On Those That Hated Chapter 2: Part Two, a vampire diaries fanfic

A/N: So some of you know I have been struggling a bit lately with my posting motivation/self-confidence, which is why this update is a bit later than everyone expected. I actually finished writing this a good two weeks ago or so, and have just been kind of sitting on it, unmotivated to get moving on final edits. But anyway, it's here now, and thanks to those of you who helped talk me through my insecurities. I think every writer struggles with them at some point and can feel crippled by them.

Congratulations to clonemaster-general on her graduation. Here's an engineering joke I stole off the internet just for you: Three engineering students were gathered together discussing who must have designed the human body. One said, "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints." Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections." The last one said, "No, actually it had to have been a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"

The book Klaus and Caroline are reading from is Michael Crudden's translation of the Homeric Hymns, specifically Hmn 8: To Ares.

And with that said, welcome to the next part. Thank you for sticking with me through this beast of a series. The end is, if you can believe it, nigh.

2014, New Orleans

"No; that's wrong."

She pivots around slowly to face Klaus. "What? No, it's not."

"Yes it is, love."

"No, because when it's an irregular verb, you have to-"

"It's not the right conjugation, Caroline." He looks way too amused by this, sprawled in his chair like he's the freaking lord of everything, and anyway, fine, oh Master of All, she supposes you know better-

Ok, he knows better, he's three million and twelve, but he doesn't have to look smug about it, he doesn't have to just be so freaking pleased that she faltered on one teensy little conjugation, and you know what, she thinks this is a damn fine translation, otherwise.

She crosses her arms, making sure to squish her boobs together. "Are you absolutely, positively sure? You've been kind of distracted today."

"Positive, sweetheart," he assures her, and if his attention has been somewhat fickle this afternoon, for a moment at least she can tell he sees only her, and she tries to remember, you don't have to stop breathing every time he flashes those dimples.

She clears her throat, and opens her book once more. " Shield-holding…rescuer? Rescuer of…cities, wore…protective…something…his big hand is really not tired…as he holds a big spear-"

She can tell he is trying not to laugh. "What?"

"Nothing," he says innocently, folding his hands on his knee.

She clears her throat again, more dramatically this time. "Olympos'…wall, father of winning, good at the fighting-"

He bursts out laughing.

She huffs and lowers the book. "Seriously, what?"

"No, nothing- please, go on, Caroline," he says with some difficulty, and presses his lips together.

His shoulders he doesn't have quite as much control over, and she can still see them trembling in the aftershocks of his outburst.

"You bring…help for…Themis, you bully of mean persons- Klaus, stop laughing!"

"Do you want some help?" he asks, throwing a leg over the arm of his chair, and slouching with his fingers steepled in front of his mouth, which she can see is still twitching.

"No. You head of people who like justice a lot…you have a…staff…king of brave who throws a fire ball among the signs of heaven that…walk down seven roads where horses on fire keep you…from? Third something of the air."

He's laughing again.

She shuts the book with a loud smack.

"I'm sorry- I'm sorry, Caroline," he gasps, and she hopes all his minions can hear him.

He giggles like a little girl.

"Here," he tells her, and holds out his hand for the book.

She throws herself into his chair when he stands, and sets a hand on either arm rest, tapping her fingers briskly, and arching an eyebrow.

He clears his throat theatrically, with exactly the same number of 'ah-hems' as she coughed out, and she looks casually at her nails so he understands that she is so not impressed right now, buddy.

She can freaking feel him smiling at her.

"Shield-bearing saviour of cities, clothed in armour of bronze, whose mighty hand unwearied wields a spear that is strong, Olympos' bulwark, father of Victory skilful in war, you who bring help to Themis, you who are tyrant to foes, you who are leader of humans who cherish justice most, sceptred king of valour who whirl a fire-bright orb amongst the portents of heaven that wander along seven paths, where blazing colts keep you for ever beyond the third rim of the sky!"

"Well, of course you can translate it better. You probably wrote it," she says crisply.

"I'm not quite that old, love. Anyway, I wouldn't be too terribly hard on yourself. The Homeric Hymns in the original Greek are a bit over the head of any beginning language student."

"Not this one." She snatches the book out of his hand, and pushes him down into the chair.

He looks amused.

"Ok, so, how do I get it to flow better? Because most of my translations weren't technically wrong. They just sounded really awkward."

"You have to be somewhat of a poet yourself. To understand, you can't merely exchange the English word for the Greek, you must first understand the format of the original, the sounds, the texture, how to preserve that feel in the translation, and how to bring it all together in a rhythm which the English speaker will understand."

"Ok, but you're not a poet."

He smiles modestly, or as near an approximation as he can manage. "Actually, I've dabbled quite a bit in poetry over the centuries, Caroline."

"Ok, but that's not what I would call the atrocities in that little journal you keep on the classical literature shelf."

"Did Elijah show you that?" he snaps.

"No; I dug it up myself the other day."

He leans back in his chair, still looking mildly pissed. "You're young. You don't yet grasp the intricacies of the classical formats."

"'And when yonder love serpent imparts his milk, and the petals have closed their paradiseal gates' has never been a poetic 'format', Klaus. 'Paradiseal' isn't even a word."

"You can make up your own!" he barks, and his irritation dissolves hers.

"Oooh, someone's touchy."

He gives her a look that she knows is not a threat, knows is not a promise, it's just: he was looking, and then he couldn't stop.

He's distracted today; his curls are a little more disheveled, not artfully, agitatedly, he's put his hands through them more than a few times, he has opened his mouth approximately 312 times to tell her whatever it is he doesn't have the nuts to say.

She might have pushed, three years ago, oh so many deaths ago, when she had a mother.

But you can see, you can just look at someone and know: somewhere there's a good-bye, somewhere there's a see you maybe never, because first she made this deal: she was always going to die, and then she made this other deal: she was always going to live, and seventeen and pink-cheeked, you can reconcile neither, but what you do know- what you do know is you never keep anything, not forever.

And that's what she sees, when she looks at him.

"Try the next few lines," he tells her, and with his hands behind his back goes to stand before the window, and look out at the sun.

She bends the book back at the spine.

"Give attention, you friend of people, giver of…well young."

And then just like that, he's laughing at her again.

She throws the book at him. "Ugh! You are such a jerk."

She wishes this could be what it's always made of, just some giddy dork laughing in the sun, because she cocked her head, she tossed her hair, maybe she didn't do anything at all, she just walked into a room, and it was brighter, he remembered two, three hundred years in, oh, yeah, the curl of the hair next to the ear, the angle of her jaw, the first note of her laugh, it's why he fell, it's why he stayed- it's not even the important things, you can absently brush a stray curl, a random piece of stubble, and remember, oh God, you love them so much.

He does the hands behind the back goober smile, and ducks his head a little, because one thousand years old, you can still find new things inside you, God, Mom, that's what she tries so hard to remember, you can be that, you can be that, and still look at someone like this.

She flings the book at him.

He catches it easily, of course.

"Ok, so, Dean will be by at 5:00-"

"Who the hell is Dean?" he demands, frowning now as he smoothes the binding she has mangled just a teensy tiny bit, if she's being honest, but anyway, it's his fault for being so annoying, she had to clutch something, his throat was too far away, and anyway, it's Elijah's, so Klaus will take the blame for it anyway.

Yadda yadda, this is what comes of bringing peasants in the house, something like that.

Whatever.

She flicks hair off her shoulder. "He's one of my students."

Klaus rolls his eyes, and with a sigh leans back against the windowsill, maybe by coincidence, probably by design, because there's no way he can't know what it is the light does for that Henley, and those shoulders-

"Love, I told you the other day I can't have you parading a bunch of stray puppies through here. What do you think that would do for my reputation? I'm not running an orphanage."

"You're not running anything."

"Neither are you, if I say so. It's my house."

She laughs and folds her hands beneath her chin, batting her lashes. "Aw. You are adorable."

He looks like he's not sure whether to eat her or kiss her, and she kind of likes that, she likes the little glint in his eyes, and that particular cant of his head, the ponderous one, you don't know, is he jovial or murderous, has he taken offense, or to himself patted your sweet young head, and laughed at this folly of youth, always thinking it's so unstoppable, it's so revolutionary, but she's Caroline Forbes.

She's both.

She faces him squarely, feet shoulder-width apart, hands on her hips, and she can see him from here, thinking about what her throat tastes like.

"It's not an orphanage. I'm just helping them get their feet under them. Transitioning by yourself is scary, I had to do it, and I don't want anyone else to have to. Also!" She claps her hands. "I found this old school chalkboard and everything, and I'm having some movers bring in several desks in about an hour. I already have my lesson plan made up. I was thinking you could-"

"No."

"-demonstrate what not to do," she finishes, unruffled. "Like you could be my teacher's assistant."

"I'm never the assistant, Caroline."

"Ok, well, you're definitely not going to be the teacher. I get to do that. You can sit at one of the desks and pretend to be one of my students, and we can, I don't know, role play afterward, if that helps. Anyway, I just wanted you to know he'll be here in a few hours. Don't eat him, Klaus, or I swear to God." She doesn't need to finish that. It's better to leave them hanging, anyway.

His imagination is so much better than her own.

He brings the book around in front of him, curling both his hands over it, and looking at her so innocently she immediately narrows her eyes at him. "I suppose I should let you know then that Adelaide will be over in a bit, just to go over a few of her assignments."

She makes her voice as flat as she can get it. "What?"

God, she could just punch him right in his stupid dimples. "Well, you'll be busy with your teaching anyway, love. She and I have a few things to discuss; I'm sure you understand."

