He dreams in wave of colour, with a soundtrack of screams lacing the edges. Everyone screams as they stand in his shadow; family, loved ones, strangers, even beasts of the wildlands. Werewolves, vampires, hybrids, humans...he's doused in their blood as if they were all equals, all as deserving to have hearts and heads removed.
He stands in the centre of the bloodbath, eyes void of life staring back at him from every angle. The room is filled with bodies, dead by his hand. Tatia, the first. Maybe not the first he'd killed, but the first whom had mattered. The first he'd forgotten. Her lifeless face is familiar to him now, frozen in her last moment of fear, a blood-soaked doll of the woman he'd first loved, eternally afraid of the man she'd chosen.
Loving him came with consequence too great to risk. Loving him was followed by death, swift and untimely, undeserved and undignified.
Tatia, savaged in a forest. Katerina, hunted until others cheered at her deathbed. Celeste, drowned body bared to any who might find her. Hayley, plagued by witches because of a child he himself had convinced her and Klaus to keep.
Women he'd loved. Women who'd once looked at him as a saviour in the world of darkness. Lovers. Moments of purity in his illicit life. Forms of beauty that returned the innocence he'd lost when been forced to take blood not his own into his body. His own mother told him how she'd hoped for him to take Tatia as his wife, that he would even raise the child she bore another man. Centuries later, and he'd been fleeting for the same with Hayley. Unspoken, he'd have not let her raise her child alone, had Klaus rejected his daughter.
Family. It always came back to family.
Siblings who make his blood boil, slaughtered around him. Klaus's heart hanging from his hand, Finn's at his feet, Kol's head across the room because the boy rose his anger more than any of the others combined. Rebekah's heart rested upon her chest. Even in death he granted her more kindness than their brothers. His niece, still an infant, drained of blood. His family weren't even safe from the bloodlust inside of him, the rage that his mother had buried within him behind the red door that hid his darkest desires.
Even while dreaming, the bodies of his savaged family at his own hand had their justifications. Kol and his reckless attitude, the multitude of bodies that followed him. Finn, ever the jealous elder sibling, who would always in his eyes be the boy who pushed an infant Elijah out of the arms of his mother. Rebekah's incessant desire to be loved by anyone, even one who would bring harm to his family. Klaus, who despite all his attempts, would never redeem himself from the centuries of suffering he'd inflicted on others.
He dreams of their deaths at his own hands, and in the cursed nightmares he enjoys it. He revels in the power that he wields as their lives flitter away into shadows. He takes the light from everyone who touches him, everyone who attaches their heart to his by any means had suffered immensely purely for the privilege to love him.
He dreams of black; of suits too expensive for a common man's tastes, of ravens at grave sites and the shadows that filled his heart with each death. He dreams of greys, of dying days where even the sky mourns the loss of life. Between, he dreams of coffee coloured book pages, aged from when he first held them brand new. He dreams of blue dresses on women he'd loved, and the waters he'd crossed between England and America. He dreams of the green of the forest where he'd become this abomination, where he'd played, hunted and learned with his siblings. He dreams of the white of his mother's dress when he was a boy, of the smiles of his family.
But mostly, he dreams in red.
There are screams with the red, with the blood that runs from wounds he'd inflicted. He dreams of what he's done, what he's become, and beneath the dreams is his mother's offer which seems more doused in bloodshed than the bodies at his hands.
New starts aren't deserving for men who've slaughtered women, men, children, villages. Men who had taken the priceless gift of a woman's trust and drained the blood from her heart. Men who had feasted on sheep hearders, stable boys, noblemen and royalty. Men who knew better how to remove a woman's blood than her lipstick. Men who existed in the shadows and dragged others in unwillingly.
Elijah. The Noble Original. They called him that. At the sides of his murderous family he seemed the honorable one. He held bargains, but when they were broken he unleashed hell. He was just as dangerous, just as deadly, and there was no classic suit in the world which could disguise the dishevelled murderer that lay beneath it. A charming smile can only hide the sharpened teeth for so long, the canines that drew life and gutted it on the ground. Adoring eyes can never hide the need to kill, the need to maim, the need to feed.
He is the red. He is the shadow. And after a thousand years and more, he is still burning with hunger.
They fear him in his dreams. Everyone he loves runs from him as he chases them down and murders them without care. That is who he is. His mother made him into a creature of darkness and he bore that shadow into a monster of the night. They run until he grabs at their screaming bodies and drains every drop of life from their bodies as they beg for their lives. They offer penance, plead for mercy, for restraint, for his sanity, but they receive nothing but an undignified death in a pool of their own blood, and it's delicious to him.
They fear him in his dreams.
They will fear him more when he wakes.