Title| Ink Through Water
Genre| hurt/comfort/angst
Rating| t
Fandom| the Vampire Diaries
Couple| jeremy/kol, caroline/klaus, damon/elena
A/N: I'm tired and angry. this chapter could have been better, I know, but I physically forced myself to get this far and now I have a chapter and one or two more to go :) don't get me wrong, I love this story, but I just get mad at the general everything when I feel like I'm doing no justice.
"i'd go hungry, i'd go black and blue
i'd go crawling down the avenue no there's nothing that i wouldn't do
to make you feel my love"
—"Make You Feel My Love"
He's dreaming again.
Oh, God please no. Kol drags in a breath at the sight before him. Jeremy is sitting in a chair, hands tied down at the wrist to the armrests and his chin bobbing against his collarbone. His eyes are dark, angry, and his mouth is spewing black fury towards him that in all his rage all Kol could see is the blood running from his veins and the gnawing of knowing he caused this.
"You don't mean any words that you say to me." Kol say primly but the words hang dead from his mouth, from the memory barely a few months old still plays out fresh and raw in his mind.
Jeremy snorts. "Kill a Hunter and you'll be haunted forever."
"Oh, darling, I have no intention of killing you." Kol jeers and brushes his fingers against the blade imbedded into the joint between Jeremy's shoulder and arm. It bleeds dark red into his shirt and drags down lines like tears. "I just la-la-la-ove you too, too much."
"Go to hell!" He snarls against the blade.
"Oh, you know I hate traveling alone." Kol says as he pulls the knife out, gently because he does like the boy still.
"Fine! I'll just drag you there with me then." Jeremy says, rising to his feet and brandishing a white oak stake. His hands find leeway in the lapels of Kol's jacket and holds him firm, steady, still as his arm swings down like an arch into Kol's chest.
He screams.
Kol wakes bashing his head against the steering wheel of his car and a very much not-Jeremy sitting in the backseat, slouched and hunched over the moleskin sketchbooks like he had seen him so many times before that Kol wasn't sure whether to kiss him or punch him in the throat. He opts to disentangle himself from the dream and reclines back against the driver's seat.
"Do you not have anything better to do than patronize me all day?"
"No, but its fun . . . very good lines. He had skilled hands." Silas says keenly, flipping another page of the book in a very Jeremy-like manner. Kol flinches and pinches his eyes closed.
"Why that memory?" he asks the ceiling of his car.
"Because it's one you regret the most," not-Jeremy says. "And it's when you realized that you loved him much more than you feared."
Kol lets his eyes lull closed.
"Do you mind telling me why you did those things to him?"
"Don't you already know?"
"I prefer to hear it."
"It was a hunch, really. I was trying to see if I could beat the Hunter instinct out of him. Make him learn through reinforcement."
"How'd that work out?"
"Honestly? Not too well."
"Really? He was a masochist then? He liked the pain?" Kol mechanically opens his driver's side door and let's himself out into the sticky hot night, the sweat gathers at the nape of his neck instantly. He feels like he's choking and pops a few buttons of his shirt collar, stealing a breath. "He did didn't he? That explains a lot."
Kol curbs his temper into his steps.
"Oh, don't stomp, you'll ruin your shoes." Silas is beside him, in Caroline's form with pink cheek and blonde curls. "Now she is a lovely treat, don't you think? Works best on your brother."
". . ."
"What is my appearance as a woman so becoming?"
"Uh—no," Kol curls his keys between his fingers, feeling the bite of each tooth digging into his skin. "For the last time—find someone else to bother."
He walks quickly across the stone footpath, further and further away from the house.
"He tries to haunt me, you know." Silas calls after him in Jeremy's voice. "Never fails. Every time I come near you—he's there. Telling me to go, telling you to run, and screaming his lungs bloody each time I make him regret it." There's a cold chill that snakes up and around Kol's spine. "Oh, I regret make him regret it. You're poor little Hunter, still so soft, he cuts too easily."
"The dead can't want for nothing." Kol says, impassionate. "You're lying."
"Maybe . . ." not-Jeremy says silkily. "Maybe not. You'll never know . . . not yet anyway."
He walks all the way back to Mystic Falls.
It feels like nothing really, each mile passes like a second while he's running though the sun has begun its climb through the sky already and has settled—his old instincts tell him that the hour is four. He feels not the ache in his bones or the pain in his teeth, the chilling numbness of living for so long was like the work of poisonous dulling his body to a slow unfeeling.
He smashes windows, concrete, granite cutting his fists to ribbons that heal too quickly and leave dull aches that could not even be considered pain. It simply felt like he had been pressing his knuckles against a hard surface for too long. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Walls break down, plaster against his elbows and shoulders and knees as he bodily works himself like a wrecking ball trying to tear apart the house.
