BKBKBKBK
The Peculiar Institution.
That's what they called it.
Over a hundred and seventy years ago, Klaus watched the boats idling down the Mississippi from a journey through the watery interior of America, unloading in front of the French Market, carrying the country's most lucrative commodity. Flesh.
Klaus's own cane tapped along Esplanade avenue where humans were kept behind private, well-kept homes. There weren't any markers dictating what they were, nor were there men loudly shouting their wares inside. Instead the purchases were made in sitting rooms and parlors, in hushed voices, word of mouth, negotiations settled before Mardi Gras and after Easter.
Peculiar, indeed.
Hypocrisy did not amuse Klaus like it did Elijah, he didn't concern himself with emulating traditions or mores, nor did he struggle with a compassion for those that suffered from these traditions and mores as his brother did.
Klaus killed indiscriminately. Saint and Sinner. Oppressed and Oppressor. He would attend a gathering in the most genteel of homes and everyone would perish under his bite. Never was there a moment where he questioned his morality as they clawed at his face and hands, pleas to the Christian god or the ones that were carried over the Atlantic from the groves of Western Africa, transfigured by the new world and its new pain.
The suffering of prey had no shape or color, it did not haunt him or even nudge the periphery of his day to day.
Blood, family, lust, sex, and the constant escape from Mikael's grip.
What is the suffering of one human over another?
Klaus probably would have continued on pondering the absurd until he was a witness to a young, very young (he couldn't have been more than eight, remember how he had to look up at you) field hand who in a defiant rage threw an apple at an overseer and caught the attention of Death.
Hordes of sweaty bodies move out of Klaus's path as he walks the blocks homeward from the Cathedral. Bonnie and Elijah had left in a limousine but he forwent the dreary trappings of the car to get lost in the crowd.
The crowd carries him to the edge of Royal street, a renovated compound consisting of two french townhomes and a spanish courtyard with manicured trees and plants and a bubbling fountain. The home is the only quiet this side of the Quarter.
At one time, inside the home, three gods, well, and one goddess were happy, and the rest…
Klaus smiles at the curlicue "M" in the iron wrought gate enclosing the compound's grounds. He glances up at the top left window, his son's old room, and in the window sits a young girl-child. She spies him and her brow furrows, raven tendrils framing her doll-like face with an upturned nose and dark almond shaped eyes. She can't be more than ten but her eyes stare him down and he returns her glare with a grin, and she sticks out her tongue and slams the shutters.
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When he reaches his home the sun has long set, there is the thud after thud of books hitting a desk, and on the hallway entry table is a gilded invitation to a ball.
You are cordially invited to the Fall Masquerade hosted by Marcel Gerard.
He passes by the open door of the study and the pile of books piled on to the polished desk where Elijah still dressed in his funeral's best but with a loosened tie and disheveled hair, thumbs through page after page.
"There shall be no sulking tonight, Elijah. We are on the verge of taking back our city, dear brother and we must celebrate," Klaus says, ready to recount how he had visited their former home.
Elijah nods that he will join in on the drink,"Bonnie and I are having lunch with Mama T's former coven tomorrow, these books have the history of the different covens lineage of New Orleans. She has the magic they will respect but I am ensuring she will also have a knowledgeable partner."
Klaus doesn't delve too far into the why his brother's use of partner makes him bristle. He pours himself a drink. The rationale of their pretend relationship is that it is necessary and decisions were made for his crown and he is content with his decisions.
"After the display at the funeral it seems he wants this war just as much as you do," Elijah expresses with amusement, "I had higher expectations for Marcel."
Klaus snorts, "I did raise him."
Tossing a book aside and grabbing another, Elijah agrees and discloses his concern over Marcel's reaction to Bonnie, "...he can detect your scent on her. This farce of a relationship will not buy the time you think it will."
"So we speed up the plan, she's ready, she could have killed them all in that church," Klaus boasts, annoyed and also very aware that his brother is right.
