Chapter Nine:
Free-range Zombies in a Playpen
Part One
"If I should die before the rest of you,
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone.
Nor, when I'm gone, speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell.
But life goes on,
So sing as well."
~ Joyce Grenfell
I
"Was the fire really necessary?"
Often called the crowning jewel of New Orleans, the French Quarter was one of Louisiana's most historical neighbourhoods. It's here that you'll feel like you have broken the great invisible clock, settled in a land with plenty of old mixed with the new. A dizzying sort of amalgamation of centuries gone interspersed with modern convenience.
There's a reimagined French Market, modern boutiques and artisan cocktails strewn between beloved antique stores and old restaurants. Like the Creole aristocrats lining the galleries of the Historic New Orleans Collection, the French Quarter is a timeless portrait – especially come dusk when swallows glide above the fortune tellers on Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral's butter-crème-coloured walls reflect the fiery sunset.
Ghost tours troop past mad Madame LaLaurie's mansion, while neon signs stutter to life on Bourbon Street where syrupy red Hurricanes slosh in famed 'go cups'– those plastic tumblers responsible for uncountable curb-side parties. Night falls, horse hooves clop, music throbs and gaslights flicker in a place full of long-told legends and those waiting to be born.
It's through these streets a young woman and her uncle stroll through ostensibly unnoticed. Yet they are not just any young woman and her uncle, one a long-told legend and the other in her folkloric natal form. The former had died twice, broken the natural laws of magic as easy as one snaps a toothpick, and the latter-
Well… he was dead.
Not your typical camera clutching tourists, then.
"Necessary?"
Hope questions back as she presses past a small group of partially drunk, fake-ID'd teens stumbling out a road-side bar. They reek of the hickory laced liquor they'd spend the afternoon downing, and the scent tickles her throat, niggles her gums. Hope fights down the first pangs of hunger that strike a hot cord in her gut. She has bigger game to hunt this afternoon. Namely upsetting the balances of the universe itself.
She didn't have time for a stop-and-snack.
"Of course not. But it was the most expedient choice. Oh, don't look at me like that."
Hope rolled her eyes, but still managed to smile politely at the man she sauntered by. Who, most likely, was wondering who the hell she was talking to.
"It was a tiny incendio cast on a clothing rack underneath the fire alarm. It got the boutique evacuated, didn't it? Furthermore-"
Hope side-eyes her somewhat transparent uncle who was, not surprisingly, eyeing up a rather pretty woman in heels tottering past them. He had the attention span of a fuckin' fruit fly, Kol, and just as enticed to sweeter things. Incorrigible too, with the way he leisurely span back to Hope with an overdramatic waggle of his brows as if to say 'Juicy'.
Of all the ghosts to be haunted by, Hope had to get this one.
"It gives us an excuse of being separated from Rebekah. If I fail in resurrecting you and I go back to the Mansion empty handed, I need an excuse on where I've been all day. I don't want to tell them about this whole scheme if I don't succeed. That's just adding salt to the wound. But if I say we got split during an unfortunate, spontaneous fire, and me, being new to town as I am, got lost in a car park, wandered off, and couldn't find my way home, well… no harm no foul, right?"
Hope is… well, hoping that it meant no harm no foul. By Kol's stare, he was of a differing opinion that her loud-mouthed, loose lipped uncle was moments from crucifying her on.
"No harm no foul-"
Kol scoffed softly, picking at invisible lint on his not-really-there shirt sleeve.
"Hope, darling, some would say Necromancy is the nastiest magic there is. I'm pretty sure we've gone far past the line of no harm no foul even talking about it, let alone contemplating doing some."
Hope's boots thudded to a stop on the pavement, echoed by the grumbling of passers-by forced to switch their own trajectory down the road to avoid bumping into her.
She can't pin Kol down, really. One moment he's all for hellfire and havoc and hedonistic destruction, something Hope herself can get down with, and the next he's as cagey as a nun on a porn site. Bloated underneath his own imagined sins.
It's giving her whiplash.
Hope herself was very much of the idea that once you planned something, no matter how reckless, stupid, or possibly impossible it was, that you did it. No ifs, ands, or buts. You see a goal; you go for it or you die trying.
She can't deal with this whole flipping back and forth nonsense.
