A.N.: Guess what, I've discovered what a three-year-old could've taught me that the OneDrive will allow me to save work I do on my iPad – chaps, there may be hope for updates yet!
Dangerous Beauty
18
Story-Time
The water lapped gently around her waist later, bubbles tickling her back as she squeezed the washcloth over Elijah's chest. She pressed a kiss to his neck and wrapped her arms around him, resting her chin on his shoulder. He was telling her about Rebekah, his youngest sister, and how Klaus had broken her, "…he would torment her, physically – imprison her, give her a vervain-poisoned blood-source after he had starved her, beat and humiliate her – in private and in front of others powerless to stop him. Wheedle her, whisper things into her ear when she was at her most vulnerable, implant false memories, bully and berate her…then he would be sweet to her, gifting her things, make her so desperate for those moments of his affection that she would endure any hardship he could mete out on her, as long as he came back to her, smiling and gentle. She believed him."
"The Taming of the Shrew," Giulia sighed glumly, pressing her lips softly to his shoulder-blade. She had always hated that play – in the film Heath Ledger had made famous, they had drawn the final curtain at the end of Act One. The second act of Shakespeare's original play had dealt with the use of domestic violence – physical, mental and sexual – as weapons employed by her husband to break Katerina. She wondered just how completely Klaus had possessed Rebekah, and it made her stomach hurt, made her wince in grief and a slow-burning rage for the girl she hadn't even met.
"Mm," Elijah murmured, gazing into the distance, head resting back against her shoulder, her hands between his, fingers straight like steeples. She frowned softly.
"Where were you?" Elijah glanced around, eyebrows rising subtly in a question. "I know you; he would have been without a head if you'd ever seen him lay a finger on her with your own eyes." His eyes glowed, and he tilted his head back for a gentle kiss. She didn't have to see Elijah with his family to know how he would treat them. She had seen him with Ashlyn, with Cara and Vera, with Chocolat and Aljaž and Jacques, with Victoire and Françoise-Amélie; she knew how Elijah treated her.
Elijah sighed, pressing his head back against her shoulder, eyes clamped shut. "After we were run out of Marseille in the 1040s A.D., we resolved to keep moving, to present ourselves as an ever more challenging target," Elijah sighed, watching as he dripped water from his fingertip on her knee. "We found ourselves in the Italian states in the twelfth century, at which time Niklaus…began to exhibit the behaviour he has become known for. A heightened sense of paranoia; lashing out with ever-increasing brutality against those he convinced himself were his enemies; ever more volatile and demanding…a cruel streak, reminiscent of our father in his worst moments, started to define his behaviour toward us, some of his own…warped understanding of love mutilated into a sense of…jealous, unforgiving possessiveness, something horrifying.
"We found ourselves in an alien world, after the home we had come to realise had been an idyll; no-one alive today can possibly recreate Europe of the High Middle Ages, for all Ridley Scott attempted to do so with Kingdom of Heaven," Elijah said, giving her a little smile; she had put the Director's Cut on the other day as background noise while she studied. "Still, it was surviving a mystical attack, the creation of the silver daggers you have encountered in your research, that I come back to, every time I try to reconcile the change in him…it was this attempt against our existence that I believe shattered Niklaus' by then very fragile hold on his sanity."
"You think he is insane?" Giulia asked quietly.
"I think he is not altogether well," Elijah sighed, "but this does not excuse his behaviour." He sighed thoughtfully. "Although how the world looked, so many centuries ago, as vampires we were out of place only by our habit of drinking blood. It was a world of…intense violence and religious superstition, feudal warfare. The lives of those not born to the nobility or the wealthy were considered utterly worthless, slavery concealed as serfdom, and even the powerful were vulnerable to political intrigues, assassinations and mutilation; disease, torture and worse as punishment, public executions, entire villages put to the sword during feudal struggles, women carried off, children enslaved. It was a world I remembered as a young man in Kattegat…but not a culture my younger siblings could ever imagine just from the old warriors' descriptions of summer raids… The new world we had immersed ourselves in fashioned Niklaus, he assimilated to it…he just…never evolved as the rest of the world became more civilised."
"It sounds like he is trapped psychologically in that time," Giulia murmured. "But you didn't answer my question. Where were you, while he was abusing Rebekah?" She asked him in a fair voice, not accusing but curious. Elijah sighed, glancing back at her.
"After the attempt on our lives, we decided it would be best not to draw attention to ourselves by remaining together… I left the Italian states to discover southern Spain with Gyda and Isak… Kol fled east to Asia, a continent he has returned to every century since, his favourite. Lagertha, my fierce and militant sister, took Rebekah and disappeared… This, Niklaus could not forgive; he took it as an attack against him to deprive him of his Rebekah, who had long been his defender, his hero, his voice when she was but a child and he was too fearful to raise his head… It was Lagertha who first fell prey to a silver dagger to the heart by Niklaus' hand. He found them, living as the honoured wife and stepdaughter of a nobleman in the Bavarian mountains, in a fashion they had learned from Lucrezia. After slaughtering the family who had ensured their safety, he punished Rebekah for abandoning him, over many decades, locked in a castle in the mountains. Rebekah became unrecognisable – utterly enthralled by Niklaus… It was not until decades later that Kol tracked them down, shocked by the change in Rebekah; suspecting what Niklaus had done to her, out of revenge for her, Kol pulled the dagger from Lagertha's chest, and while she dealt with Niklaus, Kol brought my sister to me in Jerusalem, where I lived with Gyda. And it took a very long time to mend the damage Niklaus had wrought on Rebekah…we consulted witches, who cleansed what Niklaus had implanted in Rebekah's mind. Some things we had to remove. Scars remained… Our darling Rebekah, our baby-sister, was gone, she no longer walked on air; but she was stronger for what Kol and I had done to save her."
Giulia exhaled quietly, brushing her lips against Elijah's shoulder thoughtfully. She could imagine, and really did not want to, how Klaus had punished his sister into complete subservience. She wondered just how warped the bond of family had become in Klaus' mind, suffering a psychotic break in a time when unforgiving brutality and creative torture was the norm, how deep had his attachment to Rebekah been even before turning into vampires?
"He didn't just torture and manipulate her, did he?" she said in a deadened voice, and Elijah stilled, before glancing over his shoulder. His expression, so carefully hiding his emotions, said it all. She flicked her eyes over his face. "His sister?"
