For None But the Brave

by CBK1000

As the war in New Orleans accelerates, the world beyond begins to stir. 7th entry in an ongoing AU Originals series; Klaroline

2. Part Two

A/N: SO ALL RIGHTY.

Your eyes do not deceive you-that little scroll bar over on the side of the page really is that fucking small. This second and final part really ran away with me (obviously), and I've been over on tumblr for a few days, angsting about whether or not I should split it up even though I really didn't originally intend to, with me leaning firmly to the side of my-readers-need-their-eyeballs and several tumblr users who shall remain unnamed pushing for me to post it all in one chunk, and finally I decided to just let them win, because Amanda in particular will crap her pants when she opens her e-mail and sees that she has 30,000+ words to read. So if you go blind reading this massive wall of text, I'm just gonna' direct you to them. I'M AN AMERICAN. TAKING PERSONAL RESPONSIBLITY IS UNPATRIOTIC.

And speaking of Amanda-you may have noticed that this series finally, finally has a totally gorgeous cover for it. All credit goes to this fabulous bitch, who can be found on tumblr under the username 'habrina'.

I'm going to issue a warning about the flashback now, because people can get really touchy about this particular issue. I drop an 'N' bomb in it. It's not meant to be gratuitous; it's part of a very racially tumultuous period of history which occurred long before the civil rights movement. The state of Louisiana passed one of the first laws which prohibited blacks from voting. Segregation was widely enforced during this time; everything from hotels to brothels to streetcars was separated out according to race. Lynchings increased exponentially after the turn of the 20th century. Racial relations were such that even polite tolerance between blacks and whites was frowned upon, and in 1908 legislature was passed that forbade blacks and whites from cohabiting in any sort of domestic way, including marriage. If you are that offended by this particular word, shut your eyes every time anything beginning with 'n' pops up, or avoid the flashback altogether. It's an ugly part of history, but it's a part of this story, and quite frankly, I feel like it would be outright strange to not address these issues in some ways, especially considering the fact that one of the characters is black. It's a pretty violent, ugly flashback altogether. Remember: I'm not writing about nice choirboys here.

Historical notes: The ball at the beginning is a traditional Mardi Gras celebration put on by the krewes of New Orleans. 'Rex' is the name of the actual krewe, but also the title of the male head of the royal court they elect from members of the krewe. (So basically the king.) You don't really need to know much about these balls, I just wanted to point that out, so that you guys aren't sitting here like, "Who da fuck dis Rex?" Also, keep in mind the Provenzanos and the Matrangas from the last one-shot, who were opposing families that comprised the organized crime of the day in New Orleans.

Also, it's been a while since the 6th one-shot, so I'm going to plug this in, because it's important to the modern day plot:

'He tucks himself away in the dustiest of the unused rooms in this bleedin' fuckin' behemoth of a parasite nest, and he settles down to wait.

You best hope this little dampening spell of yours keeps up, witches of New Orleans.

He's got himself an Original to notch into his belt.'

Remember that little bit at the very end? Tuck it away in the back of your mind. Turn it over a little. Feel it. Careeeessss it-

Ok, I'm done.

Go read.

---

New Orleans, 1908

Rex is a tiny little thing, this time round.

Nik and he could consume him in a heartbeat.

But his Queen- now, isn't there something to loll your tongue at.

Ms. Elizabeth L. Maginnis. Mag. In. Nis. He likes it. It's got a rather interesting flavor, rolled round his tongue, each little syllable given its proper weight, all those sounds tested out on his lips.

Everything has texture, he has found after nine centuries on this earth. Maybe you with your blind human tongue and your anesthetized little fingers cannot find all the little differences between this name and that, between sunrise and set, maybe for you there exists no distinction between ash white as snow and snow gray as cinders, burning where they stick, but he's seen a thing or two in his time, and he can tell you that this woman's name has its own diverse flavor, that her neck smells of that special summer scent of peaches gone nearly to rot, that her pale powdered shoulder will taste nearly as ripe, that her blood will go down like cream.

He'll be seeing you, darling, he thinks as he stands between Elijah and Nik, and he claps until his hands smart.

It's kind of interesting, the little tingles some of them must get down the spine as he stands watching them from afar.

Nik told him once that some humans believe this rippling of the spine is a foot upon the future grave, that what they feel is not merely the relationship between frail flesh and cold wind, a marriage of evolutionary defense, indifferent elements, but a precursor to the day that approaches all man at breakneck speed, the laying of the head beneath the loam.

It's all right, darling.

He feels it too.

He even had a grave, once.

He and Nik filled it in together, a silly, symbolic little thing, because he died, you know, and he never really got a proper funeral, so they carved out this nice little hole and they laid the boy called Kol to rest with a few battered old bits of outgrown clothes and a wagon to ease his travels, and then Nik patted him on the back and he kicked up the dirt in a great black rain, and he hasn't been back since.

He supposes it's been trod on a time or two.

But here's the difference, darling.

You will go away, as all humans do, and you will not come back.

Your grave will be flattened by years, grown over by centuries, choked off, fallen into disrepair, but here he still strides, his own walking monument.

Now who should be applauding who here, darling?

---

"The Queen is mine," Kol says with a duck of his head toward his ear.

He smiles out over the floor of the opera house as the court makes its dazzling debut, their trains carpeting the floor in a glittering winter layer, their hands scintillating, throats sparking, the flash of them enough to put out your bloody eyes.

"Would you care to make a wager on that, little brother?"

"No compulsion. Manly charm only. I know that puts you at an unfair advantage, Nik, but I called the terms first. When you lose, you can show me where you picked up that little redhead you brought home the other night."

"And when I win, you can spend the whole of tomorrow's afternoon, polishing the furniture with your tongue."

He catches a glimpse of blonde hair across the room, a shade to nearly match these pure white trains making their way with great broom whiskings over the stage, and though his hands thunder on, his eyes have lost all glimpses of this impressive procession.

"Actually, Kol, you are welcome to her. I see a friend I have a bit of business with."

The man looks up.

He lifts his hands slightly higher.

He burrows his smile slightly deeper.

Lovely to see you, Captain Woodward.

He hopes this evening finds you well.

---

The krewe spins out its first quadrilles, their elaborate costumes chiming, rustling, fluttering, the slippered feet pounding about with cavalry intensity, the laughter reverberating off the great cavern expanses of these magnificent walls.

Klaus positions himself casually beside the captain, still clapping.

The man is positively a statue next to him.

"It's interesting," he says.

"Did you know, mate, that certain names have such a draw that they cannot help but make their way round the entire city, all the way back to the very ears for which they are not meant?"

He ticks his eyes to the side.

"'Mikael', for instance. I particularly like that one. It's sort of a, uh- oh, what's the word I'm looking for, mate?" He screws up his lips and he tilts his face helplessly toward the ceiling, seeking this elusive answer in the arched marble above him.

He snaps his fingers.

"A premonition- that's it." He flicks his eyes back to the whirling krewe and their royal court, separating both palms with a sudden snap of his wrists.

The man's sweat elongates itself down his cheeks.

His heart leaps.

His spit jumps audibly from throat to lips.

"Relax, mate. I'm actually quite forgiving, when you get to know me. I regret, of course, that you felt the need to try and contact Mikael, but I'm sure it's all some sort of misunderstanding, that you were merely trying to broker a family reunion. I'm sure your intentions were quite pure, isn't that right?"

How this little man thumps with his nerves.

Interesting, the animalistic qualities the human form takes on, when it has entered into that intoxicating state known as panic.

A horse's pulse is much the same, as it beats away beneath the thighs of its rider, a pounding to tremble the very flesh of man and beast alike.

"I'll tell you a little secret," he whispers, leaning in to place his lips right against the man's ear. "I have a bit of a soft spot for little girls with red curls. I suppose it all stems from this one girl, back in Paris, who I compelled into a fire, to burn alive before the very eyes of her own brother, who, judging by his screams, was actually quite taken with her. She was an unfortunate piece of collateral damage in a rather nasty spat between myself and my sister. But her hair- it was very pretty. You just don't find that sort of shade very often. Now, as an artist, I appreciate that sort of thing, and that little girl of yours -Anna, is it?- has hair almost that exact shade. You see, my sister is a bit naïve, for all her experience, and she fell for this big brother who watched his sister burn, and it all led to this falling out between us which she still hasn't seen fit to mend, so this girl is part of my last memory of my sister. It's a bit sentimental of me, I know, and I am running on, aren't I, mate?"

He smiles amicably.

"My point is, Captain, that I would hate to see this one red-headed little girl suffer, losing her father over something as inconsequential as this. That would be a shame, wouldn't you agree? So with that in mind, I'm sure you'll see reason and cease any and all attempts to bring my father running."

---

Genevieve Devereaux knows that he drinks the blood of innocents, that he revels in their loss, that to 'paint the town red' is no mere turn of phrase, for one such as him, that though her magic slows the withering of her cheeks, his mother's halted his forever.

She sort of likes that about him.

You see, not all witches are pretentious bigots.

She's very pretty, Genevieve Devereaux.

She kisses like she is trying to drown him.

The first time he had her, it was in her mother's house, because her mother is a frigid old biddy, and Genevieve has just reached that wonderful pinnacle of rebellion, the unruly teenaged years, and he never did grow beyond his own, and so when he takes her with her skirts up over her hips, he does not muffle her cries with his hand, he thrusts away with loud gasps of his own, he pleasures her until she screams.

There is a ward, the next time he swings round.

But mother, darling-

There is no magic which can cage the heart of a budding young woman who wants her romance forbidden, who likes her trysts condemned.

One catch, however.

She's got such an attitude about Nik.

Here is something he never told to any of his family.

Nik killed his mother.

This is how much he loves his brother:

Nik killed his mother and he buried her in shame, and for nine centuries Kol has never breathed a word about this woman who sang him down to sleep, who told him such nice things, when he curled up in her arms and he cringed back in terror as midnight sent her inky tentacles in a slithering across his bedroom floor, feeling along for his heart.

She never let the monsters under his bed get him.

It's sort of ironic.

To lift the shield to these myths, to beat back these imaginary specters of childhood, to hold up this righteous sword 'truth' for your son, to peel back the layers of these mysterious pools of night and show him nothing here, dear boy, just a trick of the shadows, a gentle joke by lady moon-

And then to be eaten by your own child, the one fable you forgot to dispel.

Funny, isn't it.

No?

Well, it took him a while to laugh about it too.

Nik's a lot of things.

Most of them horrible.

But what he is, first and foremost, is his brother.

So put a cap on that tongue of yours, you little bitch, he tells her roughly as the first quadrilles break up and the floor is finally opened to the couples milling about in their most extravagant formal wear.

"He uses you, Kol," she says, tossing her curls.

"He loves me, just like everybody," he counters playfully, and not that she could tell with her merely human hearing, but his voice breaks up just a little, on this.

Nik didn't make that pact with him, after all.

But he knows about mother, and still he doesn't hate his brother, and you don't give that kind of devotion and get nothing in return.

"Klaus loves himself."

She thinks she's very smart, Genevieve Devereaux.

"I think you should stop talking about Nik now," he tells her with a smile, dancing them into one of the vast corners of this crowded floor.

"Kol," she says, and her eyes are very bright, like that's supposed to make some sort of bloody impact on him, like he's really supposed to care about the inner workings of this girl who in another handful of decades will be ground to dust beneath this ever-revolving wheel of time which spirits away everyone save himself and his siblings. "You're a minion. That's all anyone is to him. He has underlings, not siblings."

He listens to the swishing of her skirts.

He watches the beating of her heart.

He feels the gliding of her glove beneath his hand, the flapping of her skirts against his trousers, the pressure of her earnest eyes boring through to his own.

He snaps her neck.

There is too much noise, for her death to create any sort of fuss.

She's had a swoon is all, he tells the few concerned guests around him, and he sweeps her up into his arms and he carries her out into the sharp February night.

She's very light.

He likes to think he's not holding a corporeal thing of flesh and bone anymore.

What he has cradled against his chest and strokes lightly about the crown of the head is this 'soul' that these silly little humans make such a fuss over, the true essence of the human spirit, the thing which Death picks through splintered bones and split cartilage to find and carry away into divine light.

He crushes it.

Find your paradise now, you little bitch.

---

"You're quiet tonight," he points out, swirling the blood in his glass and taking a sip before looking up from his book.

Kol has got his legs slung over the arm of his chair, his bowtie hanging loose, his shirt collar unbuttoned.

"Nik," he says, and then he just pauses, like he is suddenly uncertain what was supposed to come next.

He takes another sip, lifting an eyebrow in question.

"I killed Genevieve tonight."

He sets down his glass.

He shuts his book.

Well don't look so bloody forlorn about it, little brother- it was about time, after all.

"I think I might have liked her a bit."

Nine hundred years, and he still has no armor against these younger siblings with their trembling voices and their eyes focused just past his shoulder.

Give us a joke, little brother.

He can't handle you in such a raw state.

He leans forward with his hands clasped between his knees, resting his elbows on his thighs. "Never apologize for disposing of a woman, Kol. You've got to beat them to the punch, after all."

"Are you ever going to get over Mother, Nik?" Kol asks, poking those eyes into him.

He wets his lips and sinks back in his chair.

They spend a very long time staring at one another, seeing too much.

---

It is snowing three days later when he swings round the captain's with Kol and Elijah beside him, their coats open against the breeze, hems flapping round their calves.

"Is Captain Woodward in?" he asks politely of the maid who answers his knock.

"I'm afraid he's just stepped out for a bit, actually."

"That's unfortunate- he assured me he'd be home today. Is the rest of the family in? We'd love to see the children, if it's all right for us to wait round for him?"

He gives the woman his best smile.

"Yes, of course. Please, come in."

"Fantastic. Thank you, sweetheart," he says, and he sends her away with a light touch of the face that sets such a blush upon the poor thing's cheek.

Elijah hangs his coat neatly on the hall tree.

He removes his suit jacket.

He rolls up his sleeves.

Kol picks up a vase from the table to his left. "I like this."

"It's yours, brother," Klaus declares grandly, divesting himself of his own coat.

"I like it here, is what I meant," Kol replies, and he smashes the vase on the floor. "Oops. I suppose the maid'll have to come back for that."

And indeed she does.

Elijah is very economical.

He merely dips his hand inside the woman's chest, and he pulls until she stops screaming.

But Kol-

Now here's a brother after his own heart.

There's something to be said for a little dramatic flair, after all.

"All hope abandon...ye..who enter…in," he singsongs along as he scribbles across the wall with the woman's blood.

"That's very literary of you, little brother."

"I always found Longfellow's translation a bit lacking," Elijah comments mildly.

"Now, now, Elijah- don't discourage him. You're always lamenting the fact that he doesn't take the time out of his carousing to experience more of what the great wide world of literature has to offer."

He ruffles the snow affectionately from his brother's hair.

Kol smears a handful of the woman's death playfully across his face.

The little girl with the pretty red curls appears in the doorway of the parlor ahead of them, a bundle of sheet music clutched in her hand, the fingers so stiffly arthritic for one so young.

She opens her mouth on a scream that has not the strength to sound.

"Don't be like that, sweetheart. Daddy wouldn't want you to be afraid, now would he?"

"Of course he wouldn't, Nik. Now come and say hello to your Uncle Kol, darling!"

---

Is there anything more piercing than the scream of a mother who watches her children taken before her, who stands helplessly by as the natural order is upset, who holds in her arms the last of her living offspring with such iron strength that even he is impressed at the force he must use to wrest away this final child?

"Don't cry, love- you're next, after all," he promises her, his mouth freshly lipsticked with all her pretty little daughters.

His favorite, if you're curious, is the one Kol has mounted above the fireplace, her eyes wide as her mouth, her dress spotless as the snow which layers itself in a colorless frosting over the window.

Isn't that a feat, after all?

All this red, and yet such a pretty white skirt, absolutely untouched.

---

He hears the captain's step in the hall.

The frightened hiss of a breath drawn too quickly.

The flaring nostrils of this man who, baptized in war, understands too well the scent of spilled bowels and released bladders, those messy heralds of the reaper.

He sweeps out the tails of his suit jacket, letting them drape neatly down over the piano bench.

"One, two, three," Kol says, and with a little spin, he snaps the thumb and middle finger of each hand, and he points dramatically to Klaus, who sets off jauntily across the keys.

There is a fumbling at the parlor doors, another hiss of breath drawn too quickly, the loud thunk of a forehead let down against wood.

"Please come in," Elijah calls out graciously.

He greets the man with a smile as the doors shiver apart, crack a little wider, creak slowly open.

"Have a seat, darling! Nik's really a good player. You know, someone told him once that he played with an almost 'supernatural' sort of skill- like he'd been doing it for ages and ages. We all had a good laugh about that, you can imagine."

"Do you like the song choice? It's 'Finnegan's Wake'. I thought it rather appropriate, for the circumstances. I wanted something a bit uplifting- those dirges they play at most funerals are so depressing, wouldn't you agree? Let's celebrate their life, mate, not lament their deaths. Oh, and by the way- did I say I have a 'soft spot' for little girls with pretty red curls? I meant 'taste for'. Sorry about the misunderstanding."