He wants to feel pain again. He wants to feel torn open and bleeding.
He wants Jeremy.
He wants Jeremy who could give him all that with just a look.
"Kol?" His head is lying on the knees of a pair of well-worn jeans and fingers are carding through his hair. He hums into the embrace, pressing a kiss against the kneecap of the person under him.
"What is it?"
"You have to wake up, Kol." says Jeremy.
"Then you'll be gone." He says and looks up and they're in Jeremy's old bedroom, band posters double tapped against the wall and the smell of ink penetrating the air. This is not any scene he could remember. "Silas?"
"No, this isn't a memory. When have we ever just relaxed on the bed when we had the house to ourselves?" Jeremy smiles but there's something unsettling about it, like he wasn't proud of the memories they had made together.
"Jeremy," Kol mutters, sliding his eyes closed again. "I feel weird."
Jeremy's brows rose. "Well as your closest confidante and ex-lover, I feel obligated to remind you that I can't read your mind, Kol. You're going to have to give me more than that."
Kol groans. "Ugh, emotions."
"Yeah, human emotions, human feelings." Jeremy presses his fingers into Kol's temples. "Remember you weren't always a vampire and though it took you longer than most, you got your humanity back. You aren't unfeeling and cold, Kol. No one is—not even Silas, seriously, I've been in that guy's head. You would not believe the daddy issues he has. Everyone has that Achilles heel Kol."
"I'm not going to fight the monster and get the boy at the end." He reminds Jeremy dully, wondering where he's going with this.
"I know, and that's not your destiny—you just have to find your tether."
"My tether?"
Jeremy's expression shifts like he's forgotten where he is already and looks up. "I need to go, Silas is stirring up something. I should go an check it out."
"Jeremy . . . ?" Kol's throat feels like its closing and he reaches for the boy, but his hand passed through him. Jeremy looks so terribly unfazed by it all. "You're . . . real . . ."
"The Veil is getting thinner—" Jeremy says but his voice is softer, whispering, fading like his body until he was practically see-through.
"Jeremy—wait, no!"
"Kol—!"
He lunges up in sleep, arms wrapping around a body that's no longer there and searching. He jumps to his feet among the mess of wood and plaster and glass, searching the mess for any sign of Jeremy while his voice still vibrates in his ears.
Caroline is standing behind him, knelt on the ground like she had been there a while. "Kol . . . are you . . . ?"
"No—no I'm not."
It doesn't take him long to find Jeremy's tombstone. It's not as grad as he would've liked nor as spectacular, the inscription was even bland. Brother and Friend. Had he not meant any more to anyone else? Why not Warrior? Or Fighter? Lover?
If they were so self-conscious of the townspeople asking questions, why not inscribe in another language?
Within a few seconds of staring at it Kol was caught between the will to smash the headstone to bits or call up Caroline to have a new one made in its place.
"Who thought up those words?" Elena asks as she steps beside him with cool regard. Her eyes were bloodshot and leveled on the tombstone. "Brother and Friend? Caroline really was a letdown with that one."
Kol prickles. "Actually it was your beloved Stefan who arranged this. Shady area, near your dead family. Personally, I would have seen him buried further from you're predisposed lot."
"It's what he would have wanted, Kol." Elena says like she was trying to imitate Caroline's 'everything-will-be-alright' voice that made him feel sick.
He wanted to be cremated. Like the Romans. Kol bites out and his fingers curl into fists. Well at least he was halfway met. "Tell me why you're here. If you honestly believed this was a white flag, I will put you in the ground with the rest of your family."
"I was actually hoping for that—" Elena turns and the shadows of the graveyard veil her doe-like eyes. "I can't keep living like this."
Kol is almost too happy to oblige.
There's a lingering light in Elena's eyes as she stares off over his shoulder, her expression twisted and eyes wide. Her mouth falls open and she rasps out a name that Kol catches the same time a stake is flung at his back.
He catches it, just in time, and moves to throw it back—teeth set, eyes burning—when he stops.
"J-Jeremy?" the Hunter is holding a gun, loaded with wooden bolts. His mouth his pursed and eyes narrowed, but there's a softness in them; an apology. Kol feels his breathing hitch in his throat, and it stays there, strangling him until he can't breathe but he doesn't care. He doesn't fucking care because he's here.
"Kol," he whispers, wetting his lips with his tongue and Kol follows the motion with fascination for a moment, mesmerized by the details of his face. It's the same, all the same from the look of a lost boy in his eyes to the sound of his name falling from his lips. The details Silas could easily be copying right now. He tenses immediately, having not even thought that this could be Silas in disguise. He feels foolish for a moment. Angry. Pissed. At himself. How could he even think—
Maybe-Jeremy's his eyes widen. "Behind you!"