"Do you want a body?"
Hope demands lowly, keeping her voice barely above a whisper but as cold and polished as sea-glass.
"Because this is how we get you a body, nasty or not. Foul or not."
They've stopped near a fountain now, the sound of running water and bass from a bar speaker pounding around them, making the air feel alive with movement, and Kol, of course, meets fire with fire.
"We've been walking around this French Quarter for hours. How many shops have we visited now?"
Too many to count, Hope thinks. And Kol knows that too, rhetoric and bombastic as he is, betting on it too.
Fruit fly.
Kol, Hope has come to discover, is a type of man who if he doesn't get satisfaction within five minutes thinks the whole thing useless and worth abandoning all together. Hope is a woman who is in it for the long game, the struggle, liking the climb more than reaching the peak itself.
Obviously they chaff terribly against each other in disposition.
"We've got nothing, darling. Not even a candle or tarot card to our names. Maybe we should just put a pin in it and head back to the mansion and-"
"Do you always give in this easily? What about that tenacious Mikaelson will power you keep prattling about, aye? Who knew Kol Mikaelson was such a bitch-boy that an hour of walking around makes him want his blanky and a bottle of warm blood-"
And not only do they chaff against each other, they also know how to hurt the other nearly instinctually. Throwing barbs as easy as taking a breath.
"You're just like your father; do you know that? Bull-headed and blind. The only way is your way, and God forbid anyone come in with an opposing opinion. Oh no. Definitely not. That's blasphemy, isn't it? You just have to be right-"
"Because I am right! I can do this if you just shut the fuck up and stop complaining for five bloody minutes. You know, I'm starting to see why my father daggered you if only for some peace and quiet!"
The daggers, metaphorically that is, were well and truly out. For the reason that, despite what Kol said, the one thing a Mikaelson was good at was one thing and one thing only.
Fighting.
With words, with swords, with spells and souls, a Mikaelson raged war. Most often than not, against each other.
Not surprisingly, Kol and Hopes fountain side spat was a little less nuclear conflict and more… toddlers pulling hair and slapping each other over the Lego blocks, punctuated by Kol rearing back, insulted.
"I told you that in confidence!"
He hisses and spits, and there it is, that mean gleam in his eye. The same one lighting up Hope's in unholy fire. It seemed to say if I'm hurt, I'm making sure you hurt right back.
"And I'm starting to see why your so-called friends offered you right up on the altar of the greater good as a sacrificial lamb."
Hope's fists clenched at her side, knuckles bleeding white as something threatened to break. Finger or composure, it was hard to tell.
"You take that back."
Kol's own arms came up to wrap around his chest, binding, bounding, bull-headed as he accused Hope of being.
"You take what you said back first."
Hope can't swing at her uncle, as much as she suddenly wants to. Her fist would go right through his glib, infuriating face. Neither could she push, pull, kick or yank.
But she can knock him down a peg or two with her sharp tongue.
"I am trying to help you, you ungrateful, self-indulgent, arrogant, fruit fly of a man-"
And he can bruise her pride in turn.
"Arrogant? You're calling me arrogant? Oh, isn't that rich. Have you looked in the mirror lately, Hope? I'm surprised you'd be able to see anything else but your skyrocketing ego in the reflection, but what else can you expect from Niklaus's spawn-"
Hope is getting real sick of being compared to Niklaus by Kol. Every five seconds Kol was nattering about 'Just like Nik-' 'Nik would say the same-' 'Nik would-' on, and on, and on in a never ending, never-not-rambling tirade. It pricks and prods at her, irritates her self-awareness, chips away at the identity of 'self' she has.
And he never means it in a good way, only the bad, only when Hope shows a little bit of insensitivity, ruthlessness, malice.
It doesn't paint a good picture, for Kol or for Hope.
The sad truth is she doesn't know her father. Candidly, from Hope's perspective, she's only had a 'alive' father for six bloody days. She doesn't know Niklaus, can't bring herself to try through almost crippling self-loathing, and to be constantly compared, constantly reminded that she doesn't know him, doesn't know these things about him to see the comparison for herself…
Hurts.
Hope has had all that stolen from her, taken and replaced with a life of war-fare and prophecy, and it reminds her of that too, of the cupboard and the beatings that she got instead of the cradle she saw upstairs in the mansion. Every comparison then becomes every robbed moment she might have had.