Captain Woodward's legs fail him.

Elijah grips him by the elbow and eases him gently down into the chair his wife threw when they burst into the parlor with fangs showing and cheeks smeared, the youngest daughter's pretty red curls tangled round Kol's hand.

Bit of fire in her, Mrs. Woodward.

May she rest in peace.

Pieces.

Whatever.

"You will excuse the theatrics, I hope. My brothers get a bit carried away with their showmanship sometimes. What they hope to convey with this little display is that we were distressed by your recent attempts to contact our father, with whom we have a rather troubled history. We sincerely hope it doesn't happen again."

Kol hops up onto the lid of the piano, clapping along merrily to the pounding of the hammers.

Captain Woodward begins to weep.

---

There are many little quirks, among a family that's been round the block as many times as theirs.

Chief among them is this:

Nik, fiercely, ruthlessly, monstrous Nik, rarely spends a night in his own bed.

It might be habit; they often slept two to their beds of beech and straw, after all, but it means something, doesn't it, that it is always his bed which Nik seeks out, that sometimes in that hazy in-between fog which has not quite overtaken but anchors limbs to mattress all the same, he sees Nik's smile and he feels Nik's hand on his hair, lulling him back to dream?

"Do you think Bekah will hate me forever?" he asks one night while they both pretend to sleep, curled up on opposite sides of the mattress.

"Oh, Nik," he says very seriously, and he rolls over to face this big brother who is not so very big after all, when he talks like this, with his voice in little shards round them both. "I'll always love you, darling. Now come here and give us a kiss."

"Oh, piss off, Kol."

"Come on, Nik." He gives him a look. "Niiiik." He slithers forward across the sheets between them.

"I'm sorry I said anything- would you get the bloody hell off me?"

"You're adorable when you pretend to be angry with me," he says, and he tweaks the end of Nik's nose and he nuzzles up against him, pinning his arms to his sides, smashing them both together on the far end of Nik's side of the bed.

"Get off me."

"Are you drunk?" Elijah asks suddenly from the hall, pausing in the doorway as he passes, a book in his hand, a frown on his brow.

"He's not drunk, he's a bloody idiot- you should well know that by now, Elijah. Kol, would you stop it-"

"Nik, tell me you love me."

"I'm going to break off your arms and strangle you with your own hands."

"Don't be coy, darling- it's all right. Elijah understands that I'm your favorite. I am the handsomest, after all."

"And where will you rank when I chew off your nose and spit it at Elijah's feet for observing all this with that little smirk on his face that I know means he's trying not to laugh?"

"I haven't said a word, Niklaus."

"You really don't need to, Elijah. That's the wonderfully expressive thing about your annoying face." Nik pries his arms free with a jerk that nearly breaks his wrist. "I have been given the gift of immortality, and yet I am bound to spend it with you lot. Well. I suppose the universe doesn't give with both hands, now does it?" he says, straightening his shirt as he climbs out of bed.

Kol smiles and gives a little wave from the twisted sheets.

"You could do worse. I could be wearing wool," Elijah says, and with a little smile he glides off down the hall, gracefully flipping open his book as he goes.

Nik looks at him from the doorway.

"He's right, Nik," Kol tells him solemnly. "We could be poor. And ugly. I'm not counting your face, of course."

"Your wit never fails to astonish me."

"I know how you feel," he replies sympathetically. "Sometimes, I wake up, and I think to myself, how can one being exist who so epitomizes everything mankind should aspire to be, and then I have myself a nice, Tolstoy-esque period of contemplation on things like the changing socioeconomic structure of these modern times, and also how long it's going to take Elijah to notice that I went through every suit in his closet, and I cut a hole in a to-be-disclosed location, different for each one. Did I tell you about that?"

Nik is trying not to smile.

"You realize Elijah still has those stocks he brought back with him from Cheshire."

"Yes- I hope he's not too angry, Nik. I mean, you were just trying out that new 'expressionism' or whatever it's called that's become such the rage over in Germany. Though if you'd like a bit of belated advice, I think it was a bit unwise of you to sign your name."

"One day," Nik says grandly, "I'm going to tear off your head, and I'm going to keep it in a box separate of your body, and I'll take it out every so often, and think fondly of my brother Kol, may he rest in peace. The fondness, of course, will kick in when I remember the fact that I've also cut out your tongue, and will never have to hear your voice again."

"Oh, Nik- stop. You say that to all the girls."

He does smile now. "Don't think I won't still sit on you the way I did when we were children. And Elijah won't care the way mother did."

"He'll care when I won't shut up about it."

"One day, little brother, I will be the death of you."

"I know, Nik- I adore me too."

Nik rolls his eyes and vanishes.

---

He has retreated to his studio, to the room's sole window with its bright white stripe of moon.

He watches his brother's fingers scribbling away for a moment, putting both hands in the pockets of his trousers.

"Bekah loves you, Nik. She just doesn't like you very much sometimes."

His fingers stop.

His shoulders tense.

He saw her, Nik.

In London, just twenty years ago.

She didn't want him to say anything.

She was- he won't say good. You know how fragile she is, dear Bekah, underneath those sharp nails, sharper teeth, sharpest tongue.

When he left, Nik-

She tipped her chin like she didn't care and she pursed her lips in that really prim way she has, mate, you know what he's talking about, and she held her eyes so steadily on his own, without even a blink, and then she told him, wait please, when he turned at last to leave, and she crushed herself against him and she buried her face in his shoulder.

It was very wet.

London is a bit of a pisspot anyway, always dumping that nonsense on his head like he hasn't anything better to do than kill a man for his umbrella, but it was quite nice that day, smoggy of course, smelled like the poor, but not a cloud with its black little heart to be seen.

He was very gentle, when he wiped her cheeks.

He isn't very good at not breaking everything he touches.

But she's just so very small when she cries, Nik.

"She'll be back."

But until then, he's here.

Isn't that enough, big brother?

---

"Klaus, I hate to break it to you, but this is a white brothel; you want to bring the Negro along to play, you're going to have to sneak him in the back."

"No, no, no, mate- you go in the front door now. Always. Give it a try," he says with an encouraging smile.

Marcel hesitates for a moment.

He sets his foot gently on the stoop.

His back is very straight, but there lingers yet that little touch of the downtrodden, who must slink rather than stride.

"Remember what you are now," he whispers in Marcel's ear. "There's no one who can hold you down, mate, who would dare deny you. Take whatever you like. Tell this world about how it's going to bow to you."

He's got just that perfect touch of charm, Marcellano Gerard.

Set your will upon them with a smile, mate.

It lingers so much longer.

---

"Sir," a passing waiter pauses to say sternly one night while they are smoking in the bar of the Tujague, adjusting the towel over his arm. "I'm sorry, but Negroes are not allowed in here. There's an establishment just down the street where you will be welcome."

Kol puffs a cloud in his face with a smile.

Marcel stubs out his cigar in the tray before him.

He brings both his elbows onto the bar, to steeple his fingers just below his nose. "Are you going to let him talk to you that way, mate?"

There is a last little wisp of white which escapes the corner of Marcel's mouth.

Another cloud from Kol.

The tick tick ticking of the watch in his pocket, whiling away the seconds on a dead man's clock.

Marcel leans forward. "Why don't you go get me another drink, Bryce," he says, rolling the man's name amiably across his tongue.

"And I'd like a steak, darling. Not too lean a cut- do I look like I need to be watching my figure? Something from the haunch- the right one, I think," Kol calls jovially after him, and he leans out from his stool to give the man's cheek a pinch as he sweeps blankly off toward the kitchen. "Medium rare." He lifts his cigar in salute. "You're a prince among men, mate."

"You got kind of a sick sense of humor, Mikaelson."

"But a very nice smile. Also, I'm what is known as 'genetically gifted' in a certain region of my general trouser area. Take a guess. Or a feel, if you like."

"Would you stop flirting with him, Kol?"

"Nik's just jealous. Here you go, brother- put this in your mouth," he says, and jams his cigar roughly between Klaus' lips. "It'll make you feel better about not getting to put other similarly-shaped objects there."

"Excuse me, but that Miraflor is not even remotely comparable, boys."

"Well, I'm not sure I believe that," Klaus replies innocently, stubbing out its smoldering end on Kol's forehead. "I'm afraid that after nine hundred years on this earth, I require more proof than just often delusional self-flattery."

Kol throws his hands up in the air. "All right, I just can't take this dancing around anymore. Nik, give me your charcoal- I know you've got some in your breast pocket."

Marcel watches him take it out with an amused lift of his eyebrow. "You carry your art supplies around in your pocket?"

"You never know when the mood might strike."

"All right," Kol cuts in, leaning forward over the scrap of cloth he has snatched from Klaus' lap and smoothed out over the counter. "Marcel, do you like my brother? Please check 'yes' or 'no'."

"I like to keep a little mystery, actually."

"Really. You know, I'm a bit of a romantic myself," he says with a sly smile, and he slides his hand onto Marcel's thigh.

From the direction of the kitchen, there is a piercing scream.

"Wonderful! Sounds like they've started on my steak."

---

1909 sees the further improvement of that strange winged contraption of the Wright brothers and the advent of some sort of electric washing machine, but what fascinates him most of all is the ever-evolving transition of the Gerard lad with that easy smile of his, and the things banked simmering underneath it.

He woke up afraid, of course.

The human brain will never fully process the concept of immortality though it watches year by year men such as himself walk always unaided by a younger arm, a stronger leg.

Man is born, and he dies.

Perhaps he goes on to a kingdom in the clouds; perhaps he falls instead to a pit beneath the earth, but he advances through the years always changing, his fingers stiffening slowly into oak, his cheeks shrinking gradually to prunes, and one day he opens his eyes, and before the day is through he closes them once more, and he never pries them upright again.

This is what is known.

This is what has been written.

So when Marcel Gerard takes a monster's wrist to his human lips, he does not truly believe.

He has looked into Kol's inhuman gaze. He has gazed upon his unnatural fangs.

But what does he know, of life beyond the black, of feeling his lungs inflate with the last breath and his heart pump out the final beat, of accepting in that infinitesimal moment the deal all man makes when he is pushed from between his mother's thighs into this devious world which invites him in and then snuffs him back out-

Of blinking open eyes cold enough for the pathologist's needle, and taking in a lungful of breath through lips still blue with their demise.

There is no preparation.

You don't sit there, and tell the man, look, mate, here's how it's going to be, and with a grateful flash of his teeth he sits up and he pumps your hand and he tells you, just how you described it, my thanks for your advice, and he gets up and he strides off with all the confidence of his new capabilities.

He stands on newborn legs.

He studies a hand he has never seen before.

He pats a chest he does not recognize and he touches a mouth that surprises him when it opens and it breathes its warm human air against fingers that surely do not belong to him, and then if he's like most men, he falls down, and he begins to scream.

Marcel Gerard did not scream.

But then, choice always does take a bit of the sting from life's most unpleasant moments, yeah?

The porter Tim offered his white young throat for the taking, and with him steadying the frightened young boy by the shoulders, he watched Marcel dig in for the kill.

"Now, now- I still need this one," he scolded, and he pulled the shaking porter into his arms and he fed him just enough blood to heal the lad right up.

The truly interesting thing came after.

He was very contained, this Marcel.

Kol was a bit put out with him, of course, for kicking over all these hoops he had set out for the boy to prance through like some sort of show pony, but he got over it soon enough when they took the boy out for a drink and they both recalled what fun there was to be had, in the training of a man just fresh to the fang.

Two white men with this lower order of creature, the Negro- what a scandal that is, how many eyes it draws, what talk there is about the town.

But you don't have to take that anymore, Klaus whispered in his ear and Kol toasted from his perch on the bar, and slowly the colored man called Marcel began to put up his chin for any fist that dared strike it.

Yet he never killed.

There is much revelry in trapping beneath your boot the hand which for so long has held you down. To maim it troubles no sleep.

But murder was a line that new monster would not cross.

Perhaps because to live and bear is much worse than to perish and know peace, he thought, and he watched in amusement until there happened the one fateful night that seeks out all beasts who walk the earth as men.

His was the night his mother died warm and gurgling in his arms.

Marcel's began on an uncharacteristically cool September evening, 1908.

The story is not new: a rope, a crowd, a black man.

Man is so very touchy, about the way he wears that fragile hide of his.

He remembers the boy stopped very suddenly, and began to breathe so heavily.

He remembers he slicked a hand back over the hair he'd flattened down with some oil that morning, and he smiled.

"You could have them to pieces in a moment," he said.

"You could show them what it means, to truly be powerless," he whispered.

He truly believes the boy meant only to stop them.

He truly believes the boy believed that, anyway.

The story is not new.

No stories are, truly.

But the ending might surprise you.

Six white corpses, a frightened victim, an even more terrified savior.

The first watched blankly; the second fled weeping.

The third dropped to his knees and swayed while he looked down at his hands and he felt blindly around for a mouth that dripped for so very, very long.

"There, there," he told the man on his knees, and he stuck out a thumb to swipe the dripping from this mouth, and he brought it to his own, to taste this fatal combination of loathing and lust.

Today in the lounge of the Hotel Monteleone Marcel clings still to the notion that he will be the exception, that he will beat the odds.

That little mob was merely a slip, an unfortunate mistake, and isn't everyone allowed their little blunders, from time to time?

"So then me and my friend, we take him by the ankles, right?" he is saying to the white bartender, who hangs on his every word. "And we pick him up, and we just heave him right out the window while the third guy's just thundering away up the stairs-"

Such faith in themselves, all of them.

He leans his elbow on the bar, and he clinks the ice in his drink against the sides of his glass.

He takes a sip. "You know, Marcel, I think this man might enjoy a dose of his own medicine."

"We're having a nice conversation, actually, Klaus."

"A compelled conversation. From a man who told you that you couldn't be in here, that you weren't good enough." He swivels himself on his stool so that his knees crowd Marcel's. "Johnny, mate- what do you really think of your friend Marcel here?"

The man blinks.

He presses his lips together. "I think he's a dirty nigger."

He takes another sip. "Now that's unfortunate."

He lifts his glass in a toast. "Citizens of New Orleans- if I could have your attention, please?" he asks politely, glass still aloft. "I've a little proposal to make."

He smiles.

"This man you see here before you is Johnny. Everyone give him a 'hello'," he orders, and the entire lounge obliges. "You, sir- in the corner. Now Johnny here has gotten a bit above his station, so I want you to take that tie of yours, and I want you to hang him with it. Can you do that for me? Fantastic."

He focuses unblinking on Marcel as he lowers his glass.

He tips his head down just a little to look up from beneath his eyebrows, wetting his lips. "I'll remove the compulsion, if you like. Just say the word. But consider, mate, what this man would say, were he in your place."

"Now there's no need for unpleasantness, Klaus."

"Isn't there?" he asks innocently.

"No. Call off your dog."

"All right, mate, sit back down. Your services won't be needed tonight," he obliges, leaning back on his stool with drink in hand.

"No hard feelings, Johnny; happens all the time. In fact, I have a friend I think would like you. Antonio Matranga. Tell him the Provenzanos sent you to fuck his wife; just a little present to make up for all those years of his microscopic dick. Have a good time, ok, pal?"

Johnny smiles brightly. "Ok! Thanks, Marcel!"

He leans in very close to Marcel's ear. "You're coming along nicely, mate."

---

"I'm going to write a memoir," Kol announces one day.

"What do you need with a memoir, you idiot- that's something a human with a limited number of years would write, so that perhaps a score of his pathetic contributions to this society may one day be discarded in the back of a dusty old library along with everything else the world doesn't care about anymore. For instance, everything that doddering windbag Proust has ever put out."

"You're just jealous because you're afraid he might actually be smarter than you."

"He's pretentious and boring."

"The same could be said about you, Nik. But back to me."

Marcel laughs into his tumbler of A positive.

"You see what I've had to put up with, all these years? It doesn't exactly sell you on the whole immortality thing, does it?"

"It's certainly changed my mind on it, a time or two," Elijah comments from his armchair across the parlor, turning the pages of his copy of Dostoyevsky's masterpiece in the original Russian.

"Here, Nik, take this down," Kol cuts in, undeterred.

"I'm not your bloody biographer."

"Four score and nine hundred years ago, there was a baby of exceptional beauty and obvious intelligence born to the Mikaelson clan-"

"He had potential, and yet, despite the skilled tutelage of his exceptionally superior brother Klaus, he grew up to be a complete-"

"-wizard in the bedchamber, and his own generation's Helen of Troy-"

"Why don't we start again. There once was a boy from-"

"Nantucket-"

"Whose ego was so big-"

"He said, 'Show me your best, I can fuck it.'"

"He was a doddering fool-"

"With an enormous long tool-"

"If only I had drowned him in a large pool."

"Oh good Lord," Elijah murmurs, pinching the bridge of his nose.

---

Nik is out with Elijah, when he invites Marcel over for a nightcap.

He hasn't meant to drink this much- he gets rather confessional, full to the brim with liquor, but here he is, his insides just sloshing about, his laughter louder than he means it to be, his hand shaking against the pitcher as he tips it over against his glass.

"You know," he says thoughtfully, "sometimes I'm not even sure Nik loves me."

Marcel is very silent.

