving Caroline a better fighting chance, he couldn't care less about stealing other people's brilliancy. Especially if some of said people weren't even born yet.
Klaus stopped to fix his hoody and hide from the drizzle when he heard someone calling for him.
"Hello, Niklaus."
It was the first of many times Klaus heard that greeting in Elijah's soft, melodic voice.
Of course Klaus didn't know his name yet, had no idea who he was, but it didn't take him more than two seconds to understand why that man was standing there with a cryptic smile on his face, knowing the full name he never used.
He was a reborn. An original like himself.
Elijah appeared to be in his late twenties, maybe even past that (Klaus never asked, his age always seemed rather beside the point - it's never the actual age that counts with the lot of them). There was an elegance to him that was almost otherworldly, like he'd stepped out of an old Hollywood movie into the real world. His hair was perfectly fixed, his eyes were as dark as the night, but there was something warm about him, something nurturing. Elijah was a care-taker, with an aura of mystery wrapped around him like a halo.
Klaus would meet him again several times later, in several different lifetimes, but Elijah never ceased to be a conundrum. He was always one step ahead, this infinite well of wisdom and knowledge. It seemed nothing ever happened without Elijah becoming aware of it.
"Can we go somewhere to talk?" he asked, shifting his umbrella from one hand to the other.
Klaus simply nodded. He did that a lot on their first encounter.
Klaus wasn't paying that much attention to where they were going, all lost in thoughts. He couldn't decide whether to be excited or scared. There was nothing even remotely hostile about Elijah, quite the opposite; he was very affable, very calm. Still, Klaus was apprehensive. It was one thing to imagine there were other reborns; it was a completely different one to come face to face with one of them.
As they walked, Klaus realized that there was something about Elijah. He could sort of feel his presence. Like the air around him was charged with a different sort of energy that affected his molecules and made his insides twist in knots - not in a sick sort of way, but in awareness.
"You can feel it too, huh?" Elijah asked, smiling as he looked straight ahead, as though he could read Klaus' thoughts. "Don't worry, it's normal. We can all feel each other. Our bodies aren't any different from a regular person's, but our spirits aren't the same. We can recognize a kindred soul, if we get close enough."
Elijah led him towards a small café that Klaus would've probably never even noticed if he didn't know where to look. It was the epitome of discreet, the outside not corresponding one bit to the luxury of the inside. It seemed to have been frozen in time, probably somewhere around the 1900s, like one of those belle époque fancy places. There were maybe five or six other people there, and they all felt weird, a strange sort of electricity in the air connecting them together - and to Klaus - in a manner he'd never felt before.
They were all reborns.
"Please, don't be alarmed. I know you're very confused right now, but it will all make sense in a second. I mean no harm," Elijah said. "Harming one of our own is the worst offense possible to our kind. I'd never dream of it."
Our kind. It was so strange to hear that. It was so strange to be surrounded by other immortal souls. Klaus had always suspected that he wasn't the only one because it was very unlikely that something that impossible would've happened just once, just to him. It would imply that he was in some way special, meant for greater things or some comic book crap like that. Which was not at all what he felt like. So there had to be others. Klaus just never thought he'd actually meet them.
It was overwhelming, to say the least.
"I've never met another person like me before," Klaus said, stumbling upon his words a little, but trying his best to keep the cool façade.
"Well, there's a first time for everything, even for us. I'm Elijah," he said, offering his hand for a shake, which Klaus took after a moment of hesitation. For a second there he was afraid of what would happen when they touched. But there was no instantaneous combustion or electric discharge. It was a bit anti-climactic, actually. All very ordinary. "How old are you?"
"I'm 16."
Elijah laughed. "No. I mean how many lives?"
"Oh," Klaus said. "This is my tenth."
"Ten? You're only a child."
Klaus frowned. "How old are you?"
Elijah smiled shortly, making a sign with his hands to the man behind the counter, who responded with a courteous nod. "I'm 76."
"Piss off!" Klaus said. Elijah just smiled. That man had been alive for millenniums.
The man to whom Elijah had signaled interrupted them with a tray full of delicious looking pastries and tea. Klaus' stomach grumbled as the wonderful smell of warm food filled his nostrils. His head had been so messed up by Elijah's arrival that he completely forgot it was past tea time. He was starving.
"Thank you, Emmanuel. These look terrific, as always."
"My pleasure, sir."
With another nod, Emmanuel left, and Elijah immediately started to pour tea for the two of them.
"Is he a reborn too?" Klaus said, unable to feel Emmanuel.
"No, he's a commoner. But he always spends 40 years working here, every time. He's practically family. Milk?" he asked. Klaus nodded, and felt his head spinning a little bit at the simplicity of the scene. A millenniums old man pouring him tea like it was nothing. Just another day in his life.
"You're probably wondering how I found you," Elijah continued after sipping from his cup. Klaus didn't say anything. There was no need for him to talk at all for conversation to ensue with Elijah. "I'm a frequent passenger on the 9:50 train to Cardiff on the 21st of April of 2018 myself."
Klaus gaped. "You... what?"
"Oh, don't try to picture me in the train, you'll fail," he added quickly with a grin, again reading his thoughts. "I can pale to insubstantiality if I want to, and I usually do. I imagine at this point you've probably already realized there are certain dangers inherent to our existence. If people knew what we know... It's best that we're not noticed, if possible. But I know every single face of every single person who rides that train with me. I've done it enough times to have them memorized. I don't always go to Cardiff on that day, only every few lifetimes or so. But I've been there enough to notice you, Niklaus."
He sipped again from his tea, calmly giving Klaus precious seconds to process the information.
"I noticed your presence, of course, but not so strongly. We're never sitting very close from one another. And we do get it wrong sometimes, which I thought was the case with you. You see, every single time we rode that train together, everything always played out the same way. That was a very good indication that you were not one of ours. We don't tend to repeat ourselves that much. But then..." he made a pause and smiled triumphantly. "Then you weren't there. Just like that. One day, you didn't show up. And that's when I knew I'd found another one. I went back there in my past life, just to confirm, and there you were again. I followed you around a little, did some digging. Confirming my suspicions was rather easy - you need to be more careful, by the way. Child prodigy studying inoperable cancers at the age of 16? That raises flags."
Klaus always perceived himself as a discreet person. Most of the time, anyway. Clearly, though, he'd been lacking in the subtlety department.
"Why did you have to find me? You could've just talked to me on the train."
Elijah took a deep breath then, his eyes flickering away from Klaus for a second. Maybe Klaus didn't have his skills reading people, but he knew enough to recognize reluctance when he saw it. Even before he said anything, Klaus knew that what Elijah had to share wasn't good news. It reminded him a lot of those dreaded phone calls he got so used to in his first few lives with Caroline.
"That young woman you're always talking to on the train, the one who's always late. Correct me if I'm wrong, but she's the reason you keep going back to that train time and time again, is she not?"
"Yes."
"I figured," Elijah nodded, tapping his fingers on the table. "She means a lot to you, doesn't she?" Klaus swallowed down hard before nodding. Elijah shook his head lightly, his eyes full of some sort of sad sympathy that made Klaus' insides twirl. "I'm afraid I'm here to tell you that you shouldn't see her anymore."
Klaus' heart jumped to his throat and he nearly dropped his cup. "What- what are you talking about?" he stammered.