Elijah gave a funny little nod. "Half-sister."
"Half?"
"Niklaus and Rebekah were always close, even from the time Rebekah was in the cradle," Elijah said softly. "Mother struggled to keep a child to term between them – there were four summers between them, and he was utterly entranced when she came along. Father impressed that she was his responsibility while Mother performed her duties as a healer…and the jarl's wife… Privacy was not then what it is now, and he learned the way of the world as he saw it in our small community; as we grew my siblings and I had all shared a bed, for warmth and security..." He sighed softly. "As they got older, Niklaus' relationship with our father deteriorated over Niklaus' behaviour, his irresponsible attitude. His arrogance. Rebekah, on the other hand – after Lagertha, she was his favourite. He had always preferred his daughters. And Rebekah blossomed – stubborn, to her core, and at times not very clever, driven by her emotions, but sweet. She stood up for Niklaus when Father bullied him. They became very close – too close, we often worried."
"Did you ever say anything?" Giulia asked curiously.
"Oh, yes," Elijah sighed. "Father beat Niklaus for it. A cousin was accepted; a sister… We all suspected his attachment to her was more than brotherly. It was not until Mother turned us into vampires we truly realised how deep Niklaus' bond with Rebekah was…"
"You've never told me about it," Giulia said quietly. She had read about the genesis of vampires from Veronica's diaries; but it was one thing to read a history-book and another to hear truths from the source.
"It is not a time I like reliving," Elijah said sadly, threading his fingers through hers and crossing his arms, cuddling her close. "What led us to be turned into vampires… Suffice it to say that after fratricide – even if accidental…rape and incest were just another two on the list of taboos Niklaus broke."
"Fratricide?" Giulia said hollowly.
"I was born the eldest of nine children," Elijah sighed. "Isak was a babe-in-arms when a plague ravaged Kattegat, during the summer I joined Father on my first raid to the Baltic lands to the east. We lost a sister. Freya. We returned home with ships laden with gold, in time to light her funeral pyre… Whatever gentleness Father had burned along with her. It was her loss that prompted my parents to risk the open ocean in search of a land where the men were strong and did not fear disease…this land, as it turned out. We settled a colony and eventually made peace with a local tribe. Men who turned into beasts every full-moon. Eventually, these men became our close allies. Willem was the first child Mother bore in our new home, the summer after we made berth, then Niklaus three winters after him. By the time Rebekah was born, I had married, and Gyda was well on her way… Four years after Rebekah, Mother bore Henrik. My youngest brother, and the last child Mother would bear…and burn…" Elijah was quiet for a very long time, brushing his finger over his lips pensively, eyes on her toes as she dabbled them absently in the water. "It was Henrik's death on a full-moon that triggered a war with our neighbours, after over two decades of peace, the tribe of werewolves who lived and hunted these woods of Virginia for thousands of years before Western settlers colonised it…"
Elijah trailed off, staring unseeingly into his wine-glass after refilling it, lying subdued in the water that was slowly becoming cooler. Giulia frowned, churning over what she had learned.
"If Henrik was killed by werewolves, why did you accuse Klaus of fratricide?" she asked gently.
"The night Henrik died, he had followed Niklaus out of the safety of the jarlshall," Elijah sighed, as if he had told this story far too many times, though he never stopped hoping the ending would be different. He sipped his wine, passing the glass to her. "It was customary for Father to extend an invitation to those living in the farmlands on the outskirts of the colony to dine and sleep within the great hall on full-moon nights. During such times, when the jarlshall was full to the rafters, it was easy to slip away unnoticed…"
Giulia didn't press, but waited; when Elijah wanted to talk about his family, his past, he could talk for hours, and she just listened, absorbed by the descriptions of his memories, his life, enthralled.
"There was a young woman…she was the daughter of a Native slave taken from a neighbouring tribe – even by the standards of our time, our culture, she was considered very pretty – she was less a labourer, more a bed-slave, in a place where women were scarce," Elijah sighed. The differences in his upbringing compared to hers were staggering – he was a bona fide Viking with all that entailed – summer raids, stories of Valhalla, human-sacrifice, slavery. It was difficult, when he was wearing his Ermengildo Zegna suits, to reconcile Elijah with a fierce Viking warrior pillaging neighbouring lands. When his shirt came off, that aged blue tattoo winding around his upper-arm, his scars, it was easier. The descriptions he gave of his human life were too…real. At one time in his life, Elijah had been a Viking. But he had also been a French nobleman, an Italian Renaissance painter, a Middle-Eastern physician, a Manhattan philanthropist, an Oxford professor, a WWII dam-buster fighter-pilot, a tea-plantation owner in rural China, a doctor in India, a prohibition gangster in New Orleans. All those she could believe; but it was his first, human, life, that seemed so incongruous with the enigmatic, calm Elijah he had become in the last millennium.
"By the time she had caught Niklaus' eye she had already born several children, some of whom survived infancy… From what I can remember of Niklaus as a young man, he was…petulant, arrogant…a show-off – but when he wished to be, he could be thoughtful, sweet; he was a romantic. Niklaus became infatuated with Tatia; he fell genuinely in love with her… They – fucked," he said, giving her a sidelong smile, heat colouring his cheeks. It was strange to hear Elijah swear; neither of them really did. "Often, I believe. Always in secret, or so they thought." Giulia chuckled, matching the rich rumble that accompanied a sad, reminiscent smile. Elijah sighed, the smile fading. "This devastated Finn."
"Finn?" Elijah's eldest brother, born the first of a set of twins within the same year as Elijah, Giulia had pieced together from what little Elijah told her of him that Finn had once been his favourite brother. During their human lives they were inseparable. But Finn had been "in a box" since the twelfth century, since the entire lot of them had a silver dagger plunged through their hearts.
"Mm," Elijah grunted softly. "They were obsessed with each other, Tatia and Finn. As a free man, the son of the earl, and she a slave, it was Finn's right to take her whenever he wished. Despite her willingness, he would not bed her while she remained a slave; this, I have always thought, terrified Tatia. Finn's…love for her was not like Niklaus', it was not…young. Not the enthusiastic, thrilling love Klaus had for her that would have burned itself out too quickly; Finn's love was steady, not exciting but deep and earnest. Finn was considerate to her, kind, he protected her children – he had always had a deeply protective streak where children were concerned… Tatia had never been treated in such a way – I believe she encouraged Niklaus because he represented what she knew, what she felt was safe: men lusting after her, taking her when they wished. Niklaus most likely gave her trinkets as signs of his affection, which she must have equated to the gifts other men paid her with... I once saw Finn with her; they were just sitting together, her wrapped up in his arms, watching the falls, just together…"
Giulia absorbed all of this. Casually as Elijah spoke, he had finished his wine in one, already refilling his glass. He sighed heavily, closing his eyes, and rested his head back against her shoulder, blindly passing back the glass.