And Kol's all too happy to throw that in her face, ignorant of its implicit meaning or not.
Worse yet, it's always Niklaus and never Haley.
From what Kol had told her, from what he'd seen himself following his siblings around the day baby Hope had been taken, Haley had died. She had died, turned, and instead of focusing on her own do-or-die, she'd marched forward to protect Hope against her own survival.
Hope feels almost… defensive of Haley, despite knowing her as much as her father, which is to say not much at all. But Haley… Haley's sacrifice that day reminded Hope of another mother's sacrifice, of Lily's love for her, and maybe she's transferring that to Haley, maybe it's all in her head, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.
As someone who had sacrificed herself for others too, Hope knows just what kind of special love that takes to accomplish.
But it's the sins of the father people speak about, never the love of a mother, and the fact that it's never Haley, never her mother, never 'Haley would-", it rings a little… hollow.
Kol doesn't see Hope. Not in full technicolour wonder. He sees an extension of his brother.
The brother he clearly dislikes.
Kol's own intolerant opinion of her father, as earned as it probably is, his lack of attention of her mother, as deserved as that is seen as he was dead when she came into the picture, means his only point of reference for Hope is her father.
But Hope is her mother's daughter too.
Haley and Lily.
Most importantly, most impor-a-fuckin'-tantly, she's her own person.
"At least I have a reflection. You have nothing. No body, and no fuckin' brains. Without me you'll be stuck as this. A half-gone soul that's not even really a ghost. You're more a stubborn memory that refuses to fade. But here's the stitch, uncle. You are fading. No one will remember your name in another century. Just a footnote in the history of someone else's story-"
"Of course you're focused on legacy. What else could I have expected from Niklaus's daughter? Tell me how well that's worked out for you and Nik so far? Huh? Nik lost his kid and her childhood because he was too centred on his supposed enemies and 'getting even' and showing off how 'powerful' and 'brilliant' he is, which, by the way, is just what you're doing right now, and you lost your childhood in the pursuits of being remembered as a hero-"
"At least I have people who remember me as something more than a debauched brother who couldn't even take out two muggle teenagers with sharpened twigs. That's embarrassing, Kol, even for you-"
"No, what's embarrassing is giving up your life for people who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Where are these friends of yours, Hope? Not here. You gave your life for them, and what did they do? Move on with their own and ditch you-"
"Uh, excuse me, Miss?"
II
Hope spun around at the sound of a faintly hesitant voice at her back, wide-eyed and breathless and a little bit disorientated from the heated back-and-forth verbal sparring she was partaking with her uncle. She didn't know what she expected to find. Perhaps a policewoman, concerned about the seemingly rambling teen arguing with herself at a fountain edge maybe high on bath salts. Perhaps a plucky muggle who thought they could help the distressed, maybe mentally ill woman calm down before something could kick off. Perhaps even a pastor or Mormon, bible in hand, readying to exorcize Kol-shaped-demons from her brain.
To be honest, at this point, Hope was inclined to let them try.
Instead Hope finds a woman. Tall, waifish, her cheeks were flushed a pretty pink that matched the tone of her ice-cream parlour shop uniform. Her Scoops-and-Sprinkles apron had lace frills around the edge, and the pinned paper hat atop her head was neatly fastened into place. In her hands was a book-
A book she jutted out towards Hope urgently.
"You're book."
"My book…?"
Hope asked, frowning, scowling, perplexed by the sudden turn of events. She'd never met this woman in her life, of that she was certain, and certain too that she didn't order any book or ask for one.
The woman, Lucy her name tag read, frowned back just as confused, as if Hope was the one acting odd.
"The book you paid me to hand to you?"
The woman hazards, outstretched hands wavering in the air but not retreating. The book, even from the corner of Hope's eye, was large, thick, more tome than Sunday best seller. The type of thing you find in a museum collection rather than a Barnes & Noble shelf.
"You came into our shop two weeks ago-"
Lucy starts, urging the book closer and closer, desperate perhaps. Which couldn't be possible, not only because Hope didn't remember going to an ice cream parlour of all things, but because she wasn't in New Orleans two weeks ago. She wasn't even in twenty-eleven. Hope had been back in nineteen-ninety-eight, battling Tom Riddle.
