Chapter Four:
To Catch a God's Eye
The Road to the Abattoir
Rebekah Mikaelson
Rebekah Mikaelson grimaced as she flicked a chunk of rotten flesh from her shoulder, pointlessly watching it bounce away on the pavement stones to fall off the curb and lay forgotten down a drain.
If only the last hour of memories could do the same.
"What in the bloody hell was that?"
Kol winced at her side, gingerly poking at the tentatively healing bite mark on his arm, shirt torn, hair dishevelled. Elijah, Niklaus, and Marcel were hardly doing any better. Rebekah must have looked a fright too, and the thought alone, the knots in her hair and the stains on her Chanel jeans, was enough to curl her nose up.
"Zombies, I believe. Very fast, very bite-y zombies."
"Fantastic."
Klaus cursed as he stormed down the road towards the compound of their home beside his siblings, yanking out the broken bone jutting out his leg. A shard of femur if Rebekah wasn't mistaken.
She, of course, wasn't.
"Not only is there a night-light missile flying around somewhere in New Orleans, but they're also capable of resurrecting the dead, forming some sort of pseudo sunlight that might circumvents our daylight rings if we get too close, and, by the state of this bloody street, detonating."
The closer the siblings got to the Abattoir, the clearer they could see the road home was in ruins from the explosion, people in the street cleaning wreckage with confused idle chatter, murmurs of a gas leak already taking root in the gathering. A TV in a bar caught Elijah's attention, pulling the eldest Mikaelson in front of the open doorway to peer inside.
"And bringing down the ten plagues of Egypt upon our heads."
Klaus scowled and came to his brothers side, in view of the TV before the bar, voice of the news correspondent slipping out the open door in nasally waves.
"Tonight the New Orleans News station is interviewing citizens about the strange happenings that have seemingly stricken our city in the last twenty-four hours. Frogs, showers of blood, disease, and freak hailstorms have been sighted around districts since twelve o'clock this afternoon, and has many wondering just exactly what is going on. Minister Oswald is with reporter Jane Cleary now to discuss the historical precedence of such circumstances. Biblical retribution for sin or approaching ecological disaster? Coming up in-"
Klaus and Elijah whirled away from the TV and resumed walking, just as Marcel cut in, speaking for the first time since crumbling to the floor back in the graveyard.
"She can control us too."
Elijah glanced his way, and the youngest vampire refused to meet his eye. Refused to look anywhere but dead ahead, truly, voice as lost as his gaze was.
"She… She got in my head like she just… Stepped in, and then I… I couldn't control myself. I didn't want to. It felt… Warm. Warm and cosy and safe and-… Like sunlight. Like she had bathed me in sunlight for the first time in centuries and I-… She told me to walk, I walked. She told me to stand still, I stood still. I didn't even try to fight it when she had my strings in her hands. She could have told me to rip my own heart out of my chest with my bare hands and I think… I think I would have done it if only it would make her smile, if it would let her keep me in that warm sunlight."
Elijah winced deeply, Rebekah saw, and ran a hand through his hair, straightening the dishevelled locks back.
"Is there truly such a being adept at such things? Could-"
Rebekah scoffed.
"Clearly there is, and plainly, we all saw the scars, didn't we? It's… It's her."
That brought silence. Silence that could not be denied. As the scars they had seen, a bolt of lightning across a brow, an order scrawled around knuckles, and surely the other scars too, lurking beneath the black clothes, hiding, waiting-
She had the scars.
The scars matched on themselves, currently magicked away to invisibility but there all the same.
Nevertheless, Rebekah wasn't finished.
"Do you truly believe that could have been Henrik?"
Kol shrugged at his sister's question.
"Well… She brought back a whole bloody graveyard, didn't she? With just a pat of a gravestone… What's a few centuries to someone like that?"
Klaus's jaw jumped, hand at his side flexing into a fist.
"Henrik or not, Bonded or not, it is quite apparent, given the… Magnitude of what we have just witnessed and barely survived, that finding this woman is evidently our next step. I don't fancy staying in this city with whatever the hell she was prowling in the shadows, readying to leap if I step on the wrong toe."
You knew it was bad when Niklaus, of all people, wanted to take precautionary steps, Rebekah thought. Elijah must have been of the same mind, as he nodded.
"To home, where we can heal up, and then we'll begin our search. She and the boy could have left New Orleans by now, but surely they have not gotten very far."
The siblings, cautiously, tiredly, persisted on.
New Orleans: The French Quarter: The Abattoir
Niklaus Mikaelson
When the Mikaelson's arrived at the abattoir not an hour later, worse for wear but thankfully, relatively, whole, the door was already open, jutting out into the street like an open invitation.
Klaus mutely nodded to Elijah, and both took guard at the far corners up front as the family edged their way in to the home. It didn't take either brother long to find the interlopers, the light of the living room was on, and hushed chatter could be heard from the hallway.