The bloody grandfather in the hall is very loud.

Tick…tick…tick…tick…tick…

That's what his life sounds like, you know. A lazy revolution of the pendulum, hacking away at seconds and minutes and hours that will never mark him. Bit annoying. Better than the alternative, of course.

Once a very long time ago he was nineteen, he'd hardly lived at all, and he laid down full of a night's carousing, and he woke up dead.

He starts every morning like this.

But he shakes it off.

He shakes off everything.

Insert your pretty metaphor of those impermeable feathers of the duck which sluice off water as all feelings roll themselves right off his back.

What a kidder is that Kol. Impervious to bad humor as he is to death.

But that's not true, now is it, mate.

He's here.

He's holding a glass in his hand.

He's not drinking out of it because he's waiting for an answer, because his throat is already full of fire, because this morning Nik went off with the brother worthy of a promise, and he did not even look back.

"That's kind of intimate to share with the crowd, don't you think?"

"Well," he says, looking down into his glass, "it seems like you're my only friend."

You see what he meant, about these pesky qualities of liquor, this timeless elixir of truth?

"You can't talk about something like this with Elijah?"

"Elijah would agree with me. He's not sure how much of Nik the centuries have left to us. I was just hoping…to get a different answer."

There is a breeze knocking round the shutters with divine fury.

The beeping of a horn in the street beyond.

That stupid grandfather, counting off something that no longer holds any threat.

Marcel takes a drink, and he brings his hand down against his back. "You know, sometimes I just don't know what to make of you Mikaelson men."

---

They are set upon one evening in Storyville, as they are lurching back from The Big 25 full of alcohol and laughter.

Nik hangs from his left shoulder, Marcel his right, he stumbling about between them, Nik holding him up by a fistful of his collar, Marcel guiding steps less tremulous than his own.

There are four men.

They'd like all their money.

Nik bursts out laughing.

Marcel smiles from ear to ear.

"Nik, let me have them. You got the last ones."

Nik gestures drunkenly. "Have at it, Kol. I won't lift a finger."

He flings both their arms dramatically from his shoulders.

He leaps onto the first and he rides him all the way to the pavement, and just a quick nip of the throat and up sprays the man's life in such a thick red jet.

Nik's probably already committed it to canvas in his head.

He executes a cartwheel to reach the next, and he punches a hole in the man's head that splashes gray all down the coat of his friend, who screams, who shits himself in a noxious gush, who spins round to flee, crying like a woman.

He catches him by the throat.

He pops off his head with a brisk clench of his hand.

He sets off with a skip in his step after the last, the man's coat tails whipping about behind him with the cracking of the lash, his breath rattling in his throat, his heart thundering louder than the gunshots of his heels, and with a casual little hop, Kol sneaks a foot through into this man's stride, and he kicks the man's shin from his knee with a wet crunch.

Nik is doubled over. "You're such a child, brother."

Yes, he is a child.

Father drove a sword through his heart on the day of his nineteenth year and left him alone in a warm red puddle to find his own fumbling way back from death, this thing that is not nearly so permanent as it seems, and what can you do, mate, but have yourself a bit of a laugh over it?

See- that man, hobbling round on his stump, trying to drag himself along by his fingers, leaving behind little pieces of himself, his trousers dribbling piss, his eyes leaking fear?

Funny.

No?

Well, it took him a while to laugh about this too.

He clotheslines the man in the throat.

He shoves his hand down into the man's chest.

He wiggles his fingers in a cheerful little farewell. "So long, darling!"

The man's heart sails across the street to be deftly snatched by Nik, who juggles it from hand to hand and then lobs it back to him with a smile.

---

"Do you have some sort of problem, with my friend here?" he inquires of the man pinning such a dirty look on himself and Marcel as they pick their way along toward the wharves.

"Leave it, Klaus. That's a nice suit- Elijah finds out you sullied something like that, he'll never let you live it down."

"You're right, of course," he says, and he sets his hand lightly on Marcel's shoulder as they continue on, never losing his smile.

"This isn't the kind of area for people like him."

"Is that right, mate?" he asks, and in a flash he turns, and he backhands the man's head across the street.

He sucks the blood from his pointer finger. "Papers have been a bit slow lately, anyway. A decapitation ought to wake them right up."

---

The forward push of that NAACP with its cries for equality and tolerance; Mexico put to the sword of revolutionaries; the first experimentation with airplanes that open their bellies to exhale the flames of bombs- history passes as it always does, in great spurts that will mean nothing, come the next headline.

Tim quits the Hotel Monteleon in May of 1911.

He swings round to the boy's home for a visit.

"Your mother's looking lovely," he says warmly, when she calls the boy into the hall and she leaves them alone to chat. "I sincerely hope our little arrangement is still in place?"

"Yes, sir- of course. I'll tell you the second I hear anything about Mikael. I promise, Mr. Mikaelson. Sir. Klaus."

"Fantastic," he says even more warmly, and he slips several bills into the boy's trouser pocket.

Growing up into quite a pretty little thing, that Tim.

---

Kol sets off a quarrel between the Matrangas and the Provenzanos that crowds the streets to the corners with barrels of limp red immigrants.

Marcel licks the blood of a particularly tasteful whore from his fingers with hardly a shudder.

Elijah opens his paper with a snap across the breakfast table, his tea steaming beside his hand. "Did you know that passenger liner sank? The one they were making such a fuss about?"

"The Titanic? The unsinkable marvel?"

"Yes. Yesterday, apparently."

"You see where arrogance gets the human race?" he says, stealing a sip from his brother's mug.

Elijah examines the rim with a frown, and calls the maid in to bring him another.

Kol swoops in to take a nip from his baked apples.

"If neither of you are busy for the day, perhaps you could assist in the kitchen, licking plates and polishing glasses with your used pocket squares."

"Elijah, we are not so uncouth as that. You polish the plates; you lick the glasses."

"I don't think he thinks you're funny, Nik."

"That's a shame."

"That's all right, Nik- you know I'll always give you a pity laugh. It's the least I can do, after all the times you've made me look so hysterical in comparison."

"Why don't you take yourself down to the wharves and give yourself a good morning dunking? Be sure to hold your head under until your feet stop kicking."

"Elijah, do you hear the way he talks to me? And after I stood up for you and I told him, "Nik, don't pinch Elijah's tea. You know he hates it when you take his things, and I am the last person on this very planet who wants to see our brother caused any distress." He takes a drink from the new mug the maid whisks in and has not quite set down before his brother when he yanks it from her hands. "Thank you, darling."

Klaus spreads his hands. "Perhaps you'll consider revoking that rule prohibiting stabbings during meals?"

Kol tips the mug to one side with a blurred flick of his wrist, upending the tea in his lap.

"Bloody-"

"Not at the table," Elijah cuts in calmly, rustling the pages of his paper.

"The language, or the beheading I'm about to bestow on our dear brother?" he snaps, upsetting his chair as he leaps back from the table, the puddle in his lap dividing itself into little rivulets down his legs.

Kol bursts out laughing. "Nik's pissed himself!"

"I will bloody-"

"Niklaus," Elijah warns, folding his paper neatly beside his plate and lacing his hands in a tidy pile on top of it. "He wouldn't poke at you, if you didn't make such a display of leaping."

"That's right, Nik. You need to watch that temper of yours, darling. Someone's going to get hurt one day."

"Kol. Your bat."

"What?"

"You can do without it for a few days."

"What- Elijah, you can't take it from me-"

"You can retrieve it, or I can. I think you're well aware of which is the more appealing of the two options."

"But Nik started it."

"How did I bloody start it, you little tit? I was sitting here, minding my own bloody business-"

"I didn't like your face."

"And I haven't liked yours in nine centuries, but you don't see me running about making an obnoxious little ass of myself-"

"You're an obnoxious little ass on your best of days, Nik-"

---

"Marina," Elijah says placidly, doing up the top button of his jacket as he stands. "Someone is approaching the house. Would you get the door, please?"

He snaps Kol's neck with a nearly invisible twist of his hands.

He cracks Niklaus' spine with an almost imperceptible thrust of his best dress shoes.

He dusts off his jacket.

"Show our visitor to the parlor," he calls out as he hears Marina's tread in the foyer and then the first hesitant thrumming of a tentative fist.

"Jack. Please clean up my brothers again. We will, of course, make the necessary adjustments to your payment."

He steps gracefully over Niklaus and he adjourns to the parlor.

---

A ransacked home; a broken nose; a murdered mother.

And all on his twenty-first birthday.

Well that's a piece of luck now isn't it, mate?

"She was all I had," Tim whispers, and how the poor little thing trembles as he lifts up a hand and he wipes absently at his still-dripping nose.

"And you came to me for help. A deal with the devil, is that it, Timmy?"

The lad flicks his eyes nervously up from his hands. "I want to find them. I didn't know who else…who else might be able to help me with that. Who has that sort of…reach."

Well now, Tim. Revenge takes such a strong back, a hard heart, an immovable stomach.

Man is not truly suited to real retribution, with his weak resolve, his delicate constitution, his hands imbued only with mere mortal might.

But a monster-

Now there's something that understands what it is to strike back at any who dare, who knows what it is to watch an enemy squirm and to feel not the constraints of revulsion with which his human conscience has saddled him.

"Here's what I'm going to do, Tim," he whispers, squatting down in front of the boy and folding both hands between his knees. "You've had a bit of a shock; you're not thinking clearly. So I'm going to make you an offer, and then I'm going to walk away. Think it over. Come tell me when you've made your decision."

The boy blinks.

He takes a deep breath.

He nods the head which he laid on his mother and he soaked through with her blood.

"You know what I am. You've seen what I can do. You've seen that I have no equal. So imagine the things you could accomplish, if you were to become like me. The paths you could tread. The people who would pay, for what they did to your poor mother." He lifts his hands, and he curves them gently over the boy's. "A boy like you, Tim -poor for three generations, piled beneath the debts of your ancestors- you'll never step foot outside this city. But you can have more than revenge, Tim. You can have the whole world."

He makes his smile into such a soft, soft thing, when he reaches up to touch the boy's cheek.

---

Three days later, Tim is back.

---

This boy won't get a grave.

He will not lie abed forever as the feet of future generations press their shoes to the shoots which have feasted upon his corpse of dust and bone and shot forth this incomprehensible thing life, which flourishes among rows and rows of death.

He wonders how he'll feel about that, nine centuries from now.

He hopes you've got a real sense of humor about the whole situation, darling.

Immortality's only got it's novelty until you open your eyes on the next lifetime of your very long existence.

Oh.

Still here, are you?

116 and still kicking.

Imagine that.

Yes.

Just imagine that.

Nineteen and already dead; 116 and still alive.

Wrap your head round that, mate.

---

New Orleans, 2013

Always one right before closing time.

Lord Jesus Almighty, if she couldn't have just one early day for these damn rickety old bones.

She looks up with her best yes-sir-I-sure-do-give-two-fiddlin-farts-about-your-gas-lights-needs smile, and she locks her fingers together on the smoothly-polished countertop before her. "Can I help you, young man?"

What a smile on him.

"Emmeline James?"

"Yes? That's me."

He steps up to the counter with his hands behind his back, his smile deepening.

"My name is Klaus. Perhaps you've heard of me?" he asks politely, and she reels backward with a scream.

---

He leaps the counter.

He clasps his fingers round her arm as her frail little knees give way beneath her, and he holds her swaying on her feet, both her hands coming up in defense, supplication, surrender, what does he care.

Shh shh shh, love.

Let's not be like that.

He has need of only a few names, sweetheart- and not even that, just a mere point of your finger will do, toward these witchy little comrades of yours you must aim him, and why, you want to know, love?

Isn't that the eternal question of Man.

For whither does man toil; does he day by day knock the dust from his boots and beat the mud from his coat and venture forth to his fields to acquire all over again these layers of the common laborer solely to while away these fleeting moments between cradle and grave; does the babe who draws its first breath only moments before its last subside in his mother's pale wet arms by the will of this mysterious being God, who shows his face only in the text of Man; where is the merciful hand which spares the bloodthirsty soldier yet forgets the innocent civilian; what is the point; of what purpose is any of this-

Why, why, why, indeed.

He spins her round to face the crowd gathering outside her shop.

Why her, what does he want, she's nothing to one such as him, her powers dwindled, her body crippled, dear Jesus just let her live out her final few years-

"Jesus has yet to hear a prayer delivered in my presence," he says, moistening the lips he places right against her ear, one arm gently supporting her fragile old body.

Now.

With that in mind, he's sure you'll come round to reason.

Among this lovely little row of shops which crowd her own on either side, five are run by these little thorns which have dug themselves beneath his thumbnails and begun to irritate.

"One, two, three, four, five," he sing-songs.

It's not much at all, love.

Barely a handful of this city's magical population.

"You'll give me their names, or I'll set that lot outside there to burning down your shops, until you either stop them with your powers, killing these poor innocents who had the misfortune to get themselves caught up in such nasty affairs, or are killed yourselves. What's it going to be, Emm. E. Line? Pretty name, by the way. I knew an Emmeline in Paris. I won't tell you her fate; I'm afraid it might upset you."

He holds her carefully.

She blurts out her answers inconsolably, sobbing as she tells.

He lets her go, and he sandwiches both her shaking hands between his own, stooping over to bring his eyes level with her own.

"Thank you, Emmeline," he says sincerely, and with a gentle pat of her cheek, he sets off to murder her friends.

---

The two he spared from the slaughter on his lawn he kills first.

The one they finger as second-in-command of the entire operation, below only dear, departed Jane-Anne he murders next, licking his fingers as she drops.

And so on, and so forth.

Now, loves.

Was a week of renovations on his home and the passing satisfaction of watching him pinned against that wall, screaming as he broke, really so terribly worth it?

---

She opens her hotel room door to Klaus in a suit and tie, his face breaking out in that smile he seems to have reserved solely for her as she lifts an eyebrow at him and she leans her shoulder against the door jamb. "Can I help you?"

"I was wondering if you had a bit of free time?"

"Are you asking me out on a date?"

He just looks so happy, standing here in her doorway.

"I am," he says, and what else is she supposed to do but smile back.

---

"Oh my God. Did you really kick everyone out of here?"

He jogs on ahead of her to hold the door open and gestures with a flourish of his arm for her to precede him.

She steps into the bar, her heels clicking as she goes, one hand lifting to touch her hair.

It's truly quite the sight, this place.

The antique mirrors casting back her pink lips, her bright eyes; the floors polished to glass; the hand-painted chairs; the pewter bar with its gentle clock hand gliding of chairs, drinks, plates.

Nothing quite so impressive as she herself, of course.

He shuts the door behind them.

He watches her tuck one curl behind her ear.

She sweeps her eyes round the place with a contemplative purse of her lips, adjusts her gown, glances back over one shoulder to find his waiting smile, his hopeful eyes, his nervous bloody hands.

"Do you like it?"

She tucks away that stray little curl once more as it springs free, pivoting round to face him. "So. How many minions made this possible?" she asks, indicating the bar with its candles, its wine, its plates touching at the rims, spiraling forth their fragrant steam.

He lifts his eyebrows innocently, tips his head from side to side, smiles once more. "A few."

She crosses her arms.

"I let all of them go afterward. I didn't want to soil the evening with bloodshed."

"You, Klaus Mikaelson, are a true humanist." She tilts her head. "And yes. I like it."

He looks down.

He glances up from beneath his eyebrows, still with his lips so helplessly lifted, his palms damp, his heart thundering, all of him twisted round.

How terrifying she is, this petty girl with her handful of years.

What does she understand of power, of men, of life, small-town Caroline who has yet to complete one lifetime, who comprehends not the frailty of kingdoms, the baseness of humanity, who has for so long paced within her walls, never seeing beyond their scope?

And yet how easily she can crush him.

Her smile is the first blow, her hand on his elbow the second, her fingers round his own the finishing strike.

One day I hope you bloody understand, Rebekah spat as her latest conquest fell to his schemes.

One day I hope it bloody breaks you, she screamed to his indifferent back, his nonchalant shoulders, his dismissive hands.

Love, love, love.

Bekah, haven't you learned, Elijah why do you bother, never does it hold on for those of their kind, he who hands over his heart deserves it back in pieces, she who would trust in its constancy earns its fallibility.

Mother taught him well, you see.

To bare his chest, to make of his heart a target is only an invitation.

Here goeth the dagger, isn't that right, Mother?

Who will accept a man whose father couldn't love him, whose mother turned him away, whose siblings watched this pass in silent solidarity.

But what a disease is hope, sweetheart, not a curable ailment, but a dormant festering, eating always away below the surface.

You have at long last gotten your wish after all, dear sister.

"So where do I start?" she asks, nodding toward the bar. "What is all this?"

Too soon, of course, she pulls away, and she taps her way across the floors, her curl breaking free once more, the rest of her updo swaying as she goes.

He pulls one of the chairs out for her.

He sits down in the one directly beside it and swivels round to touch his knees to her own, propping his elbow on the bar, his chin on his hand.