"She died, didn't she?" Giulia guessed, taking a generous mouthful of wine, gently tapping the base of the glass against his pectoral for him to take back.
"Tatia was the original sacrifice in the spell my mother placed upon Niklaus."
"You always refer to it as a spell," Giulia mused, after mulling over the implications that Elijah's mother had sacrificed the slave-girl two of her sons had loved in a spell on the younger. "I've never once heard you say 'curse' when we discuss the ritual. You don't think it's a curse."
"I do not believe it was ever my mother's intention to…punish Niklaus," Elijah said softly. He sighed. "My mother did what she wanted for her own reasons, but they were driven purely by her desire to protect her family… Over time Niklaus actually convinced himself that Mother placed the spell on him as a curse in punishment…"
"After what he did later, he more than earned worse," Giulia said quietly, thinking of the stranger, Rebekah, whom her stomach evaporated in anguish over. The Rebekah she felt she knew from Stefan's diary-entries from 1922. Giulia was not unfeeling; she was devastated the way others were, felt remorse, terror, heart-ache, ecstasy. She could feel for absolute strangers. Certain people just took the introversion of her emotions when they were superfluous to a dangerous situation that needed cold, clinical objectivity, as callousness.
"I have often thought so," Elijah agreed. "And on more than one occasion Niklaus hinted that he believed so also. In the beginning he suspected Mother had cursed him earlier knowing what he would become."
"He excused away his behaviour as a self-fulfilling prophecy his mother had seen?" Giulia frowned, leaning forward to sip at the wine Elijah offered her, tilting the glass for her, his eyes thoughtful as he watched her drink. She licked her lips, and his eyes watched. "She knew he would turn into a monster therefore he was justified in being one?"
Elijah gave an odd little shrug. "Perhaps," he said softly.
"Did Klaus ever express any remorse for what he did to Rebekah?" she asked curiously.
"Oh, often. Centuries later. Without a drop of sincerity," Elijah sighed. "He developed the habit of using flippancy, arrogance, violent outbursts to deal with any emotional shift he did not understand. If he felt shame, embarrassment, vulnerability, he lashed out in fear and confusion, usually pinpointing others' deepest insecurities, destroying things precious to those around him in retaliation for shaking the fragile hold he had on his own psyche."
"So how did he become that person?" Giulia mused. "Was the silver-dagger his breaking-point after so long?"
Elijah chuckled suddenly. She raised her eyebrows. "Two centuries is not long."
"Three times longer than my life-expectancy," Giulia retorted lightly, and Elijah acquiesced with a little tilt of his head. She sighed, combing his damp hair from his face with her fingertips, leaning in to give that tempting mole beneath his ear a kiss. "Perhaps the silver-dagger, in his mind, became a physical manifestation of everything he feared. Vulnerability, death, being utterly at the mercy of someone else… He has used the daggers to try and break your siblings because they were the weapon that ultimately broke him. If he's as much a narcissist as you say, he'd never dream people did not react to things the same way he does."
"They certainly are the only way he could defeat my siblings," Elijah said thoughtfully. "As his paranoia grew, so did Niklaus' pathological need for control over every aspect of his life, including us and our lives. Simply put, however, we were too strong. The daggers provided the only way he could exert absolute authority over us, and we were left wholly vulnerable to it."
"So…Finn, Lagertha, Isak, Willem, Rebekah and Gyda," Giulia said, giving his shoulder a gentle kiss with each name she counted off. "You believe he has daggered them all? All but Kol." Elijah didn't answer for a moment, finger drawing across his lips thoughtfully.
"Willem…no," he said finally, frowning in thought. "He… When we fled Marseilles, he disappeared into the winds with Lucrezia's children. Not a trace, just like Lucrezia herself several months before." His eyes fell on the glossy sleeve of the three-inches-thick biography on the Florentine-born Lucrezia Alessandra di Salvatore, the long-living Countess of Provence – and notorious – between 1002 and 1043AD. Possibly a daughter of the noble Salvatore family that, by the fifteenth century, had gained immense power, lands and influence in Florence, culminating in their daughters Veronica and Carafina making the most advantageous matches in the Italian states…a distant relative of Giulia's. The book rested on the side-table by the tub, the book Giulia had been annotating before Elijah had joined her in the bath. Hot baths seemed to be catnip for Elijah. She blinked, glancing from him to the book and back, her eyebrows knotting together slightly. Elijah…
"Elijah… Your name de guerre during the eleventh century wasn't perchance Elia, was it?" she asked, her lips twitching. He glanced over his shoulder, giving her a look that said everything. She grimaced and dropped her head, bumping her forehead against his shoulder, making Elijah chuckle. "Ugh, I'm studying one of your ex-girlfriends?!"
"Why are you studying Lucrezia, by the way?" Elijah asked curiously.
"Believe it or not, she's a reference in one of Miss Sheila's Occult lectures," Giulia said.
"I do believe it," Elijah chuckled at some private thought. "She'd find that quite delightful."
"Miss Sheila gave an entire lecture on her," Giulia smiled fondly. She loved Sheila Bennett. "Listening to her, you'd think Lucrezia was the Tyrion Lannister of the supernatural community."
"Is this another reference to that book Cara's had you reading?" Elijah sighed, and she pinched Elijah's waist for rolling his eyes.
"Game of Thrones. We're planning a winter elopement," Giulia said, sipping some wine. "No grand summer weddings, thankyouverymuch." Elijah rolled his eyes again.
"Well, if there was ever one to admire for her knowledge and manipulation of witchcraft, it was Lucrezia," Elijah sighed softly. "I believe there is still an underground cult of witches in Marseille who sacrifice to her."
"She was a witch?"
"Oh, no, just insatiably intelligent," Elijah chuckled, smiling fondly. He glanced at her, eyes bright. "Stunningly beautiful as she was, trained in combat, her greatest weapon was her mind. What was it she used to say…'I have my mind...and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge'…" Giulia raised an eyebrow.