There is a silence that sits between them and Klaus stops Elijah from his interrogation yet again on why he wanted to annihilate someone he loves.
"You don't know what I feel," He snaps, "He betrayed us," He offers as the conclusion.
The brothers had never discussed after they had to flee in the middle of the night from their home with the shirts on their backs on who had told Mikael where to find them.
And they wouldn't say who it was now.
"We betrayed him," is all Elijah says back to his brother who is uncharacteristically sober after his questions, "And it's high tim-"
Klaus sighs and rolls his wrist, "Just get on with it, Elijah."
Elijah rises, holding one of the tomes in his hand, "It is not too late, Niklaus. You still have a chance to do the right thing."
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Klaus slurps directly from the jagged tear in the plastic bag, blood spilling over his gums and on his shirt. He squeezes the bag, pleased to have found the stash at the bottom of the freezer and that the blood would meet his biological need for sustenance, but he knows the blood will do nothing to satiate his hunger.
He trades the flattened bag for the opened bottle of vodka on the corner table and touches the screen of his phone, his thumb hovering over Caroline's text before he eventually tosses it onto the covered chesterfield.
The moonlight beams through the windows of the drawing room, where Klaus has attempted to hide out from the world. After the conversation with Elijah, he had locked himself in the drawing room, warning the help and Elijah to leave him be for the evening.
The moonlight casts shadows on the floor to ceiling, stak white canvas before him and he pines for his lavish basement in his Mystic Falls hideout: the bluest room, almost black, stark of furniture and light save the paintings he had bothered to pack with him over the years.
There are no basements in New Orleans for the same reason why they don't bury you in the ground. Strange things happen below sea level, something the first settlers discovered when they hacked the dirt to bury their loved ones, only to soon find their beloveds swollen caskets pushed back to the living world.
Nothing stays buried in New Orleans.
With all your talk, here I am, begging you for help, and you won't come. You want me to follow you but you can't even show up when I need you to help me find Bonnie.
She was dead, lying for months in a sewer he could explain. "I brought her back to life."
Returning Bonnie to Mystic Falls would gain him one sweet natured blonde, but lose him the crown of New Orleans.
He tilts the bottle upward searching for the joy at having Caroline but all he feels is nothing.
There is a small knock at the door and Klaus fixes his mouth to bellow, go away, and her voice comes through the door with her heartbeat. "Okay, I was just checking on you," and he sprints to open the door before she leaves.
She is the only soul he doesn't want to keep out.
It was one thing to think of her as his weapon, as a negotiating device, to think of her in the abstract, it was another whole real, tangible and overwhelming thing to just think of her, to hear her name and let recent memories ding, to see his brother's hand at her back and to have her standing in in the doorway wearing the shirt he had given her from his own back on the night she took her first breath.
"It was clean," Bonnie explains when she sees his eyes settle on her nightclothes. He nods and offers her the vodka bottle he was draining and she partakes and tells him that it's a half past two in the morning with a raised eyebrow. He laughs and says,"Nothings wrong." He lies.
Forgetting the very task he had been obsessed with all evening, he spins around in the room, pulling the drop cloths off of the couch and settee so she could decide where to sit but she bypasses him to stand in front of the canvas, his shirt's hem brushing over the firm roundness of her bare thighs, "I didn't know you painted."
He considers the violent beauty on the canvas, the oil colors of a flame engulfing the canvas and he ducks his head and begins to pick up brushes and cap off the paint tubes, "I don't very often."
He eyes her leaning in closer to the fresh painting and how the shirt rises just enough.
"It's beautiful. Why don't you do it all the time?"
And he takes the bottle from her hand to take a gulp, "Because I love it so much.
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They finish another bottle of vodka together and she convinces him to show her how to paint.
"Like this," He whispers standing behind her, holding her hand, guiding the brush to follow the sketch he quickly drew for her to fill in with the red paint he scraped onto a palette. When they complete the lines with the brush without a mistake he can feel the joy emanating from her and he smiles into hair and impulsively pulls her closer to him, hugging her, only to suddenly let her go.
