Disclaimer: Not mine.
AN: Let's pretend that the gods weren't such an immediate problem and when Lizzie came back to the school Hope hadn't regained her humanity yet.
*o0O0o*
*Dear Gods, Make It Stop*
*o0O0o*
"Soooo," Kaleb started, dragging out the syllable long past where it should have ended, and dropped down to the couch beside MG.
"What?"
"Are we going to be doing anything about," he hesitated and raised an eyebrow, waving vaguely toward the other end of the room, "all that?"
Said 'other end' of the room was occupied by their resident - currently homicidal - tribrid friend, occupying herself with what looked to be her new favorite pastime of passive-aggressively harping on Lizzie.
Or maybe trying to seduce her, in a murdery kind of way. It wasn't quite clear.
At first, the sight had been shocking. After years of watching the Hope-and-Landon show it had been kind of jarring when following Hope's return from whatever mass murder adventure she'd been having away from Mystic Falls, and immediately following the only slightly delayed reappearance of Lizzie, Hope had seemed to have jumped tracks to semi-stalking the recently turned Heretic.
Which was a whole other can of worms that had made Kaleb, and the rest of them, stay far away from Mr. Saltzman for at least a few days until the guy had had time to resign himself to his daughter being a vampire now.
Anyway, lately, Hope and Lizzie had been getting into loud, repetitive shouting matches; which had done more to fill them all in on what had been happening with the two while they'd been away from the school than any personal prying had managed to unearth.
Both Hope and Lizzie had been very tight-lipped when Kaleb somewhat reluctantly - or anyone else as far as he was aware - had tried to pick some information out of them.
But both seemed to forget that there were other people with supernatural hearing around whenever they spent more than two minutes in each other's presence. Not that you needed superhearing when the arguments reached the higher decibels of an infuriated Lizzie Saltzman.
So far they'd gathered that Hope had been the one to kill Lizzie. Lizzie had refused to torture someone, which by the sounds of it had been an utter betrayal of this 'murder is a bonding activity' version of Hope, and then there had been a 'breakup' which ended with Lizzie running off with a god - this part was kind of unclear, but as Jen was the one Lizzie had shown up with a bit less than a month ago, this was what they'd worked out so far.
Everything else they tended to scream at each other lacked too much context to parse out.
"I love you Hope Mikaelson, but if you think for a moment I'm going to let you turn me into a monster you've got another thing coming," came the near-growl from Lizzie, this time not quite so loud that the witches could hear, but certainly audible enough for the ears of every vamp and wolf present in the room.
Yeah, and then there was that. If Kaleb had known that getting their friends back would involve repeatedly listening to Lizzie dropping angry love confessions to Hope like candy, he might have just slammed the school doors in their faces upon their returns. It would have saved him from MG's initial moping at least if nothing else.
Luckily after the sixth or seventh time that Lizzie had proclaimed the confession, even MG had stopped looking heartbroken and started joining the rest of them in suppressed groans - was it even a confession by this point though? He'd like to say, no, but Hope certainly didn't seem to be picking up on the blatant, if the ill-concealed jealousy about Lizzie's friendship with Jen was anything to go by.
"Well I'm certainly not, no," MG finally answered Kaleb's initial question. "I tried, but Lizzie refuses to talk to anyone about Hope, and I think if I tried to talk about Lizzie to her, she'd rip off my head right now."
Kaleb took a moment to imagine the likely conclusion of someone who had been entertaining romantic feelings for Lizzie confronting Hope right now and shuddered. Yeah, maybe they should wait until Hope started feeling more like herself.
He flicked his eyes over to them and immediately grimaced in regret. It looked like the angry argument part of the latest rerun of this soap opera had been put aside in favor of the part where Hope crowded Lizzie against the nearest wall like a self-satisfied tomcat - simultaneously evil and uncomfortably horny - while Lizzie visibly flushed and failed even in her half-hearted attempt to look unaffected.
Kaleb caught the eyes of some of the other students who were trapped in the school with the living nitroglycerin that was a tribrid without humanity; and the witch-vampire hybrid who somehow still managed to bring it nearly to the surface. Upon the shared, unspoken prompt they all emptied the room.
No one wanted to see what might follow - and if anyone did want to, he wouldn't put it past Hope to carve out their eyes, so he didn't think anyone was stupid enough to risk it - nothing had happened so far of course. All the previous times a scene like this happened, both Hope and Lizzie had shown up sometime later just as frustrated and twice as angry. But maybe if they were lucky, this time one of them would actually go and let the tension that had been hanging over them since their return break. Kaleb didn't think he could take much more of this.
Maybe someone should go track down Josie to whatever corner of the world she was off finding herself in, she was Lizzie's sister, she must have seen this coming long before the rest of them. She might be their only hope.
*o0O0o*
AN2: Hope you like it :)