The Abattoir
I walked into a hive of activity that morning. A bunch of random people buzzed around with decorations, strings of lights, setting up sound systems, and stocking up an ample selection of booze. I spied the architect of this lavishness poised atop the balcony, surveying his compelled minions down below.
"Hmm," I hummed, and asked, "we were heading out, but now we're throwing a party instead?"
Klaus livened up and declared, "one that will be attended by New Orleans' most influential creatures."
I squinted up at him, and hit back, "you do realize that everyone hates you?"
Klaus grinned in response, and conceded, "but they love Marcel. And as the invite states, he is the co-host. Tonight, we celebrate our truce."
"So, you're throwing a fake party, in honour of a fake truce, and your guest of honour is in a dungeon?" I clarified.
Klaus scoffed, and descended the stairs, explaining, "Marcel's attendance would only complicate matters, besides I'll have my hands full weeding out those in league with The Hollow."
"Okay. You have fun with that," I said, and brushed past him.
"And you shall surely too. Quite the selection of frocks have been laid out in your room. You're going the wrong way, love."
"I'm really just here looking for Freya," I admitted.
"I need you here."
"You don't though, looks like you've got a handle on it," I said, and gestured around.
"What do you need of Freya?" Klaus asked.
"Just a favour," I shrugged.
Klaus narrowed his gaze, and said, "you're not going to elaborate are you."
I shook my head.
"I believe she's at Rousseau's."
I'd found Freya drinking with a certain someone we all believed to be long gone by now: Keelin. She apologised for keeping it secret and I cashed in my favour: I needed her assistance with a reading. I'd discovered the location where Hayley's parents were killed. She warned me that violent death had a very specific energy, I might not like what got conjured up. I didn't have a choice.
We went to the abandoned house. And she asked me one more time if I was sure I wanted to do this. I assured her, "I get that you are this bad ass robot with no time for feelings, but I'm not a marshmallow, Freya. If this can help us fight the thing that came after Hope, then let's get it over and done with."
Freya pursed her lips and lit the candles. She took my hands into hers and we chanted. The visions appeared almost immediately. We can't let them find it. Hayley's father battled with the intruder. His baby daughter screamed her lungs raw. We need all four of them. Hayley's mother let out a blood-curdling shriek as her husband was murdered in front of her. He slumped to the floor and dropped a small key through the floorboards.
Freya and I broke apart, and I wiped the cold tear streams from my cheeks. I looked around the dimly lit room, orienting the vision and pulled back an old rotting plank of wood: there it was, a key for an 'Extra Room Mini Storage' unit.
If witnessing the murder of Hayley's parents with my own eyes wasn't torturous enough, systematically rifling through all of their personal belongings felt somehow worse. It was a long evening. Eventually, I found a jaw bone stuffed inside a teddy bear.
The Abattoir - The Den
"Where the bloody hell have you been, Elijah?!" Klaus hollered out in the foyer.
"None of your concern. Did you retrieve all of the weapons last night? And a simple yes or no answer will suffice, Niklaus," Elijah demanded, and by the sounds of their spat, they were headed my way.
"Well, that's the thing, dearest brother, I don't know the answer. Let's confirm with Dominic, shall we?" Klaus goaded him, "oh, wait, we can't. His corpse is currently burning in a dumpster. I try to avoid bloodshed, you become the town executioner! Tell me you at least learned something before you ended him?"
"This thing wants to be reborn. This morning, Vincent said that whenever it resurfaces, it does so in four distinct locations. I can't tell why, but it has to be...important..." Elijah said, and wandered into the den. His eyes widened at the mess, and the girl whose head poked out from the middle of it.
Klaus stopped dead in his tracks, surveyed the piles upon piles of boxes, and quipped, "you're hosting a yard sale?!"
"Ha. Ha. No. This is everything from Hayley's parent's storage unit, and don't drift off, Klaus, I'm actually about to answer Elijah's very pertinent question. The Hollow is looking for something. Four things, by the sound of it, for those four distinct locations. I um...heard all about it in a super-fun vision too. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that I have one of them." I showed them the creepy-old jaw-bone and explained, "Hayley's parents were killed protecting this from the Hollow's followers."
"We've seen this time and time again. When a witch wishes to be reborn its remains are required to complete the spell. You've just found a piece of our enemy," Klaus informed me.
"Lucky me. Who has the other three?" I asked.
"Dominic," Elijah recalled, "Dominic said that he had found something here."
"Wait, what? There's just, like, a bag of bones laying around that I didn't know about?" I asked, and cringed at the thought.
"No. But there is one," Klaus said, and made a beeline for the safe in the wall. It was empty. Papa Tunde's blade was gone. He sighed heavily, and determined, "Dominic's death was a distraction."
"They used our own deception against us," Elijah said.
"This thing has followers everywhere, and they have been lying in wait. They've infiltrated the entire city. If they get to the other bones before we do..." I said.
"Then they will try to raise this monstrosity. And it will come for us all," Klaus finished my thought.
Elijah spirited away, with a face of thunder, but Klaus remained, in deep thought.
"Are you hoping to find another hidden mandible?" Klaus muttered as I returned to the mess.