"No, I don't, and you know I don't. Why don't you just get rid of her? She's a little boyfriend-stealing skank."

"You can't steal what doesn't want to be taken, Caroline," he tells her, deepening the dimples, and looking up at her from beneath his eyebrows, so there's that creepy puppy-like artlessness that so totally might work on her, if she didn't know he's Ted Bundy the Calvin Klein model.

"Ok, fine. She's a wannabe little boyfriend-stealing skank. I'm sure you can get another minion somewhere. That doesn't want to put their grabby little paws all over you."

"I think that would be rather difficult to find," he replies modestly.

She rolls her eyes.

His smile has changed, so it's less puppy, more Satan. "You could always eat her."

"I am not killing her just because you're a weirdo who wants me to, like, throw Jell-o on her and then strangle her with my muddy bikini top."

She does make sure the bitch will be sure to smell her all over him, though.

The window cracks when she slams him by the throat against it, and kisses him until he drops his book.

2014, Dublin

"You got bit. How could you get bit?" Kol yells.

"I don't know!" he yells back, pulling the shirt away from his neck, and trying to coax the fucking heart back down out of his throat, and oh, Jesus, his stomach's fecked, he needs a good vomit-

"You don't know how you got bit- you were there for it, I assume?"

"No, I've been here the whole time- didn't you notice me?"

Well, he doesn't find that very funny, then. Looks like he might knock the mug off him, and smush it about beneath his nice dress heel.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Enzo's stood, and has started to casually inch his way between them, looking a little rattled- ah, thanks, lad, he does appreciate that.

The poison's simmering in him already, shyly poking away at his innards, it'll want a nibble or two, then, to test the constitution of him, before it commences with the full meal, and he tries, oh Jaysus he does, to breathe a little more slowly, to not let the surge of his heart be the product of his demise, sure it'll be hurrying the death along, then, right through his veins where he can feel already the beginning scorch, but oh, he's so fucking scared, lad-

"The cure's all the way back in New Orleans, Tim. In my brother."

"I know!" he snaps, in the kind of voice you never mean to double up against a loved one, and use as a lash, but it just spills out of him like that- don't you talk to him like he doesn't- like he doesn't know-

"I'm fucked," he says more softly.

"No," Kol tells him, roughly, and he remembers, death isn't so kind as to matter most of all to the one who has to bear it least of all. "You're not."

"I beat his head in with a 2x4 and ran away with his brother. He's not going to offer me a fresh vein out of the goodness of his heart. He didn't kill me. That was his mercy. You only get one with Klaus, if you're lucky."

"Then maybe avoiding a row with a werewolf might have been the wisest course!" Kol blasts out, as the thumb and forefinger come down from the bridge of his nose, and Enzo eases his way a little further between them now that the blood's freshened both cheeks again, and Kol has stepped forward looking for something to clout.

"Oh, sure, I'll remember next time to politely ask him, "Ah, yeh, Mr. Wolf? Do you mind not gnawing me neck, then? I'll be needin' it, if that's all right with you."

You never want to snap a bastarding neck so much as the one belongs to your best lad.

For a moment, he feels the tension just building and building, and round his collar that maddening itch of drying blood, Enzo stirs, fully between them now like they might make a spring for one another's necks, but from Kol not a twitch, he just stares, breathing like it's him that's wounded, the sister watching from her chair.

"I'm calling Caroline," he says at last. "If anyone can get some of Nik's blood, it's her. If she leaves right now-"

"She's probably at least a twelve hour flight with layovers. If she leaves right this second. If there's a flight right now, if she can talk him into just handing over a vial, or stabbing him, or whatever fucked scenario is going through your head right now, and she can get to the airport immediately."

Kol takes his phone out of his pocket, defiantly, his jaw tight. "Then I'll go myself, if she can't get it. I can take Nik."

"Right, and then we'll both be dead. Don't you bother with him. He's never been fucked about anything you want."

Enzo's brushed unceremoniously aside, and then he's got Kol right in his face, their noses nearly touching, and, oh, right, puff your chest at him, what a fucking help it'll be, to measure pricks-

"Shut your mouth about Nik."

Don't you be telling him shit about that fucker, don't you sit here and you sermonize to yourself, you stupid bastard- oh, he knows what you want, if the giant weeping fuck would just care, if he'd for once look at his own brother's happiness and judge it not by his own advantages, if he would just see, here's the boy I held fresh from the mother's womb, his joy is not a pawn, well I'll be fucked if it doesn't benefit me, I just want the little bastard bundled and snug in his ecstasy.

"No. What's he ever done but shit on you? Oh, good for him- he found it within his benevolent heart to let you go have a life, after he stuck you in a fucking box for a century. Don't you think for a second he gives a fuck about you, Kol. Not if he can't control you." He takes a breath, tastes it sticky in his throat, thinks oh, Jesus, Jesus, let him not bust out like some tiny lass, and blubber all down the shirt is fucked anyway.

He was so fucking excited, slipping himself carefully into it.

Oh, he'll just shit, he'd thought, smiling shyly at himself in the glass, and looking back at him there was this right and proper gentlemen whose collar might have itched a bit, and whose dress shoes chafed at the ankles, not like the boots sanded to custom perfection by the millions of steps and the tens of years, but he'd get the smile, oh, he'd get the smile-

Fuck him, he's about to spout like a blown water main.

"He doesn't care if I die," he says, gruffly, so at least someone can say, perhaps he was a poofter, but he went out like a man, the pretty Kerry lad. "Especially not if it matters to you."

It's not Tim's fault he's right.

You don't hit a man because the truth is too large, you're too scared of it, you have within you all the years you can hold up as rebuttal, and all the many more you can't hold up at all.

"I'm calling Caroline," he says, turning away.

Tim brushes past him.

"Where are you going?" he asks with the phone halfway to his ear, and he doesn't mean to be angry, he's just tired of being the one left alive, he's tired of lying in his sister's arms because at least they're warm, at least she's there, at least she is similarly unassailable by the years, he's tired of thinking remember, remember, it's not a love story, it's not much of a story at all, there's only the beginning and the middle, and all the ceaseless happily-never-afters that happen when the ink will never dry on that final full stop. "Don't you think you've done enough stupid things for tonight?"

"Well, I'm not going to die shut up in here. And, anyway, I've already done the stupidest thing I can think of, getting involved with you and this damn family," Tim snaps, and then for a moment he freezes, and you can see the remorse in every angle of him.

But when a man most regrets his words, it's because he spoke a fact not ready to be swallowed. "I didn't mean that."

"Yes you did," he says, and walks out.

She has just cracked her lesson planner and given Dean her brightest smile when her phone rings.

She reaches without looking to silence it.

Tim is gone when he returns to their room, but he's easy enough to track: he has broken into one of the corner shops for a packet of cigarettes and chain-smoked his way down to Christchurch.

His wound has opened once more.

It has begun to rain.

First, in that steady deluge which seizes all days in fits and starts and is reluctantly shooed by the sun, who will have her flirt come hell or Liffey.

And then it snuffs the streetlights, it blots the pub which is only a scant three steps from him, the windows are rattled as in some cosmic cannon blast, his hair is just ruined, the suit soaked absolutely through, the shirt pastes itself with sluttish precision to his chest.

He has often bragged of his, shall we say, trouserly superiority, which no nose of good sense might turn itself up at, and no gendered hand wave aside regardless of public persecution.

But he's nothing impressive enough that his courage does not outweigh his cowardice.

The rain blunts his nose, blinds his eyes, stings from his hand all the sensations which time and dust have long since interred, but he does not approach the church.

He stands on the sidewalk, huddled beneath the streetlight, watching the lamp make inconstant stripes on his shoes which are then divided by the rain, to be fought over in the gutters, where the storm has chased it quivering to its end.

He watches the windows weep, the roofs bear this storm with those undaunted shrugs which sluice new rivers into the street, the curbs stop up, the pubs gather those pale spectators of wonder-dumbed tourists.

But he doesn't go into the church.

He paces down the street a ways, rings Caroline once more, hangs up on her voicemail, paces back to the corner, to the streetlight, to the church with its swampland of drowned lawn and overrunning window boxes.

If one sits, and listens with all of him, surely he might hear Ireland grow another inch, he might hear the grass creep, the moss lay down a damp frost, the trees creak another arboreal conquest.

So might he also hear his friend's breath begin to rattle in his throat, and the delicate tissue yield another inch to mortal necrosis, and remember oh yes, oh yes- here it comes again, Death, the sneaky bitch.

Just when you thought you'd got her beat.

He sits down on the sidewalk.

He's going to vomit, and these are such nice shoes.

He runs his hands over his hair and drops his head between his knees and away between the tips of them the rain swirls, against his shoulders it pounds, his fingers age in a moment before his very eyes, he takes a breath, draws in another, feels his stomach reluctantly settle.

The church door opens behind him, but he knew that, he heard the faint whisper of the hinges the second Tim touched the handle, and the sudden leap of his friend's heartbeat, there is the exhale of candle wax and dust that tells him in a moment he will hear a voice, or feel a hand upon his shoulder, and so he stands with his hands in his pockets (the best of all the casual stances, he's found over the years; a man's world cannot fall apart with his hands in his pockets), and turns to face Tim across the yard.

The jacket has been divested, and the shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

He has a cigarette in his mouth, and his own hands in both pockets.

"Christ, you idiot, get out of that," he calls over the yard, and holds open the door with one hand, smoking with the other.

"Ok, so when you start to get really hungry, you'll start to feel this sort of itching in your teeth, right? And that's when you know you need to get a snack soon, or it's curtains for the nearest tourist."

Dean makes a note.