Niklaus was the first to peer around the bend, only to find that there was no light on in the living room at all, only-
Only a softly glowing Hemlock and a grinning Henrik, the former spread out on the chesterfield, feet kicked up on the mahogany table, the latter beside her on the chair. Hemlock spotted them before they even crested the door, boots thudding on the hardwood as she sat up, waving a flippant hand in their general direction with a toothy grin.
"See? Alive and well. No harm, no foul. It was only a few dozen undead."
Henrik promptly kicked her shin underneath the table Klaus could see from the jostle of his leg, before turning to the family in the door, smiling.
"What Hemlock means to say is she might have acted without having all the facts. She's sorry-"
"What? No I'm not."
"And she now knows that-"
"I know they're lucky to be alive. Or undead. Whatever the terminology for their kind is."
"We're family, and she wouldn't have done-"
"Oh, I bloody well would have, and I would do it again too. They kidnapped you, Henrik. They're lucky a few nips and nibbles is all they got."
"What she did if she knew the full story, and-"
"The full story being they're Vampires, ergo, complete fuckin' weirdos."
Henrik shot a glare at the woman, seemingly unperturbed by the notion of retribution.
"If we could all just… Sit down and talk like adults, I'm sure we could come to an understanding."
"They'll understand my foot down their throat if they try to take you away again and-"
"'Lock, please."
A sigh was Henrik's reply. Not quite suffering, not quite indulgent. Somewhere lost between.
"Fine. Only because you asked."
Elijah stepped forward determinedly, passed Niklaus still hanging by the doorframe. Klaus let him go, but kept a sharp eye on the woman, the small swath of skin of her face, the still slightly glowing skin and flaming hair, waiting to see if it would flare into that deathly light once more.
It merely shimmered at Elijah's approach.
"If you wish to talk, then we shall talk."
Hemlock-
Rolled her eyes.
"I don't want to talk. I want whisky and a fuckin' cigarette and a long, hot bath-"
Another bump of Henrik's leg bellied another kick, this one harsher, this one rough enough to cause the lustre of Hemlock to blaze momentarily, punctuated by a pointed growl. Henrik-
Henrik didn't seem to care.
It became apparent why when Hemlock folded, smiling tenderly at the boy.
He had her wrapped around his finger.
"But… Henrik wants to talk, and clearly I am a push over when it comes to him. So… here we are."
Klaus finally entered the room, but he kept his back to the wall, kept the exit close, kept the woman far.
Bonded or not-
Klaus did not know what this woman was, what exactly she was capable of, and while killing each other was negated by the invisible Bond they shared, Klaus suspected both of them knew that there were worst things than death.
"Here we are… And what are we exactly, little love? I've lived a long, long life, and I've never seen anything like you before."
Hemlock huffed, squaring off in her seat, bright, sunny gaze snatching to him, fastening on.
Klaus had the strangest thought then. That if he had a thousand more years upon this dust ball hurtling through space, and he spent every hour of those thousand years painting, he could never, not once, quite get those bright green star-light eyes right.
Could never get the sense of being seen bone deep correct on canvas.
It was a strange thought, an unsettling thought, a tempting thought.
"What I am is Hemlock Potter, and clearly you haven't been far if a few parlour tricks I improvised has managed to make you so bloody scared that you're cowering in the corner like a dog who's been caught pissing on the carpet."
Elijah immediately stepped between the two, before Klaus could react to being dubbed scared, before something in the tightly sutured room could blow.
"I do not believe the plagues of Egypt would be considered parlour tricks by most."
Klaus took a step to the right, to regain a clear shot of the woman, to keep an eye on her should she lunge he told himself resolutely, not to keep those solar-flare eyes in sight, just in time to see the frown marring her face, hooding said eyes.
"Plagues?"
Kol cut in swiftly, with all the delicate tact of a rampaging rhino.
"Oh, you know, the swarm of locusts, the showers of blood, and the near-out blackout the news keeps droning on about on channel four, and has the townsfolk in an uproar outside thinking the end of time is neigh. Those plagues."
The frown twitched to a flinch, and the woman-
Hemlock, braced herself on the arms of the chair before she heaved herself up, steps thumping as she made her short way to the bay windows of the front room.
"Shite. Not again."
It was clear as day that she had not wanted to be heard, but Klaus, with his responsive senses, and the rest of the supernatural enhanced inhabitants of the room, did all the same, and yet it was Elijah who stepped closer to the deceptively small woman.
Just one step.
Even Elijah wasn't currently brave enough to dare another.
"You… You didn't know you did that, did you?"
The woman whirled around, fierce curls glinting, skin sparking, eyes glowing, and the glare she shot at the eldest Mikaelson was positively venomous.
And it told Niklaus all he needed to know.