"I just figured while we're stuck here, I may as well work out which stuff to keep and which to donate. But, it turns out, I'm not very good at it," I told him, honestly, "I haven't gone anywhere near the Lockwood Manor, in years, Hayley wasn't one for hording knick-knacks, and I burned all my parent's possessions to a crisp when I burned our family home down, accidentally, fighting off a...possessed father figure."
"Good times," Klaus rasped.
"Oh, the best. It was so much faster than this," I joked, solemnly.
"Well, you don't have to sift through it all. Save the task for Hope one day. She'll revel in it. I found her exploring the rubbish in the attic this morning. She's restless."
"She's not restless. She's bored. Most kids her age would be at school. They'd have friends to play with."
"Well, once Freya teaches her to hone her magic, she'll be powerful beyond measure," Klaus declared and sauntered over to the window, "she won't need friends. She'll be worshipped."
I stared back at him, trying to suss out whether he was joking or not, and told him, plainly, "she doesn't want to be worshipped. She just wants someone to hold the other end of the jump rope."
"She'll be above such things. She will have power enough to protect herself from anything," he said, and tapped against the invisible force surrounding the compound, "we won't have to trap her in bloody boundary spells just to keep her safe."
"Thank you...by the way," I said, genuinely, "I know it's not in your nature to keep violence out of this house."
"Well, we'll protect her innocence for as long as we can. You and I both know the importance of that. No one protected ours."
I shrugged a little, and said, "I had a good run. But hey...while you're here, you may as well help me go through this stuff. You might find something useful."
"Oh, look at that," Klaus gasped, "How to Defeat the Hollow: Volume One. Hidden in here among these old Guns N' Roses records. Oh, sweet child of mine."
The Abattoir - The Den - Later
"Elijah isn't answering his phone," I said, and tucked my phone away, "but that might just be...because of who's calling though."
"It's not."
"You're so sure? He's barely looked at me in days."
"He's a little preoccupied, aren't we all?" Klaus said, flippantly, and upon clocking my expression, turned serious, "he woke up to the love of his life married off to someone else. Cut the man some slack. I'll try Freya. You might want to hold onto these."
Klaus passed over baby photos of Hayley, and her doting parents. She looked just like Hope, but with tufts of bright blonde hair instead of warm red. I smiled and said, "we should take more family pictures. I really wish I had mine."
"There is a reason vampires avoid photographs," Klaus quipped and grew more antsy as the phone rung out.
"Well, not everyone in this family is immortal anymore," I muttered.
"Freya being one of them. She's not picking up, either."
"I'm sure they're fine. They're just busy."
Klaus shoved his phone into his pocket and stalked the room. He scratched his brow and then rummaged around to the much tidier mess. He stopped and scorned, "you know, this is a fool's errand. We're not gonna accomplish anything in this mess. I should be out there-"
"Dodging an evil ghost who wants you dead?" I interrupted him, firmly, "no. You're safe here."
"Safe and entirely ineffective."
"Your daughter needs you-"
"My daughter needs the Hollow to be purged from this Earth!" Klaus hollered back.
"Why are you yelling at me?" I scorned, matching his tone, "I'm on your side!"
"'Cause I can't be trapped here!" Klaus wailed and smashed the porcelain figurine in his hands. He turned away, his body shaking, his mind racing.
His outburst hung in the air a second more, and then I approached him, a tentative hand on his back, "you're not in a dungeon anymore, Klaus. It's okay."
He composed himself and shared, quietly, "the water in the pipes was like nails on a chalkboard. I was starving. I could smell the blood from the people on the street above me, I could hear their heartbeats. My own mind turned against me. It was taunting me. It was relentless. The first few weeks were the worst."
It was to be Marcel's fate, the longer he left him downstairs. I sighed and asked him, "are you worried about Marcel?"
Klaus turned, deadpan, and said, "no. Let him suffer."
I exhaled slowly, and quipped, "wow, almost got a little whiplash there. Since we are back to our regular Klaus programming, I'm gonna go say goodnight to Hope."
Klaus scoffed and rolled his eyes, but a few seconds later he roared out, "Rosanna, wait!"
A few seconds too late it should be noted. A blade was thrust into my stomach and hauled up.
"Impressive boundary spell. Unfortunately, it only lasts as long as the witches who cast it," a warbled voice said as I hit the deck, and painted the floor red.
The Abattoir - My Bedroom
I was out for most of the night. When I finally came to, the first thing I noticed was the warmth of the room, with a fire crackling in the background, much more pleasant than the cold sticky concrete floor, and then, overwhelmingly, my stomach ached. Elijah was sat at my bedside, sifting through a journal. He dumped it the second I stirred.
"Are you alright?" He asked me, softly.
"Is Hope okay?" I asked him in response.
"She is. She didn't see anything. Marcel swept her away before she could even understand what was going on. He told her to close her eyes and sing."
I learned that Klaus had decapitated Dominic in response to gutting me; he managed to feed me his blood before taking out the rest.
"Well, that was sweet," I groaned.
"Speaking of, if you're up for it," he said, and passed over a paper bag from Magnolia's that I instantly knew contained a particular coveted Danish.
