Sorry for the delay on this one guys. I know it's not even very long but Vincent is probably my favorite character in the TVDU other than Bonnie so I wanted to make sure I did him justice. Don't worry, he and Bonnie will most certainly meet at some point—that was one of the main things I wanted to eventually do with this fic. I've also been having some issues with my computer, and have been working hard on something that I will most likely be able to announce when I publish the next chapter. I'm very excited about it! Anyway, thanks for reading. I love you.
Soundtrack (Jazz Edition):
Mike Reed – "I Want to Be Small" from Flesh & Bone
Fuubutsushi - "Eulalia Floe" from Setsubun
Miff Mole – "Haunting Blues" from The Immortal Miff Mole
February 9, 2013
"A little early to clear out the whole damn bar, isn't it?"
"Marcel Gerard! Just the man I didn't want to see. You know why I'm sitting here day-drinking in the Quarter all by my lonesome, Marcel? Because I'm pretty much done and through with the vamps, wolves, and witches of this town. And, from some of the looks I've been getting, they're through with me, too. So, if I'm sitting here, they don't see me, and if I drink, after a while, I don't see them either."
"Mhm. And how many is it gonna take before she disappears?"
"Come on, man—"
"You need to know that she is back and on the loose, and I need to find her before the witches do so I can save my friend who is trapped inside of her. And I came to you, because you are the only person in this city who knows her inside out."
"And what makes you think I have any interest in saving Rebekah Mikaelson's life?"
"Nothing. I wouldn't expect you to. But I do think you have some interest in keeping this city safe. And as long as Eva is out there, free, with any control of her own body, then—"
"Yeah, I know what the woman I married is capable of, Marcel. But like I said, I'm done and through. This city doesn't need me to be its hero."
"Maybe not. But the people who live in it do. Come on, Vincent. Help me out."
"I don't owe anyone anything."
"No arguments here."
"Okay, fine. Here's the thing about Eva…"
April 3, 2014
The darkness that softly shrouds the streets is tempered by lights of all colors, amber gas streetlamps and multicolored LED strands and humming neon signs and the distant, unfamiliar cozinesses of illuminated windows, and yet that liveliness is not reflected in the sounds—even when she extends her hearing beyond natural capabilities, all Nora can here is her own footfalls on the cobblestone sidewalk . Was this even the exuberant city of food and debauchery and magic and music she had heard so much about? Or just some paltry imitation?
Audible, albeit quiet signs of human presence begin to creep into her ears as she draws nearer her destination, and soon she can easily make out the warm, intimate din of a well-trafficked hole-in-the-wall: clinking glasses, doors creaking, chairs scooting across a wooden floor, chatter and laughter, and under it all the reserved, sparing notes of a reticent jazz trio. Nora turns the corner and finally sees it, tucked away off of the street to the point where someone could look past it without ever even noticing if they weren't looking for it. A slightly faltering lightbulb over the door illuminates the faded white cursive writing across the leather overhang: St. James Infirmary.
When she steps over the foyer, gently closing the door behind her, Nora immediately senses that her presence is conspicuous. It's not like everyone stops talking all at once and stares at her, but she can feel a shift in the overall energy of the room as the conversations drop to almost imperceptibly quieter volumes and furtive side-glances are thrown her way. She does her best to ignore the attention—which nonetheless encroaches upon her, gathering in a thin film like sweat in unwanted humidity—as she walks nonchalantly to the bar and sits down on one of the well-worn wooden stools.
"You're a new face," Nora suddenly hears off to her right after ordering a cocktail she's never even heard of before. She turns to see a tall man sitting a few stools down from her, looking right into her eyes as if he knew the precise location where they'd be once she'd moved to face him, and she immediately feels a familiar sensation, one made up of many seemingly oxymoronic dichotomies: trust/wariness, safety/fear, certainty/ambiguity. He's a witch. And a powerful one at that.
"This is my first time in this city, actually," she carefully replies, trying hard not to be too obvious as she cynically sizes him up. From what she's heard about this place, she should be safe while within its walls, but she can't take things for granted.
"And you decided to visit our little club, of all places," the man says, taking a drink of the brown liquor in his glass and swirling the remainder around. Nora looks at his hands as he does so; they look worn, weathered, but gentle.
"Well, I'd heard it's a safe house of sorts for people of all kinds, and as you probably already know, the places in which my ilk are welcome are few and far between, and the places where we're safe even fewer and further."
The still-unnamed man cocks his head a bit and narrows his eyes, not in a threatening way, but as if he's seeing something he didn't before. "What you've heard is correct." He finally extends his hand in an offered shake. "I'm Vincent. Welcome to St. James."