He gestures with the other. "Duck; a rabbit saltimbocca; asparagus with herb butter; that is known as Chef Tory's 'Tasting of Autumn Figs' -it's brown Turkey fig and buttermilk biscuit shortcake with Chantilly cream, spiced fig beignet with a bit of powdered sugar, and a shot of figcello- and then over there we have shrimp and Tasso Henican, oysters, cured Salmon flatbread-"

"Ok, is all this supposed to be a nod to that one eating contest I won at the 10th grade picnic, because that was just me being petty. Because Elena was competing, and I know it was jerky of me, but I just had to win, and I'm not going to say it was my proudest moment, but I did triumph. And then I threw up. A lot."

He reaches into his jacket pocket for his wallet. "Do you mean this eating contest?" He slips something from one of the folds and holds it up.

What a fantastic color her face turns.

"Where in the hell did you get that picture?" she demands, making a swipe for it. "I swear, you are the creepiest creeper in the history of all creepers- seriously, do you just go around collecting all my most embarrassing moments so you can wave them around in my face for all of eternity instead of letting them fade away into the mists of time where everyone else gets to put all their most really gross moments-"

He fends her off easily. "I rather like it. The mustard really brings out your eyes, love."

"Give. It. Back."

"Your victory speech must have been quite the oration: 'And above all, I will always aspire, inspire, perspire-"

"Ok, if you're done giggling like a little girl over your own cleverness, then maybe you can-"

"Oh, I'm never done being amused with my own cleverness, Caroline."

"Well, I am certainly done with it." She leans forward with one hand on his knee, feeling about behind his back with the other, pressing herself against him as she gropes roughly about.

He tosses the picture to his other hand.

He slides it into his back pocket and holds both hands innocently up.

"Give it back. Or."

"Or?"

"Trust me, you do not want me to finish that sentence."

He smiles.

She points one of the dessert forks very sternly at him. "This isn't over. But everything is going to get cold, and I don't want it going to waste."

"No; we, and certain picnic tables which shall remain unmentioned certainly know that, don't we?"

"Shut up!" she says, but there is that little hitch of a laugh in her voice again, and her bloody smile.

Some men walk this earth for centuries and never glimpse its like.

"Oh my God, this is amazing!" she cries out, drawing her fork back from the shortcake and catching with her free hand a bit of the cream which dribbles down over her lips. "Aren't you going to eat?"

"In a bit." He presses his lips together and leans back in his chair, putting his hands in his pockets. "I thought I'd wait for things to calm down a bit. You know, wait out the initial frenzy. I didn't want anything getting…pierced."

"Ok, you know what? We are not going to talk about this anymore. And you're going to get the Caroline Forbes Inquisition, just for being a jerk."

"Am I now?" He lifts his eyebrows at her.

"Yes. And the Spanish never made three football players cry using only their words, so I don't care who you ran with back in the dark ages, they didn't have anything on me."

He looks down with a little smile. "Well, I can't argue with that."

"Age," she barks, resting one elbow on the bar and twirling the fork round her mouth. "Before you were turned."

"Twenty-seven."

"So even in human years you're kind of a cradle robber."

"You perceive time a little bit differently, when you've been around as long as I have."

"I know- age is just a number, blah, blah, blah. That's what all dirty old men tell themselves." She samples a piece of the asparagus, giving it a tentative little nibble and then a confident bite. "Favorite century?"

"The 21st," he answers immediately.

She rolls her eyes. "You are such an ass kisser-"

"Isn't someone presumptuous? I have an entire network of information at my fingertips, all contained within a machine small enough to lug round in a case smaller than Bekah's toiletries bag; instant communication with the other side of the world at the touch of just a few buttons; devices that can store hundreds of songs I can listen to over and over again, anytime I like; machines capable of outrunning even one such as myself. It's a very interesting time." He slips his hands from trouser pockets to vest, leaning back even farther in his chair, smiling as he tilts its legs beneath him.

"So, nothing else of significance."

He purses his lips. "Can't think of anything. Although, the brief little reconnection between myself and Stefan was rather entertaining, I admit."

"I'm pretty sure whatever you did with Stefan was not enough to give this century enough of a boost to top taking down a gajillion years of Romanovs or whatever."

He spreads his hands helplessly. "I can't think of anything else. Though, I admit- a few things tend to slip, from time to time, after all these centuries. A reminder or two might help me recall whatever it is you seem to be hinting at."

"I find your Alzheimer's gross and inappropriate. Besides, I wouldn't want you to break a hip, in the process of being 'reminded'."

He leans forward, hands still in his pockets, lowering his voice silkily. "I'll take that as a challenge."

She puts her pointer finger to his forehead and gives him a little push, and with the smile which he knows changes the beating of her heart and the steadiness of her breath, he sinks back once more in his chair.

"Middle name?"

"I don't have one."

"Favorite color?"

"Blue."

"Favorite sexual position?"

"I'm particularly inclined to anything that involves you naked."

She rolls her eyes again.

"Favorite city?"

"Paris."

"Favorite historical event?"

"Probably the Great War. Or the storming of the Bastille- now that was an adrenaline rush."

She picks up her fork once more, and suddenly there is a drop in her voice, a casting down of her lashes, a switching of gears. "Why did you save me?"

He stretches his legs slowly out in front of him and crosses them at the ankle, rolling his thumbs round his knuckles.

There is a clock, ticking on the wall behind him.

The clinking of her silverware as it darts out for a taste, the clanging of its return against her teeth.

He listens to the thundering of his heart, to the hammering of her own, to all the little sounds of this city beyond the window, breathing its eternal cycles of life, putting away one generation as it ushers in the next.

"Well, I think that's been made pretty obvious."

"No. I mean the first time. When Tyler bit me."

He tilts his head. "It was a whim. I do still have those from time to time, you know."

"No it wasn't."

He is utterly silent.

"You don't walk into the room of some girl you don't even know and make some big fancy speech about everything that's still to come on a whim, Klaus. You don't tell her that it's ok to think about not going on, that you've thought about it once or twice yourself, and then talk her around to doing just that. You could have just left me as collateral damage. So why didn't you?"

He listens to that bloody clock tick on, on, on.

"Tyler used to talk about you all the time, when he was still sired to me."

She sets down her fork.

He presses his lips together, and he looks away.

He rolls his thumbs round and round, catching fabric as he goes. "And I used to overhear some of your conversations, when you'd call to talk with him. I wasn't purposefully eavesdropping."

He was just so bloody alone.

"You were funny," he says. "A bit annoying; very feisty."

"You got a crush on me, listening to me complain about dance committees and drive Tyler crazy with bitchy little comments about other cheerleaders and the endless Elena/Salvatore drama?"

He lets out a very slow breath.

Mikael-

Mother was much harder.

She held his hand, you see.

But Mikael-

Mikael ran him down like a dog, Mikael hunted him right to the end, Father never gave him a second look-

And yet how little satisfaction he felt, recalling this man in a pile of ancient bones, Egyptian dust, his skin burned away, his hair singed to the skull, all of him just so much…nothing.

Who do you have, Mikael wanted to know.

Nothing.

No one.

Bekah in her box, Kol alongside her in dreamless death, Finn eaten away by nine centuries of rot, Elijah gone off on his own.

What he surrounded himself with he had bought, forced, imagined.

And so won that merciless hunter of his existence, though it was he swept up and put away at last with the rubbish, where he belonged.

But there was this girl whose laugh he recalled.

Who hung on so very hard, though everything crumbled beneath her.

She came back to him at odd moments.

Such a smile in her voice, conviction in her arguments, hope in her pleas.

Twice he meant for her to die, this girl who made him want.

But to Caroline Forbes' doorstep his suddenly independent feet walked him, and into her bedroom they carried him, and what a longing ran itself through fingertips just as autonomous, as he sat himself carefully down beside this girl who looked up at him with her eyes which put themselves straight through to his heart.

"I just liked you," he says, very quietly.

He looks back at her, void of words, empty of explanation, but perhaps his pathetic reticence doesn't matter after all.

She is smiling.

---

She slips soundlessly over the side of his bed and reaches one careful millimeter at a time into the back pocket of the pants she threw carelessly on the floor when she pushed them off him, keeping an eye on his steadily rising chest, his slightly parted lips, his loosely relaxed limbs.

Her fingers hit nothing.

He cracks an eye.

She crosses her arms. "Where'd you put the picture?"

He smiles lazily.

"I'm afraid I can't remember that. I'm fairly confident, however, that the memory could be retrieved. With a bit of persuasion."

"Really." She takes a step toward the bed, arms still crossed. "And what kind of persuasion do you feel would be necessary?"

He pulls her down onto the bed by her wrists and kisses her.

---

"Tim," he says jovially one morning into his phone, putting his feet up on his desk.

"I've a bit of a task for you, if you're interested, mate."

He smiles.

"I think it'll be quite a hit."

---

He begins to notice little things out of place.

Nothing terribly awry: a subtly-altered desk drawer here, a slightly-rifled closet there, the papers at the corner of his desk just a bit off-center, the supplies in his studio a few inches off course.

Caroline berates him one afternoon for having at her files.

"I didn't touch them, love."

"Ok, well then who did? Because this is not where I put the folder on the Pelham Hotel." She glares at him. "Are you trying to tell me that Elijah, who pretty much just seems concerned with making sure his suit sleeves are lined up with his shirt cuffs, snuck in here to see if you were hiding the secret of the perfect pants crease between the "M' and the 'R' files? Or Rebekah?"

His sister pokes her head in on her way past down the hall. "I heard my name. I assume it was complimentary, since we're all about being honest these days, aren't we?" She gives Caroline such a jab with her eyes.

He swings his feet up onto his desk.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Caroline demands.

"You know what it means."

"No, actually, I don't. I don't speak crypto skank."

"Are you going to let her talk to me like that, Nik?" Bekah snaps, crossing her arms, adopting that one particular stance with which he is so bloody familiar, hip cocked, chin jutting, eyes sparking.

He leans back in his chair and lifts his hands helplessly.

"Yes, he's going to let me talk to you like that, because he knows that you are an unreasonable child, throwing a temper tantrum."

"No, he's going to let you talk to me like that because for some reason he's decided that some little small-town cheerleader is where he wants to put his pecker for the rest of his existence."

"Ladies," he tries with that smile of which most women are particular fans.

Caroline hardly even looks at him. "Shhjjt!" she snaps, waving her hand at him. "I don't know what your deal is lately, but you have been all up my ass for days now, and I'm sick of it."

"Well, why don't you just pull my hair and spread a nasty rumor about me then?"

"Uh, like I don't have lots of little nasty truths at my disposal without having to resort to freaking gossip. Like how about Rebekah leaves all her grody hairs in the shower every time she shaves? Or the Lake freaking Erie sized puddles on every surface she happens to pass out on? Yeah. Klaus isn't the only one."

"Caroline spends twelve hours in the bathroom and emerges looking exactly the same as before. Caroline puts on so much perfume that the entire house smells like a cheap bawdy house. Caroline-"

"Rebekah steals bras. What kind of girl even does that? That's like sacred territory. You don't jack another woman's under things. You go to hell for that."

"Oh, like you can even properly fill them out. Besides, Nik's money, a.k.a. mine, probably bought them anyway."

"You know what? Where are your daggers? I'll stick her myself."

"It would almost be worth being put back in that box, since it would kill you and all."

He scrubs a hand across his mouth and flicks his eyes briefly toward the ceiling. "You were saying about the files, Caroline?"

"Oh. Right. You know what, actually- I bet it was you."

"Why would I touch your bloody files? I don't give a crap about Nik's little war, so long as it doesn't affect me."

"You probably did it just to piss me off!"

"Right. Because I have all this time on my hands, to go around misplacing your and Nik's toys just to get on your nerves."

"Uh, yeah. I mean, remind me what you do around here again? Aside from flip your hair and make sure you didn't chip a nail when last night's binge put up a fight."

He swings his feet down.

"Sounds like Tim's back with a couple of new recruits."

"I didn't hear the door," Caroline replies.

"I'll go look for him," he says, and he flashes past his sister and into the corridor beyond where Elijah has just appeared, one eyebrow lifted.

"Get out while you still can, brother," he warns, and vanishes down the stairs.

---

"If you were me, where would you hide an object of extreme importance?" he murmurs one night against her skin, smoothing his hand down her flat white stomach to the waistband of her knickers, where he rests it lightly, feeling beneath his fingers the slip of lace and silk.

"I don't know- in my pants, so you'd be likely to run into it all the time?"

He rolls his eyes up toward her with a smirk, and hooks his thumb beneath that wiry little waistband with its band of smooth white elastic. "I mean, where would you look for it, if you were trying to find it?"

"Drawers. Your office, your studio- I don't know. Someplace where you spend a lot of time."

She sinks her fingers into the curls at the nape of his neck, strokes them absently down to the first knot of his spine, brushes them back up with such a light touch he is taken by a jagged little shudder all the way from shoulders to toes, his bare back tensing underneath her.

"Why?" she asks.

"Just curious," he says, and up that supple little stomach he slides, kissing as he goes.

He rolls on top of her and he takes her face between both his hands, and for a moment he just runs his thumbs along her cheekbones, basking in this smile which she flashes without stopping to think.

---

Don't leave her behind, Stefan, she thinks as Klaus rips her shirt down the middle and throws her half-naked onto his desk.

Don't think it doesn't mean anything, Klaus, she pleads as Stefan follows smiling along behind as she tour guides her way down the French Quarter, pointing out shops as she goes.

It's just this man.

He has stood beside her for so long, he needs someone to lead him through, Elena didn't love him enough either, and the things she knows, about these holes that are left behind, that cannot be patched over, that can never be puttied smooth.

Stefan Salvatore is her last friend.

One day she packed her bags and she left behind this enclosure where she lived her tiny finite years twelve slow months at a time, and don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out, Care, no thanks for stopping by, Mystic Falls, population 2,999 at last.

But Stefan sent her off with a smile, he checked in just to see, he doesn't cut her down, he will never throw her away.

And what is he going to think of her now, Caroline Marie Forbes, who held out for so long, who never took this creep's bait, who always called him out, who last night threw him into a wall and kissed him until he bled?

---

"Nik's not going to be your dirty little secret."

She lifts her eyes from the map spread out across his desk and she leans back slowly in his chair, stretching her legs out in front of her. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me. You're not going to screw my brother, and go on your little walks with Stefan, and swing him by the hand and skip along in the sunlight while Nik waits around for you to be ready to come back."

She taps the pen in her hand against the desk.

The clock on the wall tick tick tocks, tick tick tocks.

"Is that what all your bitchy little comments have been about lately?"

"If you're just playing around with Nik, I will eat you, excruciatingly slowly, Caroline," she says, and how much this big bad bitch's voice shakes, as she spits her threats. "Be aware. I let Tatia have a pretty face full of my nails; you'll get my teeth."

They stare at one another for a very long time, and then she sets down her pen and Rebekah spins to leave, but there is nothing done about this, not with the air hanging so heavily about her shoulders and the breath squashed flat inside her lungs, sticking where it slithers.

"I'm not," she whispers, and that bright blonde head pauses in the doorway and her hand comes up to her own head, and now a tilt and a sag and she drapes herself bonelessly forward across this desk. "But how do I keep both of them? How do I tell my last friend that I love the guy who drove the initial wedge between him and the only girl he will probably ever love? How do I tell him, "Oh, yeah, and by the way, remember Klaus? That guy who kicked you back off the wagon and ruined your life? Yeah, I'm getting some of that. A lot of that. Like, an inappropriate amount of that-"

"You don't have to be so specific, thank you. I can hear what goes on three blocks away, not to mention two halls down."

She turns slowly back, and this is the look she hates the most, not Rebekah the Snob, Rebekah the Original, the superior, but Rebekah the frail freaking girl, no-mother Rebekah, whose eyes crinkle as she smiles, whose hands shake when she cries.

"Stefan is the last person who will ever judge you, Caroline," she says quietly.

No, you don't get it.

Everyone judges her.

Elena gets a pass, Bonnie was so much better, but Caroline- watch her stumble as she goes, keep her always on the other side, build a wall she cannot scale, nurture a friendship she can never quite infiltrate.

She is broken, didn't you know?

You don't want to step on her shards.

"And maybe," Rebekah says, looking down for just a moment as she talks, "maybe Stefan is your only friend, because you won't look any farther for another."

She looks up for just a moment, and then she is gone.

---

Tim brings him three new ones for a trial run.

Such jittery little things, standing before him.

"I want you to track down Jennifer Harten," he says, giving them the name of a witch Caroline picked up in a little corner boutique off Bourbon, "and I want you to take care of her."

He casts his best smile toward Tim, who has that outdated little hat crumpled between his hands, poor nervous little lad. "Make it look like the werewolves did it."

---

Stefan walks in one morning while he is plinking away at his piano, nothing terribly complex, that lively no. 15 of Burgmüller's, the flowing legato of the more subdued first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight sonata- just a bit of grease, to unlock the axles of his mind, to turn the wheels smoothly through their rotations.

Not even a knock, mate- hasn't someone grown a bit presumptuous in their time apart?

"Stefan!" he calls out warmly without turning around, his right hand jouncing its way through a series of staccattos. "To what do I owe the pleasure of this surprise? Or did I just miss the phone call you must have courteously made, informing me that you'd be swinging round at some point, if it wasn't too much of an imposition?"