"That's a Tyrion quote," she said, eyeing Elijah dubiously. He shrugged.
"My family came upon Lucrezia mere weeks after she had married the Count, barely decades after we had turned and fled this world for our old country," Elijah mused. "Over our years together in Marseille, we became very close…through all our adventures there – possessions by ghosts of Roman witches, child-sadists, political intrigues, sieges – she nurtured the healing of our family after the horror of what we had become nearly destroyed it." He sighed, reaching for the book, and eyed the glossy protective cover. "This biography is exquisitely candid and personal. Honest to a fault… She was imperfect and terrifying, absolutely delightful and loyal… Brave… she was our friend… Lagertha looked on her as a sister, two fierce, martial women who were absolutely delightful and seductive, who knew how to laugh, charming, good-hearted women; Finn absolutely adored her, I do not think Finn had ever had a friend like her… Gyda…for a time I believe she looked upon Lucrezia as a mother. A mother who did not age, healed from any injury just as we did, survived a brutal childbirth and was on horseback leading the vanguard to break a siege the next day..." He sighed, shaking his head. "Lucrezia mended our family, nurturing our relationships when we ourselves were too…stubborn to mend the breaches; when she vanished, everything disintegrated."
"So she's the one who got away," Giulia guessed, smiling. Elijah chuckled.
"Had we remained under her influence, well… There is no use in wishing I could rewrite the past," Elijah sighed, shaking his head. "We are what we are. Though certainly she would have made us ashamed for some of the things we have done – and Niklaus would never have dared cross her."
"He was afraid of her?"
"We respected her," Elijah chuckled easily. "In the way it is possible to both fear and love, admire someone. Strong and gentle, seductive and playful, she was the most…enigmatic leader of her time, deeply loyal, frighteningly intelligent, wicked and sweet, joyous in conflict, obsessed with intrigue. And kind. Yes, Niklaus was afraid of her. He valued her friendship and respect, and she was not afraid to tell him when his behaviour disgraced him."
"You think he might have turned out differently, if she'd been around longer?" Giulia guessed.
"I know he would," Elijah sighed. "Unfortunately for us, she did not; to this day I have no idea what happened to her… At the point in our lives when we met Lucrezia…we were still very much, psychologically, human. It was the only time in all my years that I savour as the very last moments of my…innocence. We had no idea what we truly were, our abilities, we had no idea what we would become, we would never have dared dream we would see ten centuries eclipse while we remained unchanged, growing ever more powerful… My family's time in Marseille remains…the golden age of my life as a vampire… You would not have recognised us."
"No?"
"No," Elijah chuckled. Then he sighed, seemingly exhausted, his shoulders drooping as he lifted a hand to rub his face. "We were…young. So very young, and afraid. We had no control over our impulses; our emotions terrified us; we found ourselves in an alien land, a culture we did not know. We were the outsiders then. We did not know our own abilities; we had no concept of our own strength, or durability, our ability to compel others. Oh, we had fought werewolves, as men. We had learned we could suffer from their bites but not die from their attack… Like infants, we had to learn what we had become... But it took time, and we learned how invulnerable we were only because we were tested so brutally… Everything was ours to discover, to experience – and we did, with Lucrezia. She befriended us, sheltered us; from her we learned how to survive, she taught us how to live again… We had our adventures, back then when the world was brand-new to us, with her we had a family; she was the heart of it… We were then what we might have been."
"That's a lot to put on one person," Giulia said softly, thinking of this Lucrezia woman. She hadn't read the biography in its entirety yet – apparently she didn't need to; she had the best resource possible lying between her legs!
"Lucrezia could bear the weight of it," Elijah said distractedly, eyeing the book. He had flipped the cover open, reading what had been scrawled on the first page. "What is this?"
"The author only publishes in limited-runs," Giulia said, smiling happily. Tracking down the biography had been difficult, but she had discovered a wonderful little independent publishing company that focused on small-batch printings with exquisite illustrations, meticulously bound in ethically-sourced leather or printed linen, beautiful classics printed as a collectors' set, all of Shakespeare's plays with unusual front-cover graphics picking up a theme only hinted at in single lines of the plays. "It's through an independent publisher; I had to get the author's details off of them so I could purchase the book direct because they didn't have any copies. He signed it before he mailed it."
"It's a thoughtful message," Elijah murmured.
"When I emailed him to ask for a copy, he asked what my interest was in the Countess of Provence," Giulia said softly. "I told him about Sheila referencing her in my Occult class, and about that dissertation I'm writing on exceptional women throughout history. He sold me a copy of his book on condition I sent him a copy of my dissertation. And speaking of – I need to get out and do some work." She dipped a kiss against Elijah's shoulder.
"That dissertation you're writing for your own amusement!" Elijah chuckled, gripping her knee to keep her in place.
"Yes, but the water's getting cold," Giulia said, kissing the back of his neck, and he acquiesced, allowing her to climb as gracefully as she could out of the bathtub, following her out, and she smiled gently at him as he tucked her close, wrapping a huge towel around their hips. She linked her arms around his waist, leaning close to give him a gentle kiss. She always knew when he was upset; he became affectionate, more tactile even than usual. And then he grew distant, the momentary relief of being emotionally intimate with someone, shedding burdens he had carried for far too long, embarrassing him, unsettling the cool composure he put so much effort into maintaining, making him that much more resistant to emotional vulnerability. She could coax him out of it, gently, or demanding, depending on what had caused him to curl back into his shell. But pets were the greatest help; Elijah loved Firenze, and Giulia remembered Elijah's spaniel. She imagined pet-therapy was the simplest and most effective way Elijah could work on his issues.
She enjoyed the affectionate phase, relaxed on the sofa, the entire living-room just a mess of paperwork, stacks of books, meticulous design plans, calculations, fabric swatches and the hardware-store catalogue decorated with fluorescent Post-It flags.
"One day, will you tell me how you've arranged the system of what you're working on?" Elijah asked, stroking Firenze's head as her cat purred in his lap. They were both smitten with Elijah.