"Nora, Hildegard," she answers, noticing the way he ever so slightly tenses when he touches her. "You felt my death."
Vincent looks confused. "Yes. You're a vampire. But—"
"I was born with the ability to siphon magic. And I'm sure you can figure out the rest. So I may, erm, smell like a witch, but I'm not a real one."
"A siphon, wow." Vincent leans back on his stool, visibly amazed. "To my knowledge only one of those has been born to a New Orleans witch family in the last five hundred years. You must be from—"
"The Gemini coven, yes. Originally." Nora downs her cocktail more quickly than she had intended to. "Not exactly paradise."
"So I've heard." He wordlessly signals the bartender, a friendly-looking kid with dark hair who couldn't be much older than 21, to refill Nora's drink. "This is a trip. Gemini witches and New Orleans witches don't usually... mix. Not that you aren't welcome. But I don't know if I've ever seen someone from your coven here, and I've been around a while. Longer than you think."
"I would rather die than call myself a Gemini at this point," Nora replies, raising her glass, which Vincent clinks with his own. "They didn't take kindly to my sort. Not having my own magic and not loving who I was supposed to love—all the disappointment and hate started to blur together after a while. That was in the 1840s, yet it seems they haven't changed even a tick since then." She sighs. "According to a friend of mine who was there to witness it, they're all dead now. Which doesn't feel like justice at all."
"Death is never justice." Vincent gestures around the club. "Usually, at this hour we'd be having to raise our voices to hear each other over the noise. But we're in mourning, sort of. A lot has happened in the past week, but what I'm mourning is a bad call I made. I chose to trust a guy who I thought understood what I just said about death not being justice, but he ended up being just as selfish and vindictive as the rest. And a lot of people died." He downs another few fingers of whiskey, almost immediately replaced by the young bartender. "We're also remembering our ancestors, who forgot that letting go isn't something to fear and languished to the point of bitterness in a well of existential limbo, and so we severed the link and allowed them to move on." Vincent lifts his refilled glass high above his head and loudly says, "To the ancestors!"
The declaration is echoed in messy, powerful unison—even including the band, who keep playing without missing a beat—the sound of the collectively bolstered three words much louder than any moment before it, and then the toasters drink and return to their conversations.
"To me it seems we may never not be in mourning. But at least we're in it together, yeah?" Vincent isn't overtly friendly, a little intense in fact, and yet something about him makes Nora want to tell him everything. "I hope it isn't invasive to ask, but... what are you mourning?"
Nora laughs a little. "How do you know I'm mourning something?"
"Everyone's mourning something."
"Fair enough." She taps her hands on the rounded front edge of the bar in a nervous rhythm. "A lot of things, I think. I had something amazing, someone amazing, and I ran away from it, and now I feel like a huge part of me has been ripped away. And before that I had something, someone unspeakably awful, and I finally found the courage to end it, and yet I miss that too. I've lost two people I called brothers, one I called mother, and most of myself along the way."
"And yet"—Vincent makes a dramatic sweeping motion with his arm—"here you stand."
The simplicity of the statement feels warm and even rejuvenating in Nora's brain. "Here I stand."
"So tell me, why'd you run away from that good thing you had goin' on?"
"Same reason as anyone I guess: self-sabotage."
"Sure, but everyone has reasons for shooting their own feet, though to be fair they might not know exactly what they are." He squints at her a little. "But I suspect you do."
Nora squints back at him. "Why? Why do you care? You just met me."
"Thing is, one, like I said, aren't exactly too many siphon-vampires rolling through here. This is kinda history here, in fact. I won't go blabbing about you, don't worry. And two, see, a very good friend of mine was a bartender at a little place called Rousseau's, back a few blocks thataway toward the center of the Quarter. I didn't go to any bars for a long time, since that was something my ex-wife and I would always— well, you know. But I don't know, she taught me to have fun again. So many great conversations and people and experiences. Thing is, she didn't live long enough to spend much time here." Vincent gestures widely to the room. "And I feel like I owe it to her to make new memories. New friends. Buy a stranger a drink, hear their life story, that type of thing. You're welcome, by the way," he says with a smile, indicating Nora's finished second drink. "So now you're on the hook for the other half."
"Fair enough."
She's about to order another drink when Vincent waves her away and flags down the bartender. "Just open us up a bottle, Josh."
"Of what?" Josh tosses a colorful wine up from under the bar and catches it with his other hand, then reads the label aloud. "The usual? Dragon fruit guava moscato?"