She'd only been here six days.
"Look, I think you have the wrong person-"
Yet, Lucy would not be deterred, holding the book out further, almost pleading for her to take it with big, pale blue eyes.
"You came in two weeks ago with that handsome young man who was giving you the moon eyes, and you handed me this book along with… well, a lot of money, with the only condition being I was here this day at this exact time, you were adamant about that, to give it back to you, or you'd take the money back and… look, I'm in college. I have bills to pay. My mother is ill. Ten grand is a lot of money for me to just pass up-"
Ten fuckin' grand?!
Who the hell was handing out ten grand for a impromptu book delivery service?
According to Lucy… Hope.
Was this a trap? A ruse? Had someone Polyjuiced themselves into Hope to… what? Get a book to her?
"And you said you'd be acting a little strange about it-"
Lucy shakes her head, shaking her messy thoughts with it.
"Well, the man said you'd be acting all 'witchy-woo', whatever that means, and you said to tell you that… that Dobby is in such a beautiful place, to be with friends. Dobby is happy to be with his friend, Hope Potter-"
Hope was sure, by the sudden wash of ice-cold, that her face was, perhaps, as pale as the marble of the fountain they stood beside.
Dobby's last words.
The only one to know those words were Hope. He'd whispered them to her as he died in her arms. So small, so weak, so full of love… Dobby. An elf amongst elves.
Hope had never told anyone Dobby's last words. Not Hermione, not Ron.
No one.
But ice cream Lucy knew them.
"I have no idea what that means, what any of this means, and look, if this is some… gang stuff, I don't want to know. So can you just take the book, please? It gives me the… heebie-jeebies."
Hope does, in fact, reach out and take the book, feels a zang of magic in her fingertips as soon as the tips brush a strange sort of stitched leather, notices how fast the woman pulls away from the book as if it were a plate of spiders. Something that makes your skin itch.
And it makes Hope's skin itch too.
Itch with fuel.
"So I can keep the money, then? You have your book."
"Yeah-"
Hope blinks and tries to swallow around an unexpectedly dry mouth, the feeling of… power in her hands.
"Yeah you can keep it."
Lucy needs no more confirmation, turning in her white sneakers to partially run off, melting into the unobservant crowd, back to her nine to five and her now ten grand richer bank account.
Hope stays exactly where she is, stock still, the blood in her hand humming from emanating magic working its way up her arms and into her spine, into her chest. She glances down for the first time, glances right to the cover of the book she was clutching, saw that it was bound in leather like she had thought, but stitched in large lines, triangular sheaths of something like leather but not really sewn together more like wounds than binding-
The Deathly Hallow symbol branded right on front, burned into the hide.
"I think that's human skin."
Kol pipes up excitedly from her side, and Hope hums back.
Leather but not really.
"I think this might just be our gross golden ticket."
III
They sit on the fountain edge together, hip to noncorporeal hip, flicking though the pages of the book in Hopes lap highlighted underneath a flickering gas lamp just beginning to turn on.
"I'm starting to think that Lucy wasn't lying about who gave her this."
"Oh?"
Kol asked, perking up.
"Why's that?"
Hope flashes him a page, scrawled in chicken scratch that's hardly intelligible to anyone but Hope. And only because she'd spent her whole life reading just that script.
"Because this entire book is in my handwriting. Polyjuice changes a face, a physical structure, but it doesn't transfer ticks such as speech patterns or handwriting. It's one of the security tests at the Ministry they do to make sure no one's trying to sneak in and out of where they shouldn't be. A log book of signatures."
Kol whistles long and low, despite not knowing what this Ministry was or Polyjuice's shortcomings, he gets the gist.
"A magical grimoire made from human flesh… remind me not to piss you off again should I lose my arse cheek for a shopping list."
Hope scowls, flushing abashedly.
"Do you know what this means?"
Kol's owlish blink tells the young women he doesn't.
"It means I made this… I made this but I haven't yet. Which means… which means I do make this, and I must time travel backwards to give it to that Lucy to give to me, maybe because… because I'd already done so? Like a closed loop. I do it because I've done it already, but why-"
Kol throws his hands up, as if he were trying to ward her off.