He hears Stefan's hands burrow into the pockets of his jacket. "Well I figure I can probably venture into the lair without too many scratches, considering the fact that a certain newborn blonde will never forgive you for pulling my insides up out of my throat. Or whatever the threat of the week is."

He whips through the sixteenth notes on his left hand.

Three measures of triplets, on the right.

A brisk walking of his fingers from octave to octave.

"I know Caroline think she's being sneaky. But I'm not blind, Klaus. I know what's going on between the two of you."

He stops.

He floats his hands lightly up off the keys, and sets them on his thighs.

"Is this where you demand to know of my intentions toward her?"

He listens to those hands shifting round in their pockets, to the humming of the traffic in the streets below, to all the little people with their annoying beehive chatter.

"Well, we both know it would be ridiculous to pull the big brother hurt-her-and-I'll-kill-you card."

"A bit unreasonable, yeah, considering my untimely demise would precede hers. And yours."

He twists round on the bench with a smile on his face. "I assume you're here to warn me off anyway, to try and appeal to the one little kernel of goodness that must still exist deep down inside me, if I can care for this one little baby blonde."

"I'm not going to try and appeal to anything, Klaus. Pleas have never gotten anyone very far with you."

He lounges back against the piano, and brings his elbows up onto the keys with a discordant little jangle, broadening his smile. "True. You don't build a reputation on mercy, mate."

Stefan stares unblinking back at him, leaning forward just a little as he drops his voice.

"That being said, Caroline is my friend. And if she doesn't make it out of this ok, I'll find some way to make you regret it."

He smiles just a bit, and there's that peek of the old ripper, who swims patiently about just below the surface, never quit sinking away to the bottom.

"Have a nice day, Klaus."

He watches this old friend of his make his way to the door, his fingers twitching just a bit where they dangle down past the keyboard.

"Wait."

Stefan stops without turning.

"I need your help with something."

"Why would I help you with anything, Klaus?"

"Possibly because it concerns the benefit of the one person we both care about."

Stefan revolves himself slowly about.

"Not here. If you haven't noticed, my family and I are not on the best of terms right now. This isn't something I want them walking in on." He stands and spreads his hands with a little smile. "Why don't I reacquaint you with the French Quarter?"

---

Shut your eyes, little boy.

Away away down deep, to your untroubled sleep, Mother used to tell him, in her singsong voice, stroking his hair as he went.

But sometimes, when she was not there, Nik sang it to him in his terrible, terrible voice, breaking on the higher notes, trembling on the lower, just bloody botching the whole thing on every possible level.

But he had a nice smile.

Death is similar.

He ought to know- he's died three times.

You feel a great pain, you breathe your final few, you fold down to feel the floor beneath your knees, to catch the cabinets with your fingers, to thrash your last throes, to make your grand stand-

A thousand bloody years on this planet and he is not going to be taken down by some brittle human and his little bloody bitch sister-

But in the end, you shut your eyes anyway.

You sink away beneath the waves.

There are so many layers -sleep, death, what does it matter- into the black they all take you, down and down and down.

Nik didn't sing to him this time.

That Nik is long gone.

He only died once, but it was enough.

Funnily enough, though, you can never take away everything.

A sword does not sever that much.

What happened is he stepped from that little crumpled husk of black ash and gray smoke and he stood staring down at this thing that used to be his skin, that peeled off and sloughed free his soul -or however some bloody poet might pretty up this thing of burned meat and singed hair- just as easily as any human sets down his corpse among graveyard dust and spring mildew and walks off into his bright white light, and on the other side of a spell he could not breach, his brother did the same.

For a minute, they both stood, and they stared down at this crumpled husk of black ash and gray smoke that used to be a boy called Kol.

He knows.

He counted every second.

He still doesn't know why.

He thinks it's because clocks move so much slower when you're watching their hands tick away the time, and so for a minute that lasted almost as long as the entire span of his very long life, he got to look at something else.

But you can't avoid the only thing in the room forever.

He took his minute, and he stared at the boy called Kol, and then he looked up at last, to the boy called Nik, who sometimes sang him off to sleep, and he remembers he took three steps forward, three very precise steps, each evenly spaced, and then he stopped.

Nik wouldn't remember.

He didn't see him.

But he took his own one shuddery step back, and then he fell down.

Nik, who used to pat his back when he cried, took a dagger, and he slid it into his heart while he wasn't looking, and for nearly a century he left him folded away in that box, suspended in his silent black sleep.

Nik, who taught him how to sit a horse, stored him away in a cellar and went on without him.

Nik, who fished him out of a pond too deep, covered his face with his hands and sobbed like a girl.

You never really know what to do, at a moment like that.

Stand there and tell the poor bloody bastard, sorry, I think I've got some peace to go find, perhaps 72 virgins to exploit, maybe a lady's dressing room to hang round?

He's not sure if that's the moment he was supposed to leave, if there was supposed to be something bright flaring down from the ceiling to touch its hot white beams to his head and carry him away into the light.

Maybe he shouldn't have sat down.

Remember the time I broke your favorite toy all to bits, he said, and Nik went on crying.

Remember the time I painted you up like a tart and I sent you off to the Lancasters without even a hint, he said, and Nik never looked up.

It's all right.

Just a bee out of your bonnet, right, brother?

Don't cry, Nik.

He's trying to be a man about this.

A thousand years ought to be enough, right, mate?

He's here, brother.

It's ok, Nik.

One hundred years, two deaths- he supposes he can forgive you that little 20th century spat that starved him of his last century.

They sat there for a very long time.

Nik won't remember it.

He'll never forget it.

There was never really a light, nor a tunnel, none of that bloody Judeo-Christian rot with angels and whatnot.

He had his brother right beside him, and then he did not.

He's doing all right over here, he supposes.

A bit boring.

He hasn't his bat, you see.

But he watches.

It is the only thing he has left, after all.

The Caroline girl makes Nik smile. Bekah doesn't like it; no one is ever supposed to eclipse her in his heart.

But he-

He thinks it's nice.

That's the one upside to death, at least.

It keeps all your secrets.

---

"Klaus!" she hollers, slamming the door behind her. "Klaus!"

He is already in the doorway of his study when she reaches the top of the stairs, curls tousled in his 'thinking' hairdo, that little rumple of a frown line that will never be permanent between his eyebrows. "I can hear a heartbeat three blocks away, love. You don't have to shout."

"Sorry. But you know Gaiden Markerson? The guy from the Pelham?"

He opens his mouth to respond.

She cuts him off. "Ok, well now all of a sudden he's pulling this 'you wash my hand and then maybe I'll think about globbing some cheapo dollar store hand sanitizer onto yours, blondie' crap with me, so today when I stopped by to check in and see if he had anything new to share, he cops this total freaking attitude with me instead of just handing it over, like the good little cooperative informant I just want everyone to be, and why are you smiling?" she snaps.

He presses his lips together and drops his head a little. "I'm sorry. Go on."

"So I tried to sweet-talk him, and turns out he's gay, so there was a waste of a twenty dollar push-up bra-"

"Oh, I assure you, it won't go to waste-"

"Hello, I'm talking," she snaps again, and this time he covers his lips with the palm of his hand, and yeah, get yourself a good giggle out of this, Mikaelson- hope you like your freaking Buckingham Palace-sized bed extra spacious. "He told me to come back later, when he had time. And I said 'no, I'm on a schedule here, buddy, I'm not your employee, you don't boss me around', and he laughed. In my face. And left me standing there at the front desk."

"He wouldn't dare," Klaus says with a little smile.

"Well, he did."

"And what did you do, sweetheart?"

She hesitates for just a moment, bringing her hands palm together and pressing both index fingers against her nose, flicking her eyes briefly away and then back to his. "I kind of beat him up a little."

He bursts out laughing.

"Not a lot! He was just such a sexist jerk, ok, like, yeah, little girl, come back when you have a penis and are therefore worth my time, so I just twisted his arm a little. While I was pushing his face into the wall. With my heel."

He looks so proud he could just freaking explode little messy pieces of indestructible hybrid all over the expensively papered walls.

"I know that probably really wasn't-" she starts, and then a sudden shifting in the room he partially blocks with his shoulders draws her attention beyond his smiling face, and she falters completely. "Stefan?"

He gives her a little wave from the chair he is seated in, his jacket draped over the back, his hands returning to where they have been neatly folded between his knees.

"What are you doing here?" She snaps her eyes back to Klaus, and takes a step forward. "Are you two, like, buddying around now? Because Stefan, the moment he makes you feel uncomfortable, or tries to force you off the wagon, you tattle to me. Immediately."

"I haven't even bloody done anything!" he protests, following her inside as she blazes past him, scowling as she goes, Stefan looking away as a little smile creases his face, Klaus flashing around behind his desk to take a seat before the stack of files she pulled earlier for him to sort through.

"Actually, Caroline, we were just talking."

"Yes. Quite a nice little chat, actually." He puts his feet up on his desk.

She slaps them off. "Not on my files."

Out of the corner of her eye she sees Stefan make a motion behind her back, and whips around to find him innocently staring up at her, hands placidly folded.

"That's real funny, coming from you, mate. Tell me again- what's the name of a female that doesn't start with 'E' and end in 'lena'? Come on, now, Stefan- I'm waiting for an answer." He folds his hands in silent mimicry.

"What did he do?" she demands.

Stefan clears his throat with a little cough. "I was just pointing out that Klaus seems a little-"

"Bit of a bitch at the end of a leash? Unless there's some other way to interpret mouthing, 'Here boy' and jiggling his hand round like he's having a seizure."

"Just making an observation." Stefan smiles pleasantly.

She shakes her head with a little roll of her eyes. "Ok, what are you even doing here?"

"I'm afraid that's my fault- the allure of my magnetic personality and all. You'll have to get used to that, Caroline."

"Yeah. It's a big concern of mine, actually. I have to fight off the entire throng of admirers waiting outside for your autograph every time I come over."

"Somebody's still in a mood, aren't they."

"That was a mistake," Stefan says, leaning back in his chair.

"Yes, I'm still in a mood. And excuse you very much for adopting a tone with me, and let me just say, who can tell if I've gotten all of my urges to grind the faces of uppity boys into their desks out of my system?"

Ok, just God, does he have to look so seriously enamored when she's threatening him?

"I have something better for you to do."

He smiles.

"Stefan and I were just discussing this recent ceasefire between Marcel and myself; I think, to commemorate the occasion, perhaps we should have a little get-together."

"You and Stefan were planning a party together."

"No, love; I thought you could plan the party. That is, after all, your forte. I'm thinking, catered meal, perhaps some dancing- formal wear, of course."

He smiles again.

"No budget."

There has never been anything quite so musical to her ears in all her entire very short life.

---

Nik is welcome to his precious little Caroline.

For a thousand bloody years she has known only transitory friendships, these little stepping stones that lead to nowhere, that will never carry her away to a happy ending.

She doesn't get an ending.

If a friendship endures from inception to the final dusty breaths of a shriveled old corpse on a clean white bed, it is because it ran out of time, because chance, fate, a failing kidney took this friendship, and it cut out its gangrene before it spread to sepsis.

People are frail, that's the problem.

There is nothing solid about them. The entire infrastructure is flimsy, the bones porous, the muscles soft, the skin broken by its paltry few pounds of pressure- and what this infrastructure houses.

There is no moral which does not crumble to time. Your bloody ethics do not lock themselves at the knees and set their shoulder to it, and push and push and push back against the centuries.

She used to be a nice girl, you know.

Once she probably deserved a friend.

But she doesn't bloody need one anymore.

Sometimes her chest squeezes horridly, true.

Sometimes she sits on the downstairs divan listening to Nik make the girl laugh, and she feel so very, very small, hearing these people choose one another but never her.

Keep your back very straight, your knees together, your hands folded, your face a slope down which all emotions run, collecting in your heart but never your eyes, she learned in London's drawing rooms, and this is what she does, when Nik makes the girl laugh, when from his upstairs study echoes the sound of Nik getting something she has never even glimpsed.

What is it like, brother, to be valued for something beyond your body, to be appreciated not for the softness of skin, the curve of waist and breast, to open your mouth and to express your views and to be really bloody listened to, not because a little dewey-eyed interest may lead to parted knees and open mouth, but because what you have to say is of real worth, because your views are appreciated, your opinions matter, you have something to contribute.

She has always been just a girl.

She's eaten scores of them, of course, these nobodies who never took her seriously.

But you don't fill the hole, with silent lips and ceaselessly staring eyes.

You never fill it, actually.

Mother never told you that.

She prepped you for your first blood, for the attentions of men which would come with the broadening of hips, the growth of breasts, she taught you herbs, she gave to you the care of your youngest brother as practice for the babe you would never cradle to your own breast and love so much it hurt, but she never trained you to make it go away, this hole.

Mother, she would say now.

Do you know why she wanted that cure?

She's had a thousand years.

She's seen a million things.

But she isn't tired of it all.

She'd like to watch the colonization of Mars, the ceaseless march that is technology, always on the move.

She just wanted one thing she could keep.

Nothing is so elastic it can be stretched out over centuries, but for a handful of decades, someone could have loved her all the way to her lonely mortal grave, right?

The brothers Salvatore rammed her chance down the throat of that ancient freak Silas without a second thought, and she will tip her chin, and she will let this run down her face to pool in her chest, she will never let it through, when Elijah sits across from her smiling at something that Petrova bitch has texted him on his phone and above her head Nik laughs at something the Forbes girl has done to strike his fancy, she will not. Bloody. Care.

But when one day the girl approaches her a little carefully, babbling something about some bloody party Nik has got up his sleeve, and a collaboration, when she looks so bloody earnest about it, there is once more this horrid squeezing in her chest, crumpling her up so ruddy small.

What's interesting is not the pressure this girl's stupid nonsense prattle exerts on her heart.

It's how she expands afterward, when she tells the girl yes.

---

She is sunk down beneath layers of raspberry foam when she hears the door to her hotel room whisper open and click shut.

"Blood bags on the counter!" she yells out to Stefan, holding up her foot to wriggle her toes about in the bubbles with a wrinkle of her nose, and is there any more fantabulous feeling on this planet, than the slip of soap and oil, the chemical fizzing of bath bombs erupting in little science experiment spurts from the bottom of your tub, spilling pink everywhere they roll? "I'll be out in a little while!"

"Stefan's still out, actually."

"Klaus!" she snaps, sinking down beneath the water with both hands to her breasts. "Get out!"

He smiles at her from the doorway. "You do remember I've already seen everything that's underneath there?"

"Bath time is sacred time. It's a girl's sanctuary, where she comes to be alone with her thoughts and her blow-up bath pillow and her black raspberry vanilla bath gel, not to be ogled by dirty old men."

"I'm not here to 'ogle' you, actually."

"Well, you're not doing a very good job at not doing it." She glares at him and sinks a little deeper, propping one foot on the faucet.

He takes a step inside.

"So what are you here for?"

"We've a slight problem on our hands, love."

"And that would be?"

"I think the hunter's hiding out in my house."

She sits up so abruptly her foot slips down off the faucet and sends a little geyser of raspberry-scented water into the air. "What? What do you mean, the hunter's hiding out in your freaking house?"

"I think the witches may have used their little assault as a distraction while they slipped him in the back door. Do you remember we couldn't smell any of them, not their sweat, not their breath, and neither could we hear their heartbeats, their breathing, all those little things we're so accustomed to picking up from miles away? I think he's tiptoeing about, under cover of that spell, looking for the white oak stake."

She spends a moment with one frothy hand pressed to her forehead, taking in his information. "Is that what you were getting at, when you asked me where I'd look for something important I thought you were hiding?"

"Yes. Someone's gone through my studio, my bedroom, my office. Subtly, of course, but I know when things are out of place. I suppose it could be Bekah or Elijah, poking round for the daggers, but my sister's a bit more straightforward than that, and while Elijah and I are hardly on the best of terms right now, it's nothing so serious that he would fear for his freedom."

"Rebekah wouldn't leave everything just 'subtly out of place' if she was pissed at you. She makes you look like a freaking pacifist."

He smiles a little at this, and takes a seat on the closed lid of the toilet, leaning forward to strain his pea coat at the shoulders and clasp his hands between his knees. "That's what Stefan and I have been putting our heads together over, these past few days. I'm not quite ready to trust either of my family, particularly after Rebekah just tried to have me murdered at the hand of this very hunter, but Stefan has an entire bevy of loved ones riding on my survival. You in particular, Caroline."

"Why would I be at any greater risk than everyone else?"

"If the witches did slip him in, he's been hanging round for a week, overhearing our conversations, observing our interactions. He knows you yourself are frequently in and out, and he knows Sophie is not only a captive in the house, but linked to you. He'll need to draw me out, put me in a vulnerable position, and the best way to do that would be to go directly through you, or Sophie."

"But he hasn't found the stake yet, so he can't do anything. He could take me or Sophie hostage or whatever, but what kind of leverage would he have over you? He can't kill you, so what's the point?"

"I'm going to show him where the stake is."