She really had not known what she had done. Not entirely.
"Sorry if having my brother kidnapped by Vampires sent me on a bit of an emotional tail-spin."
Marcel, then, perhaps, made his most reckless choice of his life that evening.
"He's not your brother, though."
The leather gloved hand was up, fingers flicking, and Marcel went flying. He landed in a chair across the room, far away from the one occupied by Henrik, where the leather and wood ripped and tore itself apart by unseen forces, held aloft by magic, before ostensibly bending around him, pinning him down-
Encasing him until only his head was free, a strap of leather tied tightly around his mouth.
"Yes he is… And that's enough out of you for this evening. As someone who has been in the deepest recesses of your mind I can categorically say you bore the living shit out of me. My city this, my city that… Grow the fuck up, or sit down and be quiet."
The leather clad hand fell back to her side, and that, right there, was when Klaus saw a glimmer of what they had in their front room.
Death.
Death in ringlets.
Hemlock cooled off with an exaggerated roll of her shoulders.
"Henrik might not be my brother by blood, I'll give you that… But I saved Henrik. It's my responsibility to make sure he's safe, and you lot nearly-"
"Hemlock-"
"No, Henrik. If you want us to talk we'll talk, but first they'll understand why they've pissed me off. You fuckers nearly hurt Henrik. Those little blights was simply my… Essence and anger lashing out subconsciously."
Her head cocked, green eyes sharp in the setting dusk, smile impossibly burning-cold.
"Now imagine what I could do with a bit of planning if you want to try and do that again?"
From the crook of the room, and from the corner of his eye, Klaus could see the bob in Elijah's throat. A heavy swallow for a hefty threat.
And it was a threat.
A threat Rebekah side-stepped before Niklaus or Kol could meet it head on.
"And what are you exactly."
Hemlock shrugged by the windowsill, sheen a muted gleam in the low light at her back.
"In the strictest sense, I suppose you would call me a Demigod, but I prefer just 'Lock."
Kol laughed hard, loud and long.
"Gods don't exist."
The scowl Hemlock threw at Kol from over her shoulder was full of a sort of limp pity, like you would give to someone asking if Santa Claus was still real in their fifties.
"No, of course not, you bloody idiot."
Elijah frowned, mouth opening, but the woman carried on, pity rolling to a simmering exasperation.
"But my father is ancient, powerful, and was, at the very least, around six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia where he set up his own little kingdom of fanatic worshipers. Now they're known as the Old Ones or the Slumbering Ones in certain Witch circles. Beings not of this realm or this world or even this fuckin' dimension, but capable of creating… Bridges into it. Just enough room to wiggle their immense supernatural spirits through in a tiny tendrils for a peek, and to get their jollies off messing with the Muggles. Nevertheless, the Mortals of the time had no other name for whatever the fuck he or the rest of his kind was, no way of seeing them or describing them as they exist outside of human physicality, and so they gave them the name Gods. So, again…"
Her grin was sharp, earnest, as she held her hands out, palm up.
"Here we are."
Elijah let that settle before he tilted his own head curiously.
"And how exactly does a Demigod get here?"
She snorted, and appeared in a flash at the bookcase by Rebekah, flicking through the leather-bound spines with deft little fingers.
She was fast. Dangerously fast. Deadly fast. As fast as-
As fast as light.
"How does any Demigod tale begin in the myths? A pretty woman in the wrong place at the wrong time who stubbornly says something she never should have."
Her fingers stalled on a book, a small green tome that she plucked from its home on the shelf. She weighed it in her hands as Klaus interjected himself into the conversation. She did not look at him, but kept her gaze on the book, and it-
It irritated him.
Rubbed a little too raw.
"You truly expect us to believe this, don't you?"
The book in her hand erupted to a pile of ash, cinders she dusted off carelessly onto the floor below. Nevertheless, despite the outburst of destruction, her voice bellied no annoyance at the line of questioning, as if she were used to being thought a liar of.
I Must Not Tell Lies.
Klaus's stomach churned, the back of his hand burned, and there it was, that rough-raw sensation.
Look at me.
"Believe it or not, it is what it is. Your faith is not needed for my existence to continue. I think therefore I am, whether you want me to exist or not."
They must have looked a little lost when she glanced their way, finally, perhaps even a bit confused or frustrated, because her face rolled to a kind of sympathy, soft but unforgiving.
"My mother was a Witch. A powerful one at that. She was doing her Mastery on Charms when she… Conceived me. I don't know her precise field of study, but I do know it involved Babylonian wand-work and fertility-… A topic close to her heart."
In an instant she was by the fire, picking up their photos on the mantel, filtering through snapshots of their lives.
Light was like that, Niklaus thought languidly. It seeps into the dark places and fills it up with itself until there was no room left, no shadow untouched, no skin unburnt, nothing else but the light.