Klaus slips into the room, and shuts the door quietly behind him.

"Um, you're kind of late," she snaps.

He smiles, and takes a seat at a desk just a few down from Dean, where he will be always within the peripheral vision of the twitchy newborn, and can spend the entire class making freaky with his creepy Mr. Burns finger-steepling routine. "No. Sit in the back."

He puts his feet up on his desk instead.

Dean glances nervously between them.

"Good to meet you, mate," Klaus says with just the perfect amount of charm in his voice. "Dean, right?"

"Uh, yes. Sir?"

"Don't talk to him," she demands as Klaus licks his lips and says, "Now that's what I like to hear."

He raises an innocent eyebrow at her. "Go on, love. I'll just sit here quietly and observe."

"Did you ring Caroline?" Tim asks when the door has been shut behind him, and he has reclaimed his seat on one of the pews, perching on its back and balancing his feet on the bench just behind it. He musses his hair and flicks his cigarette on the floor.

"Yes. She's not answering. I can't leave a voicemail, of course, because Nik might overhear her listening to it, so I'll try her again in a few more minutes. I'll give it an hour and then we'll catch a flight out-"

"No," Tim says firmly.

They stare at one another for a moment.

Tim lights another cigarette.

He takes a long inhale from it, blows a hot gray cloud into the space between them, scratches at the back of his neck. "I don't want to fight, Kol. Not now."

He tests the lump in his throat, decides he can swallow around it after all, looks down at his shoes until he is sure he is composed, sure he is in command of himself, his voice will not crack, his eyes not mist, life goes like this sometimes, that's all-

There once was a boy called Kol.

You might recognize this story.

You will try to say yours is different.

You will try to tell it a different way.

But life goes like this, darlings.

It's only a story, you could say, and breathe your good-bye sweetly against the trembling lips you will miss for a while, but oh, what are mortals here for, if not to lose and lose again.

"I'm not going back," Tim says quietly, and he just keeps on looking at his shoes. "I know what you want. You want to go to him and tell him someone you care about is dying. And you want him to not care what he thinks of me, you want him to not care he's not got a use or a reason for me, you want him to not do it because it's good or bad, or right or wrong, you want him to do it just because it's for you. You want that to be enough. There's nothing wrong with that, Kol. But it's not who your brother is. I'm sure he was once. I'm sure he deserved everything you're still holding onto. But don't keep bloodying yourself on him. Ring Caroline. But we're not going back to New Orleans. I'll just have to roll me dice like any other poor bastard. And if I'm going to die, I want to do it here."

There was a reason, after all, he didn't come in from that rain.

"So you want me to just let you die," he says finally, looking up. He's not sure how well he said it; not steadily, he knows from the look on Tim's face, not with that smooth oration of a man accustomed to giving any number of death speeches to all the soft-cheeked boys and girls who will never outlast his youth.

"I want you to respect us both more than that. I want you to respect yourself enough to not go running back to him. I want you to respect me enough to let me make me own choice." He flicks this cigarette too on the floor, and pockets his hands. "It's not for you to say, Kol," he says, but he does it gently enough, smiling a little to lessen the blow.

But there was a witch, Tim, and did it have to-

Did it have to be you both?

He licks his lips, feels the breath swell in his chest, his nostrils flare with it, there is the sudden hot pressure in his chest and his eyes, he looks up to find Tim staring at him rather pityingly, now, now, darling, don't do that-

"I don't need your permission to take you back to New Orleans."

Tim slides his feet on the pew back, so he's snugged his heels against it instead of balancing his toes on the edge. "I know that. You could break me neck, clout me over the head, whatever you like, and haul me wherever you want." He hunches his shoulders, burrows his hands a little deeper into his pockets, looks up absolutely unblinking. "But I didn't think it needed to be said that you shouldn't fucking well do that, you bastard. And if you do, I'll never speak another word to you in me fucking life."

The rain cannons off the windows.

He can hear the breath frothing in Tim's throat, and the heart thunderous in his chest.

The venom in his wound sheds that faint odor of death which, unwanted, waters his dry and aching mouth.

"I understand," he says, and snaps Tim's neck.

Her phone rings freaking again as she is tapping her ruler to the tiny little squiggle of a jugular on the human outline she has chalked onto her board, and with a sigh she exaggerates just enough to let both these boys know exactly how well she takes interruptions, she silences it once again.

"Well, someone's rather persistent. Don't you think perhaps you should get that, sweetheart?" Klaus asks, re-crossing the boots she has told him eight times now to take off his desk.

"No," she replies crisply. "Because I, unlike some people, understand how rude it is to interrupt during class."

"If it makes you feel any better," he says as soon as Tim wakes, "I regretted it soon as you hit the floor."

"Fuck off," Tim tells him, and he does.

But the tenth call in as many minutes obliterates her patience, she's just a monster, she's not superhuman, after all, and to Dean she says, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'll take care of this really quickly," and darts out a hand for the phone.

Klaus at least has left to go meet some contact or another, so there's no smirk to endure, or commentary to try and ignore, it's just this one little teensy newborn blinking at her from his desk, his sweat noisily making its way from throat to collarbone, God, she just loves it when they look at her and they see past the blonde hair, the pink nails, the cute little flounced skirt she wore today in this soft springtime green, sometimes she thinks, they're really starting to see: it's not just Klaus they need to fear.

She smiles to herself and hits the 'accept' button. "Who the hell is this, and also, someone better be dead, because seriously-"

"Caroline," a man interrupts, and he sounds so solemn that for a moment she doesn't quite recognize him.

"Kol?" she ventures tentatively.

"Is Nik anywhere near by?" he asks. "I don't hear him right now."

She sets down the ruler in her hand. "No, he left a little while ago. It's just me and one of my students right now."

"I'm not even going to ask about that. Get rid of him. Nik can't hear this. I don't want it getting passed along to him."

She frowns. "Okaaay." She lowers the phone, pressing it to her shoulder. "Hey, Dean, just work on this review, ok?" She flourishes a paper at him from her desk. "It's mostly multiple choice, but there are a few essay questions. I'm just going to slip out and take this call, ok? Business."

She blurs down into the living room and beyond, out into the street, where Dean's newly awakened ears are not yet attuned enough to reach, and lifts the phone back to her mouth. "Ok, what is going on? And is Rebekah with you, by the way? Because she just all of a sudden took off, and I have something I need to discuss with her-"

"I need you to get some of Nik's blood," he says, and her stomach drops.

She can taste her heart in her throat.

The grandfather clock gives three soft bongs and then dies abruptly.

There is always something in the air when he approaches. Perhaps you are too young to know exactly which portent it is that weights the shoulders, cramps the belly, wets the hands, but there is in his walk that certain presage of something, you can feel the world flinch back just a little, and with haunted eyes wonder where does he go, what does he hail-

And oh God, you know, she thought when he cradled her on that couch and he choked on her name, and the first warm gurgle of that blood dampened her lips, and sweetened her throat- she'd never be afraid of him again.

The day is too warm for a coat.

He is wearing that Henley rolled up to the elbows when he steps into the house, the sun gilding his hair.

"Is class over already?" he asks, smiling at her so sweetly she wants to believe, she could just ask him, she could just ask him and say it's for your brother, it's for your brother, Klaus, and he'd just hand over his blood and his blessing.

But you can't take that risk with him.

She works up her best smile. "Yeah, he was doing really well. I let him go early. I was thinking- I've been thinking about it for a while, actually, but maybe it's a good idea with all these werewolves running around and the full moon so close if you give me a vial of your blood or something for me to keep, in case I'm out by myself and something happens?"

He stares at her.

She hears the clock ticking away its seconds with clicks that ring her very bones.

He can hear her heart, oh God for sure he can hear her heart, and guess that no mundane request stirs it quite like this, wakes the sweat on her forehead and knocks the knees just subtly against one another- he'll look at her plastered smile and her too-wide eyes and he'll see, as he always does, all the way to her lie-

She takes a deep breath.

He cocks his head. "Why right now? Are you planning on going somewhere?"

"No," she says too quickly, and takes a moment to smooth her voice, to straighten her knees, to imagine herself back to that valedictorian podium where her voice did not waver, and her audience never guessed: this girl has lost so, so much, from these bleachers where all her friends are missing.

"I just figured that I should mention it while I'm thinking about it, you know? Because next time it comes up, it'll be when I really need it, and I'd kinda' rather have it before then. I could wear it around my neck or something."

He seats himself on the arm of Elijah's favorite chair, studying her in that creepy way he does, from beneath his eyebrows, where you just know he sees freaking everything.

"It's a good idea, don't you think?" she prompts him.

There is the eerie silence of a snowed-in morning, when all the world has lain down to sleep, and for miles the Earth does not know whether it will wake.

And then he blinks.

She sees the hands folded on his knees unfurl, and inside her chest something loosens just slightly, she realizes, oh God, oh God, he has wrestled and triumphed over his suspicions just for her, and will give her anything, throw aside his paranoia, his instinctive mistrust, his automatic wariness, this is Caroline, his Caroline, and she said, with her hands on his cheeks, and her forehead pressed to his, it's me, it's you, forever.

For so long, he understood everything but that.

She's going to throw up, and this is such a nice dress.

"I've been meaning for a while to give you just such a thing, just in case. Since you're always darting about without me," he says, smiling at her.

She laces her hands behind her back, so he can't see them shaking. "Do you think you could give it to me right now, since we're talking about it?"

"There's a flight to Dublin leaving in an hour. I'm on my way to the airport right now. I guess we see if customs is on vervain, because I don't have a passport."