She blinks and looks down with a little laugh, ducking her shoulders back down into the fragrant warmth of this bath that he is so totally ruining. "Kay. I didn't just hear you say that you're going to lead the hunter right to the one thing that can kill you. I know I didn't hear that, because you are Klaus, you're going to outlive us all, you're too smart for everyone, you are faster, stronger, better, blah, blah, blah. Did I forget anything?"

He leans forward just a little, scrunching up his nose. "You forgot devastatingly good-looking."

"Sorry. You are Klaus, you're going to outlive us all, you're too smart for everyone, you are faster, stronger, better, your dimples fell entire civilizations of panties, your eyes bring monarchs to their weak, liquidy knees. Blah blah blah."

He dips his chin and looks up from beneath his eyebrows with the wickedest smile he has ever given her. "I don't care about entire civilizations of them," he says, and flicks a pointed look at the parts of her visible through the fine mist of bubbles beginning to melt away beneath the surface.

She drapes her arm over the side of the tub, letting her fingers dangle. "Could we get back to the part where you're apparently committing suicide?"

"I don't fancy one of the five wandering round the city, wreaking all sorts of havoc." He lifts his hand and tentatively traces the very tips of his fingers over the web between her thumb and index, utterly intent on this disturbingly tender, tender caress.

"So you're luring him out," she says, watching the movement of his fingers, the shifting of all the little tendons beneath the fine blonde down coating the back of his hand. "For what? You can't kill him. Not unless you want to spend another five decades out of your freaking mind."

He looks up with another of those wicked smiles. "Well, that's what the party's for, love. I just need someone who's not me to kill him."

---

He watches the bustling of the little human ants scurrying in and out of his home with lidded carts, steaming trays, fizzing bottles.

There is the squeaking of rubber wheels, the moist cringing of flinching eyes, the drill sergeant bellowing of his sister and Caroline, the scratching of pen set to paper, the soft eggshell rustling of Elijah at his books in the library-

Caroline's heels.

Rebekah's piercing orders.

He shuts his eyes, and for just a moment, he lays out the entire house in his head, projecting the whole thing round this little space he clears out in his mind.

The caterers- there, to his right, in the foyer. Squabbling over something with Caroline, whose heart rate is up, whose blood is elevated, whose fangs are so close to the gumline.

He smiles.

Elijah- the library, as he has already determined.

Sophie tucked away in her little newspapered hole, of course, scratching away at time one bored boot mark in the wall a day.

Rebekah- the kitchen. Really giving it to some little man who thinks because God, evolution, some startling noise in the sky gifted to him an appendage to hang down between his legs, he is not beholden to this one small girl with her pretty red cheeks and her innocent blue eyes.

She'll be seeing you, mate.

He smiles again, and he opens his eyes.

Stefan- behind him on the stairs, skipping steps as he goes.

He walks with that same casual swagger of the 20s, you know.

The man who was his brother did not care upon who he tread; this Stefan dodges bodies with a swallow and a sidestep, but don't for a moment think, mate, that this man who was once his brother does not circle still, waiting for the chum to at last overwhelm, to foam the waters all to red.

He presses his hands palm together beneath his nose, and he darts his eyes round the entry hall.

If a general is to win his battle, he must preside over as many details as he can manage.

War is not built upon grand gestures, but rather the backs of men who have never before been significant, scrabbling about in the mud with their rifles and their resolution.

It's the little things that trip you up, all the minor inconveniences of weather, of terrain, of weary feet blistered from the march.

Everything must have its place, all the set pieces must be nudged to their spots, the stage awaits only its players-

Wait.

The bloody- oh, shit.

"The ice sculpture," he says to Stefan, as the eldest Salvatore alights upon the bottom step and hops down onto the carpet. "She ordered a bloody swan, not whatever the hell that is."

"What?" Stefan asks, craning his neck to follow his gesture.

"Caroline-" he starts, and he hears her heels leave the foyer and click forward across the floor. "Hide the bloody thing," he hisses, and in a flash they are both upon it, he with his hands round the railing of the cart it drips down onto, Stefan kicking open the nearest door, both of them wheeling the whole thing madly along, Stefan's heart pounding, his blood rushing-

"What are you doing?" she demands from behind them.

They freeze.

He listens to the fluttering of Stefan's pulse, to the hammering of his own, to the thudding of each droplet sliding down off this frosty figurine, impacting like those long-ago cannon balls of the American Civil War.

They look at one another.

God be with you, mate.

Or Satan.

Whichever entity it is that watches over creatures like them.

He turns smoothly, his dimples cutting just as deeply as they will go.

Stefan slips himself in front of the sculpture. "We were just admiring all your handiwork. Everything looks great, Caroline."

"And I was just admiring how ravishing you look in that dress, love," he says, taking a step forward. "Have I told you lately how fantastically suited to blue you are?"

She tilts her head, tightening her hands on the clipboard she has propped against her stomach. "Why are you both kissing my ass? Is something wrong?"

"Of course not," he lies easily.

"Then what are you hiding?"

"It's nothing," he says.

"We wanted it to be a surprise," Stefan adds.

She could cut him with that smile.

"There are no surprises. Not today. I have every single moment of this party planned down to the second, boys. I have memorized all the shifts of the waiters, the exact moment at which they are supposed to switch out with each other, who's serving the crab puff cakes, who's on date pastry duty, and every. Single. Person on that guest list is filed away just as painstakingly: who hates who, who doesn't like this, who is probably going to piss Klaus off and wind up with their liver torn out, and who is on clean-up duty after that inevitably happens. So. Like I said." She smiles again with only her lips, hugging the clipboard to her chest. "There are no surprises." She makes a little flicking motion at Stefan with her pen. "Move."

He steps slowly to the side.

"Oh my God what the hell is that?"

Klaus lifts his hands helplessly. "I actually pointed out when they wheeled it round that there was some sort of mistake, but Stefan signed for it anyway. Sorry, love. Shouldn't have left it in his hands, I know, but I had business elsewhere."

"Did you just throw me under the bus?"

Apologies, mate, but every man for himself and all that.

"I called them like twenty minutes before they got here to go through each and every single item to double check that everything was absolutely correct and that they hadn't forgotten anything and they told me, Klaus, in fact, they absofreakinglutely assured me, Klaus, that everything I listed off was exactly, exactly what they had in their delivery van."

"Why do you keep saying my name, sweetheart- I told you, Stefan was the one who-"

"Noticed that there was an uneven number of date pastries vs. crab puff cakes and pointed that out to the caterers so they could fix it before it became one more thing Caroline had to deal with."

What a smirk on his face.

Let him get that for you, Stefan.

"And what did you do?" she demands, throwing up both her hands.

"I didn't eat any of these annoying little minimum-wage laborers putting their muddy shoes all over my bloody floors," he snaps.

"So you've been completely useless."

"I-"

"Did you even move the piano out of the way like I asked so that the string quartet actually has somewhere to stand?"

"Yes."

She drums her pen furiously against her clipboard. "Ok, you just lied to me."

"I was gettingto it."

"Caroline, don't worry about it. I'll take care of it for you."

"Your nose is looking a bit brown, mate," he snaps. "I'm afraid it's not a good look for you; it clashes with that thing you're wearing that I assume you see fit to call a shirt."

"Better than red. Which is what the floor underneath you is about to be."

"Stefan, the piano," she barks. "Klaus, go make sure Rebekah isn't undermining all my good taste."

He smiles thinly. "Right. Because I don't fancy my spleen where it is."

"What, are you telling me you're afraid of her?"

"Of course not; just wise enough not to pop round to the kitchen and tell her, "Oh, by the way, love, Caroline wanted me to ensure you're not ruining everything by sticking your vulgar little nose into it.'"

"So I have to monitor her too?"

"If by 'monitor' you mean engage in your daily session of eyeball scratching, then, yes, I think that should be left to you. You do seem to have rather a talent for it, after all."

Stefan claps him suddenly on the shoulder, leaning in toward them both as he bears down with his fingers. "Look, why don't you go handle Rebekah, and Klaus and I will both deal with the piano. I'll do the heavy lifting, he can boss me around, make me move it to every corner, shift it all over the room until he is satisfied and I wish killing him didn't trigger the untimely demise of me and everyone I care about. It'll be like old times." He smiles right beside Klaus' ear.

"Fine. Then go get dressed- both of you."

"I feel like perhaps we should salute, Stefan. What do you say- have you got a good 'Heil Caroline' in you?"

"Go," she bellows, pointing with that pen of hers, and now with a sudden laugh, Stefan flashes them both away down the hall, his hand still lingering.

"That's what you want, for the next millennium. You know her and Rebekah are going to butt heads at least twelve times a day. And then they're both going to turn to you, and expect you to take their sides."

"And then I jump out a window, and lament the fact that no matter how many times I break my head open on the pavement, it will never be permanent," he replies darkly, and wouldn't you know it.

Stefan has a real smile for him, in response to this.

He never meant to befriend this man, you know, back in the 20s. He'd latched onto Bekah after all, frail, frail Bekah who always went poking round men who weren't him, who always decided that he was never enough, who always sought out something better.

He'd put him in the rubbish bin where he belonged soon as she turned her back, this Stefan Salvatore with his funny hair and his casual strut.

But there was Kol, in 1915. Elijah, 1918. That brief stint with the Collins lad, 1922.

He was all out of brothers, you see.

It's not impulse that is his downfall, father.

It's what you never cut out of him.

---

She steps into his bedroom while he is dressing, and pauses in the doorway.

He watches her in his mirror while he lines up his tie.

"Everything's ready to go."

He lifts an eyebrow.

He says nothing.

She slouches a little against this doorframe that is the only thing still holding her up, and she touches a hand to her curls. "I'm sorry I was kind of a bitch earlier."

"No, you aren't," he says, but there is a smile in his voice, and there will never be any man who still looks at her this way after she has gone all Caroline Hitler on their ass, with so much adoration that for a moment she barely remembers this Caroline Forbes who never got enough, who always wondered why not her.

She steps in to take over his tie, knotting it deftly as he goes on smiling into that mirror.

"You know, after a thousand years, I am capable of handling my own tie."

She drops it with a nervous flurry of her fingers, and she smoothes her hands down the lapels of his jacket, taking one deep breath and blowing it back out against his suit, her curls dancing. "Sorry. I'm just…I'm nervous."

"You don't need to be," he tells her.

He sounds so sure.

He is always so freaking certain.

When you have paced this earth for a thousand years you know exactly how far a stride will measure, how much a step will advance, when you are aware down to the very millimeter where your feet will fall, it takes away all ambiguity, that eternal breeder of fear.

But some people have not had eight trillion years to know everything, ok, and they are kind of just freaking out a little, because what if he is not right; what if he has made a mistake, slipped up, miscalculated these slender little margins of error- what if he walks right into the trap of this man who has probably spent his freaking diaper years staking little Edward Cullen action figures-

She takes a deep breath, and she reaches down inside her for the girl who shut her eyes and tried to go away, when she gave up at last on all the screams that were never going to move her pretty new boyfriend, who watched her friend fall for this man who held her down like she was nothing, who never let her tell him no.

This girl does not succumb.

She will not submit to fear, to fate, to any will that is not her own.

She will march out to meet this as she does all else, with her glossy smile and her shoulder set to these endlessly rotating wheels of providence, always pushing back.

He smiles down at her. "Kiss for good luck?"

He says it playfully, the way he does most things he really means, but she can see the anxiety in his fingers, when he goes to twitch this tie that does not need to be adjusted, and she spots the fear in his eyes that drop too casually to these cuff links that do not need to be tweaked.

He can throw her down on a bed and screw her until she sees stars, but he cannot hold her hand without shaking, he cannot lean in for an embrace that is not sexual without hesitating.

You can live a thousand years, you can murder a gazillion people, and still be so innocent.

You pile ten centuries of time, of war, of bloodlust across your back, and still straining away against the load is the boy who never moved past his childhood, who always carried with him that deepest of cuts, the first heartbreak.

She takes his lapels gently in her hands.

It is not a passionate thing, a crushing of teeth and tongue, a raking of nails, a bucking of hips.

But it lingers.

He holds so still, she moves so carefully, but it's not any of this that gets her, that closes itself so freaking tightly around her chest and squeezes until it hurts.

It's the way he rests his forehead against hers when it is over, how long he keeps his eyes shut and how equally long he spends not looking away, when he opens them at last.

He goes for levity, of course, when he can finally talk.

"I'm looking forward to ripping that dress off you later this evening."

She pushes him back and hold him at arms-length. "Ok, listen very carefully to me, Klaus. You will not put a single scratch, tear or nick in this dress. If I were still alive, I would put this dress in my will. I would marry it, have its babies, and live in perfect happily ever after fairytale princess white picket fence domestic bliss with it."

She leans in just a little, and smiles.

"But you can rip what's underneath it."

---

She struts away toward the door, but at its opening there is a sudden hesitation, a lingering of the foot, a press of the hand against the frame.

"What would happen, if we both died?" she blurts out suddenly, tightening that hand just a little upon the frame. "I mean if one day your bloodline was wiped out or something? On…the Other Side. I mean, what's it like? Are you just, like, whisked away into this other dimension, all by yourself? Would we…see each other again?"

He slips both his hands into his trouser pockets, and he listens to the pounding of his dead heart, to the surf of the blood rushing in his ears, to the friction of fabric and finger.

He wets his lips.

To have a thousand years of language leached away by this one small girl is still so bloody disconcerting.

"Would you want to?" he asks, and if this is eagerness or terror in his voice, he couldn't bloody tell you.

He shot a man off the end of his rifle once, with those sulfurous bombs of the Great War falling all round him and the clattering of the machine guns whizzing past just overhead and that malignant soup of the trenches sucking away at his boots.

And do you know what he thought, sunk to his shin in this broth of shit and mud, up to his muzzle in English entrails, his bayonet pealing away against first rib and second?

What was Bekah up to in their Hamburg manor; how was Elijah getting along in Moscow; what happened to that bloody Elgin he pinched from the lad of three trenches ago; how bloody cold was this broth that spilled over his boot tops and bubbled round his toes.

He walks among atrocities that leak a man's bowels in messy splatters down his legs, and he never bats a lash.

And yet he cowers, waiting for this second-long eternity that passes from question to answer.

She turns round slowly.

"Yes," she says, and he has never been so warmed by such an incredulous look.

"Then we would."

Whatever he had to do, love.

---

She ripped down all the articles on her first day.

It made him fucking smile to see it, when he walked in with her daily meal, and he left them there until she got too hungry to resist.

Sophie Fucking Devereaux is a goddamned person, she told herself while that scared little tourist huddled in the corner and begged so brokenly for his mom.

They always revert, Klaus told her with a smile.

What seventeen-year-old is not too sophisticated for his mother, until he finds himself in a bit of a spot?

How quickly the childhood comes rushing in to make boys of men.

Fuck off, she replied, and she pressed herself into the opposite corner and she told that kid it was going to be ok, she would not hurt him, their captor may be a monster but she was the hero, and in what kind of fucking story does the goddamned devil not get his eventual comeuppance?

But do you know-

She didn't even say sorry, when she broke at last, and she chewed away at his throat until he stopped crying.

She wasn't.

You are never supposed to be the villain of your own story.

So here's what she does.

She wads the articles full of her sister's dead face up in the corner and she takes the top sheet from her bed and she drapes it over this poor goddamned seventeen-year-old who didn't deserve her teeth, and then she sits once more in the corner opposite all this, and she tells herself it happened like this:

Sophie Devereaux fought the good fight.

Sophie Devereaux was captured on a gray November morning, one of those in-between days, not quite a storm, neither a picnicker's golden dream, a drizzle here, a patch of sun there, and inside this cell where she waited to die, she decided they would not have the satisfaction, and she fashioned from her thin shitty sheets an escape that creaked against her neck when it pulled tight against her bars.

But you have to shut the covers of the book eventually, don't you?

Hers slams closed on a gently rotating fan that rattles when she awakens with a jerk, and starts to laugh.

Not the full-throated roar of a good joke.

You know the kind she means.

Ever double over in a fit because something is just so goddamned far beyond unfunny it's laugh or kill yourself?

You see how she fared with the latter.

---

There is a lot of noise downstairs, she thinks on the whateverth day of her sentence, staring up at the one corner of the ceiling where there are no dead sisters or gaping holes in the plaster where Klaus fucking Mikaelson ripped out the only temporary reprieve she gets, in a place like this.

Some bellowing, between Caroline and that frosty bitch of a sister who makes Klaus look like a goddamned humanitarian.

The nervous fluttering of a couple dozen human hearts, drumming all the way down into her aching gums.

The soft rubber whispering of wheels on wood, gliding along those polished floors the size of lakes.

More bellowing.

An intervention, by the soft-spoken one who cradled Caroline downright kindly in his arms, that day Klaus' little bitch boy walked her roughly into the mansion with his hand tightly on her elbow.

This all goes on for too long (way too goddamned long, if you ask her), interspersed with a burst of bitching from Klaus and the sound of something heavy scraping across those polished floors the size of lakes, and then from somewhere down below, she hears the sound of a violin.

Just a few tentative notes at first.

And then the crying of the cello, voicing something that she will never quite understand, that pierces her nonetheless.

She stares up at the ceiling.

Mom taught her you are not a victim, you will not go down without a fight, you will not lie patiently waiting.