"You shouldn't see her because she's your anchor."
"My... what?"
"Anchor," Elijah repeated. "Did you never find it strange how suddenly close to her you felt? How extraordinarily fast the two of you got along? For us, it's not very easy to let people in, is it? Well, it's never easy for me, and not for anyone else I've ever met. That's not to say we don't have friends and lovers who become very dear to us, but it's different, isn't it? We don't always go back to the same people over and over again. We might go back to our favorites from time to time, but not all the time. Not every single lifetime. It's not in our nature to get attached so easily to things that are so flitting. But you did get attached to that young woman, didn't you?"
"She's... We're... I love her," Klaus gritted out, almost aggressively.
"I know you do. That's what that feeling is to us, what the anchors stir in us. Love. It is love, after all. A dependable, all-consuming and completely overwhelming love, unlike anything else we've ever experienced." Elijah stopped for a spell, looked right into Klaus' eyes. "But she keeps dying, doesn't she?"
"How do you -"
"Anchors," Elijah cut him off. "That's what they do. They never last too long. Here's the short story. We don't know what created us, how we came into being, what makes individuals like ourselves possible. If it's magical, extraterrestrial, biological - no one knows. There are a few educated guesses, but no certainty. And the same thing goes for the anchors. We can't explain them. All we know is that for each of us there seems to be a person who serves as an anchor. Ask any immortal, and they will tell you the same story. We call them anchors because they keep us tied to this one same event, over and over again. We just want to go back to them, whichever way we can, and that invariably leads us back to one same day and one same time and somewhat guarantees, with only minor disruptions, that we are going to follow coordinated steps, the same as every other human being. Whatever got us here - whichever cosmic force is responsible for bringing us back to the starting point after our deaths - it tries to correct this anomaly by forcing us to follow one same path as though we are normal. And they do it through the anchors. That's how they get us back on track, keep us under control."
Klaus could feel all the color draining from his face, the bottom dropping out of his stomach. Caroline, his Caroline, his perfect, beautiful Caroline, just another pawn in this stupid game the universe was playing with him.
"No..." he murmured after a moment. "That can't be. Caroline... She loves me. We love each other."
"I'm not saying you don't. The feelings you have for your anchor are very real. She's your soulmate, after all. Trust me, I know." He said it with such sorrow, his eyes so full of remorse that Klaus couldn't help but feel sympathetic towards his pain. He was either a very good liar or telling the truth. "But that doesn't change the fact that she's brought on to your path for a reason, and that reason is to keep you trapped on a never-ending loop of grief and loss. Because they never live long enough, regardless of how hard you try to save them. That's the catch. We love them too much, we lose them too soon, so we go back and we try again. And again, and again, and again. It's a very sadistic game that we cannot escape. Not unless we let them go."
"But... I tried to find her sooner, before the train ride, and she was with someone else. She didn't fall in love with me then. If she's my anchor, then how come she didn't fall for me?"
"That's because you broke the spell. When you change the course of events, you break the power that bonds you. There's no way to guarantee it'll go the same way anymore. The principle is the same as with the theory of chaos. Once you change something, regardless of how small, you cannot predict what the modifications will create further down the path. It might happen the same way, or it might not. In your case, it didn't. Let's just say you freed her from her anchor duties."
"So what? What if I don't mind being trapped? I don't care. I just want to be with her."
"Niklaus..." Elijah said, leaning slightly forward over the table and holding his gaze. Young is something Klaus never feels anymore, not since he came back the first time. But looking into Elijah's eyes, he feels no older than the 16 years of his body in this life. "I know it's hard to understand. And I know it might take a while for you to digest the idea. It's why I wanted to see you years before that train ride finally came around, so that you would have enough time to think about it. There's a whole world of things you don't know yet about being who you are, Niklaus. Maybe in the beginning you won't understand. By God, it took me two lifetimes to let go of my anchor after I learned what she was, and I still think about her, one way or another, every single day.
"But the thing is... You will only start living a full life that is entirely your own once you learn to let go. The world is so big, Niklaus. You can see it all, you can have it all. You have time, which is the most precious treasure in the universe. You can learn other languages, visit exotic islands, meet new people - fall in love. Leaving the anchor is not the end. And more importantly... If you really care about her, you will let her go. If you stop going to her, it'll break the spell. She'll live, Niklaus. Long and happy years. That's the only way they get to live. Away from us. We are what kills them. I know it hurts, but that's the truth we all have to accept at some point."
What Klaus remembers best from that moment is the cold, raw ache that spread through his chest. All those years working hard to become a neuro-genius, all those lifetimes moving heaven and earth to try and save Caroline from the next tragedy... And it was his fault all along. He was the car crash that smashed Caroline's head, he was the drunk driver that ran her over and left her for dead, he was the thief who shot her cold in the chest. He was the tumor growing in her head.
Klaus was the disease that ended Caroline's life. His love was poisonous.
He left the café with Elijah's phone number - which he guaranteed would remain the same in every life, should Klaus ever need him - and a question ringing loudly in his head: what the hell was he supposed to do? Stop his entire plan for that life and just... quit? Not go after Caroline anymore? Find something else to occupy his time with, like saving her had been no more than a hobby?
His mind wasn't clear. It raced and pounded like the worst kind of fever. Klaus didn't leave home for a week, just hid under the covers, not wanting to see the light of day. His mother thought it was the flu - "There is this virus going around," she said. "Oh, Niklaus. I told you not to go out with just that hoody, didn't I? If you would only listen for once. Let's hope you don't get everyone in this house infected."
Usually, that type of comment would've hurt him, even after so many lifetimes to get accustomed to Esther's vinegary lines. He's tried to win his parents' affections, tried to be the son he thought they wanted. Nothing he ever did worked. He was never enough. This time, however, Klaus, didn't care. He wasn't paying attention to anything Esther said. He was unaware of even thinking.
The good news was, he had over a decade before the next 9:50 train to Cardiff. That would give him some time to consider, perhaps even come to terms with his new reality: he wasn't alone in the universe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of reborns out there, joined together by this little club of rules and regulations - "I will tell you all about it when you're ready," Elijah said, "but right now I think you have more immediate matters to appreciate" - and Caroline was just another freakish anomaly in a long list of deviations in his life, one that he was supposed to walk away from. An anchor.
Klaus thought a lot about what Elijah said, about how he could meet other people and fall in love again and do different things with his life if only he didn't let himself get dragged back to that Cardiff-bound train every time. He thought about Camille and the only time he ever made the active choice of not pursuing Caroline. He'd lived a moderately happy life then, and he'd loved Cami with as much heart as it was possible to. Klaus never regretted the time they spent together. So Elijah wasn't all wrong. It was possible to love other people, even if, deep down, he still missed Caroline.
The thing is that Klaus had a choice then - he decided against being with Caroline because he knew he'd always have the next life. Now it was no longer a matter of free will, but an imposition. That made everything different.
The question of whether or not to leave Caroline for good set on the base of his spine like a parasite for eleven years. And when the time finally came, Klaus bought the ticket and boarded the train.
Twenty seconds before Caroline got in, he changed seats, moved to an empty space across the corridor and watched as the same old scene unfolded before his eyes. Caroline, wet and bothered, jumping onto the train late as always, taking her spot, trying to work on her mobile...