Kol turns; fist locking with the Salvatore's and crushes it in his grasp like a fistful of popcorn instead of bones and skin and tendons. His other hand lashes out, flat-palm hitting upward on Stephen's chin and efficiently snapping his neck, before he turns back to Jeremy. He looks oddly unscathed by the whole thing.
"It's you," he winces at the sound of his voice—the little boy in the timber of his mocking tone, the fear lacing his throat like sticky poison. Jeremy nods curtly and says, "It's me" before he lowers his gun, eyes trained on Stefan's still form in the tangle of brown leaves and wet grass.
"You're here." He says and curses himself his voice, thought stronger, is not strong enough.
"Yeah." Jeremy nods, eyes falling back to Kol again. There's something dead in them, remaining from his time across the Veil. It's a darkness swirling in the edges of his soul that tugs downward at his mouth and traces the whorls of his tongue as he speaks.
"How long?"
"The Veil," Jeremy mumbles and glances upward as if it were a plausible thing hovering over the town instead of a leashed doorway. "When Bonnie closes it, I'm gone."
"Hn, you sound oddly calm about it." Kol coaxes flippantly, and part of him hopes this is really Silas instead of the real Jeremy because—he just doesn't know—or that Jeremy would bite at the bait he was offering. An argument would make everything better.
Jeremy's frown deepens and he tosses aside the gun and strolls forward before dipping to the ground to collect his unconscious sister and pulls her limp arm around his neck and his other arm circles under her knees.
Kol could think of a thousand different ways this could be going.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm going to take my sister to the boarding house, and then I'm going to find Alaric, and then I'm going to order twelve pizzas—I'm starving."
Kol stands for an outraged moment as Jeremy sweeps passed him with his footsteps crunching across the ground.
"Don't follow me."
That was last night.
He remembers a time he liked girls with their smiles and curly hair and soft skin.
Boys, however, also had nice smiles and curly hair and few had soft skin.
They were similar in his mind; exempting the fact that very few men would induce the silent treatment upon their respective partners like a girl would a man. Of course, Kol got the cream of the crop. Jeremy is one of this few annoyingly stupid, should-be-put-down men and so happened to also be the one Kol liked.
Jeremy wielded silence like a weapon because he knew it would annoy Kol more than anything he had to say.
But why was Jeremy mad at him?
Kol smashes the bat into the side of Katherine's skull. "Surprise motherfucker."
Bonnie glares at him as he throws the bat casually onto his shoulder, staring down at the should-be corpse in front of them. "Great Kol thanks a lot. Now I have to drag her around all day."
"Complete the spell?"
Bonnie flushes. "I am working on it."
"Yeah, about that darling." Kol tosses and the bat aside and leans down to grab Katherine's ankles. "I'm going to have to ask you to put a hold on that."
About the opening scene its part of this prequel I have been writing for this story. *police sirens in the distance*
I am so far beyond my better judgment right now I should be playing with matches in a bathtub or kerosene. How does this qualify as a good chapter? I don't know I cut it in half because it was taking too long. I'm sorry. Sick, blah. Cannot speak, yet I have so much to say.
In Short: My parents just had a party but at least their friends brought food so I came downstairs from my deathbed to say hi and ended up staying now I'm well-fed and writing and reassured by two tipsy women that I'm not the crazy one and I'm always right and my new blue hair is cool, while my dad's passed out in the garage with the dogs. (I know what you're thinking and it's not like that. I'm used to this, I love this, I've missed this. My parents having fun and even though they had me young they didn't resent me for it, they just kind of brought me with them. I grew up around happy drunks, learning how to take care of people, laughing at crude jokes, learning how to fist fight from a guy who told me I was going to get in trouble someday and learning how to braid hair from biker chicks. There are a few bars and restaurants I can walk into in my hometown and have no one remember me or my parents. My old babysitter owns the bar uptown and he taught me how to persuade people (bartender-style for tips and such, which has come in handy) and years later gave me my first drink. I have that personality. And seeing all my parents friends is like one big extended family that I just want to hug, they feel like the real Christmas to me. I really don't know how to describe it, but it's like when I was little I wanted to hug everyone. My memories of winter were always the best because people wanted to be attacked by a seven year old to warm up. And everyone always wore leather jackets and smelled like winter, and perfume, and alcohol, and food. Those are my memories of the holidays, its what I look forward to the most. I wish I saw more of them.)
Be back soon, show of reviews, who's still here?
~QueenVamp