"At some point in her travels, far away from home and the fiancé she left behind, she ended up in Cuthah-"
She glanced over her shoulder, and shot off a smile.
"Or as you would call it now, Tell-Ibrihim… Iraq, if you didn't know."
She ran a thumb over the wooden frame of a photo, grew tired of the image, and placed it back down on the mantel, skimming the rest with only her eyes and a curious twist to her lips.
"She made the discovery of a century there. A Mesopotamian temple was located just under the mound. She must have thought she had hit the jack-pot. She had spent months looking for Inanna-"
An idle wink, this time, was their gift.
"The Mesopotamian goddess of sex, war and fertility."
Hemlock quickly abandoned the photos all together, instead drumming a finger over the brick of the fireplace, humming as she went. By Henrik's unperturbed nature, it seemed Hemlock's whimsical, almost fanciful, interest was a familiar occurrence.
So was her inability to stay still.
"And here it was. It must have been the Goddess, my mother thought. There were Lions depicted on the walls, on the throne, on the bloody ceiling. That was Inanna's symbol. Lions."
A dry laugh, like desert sands whipped up into the air, followed by a wry shake of a gilded head.
"It wasn't only Inanna's emblem, however."
Rebekah shook her own head in return.
"What has this got to do with Demigod's and plagues and-"
Elijah's voice drifted over his sisters.
"It was not Inanna's temple, was it?"
An arid, dead smile chaffed on Hemlock's face.
"No."
But then she shrugged haphazardly, and the weight was lifted from her face and her tone.
"Did you know in the ancient Mesopotamian religion any iconography, statue, written word… Anything related to their gods became, in turn, them? If you created a painting of Inanna, her spirit would reside there, her power too. You write her name down, and she's in the ink and the paper. Every icon of their gods was treated with the upmost care because they were, in fact, their gods. I think it was their bridges, in truth. Somehow when the Mortal imagination homed in on depicting them either in words or pictorial form… Well, it opened a doorway. Just a slither. Just enough for them to get a toe in. In short, You carve a statue of an Old One… You better know how to pray."
Elijah exhaled long, picking up the small, tiny pieces Hemlock was dropping to stitch together a picture.
"Whatever holds the engraven image shall become what it depicts."
Hemlock nodded, and Klaus crossed his arms over his chest.
"If not this… Inanna, then who's temple was it?"
Hemlock became, perhaps, the most still Klaus had seen her become this far, stonily, pitilessly, back ramrod straight, gaze away, refusing to look their way. He clamped his mouth shut, teeth grinding, if only to stop himself from asking her to see him again.
"He had many names, most long lost now. Meslamtaea, Erra, Irra… Nergal-… the High Summer Sun…My personal favourite is the Sunset King."
The light, Klaus thought.
The light.
"He was a Sun God."
Hemlock, nonchalantly, shrugged, returning to her rooting about the room, now by the low-slung couch, running a gloved hand across the back, inspecting her finger for dust, gingerly bypassing Henrik and his chair.
"In his most basic form, yes, I suppose so."
Rebekah chuckled.
"A little be of sunshin-"
And Hemlock swivelled, egregiously glaring, sharply cutting the blond Vampire off dangerously calmly.
"What you fail to remember, however, was how bloody deadly the sun was in Mesopotamia and to its people. The Mortals struggled to understand the brutal supernatural force they had let into their world, and so they equated him to the closest thing they knew was like him. The sun. However, being equated to the sun was not a compliment. Summer was the season of war for ancient Babylonians, Assyrians and Akkadians. Crops burned underneath the blazing sky and famine ravished the land. Men died of exposure if left out too long, and that wasn't long at all, disease festered and death hit like a tidal wave. The sun may have been Nergal's power, it may be how the Mortals understood something like him, but he wasn't a sun god as we understand a sun god to be today. All flowers and life and merry-fuckin'-making. He was a God of summer sun, war and disease and death. A very specific death. Inflicted death."
Rebekah, swiftly, whistling between her teeth, backtracked.
"Alright… A bit of a bastard then."
Hemlock-
A smile brokered out across her face, and there was a unexpected warm sound ringing in Klaus's ears, hot and humid and sizzling and-
Laughter.
She was laughing.
"Yes, a bit of a bastard. Do you know what his favourite past time was?"
Silence, and Hemlock's laughter died down as she turned her attention to the curtains, thumbing the velvet.
"Nergal liked to go out and destroy. No reason, no rhyme, just destruction. He never felt remorse, he never felt regret, those were Mortal emotions and he, unlike you lot, had never been Mortal. He was something else and… And he would not stop until his fury waned, and only he ever knew when that would bloody happen. He was renowned for impulsively and randomly laying waste to Babylon, not to punish sin like the other Gods, maybe even his brothers and sisters if whatever he was had family relations, but because it was simply in his nature. A sun has to burn."