"Oh, it's very easy," Giulia said, using her pen to point at different areas of the floor. "Over there is college work: resources for Punk & Politics and my awesome-women module. Reference-books for my medieval languages classes, and my Occult, Enlightenment Literature, philosophy, engineering and physics classes and that is the information for the sports and social committees I've joined at UV. I've got a few projects on the go for each of my classes beyond what's required from the syllabus because I'm paying to honour them with my IQ, I might as well get the most out of it. If those start to bore me, I pop over to my theses so I can really stretch, and once I start to get a little frazzled on too much coffee, there's a stack of vintage Vogues that belonged to my grandmother Doll, and antique recipe-books I managed to track down from a rare-books store in Manhattan, so I can work on outfits for the vintage festival Cara got me tickets to, and the 1860s celebratory Founders' dinner I'm recreating to celebrate the sesquicentennial anniversary of Mystic Falls' charter…"
"The 'sesquicentennial' anniversary?"
"One-hundred and fiftieth," Giulia smiled, and Elijah gave her that quiet, enigmatic little smile before chuckling, shaking his head.
"And the rest?"
"That box over by the bar contains all of the Gilbert journals, which I stole from the Gilberts' lake-house," Giulia said. "I burned most of the weapons I found but some might prove useful. That trunk I stole from the Lockwood attic; I gave Mason PDF copies of the files I scanned into my computer so he has access, but I'm trying to consolidate the Lockwood journals with the Gilbert ones, my copies of the Fell and Forbes diaries, and I've pilfered a couple of Stefan's more intriguing journals." She gave Elijah a lewd smirk. "Over there is all the information Caroline and I have started pulling together trying to organise our road-trip this summer, and on the floor are some designs I've sketched to refurbish my uncle's teardrop-trailer he bought in the UK ages ago."
"Oh, is that all?" Elijah asked mildly.
"No – under the coffee-table are the plans Caroline and I and the rest of the Social Committee at school have been working on for the Sixties dance and the junior-prom," Giulia stifled a yawn, "I'm Treasurer so I have final say; it's up to me to reign Caroline's enthusiasm in, the others are too afraid – you've seen Queenie in Blackadder? Imagine her with fangs. Managed to convince Car-Bear to save Gatsby for our senior prom theme, although she thinks I'll just graduate this June and be done with it. Maybe I will, take a gap-year and travel before I start my sophomore year at college. I can apply from the road… And speaking of, inside the cabinet beside you are course catalogues from various different colleges and I need to do some research about schools appropriate for Caroline, I don't want her falling in with some sorority that hooks her in by masquerading as a haema-sexual-sadist vampire cult."
"Stay away from the Ivies," Elijah said, and Giulia did a double-take. He smirked, chuckling, and shook his head, scoffing, "Haema-sexual-sadists… Anything else?"
"Over there…is research on the doppelganger; the entire concept has me curious," Giulia said. "How did Katerina crop up in Bulgaria only five-hundred years after your mother slaughtered Tatia here, in what became Mystic Falls, in the late-tenth century? Only your family would have had such mobility. So did you bring Tatia's children back across the ocean, or does the doppelganger crop up in Tatia's bloodline, either from her children or her ancestors? Was Tatia's father a Viking? Or a male labouring slave you brought with you from Kattegat, taken from the lands you plundered during the raids? What were his origins? That could answer where it would be most likely you could find a doppelganger. Are there more doppelgangers sauntering about the earth? I can't imagine Nature would provide only two within a millennium, there had to be an insurance policy, another somewhere at the same time in case one died." She scratched her head, then sighed, yawning.
"I asked," Elijah said, shaking his head. "You'd think I'd have learned by now."
"I know, and I haven't even finished," Giulia smiled. "I haven't told you about my 'vampire diary' for successive generations of Founders to learn from; I haven't told you about my plans for overthrowing the Council from the inside; and we haven't even touched on the sacrifice."
"Do tell."
"And ruin the surprise?" Giulia smirked. "I'll breast my cards, you do the same." He chuckled; Elijah had pulled out a worn set of playing-cards, and they sat on the sofa, idly playing a seventeenth-century game she had learned in the limousine headed toward Connecticut for the solstice in December.
"Would you teach me Norse?" Giulia asked, glancing up at Elijah as he hissed, frowning at her cards as she laid them down.
"Why would you wish to learn a dead language?"
"Because I can," Giulia smiled, and Elijah chuckled. "How much did your language change when you emigrated here? I imagine communication between the Vikings and the Natives was strained at best."
"Of course, mostly because the Natives tended to begin conversations with poisonous arrows," Elijah chuckled, smiling fondly as he observed his fresh hand of cards, and she laughed. Elijah had told her that it had been nearly three years before his family and other colonists had truly trusted the fragile peace brokered with the Natives. "Mother created a spell to understand the foreign tongue of the Natives, eventually we learned – my younger siblings, Lagertha and Isak, they picked up the Natives' language very swiftly; Willem, Niklaus, Rebekah and Henrik grew up bilingual, by the time Henrik was born our links with the tribe were so strong… When we returned across the open seas, we discovered just how much our language had altered through proximity with the Natives, and it was a struggle at first. But we learned how to adapt, and quickly, when it meant our survival."
"I imagine your emigration from Viking Denmark to the untouched lands of the Natives was a very different experience from Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus'," Giulia said thoughtfully. "In the Middle Ages the culture of Europe was not actually so far removed from the Natives'."
"In many ways we were remarkably similar," Elijah said. "Our farming techniques were far superior, though that is not saying much. We all worshiped at Nature's altar. We engaged in feudal land-disputes. We had the shield-wall, but the Natives had their own honoured war-tactics. Slaves were taken from defeated tribes, corporal punishment was the norm, the sense of community and responsibility for each other was richly woven into the fabric of everything we did. After the initial ambushes, Mother strode into their camp one morning and sat down to talk with their shaman." His features illuminated with a smile, chuckling softly. "They exchanged stories – and spells. Their mutual curiosity in each other's magic was the first link that eventually drew our two communities together."
"Why did your mother and father choose to risk the ocean?" Giulia asked. "I know you said you lost a sister, but you could have all died trying to cross the Atlantic. I'm shocked you didn't."
"Mother harnessed the seas to protect us," Elijah said, with a strained smile. Giulia set her cards down.
"What poor slave was the doomed Iphigeneia?" she asked succinctly, placing a card down with a smirk as Elijah let out a soft growl, scowling at his cards. "So, why cross the Atlantic?"