"Ah, a funny man. A comedian! Why you working at this dump, Carlin?"
Josh smiles as he sets a dark bottle of whiskey that looks like it was brewed and corked in the murkiest depths of the bayou onto the bar, then a pair of thick shot glasses next to it. "Be careful," he says, looking at Nora but slightly jerking his head toward Vincent. "Vampire tolerance or not, he'll still outdrink you."
As he walks to the other end of the lengthy bar, Nora turns and raises her eyebrows. "He's a vampire too?"
"Yeah. Got turned too young, in my opinion, but he's made the best of it. One of the kindest and most trustworthy people you'll find in this city, humans included."
As Vincent pours them both shots, Nora glances around the club with new appreciation. "New Orleans seems like the place to be."
"It has its moments." They tap the small but surprisingly heavy glasses together and drink, the burn of the strong liquor somehow both more and less harsh than she expected, bitter and caustic at the edges but soft, warm, and soothing at its center. "Alright, the floor is yours, Nora Hildegard. Don't feel like I'm pressuring you to talk about anything you don't want to talk about. But I always know the look of someone who needs a good vent."
"Are people ever distrustful of how wise you are?" Nora asks with a smile.
"It's New Orleans, my friend. We're all too wise for our own good down here."
"Doesn't seem like the worst problem to have." Nora shifts on her stool, uncrosses her legs, recrosses them. "So... okay. I met a girl. We were enemies at first, wary allies after that, and finally friends, then lovers. And it was so good. More than I deserved, much more, but that isn't why I ran away. She not only listened to me, but really heard me, in a way no one else has, and I did the same for her, and we fell in love and it scared me so bad, but that isn't why I ran away either. For a time I wasn't just afraid of, but fully convinced I would hurt or kill her, but she somehow got us through even that, so that also isn't why I ran away."
"Let me ask you something, Nora." Vincent shifts away from the bar on his stool to face her directly. "I ain't seeing any reason for you to have to come to this particular city, this particular little jazz club, other than one: magic. You know, we get a lot of tourists who don't really believe asking us to do an incantation to bless their unborn child or some voodoo ritual to open up their third eye. And we get vampires asking us for daylight rings—but it looks like you're good on that already. And witches from all over coming in to share spells and research. But you don't fit into any of that. So I have to ask: what magic brings you here?"
Nora sighs and almost doesn't respond, because the way Vincent is intently looking at her seems to signal that he already knows her answer. But in truth, she herself doesn't even really know it until it actually comes out of her mouth. "I'm not worthy of magic."
Her new friend leans back, strokes his chin contemplatively. "Now why would you believe that? And I'm sure it won't help, but I gotta say, I been around this city for a long time, seen a lot of awful witches. Can't even count on one hand how many are for sure less 'worthy' "—Vincent makes air quotes with his hands when he says the word— "than you, even after knowing you for, what, half an hour?"
"That's not what I mean." Nora pours herself another shot and tosses it back; she still isn't drunk enough for this. "I— I don't even have my own. If there weren't any magical objects or people for me to steal it from, I wouldn't—couldn't be a witch at all. And all I've done since the vampirism gave me an unlimited source is attack people. I just use it as a tool. I'm not a servant of nature. I'm a fucking abomination."
"You're not an abomination. You're unique. A miracle of nature." Vincent pours them another round. "And if there weren't magical objects or people on this earth, there wouldn't be no magic on it neither. We're all just a piece of nature. Even vampires. If vampires were antithetic to nature, they wouldn't exist, because She wouldn't have let it happen. The magic flows in and out of us every day, humans and supernaturals. We are all servants of nature, whether some of us are willing to admit it or not."
Nora just shrugs and drinks, unsure of what to say.
He continues: "This is those Gemini purists talking. They must have done a number on you. Siphons are just as much witches as I or anyone else—if that's what they want to be, that is. Wherever you go, whoever you end up being, you'll always have a home waiting for you in the Quarter."
Tears of appreciation well in Nora's eyes. She quickly wipes them away before shakily saying, "If everyone here is as nice as you, I might have to take you up on that."
"I ain't nice, Nora Hildegard," Vincent replies with a grin. "I'm a member of a community. And if that community is ever threatened, no niceties to be found."
She smiles back despite the intensity of the statement; Vincent's warmth makes it less of a threat and more of an invocation.
"So this star-crossed lover of yours, she's a witch, yeah?"
"How did you know?" Nora squints at him, convinced he's a secret psychic.
"You've all but told me exactly what's goin' on here. She's a witch, a 'real' one according to you, so it's not just that you don't feel like you're worthy of magic, you don't feel like you're worthy of her."