Another shrug. This one harder, jagged. Pitted.
"Just as my mother, my very, very witch-y mother, thought that magic could fix all her woes."
Kol pulled away from the door he had taken root in, cocking a brow.
"So you mother found his temple."
Hemlock dropped the curtain, four little smears of black telling Klaus she had nearly decimated those too before she had dropped the fabric.
"She found his temple, and she found a statue. By that point six thousand years hadn't treated it kindly. All it appeared to be was a big, malformed slab of rock with a half scratched out inscription on the bottom. She saw the lions, and she thought it was Inanna. The excavation team decided, possibly in the most misguided choice of the last five thousand years, to bring the statue up above ground to get a better look at it. A day passes, a week, maybe even two… Strange things start happening in the camp immediately."
She shook her head, took a breath Klaus could see, a little inhale that wanted to be a sigh but was caught too deep in a throat.
"A man wakes up with some sort of leprosy-syphilis hybrid where his skin literally sloshes off as he raised from his bed, and dies by ten in the morning. A witch loses her mind, goes berserk, starts shooting off killing spells left and right with a war cry. All the food rations turn to ashes in their packages and tins. After a young archaeologist decides to immolate themselves in the middle of camp with cheap gasoline crying until the very end for the Sunset King's glory, the governing board decided to pull out. Of course it was too late by then. Something had caught Nergal's eye, and no one else saw what it was until it was too late to do anything about it."
Elijah delved his hands deep into the pocket of his slacks.
"Your mother."
Hemlock waited, paused, crashed-
And nodded.
"Good ol' mom. Turns out leprosy man had stolen one of her thesis ideas, and nearly cost her her place on the team. The witch had been making snide remarks her way for months. She had a peanut allergy, so all the food was destroyed. And self-immolation boy? He'd swatted her arse in the mess hall once when she was walking passed. The thing about gods… They don't really do moderation. That's a human concept. It's all or nothing for them. One wrong remark to something they see as theirs, and its game fuckin' on."
She shook her head, locks lighting to an almost fire shine.
"Consent, however, has a different meaning when it comes to Gods-… Or at least the Mesopotamian Old Ones. Nergal couldn't do or take jack shit without my mother first engaging him, and she wouldn't even look at the statue, too focused on the temple inscriptions, no matter the dramatics he tried to use to lure her in. He made the sun rise at midnight. He made the waters flow as blood in their pipes and taps and bathtubs. He scorched the earth until the crops failed that year. Did you know the Bible stole the story of the ten plagues of Egypt from the ancient Mesopotamian religion? They stole the story of Noah's ark too… My mother was quite lucky my dad didn't try and do a repeat of that one to get her attention. "
A wave of a flippant hand, as if Hemlock was trying to bat away an irritating fly.
"Yet, nothing worked. Mum wouldn't look his way. Just one prayer. Just one word… Just one request, that was all Nergal needed, something that meant my mum acknowledged his existence, his power, and then he could slip in. He gets that, in the end. The Gods always get what they want."
Hemlock shrugged, idly pilfering through a side table draw, flicking through the magazine she had spotted in the depths.
"As for my mother, she grows desperate looking for her answers and when the board tell her they were pulling out, that she need to pack up and leave that night, it only gets worse. She knew she was running out of time, and if she knew that Nergal did too… She was infertile you see? Something about scarring on her tubes…"
Rebekah hesitated before butting in.
"Her fiancé?"
Hemlock nodded, slapping the magazine closed and shoving it back into the draw she hip-checked to close.
"Precisely. She wanted a child. It was the 1980's. It's what everybody did back then, or thought they should do. Settle down in a picket fence and have two point five kids. She went searching for a way. Merlin knows when or how she got rip-roaring drunk, where the magically appearing fuckin' wine came from, but she did, and as with all drunk people she stumbled headfirst into trouble. She found the statue on her stroll back to her tent from the community barracks after spending the night in the temple in a last-ditch effort to translate some of the inscriptions."
Elijah interfered.
"Or the statue found her."
A laugh, bright and burning.
"Yeah… Most likely. And just like all drunk people, she stumbled right into that fuckin' statue, and cut the palm of her hand on the bloody rock. It must have been Nergal's first taste of blood in millennia. I think he liked it, and I like to think she cursed the thing black and blue before she said she just wanted a child."
Klaus could not see Hemlock's smile head on, her face turned profile as it was, but he saw half of it, half of that mournful, ruptured smile, and-
And suddenly he gets it.
Suddenly he gets her.
There was a certain… Gravitas when one realized they should not exist and yet still did, and their presence somehow fractured everything else around them, as if they were bullets fired from a smoking gun into a plane of glass. Niklaus was the product of a secret love affair that saw his family doomed, damaged, transformed as they were. He was a Hybrid, something other, something previously singular.