It was the hardest thing Klaus ever had to do, but he faced away from the woman he loved and stayed like that for the rest of the trip.
"Live, Caroline. I want you to live."
He watched as Caroline walked away at the platform, completely unware of his existence, and as soon as she was gone, Klaus bought a ticket back to London and went home.
His love had been a curse to her for way too long. Now, he'd turned it into a gift. Even if part of his heart would be forever with her, even if Klaus could never find love quite like that again, even if every cell in his body itched for contact.
In the end, Klaus would not be able to live with himself knowing how vicious and toxic his mere proximity was to the object of his utmost affection. That hurt almost as much as leaving her - almost as much as losing her.
That's how much he loved Caroline. Enough to let her go.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x
That, however, was a lot easier said than done.
Klaus swore by everything holy and pure that he wouldn't be going back to that train again. When he looked at the situation objectively, rather than through the blurry lenses of his hurt feelings, it didn't seem that it should be a hard decision at all. With him, Caroline would die. Without him, she would live. It was that simple.
That was not to say he was willing to let go without a fight, though.
The fact Elijah seemed to be telling the truth didn't mean Klaus wouldn't conduct his own investigation into the matter. He had to see with his own eyes that Caroline would survive the grim reaper that followed her around like a shadow whenever they got together - that she would be happy and fulfilled without any Klaus Mikaelsons crashing into her life uninvited. Honest though Elijah may have been, his words weren't enough to settle the matter to Klaus.
He couldn't think of a single reason why a complete stranger would lie to him about something that did not concern or affect his life in any way, but it was still part of his instincts not to trust anyone, not even another reborn. If there was even a small chance that Elijah was wrong or if there was a way to break the spell without getting Caroline killed... Well. He was all game.
Along the course of his tenth life, Klaus tracked down Caroline a few times. And every single of them was excruciating. He always feared doing that before because he didn't want to find out whether Caroline could have peace as long as he wasn't around. Now it was his only option to confirm Elijah's story.
Klaus found her three times. The first happened two years after the train ride, and Caroline was apparently well and healthy and still working at the gallery. So she'd managed to escape at least two deaths already without the need of any biblical interventions. But Klaus wasn't too impressed. Those early deaths were all circumstantial; Caroline was at the wrong place, at the wrong time. It was only too simple to avoid it by not being there, and if she wasn't with Klaus, then she was somewhere else, doing something else, and it was completely plausible that a smooth change in directions would lead Caroline away from those two encounters with death. The same went for the third one.
No, the part that worried Klaus the most was the brain tumor. Whichever way you looked at it, it was unavoidable. That would be the one to provide irrefutable veracity to Elijah's tale.
Klaus postponed the moment for as long as he could, but it eventually became clear that it was futile to pretend he wouldn't have to find out sooner or later, and it was best that he ended this once and for all in one lifetime, rather than carry the doubt over into the next.
Roughly ten years after the 9:50 train to Cardiff, Klaus started his search feeling torn between how desperately he didn't want to find Caroline and how much of a monster that sentiment made him. Finding her meant that it was all true. They never got to spend ten whole years together, Caroline was always dying before that.
When it took him no more than ten seconds online to find out about Caroline Forbes' whereabouts, he was crushed.
Thousands of Google mentions, hundreds of photographs and dozens of interviews. Caroline was as beautiful as ever and one of the most respected figures amongst modern art circles in Europe and the United States. Managing director of the Tate Modern. In her mid-thirties, past the tumor phase, alive and well and healthy.
Klaus never thought that a heart could sink this fast.
The sensible thing to do would've been to accept defeat and remove himself from Caroline Forbes' story for good. But Klaus was never known to be a sensible person. What he did instead was donate ridiculous amounts of money to the museum and its charities, torturing himself with the useless hope that seeing his name or his face would spark a memory back into life. He knew it was impossible; the memories were simply not there.
In fact, Klaus wondered if maybe Elijah didn't get the whole anchor thing wrong. To him, it seemed like it worked the other way around. Caroline could get away from him and never miss a thing, while he had to stumble through life with a frown on his face and a hole in his chest, forever hung onto her. He was the true anchor, stuck to the bottom of something. Not Caroline.
All the money invested made Niklaus Mikaelson one of the most important names on every single list of guests to all the important events at the Tate. For six years, Klaus refused all invitations, until one day he woke up with a bit of an attitude and decided to go fuck it.
And then he wished he hadn't.
It should've been enough to know that Caroline was alive, that was all the answer he needed, but apparently Klaus had some masochist tendencies in him to go along with the brooding and had to go twist the blade in a little bit further.
It was painful - actually physically painful - to see Caroline parading across the hall, shaking hands and offering smiles and being absolutely stunning as a mid-thirties woman. Perfect in every way, except for the fact that she wasn't his.
Every single memory of every life spent alongside her emerged from the depths of Klaus' mind in the space of a second. Waking up next to her, making her breakfast while she got ready for work in the morning, sketching her face while she slept - watching her in a white dress, beautiful as a Renaissance painting, walking down the aisle to become his wife. Memories of lives he could never live again, because Caroline was right there, after all. It was all true.
"Mr. Mikaelson," Caroline said, a smile on her face that showed enthusiasm but professionalism. Klaus was fascinated by all the new wrinkles on the corners of his beloved's eyes, the signs of an age he never got to see on her before. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I was starting to think I'd never get the chance to thank the man who makes my work so much easier in person. You're a blessing to all modern art lovers, sir, I hope you know this."
Bang. Bang. Bang. Every word uttered in that American accent felt like a shot straight to his heart.
"I'm not a fan of the spotlight," he said, not quite sure he was being successful in hiding his disheartenment. "My donations are made purely out of love, Ms. Forbes. Nothing more."
"Oh, I believe that. A man who contributes as much with the museum and our charities as you do obviously loves his art very much. It's a very noble feeling."
"Yes," Klaus agreed. "I do love my art."
They spoke for a while - about the museum, the current exhibitions, the future exhibitions, the pieces they were desperately trying to acquire, her plans for the immediate future. It was easy conversing with Caroline, and Klaus loved to watch her go on and on about the things that excited her. She had such passion, such drive, that woman. That was one thing that didn't change. But it wasn't the same. Caroline talked like she wanted to impress. "See, we're taking very good care of your money, I'm extremely professional, you can trust me, please don't ever stop signing the checks."
Klaus wanted to interrupt her just to say there was no need for her to embellish so much trying to convince him to keep the investments. She could just be honest, talk from her heart. He couldn't care less about what she'd do to the money, he'd never stop helping her, even if that meant twisting Elijah's rules a little bit.
He didn't stop her, though, playing hard to impress just so she'd keep talking. Everything about her was dazzling. The way she smiled, the sound of her voice, how the accent became thicker when she laughed or got particularly excited. Klaus wouldn't mind booking himself a chair to sit there and watch her all night.
After a couple more champagne flutes, Caroline turned the conversation around and started asking about him. "What is it that you do exactly, Mr. Mikaelson, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Please. Call me Klaus," he corrected her softly. "I'm an investor. I make money from putting money in the right places, at the right time. And then I take that money and I send it to causes that matter."
"And what about Mrs. Mikaelson? Is she here tonight?"