"Please, stop. All this talk of resurrection, human skinned books, and now time travel? I'm getting a headache, love, and I don't have an actual head to ache. How about we, instead, focus on what goodies might be inside that horror of a book of yours? You know, like maybe a nice little spell to get your favourite uncle his body back?"
Hope flicks through more pages, pausing here or there, frowning in others, wincing in more.
"I've never heard of most of these spells and rituals. Look-"
She deliberately points to a page she lands on.
"Here's an evocation ritual for something called a Blood Tower. What the fuck is a Blood Tower? And why would I need the… the fuckin' tongue of a curser and the jaw bones of seventy-seven plague victims to summon one? And here-"
She flicks through more pages, frantically heaving the book from her lap to hold outwards, to show Kol.
"Here is a whole two page spread on breaking myself and someone I only call my 'Cobra Kai' from-"
Hope turns the page to another two-page spread.
"Something called a 'Prison World'. I have no idea what a Prison World is, but it sounds as ethical and enticing as a fuckin' Blood Tower."
Pathetically, with more than a pained wince, Hope drops the book back into her lap where the bloody human skin pages flap and turn at gravity's will, landing somewhere towards the back.
"Well, it sounds like you become the life of a party-"
Hope glared at her uncles joke, who was quick to snap his mouth shut. Instead of lingering in the look, Hope finds her attention falling back on the book in her lap, skimming through the pages idly, reading the titles as they come and go.
None of them sound remotely good.
What in the name of Merlin would Hope become if this is the sort of magic she's making?
Not good.
That makes her feel sick. Sick and bad and all knotted up inside.
"Look, Hope-"
Kol, uncharacteristically, entreated softly, stretching out as if he was going to lay a hand upon her shoulder.
He couldn't, of course. He'd pass right through.
In its place he falls back on his calm as he pulls back his hand, trying to blanket it with her too.
"White and black magic don't exist. Wait before you argue with me-"
Now it was Hope's turn to have her mouth snap shut.
"It doesn't. Truly. Magic and spells are only as evil as their intent is. Healing magics started out as attack hexes; didn't you know? Spells made to render a person apart came into the hands of someone who wanted to put people together again, and history was made. It's the same magic, the same incantation, exactly the same spells. Yet, their intent fixes them on different paths. Bad and good magics don't exist, only bad and good people. Who's to say this… Blood Tower isn't used to feed Vampires? To protect a place? You can't judge a book by its cover."
Hope snorted indignantly, but she noticed her hunched shoulders were settling down, easing off along with her crushing self-doubt.
"Even if that book is bound and written on human skin?"
Kol broke out into a blinding grin, voice lifting in a way that shadowed an underlying double-speak.
"Especially when that book is written and bound on human skin."
Hope can't match his eye anymore, can't stand the prickly feeling of being seen, of having someone notice that as much as she stood up for McGonagall, Hope also sent a satisfying a Crucio at Alecto Carrow.
Maybe Kol was right. She's not a hero, despite what other's would paint her as. She was just a girl trying to survive, and sometimes, the worst of times, she'd done some pretty bad stuff of her own. Maybe-
"Wait… Here it is!"
Hope laughed as her eyes fell on the dumped book open on her lap.
"The spell to resurrect my pesky uncle to get him off my arse."
Kol pushes closer, leaning over, searching.
"What's the spell called?"
Hope chuckles and points, finger tracing along with her voice.
"No, it's literally called 'the spell to resurrect my pesky uncle to get him off my arse'."
The chicken scratch across the top of the page validates Hope's statement, and earns a deeply warm huff from Kol.
"You're a blunt, mean little thing, aren't you?"
Hope scans the text following beneath the header.
"Well my bluntness has saved us from browsing through this book anymore than we have to, so I say hurrah. Come on-"
Hope slaps the book closed, startling a flock of nearby pigeons into the setting sun sky. Perching the big tome in the crux of her elbow, a fight all on its own, she gestured for Kol to follow with a tilt of her chin.
"I know where we need to go."
Hope doesn't hear Kol following, his steps make no sound, strike no stone, but she can feel him trailing her.
"And where would that be?"
"Where the first and only ingredient can be. A mortuary. Apparently all we need is me, the soul in question, id est you, and a fresh cadaver."