It was a lonely road to walk for forever and a day. To know that in the entirety of existence, in the vastness of reality, there was and would only be you for eternity-
It was why he had tried so hard to break the curse placed upon him. Tried so hard to create one, just one, more Hybrid.
If his nature could be replicated, it meant he was not, in fact, a mistake, a fault, a goddamned blunder of the universe.
Hemlock shook her head.
"Gods so rarely think of the consequences… And they never pass up a chance at picking ripe fruit from a tree. Never make a deal with an Old One. You pray for food and shelter, and they demand the death of your first-born son just for shits and giggles."
The muscle in Elijah's jaw jumped.
"She took something more than her bags home with her."
A nod, stiff, rigid, and hard.
"She had one hell of a dream that night when she passed out, something she wrote down in her diary as blinding light slipping under my skin with a summer smile and the scent of ashes being breathed against my throat and two months later, soundly back on good ol' blighty soil, she had me, a screaming, ginger brat that destroys everything it touches."
Spotting Marcel's rather confused frown, despite the leather binding him down, Hemlock chuckled, a crackle of a solar spike.
"Demigod, remember? I was created with all ten-toes and ten-fingers and outer-dimensional-Divine fuckin' energy in one instantaneous moment. Like a singularity, I just… Existed suddenly. Freaked my mother right out when she awoke the morning after and found a nine-month pregnant stomach underneath her wrinkled covers. Mum only carried me for two months because her body needed time for it to adapt to my miraculous presence and realize it was, indeed, pregnant without the build up and needed to push me out."
Niklaus stepped forward, daring the one question no one else had asked, no one else seemed willing enough to ask, gaze skittering to the boy on the chair.
"That doesn't explain how he is here."
Hemlock scoffed.
"Doesn't it? I told you, Nergal's my father. I inherited his… Powers. Plagues and all."
Elijah slipped in gently.
"Henrik was… Was murdered."
Hemlock grinned.
"Inflicted death. Bingo."
Rebekah shook her head.
"But he died-"
Rebekah choked a little there, stumbling through the word, but pushed through in the end.
"A thousand years ago."
Hemlock glanced to Henrik, now perked up on the coach with the conversation back on him.
"Why don't you go outside for some fresh air, yeah?"
"But-"
The look Hemlock gave the boy belayed no room argument, not even an inch to disagree with her unexpectedly, unemotionally slack face, and realizing he could not grumble his way to victory in this, Henrik sighed, stood, and walked out the room.
Hemlock waited until she heard the front door click shut before she spoke again.
"I… Travel in my sleep. Every night-… To where the dead call to me. I… I don't know how it fuckin' works, alright?"
She shook her head.
"I just end up there. Everywhere. To people who only died yesterday, in the last minute, or thousands of years ago. I normally can't do anything. I just have to… Watch."
Klaus tried to imagine that, this suggestion that every time he laid his head down to rest, he would see only murder and killing and death, and all he could do was watch it happen.
How many nights would it take before apathy took hold?
How many nights until you tried to stop sleeping altogether?
Not many, he thought.
Not many at all.
Hemlock, however, straightened up, crossing her arms over her chest, chin tilted proudly, green eye blazing.
"One night a while ago I see a boy in a woods. He's running from Werewolves. He's running as fast as he can, and it wasn't fast enough. I'm there, standing on a knoll between the bare branched trees, I'm watching, and I can't move to help him."
She chewed the memory up between her teeth, swallowed it down deep, and cocked a brow.
"Do you know what Henrik's last thought was?"
Elijah was the only one brave enough to answer with a shake of his head. Hemlock smiled back gently.
"Really? It was night-time. It was dark. He was just a boy, and he was scared. Come on, now… You must know."
Klaus cut in, faintly, brokenly.
"He wanted to see the sun one last time."
Klaus could see Elijah wince, as he could see Rebekah recoil and Kol blink back the grimace wanting to pepper his face, but Hemlock, she nodded.
"I just want to see the sun. I heard it as clear as if he had spoken it right into my ear, even over the wolves howling."
She shrugged, arms coming down to swing at her side, thumbs hooking in the loops of her jeans.
"Apparently that was the magic phrase. It was enough. I found I could move, and I did what anyone in my place would have done when seeing a scared child. I reached out, grabbed him, and when I woke up-"
"Here he was. You'd brought him through."
Elijah finished, but Kol blustered, haunted by his own memories of that night so long ago and still not long enough yet to make it not hurt. They could live another millennia, Klaus suspected, and even then time would not heal that wound.
"We buried his body."
Hemlock nodded as if it was of no consequence, as if they were simply not grasping the right words in the right places, as if she had already laid it out all for them and they could not see.
Yet, how could that be?
How could Henrik be buried a thousand years ago in a now unmarked grave, and be outside this very house, rosy-cheeked, sitting on the step stoop?