Klaus stopped then. In a certain way, he was staring right at the only Mrs. Mikaelson that had ever existed, Hayley aside (and, at this point, Klaus hardly considered her a part of his life anymore). It occurred to him that question was the most clichéd way of finding out whether someone you're interested on is already taken, but she didn't seem particularly flirtatious as she asked, more like conversational, casually interested in learning more about the guy who kept making donations to all her personal projects.
Too late. The second the idea crossed his mind, it ignited a flame inside of Klaus. Was Caroline flirting with him? Was she trying to feel the ground before advancing?
"There is no Mrs. Mikaelson," he said, his heart already beating faster. What was he supposed to do if Caroline did make a move on him? Wasn't that against everything Elijah told him? Shouldn't she have broken out of the spell by then? God knows how he tried to get her to notice him outside of the regular timeline before, it never worked. Could it be...?
"Hey!" someone interrupted them, heads turning towards the voice. It belonged to a man Klaus had never seen before, in any of his previous lives. He was probably on his late thirties or early forties, fashionably dressed in a neat and classic dark grey suit. It looked almost aristocratic on him. He approached them with a smile that lasted on Klaus' direction for two seconds before he focused all his attention on Caroline - and then the smile grew into a beam, his green eyes sparkled and Klaus just knew that he wouldn't like that man, whoever he was. "I've been looking for you all over."
"I'm sorry. I was having such a lovely conversation here, I forgot to go back," Caroline said, sending Klaus a quick glance as she spoke. "This is Mr. Niklaus Mikaelson," she added, gesticulating towards Klaus.
"Oh," the man interjected, eyebrows shooting up in surprise. "You mean the famous Niklaus Mikaelson?"
"Famous?" Klaus asked.
"Oh, yeah. You're a celebrity around here. Caroline never shuts up about you. Niklaus Mikaelson, the museum's most important patron. She's had a crush on you for years now, Mr. Mikaelson," the man said, chuckling.
"Stefan," she admonished, her cheeks immediately flushing. "You're being inappropriate."
"I'm sorry," Stefan said. "I'm sorry, Mr. Mikaelson. I meant no offense."
"None taken," Klaus offered through gritted teeth.
There was a short and awkward silence before Caroline broke the ice again. "This is Stefan Salvatore, he's one of the museum's lawyers," she explained. And then, after Klaus and Stefan shook hands, she added. "And also my fiancé."
He knew he was going to hate the guy.
So that was the person Caroline was meant to end up with. Stefan Salvatore. Posh and handsome and insufferable.
Stefan just looked... Perfect. Exactly like someone Caroline should end up with, if only she wasn't meant for Klaus. They were soulmates, Elijah said. Stefan was just a suitable replacement. He was the person Caroline's de-anchored heart rushed to. Not Tyler Lockwood, who was a cheater and unrefined, unlike Stefan Salvatore, with his ridiculously fancy name and big hair, fitting the perfect description of People Anyone Would Want To Introduce To Their Parents.
Klaus wanted to gut him right there.
"So you're... to be married?" he asked, eyes darting down to Caroline's very obviously ringerless hands.
"I don't wear a ring," she said, noticing Klaus' indiscreet look. "Not yet, anyway. We've been engaged for two months but my ring kept falling off my finger. I was afraid I'd lose it, so I took it off. Need to have it adjusted but I can never find the time."
"Ah," was all the words Klaus could produce.
Well, he didn't get the size of the ring wrong when he proposed, did he?
Caroline told Stefan she'd be right out and tried to make Klaus comfortable again by diving back into their work conversation, but it was too late. Klaus' mood had been irreparably soured. As soon as he could, he got out of there. Running.
It was hard to tell what hurt the most: confirming that Elijah was right about the anchor curse or finding out that Caroline was engaged to be married to someone else. Each time she escaped him, Klaus grew more possessive, more protective, more jealous of every man who dared to come close to her. The things he wanted to do Stefan Salvatore there... He was afraid of his own impulses. It seemed his ninth life had caused more of a permanent damage to his humanity than he thought.
After that disaster, Klaus decided not to try and find Caroline again. At least for a very long time. He never stopped donating to the museum, but declined all of their invitations, some of which were personally sent by Caroline. He got an email right after the event apologizing for Stefan's ill-timed joke and hoping that he hadn't made Mr. Mikaelson too uncomfortable. Klaus never replied. What would he say? 'The only thing that made me uncomfortable was the thought of Stefan dearest's tongue in your mouth.'
For the next thirty years, Klaus split his time between wallowing in self-pity and dedicating his days to traveling and hobbies and temporary lovers who meant absolutely nothing and never quite filled the hole left by that awful night at the museum. And then he finally went back to London. A quick search revealed Caroline Forbes, now in her 60s, had been promoted to CEO of the Tate Modern. She was still alive and well, but Stefan had passed away a few years before, after decades of marriage. She wore his ring on a necklace around her neck.
Klaus felt almost sorry for her. He knew exactly what it felt like to have someone you love being taken away from you.
They never saw each other again, and Klaus never tried to find her after that. He died at the age of 75. Caroline might even have out-lived him.
x-x-x-x-x-x
Klaus spent 1026 years, or 14 lifetimes, completely away from Caroline. That is a hell of a lot of time to fill, if you ask him.
The beginning was hard. After so much time dedicating the first few years of his life to waiting for her, it was difficult to assimilate the fact that those were not waste years anymore. There was nothing waiting for him on the 21st of April of 2018. He could start to live well before his 27th birthday. But how? He didn't even know where to begin.
The problem is, when you have 1026 years to live, you have to learn how to get creative, otherwise basically everything starts to get old very soon. And in his particular case, the temptation to crawl back to Caroline was way too big, at times almost like a magnetic force was pulling him towards the train - which might actually be the case. Who knows how the anchor thing works?
It was an arduous and exhausting fight against something that he'd built into a basic instinct over the years, but, slowly, Klaus became used to the concept of having Caroline as an idea, a hypothesis that wasn't really tangible. It made Caroline feel less like a human being who was alive and breathing and walking around somewhere, and more like a dream Klaus had a long time ago.
Elijah kept showing up randomly. He never called to say when he was coming, never bid farewell before going. Klaus was never sure when he'd see him, but somehow Elijah knew exactly when he was needed the most. Whenever Klaus started thinking too much about Caroline, there he was.
He taught Klaus all about The Strix, a name almost as presumptuous as the organization itself. The Strix has existed for longer than anyone is capable of pinpointing. No one can tell who started it, or when, only that no matter how far back or forward in time you go, it's always there, all over the world. That's another cool thing Elijah taught him, by the way: sending messages back and forward in time through other reborns. It takes a while for things to get answered, but eventually they do. There are tons of ways reborns can get their messages across, but the most commonly used is through their chain of fellow originals. All you need to do is find someone who's either much older, which means they'll have started their lives long before you, so that message can travel back faster, or someone much younger, who'll live way beyond your years. Reborns have been doing that sort of thing for ages. It's quite impressive. Klaus managed to send some messages through time to some of his favorite artists. It was glorious.
The Strix is also wonderful if you mean to travel the world. They hold meetings absolutely everywhere and offer all sorts of assistance to its very exclusive members. Klaus had no idea there were so many of them. To reborns, it doesn't matter if they never saw you before, they consider you a friend merely because you share that one personality trait with them - which, well, is kind of an important trait, indeed.