"How fresh are we speaking? We could kill-"
"We're not killing anyone."
Hope asserts, much to Kol's clear chagrin. Going to a morgue would take longer than killing some random person on the street, but Kol would have to deal with his own measly patience.
"You'll have to make do with a slightly more stiff… well, stiff."
Kol catches up just as they turn a corner.
"Beggars can't be choosy, I suppose."
However Hope falters near a streetlamp, abruptly diffident, more reticent than she had been contemplating possibly resurrecting the dead, which might say something a little unkind about herself.
"Kol?"
Kol walks on two steps, three, before he realizes Hope has fallen behind.
"Yes?"
He's frowning at her, the most weary he'd been around her so far. And doesn't that speak volumes.
"I… I didn't mean what I said earlier. About the dagger? All of it? I… you're right. I am a blunt, mean little thing when I want to be and sometimes I just say stuff to… to say it. I can't really help myself at times. I… didn't mean it."
Kol's face allayed, softened in the diminishing light.
"I'm sorry too. Us Mikaelsons-"
He chuckles at himself, at her, at their shared family she's only just discovering.
"We're… we swing first and think later and forget that every punch breaks the skin of our own knuckles too. But-"
His grin comes back full force.
"You're not so much like your father, I imagine."
Hope knows now what he's really saying beneath his bravado.
I see you for you.
It's… nice. Heart-warming. And completely too soppy and sentimental to linger on for long for the two obstinate, slightly philophobia riddled Mikaelsons to not cringe away from. Like a sibling saying I love you out the blue, the kneejerk reaction is 'what do you want?'.
And so Kol shirks the whole moment off them both with his well-timed slights.
"Nik wouldn't be caught dead apologizing-"
Hope, on instinct, bristled, none-the-wiser of the lure Kol was laying to break the heavy tension because, in fact, Hope was very, very much like her father. And apologizing, no matter the regret they felt, was not something they did without receiving all the grace of having teeth pulled.
"I didn't say sorry. I'm not apologizing. You're the one who did that. I was just saying I didn't necessarily mean what I said before. Take that as you will."
Kol didn't chuckle anymore as Hope marched on past, struggling to keep up even though he had the longer legs, and there was nothing giggling about his bright, hot laughter.
"Ah, but it was implied, yes? Oh come on, Eggs. You can't backtrack. I know now underneath that calcium carbonate crystal made shell is a soft and gooey, sunny-side up centre."
"Your insides are going to be soft and gooey once I find a body to put you in."
"Poor threat. Lacks pizzas. You should have included a hint towards stick blenders and orifices."
"Kol?"
"Yes, darling?"
"If you don't keep quiet for the next twenty minutes as we walk to the local mortuary, you're going to regret giving me ideas."
IV
It was woefully easy to break into the morgue. Hope supposes that that is normal. No one respectable envisions requiring strong security around dead bodies.
What do they imagine? That the corpses would just get up and walk out?
Perhaps one would today.
It's easy to jimmy the lock on one of the lower floor windows, easier yet to slither on through, easiest of all to find the cooling units in the basement. The mortuary technicians have clearly locked up for the afternoon and gone home for dinner, by the lack of muggles in the building in need of stunning. There's nothing standing between Hope and the morgue tables.
The last corpse whirls on tiny wheels as Hope drags it out the cubical it was freezing in, a ka-thunk punctuating the locks clicking into place on the body slab.
"This is it-"
Hope asserts as she checks the clipboard she'd pilfered from one of the desks in the back office.
"These are the three freshest bodies they have on tap."
She feels a little… restrained about this, standing here now, faced with three bodies. The actuality of what she is about to try. Since they weren't just flesh and bone. These use to be people. People with families and homes, nine-to-fives-
But they obviously were no longer in there, Hope reasons with herself. These were just empty boats. The souls, the real people, were long gone from their cages and this world.
Hope was just… re-mortgaging their temporary homes. That's right. She was more a real estate agent than some sort of body snatcher. No Burke and Hare.
Or so she hoped.
So she fuckin' hoped.
"So what's it going to be?"
Hope swallows down her hesitancy, she'd come too far to back down now, and turns to her inspecting uncle. She uses her clipboard to gesture to the bodies laid out before her, and Hope really feels like an estate agent, trying to sell the leaky faucet in a bathroom or rewording 'tiny shithole' to 'studio apartment in the heart of a city'.