He looks up at Christchurch Cathedral, and wipes some of the rain from his chin. "Give me your flight number, and I'll meet you inside the Dublin airport. Your phone probably won't work over here, so I'll just keep an eye out for where it's coming in. Hurry along any of the layovers if you can; I don't know how long he's got left. We'll probably be cutting it close, Caroline."

"BA0048. Just get him to the airport," she says, and in the background he hears a horn blare. "I'll be there. I promise."

She hangs up.

He shuts his eyes for a moment, and pockets his phone.

Klaus' SUV she abandons on a random city block.

Her purse she tosses over a shoulder and she walks right into the airport with her head up, her smile bright, please dear whatever God in heaven, let them not be on vervain, she prays, and flounces up to the ticket counter.

He lets Tim alone for perhaps an hour, and then whisks silently back into the church. "Caroline's coming," he says, holding up both hands when Tim whirls round with the most thunderous look he's ever seen on his face. "I know you're mad at me. I'm sorry; I really am. But you don't need to die because I'm a tit. You can hit me with my bat, anywhere you like. Except the face." Tim clenches his jaw. "Or you can hit me in the face, just this once." He takes a step forward, his hands still out in front of him. "Just come to the airport with me. That's all you have to do, and then you don't have to talk to me ever again, if you like."

The first acceleration of the plane jerks her back into her seat as she's leaning forward to adjust the safety card, and as the plane rattles around her, the overhead baggage is agitated within its compartments, the three children in front of her press their awed noses to steam the window, she realizes suddenly, this is the first time she's ever flown.

The tarmac outside the window vanishes into one long stream; the yellow lines dissolve; the wings bounce.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the little TV in the seatback beside her flash a brief glimpse of Katniss Everdeen's smiling face.

The man on the other side of her sips from a water bottle he has brought on board with him.

The engines become a roar, a thunder, a tempest, she brings her hands up to cup her ears, there is a sudden lift at the front of the plane, beneath her feet the world drops, the wheels retract, she feels the clunk of something or another winding smoothly back up into the belly of the plane, there is the strange bottoming of her gut, and the pressure of all this stale and cast-off air-

She clamps her hands around the armrests, her heart pounding.

The plane climbs, climbs, she sees so far beneath her the airport shrink, the cars contract to pale children's toys, humming smoothly along their model streets-

And then the first cloud shrouds the plane, and she feels the first testing jar of turbulence.

Ok, ok, not bad at all, she can take a little bouncing, totally no biggie, she'll just take out her magazine, rifle its pages as casually as any of the unruffled passengers sitting oblivious around her-

The plane drops.

She screams.

Somehow, he talks Tim into the car he has stolen, where he will spend at least the next ten hours languishing in an airport car park, awaiting his fate.

His pissy silence is rather short-lived.

Round midnight, he begins to throw up.

He's quite pathetic, with the back door open, head in his hands, just heaving onto his nice dress shoes, but you don't pity a man you've just killed; he's not apt to take anything other than meek silence very well.

But he does, when Tim has finally passed out in the back seat, carefully crawl out of the driver's seat and into the back with him, so he can at least sit and stroke the sleeping head, with its still-drying bangs plastered down over the forehead.

He looks younger without his hat, and the fever high in his cheeks.

He died his third and most final time alone on the Gilbert's kitchen floor, and oh, if Nik had been just a bit sooner.

No man should go out like that.

So when Tim's sleep is deepest, and the sweat thickest on his forehead, he lies down on the seat beside him, and takes the head onto his shoulder, because somewhere, somewhere (he ought to know, after all, drowsing away Earth's best years under Nik's dagger), a dreamer can be touched even in the farthest reaches of his armored Wonderland.

Forgive him his self-absorption; he's had nowhere else to put it.

Of course he's not ready for you to leave.

Of course for a moment, he thought, to hell with you, to hell with you, what about me, but he knows: that's the whole point of loving someone.

He does move once more to the driver's seat when Tim resurfaces from time to time, and has to empty what little is left in him onto the pavement, but perhaps five hours in, Tim forgets he's angry, or his illness has superseded it, he says, "I don't think I'm going to make it."

He says: "I'm scared, you bastard", and chokes on the last word.

"Shh. You're going to be all right."

"I got gut-shot once, in the Civil War. That's what this feels like, except everywhere. I don't want to die, I don't want to die- but oh, God, just to stop it-"

He twists round in his seat. "You're only being a big baby about it; you know how you get when you so much as stub a toe. Just breathe, darling."

"Fuck you," Tim rasps, but he does inhale deeply, and lean his head back against the door, his nostrils flaring, his Adam's apple working, the pale forehead skin wrinkling, disrupting the beads of sweat along his hairline. "If I live-" he rolls his eyes toward the driver's seat, "if I live, the offer of hitting you in the face with your bat still stands."

He reaches back to clasp the hand dangling limply off the seat, and runs his thumb over Tim's. "Then you have something to live for, don't you?"

The rain has stopped when Tim begins to hallucinate.

He listens to it dripping off the roof of the car, and landing thunderously on the painted lines, to Tim's laboring lungs, his struggling heart, to the earliest of the morning flights touching their great wheels smoothly to the tarmac.

There's a body in the back seat, Tim tells him.

It changes everything.

And then later: What do you think me poor Ma is going to say, when she realizes her son is a pervert, a murderer, a drunkard, she would have wanted me to just die, she would have wanted me to just die, lad, ah, God-

He knows the feeling.

But he tells Tim: it's all right.

She loves you anyway.

It's just what mothers do.

He has to alternate the heater and the air conditioner as Tim shivers through one feverish wave and then opens his shirt to endure the next, and there is a moment, when he's vomiting onto the floor through his nose because he hasn't the strength to open the door anymore where he thinks, to mercifully crack the ribs, and snatch the heart still-warm from its heaving chest- wouldn't that be far kinder than to let him lie here in his own blood, his drool, his vomit, all that sticky mishmash of fever sweat and mucus- if a man begs for his own death, is it for anyone to play God merely because oh, they're going to miss him so bloody much?

He licks his lips.

He looks out the window.

"Tim," he says shakily, and wipes his hands on his trousers. "Do you really want to die?"

He's a while thinking about that, spitting out the last of his bile.

"You have to be really sure. I can't do it unless…unless you just can't go on."

Tim scrapes in a wheezing breath that sounds like one of his last.

"But I'll make it quick, if you need me to."

He hears the creak of the seat settling, and at last looks back to see Tim roll his head onto the cushions, and he thinks, the arms spread out as they are, the eyes half-shut, the mouth red with blood, but the forehead free of tension- he thinks here finally is surrender, and for a moment he cannot breathe.

He's just used to sounding brave, he's just used to the good front, and how it must be pasted over everything, he's not sure at all, can he really reach into the chest, touch the heart which has lulled him many a time to sleep, close the long-lashed eyes so the boy is already a corpse, and his pulse merely a formality- be really sure, Tim, be so bloody certain.

"No," Tim gurgles. "I don't want to die. I don't want to die at all."

That first rosy mist of Ireland's uniquely wet dawns has veiled the airport when Tim says, "Kol" in his most somber confessional voice.

He touches the damp forehead, feels the limp hair, runs his fingers down the smooth cheek and over the brief roughness along the jaw, where most of his pitiful stubble has accumulated.

"I still think you're a fuck, for what you did to me at the church."

He opens his eyes.

The sun has melted over the window of their car.

Tim is breathing fitfully in his arms; they are both curled up on the backseat he has cleaned as well as he can in between Tim's vomiting, but neither of their suits will ever be the same again.

Elijah would despair.

There is some tiny giveaway, somewhere in the world: perhaps the scrape of a far-off shoe, the huff of a distant breath, the proclamation of whatever perfume this person has doused themselves in, and for miles advertises to the public.

He sits up.

Tim stirs.

He sees, through the front window, a woman approaching the car.

She's not particularly official-looking, but they have been parked here for nearly nine hours now; someone was bound to come checking for murder victims sooner or later.

"What is it?" Tim asks softly, blinking hazily up at him.

"Stay here. Caroline should be landing in a few hours. That's all the longer you have to hold on for, all right? You're going to be ok. Just lie here and be quiet, whatever hallucinogenic ravings might take you. I'll just compel her and be right back."

He climbs carefully over Tim and pops the door.

"Hello, darling," he greets her, and flashes his best smile.

"Are you Kol Mikaelson?" she asks.

He stops and glances back toward the car, narrowing his eyes when he has once more returned his attention to her. "I'm sorry, I haven't had the honor. But I better very quickly, or you'll be missing your head."

"I have something for you," she says instead, and opens her purse.

Kol is waiting for her at the customs booth when she lands, looking uncharacteristically terrible as he flirts with the officer behind the counter, who seems flattered nevertheless.

She breaks into a run. "I'm here! It's here! Where's Tim? Why didn't you bring him here? We could have minutes, Kol, you don't know, it varies from werewolf to werewolf, how long their venom takes to-"

He grabs her by the shoulders and whisks her off to the side, bidding a smirky good-bye to the customs officer. "You're too late, Caroline."

"What do you mean I'm too late- oh my God, oh my God, is he dead?"

"No," Kol replies, fixing the curls which have gone a little lank on her shoulders. "By the way, darling, no offense, but you look terrible."

"I didn't sleep for the entire plane ride. And what do you mean I look terrible? Isn't that dried vomit I see on your suit?"

"Tim had a rather rough night."

"Yeah, hmm, speaking of that guy- what the hell happened?"