Travelling was Klaus' weapon of choice to stay away from his anchor. God, he hated to think of Caroline as a thing. It had such an awful ring to it, like she had been a terrible thing to happen to him. He met reborns along the way who grew so resentful of their anchors, harboring such bitterness and animosity towards them, that they actually started to hate them. Some would even go back to the anchors just to kill them, make them suffer, which they felt was honest retribution. Klaus knew his fair share of anger, but it was never directed at Caroline. She wasn't at fault for the tragedy of their fates. Klaus was certain that given the knowledge and the choice, she would fight for them too.
The vengeful ones, however, were amongst the minority. What most reborns internalized as the truth in order to make the separation from their anchors more palatable was that their feelings were not real, but born out of manipulations. Klaus refused that just as vehemently. He'd accepted that he had to let the woman of his life go because that was the only way to save her, but he'd never settle for the idea that what they lived together had never been real. If that wasn't real, then nothing else in his life was. Caroline is always the most vivid memory he carries with him and that, to someone who's lived for almost two thousand years, is saying a lot.
Klaus went everywhere. Wherever his heart told him to go, he'd do it. Sometimes he'd wake up, spin the globe and go wherever his finger touched.
He started with remote beaches, nearly deserted islands and exotic tropical forests. Then he moved on to the mountains, hiked and climbed up the Andes, the Everest, Kilimanjaro, the Himalayas. Then came the deserts. And then, when he started missing the comfort of indoor plumbing, piped water and heaters, he went back to the big cities.
He worked as a diving instructor, as a ship captain, as a wild life preservationist. He learned how to cook and even collected a few Michelin stars as a renowned chef one time. He made his old childhood dreams come true simply because he could and won a Champions League as Cardiff captain, went to Mars on the first manned mission to the red planet. It was a fiasco, by the way, the entire crew died on the landing. Klaus was 57 at the time and felt really frustrated once he was old enough in his next life to remember. He thought he was making history. But he figured he died as somewhat of a hero and probably had memorials built in his honor, had his name taught in schools, maybe even became a question in Trivia Pursuit. Death-wise, it wasn't the most horrible way to go.
Klaus had... Well, more lovers than he can remember, to be honest. Not all of them were memorable. Some just entertaining or exceptionally good at what they did. He learned certain tricks that would make him blush if he had such inclinations. It's amazing how you can live for a thousand years and never stop learning new things. There's always something different, like a twist of the tongue at the right moment or a little curve of the fingers or some creative new position you never tried before. That, he reckons, is what Elijah meant when he talked about living.
Not everyone he met along the way meant something, but that is not to say no one did. A handful of people became very dear to him, a few Klaus would go as far as to say he loved, in his own way. He even married again, once. It felt wrong, because the only people he'd ever married before were Hayley, who turned out to be a mistake, and Caroline, who was… Definitive. He didn't think he should marry anyone, anymore after her. In his heart, he would always be married to Caroline, and that would lead him to invariably comparing everyone else to her, which was unfair.
It took him a few lifetimes to get over all that and decide it was time. Her name was Rose and she owned a restaurant by the beach in Costa Rica. Technically, they weren't officially married, but the symbolic ceremony happened. Rose had this whole philosophy about honoring vows professed in front of loved ones under the sky, blessed by the moon and the stars. She was a bit of a hippie, truth be told, and Klaus, always the skeptical resurrecting man that he was, didn't believe any of that spiritual stuff, but Rose was so passionate about it he couldn't help but play along. In every aspect that counts, they were married. And Klaus did love Rose and her free spirit, her passion for the simple things and the intensity with which she defended what was important to her.
In his 22nd life, Klaus felt bolder. He decided he wanted to get inked for the first time. It was never something he had particularly fancied, not on his own body anyway, but what the hell. He should try it at least once. And he's very glad he did, because it led him to Vincent and Eva. They had a tattoo parlor that doubled as a voodoo shop at the French Quarter in New Orleans, where Klaus decided to land for a lifetime of historical and slightly supernatural amusement. Besides being amazing tattoo artists, they were also incredible lovers. Klaus lived with the pair of them for six years.
That 22nd life was quite the ride. Klaus partied like he never had before, made out with more random, drug-induced strangers than he ever had before, got both his arms completely covered in tattoos and even had Vince and Eva's names inked to his wrists. He had an X tattooed on the left side of his chest, but never explained to them what it meant.
He parted ways with the duo when the subject of starting a family came up. If there was one thing that never changed, not even a little bit, in all his years of existence, it was how much Klaus abhorred the idea of having a child. It was hard enough not having all the people he loved with him every time he began a new cycle; he could not fathom the pain of losing a kid.
Vince and Eva were a little hurt, but they understand he just wasn't ready for the commitment. Klaus' refusal got them to delay the project for a while longer so that they could enjoy more time together. Then Klaus moved out, and they moved on. Vince and Eva had Finn and Freya while Klaus had a series of overdoses that nearly killed him. No pain, no gain, right?
In his 23rd life, Klaus decided to take things slowly again. It was as though he was brought back into being still on a hangover. He decided to stay in London, dedicate some time to his old mates from his first life, and ended up working as an investment consultant – and donating money to the museum again, just because.
After the threesomes and partying hard of his past life, it was a little anti-climactic, but a much welcome change in venues. For the first time he could actually feel it in his brand new bones that he wasn't getting any younger.
Soon enough he understood the reason.
In his 23rd life, Klaus ran into Tatia again, the girl who'd been his very first kiss, in his very first life.
She was as ordinary as a person can be, worked as a barista, made just enough money to rent a tiny apartment and liked playing football at the park on Sundays. She'd attempted a professional career when she was younger and was pretty decent, but a serious injury decided her fate for her when she was 16. Needless to say, she was quite impressed with how good Klaus turned out to be at football - he did win a Champions League once, after all.
They met as kids in school, as always, and then never saw each other again. Until one day Klaus left work early and met with Trevor at a café in a part of the city he tried to steer clear off because it was way too close to the Forbidden Perimeter of Caroline. And there he found Tatia. Trevor, who was a regular, dared him to ask for her number, which he deemed would be a funny joke because Tatia had turned down pretty much everyone who'd ever asked her out and Trevor was pretty sure she was a lesbian. Only he didn't know Klaus and Tatia were childhood pals and, as it turned out, she was bisexual, not gay. Klaus got a phone number and made Trevor 50 quid poorer.
Not in any of his previous lives Klaus had realized how much of a beauty Tatia would grow up to be. She had a beautiful smile, an infectious laughter and a personality that could expand to fill an entire room. She was modest and funny and walking with her meant stopping to say hi to someone every five steps because that woman knew absolutely everyone.
Their relationship was not the moving-heaven-and-earth type. It didn't set quakes or sweep them off their feet. But it was simple and fun and, over the years, Klaus came to develop a strong predilection for things that were easy. He'd had enough of complicated relationships for 50 lifetimes.
His 23rd life was bound to pass by as uneventfully and calm as he could possibly hope for, but another apparition by Elijah got his engines moving out of axis again.
He was sitting by the window at the café, waiting for Tatia's shift to be over, watching from afar as she moved behind the counter, offering jokes and smiles and coffees, when Elijah slid onto the seat right across from him.