Elijah glanced over the top of his cards, reaching for the crystal tumbler sparkling with amber liquid, a lovely bourbon Elijah had brought to the house when he had moved his things in. "It was customary on summer raids to take slaves as well as treasure," he sighed. "Younger was better, and strong. A couple of years before Freya's death during the plague, Father brought home one particular young-man, barely out of his teens – Father was impressed by him; he had apparently fought several of Father's warriors, protecting women in a village they had raided. Father valued the honour and courage of his actions, spared his life… Father had him train with us, Finn and me. He was free, not a slave as the others were – he joined Father in the shield-wall the next summer. In the light of the full-moon after his first ambush, Father saw him transform into a beast with his own eyes."
"Fenrir," Giulia said, smiling. She couldn't imagine the reaction of Elijah's fierce Viking father, seeing a man turn into a wolf; Vikings had feared the coming of Ragnarök, the end of the world, when Fenrir, the monstrous wolf-son of the god of chaos, Loki, would kill the allfather, Odin. "Did your father search for a Gleipnir among the looted treasure – don't laugh if I butchered the pronunciation." Elijah gave her a charming smile, eyes glinting.
"No, he found no Gleipnir. However, Mother fashioned one for him," he said, with an ironic smile.
"She was there?"
"According to my father, before they left for the raids Mother had presented him with a ring, and instruction in the form of a poem he did not understand until Rollo changed before his eyes," Elijah said softly. "This ring Father gave to Rollo; it protected him from the moon's influence."
"Similar to a daylight-ring for vampires," Giulia said thoughtfully, intrigued, mind churning with the implications. Elijah nodded.
"Father sought to harness Rollo's impossible strength; after the plague took our Freya, Mother wished to find more of his kind," Elijah sighed. "Men immune to plagues, who healed from any injury. It was her belief that around such people, our own would be safe from disease. With Mother's ring on his finger, Rollo never had to transform unless he desired to… When we landed here, the Natives scented instantly what he was. And he scented them. He had never met another of his kind before… Over the years, Rollo became intrinsic in the peacekeeping between our colony and the Natives; he married a woman of their tribe and fathered children by her."
"What was he like, Rollo?"
"Enigmatic," Elijah said, with a pained smile. "You would have considered him very handsome. Golden-haired, with good white teeth, broad high cheekbones and eyes bluer than sapphires. All the women admired him – and he loved them. He was a favourite of my mother's; he was supernatural, just as she was. It bonded them, and he was loyal to her for his ring, for the release from his transformations… I believe Rollo would have done anything for her, certainly he loved her." Giulia glanced at him, as he frowned introspectively.
"You suspected him of something?" she mused, observing his expression. He gave her a subtle smile, the one he gave her when he was surprised she was so succinct.
"After Freya's death, the Father I remembered was gone," he sighed. "Mother's husband, too, she could barely recognise. He turned cold towards her, I think Mother felt he blamed her for not keeping Freya alive, with all her magic – she had sacrificed a slave in Freya's place to keep her alive, resorted to the darker magics she had never dared touch before, but even this did not work… While Father prepared to sail across the oceans, and then oversaw the expansion of our colony once we had made berth here, Mother and Rollo forged ties with the Native werewolf-tribe… Willem was born, five months after we arrived, but Father continued to show little interest in my mother. He raged, or fell into a deep depression that could only be broken by mother's herbs…after his rages, he was gentle with her – this, I believe, Niklaus saw too often, remembered it, repeated such behaviour with Rebekah. The discipline my father had raised me with had devolved into abuse; Mother used her magic, her herbs and small magical amulets, to alter his behaviour. After Niklaus was born, suddenly Father showed interest in her again, was kinder to her, though he was by no means the man he had once been."
"What happened to Rollo?"
"He married a Native, settled lands between the tribe and our colony," Elijah said softly, his eyes becoming faraway and sad. "After we turned into vampires, during the war that followed, Rollo and most of his family were brutalised." Giulia let out a breath, shaking her head. Reading between the lines, Giulia guessed she had come to the same conclusion that Giulia had; that his mother had had an affair with Rollo. "Several of my siblings suspected our father…"
"But you don't?" Giulia said quietly, eyes narrowing as she watched him.
"Father had a temper but he had never been needlessly cruel," he said. "Mother…was his entire world, and he knew he had abandoned her at a time in their lives when it had been hardest… Despite Freya's death, he had always wished for Mother's happiness…"
"Do you think he knew, that she had taken a lover?" Giulia asked, dealing another hand of cards.
"Possibly he had even encouraged Rollo," Elijah said, and Giulia's eyebrows flew up. He chuckled softly. "Father was earl for a reason. What he could not do himself, he had the talent of knowing exactly who could. Encouraged them, built up their confidence, strengthened their skill by his faith in it, even when people second-guessed themselves… And he knew he was not the man he should have been after Freya's death."
"I'm surprised," Giulia confessed. "I would never have imagined a Viking earl in the Middle-Ages ever being happy to be undermined by a woman, even if she was a powerful witch who could melt his bits off." She surprised a laugh from Elijah, and he chuckled, before sighing and pulling a face as she set several cards down.
"Father was always very happy to be undermined by my mother," he said softly, his eyes glowing as he gazed at Giulia. "A trait I must say I have inherited… We both crave and admire powerful women, are quite happy to be ensnared by them when they appreciate us in turn." Blushing slightly as she smiled at him, Giulia picked up a card, and frowned.
"I can't imagine, even given the situation, that your father would have been happy that your mother bore another man's child," Giulia said quietly. "Even if only the three of them knew."
"My parents' relationship was…very fluid," Elijah said softly. "You know enough of Viking culture to know women had a position of much greater respect and power in the Nordic lands during the Middle-Ages. They held property and could divorce; between my parents, there was always a deep mutual-respect and admiration. Their love flowed and ebbed, it changed its form, growing and receding with the seasons – but never was their loyalty to each other ever shaken; they knew how to make each other happy. Often Mother invited slave-girls who caught Father's eye into their bed."
"Your mother sounds clever," Giulia smirked.
"Oh, she was," Elijah said quietly, eyeing his cards. "Father was the hand that wielded the sword – Mother was the mind that guided it. She and Father both were strategists, they were leaders; they acted on behalf of communities who turned to them for leadership, and they did not disappoint."
"How did they get there?" Giulia wondered.