I whispered back, with a wide smile, "you know I am. I should get gutted more often."
He sat beside me on the bed; the smallest huff of laughter escaped him. He smirked at my delight and carefully brushed stray hairs out of my face. He asked, "how are you feeling? Really?"
"Oh. Way better."
"Are you lying?" He asked, flatly.
"Only a little."
Elijah offered more blood as I was still clearly in pain, but I turned him down, "um, I'm already risking condemning my sister to an actual eternity in a magical coma, I shouldn't fly any closer to the sun, you know. How was your...errand?"
"Vincent restored the link to the Ancestors tonight. We now have the means to put the Hollow back in its cage. And Freya discovered that Dominic had the name of a werewolf bloodline: Apisi. They were entrusted to be the guardians of a bone, like Hayley's family. She tracked the lineage and the last of the modern family supposedly died a couple years ago, under dubious circumstances," Elijah explained, knowingly.
"No, it did not. Tyler's line was Apisi. So, the bones are in Mystic Falls," I concluded, and ruminated on the possibility of returning to the hometown I'd sworn off forever and ever, "I can call Alaric, maybe he can search for the bone."
"That sounds good to me," Elijah said, and rose, buttoning his jacket in one swift motion. He paused a little before departing, sat on his words a second longer and then said, "get some rest."
"Hey, you know, I was expecting you to be all, 'Rosanna, you should go! Why are you entrusting such an important task to that buffoon?'" I said, teasingly.
"If you trust him, then so do I. And I don't want you to leave. It is as simple as that."
Okay, don't you have a string cup line to the Ancestors or something? We've wasted enough time. You surely know all of this already? Fine. We were at war with a creature we barely understood, so of course when the creepy Ancestor Hotline told us to come on down and pick up some info, we went.
Elijah didn't want you to go.
Well, the Ancestors are...partial to a trap or two, so his hesitation certainly had founding. But Hope was part of their legacy so...I thought it was worth a try. We needed all the help we could get. Klaus and I went to the Ancestral Plane. Davina told us a bedtime story about the Hollow's origin and then expelled me, leaving Klaus behind. She told me Klaus was surplus to requirement and got on her nerves. Understandable. All we needed was a blade imbued with Hope's blood, the last Labonair, the last of the Hollow's bloodline. That was her weakness, and while weakened, Davina would channel Klaus to trap the Hollow. Easy peasy.
The Hollow was currently inhabiting Marcel's girlfriend Sofya, and she was busy taking names by the time I found her. I stabbed her, and she got real pissy. After taking out her grievances on us all, physically, she explained that our trapping plan required a release of power so grand, like the kind you get by sacrificing the life of an immortal. Someone had to die to stop her.
The Ancestors did not disappoint. The trapping plan was...yeah, a trap. They were going to kill Klaus, and Davina would revel in the chance to deliver the blow. We pleaded with her not to orphan a little girl. Elijah offered himself up to die. Hope stormed in at the eleventh hour and blasted the salt circle that tied Davina to the mortal plane; she vanished in an instant; the day was saved; and all the adults in the room felt a heavy mix of embarrassment and pride. Klaus stirred and awoke. His little girl rushed into his startled arms.
"Dad seemed sad," Hope told me, quietly, that night as I tucked her into bed.
"I think that he wanted to be the one doing the helping today. But we both agreed on one thing: you were very, very brave," I assured her.
"I just thought about what you would do," she said, and my heart burst into a million pieces, "it's like you always say: if we stick together, nothing can hurt us. Always and forever."
And after you tucked the little girl into her bed...
Elijah returned to his room that night and found me, sitting cross-legged on his bed, waiting. He propped the dagger he carried down on the side table and just looked at me. I demanded to know what the hell he was thinking earlier.
"Excuse me?"
"You can't frolic with me in a field and promise me some sort of future one minute and then in the next one, just offer yourself up to die."
"Survival demands sacrifice," he said, calmly, all matter-of-fact, and wholly frustratingly.
"There is always another way, Elijah! That's our bread and butter, that's what we do, what we have always done, we always find another way!" I ranted.
"There wasn't time for another way," he said, flatly, again.
"Well, Hope just got her family back, and she needs you."
"Hope needs her father!" He dismissed the notion out of hand.
"I need you!" I barked back, and rose from the bed, heatedly. He dropped the act, dropped his guard instantly. I told him, "but we've got to figure out a way to fight and win and still have something that I recognize as a good life."
"Rebekah asked me if there was somewhere, I could go to be happy. Begin again. Manosque. It's this beautiful village in the south of France, the countryside. And when we end this and we will end this, I'll take you there. I promise you I will make this right," he said, and caressed my cheek.
Our gaze held another moment, until nerves got the better of me, and mine dropped. I gestured to the dagger and suggested, breathily, "you can start by giving that to Marcel."
He stepped even closer, and he brushed a hand against my cheek, to the nape of my neck, and he pulled me into a long kiss. My breath caught in my throat. He held me under. He pulled away and looked into my eyes, deep, unwavering, and he said, "first thing tomorrow."