But Mom.

Mommy.

She took Jane-Anne's fragile human head, and she smashed it all to pieces, and so even though on the second day of her interment she tried to kick Klaus Mikaelson in the balls, to flash out around him and make it into the hallway beyond, do you want to know what she felt, when he grabbed her by the scruff of her neck like an unruly fucking puppy and he tossed her down onto her bed in the space of a blink?

She wasn't-

She doesn't want to call it relieved.

But you tell her.

What does she deserve, after Jane-Anne leaked herself into bright red puddles beneath her boots?

She'll go through the motions, ok.

If ever she gets the chance, she will punch Klaus Mikaelson in the face until his nose fractures with a wet crunch and his teeth skate themselves across those floors with a rattle like dice, and she will spit on him as he falls.

But what she really wants, this girl who revolved laughing beneath that slowly rattling fan because she had nothing else to do, is to not look ahead into her very long future and see nothing but unnaturally extended years full of a hundred thousand seventeen-year-old boys who didn't deserve her teeth.

Mom.

Can you live so far beyond the scope of normal human years and not become this man who used to feature in all your bedtime stories?

Once upon a time there was a human called Niklaus.

He was a nice boy.

Isn't that how it went?

---

Elijah makes his opening speech.

He always did enjoy playing the charming host.

What a veneer his brother glosses himself in.

There is no more dangerous creature than the man whose core is formed of honor, who pursues all in the name of these flexible things known as morals.

What atrocity may not be overlooked if it is only a stepping stone to this thing called justice, if in pursuing the principled path one must get their hands a little dirty along the way, all in the name of this distant 'cause' dangled like the carrot before the nose of the donkey?

Man has based his whole existence round these causes which set country upon country and pit soldier against soldier. Murder your fellow man for the way he drapes his uniform, isn't that right, mates? Because he blouses his trousers round Russian-issued boots, you must take your French cannonballs, and cut him all to pieces.

Elijah is not a man, of course.

But his brother likes to forget that little detail sometimes, you see.

He looks at Caroline as he lifts his glass for the toast, not in the way he once lingered on Tatia, in a way that the human boy Niklaus was too stupid to pick up on, but with that same calculation which a thousand years has beat into them all.

His brother's voice dies away.

The quartet sets its bows to singing.

The dancers step into their positions.

Marcel flashes him a smile.

Bekah skewers him with a glare.

And from his perch on the stairs, glass in hand, Elijah watches this all, that poker face of his entirely placid.

He touches Caroline's arm. "Come on, love."

He listens to her take a breath, to the shifting of her curls on her shoulder as she squares them just a little and she lifts her chin, steeling herself for this opening act, and then she drapes her hand over his arm, and she slides it all the way down to his own hand, to lock their fingers together.

She turns her head to bring her lips to his ear, and she pitches her voice just low enough that it will not carry. "No offense, but your brother kind of creeps me out."

"Yes," he says, and he swings their joined hands subtly back, to hide them in the folds of Caroline's skirt. "He is a touch…intent, isn't he?" he points out with a look to Elijah, who only stares impassively back, not blinking.

He whisks her away out of the crowd.

---

"I want you to keep your eye out, for anything suspicious," Klaus tells her, leading her through the doorway of his studio, into the reek of acrylic and sealant.

Eighth grade drama, do not fail her now.

"What? Why?"

"I think Bekah's been at my things. Looking for this," he says, and he pulls down a canvas from the wall on her left and he flips it around, laying bare the plain wooden backing of the frame.

He slides his fingernail along the corner, and suddenly a whole piece of it lifts up and away, creaking as it goes.

The stake is nestled in this little hollow just below it, way too freaking innocuous for something that can wipe out fifty trillion vampires in one fatal swoop.

"Aside from me, you're now the only one who knows where it's hidden. If you see her hanging round here, tell me immediately. She doesn't belong in here, and I can tell she's been poking round my things lately. I don't trust her; she did just try to have me murdered recently, after all."

"Do you think she's going to try something tonight?"

"I don't know; I doubt it, but with Marcel suddenly in the picture, she might decide to strike up another bargain. She knows I don't trust him either, but also that I am content in my belief that he can't hurt me. He doesn't know that killing me will also take out him and all of his little cohorts."

"I think Rebekah spent way too much time organizing this party to tarnish it with bloodshed."

"She also knows with so many people here that I can't possibly watch everyone at once." He replaces the frame with a noisy snap. "Like I said; just keep an eye out. I'm going to whisk Marcel off for a little private chat; I want you to make sure she stays in the midst of everything, and doesn't go wandering off on her own."

She fills her lungs just as far as they will expand, and then she lets all this slowly out.

"Ok," she says.

He is not scared, his smile tells her.

But his fingers are just a little damp, when he picks her hand carefully up out of the folds of her skirt where she has buried it.

Funny how long you can live, and still be afraid of death.

---

"Marcel," he says graciously as his former protégé makes another pass at his sister, who has already rebuffed him at least once tonight, judging by the look on her face. "Fancy a drink? Let's catch up a bit, you and I."

He smiles and he claps his hand round the man's shoulder, and how gratifying it is, that Marcel still jumps just a little, his smile stiffening as he goes.

---

Those assholes are all just living it right the hell up down below, when the door to her room suddenly swings open.

It's not Klaus.

It's not even that bitch sister of his, who barely even looks at her as she tosses inside that day's catch, flipping her hair as she slams the door behind her.

There is no fresh young human who will die too young by her hand, pleading on their knees.

There is just the soft-spoken one who cradled Caroline downright kindly in his arms, holding a blood bag in his hand.

"You're Stefan," she says.

She's not sure exactly why.

Who gives a flying fuck what this asshole's name is, or why he's come in Klaus' place, or what it is that prompted him to show her the first fucking inkling of pity she has gotten in this awful goddamned place, with his bagged blood not fresh from the thrashing young vein.

He tosses her the bag, and leans his shoulder back against the door. "Yeah. I hope you don't mind some company; I'm going to be here for a little while tonight."

She jerks the cap from the bag, and she backs up to put the bed between them. "That sounds kind of ominous."

"It is. There's a slight problem."

---

"What's going on?" Rebekah snaps as the quartet strikes up something lively, and all around her guests pair off with twirling skirts and clasped hands.

"Kay, could we not hash out whatever bug is up your ass in the middle of the floor, where we're in everyone's way?"

Rebekah grabs her by the wrists and whirls her in between the dancing couples, shifting one hand to her waist, the other to the own fumbling hand she brings up to brush her off, and now she waltzes her rudely between some guy with his hair in these totally fugly dreadlocks and the girl whose hand he has just reached out to take. "Excuse us," Rebekah tells him bitingly, giving his hairdo such a judgmental look that it's a freaking wonder it does not shrink away in shame. "We're in love."

"What are you doing?" she hisses.

"I'm not stupid, Caroline. My brother's up to something. I want to know what it is."

"Ok, now is not really the time for this discussion."

"I believe any of the moments preceding the one where I rip out your heart and feed it to Nik to be the ideal one." She smiles icily.

Caroline flashes her very best Miss Mystic smile. "Go ahead. But you're going to ruin your nails, and I spent like an hour on them, and I know you like them, because you spent only maybe a minute bitching about how you should have just done them yourself."

"Tell me what Nik is planning, Caroline. He's got that schemey look in his eyes."

"He always has that look in his eyes, Rebekah."

"You can put away that little tone of yours right now."

"Or what? You'll eat my liver?"

"Or I'll dig it out of you with a spoon and leave it dangling halfway out of you, dripping everywhere, completely ruining your dress."

"The dress is crossing a line."

"Please, Caroline; you're shagging my favorite brother. Let's not talk about crossing lines."

"You know, Elijah probably just heard you. Although maybe he should be grateful for not being first in your heart, if you show favoritism by trying to murder the object of your affection."

Rebekah smiles and pulls her a little closer. "I just love it when you get all…what was it Nik called it? 'Fiery'? 'Feisty'? Annoying?"

"'Sexy', is probably the word you're looking for. You know, like, favorite spot to put his penis kind of sexy."

"You know I could snap you like a twig."

"You know you're going to have to handle all the clean-up, if you do that."

Rebekah glares.

She smiles.

The lights snap off with a sudden pop.

---

Well, Stefan tells her.

There's a good possibility some of your friends snuck the hunter in here to take a crack at Klaus, whose death will wipe out pretty much the entire fanged population of this city.

And he is here to make sure she, a.k.a. Caroline, does not get caught in the crossfire.

She sets down her bag.

She sits down on her bed.

Jane-Anne, you did not know that.

You did not premeditate the death of your own goddamned flesh and blood, who has not cried in God knows how many years, who tried so hard not to fold down onto her knees and weep like a bitch when they lowered your splintered head into that coffin and they stored you away in your tomb.

Jane-Anne.

You didn't…you didn't hate her that much, did you?

She looks down at her hands.

Jane-Anne kept her back turned for so long on that final confrontation, you know.

It's like she couldn't turn around.

It's like she didn't want to see.

Mom, did you watch that?

Mom, couldn't you have sent her a sign?

---

Here is a truth:

Marcel Gerard did not deserve to die.

But then neither did the boy called Niklaus. Not until much later.

But isn't that the real truth, then, mate?

All men deserve to die eventually.

Marcel shakes the ice in his glass, and he looks out over the small back garden, drowned beneath all that soft white moonlight.

"Elijah mentioned Kol. I'm sorry to hear that," he says suddenly into five minutes of silence, and isn't it strange, how deeply a name can cut?

You'll find, if ever you have the opportunity to live as he has, through decades of insurrection and centuries of starvation, death all round you though it is never supposed to touch your cheeks that never sag and your fingers that will not wrinkle, that it's always the queerest things which are edged.

Could he have ever guessed that one day Kol's simple little monosyllable moniker would pierce him til he bled?

It was never supposed to be permanent, brother.

You were never not supposed to wake up.

"I actually really kinda' liked him," Marcel says, shaking his ice once more.

"Yes," he replies, looking off across the garden.

So did he.

Maybe you wouldn't understand that, little brother, after he took that dagger and he slid it up into your heart, cradling your head back against his chest as you sagged.

But if you're listening, little brother.

He shouldn't have done it.

He should have faced you like a bloody man.

"So, Klaus- you bring me out here to woo me, or what? You know, Caroline kind of strikes me as the jealous type. You might want to watch yourself."

"Actually, I had something I wanted to discuss with you," he replies, and behind him, the house suddenly goes dark.

---

Stefan disappears.

For the space of three disorienting heartbeats, her eyes adjust.

The walls leap suddenly from the black, the bed rears up underneath her, Stefan's white dress shirt appears with radioactive abruptness beneath his tux.

Downstairs, there is a scream.

---

She doesn't mean to brag, but once she took down an entire royal house for hurting poor Kol's feelings, those bloody bitch princesses and their lofty ideas about station.

They were in the middle of a ball.

Nearly a hundred royals, all prancing about with their necks dripping diamonds and their fingers flashing round blinding glimpses of emeralds cut to dazzle.

What a mess they made, amidst their pretty jewels.

So excuse her, if she laughs when you come at her with that pitiful little excuse of a gun, all five chambers of this little toy of a weapon clicking away, spurting its hot white exhales that sting where they strike.

"Don't kill him! He's one of the Five!" Caroline screams as she slaps this toy out of his hand and she grabs him round the throat, forcing him down onto his knees.

"I saw his tattoo- look," she says, jerking up the man's cuff.

"This isn't Galen."

"No, it isn't," Caroline replies grimly.

She backhands him into a limply unconscious heap on the floor.

"Elijah, don't kill anyone!" she hollers over the sound of some woman weeping over her date, his severed head rolling forlornly about in her lap, and she grabs Caroline by the wrist and tugs her with a sharp jerk toward the stairs. "Where's Nik?"

---

"Forget to pay your power bill, Klaus?"

He snaps his fingers at one of the two bodyguards who have accompanied Marcel out into the garden. "Go and have a look at what's going on."

Marcel downs the last of his drink with a flick of his wrist.

The screams do not belong to Caroline.

He would bloody know, he assures himself, and he goes back to leaning casually against the railing of the terrace, nonchalantly swirling his own drink.

---

There is another shot.

Her brother swings himself lithely down over the banister, landing his perfectly-polished shoes on the bastard's head, and she hears a crack that she hopes wasn't the man's bloody neck.

It's a bloody cave in here, it is that dark.

She shoves aside some useless little twit who's trying to push her way through this crowd that has begun its predictable stampede, the stupid bloody cows, towing Caroline along behind her, punching some thick stupid boy who won't bloody move in the side of the head and tossing him aside as he falls, her heels clicking against the marble, Caroline's hammering out this same staccato rhythm, the crowd frothing around them, everything jostling elbows, flailing hands-

Elijah slips his arms round one of their necks and strangles him unconscious, the man sliding down to meet his long black sleep in a pile at 'Lijah's feet.

He flicks the hair from his eyes. "Please, everyone- remain calm."

Caroline has dug in her heels and yanked them both to a stop, and now in the center of this maelstrom they plant themselves like a boulder round which the river must redirect itself, Caroline's fingers pressing tightly round her wrist. "Wait."

She indicates the man at Elijah's feet.

"That's Galen. Oh my God- Elijah, does he have the white oak stake on him?" she calls out, and with just the tiniest lift of his eyebrow, her brother leans over to rifle the man's suit, and comes up empty.

"Oh, shit. Galen is the one Klaus is expecting to come after him- oh my God," she breathes, and there is so much fear in the girl's voice that her stomach drops away to find her feet, burning as it goes.

---

Stefan puts his shoulder to the door.

"What are you doing?"

"Klaus thinks the hunter might come after you, to use as a bargaining chip. Now, I don't know exactly what he has planned, but I know that he's not strong enough to get past me holding the door shut. He can't open the door, he can't use you against Klaus." He flicks his eyes up to hers. "Just relax, all right? I'm not here to hurt you. I'm not even here to rub all this in, the way Klaus would."

She smiles thinly. "So you're one of those good vampires I've heard so much about."

"No," he says.

He is just as decent a guy as he can be, with a nose full of human and an entire evolutionary chain of unnatural lust working against this frail, frail control he holds onto for as long as he is able.

---

"Your party got just a little out of control," someone says from the doorway leading out onto the terrace, and a man steps from hallway shadow to the bright white light of this sharp autumn evening, loosening his tie as he goes.

"What's going on in there?" Marcel demands.

"Dunno; seems to be under control now, though. Couple of guys with guns; one of 'em had a sword. We got one with his head cut off, someone with their heart ripped out, couple other less permanent injuries, I think, but that oldest Original, your brother -Elijah, right?- took them out. Well, actually, your sister got one of them. There's some panic still going on, but nobody's, you know, killing anyone anymore. Came out to have a smoke; didn't realize you guys were out here."

The man edges toward the railing, reaching into his jacket. "You mind?"

He tips his head. "No."

He takes another sip.

"Well, this has been a fun night, man. Should have known it wouldn't be without its drama, though," Marcel tells him.

"I always have had a bit of flair for this sort of thing."

He lifts his glass.

The man reaches into his jacket.

---

"Caroline, where is he? What in the bloody hell is going on?"

"He knew about all this. Ok, well, he didn't know they were all going to be showing up, he knew Galen would be here, and he was going to lure him out, and he took Marcel off somewhere so they could talk in private, but really so that Galen would see him off by himself and decide the time was perfect to strike, when he was all by himself, or almost by himself, but he thinks freaking Galen is coming after him, not some guy he's never even seen before, and he doesn't know there are freaking two of them running around, and who the hell even knows who's got the stake-"

"Take a bloody breath," she snaps, seizing the girl by the shoulders.

"Elijah," she barks over her shoulder as she hears him padding up behind her on his soft-soled Ferragamos. "Search the house. Find Nik. He's gone and done something stupid. Don't let anyone stab him; I'll be displeased."

That right is the sole property of his own flesh and blood, after everything he has done to them.

And besides.

No one ruins her bloody party.

"Let's go." She clicks her fingers at Caroline, and she marches away with her skirt clutched daintily in her hands, the blood surging in her veins.

You will not die, Nik.

Not so soon after Kol.

She bloody forbids it, you stupid prat, everyone leaves her too bloody soon, and you will not do the same, if she has to follow you back behind that veil, and she has to tow you out with her own bare bloody hands.

---

Marcel turns back from the railing to face his bodyguard, his mouth partially open.

He watches the moonlight pool between his lips.

The man's hand shines with soft nickel luminosity.

He rolls his whiskey round his mouth.

The man smiles innocuously at him, a little nervously, but isn't that how they all approach him, so tentatively, as though he will rip head from shoulders for the most minor of infractions, for the faintest suggestion of an impertinent glance?

He swallows.

Did you know, mate, he can smell gunpowder?

Not that residue left behind on the fingers, that metallic sprinkling of violent dust, blown back across the palm and over the fingernails- any human accustomed to the range can scent out that particular perfume.

No.

What he means is the propellant snuggled down into its brass bed, awaiting that fateful drop of pin to primer.

He's had a bit of experience, you see.

He once climbed an entire wall of French revolutionaries, pistol in his hand, cartridges between his teeth, and all round him was that metallic fragrance of the balls, singing as they fell, sizzling where they struck.