"Granny with no teeth, man who hasn't had the whole in his head fixed yet, or the woman with her neck at ninety degrees? I've got to say, number one looks the most… roomy."
Kol scratches at his chin before he shakes his head.
"No."
And Hope sighs a little. She thinks maybe Kol's come to the same slightly awful conclusion she has, that maybe they had gotten ahead of themselves, that maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all, that maybe they should go home and forget this ever happened.
And Hope couldn't have been more wrong.
"None of these will work. Look at them-"
Kol waves a hand out with a wince of antipathy.
"They're… dreadful. Now look at me? I need something like me. A dashing, handsome lad with a Casanova flare. Casanova was based on me, after all. Young but not too young. I want dark hair, but I won't complain at blond. Definitely not old-"
"Bloody hell Kol."
Hope curses.
"This isn't a fuckin' pick-and-mix. You can't just spit out the jellybeans you don't like. This is what's here, and this is what you choose from or so help me I'll cram your soul into a dead rat. How about that?"
Kol blinks once, twice, and deflates.
"Fine… fine. I suppose I'll settle for the lady with the broken neck."
Walking to the edge of said lady's slab, Kol's head cocked to the side curiously.
"So what now?"
Hope herself was very much of the idea that once you planned something, no matter how reckless, stupid, or possibly impossible it was, that you did it. No ifs, ands, or buts. You see a goal; you go for it or you die trying.
Hope was no quitter, and she wasn't about to start being one now.
Following him to the edge, opening the grimoire up to the page of the spell, she winces at what she finds.
"I only wrote you'll know what to do. Don't fight it."
So there Hope stood, before a dead body with a ghost at her side with a fuckin' book bound in human skin in her hands, waiting, pausing, the office clock two doors down ticking, tocking. She doesn't know how long she stands there anxiously; how long Kol looks at her expectantly, how long time can stretch when nothing fuckin' comes.
"Nope."
Hope shuts the book closed eventually, dashing it down onto the morgue slab beside the lady's unmoving bare feet.
"I don't have a clue."
Kol snorts, because of course he does, pursing his lips in a thin line.
"Well that was anticlimactic. Maybe we can try another morgue? New Orleans have several-"
Hope reaches for her book again, goes to pluck it up and move on and put all this behind her when-
Well, the back of her hand brushes the skin of the ladies foot as she reaches for the book.
It's immediate, the effect, the feeling.
She feels herself like water, flowing, a stream that moves in the dark of nothing, and she feels the body too, a great big empty maw of a cave, and suddenly she's lashing out, grabbing the ankle hard, enfolding her fingers like roots in the soil below a tree.
Don't fight it.
Hope doesn't.
"Uh, Hope, darling… you're eyes have gone white. I mean… white-white. Dead white. It's a bit creepy if I'm honest so if you could pack it in-"
But Hope can't pack it in, because Hope's not really there. It's hard to describe, the sudden lack of self she has, all she knows and feels is the river, the water, a thing that moves others as it moves itself, but cannot feel its own progress because there is no end and there is no beginning, only water, only change.
Hope snatches out again, and she does the impossible.
She catches her dead uncles wrist in her hand, and she holds.
Kol looks down at the grip amazed, astonished, worried.
"Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth h'ee - l'geb f'ai throdog uaaah-"
"Oh no..."
Kol tries to tug his hand free desperately but can't. Hope holds on, holds and latches, and an ungodly wind in the room begins to thunder above their heads.
"Not tongues. Don't start speaking in tongues! That's creepier than the eyes and Nik is going to kill me if-"
Kol doesn't speak again. He can't. The water rises-
And the water flows.
Hope is a river, she's a lightning rod, she's the copper wire of a telephone pole. Kol's soul is there, beside her, and then in her. She feels him there, in her waters, flowing through the great bottomless river in her chest, in the nothingness, and down he goes the riverbend, from one hand to the next, she's a river that takes, a river that swallows, a river that guides-
Something explodes, the lightbulbs above, the window, something inside Hope, and it's strong enough to send her off her feet, send her flying back, to break the hold she had on the corpses feet.