"How is everything with Elijah?" He says wishing there was another bottle to distract them as he sketches the next figure for her to paint
"Pretending comes natural to us," She says, admiring her work and turning to face him, "I have a confession to make."
Klaus face darkens.
And she backs up and finds the velvet settee, folding her legs under her, "I knew you painted."
He furrows his bow.
"At the farmhouse, I found your letters and I read them."
I know you want me to believe you're some kind of monster, but I see you. That's what she said before he killed the children's puppy to prove her otherwise. Was it the letters? Or his blood that he trickled on her corpse. She saw him dismember and still held his hand as he trapped them both in a rotting house. She twitched her fingers at him after killing wolves and didn't flinch when he kissed her. I see you.
Bonnie Bennett, the witch with a heart of gold, is the only one to see him and not issue an ultimatum on him, she didn't say I see you but tough shit or run away or say I can't.
"And what did you learn, love,"He says, preparing himself for anything but he's greeted with a wide grin that lights up the dim room.
"That you should do more of what you love," She says between her smile.
He will not save the impulse on a kill this time.
He doesn't say a word before he gets down on his knees in front of the couch, and the look of her surprise and brief fear on her face is enough for him to revel for the rest of the night. But he reaches for her, running his hands into her hair, cradling her skull with a slight pressure that makes her slowly open her thighs. And he leans forward over her lap and whispers, "Don't be afraid of me, Bonnie." And her hands find place on his shoulders and she runs them down his chest and over his stomach before he grips them into his and he tells he to take the shirt off.
"Stand. I want to see you." He commands.
She lifts up to do as he says, but he encircles her waist and kisses along her navel before nipping downward and she crumbles under the intensity of him.
"May I" he breathes into the tight space between her closed legs and he hears a small yes and it's all he needs to grip her ass and nuzzle the fleshy part of her right inner thigh, biting down without warning, his fangs embedded in her veins, causing her to stiffen and groan.
She tastes like Heaven.
It is her who finally grabs the back of his neck, her nails digging into skin, and crushes her lips over his bloody mouth, tasting herself and he presses her down onto her back, hitching her thighs on either side of his waist. He kisses her and he pulls the shirt from over her head to take her breasts into his mouth, while he rubs between her legs, breathing the word beautiful with her nipple between his teeth.
And there is no hesitation between them, they tangle themselves in each other, mouths and hands yearn to be on the other, until they are frenzied from arousal and blood, and Klaus undresses, pushing his jeans off while still draping her. Tonight will not be the night to save the impulse for the kill. Tonight he wants Bonnie and he sits up and roughly grabs Bonnie's thighs to slide her closer to him, to smell her, to bury himself in her, to get lost just in her.
You see me.
And I see you too.
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He reaches for her while she's in that in-between place, sheets over her bare shoulders in a bed she did not fall asleep in but was carried to after she drifted in his arms. He pulls her to him, skin to to skin and presses his mouth against the nape of her neck, the warmth and heat of her body pressed against him. The pale light of morning is creeping underneath his bedroom curtain and he listens to her sigh and her breath return to the slow rise and fall of sleep. And he kisses her, folding her to him in his arms, and she tosses over to him with languid half-open lids and he smiles wide, and kisses her and hears himself say the words. I have something I want to tell you.
He has his own confession to make.
"I, " He starts, licking his lips and casting his eyes downward, "The reason…." "The reason, Bonnie," And he looks into her mossy green eyes filled with a rare warmth; there is so much love there that he swallows as he contemplates the end, how his words will douse that warmth, and her eyes and that love, that golden thread, that unlikely connection from her to him will snap.
He falters."I have to leave you," and a fresh look of concern clouds her face and he continues, "But I will be back so soon you won't even have time to notice I'm gone," He says convincing himself that this is all he ever wanted to tell her.
They kiss and run their fingers along each other's limbs until she falls back to sleep and he untangles himself to leave for Mystic Falls.