"I—" Nora's words catch in her throat. It's as if a massive switch of realization in her brain has finally flipped and she's reeling from the inertia of it. "Wow."
"That sound about right?" Vincent pours more shots, seemingly unfazed by their blazing pace—of both the discussion and the drinking—so far. Josh had been right, apparently.
"I don't even know what to say, Vincent. I think you just unearthed something that was buried so deep I might have never found it on my own."
"You already knew," he responds, smiling. "I just helped you realize that. Anyway, glad to hear my armchair shrinking worked. Cami would be proud. Plus, being Regent now, I'm gonna need whatever healing tools I can muster up."
Nora's eyes widen. "You— you're the… Regent of the New Orleans witches?" She quickly stands up, straightening out her simple monochrome dress. "Should I have knelt? Or bowed? Or—"
Vincent closes his eyes and shakes his head, the ghosts of a grin at the edges of his mouth. "Nah, it ain't like that. Right now I'm just a guy at the bar listening to some jazz like everyone else." He opens his eyes and looks at Nora with slightly raised eyebrows until she takes the hint and plops back down onto the stool. "And even if I were in Regent mode, none of that kneeling or bowing shit. Ego is what got us into the mess we just had to clean up and countless messes before that. I'm breaking the cycle."
"You might be the smartest person I've ever met."
Vincent laughs. "No way. I told you, it's just wisdom, and everyone here's saturated in it. Old city, old bones, old secrets. And now I'm old too, and I've seen a whole hell of a lot. And even with everything I've lost, you just gotta push forward, you know?"
"I do. But I'm not usually that great at it."
"Yeah, you and everyone else on this damn earth." They clink glasses again and drink. "You want my best advice?"
"Absolutely."
"You're gonna want to go back home at some point. I can see it in your eyes. But for now, why not keep going? Consistent movement can be a powerful therapeutic. And maybe there's a place farther away that you've been thinking about visiting. Perhaps it's finally time, mm?"
The ineffable image of that god-forsaken place flashes in her mind, taunting with its traumatic hold over her, its unattainable distance, and in a long-overdue surge of determination, Nora is ready to confront and defeat it once and for all.
Despite the rapid-fire thought processes swirling in her head, all she says is, "Perhaps."
Vincent winks, such a small thing that nonetheless fills Nora with the affirmation and confidence she needs. "So what's your plan, traveler? We have rooms here, if you'd like to stay for a bit. Recharge your batteries."
Nora didn't realize that the effects of the hard liquor were setting in until she hears the subtle slur of her words as she speaks them. "Thank you for the offer, but I should probably be on my way. Keep going, like you said."
"Well I didn't exactly mean tonight," Vincent says with a chuckle. "You really want to follow up all this drinking and talking with a lonely night car ride? Bat in the night?"
"I'm taking the train, actually. Gives me time to think. And read." She gestures to her bulging bag, which is filled with a supply of books almost entirely recommended, loaned, or given by Bonnie.
"Well all right, I guess I can't stop you." Vincent waves the bartender over again. "At least let me buy you some coffee so you can sober up a bit. Mind putting a pot on, Josh?"
"You got it," he replies, turning around as Nora tilts her head to squint her eyes at Vincent.
"You remember I'm a vampire, right? Immortality, near-invincibility, all that?"
"Ever heard of a little thing called southern hospitality? We like to make sure guests are safe and comfortable. Another thing dwelling deep in our bones."
"Well then I suppose I can't refuse." She smiles and takes the cup of coffee from Josh when offered. "I'll come back and visit sometime, you know. Now that you've met me, it'll feel empty when I'm not around," she jokes.
Vincent laughs. "But actually, though. If we could get even a few more witches with such different perspectives to swing through every once in a while, I think it would be great for the coven. You should bring this mysterious lady love of yours with you."
Nora looks at the floor. "If she ever speaks to me again."
"You'll have a lot of explaining and apologizing to do, yeah. But if what you've told me is true, y'all'll be fine. As someone who had that kind of love and let it slip away, I implore you: don't hold back."
"I won't." She swallows the last of her coffee and then quickly wraps her arms around him in a sudden hug, which surprises him at first, but then he relaxes and reciprocates. "Thank you, Vincent. When I came here I didn't really know what I was looking for, or who, but now I know it was you."
"Godspeed, Nora Hildegard," Vincent calls out to her as she walks toward the door, and when she turns around to wave goodbye both he and Josh give her a synchronized casual salute.
42 minutes later she's on a train to Portland.