Hope comes hurtling back to herself immediately, just in time to feel her head bounce off the brick wall across the room she's slammed into. She lands on her arse with a thud and a groan.
V
When she gets back to her feet finally, Hope feels shaky on her knees, dizzy too, tired beyond count as if she's just ran a marathon and then took a trip around the globe in an air balloon. She tries to rub at her eyes with quivering hands, to clear the white spots dancing in her vision.
One of the morgue slabs creak under shifting weight. Hope snaps up, blinking the fog away-
And she finds Kol slipping from the table, weak on his feet too. Not Kol in a corpse, not translucent Kol, not even Vampire Kol, but Kol with skin and blood and soul.
He looks just as he did as a ghost but wrapped in flesh and body.
He looks down at his hands, looks down at his chest, looks down at his reflection in the steel morgue slab and he laughs. He laughs so loud it rings in Hope's ears
"You did it! You bloody did it!"
Hope staggers up, staggers over, and she finds herself poking at Kol's arm experimentally, testing the bounce of skin and muscle.
Her finger doesn't pass through.
He's there. He's really there.
"The spell must have transfigured the tissue of the corpse to match the soul-"
Kol scoops her up, spinning her around, still laughing, still grinning. Hope can't help but to join in with his mirth, as infectious as it is.
"Who cares!"
He plops her down on her feet unceremoniously but he doesn't let go, catching her shoulders to shake enthusiastically, breathing in deeply, sighing deeper yet.
"Oh it feels good to breath. To feel cold. To feel my own body. To… to feel. Hope you marvellous mad girl, you. You actually did it!"
Necromancy-schnecromancy indeed.
"I did, didn't I? But… uh, you might want to find some clothes. You're as naked as a newborn and it's making this heartening moment exceedingly weird."
Kol at once released her shoulders, noticing for the first time Hope pointedly looking up, away.
"Right, yes, clothes. Oh, I've missed clothes too-"
Thud.
The two turned towards the unexpected disturbance, towards the long wall of refrigeration units down in the basement.
Thud thud.
The two froze.
Why?
Because the banging sounded like it was coming from the refrigeration units. From inside the refrigeration units.
Thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud-
One, two, five, ten-
The doors rattled, banged, one after the other joining in an unearthly cacophony of banging and pounding. Hope watched on wide-eyed as a deer caught in headlights as she saw the doors dent and shake in their frames, the locks barely hanging on, holding the inside from the outside, a wall of trembling, breaking doors.
"That doesn't seem good-"
Kol was cut off by an inhuman groan, a sound of rattling rib bones and shrunken throats, followed by another, this one tinged wetly with coagulated blood, and the two corpses on the open morgue slabs heaved up in a sit suddenly, heads lolling like puppets pulled. Eyes dead, jaws snapping, decaying faces hungry.
Hope grimaced as they lurch and tumble from their tables erratically, rising from their temporary tombs.
Thudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthudthud-
CRACK.
"Uh-oh."
Next Chapter: We're back with Klaus & Co as the Mikaelson mansion is in uproar trying to pin down where Hope has gone. Frustrated with a lack of answers Klaus is at his ropes end when he receives a call from a local mortuary, Hope on the other end a bit breathless, asking if he could come pick her up from a tiny, little pickle she's gotten herself in… and to bring as many muzzles as he can with him.
A.N: This chapter was so much fun to write, and I hope you had as much fun reading it. There's something about Kol and Hope that gives, despite their actual genealogy, big sibling vibes and I'm living for it. Don't worry, serious moments are coming, but for the moment Kol and Hope are on their 'let's turn Klaus and Elijah prematurely grey' arc, and who are we to stop them lol?
My description of the French quarter comes from a travel website (to give credit where it's due). I've never been to New Orleans (hoping to change that soon), and so I needed perspective from someone who has to really give it natural flavour.
The spell Hope uses is a nod to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft. Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth h'ee - l'geb f'ai throdog uaaah, translates to 'I call death, Yog-Sothoth answers - here they call trembling.' It seemed to fit and I love H.P. Lovecraft's works (but not the man), so threw it in as a little appreciation.
As always, thank you so much for the follows, favourites, and reviews. I hope this chapter made you giggle once or twice, and, if you have a spare moment or two, please don't forget to drop a review. I will hopefully see you all soon! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21
