A/N: So Klaus gets a little gay in the flashback.

Ok, he gets a lot gay. I know this isn't some people's thang, so I'm throwing this out here now. (Although if a little homosexuality gets to you after he's murdered children, killed people for having bad blow job game, and just in general manipulated and murdered his way through scores of innocents, I'm sort of judging you a little.)

As with, well, uh, everything I write, this flashback is pretty nasty. *Covers Amanda's seventeen-year-old eyes*

The quote Klaus is turning over in his head in the very first paragraph is from War and Peace.

And with that, I leave you all to sit in shock before your screens, dumbly blinking for several disorienting moments, because this is surely the shortest author's note I've ever written.

New Orleans, 1912

What is wrong? What is right? What should one love and what hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What is the power that controls it all? Pierre Bezuhov asked in Tolstoy's masterpiece. And to rejoin: And there was no answer to any of these questions, except the one illogical reply that in no way answered them. This reply was: 'One dies and it's all over. One dies and either finds out about everything or ceases asking.' But for one such as him there is not even this.

You see this man's heart, here in his hand. It has ceased to beat. Its owner has passed beyond. Has he achieved peace, purgatory, paradise? Does he drift in aimless mists among the masses, who shake off his presence with a brief shuddering of their shoulders and a slapping of their neck? Does he stir them with cobweb fingers to itch the nape and twitch the brows, lingering always among what he can touch but no longer impact?

Such is the great mystery of man.

He'll never solve it.

He is still occasionally shocked by this.

He wakes beside Kol in a rumpled bed and he touches his chest and he blinks his eyes very languidly, and he thinks to himself, today I am 927, and I have so much more to come, and on very damp mornings when there streams through the window the scent of sea and storm, when he is again struck by the understanding that he has left to him a million more of these sullen gray days that weigh lightly on no man's soul, he wonders how many more revolutions of the clock he truly desires to defeat.

And then the boy on the bed beside him stirs, smiles sleepily, pares his heart down to the bone beneath it, and he remembers.

Once there were two boys who wanted only an endless wood, numberless streams, incessant youth. A boy could live forever, beneath the trees of his ancestors, in pursuit of hoof and paw, bounced along on the back of a brother.

And so he gets up.

He ruffles the hair of this other boy and he cracks from his neck and his knuckles the stiffness of sleep, and he puts on a smile, the greatest mask of all.

He thinks of his sister, who has hated him with steady and faithful heart for nearly a century, of her soft hair, her sharp tone, how once she held his hand and she trusted him across a stream swift enough to scatter and drown them all, and he buttons his jacket.

He remembers his father hates him, his mother discarded him, and he gives his curls a little comb with his fingers, a slick of oil, a last glance in the looking glass.

He does not walk out into that sullen gray day for the right reasons.

To prove a father wrong, to spit in the face of Mother, the original whore, to turn the shoulder to beloved Bekah and prove at least to the world that there is no weight which may be hung about his ankles and bring him staggering to his knees- is that life?

Hasn't evolution given a man his nose to smell the flowers, his hands to feel the smooth young cheeks of a girl flush with love, his eyes to admire the death of the sun and the birth of the moon? Is a sort of thumbing of the nose true purpose, does revenge plant in his heart the true verve of all existence has to offer?

Of course not.

But he has more, you know.

This heart in his hand, for instance.

He squishes it in his palm, he drops it carelessly onto the victim's face, he licks it slowly from his fingers.

These are the little amusements. You can hang an entire century on these moments which blur together from one to the next.

And that boy, of course.

Quite a swathe Tim has cut through the French Quarter.

He turns up the collar of his greatcoat.

It doesn't quite match his suit, Elijah would be positively horrified, but it's a relic of that American Civil War he enjoyed so much, and still caught within its gray folds is the crusted blood of an exceptionally tasty Union officer who died full of musket balls in this very same coat.

It's quite warm.

It's bad form to smoke in it, cigar smoke never will persuade itself to be aired from anything, but this freshly imported Cuban El Luxardo adds such a dimension to this somber morning, to the blood in his mouth, to the piece of liver wedged between his back molars.

He blows out a sky-colored cloud.

There is a woman sagged down the wall of Lafitte's, open at the throat, gushing at the mouth, trying to guppy her final words to him, the little round marbles of her eyes locked already in that final stare, her chin red, her lips foaming.

He tilts his head.

He blows another cloud.

He walks on.

There is a smear of red farther down the wall, a splash of it in the street, another streak on the sidewalk, a puddle round the face of the man who left it all behind.

He steps gracefully over him.

He flicks the cigar.

The ash drops sizzling against the man's open eye.

Now, Tim.

The trick is to let them see you coming.

These blokes- didn't have a clue, died rather peacefully, considering, exited their bowels post-mortem, let go their bladders in the throes of death and not dread, dropped where they stood, probably had not even time for a scream.

He has potential, this pretty young thing, but he's a ways to come yet.

"Timmy," he calls out cheerfully.

He taps his cigar again.

"Oh, Timmy."

Such a silent thing, death, isn't it?

It's as if the birds themselves know.

The clouds have opened themselves against his head, washed the oil from his hair, smoothed the curls in lank ringlets across his forehead, broke themselves apart against the pavement, ricocheted themselves in a thunder of grapeshot off the bonnets of cars, filled this heavy steel air with a fusillade to shake the shutters of sleeping homes, and yet not a peep from anything that is not this sky that makes war upon the streets.

He finds the boy at the end of Bourbon St.