"Well, it was a dark and stormy night. We had just seen Romeo and Juliet at the Gate Theatre -very nice, you should pop in while you're here- and left rather abruptly when Bekah decided to usurp the role of Juliet. Tim, being a gentlemen, decided to leave my sister and I to work out our differences, and went for a walk-"

"I mean the part where you said I'm too late, but he's alive? Was just wondering if it's not too much trouble for you to elaborate on that."

He takes her purse as they compel her past customs, and snaps it open so he can rifle through it, his brow furrowing as he reaches the bottom. "There's nothing in here I like," he scolds her, and tosses it back.

"You're a twenty-first century woman. You carry your own purse, darling," he says when she gives him a look.

"Tim," she snaps.

"Tim, right. Already cured."

There is a brief moment of stunned silence while this sinks in. "What?"

"We were waiting for you in the car park, when some compelled woman comes up to us and hands it off. Sound like the handiwork of anyone you know?"

She stops in the middle of the airport; Kol good-naturedly prods her on to one of the food stalls where he shoplifts three sandwiches and a children's juice box. "Klaus did this? Klaus set this whole freaking thing up?"

"I think that's our safest bet. And since A. Tim isn't dead, that obviously wasn't his objective, and B. You're here, and not moldering in his dungeon, he let you go. Which would suggest to me that the whole point was to get you out of New Orleans."

"Maybe he didn't let me go; maybe I just tricked him."

"I believe modern sarcasm dictates this is the part where I say, "Oh, that's sweet", but dumbness never is, darling. Not even ironically."

She wonders if for just a moment, sandwich in one hand, juice box in the other, he has dropped his guard enough for her to hit him, or at least kick him in the shin or maybe push him over the railing of the stairs he escorts her to.

The car is a little white Kia Tim has parked in the 'coach' loading zone, where he leans against the driver's door, still a little pale, the collar of his shirt brown with his healed injury.

"Is he wearing normal people clothes?" she asks, stopping again.

Kol loops his arm around her neck, eating his sandwich over her head.

"Knock it off."

"Well, I don't see what the big deal is, darling, it's not like you've washed it recently."

Tim is leaning more heavily than normal on the car door, she can see as they jog down the stairs to the loading zone, and Kol waves him into the car, where he turns suddenly into a psychotic mother hen, tossing both the leftover sandwiches to Tim and cramming the straw of the juice box which has already been opened and half-drunk into his mouth.

"Oh, and this," he says, and snatches a nearby woman, heaving her into the car.

"Kol! You can't just kidnap people in front of everyone!"

"No one cares; people disappear every day, Caroline."

"Ok, but you kinda' just snatched her in front of like thirty people!"

He holds his hands out to either side. "And did anyone even blink? Society these days, I swear, darling. You know, back in my day-"

She pops the passenger door and the woman scrambles out, fleeing toward a bus which has just pulled in ahead of them.

"That wasn't very nice," Kol tells her.

"Neither is kidnapping and murder. So I kind of think my sin is slightly outweighed here." She tosses her purse into the car, and begins to crawl in after it when the smell which she has been too distracted to notice just consumes her, and she backs hastily out, clutching the purse to her chest. "I'm not sitting back there! There's dried vomit everywhere."

"Right," Kol says. "That was a little insensitive of us."

He walks over to the car which noses itself in behind them, and bashes the driver's head against the window when he gets out, then tosses the man into the road. "Your chariot, darling."

He gestures theatrically at the car.

The drive into Dublin is silent.

You can feel the weight of all the grief, anger, disappointment, whatever it is they have stacked between them- people, they build such walls with nothing more than silence, entire trembling structures which are constructed with nothing and must be felled with everything.

It's disconcerting to watch Tim leave his hands in his lap and Kol keep his on the wheel.

Kol drives like a maniac, whipping in between cars, braking at the last moment, choosing at random which side of the yellow line it is he likes best, and she thinks this at least ought to inspire some good-natured bickering, here is where Tim dons once more his role of Husband and scolds him for rattling the teeth out of their company, but he only leans his head against the window, and braces one arm against the dash when Kol stops so suddenly she smacks her head on the back of his seat.

So her first glimpse of Dublin is tainted.

She stepped finally from her one tiny box and she shook the native dust from her feet and what she should have felt, disembarking that plane with just the one bag over her shoulder, one tiny girl amidst all these thousands of years and millions of people whose accents she will sometimes not understand, whose cultures will baffle her, whose cities will terrify her-

There was supposed to be an awakening.

She was supposed to watch the first church break the gathering clouds with infant eyes.

She was supposed to just stand for a moment and inhale this new world, taste the unfamiliar grass and all the hidden mosses of a thousand rained-out crevices, touch with her first tentative steps the slick novelty of what are in fact actual freaking cobblestones-

She kind of wants to knock their heads together.

He's alive, you love him, there's forever, there's a world and no fetters of age, infirmity, money-

Jerks.

Kol pulls up in front of a hotel called the Grafton Capital and gets out wordlessly.

Tim opens the car door for her and lets her precede him through the hotel's revolving door, then leads her up the stairs to the second floor where they are staying in some swanky suite, which they have pretty much trashed, she sees as she enters the room.

Several of Charles Dickens' novels are scattered across the bed, a pair of pants that must be one of Tim's hanging over a chair in the corner, the trash overflowing with cigarette packets and empty bottles of alcohol, one of them just shattered carelessly on the tile in front of the vanity counter outside the bathroom, there is on one of the nightstands what appears to be drug paraphernalia, and on the corner writing table actual cocaine, she can smell all their myriad sins, the lingering sting of the cigarette smoke and the strange medicinal hint of what might be the cocaine, the copper must of long-dried blood, which itches still her unfulfilled gums.

"Ok, so you guys are pigs."

Tim at least has the common decency to look somewhat ashamed.

Kol just lounges back in the chair with the pants across their back, and puts his hands behind his head.

She waits until Tim has disappeared into the bathroom and the shower has thunderously started to turn on him and demand, "What the hell is going on with you two?"

"Keep your voice down. Tim and I had a little row, that's all. Or a couple."

"You were fighting with him while he was dying?"

"He did start it." Kol puts his feet up on the desk in front of him and for a moment looks so like his brother she feels this little squeezing in her gut. "Anyway, it's not really any of your business. What do you want to do?"

"What do you mean?"

"There are approximately twenty five pubs within walking distance, and the river is perhaps five minutes away at human speed. We could drown someone. Or knock over one of the statues on O'Connell Street. They just put them back up, I saw. They had a couple of oopsies the last time I got really drunk."

She looks pointedly at the garbage can. "Which was every day, apparently."

"Don't look so judgmental." He rolls his chair over to the writing table in the corner with a shove of his feet against the desk. "Cocaine?"

"No. God, let a cleaning lady in here once in a while, would you?"

"We did. I ate her. So that didn't work out very well."

"There's this thing called self-restraint you might want to try practicing once in a while."

Kol tilts his chair back and rubs his chin contemplatively, squinting up at her in confusion. "Haven't heard of it."

She rolls her eyes. "Why don't you go make up with your boyfriend and then you can go out and play."

Something shifts in his eyes; she can hear him swallow, the deafening increase of his heartbeat, that nervous lathering of the belly you can hear if for a moment you dumb your ears to the world and to your instinctively exploring senses which stretch out for the three men below the window and the child in the hallway say nope, sorry, not right now, there is before you something of far more interest, import, vulnerability, and always, always, the head comes around, the ears snap off, the teeth lengthen in premature anticipation.

"What did you do?"

He rubs the little dimple in his chin and looks out the window, and for a moment, she thinks he is almost uncomfortable, she thinks he doesn't have much practice at it, but he does remember the faint twinges of it, and with whatever is left of that far human boy, regrets whatever it is he has done.

"I acted like Nik," he says at last.

There is in the lobby a sudden explosion of familiar complaining, and just a few seconds later, that same shrill bitching in the hall just outside the room.

Rebekah bursts inside with some guy dressed in a suit on her heels, four shopping bags in either of his hands. She loudly instructs him to place them on the bed, carefully, so they don't touch the books or anything else 'what's-his-face' has dirtied with his filthy plebeian hands, then crosses her arms and whirls on her brother. "We have a problem, Kol."

"You realize Tim and I have had sex at least a thousand times in that bed." He runs a hand over his face, sounding so tired that for a moment she wants to tuck him in, bring him milk, just for a moment sit stroking the stubbled cheek which much look so young, loose with sleep. "He's all right, in case you were wondering."

"I'm aware, you idiot. Caroline's here, the shower is running, you're not out grief-murdering the population. I said we have a problem."

The shower has been shut off; she listens to the plinking of the final drops.

"The two of you just ran off, this man, whatever his name is, was worried-"

"Enzo," the suited man cuts in, with the kind of smile that says you're going to remember that name for so long.

"Did I ask?" Rebekah snaps. "Anyway, he was worried, so I allowed him to take me shopping to distract him."

"You're such a philanthropist, Bekah."

"I brought the white oak stake here with me to Ireland. I had it with me when we left this room. And now, I don't."

Kol swings the chair from side to side, just looking at her.

She can hear the rustle of Tim dressing in the bathroom, and then the gush of the faucet.

"The white oak stake is gone, Kol."

"Nik took it."

Rebekah immediately blanches. "Nik's here?"

"No, but someone who's working for him is running round Dublin. I'm sure they're already on a plane back to New Orleans. Did you really think you could steal it from him and just fly free into the world, with his unspoken blessing? It's the one thing that can kill us, Bekah. He's not going to leave it in anyone's hands but his own."

The bathroom door opens; Tim steps out and wordlessly grabs the jacket which is draped across one of the bed posts, nodding briefly to Enzo.