"Hello, Niklaus," he said, looking older than Klaus had become used to seeing him. Elijah normally never came looking for him once he started to approach his 60s. Never after the 70s. Klaus never asked why, but he could guess.
"This is unexpected," he said, not hiding his discomfort.
"Isn't it always?" Elijah replied, with a casual smile. He was partly right. Klaus never expected to see him, but there were patterns to his visits. He'd always wait for a moment when Klaus was completely alone and they'd customarily end up at the reborns café. According to his own words, it was the only place where they were guaranteed to be completely safe to discuss their businesses.
Klaus shot Tatia a glance and their eyes met for just a second. Tatia smiled, Klaus smiled back, and then he turned to Elijah, who was watching him with a wistful air about him.
"I'm kind of waiting for someone," Klaus explained. "I can't leave now."
"I know. It's the lady behind the counter, isn't it?" he asked, not at all discreet in his observation of Tatia, who pretended not to be curious over Klaus' new company as she continued to chat away with the customers.
"Yes. Tatia," Klaus replied.
Elijah grinned. "You've always had good taste. She's an exquisite beauty."
Elijah seemed to keep a pretty close eye in everything he did, always knew who he was seeing at the time, sometimes even better than himself. He liked to investigate how his life was going before showing up, he said. 'To make sure I'm not intruding too much.' Klaus told him several times that all he had to do was ask, he was far more comfortable telling him everything himself than having someone snooping around. 'You never realize I'm snooping around though, do you?' was all he answered, as though that was sufficient justification.
"She seems like a nice girl," Elijah continued. "How long do you think you'll be with her?"
"I'm not thinking of ending things in the immediate future, if that's what you want to know. Why? Are you interested?"
Elijah laughed. "I was just wondering if you think she'd be good enough for a lifetime."
"I..." Klaus stopped mid-sentence, narrowing his eyes at Elijah. "What is this about? You never ask me that kind of thing."
Elijah smiled that wan smile of his again, his fingers drumming idly on the tabletop, eyes lowering from Klaus' face. He felt a shudder at the pit of his stomach all of a sudden, and it took him only a second to realize why.
Over the years, Klaus grew accustomed to Elijah's presence. His initial reluctance and the small trauma created by their first encounter faded away as they grew closer. He acted as a bit of a mentor to Klaus, teaching him things he would've never been able to figure out by himself, showing him to a world of possibilities he wouldn't even have thought of exploring. Klaus considered Elijah as a friend now, a good friend. Maybe even his best friend. Certainly the only one who really knew him.
He was as kept together and poised as you'd expect a reborn of his experience and caliber to be, but Klaus learned how to read his manners and see past his masks over the years. And he certainly knew what that look meant. How could he forget? It was the same look he got when Elijah told him about the anchors.
"Elijah..." Klaus started, nervousness already creeping up on him. "What is it?"
"How are you feeling, Niklaus?"
"How am I...? I'm fine. Why?"
"Aren't you feeling a little... tired?"
"No. Not particularly."
"Are you sure?"
Klaus stopped to consider the question more deeply. "Well... A little, I guess. I'm taking things slowly this time around. I kind of went a little crazy in my last life."
Elijah smirked. "So I heard. Don't worry - I'm not judging. We should all go crazy at least once. Maybe twice, just to cover more ground on the craziness spectrum. We do have time for that."
"Why are you asking if you already know?"
"Don't you think it's odd that you've carried exhaustion on to a new life?"
"I... Never thought about it. Is it?"
Elijah swallowed down hard, forced himself to hold Klaus' gaze. "You're dying, Niklaus."
And that... Well, that really was unexpected. Klaus' eyebrows shot up to his hairline in confusion. Trust Elijah to never dance around the point with controversial matters.
"I'm... what?"
"Dying. Your cycles are ending. You don't have much longer."
There was a space of silence for about five seconds before Klaus burst into laughter, so loud even Tatia turned to look. He only managed to reign himself in when he realized Elijah wasn't laughing as well. If anything he looked more serious than before. Sadder.
"It does sound impossible," he said. "When you hear that for the first time, anyway."
Klaus swallowed down the last bit of laughter feeling his heart grow heavy all of a sudden. "What the hell are you on about? I can't die."
"It happens. Eventually. We don't know how or when. That's just another thing that doesn't seem to make much sense about us. We don't know what creates us, we don't know what decides when it's time to take us away. But the same force that wants to ground us through anchors eventually finds a way of eliminating us." He made a pause then, drawing the air in sharply, and when he spoke again, his voice came out more than a little shaky around the edges. "And your time is almost over, Niklaus. I'm so sorry."
Your time is almost over.
You're dying.
There was a time when Klaus would've given anything to hear those words. But in his 23rd life, he wasn't sure what to make of it. Death had never seemed as a scary prospect to him; at most it was an inconvenience. It's really boring to be a three years old with the mind of hundreds of years. The last time he ever faced death as a normal person had been so long ago Klaus couldn't even remember what it felt like.
If it had been anyone else telling him that, he wouldn't have believed it. But it was Elijah. Elijah would never lie to him.
Dying. He was dying.
"How is that possible?"
"I was hoping I'd only ever have to explain that part to you when my time came. You know how we can feel each other's presence. Some of us can feel is stronger. Usually the older ones. The longer you live, the more sensitive you become to the shifts of time. And that's what we cause, a shift. These people, they know when someone new is born, and they know when someone is taken away from the timeline, either by assassination or because their time has simply faded. And when that is the case, they can usually tell beforehand. Sometimes lifetimes ahead."
"So... When I die, that will be it? I'm not coming back anymore?"
"Two lifetimes, Niklaus. You'll die on your 25th. You have this life and the next two to plan. And then it'll be over."
Two lifetimes. That suddenly felt like such little time. Was that how being a normal person felt like?
"How long have you known this?"
"Not long. I went to lots of people to confirm the information. Sometimes they sense different things. We make mistakes too. Unfortunately, it seems like they're right about you."
"Did I do something wrong?" Klaus asked, thinking back on all the bad decisions of before. Clearly he wasn't one of the good ones, but he could go for whole lifetimes without causing a stir. There were originals out there doing much worse. "Am I being punished?"
"No, it doesn't work like that. Some terrible people live for twenty thousand years, some perfectly well-behaved ones get taken away before their tenth cycle. We don't know. Maybe there's a cosmic disease killing us, and you just got infected."
Klaus fell silent again, immerse in his own head. There was too much to register.
You're dying.
"Why are you telling me? Why not just let me go?"
"Because, Niklaus, I think you might have a thing or two you want to do with the time you have left. We don't tell everyone. Some people go crazy when they realize they're going to die, start ruining the timeline trying to fix it. But I don't think you're like that. You deserve to know. Take whatever time you have left, Niklaus, and spend it at your heart's will. If you want to be with the fine lady over there, that's good. She seems good. But if there's anywhere else you'd rather go... Don't hesitate."
x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Don't hesitate.
Easier said than done.
Tell anyone they have a few more years to live and then ask them what they'll do with their time. The first thing is: they'll hesitate. It's too heavy a responsibility, too much for a person to bear, the weight of being precise with their decisions for whatever time they have left so they can die without regrets. And for someone like Klaus there was the added bonus of having to learn how to cope with mortality. It's not an idea that came naturally to him.