"Together," Elijah smiled warmly. "They were a team. They respected each other, earned everything they gained, they fought for their family. Father was not always earl; his family were farmers. But he was strong and clever, and Mother was a talented healer. They were both people of vision. And they wanted everything for their family."
"When you've mentioned your father before, you used the present-tense…" she said softly, and she gave him an inquiring look. "Him, as well?" Elijah glanced up.
"Mother was the only one who did not turn," Elijah said quietly, arranging his cards. "She did this to us, after Henrik's death." The way Elijah phrased things was always meticulous; 'did this to us' as if it had not been their choice. Elijah had yet to tell her about the night his family had turned into vampires; she suspected it might be a conversation she would be waiting a very long time to have. Elijah sighed, gathering the cards in one sweep of his hand, tapping the deck sharply to align the cards together, and boxed them up. The game – and the conversation – was over. She had touched a nerve, after everything they had discussed – it was his father that caused him to close off, shut her down.
His father was alive. Not only a brutal Viking earl but a vampire over one-thousand years old. And for some reason, it was he who made Elijah clam up. Not Rebekah's abuse at the hands of their brother; not Willem's disappearance into the mists of time; not Finn's imprisonment in a coffin, daggered through the heart with a silver blade; not even the enigmatic Lucrezia who made his heart skip a beat to this day – she had heard it. It was his father.
"What was Willem like?" Giulia asked curiously. Elijah had described all of his siblings, both as the vampires they had become, and the humans they had been – quiet Finn, nicknamed "the calm", earnest and loyal to a fault, still waters running very deep, gentle, clever and intuitive, exceptional with children, he and Elijah used to laugh so hard their stomachs ached for ours: if Finn was "the calm" his twin-sister Freya had been "the storm", fiery and provocative, magically gifted, quick to laugh, she had loved to tease them, learning how to use a shield, on the cusp of marriage to a man of their father's choosing when she had died: Lagertha was fierce, martial, exquisitely beautiful and fearless, a strong, fair-minded woman, a shield-maiden who worshipped Freyja and her Valkyrie, a leader also fiercely independent, she had earned and held the respect and admiration of everyone who knew her, devoted to honouring the goddess Freyja's martial aspect in her role as a shield-maiden after the loss of both her children and the miscarriage of an unborn baby. Isak, Giulia had heard of from Cara and Vera – a lover, more than a fighter; in his human life he had been magically powerful like his mother, creative, luxuriating in the simple things – to enjoy a full belly and a beautiful woman. Not idle but utterly relaxed, choosing what he was willing to fight for.
She had heard enough of Niklaus: Rebekah was stubborn, spoiled, the youngest daughter, refusing to pick up a shield, scorning Lagertha's lust for warfare. She had preferred fishing and collecting flowers and herbs for their mother, listening to stories of Kattegat, a land she had thought never to see with her own eyes, hopelessly infatuated with any male who showed her favour, and foolish with them, dragged back to the jarlshall at the age of thirteen by Finn, when he had caught her with her skirts around her waist, though he hadn't said a word to their parents about why Rebekah was red in the face... Henrik had been stubborn, hard-working and wise for his age; he had died at thirteen, still unable to grow a beard but devoted to learning swordsmanship and helping on Elijah and Finn's farm, a devoted friend and playmate of Elijah's children they had all looked up to – all except Gyda, nearly four years older than him.
Elijah struggled to talk about Gyda, as if the words choked him… His first of seven children, the last stillborn during complications of labour that had killed Elijah's wife, and Elijah's only surviving child.
Giulia didn't push him on it, curious as she was; she remembered the paintings in the Connecticut mansion. He had mentioned that Gyda had been classically trained; that after New Orleans had burned in 1919, Elijah had heard rumours that Klaus had tracked her down in St Petersburg during the Revolution two years prior – he'd never breathed a word to Elijah, though Elijah had then remembered Klaus' extraordinary good mood when he had returned from 'the front', where he had "indulged in the best meal he'd had in decades".
But Elijah had mentioned Willem only in passing, a reference during their human lives, more involved with Elijah during their time in Marseille due to his friendship with Lucrezia. She had heard more about Willem from Billy in Manhattan, and Damon, than Elijah could tell her; she would probably learn more of him from the biography on Lucrezia, Countess of Provence. For she was certain he was one and the same. The photograph in Billy's Bar was the same face she had seen in Damon's few photos, and Billy had confirmed that the original Billy was the Original Willem.
"As a human, Willem was…you would call him the life of the party. An extrovert," Elijah said softly, smiling sadly. "He was…magnetic. People were drawn to him, like the sun… He had our father's temper but worked constantly to temper his instincts to just react. He was…good-natured, loyal, he favoured Lagertha above all the others. He loved best his farm, women. Oh, they loved him. He was strong, and kind, gentle with the vulnerable, and terrifying when what he valued was threatened – very skilled at warfare but too clever to engage in active conflict when there were other means to achieving the same end. He was more like Mother than Father, more cunning, in the best way possible. You'd like him." He gave her a fond smile. While Elijah often looked like a thundercloud while talking about Klaus, or Kol, with Willem his features remained gentle, affectionate. "After we turned, Willem…kept to himself. Of all of us he complained least but hated more what we had become, always fighting some internal struggle for control. He would disappear for great lengths of time, secretive, quiet, but glad to see us after. He was close to none of us but perhaps Gyda, whom he had always adored; Lucrezia was his fiercest friend and ally, they laughed like young children when they were together."
"So Finn and Willem," Giulia smiled. "They were her favourites?"
"We were with Lucrezia for over forty years," Elijah chuckled softly. "Initially she favoured Lagertha, they were so alike. There was a deep feeling of mutual admiration and respect between them – which left out Rebekah, and that she could not stand. Gyda…she encouraged and protected, drawing her back out of her shell where I could not…could not reach her. Gyda grew under her influence. Isak and Lucrezia, they did not get along well in the beginning, two dominant personalities – and he made the mistake of attempting to seduce her ward."
"Her ward? Oh. There was a young girl with her," Giulia mused, reflecting on what she had read in the biography. She had only read the introduction to chapter one, but she knew a twelve-year-old girl had accompanied Lucrezia from Florence on her marriage to the count. "What was her name again?"
"Sancia," Elijah said fondly, a small smile on his lips. "She was very young when she arrived in Marseille, still a child really – and a darling. Large hazel eyes and sugary blonde hair that was almost like pale champagne, very fair skin. She grew more exquisite as the years passed. This, of course, made Lucrezia deeply protective of her as interest in Sancia grew. Sancia, now, she may have been more Lucrezia's favourite than any of us – except…me."