"This is all your fault, Kol. If you could take just a moment to look up the word 'subtle' in this thing called a dictionary, Nik never would have been able to trace us so easily, but of course your handiwork is all over this country-"

"No one asked you to come, darling."

"I had to go somewhere; Nik was being insufferable."

"It's so nice to be your afterthought, darling. 'Nik's annoying me; what was that other one's name again? I suppose I'll look him up'," Kol mocks in a pretty credible imitation of her voice.

"What is your problem?" she snaps. "I thought you'd be grateful-"

"Absolutely, darling; you know how much I enjoy a few scraps of attention because Nik's been bad and needs to learn that if he can't shape up, you might do something dramatic like fuck some self-esteem back into yourself with the one person you know isn't going anywhere."

And suddenly they are shrieking at one another, Kol out of his chair, Rebekah putting to good use the empty bottles in the trash can, Tim quietly easing her out of the way as one of those bottles splinters against the wall just a few inches from her head, in the midst of all this the Enzo guy watching with great interest, and Tim quietly putting on the hat he's retrieved from who knows where, and now with the cap situated, the jacket buttoned to the throat, he slips out into the hall.

She chases after him, and grabs his arm. "Where are you going?"

He looks down at her, slightly startled, his pocket crinkling where he clenches down suddenly on what must be his cigarettes. "Uh…just out to walk for a bit. Down to the river, or maybe to Trinity College."

She shuts the door hastily behind her as another bottle wings this way; it shatters loudly.

Rebekah yells something about a dress; there is the sound of what must be Napoleon's entire Russian assault, the thunk of what she is pretty sure is a book spine hitting the wall, Tim winces, a window is flung open, the day magnifies, she smells how the homeless have been using the alleyway out back of the hotel, and the drunks its dumpster, and grips his arm a little harder. "Can I come? And by the way- was Kol saying he and Rebekah did it?"

"Better not to ask," he sighs, and walks away down the hall.

Trinity College funnels its parents, its students, its tourists through a a slick black gate which, freshened daily with its thousand new coats, gleams as though just painted.

For all its reputation, here at least Ireland is one passionless cell block of gray river, gray streets, gray buildings, the fog has climbed too often from the Liffey and now lives in its stones, the people tramp not so much miserably as resignedly from squall to squall, wielding their umbrellas, their hoods, their bags, one damp bus after another spits its own fog-colored breath, and lurches away despairingly, but the courtyard, the courtyard-

First you pass through the gate, and if there is that first tender prickle of a new country, a new ocean, a new people still within your wild young heart, you think, they don't make gates like this in America, you think, no American hand has shaped a roof so fine, a wall so well, the doors loom straight from your books, and hold still within their cracks those historical fingerprints where the old hands have brushed, and the book bags bumped.

Then the shelter of the small little gatehouse, carriage parking spot, whatever it's supposed to be, where for a moment the snowed-in walls, anonymous beneath months of lessons advertisements, babysitting opportunities, club invitations banish the rain, and the cobblestones are slyly dry, that you might think Ireland has its little spots of desert, whatever claims the sky-

And then back out into the rain, into the wind, put your hands hastily to your thighs if you want to preserve the modesty of your shy young tour guide, and here's where you remember the postcards.

The lawns are neatly trimmed, and preserved with chains and the warning signs which proclaim in both Irish and English to keep off the grass.

They have to be painted, Photoshopped, phony, you're going to think.

You're going to think: but there's never been a green like this, you could touch your soft little skirt with the hand-stirred dyes to the blades, and mistake it for bland sea foam rather than crown emeralds.

The buildings sprout, gray, from their cobblestone beds. Between their bricks she can smell where the chinks have grown fine green beards, that musty damp forest scent of the heavy wooden doors, and beyond them, the glass cases of careful libraries, which are to be admired rather than studied.

There are a thousand, perhaps a million books with their fresh bindings newly cracked, and their pages hardly pencil-dented. A thousand more, which are barely dust and spider web.

Ahead of her, a man sweeps about those elaborate gestures of the particularly theatrical tour guide.

"Do you want to see the Book of Kells?" Tim asks, looking up from his lighter, one eyebrow cocked, so that for just a slight moment he looks maybe a little rakish beneath his hat, his next cigarette already steaming.

"What's that?"

"Old manuscript. You see that line over there?" he points across the courtyard. "That's the door you go through to view it. You have to buy tickets beforehand." He looks away, takes a long draw on his cigarette, scuffs his foot just a little. "I'll take you meself, if you like. Everyone likes to have a gawp at it."

"I think I'm just going to look around right now. You don't have to babysit me, if you don't want to."

"Ah, that's ok," he says, not looking at her, exhaling another long gust of smoke.

Ok.

Well, then, buddy, everyone shoulders their load.

She hooks her arm through his, and tries not to smile when he stiffens and subtly shifts so there is another inch or so between them. "Then you get to play tour guide."

"Uh…all right, then. What do you want to know?"

"How old is this place? Did anybody famous graduate from here? Did you go here when you were a human or anything? What the hell is that huge metal ball thingy? What's this building? And that one?"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," he says in a mildly panicked voice, taking the cigarette from his lips and tossing it into a nearby puddle. "Lob them a little slower, would you?"

"How-old-is-this-place-"

He looks at her.

It is a singular talent of quiet people, she's found, that one look just totally does it, you know instantly what a talker would have had to gibber away at for a solid five minutes.

"So?" she asks, and flips her wet hair a little. You don't quail Caroline Forbes with a look, after all, did she ever tell you about that one time this football player actually had to immediately rush off to the bathroom to empty his terrified bladder after an unauthorized questioning of punch bowl placement?

So the fable goes.

(He didn't make it, by the way.)

She hands him the umbrella he stole for her back on O'Connell Bridge.

"I don't know how old it is. Lots of famous people have studied here- lots of the old Irish writers, you know, Oscar Wilde and the like; I went here for a bit back in the 20s, so I was already…you know. The 'huge metal ball thingy' is some modern artsy shite -crap- this building is the library, and that one is one of the lecture halls."

"If you kept track of them all perfectly, why'd you ask me to slow down with the questions?" she demands, jerking him toward one of the lawns, where she has just spotted a pathway.

He stumbles a little.

"You'll use up me quota of talking."

"Ok, first lesson, you never ration something like that. Second, whatever weirdo bad boy amble that's supposed to be is gonna' have to pick. Up. The. Pace." She snaps her fingers to emphasize each word. "We're sightseeing, not murder strutting."

She's not sure, but she thinks he's trying not to laugh. "What the hell -the heck- is 'murder strutting'?"

"You hang out with Kol. You know."

And because that name stiffens him a little more, you can see whatever has been erected between them pains him somewhere right around where she can at this moment feel a boy back in New Orleans, perhaps fingering his little Caroline pawn which has neatly taken its spot on the board, she whirls him away around one of the buildings, which must too be pointed at, exclaimed over, posed beside.

You forget, when you first step off the plane and there is a whole new world which must be sniffed around and probed at that every craft has its phantom cargo of spurned lover, hurt mother, fuming daughter, what hurts are set aside for those more pressing concerns of poor food, petrifying turbulence, flatulent neighbor are wheeled back around with that first clanking revolve of baggage claims, which spits up such familiar fetters as it materializes battered luggage.

It's just-

He wasn't supposed to use her.

And you think, sure, it's just a tiny step, he has to feel his way carefully, you can tell he's fumbling around in the dark, he's so uncertain, where does he place his foot, does his hand go here, should he set it there, and of course there are the moments of which even the unflagging despair, when he instead backs the foot and withdraws the hand, you wonder, did you, after all, place your faith with such blind stupidity as that far away girl whose fairytales failed her, God, so badly-

But he was moving.

If you did not think one day, you'll dress him in armor, and he'll sit a white horse, still you knew, he was trying.

If his smiles didn't lie, and his hands drew no fabled tenderness on her back, still you don't vault your self-doubts in a day, and leave them behind forever.

So she wasn't good enough, smart enough, necessary enough, he had to pull this shitty, shitty stunt so his brother knows: you will never escape, and she is sure: in his universe there is only one sun, and if for a while he loans his heart, he will never gift his trust.

The sun is, at this moment, contemplating an appearance.

It puts out feelers.

It has to tiptoe out behind one cloud and then another, and she sees around her the tourists intent upon its struggles, and the locals impervious to its presence.

Perhaps his is just rising.

Maybe it touches his sleeping head in his rumpled bed, sluices down the naked back with one great wash of gold, stains the sheets, buffs the pillows, gilds the one curl that always escapes unruly down his forehead.

Tim holds the umbrella silently.

She can feel his scratchy coat against her arm.

"Can I tell you something that's going to be way too TMI and is going to make you so uncomfortable?" she asks, but it's not for permission, she doesn't need his blessing, it's a warning, because sometimes, some things, they're just too big.

For a moment, when he looks at her, and she sees he's not exasperated, he's not bemused, he's just so young, and you can see in his eyes that her voice has cracked, the first tear has run that annoying track right down the side of the nose, you can see he doesn't know for what, but he's sorry you're hurting, he's sorry there is in all this world anyone who knows the tightness of the chest, and that burning in the throat-

She thinks about how he couldn't stay human, not in this world.

Maybe she couldn't either.

"I just don't know what to do," she says, and she thinks it's going to come out ok, she thinks, she's Caroline Forbes, she's got this, and then she bursts into tears.

"I just don't know what this means- he was such a jerk he could have just told me- he could have just told me to leave, I am so used to hearing that you know, and my mom just died and I'm still trying to figure out what the hell you do when you can't just call her up and maybe she doesn't know any better either, but she's not going to let you do it alone and I know he's not human he seriously made some guy eat his own baby but you know I was dealing with that, I was dealing with the fact that human laws just don't mean the same thing to him and one day they're not going to mean the same thing to me, and I was getting to where I was ok with that, but he was supposed to stop hurting his family, he was supposed to stop hurting me, he wasn't supposed to use us anymore."