Yes, he still had a lot more time than the average person in roughly the same circumstances, but time was a very relative thing from his point of view. Two and a half lifetimes was nothing. It would go by in the blink of an eye.
Klaus did spend some more time with Tatia, but it just wasn't the same. After Elijah's visit, he found it hard to focus on anything again for a very long time. Work, relationships – it all blurred out a little. His head was always miles away. Tatia asked him a billion times who that man was - even she could trace Klaus' strange behavior back to Elijah - but Klaus never shared more than the fact that he was an old friend. At last he realized he'd become more of a burden to Tatia than anything, and she had completely lost her sparkle. Mortality, turns out, paints everything in a different hue. Klaus became introspective and sulky, considering possibilities that were far away from her tiny London flat and Sunday football.
They parted ways about six months later.
The rest of his 23rd life was spent in and out of The Strix' headquarters spread across the globe, seeing reborns to talk about death. The subject was somewhat of a taboo for The Strix, which explained why Klaus had never heard of it before. The club's official position is that no one should be informed about their impending deaths because it's hard to predict reactions. The risk of having someone screwing up big time, either to try to save themselves or as a way to get revenge on an old foe, is way too high. Elijah was probably disrespecting direct orders when he told Klaus.
Finding other reborns open to discuss the matter demanded more patience from Klaus than he'd originally been willing to spare. Took him a while to come upon groups who diverged from The Strix's official stand. Some had already lost many beloved friends; a small few, Klaus found, were also on their countdown. Yet others had been alive for over five thousand years and not a sign that their cycles would be over any time soon. The system didn't follow any known or predictable patterns. There was no way to tell, no way to avoid it.
Once he got a grasp on the idea that his fate had already been sealed and there was nothing he could do to change it, Klaus decided he had to come up with a plan. Not only he'd have to keep a lid on his extreme anxiety issues, already rearing its ugly head again after lifetimes under control, but he had to figure out what to do with the time he had left.
And it had never seemed to move so fast before. His 23rd life was a difficult one to navigate. Coming to terms with his own mortality was harder than Klaus could've ever predicted it to be. There were so many times throughout the course of his existence where he'd wished for death to stick, craved for the sense of relief that came with closing his ways and giving in to the darkness knowing that it would be the end. He never realized how much he wanted to live until he heard that he wasn't going to for much longer. Why exactly did he want to keep going? What was there for him to do yet that he hadn't already?
And then he realized - it was her. Of course it was her. It was always her.
He couldn't be with her, and because he couldn't be with her he couldn't even see her, because he didn't trust himself enough to lay eyes on Caroline and not do anything stupid. And still, even 13 lifetimes later, there was a part of him that felt like he was on an interlude, killing time and waiting out for when it would make sense again to go back to her.
He held back on fixing the anchor situation for almost a thousand years, hoping that if he'd waited long enough, if he behaved well enough, then maybe something would happen, an answer would come, someone else would figure out a way to cheat Mother Nature. But no magic answers had been unearthed, and now he was out of time.
The one thing Klaus wanted more than anything else was the one thing he'd die without ever having achieved: a lifetime with Caroline.
His 23rd life ended in its usual painful way, but sooner. Klaus' disease consumed him faster than ever and took him at the age of 69.
Before that, however, he made a bucket list.
His 24th life was for seeing places and people that mattered to him once more before it was time to go. For normal people, that part doesn't take more than a few months, maybe years if they have enough of it to spare. For Klaus, it would take a bit longer. Fitting 23 lifetimes into one was… Well, for one, tricky.
He spent time with Trevor in his early years, went to see Rose in Costa Rica, then Vincent and Eva in New Orleans, stopped by Tatia's café a couple of times. Aurora was a hard one to track. She was as angry and rebellious as ever, never stopping for too long in one place, but he eventually located her stirring trouble in California. Klaus felt like he owed her something, like a thank you or an apology for being as absent and short-tempered as he was back when they met. Not that she remembered any of that, of course, but he wanted to be fair in his goodbyes. The time they spent together had never been about her at all; it was about Caroline. In her own complicated way, she'd given Klaus exactly the medicine he'd been in need of to placate the pain of that lifetime. So now it was time to give back.
Their second bout together was a short-lived one, spent traveling the East, where her demons had a harder time getting to her. Klaus could never give her what she truly wanted, which was to have him, completely, all to herself. But it was honest, at least, and he thinks she was the happiest he ever saw her. It was good enough for him.
Then it was Cami.
Klaus saved her for last because it was bound to be more complicated. For starters, there were lots of calculations involved in figuring out his timing so he wouldn't accidentally bump into Caroline at Rousseau's. And there was also the fact that Cami was simply different from the others. It wouldn't be just about stopping for a quick hello and a few shots and see you later. He spent 50 years with her once, which is still the most Klaus has ever been with anyone in a single life. There's no way she could ever be like everyone else.
She wasn't working at Rousseau's anymore by the time he found her, but was still a regular as a client. Just as it happened when she was with Klaus, all those lifetimes before, she got her degree and started a practice. She wasn't the same 20-someting idealist Klaus first met; now she was the mature mid-thirties Camille who'd said yes when Klaus asked her to move in together.
When he found her, he meant to step forward and just strike up conversation - it wasn't hard at all; all you had to do was catch her eye and say 'Hello, how's it going'. Camille was humanly incapable of ignoring words directed at her, even if she wasn't working there anymore. He watched her for a while, waiting for a cue, but something stopped him. The way she was interacting with the other people there, with Marcel, held Klaus back.
Soon enough, he realized what it was. Camille wasn't there just because she liked Rousseau's. She was there because Marcel was, now apparently the manager, and they were together. So Klaus was right before. In his absence, Marcel Gerard was the person she was meant to end up with.
Of course it had occurred to him that he might find Cami already spoken for at this stage of her life, and he even suspected that Marcel was a strong possibility, but Klaus thought he would've been more disturbed by it. It wasn't jealousy what he felt, but a strong sense of disappointment. He'd wanted to be with Cami, even if just for a while, but he couldn't do that now. He couldn't just dive in and ruin her life, disrupt her timeline. He'd lost his chance. It was too late.
What to do, then?
Klaus must've spent hours staring into nothing, nursing a pint he barely touched, because suddenly he found himself being snapped out of his thoughts by someone saying, "Hey." He blinked, and found Cami, who'd taken the vacated seat next to him, smiling. "You ok there?"
"I... Yes," he replied after a moment of taking it in. She looked... Exactly the same. Same voice, same smile, same kind eyes. The 17 lives Klaus spent apart from her had shaken him up in every possible way and spat out someone different from the man she got to know. And yet Camille remained exactly the same. It was always a bit painful when that realization dawned on him, made him feel a little less human, a little more like an anomaly that shouldn't exist.
"I'm sorry, you must think I'm insane," she continued. "I promise I'm not. I'm a therapist - which is one step below crazy, but still sane. I was watching you - again, not a creeper, just really observant, it's a thing that I do - and you spaced out for hours, man."
"Did I?" Klaus asked, grinning at how familiar the conversation felt. "Bloody hell. My beer's gone warm."
"Tell you what. I'll buy you another one and you can tell me what's gotten into you." Klaus opened his mouth to reply, but she cut him off before he had a chance to say anything. "I know, you're probably wondering Why the hell would I talk to that crazy lady?, but like I said, I'm a professional and I worked here for years as a bartender and I just can't help it. I see someone who looks like he could use a bit of conversation, I just have to start it. I'm Cami, by the way."
"Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Cami," he said, a dimpled smile the size of the world on his face. "Klaus."
"I got a name! Is that a yes, then?"
"I'd be insane to turn down a free therapy session, wouldn't I?"
"Exactly! That's what I keep saying to that handsome fellow back there," she points to Marcel. "He thinks I'm scaring people away and being freaky."
"Nonsense."
"Thank you. I like you already. Marcel," she said, slamming her hand down on the counter. "Two pints, please!"
"Is she harassing you, sir?" Marcel asked when he brought their glasses. "I can get her kicked out if she is. But she just keeps coming back in."
"I'm about to get a free consult," Klaus replied. "And a free pint. Sounds like a good deal to me."
Cami gave Marcel a pointed look, arching her eyebrows in a triumphant See?! way. "It's a great deal."
Marcel rolled his eyes and grinned affectionately. "Do not hesitate to call me if this gets uncomfortable, sir. I've told this lady several times that this is not the way to prospect new clients, she just won't listen to me."
"I'll let you know."
"Behave, Cami", he said before going back to work.
"So," she continued, fixing her full attention on Klaus and gulping from her pint. "What's your story, Klaus?"
"Well," Klaus started. "There's this girl..."
Klaus told her about a girl he loved but who kept escaping him. He told her about how much he wanted to go to her, how every inch of skin on his body longed to be close to her again, but that he knew that being with him meant she would have to give up on certain things. He felt it was unfair to strip her of her dreams, of a future that held such great accomplishments, just because he couldn't fathom happiness without her.
Camille didn't shut up for the next two hours. Obviously Klaus didn't tell her half the story, left out some pretty massive parts that were sure to swing her opinion, but she actually made some pretty interesting points that got Klaus thinking that perhaps he should've sat down with her to discuss Caroline before.
"It's noble of you to want to protect her, but she's a grown woman, Klaus - I mean, she is a grown woman, right? Please tell me we're not talking about an underage girl here."
"Perfectly grown woman."
"Good. So my point stands. You just want to make decisions for her based on what you think is right, but you can't. You have to let her decide for herself. It's her life. Wanting to take over the wheels for her is incredibly narcissistic of you."
Klaus cocked her an eyebrow. "Narcissistic? How am I being narcissistic if all I want is the best for her?"
"You just answered your own question. You think you know what's best for her and that she's incapable of making a solid decision. Have you asked her? Have you talked to her, openly?"
"It's... Complicated."
"Maybe. But it's never as complicated as not talking. Conversation is the cornerstone of any healthy relationship. And removing the choices about her life from her just makes you a jackass."
"Never remove the choices, man," Marcel said, joining them. Klaus didn't realize that it was just the three of them there. The pub closed and he didn't even notice it. "Gets me in trouble every time."
They continued to talk for hours yet, the three of them, like in the old days, as though Klaus hadn't sat out for 17 lifetimes. They had chemistry, that group. Conversation just flowed, and if Cami didn't have a patient to see the next morning, they probably would've kept going way into the night.
Elijah says normal people never remember, not even as an afterthought. "What we're reborn into are like alternate realities, Niklaus. What we lived before doesn't exist anymore - not to us, and definitely not to them," he always said. Klaus thinks there might be something there - some sort of impression or an attraction so subtle that can go by completely unnoticed. The principle is the same as with the anchors. It's just easier to get along with certain people. So maybe they don't have memories per se, but they have something.
If he had more time, Klaus would go deeper into his theory.
Seeing as he doesn't, he just resigned himself to going back to Rousseau's time and time again, sometimes just to hang out with Marcel, sometimes with the two of them. Being the third wheel for that couple never bothered him, and if they felt awkward, they never showed. Camille was as gentle and accommodating as ever, but she didn't show any signs of interest in Klaus other than as a friend, not even after he started going to her office for proper therapy sessions - that consisted mostly of Klaus telling her about his life as though she were his biographer. He told himself that if she seemed interested, he'd make a move. Otherwise, he was fine just being friends.
Talking, he found, was a relief. His second life had left Klaus scarred for good when it came to seeking professional advice. He knew for a fact that there was nothing anyone could ever say or do to help his particular case and if he ever went into too many details, they'd just want to stuff him with medication and admit him into facilities again. He never told Camille the truth either, but just being able to unload some of his burden, put it out into the world, even if in incredibly vague terms, was liberating.
Cami and Marcel tried to set him up with a girl or another every now and then, taking him on surprise double dates. None of them ever stuck for too long. His record was two weeks with a friend of Camille's named Ivy.
"I give up," Cami said after Ivy informed her of their break up. "I've tried everything. All my friends, friends of friends, even people I barely know. It's like you don't have a type."
"I'm… comprehensive."
"Or you're too hung up on someone else. You have to tell me who that girl is. I can't die without figuring out the kind of woman who's capable of hooking the heart of Rousseau's most eligible bachelor."
Being single wasn't a hassle. It never was. Klaus was lonely even when he was surrounded by a crowd. Relationships, serious ones, were, in Klaus' experience, more troublesome than they were rewarding, with a few exceptions. Scoring someone to share his bed was easy enough whenever he felt like it, but that wasn't the point of his 24th life. He wanted to spend it with Camille in a more intimate manner, and it's exactly what he did. Not as he'd anticipated, sure, but in many ways it was even better. Their therapy sessions were a blessing in judgmental disguise. Marcel was the brother he never had. And when he was standing at the altar on Camille's wedding, as Marcel's best man, he knew he'd accomplished exactly what he had set out to do for that life.
His disease caught up to him sooner yet this time. Klaus could feel his soul getting weaker as his body grew more and more tired. Elijah said he'd feel the effects of time ebbing away, so he wasn't surprised when death came at the age of 59. He didn't fight too hard. There was no reason to prolong the suffering. Cami and Marcel were there with him when he took his last breaths. Klaus remembers looking at Camille's big green eyes, so full of compassion, and saying, "Her name is Caroline."
Cami smiled then, the tears she'd been holding back rolling down her cheeks. "That's a beautiful name," she said.
That's the last Klaus remembers of his 24th life. All things considered, he did well. His purposes for that lifetime had all been fulfilled. Everyone he wanted to see one last time, the places he set out to revisit, all checked out. Just one more life ahead of him, one more rebirth before it was all over.
For his last life, there was just one place Klaus wanted to go. One person he wanted to see.
He patiently waited for the 21st of April of 2018. It felt like a billion years, but it's finally here. His last 21st of April of 2018.
Caroline is as late as ever. As annoyed as ever. As wet and disheveled as ever.
Fifteen lives spent away from that woman and still his pulse races, his mouth goes dry and his breath falters at the sight of her. Every part of his body shakes in anticipation, desperate to get closer, to feel her again.
He doesn't care what anyone else or The Strix has to say. Fuck this anchor bullshit they keep throwing around. This is love. Overwhelming, all-consuming, larger-than-life love. The greatest love of all. The love of all his lives.
This is Klaus' last life, and he just wants to say goodbye to the one person who gave meaning to all the twenty that came before.
TBC
bThe lyrics at the beginning are from iWith Every Heart Beat/i by Robyn./b