"I brought his soul through. I don't… I don't think Henrik realizes that. He doesn't remember much of the first few weeks he was here. I could see him, but…"
Hemlock grimaced, wincing, the flare of her skin shockingly blaring so bright, so suddenly, Klaus had to snap his gaze away before the blaze receded with a sheepish-
"Sorry… I just-…"
Hemlock shook her head, but she was frowning at something, as the Mikaelsons slowly came to.
"The first few weeks were… Bad. Really bad. He began to… Drift. Fade in and out of existence-… I couldn't see him like that so I figured out how to conjure him a reconstructed body a week later, stashed his soul in there while he was sleeping, and bobs your uncle, one live and well boy permanently tidal-locked in the living world. It was all quite simple really."
And then she seemingly came to refute herself.
"Of course then I had to figure a way out to create sunblock on colossal steroids, but we made it through."
At Rebekah's blank stare, still blinking away the momentary flash of light from an emotional reaction, Hemlock rolled her eyes.
"I literally exude sunshine permanently, whether its bright enough for you to see it or not. The radiation from me alone is enough to give a mortal nasty skin cancer from standing too close for too long. Henrik is a mortal boy now… Without protection he'd have had stage four cancer in every organwithin a month. As I said before, sunlight isn't nice. In its most basic form its electromagnetic radioactivity. I'm a fuckin' walking, talking, nuclear fusion reactor."
Elijah scrubbed at his eyes.
"And we were left with his previous body to bury."
Klaus ran a tongue over his teeth, choosing his next words carefully.
"You don't seem the type to just lay out a life story like this without reason."
Why are you telling us this?
Hemlock met his eye and smirked, keenly, abruptly. The hairs on the back of Klaus's neck leapt up for the first time in centuries.
"Have you not been listening to a word I have said? I'm a lot like my father in many ways. In terrible ways. We're greedy, cruel, spiteful creatures when we want to be. Sometimes, I see a ripe apple dangling from a tree, and I can't stop myself from reaching up and plucking it. When something catches my eye-"
Elijah ended the thought.
"It's yours."
In a flash of light she was gone and-
At the door.
The only door out of the room.
Kol, the closest now, stumbled away, and Hemlock reached an arm out, braced against the doorframe, leaning casually against the only exit-
Calmly barring their escape.
"It's mine. Henrik is mine. My magic-… My power, whatever it is that makes me shine, whatever it is that makes my father and myself burn, it flows through his body that I made. He's my brother. I won't just let you swan in here and take him from me."
The hand on the frame clenched, glove vanished, bare fingers burrowing as veins of rot and ash and petrification splintered up and out the wall, weaving through the brick and mortar and plaster, threatening to bring the room down upon them if left to spread any further.
Almost to make a point, Hemlock stopped them, those streaks of possible death, but her hand didn't leave, the finger on the trigger just waiting for a reason to pull.
"I've let you all have your fun, Vampires. I've let you and the Wiccans run free and play your little games of war for months now like children play with toy soldiers in a sand pit. I've let you strut about in these streets calling yourself kings with your imaginary crowns. I've let you plot in your little homes and your dark corners and perform contests of just how low you lot can sink, and not once have I intervened… You should have been thankful for the restraint and mercy I have shown you and this fuckin' cesspool of a city… Don't you ever fuckin' forget that. Everything you have here, everything you see and touch and taste, each other, this house, the bloody ground you walk on and the air you squander… You have it because I've let you have it."
There was a duality to her voice, a two-tone dance, one blazing and hot and the other deep and dark and bottomless, overlapping to create a deafening rumble, a sudden shift in sound and sense like a cavern had opened up in the room unseen but there all the same, and something sleeping below, in the unseen down and in the dark had begun to awake, begun to roar-
And then it stopped.
Just stopped.
Hemlock's hand fell from the door, going behind her back to fold with the other, and the grin she gave was light and airy.
"It would be an awful shame to see what happens to you if you try and push my forgiveness."
It was there, right there, standing in that very spot that Niklaus finally realized the truth of Hemlock's story.
This really was a Demigod.
Not ones from children's books, ones who went on wild quests and back home again in one piece, but something not-
Not human.
Something that had never truly been fully human, despite the face it wore or the mannerisms it mimicked. That was just confetti. Something like the old myths, something forgotten, a brutality between the greed and the wroth and the might and the-
The sunlight.
And Niklaus Mikaelson had, strangely, surprisingly, never wanted anything else more.
"The way I see it, we have three options here."
Hemlock held up a lone finger.
"The first, you try and take Henrik from me. In which case, before you so much as get out this house, I will have New Orleans burned to a fuckin' crater like I did Tell Ibrahim. Mortals, Vampires, Wiccans, everything will die, nothing will grow here for millennia, anyone who so much as breathes the breeze from this place will suffer all diseases ever known to mankind, and I will make this land a testament to my rage for eras to come, and then I will take Henrik somewhere else and start again."