You don't make war on someone like him, lad.

"Marcel!" he yells out in warning, and he yanks the boy one-handed against him, shoving his hand past the lapel to the trigger of the pistol in the boy's inner pocket, and now twice he fires through the lad's jacket as the railing shivers against him and on the far side of it another of these pesky hunters makes his appearance.

His chest puts out two aromatic geysers of blood and he reels back over the railing, his arms cart wheeling as he goes.

The boy in his hand makes a lunge for his other pocket.

Marcel's bodyguard flashes across the terrace.

---

"It's getting quiet," she says with one shoulder to the wall opposite Stefan, arms crossed over her chest. "Does that mean all the fun is over? I don't feel dead. I guess that means Klaus wins again."

"Probably. He usually does. Happens when you've been around that long, and you've seen pretty much everything there is to see."

He keeps his shoulder wedged tightly against the door. "Still. Better safe than sorry, right?" he asks, and now from the back of the house, two shots ring out in rapid succession.

---

Rebekah flashes away down the hall.

She sprints after her across the carpet, these quicksand fibers hindering her heels, stumbling her steps, and please please, God tell her he is still in control, please tell her that in another moment she will not clutch her chest, sink down to her knees, find herself whisked away to this other dimension where she will never see her mom, where she may not find her friends, where his stupid jerk face might just be wrong, and they will never meet again-

---

How bloody close he has cut this, that hand with its stake poised for the kill half an exhale from his sternum, tip rasping against his shirt, the boy's breath in his face, Marcel's shout in his ear, but Marcel's protector is a fast little bugger, and to the hunter's head go his hands, and now a twist of his wrists and a whipping of his arms and the boy's spine separates with a crack, the entire bloody lot, stake, pistol, boy collapsing with a clatter to the pavement beneath him.

He calmly brushes off his suit, and he picks up his glass once more.

Marcel's bodyguard has gone round to check on the other hunter.

"You just missed his heart," he calls out.

"Did I now," Klaus says mildly, and he takes another sip as the man finishes him off.

---

Rebekah bursts onto the terrace, she right behind her, and now they both skid to a stop as Klaus hops up to take a seat on the terrace railing, both arms spread out to either side, drink in his right hand, the biggest shit-eating smirk on his face.

Marcel flashes them both a smile that might just charm her lacy black panties right down her fabulously-scented legs, if she hadn't already seen it done just a little bit better. "Evening, ladies. You girls were having too much fun in there- couldn't have you one-upping us, could we?"

Klaus raises his glass to her, and the things he is going to do to her tonight in her lacy black panties, she sees in his eyes.

He takes a drink.

Rebekah clotheslines him square in the chest.

He sprays bourbon as he flips over backward and lands with a loud thud in the flowers down below, perfuming the air with all their ripe little deaths, and now his sister sweeps her legs with ladylike grace over the railing, and she follows him down into this crushed vegetation, heels-first.

"You little bloody idiot," she hisses, and begins to kick him in the head.

"Get off me, Bekah!" he snaps, fending her off with his forearms, protecting his face with the sleeves of this once-nice suit she kicks holes into, trying to roll himself off to the side, Rebekah pursuing him all the way, he wrestling with her skirts, she trying to put her knee to his throat, to pin him thrashing in place-

Marcel flicks an amused look at her.

"I'm going to rip off your head, Nik, and I'm going to put it so far up your bloody-"

"Rebekah," Elijah interrupts from behind her.

She freezes with her hand to the side of Klaus' face, forcing him cheek-down into the mud, his hands looping around her wrists, both of them locked together, Klaus' eyes blazing, hers just as hot-

"You have guests to attend to."

"In a moment, Elijah. Nik's about to be castrated, and you know I don't like to leave my work half-finished. Caroline, hand me the terrace railing."

"I'm gonna' check on my people," Marcel puts in, and he leans over the railing with a playful smile to them both. "Klaus, nice talking to you. Rebekah- always a pleasure."

"Obviously," she says with a falsely bright smile, pushing down with the heel of her hand.

Klaus sputters, he pushes back, he upends her on her ass and surges upright, spitting mud, his hair spotted with all the crushed little corpses of the plants they have demolished. "Do you want another dagger in you?"

Marcel and his bodyguard vanish.

"Niklaus," Elijah says calmly.

"Well, I didn't bloody start it, Elijah."

"You're going to personally dry clean this dress yourself," Rebekah snaps, wobbling just a little as she stands and she gives his shoulders a brutal shove, her heels sinking into the dirt. "If you've ruined it, Nik, I will take that stake, and I'll ram it down your bloody throat, and then I'll watch you slowly choke to death on it, while I toast your long-awaited demise with that bottle of 1907 Heidsieck you won't let anyone open."

"It's a bloody dress, Bekah- I'll bring in an entire shipment of them from Paris."

"I don't care about the bloody dress, your drooling, half-wit prat!" she screams, and then she sends one of her shoes sailing right at his eye, and in a blink she is gone.

He throws his hands up. "What did I bloody do?" he demands.

"Just clean this up, brother. I'll talk to her."

She hears Elijah disappear with that characteristic little hiss of air displaced too quickly, and she crosses her legs at the ankle and shifts her weight back onto the rear heel, folding both arms over her chest.

"What?" he snaps, wiping one hand down his face.

"Nothing."

"Then why are you smiling," he spits, yanking half a torn leaf from his curls.

"You just got beat up by a girl."

---

He takes off his torn suit jacket, and he flings it just as far as it will fly across the garden.

He fumbles off his tie amidst an entire flurry of the worst language he has accumulated throughout his ten very long centuries, and this too he sends in a broad arc across the ruined flowerbed, scrubbing one hand frantically through his hair.

He rolls up his sleeves.

He touches one hand to its cold steel, and he leaps the railing in a casual bound.

In the hallway just beyond the doors, he pauses to assess himself in the mirror, and he wipes the last of the mud from his cheeks.

They all look round, of course, when he descends the stairs with his hands in his pockets, smiling as he steps, his teeth cracking against the grains he missed, when he spit out the final mouthful of that undignified little wrestling match.

What a bloody smile Marcel has for him.

"Decided to dress down, Klaus?"

"Party's over; time to let down our hair, now isn't it, Marcel?"

Ah, yes, mate.

You remember this smile, now, don't you?

You won't recall it, but once he stood over your flimsy still-human body wearing this precise expression, his mouth red with your life, his hands shaking with your death.

You would have screamed to see it.

He looks from this smile of Marcel's that fades away so quickly to the hand he has clapped round the shoulder of a girl bent sobbing at the waist.

She has a head in her lap.

She's spilling herself so noisily down onto it.

To feel the anguish of a stranger, to be touched by tears you do not recognize, is a human failing. In all of his very long time upon this earth, he has not once seen this turned into any sort of advantage, never has it put a man ahead of his time, his fate, his station, Death grants him no reprieve for this small kindness, disease does not pass his brow, starvation will not ignore his stomach.

But the boy Niklaus understood, once.

He has his moments of occasional usefulness.

He puts this boy into his voice as he crouches down in front of her, and he reaches out to gently touch her cheek, to tilt her chin tenderly up, and he turns her round to look at the limp remains of these three hunters whose shoulders bear the burden of this bloody death in her lap.

Shhh, sweetheart.

There, there.

He brushes his thumb along her cheek and he gives her the tentative smile of this human boy Niklaus, such a trustworthy thing it is, and do you want to know the really interesting thing?

In the end he hardly needs to say a word.

She sets upon them so fiercely little pieces of Galen Vaughan splatter the banister, the walls, the guests still watching from their grimly silent circle.

---

Things have gone very quiet downstairs, when Klaus comes to let out Stefan.

He doesn't look at her.

Stefan does.

He doesn't say anything, but she gets the impression it's not really a personal thing, and when he steps out into the hallway, Klaus already long gone, he bangs his hand twice against the door, and he gives her this little thing that is not quite a smile, not exactly a frown, and then he shuts the door between them, and she hears him start off down the stairs.

My sister's dead, she feels like calling out for some reason.

It was me.

She just thought maybe someone should know.

---

"Well, that was a productive evening," he says over his shoulder as he hears Caroline in the corridor outside his room. "I wanted one hunter, I got five."

He turns around with a smile.

She leans against the door frame, still clad in her gown, her hair just a touch worse for the wear, her lips still freshly pink, her cheeks just as rouged, and she crosses her arms. "How did you know about the guy who attacked you on the terrace?"

"I didn't, but every plan needs to have a little room for improvisation. If you go out there, and you think you've got the entire battle completely figured out, that some things won't change on the fly, that you won't suddenly lose a regiment to a lucky volley, a cavalry unit to a bit of mud, then you've already lost the war. Not to mention, love, I've seen an assassination or two in my day. I know what one looks like." He lifts the bottle of champagne on his dresser, and he pours out two glasses, picking up the first, holding out the second.

"Actually, um, I'm going to go out with Stefan. Elijah's going to take care of the hunters, and Rebekah and I decided we were just going to take care of everything else in the morning, so I was going to change out of this real quick and go have some quality friend time."

She doesn't ask him to join, of course, and he sees in her fidgeting hands and her feet rolled from sole to side, so eager to be off out the door, that it never even crossed her mind.

He sets down the second glass.

"Oh," he says.

Well, then.

Isn't this how he knew it would be, with Stefan in the picture?

"I'll see you later," she tells him, and she flashes away down the stairs without so much as a foot put through to his room.

A proper bloody good-bye might have been nice, he thinks, but who ever considers that even a monster might need such a small gesture as this, a touch on the cheek, a press of the lips, that wordless little promise between stupid human lovers, who one day will stop coming back but who live as though death shall take them both together?

---

They are in the Napoleon House.

Her hand is shaking.

Fear is a funny thing, she's found.

You freeze or you spew: there is no in between.

She sits at this table between them with her hands in her hair, casually twirling, and she vomits out so many, many things without saying anything, and in his smile is this little invitation, it's ok, Forbes, cut to it, whatever you need to say, but, Stefan, what kind of opener is there, to something like this?

She stops very suddenly, and she blows out a breath.

She sets both hands on the table.

She survives.

She is Caroline Forbes: it's what she does.

If Stefan Salvatore looks her in the eye and he sees what she has been afraid of all along, that he has wasted his time, that he should never have bothered, it will break her.

She will shatter, she will be strewn, she will piece herself slowly back together.

Caroline Forbes sat on a wall.

Caroline Forbes had a great fall.

None of the king's horses and none of the king's men bothered to put her back together, so she did it herself.

She swept up the shards.

She glued together the cracks.

She lifted her chin and she said, ok, this time I learned, and she stayed off that goddamn wall, and she skipped on down the yellow brick road, and ok, she is totally mixing her metaphors here, and anyway she never really did stay off the wall, she climbed a little higher every time, she fell a little farther, she swept up a little more, but do you want to know what she never did?

She never stopped trying to get to the top.

She never stopped tacking all her pieces back in place.

So here she goes again.

"I'm kind of sleeping with Klaus."

She hears Stefan's breath in his nose.

Hers, pounding in her lungs.

The foaming of beer slopped over the edge.

He blinks.

He looks down at his hands. "I kind of already figured that out, Caroline."

"It's kind of more than just sex. It's kind of...a lot more."

He looks up.

Somewhere, a clock is ticking.

There is always a clock ticking. This is how the rest of her life will be, a ticking clock and all the frail human hearts this clock ushers away toward their deaths and she just freaking sitting here awaiting the next blow, squeezing her eyes shut against the shot.

"Caroline," he says gently, and she opens her eyes very carefully, and she sees that across this table between them, he is smiling at her. "I kind of already figured that out too."

"Am I horrible?" she whispers.

He sits back.

He slides out of his booth and he nudges her into the corner of hers, and then he sits down with his hands folded on the table in front of him, and he gives her this very serious look out of the corner of his eye. "Yes. You are literally the worst person I've ever met, Caroline. I actually, uh, I had this brush, with Hitler, back at the height of the war. And do you know what I thought, when I first met you? My God, this girl is just the very reincarnation of that guy. I mean, you don't know how hard I've looked, for some hint of like a moustache, or maybe a swastika sewn into your cheerleading uniform. In fact, every time Damon does something just unforgivable, I think, hey, it could have been worse- Caroline Forbes could have been my sibling."

Why are laughs so freaking sticky sometimes, she wants to know, and then she lets out this little strangled something that is neither sob nor snicker, and she leans her head down against his shoulder.

He puts his arm around her, and he sets his chin on her head. "I think you're happy, Caroline. And I don't think there's anyone who deserves that more."

---

He has his feet dangling off the side of his bed and a book in his hand, when she steps through his doorway.

He doesn't look up. "I thought you were out with Stefan."

"That's weird- I could have sworn I was standing in your room, but, I mean, one of us here does know everything there is to know about everything ever, so who am I to say that I'm not closing out happy hour with Stefan down at the Napoleon House right now?"

"Very funny." He shuts the book, and he takes a sip from the glass on the nightstand beside his bed.

"What are you reading?" she asks, because his voice has lost all its bite, and he smoothes his thumb so carefully over that cover, as he leans back against the headboard with his eyes on the ceiling.

"Just something I brought back with me from Mystic Falls. I always keep it at whichever house I'm currently living in."

"It must be something pretty important, then." She takes a tentative step forward.

He flicks his eyes down from the ceiling, and he reaches up to run one hand down his face, scrubbing roughly at the beard coming in across his jaw, his nostrils flaring just a little, one foot twitching suddenly against the bedcovers. "It's Kol's…'memoirs', actually."

"His 'memoirs'?"

"They go something like this: 'Dear Nik, I know you're reading this, and I know you're jealous that nobody saw fit to scribble down any of your life, but we've always known your star has never shone quite so brightly as mine, so don't take it too hard, brother.' He wrote them all himself, of course. He didn't get very far. Most of it's little notes to me and Bekah, because he thought we'd go poking our noses into it instead of respecting 'the privacy of his art'."

"Did you?"

"Of course."

He tosses the book off to one side, and she watches it bounce once, twice, Klaus shooting her a little lift of his eyebrow that is just way too purposefully casual.

"You know it's ok to miss him. You don't have to take that out only when everyone else is gone, like it's some kind of dirty secret."

He stares at her in utter silence, and then he blinks, just once, but it is enough of a flicker in his defenses for her to take another step, to quietly shut the door behind her, to carefully ease herself forward just a little more.

"Well, it won't bring him back, at any rate, and it certainly won't erase all the things I did to him."

"Grieving's not for the dead. It's for the living," she says quietly.

He takes a very deep breath, and he looks away.

"I mean, that's what funerals and stuff are for, right? It's not to lay them to rest; it's to lay us to rest. It's to say good-bye. They've already found their peace. So it's our turn."

He lets the silence stretch and stretch and stretch.

"Did you have a nice chat with Stefan?" he asks roughly, still not looking at her.

"I told him about us."

He does look around at this, one hand coming up to rest on his thigh, his head still tilted back against the board. "He already knew, actually. He came round one afternoon to have it out a bit with me. Just doing his duty as best friend, setting down some parameters for me. Apparently, he'll find some way to make me pay, if I ever hurt you. I suppose it's completely useless to tell him he needn't worry, considering his opinion of me."

"That wasn't really the point of it. I mean, if I wanted to give him a heads-up about us having sex, I could have just sent him off with Rebekah for an afternoon. I'm pretty sure she'd have lots of little bitchy comments to make about it."

She sits down on the bed beside him, next to the leg with the hand on it, and she squeezes her palms nervously together between her knees. "I wanted-" she starts, and her voice wavers here, breaking off into so many little pieces, and she licks her lips and she inhales through her nose, and she tries again. "I wanted to let him know that it was time for him to walk away, if that's what he needed to do."

---

Why, he wants to know, and Caroline reaches up so carefully, and she touches his cheek.

"Because, yes, I wanted to say it back. Because I am in love with you- because I am in love with you, Klaus, and I'm not going to be sorry about it anymore."

He doesn't even embrace her, you know.

He's not even sure he can lift his arms.

He just squeezes his eyes shut, and he turns his face into her palm, and how entirely different it is, this caress of the face, when there is no pity behind it.

---

A/N: Well, the Five fucked that up astronomically, didn't they? Are their troubles on that front over then, or...? ;)

We've got one more NOLA flashback to go; it will be appearing in the eighth one-shot. It will also be told from the perspective of Klaus and Kol, and will delve more into the relationship between Marcel and Klaus, as well as covering what it was that led to Kol being daggered. Aaaaannd...our favorite Original blonde bitch will be putting in an appearance at last. We'll also see another character crossing over from Mystic Falls in the next one-shot, so ruminate on who that might be for a bit.

Kol is a character we didn't see much of in the original canon, which leaves authors a lot of room to play, in terms of fleshing him out, so while we've all got our own little headcanons, I hope you feel I've done him at least some justice.

And yeah, I sort of vomited my Klefan/Team Barbie/sassy Klefaroline feels all over this. I'm not sorry.

Thank you as always for your comments, your favorites, and your tumblr messages; it makes my day, to hear from you guys.

Until next time.

*Dramatically flourishes cape and vanishes*