She is led over to something, she can't even see it at first, but there's movement, there's the blurry glide of first the surely staring faces and then that vague blotch of lawn, and finally what must be a bench underneath her, wet stone, she feels that, she feels that, and a hand gripping her by the elbow, she can hear those muffled whispers which the humans shoot off beneath their conspiratorial hands, loud as cannons, and she's sorry, she's sorry, how humiliating is this, how far down her cheeks must her makeup be streaked, but didn't she tell herself long before Mom left and Stefan didn't care anymore and Elena stopped calling, it's ok, whatever she feels, it's hers, you don't apologize for what's raw, what's you, so she guesses just fuck her freaking mascara-

"Here, then," Tim says gently, and offers his sleeve.

She stares at it for a moment, and then pats it against her face, smearing makeup, snot, drool, all down the length of it, which for a moment makes her cry harder, so she has to just sit with it pressed to her lips, until the next flood has subsided at least enough for it to even be worth trying again.

"I'm sorry," she gasps, hiccuping. "I got snot all over your coat."

"It's all right," he says, letting her clutch it against her nose. "It's a very old coat."

"I'm sorry Klaus had you bitten." She hiccups again, and wipes her nose once more.

"Well, that's not your fault. He's an arsehole."

She stutters what she thinks might be a laugh against his sleeve, and squeezes her eyes shut against it. "He is. Can I say 'arsehole', or am I too American?"

"Sure," he tells her good-naturedly. "As long as you don't laugh when I try to pronounce me 'threes'."

"Say 'thirty three'," she sobs, stifling a fresh wave on the poor coat sleeve.

"Tirty tree," he replies, probably hamming it up just a little with his brogue, patiently holding up his arm so she can just maul the sleeve.

"You can't talk." She sniffles the breath back into her, wipes a spot of drool off her lip that she can feel crawling toward her chin, gives another good dash beneath each eye, so that she pulls his arm away black. "Sorry; I'm really sorry, this is probably some kind of heirloom or whatever, I mean, all your clothes are like eight hundred years old, I really hope you can dry clean this out-"

"I've got another, if I can't. Just keep it there, till you're all right."

She opens her mouth on a laugh that hurts. "That would take a really long time."

"Well, lucky then. That's exactly how long you've got."

He keeps his arm cocked at face angle, but it's got to slow eventually, every flood is eventually a trickle, and what are the chances of him sitting in his bed, crying rather than crowing, so she takes a couple of breaths that expand her chest to pain, she wipes her eyes one more time, and she realizes: the clouds are no longer vague watermarks, the faces are suddenly human flesh and not soft wax, the buildings once more stand with earthly resolve rather than Atlantis waver.

Tim lowers his arm slowly.

The umbrella has nodded forward; it has begun to rain sometime in between the sun's Herculean labors and her noisy breakdown.

She watches it shot put out over the brim of Tim's cap, feels it sting her eyes, her nose, her lips, all the parts which are selfish with grief, and to all other sensations blinded.

The tourists have begun to dash for the buildings, to shelter under its roofs and be warmed by stale halls which, ten eons thick in the dust of those vellum mummies which must be nursed back to books, are at least dry, windless, painless.

Each drop takes little bites from her hands, and she holds them both out, she thinks, hey, hey-

It hurts.

She will feel again something that's not in her chest, that's not blocking her throat, that does not usurp her head, and to the smallest parts of her whisper you see, you see- we always told you.

You always have to wonder, after a cry like that.

You always forget, in that one jagged moment, what anything felt like before.

Tim takes out his cigarettes, protecting them carefully from the rain, and holds them out to her.

"No, thanks."

He drops the umbrella; her hair is ruined anyway, and his hat soaked.

He lights one of his cigarettes, and sits with his elbows on his knees, hunching over it.

It's kind of fascinating, watching him triumph over all these conspiracies of wind and rain, and keep the end faithfully burning, each of his breaths the same color as the sky.

"Your weather kind of sucks."

"Sorry. I didn't make it."

She looks over at him, all 6' 3" of him curved over this stupid cigarette, the hat dripping steadily, the hair at the nape of his neck running its own steady stream down his jacket, each tap of wet ash landing on his shoe, and punctuated with a "Fuck!" he tries to cover with a cough or a sudden throat clear or, once, an awkwardly-spaced 'fuu…chsia' that knocks this laugh right, stunned, out of her.

"Most people say 'fudge'."

"It was the first thing that popped into me head." He finishes the cigarette and flicks it onto the pathway, straightening.

"You know you can cuss in front of me. I went to high school. I've heard an 'F' word or two in my day. I might have even used it."

"Me moth- I was taught it's not polite, like."

She smoothes her hands over her damp skirt, crossing her ankles and tucking both feet under the bench. "You can mention your mom. It's ok."

He adjusts the hat, crosses his arms, is not satisfied with this, lifts one knee to his other ankle, bounces the leg nervously, picks at some imaginary flaw or another on his pants. "I wouldn't have wanted anyone to pick at it when me own mother first…you know."

"Died? That's what they do eventually, all of them. I just thought I was going to have some time to…prepare or something. I thought she was going to be old, and happy, it was going to be like a grandparent going, or something- of course you're sad, of course you sit there next to their bed and you cry, but they got such a nice long life, and until you're gone, they're not really gone. And then it won't matter anymore." She picks at her own imaginary flaw on her skirt. "Sorry. This is really weird. You're probably totally freaked out, me just dumping all this on you."

He bounces his leg again. "I can run faster than you. So if I can't shoulder twenty or so little years after 123 of me own, I can put a Tim-sized hole in that gate over there faster than you can blink. Don't worry about me."

She smiles, and smoothes her skirt again, looking down at her hands, at her knees, at the one fresh hangnail she ripped she's not sure when.

The rain helpfully waters the closing wound.

"I'm sorry about being a jerk to you. Back in New Orleans. I was kind of…bitchier than I probably needed to be sometimes."

He scratches the back of his neck, and squints over the courtyard to the parking lot across from them. "That's all right."

"I did catch you looking at Klaus' butt a few times, though." She lifts both her eyebrows and pins him with a knowing look.

He turns red.

"And it's mine, soooo. I mean, I'd expect you to get kind of pissy if I was going around checking out Kol's butt constantly. Luckily, I know better."

"That'll disappoint him." He smiles briefly, but it looks strained, and he drops it in a moment.

"Do you want to talk about whatever happened between you two? I mean, I know we're not really bosom confidantes or whatever, but I did just wipe snot and makeup all over your coat, so I kind of owe you."

He takes out his packet of cigarettes once more, but just sits turning it in his hand, crinkling the plastic, rolling the few leftover sticks against his fingers. "No."

"Ok. But you can, if you want to."

He scratches his neck again, bobs the leg, shoves the cigarettes into his pocket and leaves his hand there where, unseen, it worries something that clicks with each clench and unclench of his fist.

"I think he's really sorry about whatever happened, if that helps."

He squints again at the parking lot, the rain plinking, plinking off his hat, and between his feet constructing a slow mirror to shine back the flushed cheeks, the steady eyes, the clean and boy-like jaw. "Not really."

A few of the raindrops have hardened, and ricochet off the pathways and the hoods of the students who dart from one doorway to another.

"You're talking to me more, now."

"Hmm?"

"That first time, when Klaus sent us to steal the armored car from the police station- you barely said two words to me."

He gives another couple of rapid clicks of whatever it is in his pocket that he's playing with. "It comes in increments. A few dozen conversations under our belts, and a bit of Guinness in me, and you'll think I've swallowed the Blarney stone."

"What's that?"

"It's a big rock out at Blarney Castle- you kiss it to get the gift of gab." He ducks his head, fires off a few even faster clicks inside his pocket, slides his eyes shyly toward her, ventures tentatively into this first gentle joke, testing the waters as he goes. "I don't think you should go near it."

She doesn't laugh, but she smiles, so he knows it's ok, she felt how carefully it was done, she isn't to think: here is one more flaw for the cons column, which stretches already to her feet.

He smiles back at her, and she sees the freckles on his nose crinkle just a little, the eyes soften at their corners, and there is just one eensy little possibility that when not lusting after her boyfriend's clearly Caroline-labeled parts, he might not be so entirely bad.

"Do you want to see where someone's changed the sign for the Grand Canal Docks to 'Grand Anal Cocks'?" he asks, with this kind of innocent eagerness that for a moment reminds her how long he must have gone, struggling from friend to friend.

"Oh my God- are you serious?" She bursts out laughing.

"It rains a lot. What else are we supposed to do?"

The hotel room is a category five disaster when they return at last, after Tim has taken her to the sign and then out for what he assures her is the best Irish stew in Dublin, which is served by a pub called the International, where they are for a solid hour entertained by the chatty bartender who minds his sluggish morning with a rag over one shoulder.

Kol has taken off (or been violently deprived of) his suit jacket, but has not yet showered out his rough evening, and sits with his socked feet on the writing table, twirling his phone in his hand.

She can hear Rebekah splashing in the bath.

"Where's that Enzo guy?" she asks, just for something to penetrate the awkwardness which has sprung up between the boys.