Another finger joined the first.
"Second, you lot decide you can't deal with all this, and leave. Of course, that will upset Henrik, and I can't have that. He's gone and got his heart set on getting to know you lot again… So I will have to hunt you all down one by one where I will personally show you just how many inflicted deaths and diseases I can create. You'll find I'm quite the imaginative girl."
The last finger rises.
"Or, option three, we learn to… Get along, for Henrik's sake. New Orleans stays as decadently debauched as it always is, tongues stay in mouths and bones stay pearly white and skins stay unlacing, and I won't have to set up flower shop somewhere else and explain to Henrik why I went on a genocidal rampage and why a large chunk of America is lost in a ditch."
A bright smile, both hands raise now, open palmed, finger splayed.
"Win-win."
She looked at the clock and took another step back, into the hallway.
"Tell you what, I'll give you fifteen minutes to think it over."
She started to turn, to walk for the front door, but Rebekah called to her back.
"Fifteen minutes? I thought Gods were meant to be at least reasonable?"
Hemlock stalled, and glanced back over her shoulder, smile a clear snappy thing on her gilt face.
"Oh, sweetheart, no. Wherever did you get that silly idea from?"
Hemlock did not wait for a reply, there really wasn't one to give, and she disappeared around the bend, the sound of the front door opening and shutting momentary echoing, likely going to sit with Henrik on the doorstep, and for a long, long while, all was silent in the room until Kol broke it with a grin.
"We're going for option three, right? I like my tongue, bones, and disease-free skin exactly as they are, thanks."
Klaus scowled at him.
"Of course we bloody well are!"
Next Chapter Preview:
"She doesn't know what we are. Not to her. She doesn't know we're Bonded."
Niklaus turned away from the mantle at the sound of Elijah's voice, checking the clock.
Ten minutes left.
"Apparently not, and if we say anything now she'll think it's a ploy to ingratiate ourselves and possibly steal Henrik out from under her."
At Rebekah's glare, Klaus shrugged.
"It's what I would think in her shoes, and evidenced by the current state of the walls around us, she doesn't trust us much already."
Elijah sat down in a chair, crossing one long leg over the other.
"Then we need to decide what our next steps shall be, and quickly."
xXx
"You weren't… You weren't scared today, were you, Henrik?"
You weren't scared of me? Was what Hemlock truly wanted to ask, but couldn't bring herself to, couldn't really face the answer if it was yes-
Henrik had seen her do things before, many things, what she was was hard to hide in close quarters but never-
She broke vases and turned things to ash and sometimes shone a little too bright, but he had never seen her truly angry before, had only caught a glimpse of that anger today, and… And Hemlock remembered how scared she used to be when she saw Vernon annoyed, how terrified that he might turn and take that anger out on-
She couldn't bare the thought of it if Henrik thought she would… she would…
Henrik grinned up at her.
"Not once. I always knew you were coming for me."
It was that, right there, that broke her. That childish innocence, that unfiltered purity, that sole belief in there being nothing to be scared of because he knew she was coming for him, that he wasn't scared of her-
Even Hermione and Ron had been scared of her, towards the end, when her Divine gifts had really started to mature enough to show, and here Henrik was, doe-eyed and smiling, so sure-
So sure she was good.
That she was worth believing in.
It hurt something terrible, it soothed even more, and it only reinforced Hemlock's conviction.
This boy was hers.
Her little brother.
Her little soft-dark light that helped her see in this terrible, ugly world.
"And I'll always come for you, Henrik. Never forget that. Whenever you need me, I'll be there."
"I know."
He chirped; grin dimpled.
"And I'll be there for you too. That's what family is for, I think."
xXx
Hemlock paused at the end of the road, Henrik beside her, on their way home, and turned one last time, eyeing the house they had walked away from.
She frowned deeply at it, imagining the people inside and came up conflicted.
Hemlock had flared back there, momentarily lost control of her shine at one point, quite brightly.
Really, brightly.
They had only been a few steps away. They should have been dust. They should have burned.
Everyone else, Vampires with their bloody magic rings too, had sizzled to cinders with less-
So why hadn't they?
Furthermore, if they hadn't burned, if they could stand the shine, could she reach out and-
"Hemlock?"
Henrik asked inquisitively, and Hemlock shook her head and turned back around, smiling.
"Let's go home."
A.N: This chapter was quite heavy with exposition, but it was one that needed to be done and done here, so we can all get to the juicy part of the story! So fear not, not all chapters will be this thick, but I thought now was a good time to get this out the way.
Thank you all for the lovely response to this fic. I hope you liked this chapter, and if you can, don't forget to drop a review. Hopefully, I will see you all soon with our favourite quad of human disasters stumbling their way through love.