"I wondered when we'd get there," Giulia smiled. "The others all adored her, but what about you?"
Elijah's eyes were sad, guarded, as he sighed and flicked his eyes over her face. He said simply, "She is mine, I am hers."
Again, that careful choice of words; is. Not was. Not used to be.
Whoever Lucrezia had been, in a thousand years Elijah had never recovered from her loss.
That would have been quite a daunting revelation, had Giulia not already known any deep emotional attachment with Elijah was futile. She wasn't going to sit out on her life to be with him, when he could offer her so little – she wasn't going to turn into a vampire just to have a chance at being with him, either – especially considering the fates of all his other ex-girlfriends. Were they exes if they had been murdered by his brother? In her mind, Elijah was an eternal widower, forever bereft of his lovers.
Over his interminable life, Elijah had stopped letting people in: though Elijah had never been intimate with her, Katerina Petrova's escape had marked the moment when Niklaus started to use Elijah's lovers to punish him, had used them to manipulate Elijah's behaviour, perhaps guessing that rather than risk their lives, Elijah would prefer to spend an eternity alone. Giulia believed Niklaus would rather have Elijah cleaning up his messes, than making any of his own. Elijah had allowed himself moments of companionship, but had never, not since Lucrezia's disappearance in 1043AD, allowed anyone in – his grief at her loss transforming over centuries into the dread of the inevitable, Niklaus using the people Elijah grew close to, to punish him with their deaths, their mutilation, physical torture and psychological manipulation. Elijah did not let them touch him.
By 1820, when his family had lived on a grand, sprawling plantation in New Orleans, Elijah had taken up with a wise, young girl, the free daughter of a slave and a wealthy French émigré, and a witch; when he had found her dead in her own bath a year later, following rumours Niklaus had spread about black-magic being the cause of the mutilations plaguing the city, Elijah had sat with his head in his hands beside her body. Quiet, perfectly calm, internalising his grief, his shame at not protecting her well enough, the humiliation of being treated so horrifically by his youngest-brother, and the strange, hollow relief he had felt, that the inevitable he had been expecting had finally happened. He could breathe again, and not have to worry. Until the next time…and he vowed there would not be one.
Elijah allowed others to get close, but he did not let them in. Never close enough that their deaths would touch him. Giulia had guessed that very early on, realised that he knew anything between them was rash, deadly and temporary. Giulia wasn't going to worry too much about the future of their relationship when both of them knew there was only the slimmest chance the outcome could be any different to what Elijah had experienced again and again, until he had started making the conscious decisions not to become emotionally invested in his relationships with women.
Giulia suspected Elijah would bring about Ragnarök to discover Lucrezia's fate; but Giulia was not her.
She just wanted to enjoy Elijah for as long as she had him. Until Klaus reared his ugly head, they could indulge in whatever intimacy they wanted. As soon as Elijah's brother entered the game, everything would change. Giulia dwelled on Niklaus – Klaus as he called himself – for a little while, on the siblings and the daughter Elijah had been without for centuries. On the one who had disappeared into the mists of time.
"Did Willem just disappear?" she asked, a little while later.
"Willem again?"
"I'm curious. Out of all your siblings, he's the one you talk about least," Giulia said fairly.
"I know too little of his life to talk about it," Elijah sighed. "After we were flushed from Marseille, he vanished into the mists. The rest of us went one way; before we realised he was gone, it was too late to turn back…for centuries none of us heard any word, not even a whisper, of his existence…we did not know if he was alive or dead, not until I moved to Manhattan and bumped into him by chance on the street."
"That must have been quite a shock," Giulia smiled.
"We did not recognise each other," Elijah smiled sadly. He sighed, shaking his head. "It had been nine centuries since we saw one another. But still – we embraced as brothers. Arranged to meet for a drink to…catch up…"
"What happened?"
"Willem never appeared," Elijah said softly, his eyes lowering as he clenched his jaw. "He had fled. Fled the city, after realising I lived there… He had fled at the sight of me." Giulia moved closer to Elijah, realising…he was hurt.
For whatever reason Willem had disappeared, he had hurt Elijah.
After a thousand years, meeting his brother by chance – the first time he had seen Willem since the 'golden days' of his life – he had been stood up, made to realise his brother had fled him.
Elijah was not a man who wore his heart on his sleeve but their intimacy over the last few weeks had given Giulia an insight into the subtle tells, the tiny indications of enormous emotional upheaval going on within; nearly forty years on, Elijah was still hurt.
Sitting behind him on the bed, legs either side of his hips, she cuddled his waist from behind, kissing his neck before tucking her head down, hugging him tight.
For whatever reason, Willem had fled New York City after realising Elijah was there.
Willem Mikaelson had secrets. He had kept out of the Originals' crosshairs for nine centuries. And he was absolutely a person Giulia wanted to meet. Because, if what she suspected was correct, he held the answers to a lot of their prayers. And that was probably why he had kept his distance.
She stayed up late while Elijah went to bed, emotionally drained by their talk. But she stayed, working, and writing in her diary. She was cataloguing everything, her ideas, her research, the 'teen drama' going on in her life, Elijah. For posterity, more than anything. She doubted future generations of Salvatores would read it, because she was becoming rather resigned to the fact that children were most likely not in the cards for her – no matter what Caroline said about adoption. No-one was going to give her their kid!
Maybe one day Caroline would read it and be staggered, long after she was gone, by the effort Giulia had put in to protect everyone. She knew what people thought of her. And they were wrong – she was happy to prove that to them, flipping them the bird from the grave as they realised just who she had been all along.
Perhaps her mentality was becoming a little too fatalistic, but given everything she knew was coming over the horizon, she couldn't be blamed for making contingencies. She picked up her phone, after stretching her fingers, taking a break from writing, and sent a text to Slater:
You know you said you can find out anything about anyone with a little research? I've got a challenge for you… - GS
What?
Have you ever heard of Willem?
A.N.: The plot thickens. I enjoyed writing this chapter about Elijah's family – I know 'enjoy' isn't the right word for Klaus' behaviour toward Rebekah, but I thought it actually really works with Klaus' personality, his absolute control over Rebekah's life – she is his; he'll do what he likes with her.