"He went back to his own room for a bit," Kol replies, pointedly looking at only her when he speaks, and twirling the phone so cavalierly in his hand. He leans back a little farther in his chair so they'll both see not a man but instead an icon of relaxation, which is touched by nothing, and most certainly not tall Irish boys in their dripping hats. "Bekah and I have decided we're leaving tomorrow. I'm not in the mood for any more of Nik's interference. Anyone who wants to come, can." He sets his phone against his chin and leans into it, looking at her, but you know, of course, that's not where his eyes really are.

"And where would any of us who want to come be heading?" she asks, pressing her hands together, and bringing the points of them to rest just beneath her bottom lip.

Kol slides the phone up so it rests just under his lip. "I was thinking the Middle East. I haven't been there for a good, oh, four hundred years or so. It looks like fun. Egypt, most likely. I'll take you to the Pyramids. We can spit a body right on the tip, completely confound the police."

Tim shifts his feet, she sees him pocket both hands, and hunch forward the broad shoulders, and you know before he speaks what he's going to say.

She does.

Kol doesn't.

She can tell when she looks at him: his experience has never supplanted his hope.

"Youse guys go on ahead," Tim says quietly. "I think I'll stay here, for a little while. I'll meet you later."

Kol pulls the phone from his lips, drops the hand he has tightened around it silently to his lap, shifts the socked feet, tries, so valiantly, to cover with his voice everything his face has just revealed. "Ok. Right. Well, Caroline? What about it?"

The first order of business, of course, is to return immediately to New Orleans, and kick him in his squishiest parts.

But she looks between the two of them, Tim glancing away and scratching his neck, Kol with that painfully cheerful smile on his face, and she opens her mouth, she thinks no, you see, there's this boy, I know he hurt me, but it's ok, I'm used to it, this too I will move beyond, she thinks, surely, surely, he's learning, and creeping to his eventual snail's redemption-

She says, "Yes."

2014, New Orleans

His cook he has nipped from the finest institute in France, and set to work blank-eyed in his kitchen.

You can imagine, then, the smells which must waft from his house, and to the bereft tempt onward, where a man's common sense has no domain, and his stomach reigns supreme.

He had to clean up three vagrants from his front yard just last night.

Just terrible what they do to the real estate value, mate.

The dishes are brought in one course at a time by white-suited waiters who with just the right flourish wield their pepper grinders, and from the silver platters lift the monogrammed lids to magic from this simple ware the steaming lamb, the greens which stroke lazily in their oily beds, the tiny caps of the mushrooms slick with cheese.

He sips his wine.

His favorite among these smart-suited subordinates takes his place at the side of this head chair which he sits alone to stare down this vast and empty table, towel over his arm. "Sir?" he asks politely, and holds out his wrist.

Good lad.

He smiles with just the right pressure upon his dimples, so the boy feels it everywhere. "Not at the moment, Julian, thank you."

When the first heel strikes the sidewalk half a block away, ten minutes to the appointed time, he sits back in his chair, and he steeples his fingers, sharpening his eyes upon the steam.

He smells first her perfume, and then the young neck.

There is the soft tap of her fingers upon the door, the whispering of the hinges maintained to silence, that initially jarring transition of the feet from stone to wood, when the echo changes utterly, and flinches for a moment his long-suffering ears.

He does not turn around.

The heels sink once, twice, thrice into the carpet; beside him Julian straightens a little more; from the kitchen there is a bang; in the living room that old grandfather chimes his soft reminder.

She takes one more step, so she is out from his peripheral, she is before him fully, he can see now the flare of the hips beneath their belted coat, the puckering of the lapel around the bosom, the rehearsed arrangement of the long hair over her shoulders.

He turns the steepled fingers into a fist which he rests his chin upon, and smiles up at her, precisely as he handled poor Julian, knowing how the dimples cut just right the shaved cheeks, the curls hint at the cherub who must surely exist still beneath the demon, the lips of sly experience flaunt their unknown skills.

Adelaide slowly loosens the belt at her waist.

Perhaps, if he possessed this monstrous thing which turns on a man when he least expects it, the Judas heart, he might feel something which a less evolved creature might instantly realize ah, yes, here is the pinching of the conscience.

"No Caroline?" Adelaide asks, skimming the coat from her shoulders, and draping it over the back of the chair opposite him, before which lies a magnificent setting.

He does believe even fusty Elijah would approve.

"No," he says, carefully modulating his voice so she senses not his cold and lonely sheets, nor hears the twisting in his gut, and he laments once more the stage's loss.

"Interesting."

She smiles.

She takes her seat.

"Wine?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow.

"Please," she replies, and is obliged by Julian, who pours gracefully.

Her first sip is delicate; she sets the glass aside after only a moment, and leans back in her chair, draping her arm across one of its rests. "I think you've made a wise choice, Klaus."

He lounges back in his chair, and tosses a leg over one of the armrests, which Elijah would despair of, but you can never, after all, brother, appear too casual in front of one's minions, who must know, at all times, the reins have never slipped your hands, if there is a progression in their own position it is because you have chosen to advance one piece rather than another, if Shakespeare's world was only a stage, so too is yours only his board, where he puzzles out his next God-like leaps and divine campaigns.

"I always do," he tells her, smiling amicably.

She picks up the wine glass once more.

There is, apparently, no more need for propriety, she drains the glass with a brief toss of her head, Julian tips out his next elegant refill, the smooth and perfumed legs cross beneath the table, and he sees to himself how she silently eyes the walls, and discreetly judges the table, the room is wallpapered with her own personal touch, the chairs recovered in her specific preferences.

He cuts into his lamb, and discovers to his delight the center is just undercooked enough, the exterior fired perfectly right, the seasoning light, the braise deft.

Adelaide begins to choke.

She has taken her third swig of the wine, and begins now to convulse.

He watches the fingers clench upon the tablecloth, the throat heave for its failed breath, the lips gather their first rabid foam.

He takes another bite.

"It's Strychnine," he tells her casually, sipping again from his own glass. "Quite the favorite among the black widows of the 19th century. I knew many a husband who succumbed to it. There was one- ah, you don't want to hear about that." He forks up some of the greens, studies them critically, sees, yes, the cook shall live another day, the kitchen birth another masterpiece, the table bear once more its fragrant burden.

He laughs around his next bite. "What am I saying, sweetheart- of course you're interested."

Shall he start it once upon a time, as the bedside stories go?

She lurches sideways out of her chair, snagging the cloth, upsetting the dishes, making such a production of the whole thing, the blue lips, the flailing hands, fantastic, sweetheart, he gets it, but if there never was instilled in you the manners of a gentlewoman, let him oblige: It's rude to interrupt.

"So, anyway," he tells her, chewing the lamb which simply melts on his tongue, "there was a chap in Surrey, back in 1802. Beautiful wife. She might have taken a shine to yours truly." He smiles modestly. "Torrid affair, very hush hush, you, I'm sure, get the picture. Anyway, I let it slip to this young English maid that a bachelor of my particular standing might be only too happy to sweep her away to the lands of her picture books if there wasn't that slight issue of the family she already had hanging about her ankles. Terrible weight, a dusty old husband and his shrieking progeny."

Adelaide kicks the table leg, thrashing about as she is.

He rescues his wine glass before it can spill.

"Let's not be so dramatic, hmm? It might have done quite the number on her family, but it won't kill you. I expect you'll metabolize it in merely a few minutes." He samples from the mushrooms.

Adelaide retches violently, brings up nothing but a bit of wine-colored foam, her hands spasm to claws, the spine twists with a crack, now didn't that sound painful, he does hope it's nothing permanent.

Julian refills his glass.

The doorbell chimes. "Julian, get that for me, would you, there's a good lad. That must be our guest."

Another waiter appears from the kitchen as Julian vanishes, carrying his dessert, which he jovially told the cook was to be a surprise.

The torch has brought out such a nice glaze on the surface of this dish which flirts a vanilla steam beneath his nostrils.

Julian returns with the pretty little blonde he today lucked upon bar tending in the French Quarter, and clears from in front of him his emptied dishes.

"Come here, love," he tells the girl, beckoning her in with a quick little flick of his finger. "Camille, was it, sweetheart?" He shifts some of the curls on her shoulders so they lie exactly as he remembers, and smiles reassuringly at her.

"What am I doing here?" she asks, swallowing hard, and with her fear sending such a delicious waft of pheromones into the air.

"Do you see that axe, love?" He points to the tool propped innocuously in the corner of the dining room, the light catching it just right, so the eye is drawn to its newly whetted point. "Pick it up, go on. Good girl." He smiles at her. "Now, I want you to chop off her head." He gestures one-handed to Adelaide, with his other breaking the first layer of his dessert, and into the air introducing a hint of cinnamon, a suggestion of bourbon.

"What? I can't do that- that's horrible! Who are you? Look, we can talk about this. Look- I'm a psychologist. Whatever is bothering you- I can help you."

"Of course you can, love. Julian?"

He holds up the glass.

"Turn around," he orders the trembling little psychologist, setting down the dessert fork to circle the hand not preoccupied with his wine.

He tips his head, assessing, assessing, the shape is nearly identical, the styling only slightly off, the curls tumble with nearly the same bounce, and only marginally less gloss, if he has the lights dimmed, and to his seventh glass surrenders himself, the shapes merge, the styling is superimposed, the curls beam as in a sun shaft rather than a sand squall.

Back into the dessert goes his fork. "My compliments to the chef, Julian."

"I'll be sure to let him know, sir."

"Go on, love," he encourages, delicately patting his chin with his napkin.

She lifts the axe, screaming.

Ah, well.

There's never quite anything like the original.

He does like how the blood colors those curls, though.

A/N: Now no one can say I'm not incorporating the show. :) I hope you all enjoyed Cami's cameo (ahahahaha). Merry Christmas, if I don't talk to you on tumblr, and see you next time!