He smells of fear and arousal.

He has a heart in his hand, another smeared messily round his mouth.

He cries very noisily.

"I don't want this anymore," he babbles, dropping the heart, bringing his hands to his eyes, wiping the snot from his nose, tilting his arm down to catch the pink saliva bubbling against his mouth.

What a faucet grief opens inside a man.

"I don't want it I don't want it!" he sobs, wiping his eyes, his nose, his mouth.

"Why?" he asks gently. "Because it's too enjoyable? Because you are used to toiling away your days under the yoke of poverty, enjoying neither minute, nor hour, day, week, month? Going always from one to the next with no hope of anything more?" He drops his voice. "Tim. Take a moment. Take a breath. What do you feel? Underneath the screaming of your conscience. Underneath the horror left over from your days as a man who wouldn't hurt a fly?" he whispers.

The boy wipes his nose.

He licks his lips.

"I like the taste of them," he confesses hoarsely, and though his brow will never show a furrow, his cheeks another day, there is suddenly the weight of an entire century upon his young, young face. "But they're people."

He crushes the El Luxardo beneath his heel.

He reaches out to brush the boy's lips with his fingers.

Tim blinks.

"These," he throws his arms grandly out to either side, "are prey, Tim. They are nothing but livestock. You wouldn't get all sniffly over a slaughtered chicken, now would you?" He smiles.

He leans in very close.

"What are you doing?" the boy whispers, and pulls back just slightly.

"I missed a spot," he says, and runs his tongue across the corner of the boy's mouth, very leisurely, watching him from beneath his eyebrows.

The boy's eyes are very wide.

But he hasn't pulled himself back another centimeter.

Just listen to how riled up his little heart is.

What a boil a fresh kill sets to the hormones.

He claps his hand round the boy's shoulder. "It'll get easier, Tim. I promise."

There isn't an actor alive who could inject such sincere sympathy into his performance.

Do you see how the boy leans on him a little?

How he sags just a bit, and it is to the shoulder of this monster 'Mr. Mikaelson' he puts his own, as if this is the sturdiest of all foundations, the only refuge he will ever have at hand?

As if he is going to save the lad from himself.

Tim tries to rein himself in, of course.

Any man who has only ended up as monster and did not start off that way will make the same attempt.

But Tim-

Appetite of a growing boy, and all.

Never going to grow out of that, Timmy.

He finds it's easiest to bring the lad round by first offering to him the unsavory men of the type who broke his home and took away his mother, these alleyway creepers who have their whores without pay or permission.

They eat three of them one night, four the next.

On the following he slips one of the whores in between Tim and his victim, her throat already bleeding from his own teeth, her eyes glazed with his compulsion.

The boy switches seamlessly from thief to whore.

He feeds from the other side of the woman's neck as Tim laps her hungrily with teeth and tongue, his breath rough in his throat, his heart loud in his chest, midnight all round them, rubbish beneath their feet, the cold stiffening in his fingers and blooming in Tim's cheeks, rain in a light volley upon the streets, the tires of the automobiles hissing past, the Mississippi in a waterfall gush against the pilings of the piers-

They let go of the woman at the same time.

She falls very quietly.

He tips his head back and lets the blood run down his chin, and he watches the boy try to throttle back his breathing, to slow his heart, to tame everything that has got itself all churned to foam within him.

"When are we going to find who killed my mother?" he asks breathlessly.

Klaus licks the blood from his lips.

He smiles.

"When you're ready."

You wait until the emotions are heightened, lust let loose, control given free rein, a hot meal in the belly, death still a perfume in the nostrils, fangs still prickling with the tender enjoyment of a good kill, the tongue slicked with its layer of copper, and then you strike.

This boy is not a bad boy.

But he yields so very easily, when prodded in all the right places.

Marcel is much more contained.

Perhaps he's seen more. Perhaps he has lived for so long stifling his instincts to kill that he must let himself out gradually, carefully feeling his way, a toe to the tide pool before a belly flop into the ocean, a hand waved cautiously into the dark before a foot set through to the room.

This boy abandons himself.

It's about right.

It's the only way you truly forget, after all.

No man's throat tastes quite so satisfying if a kernel of awareness is allowed to fester in the belly of his predator. You snuff the conscience, else it takes hold of you by the bloody neck and it shakes you until you see, until what has been gingerly wrapped up in years and laid to rest in some ancient corner of your brain understands I did this I bloody did this and into hot white sun you scream, sizzling your dry Egyptian death.

So the boy buries his face, and he drinks until he is satisfied, and then for a moment he kneels, composing himself.

He waits until the boy stands.

He listens to the boy's breathing take a leap, to his heart skip a beat, to the noisy shutting of his damp lids.

He sucks the blood from the boy's bottom lip, his fangs down just enough to scrape, his fingers smoothing across the boy's shoulders, his tongue flicking over the boy's mouth.

He catches an errant drop with his thumb as he pulls back.

He pats the boy's cheek.

"Shall we?" he says, and steps off the curb in front of a car that does not dare strike him.

"What's the first century like?" Tim asks lazily from where he has reclined himself on the passenger side of the Abbot-Detroit whose driver lies sprawled in the backseat, still seeping from his throat.

He drapes one hand lazily over the wheel, lolling his head back against the upholstery. "A novelty." He takes a sip from the bottle of Geo Roe in his hand. "A hundred years is still a very long time. And there you are, still putting along, just as pretty as the day you died. About the third century is when everything begins to blur."

"So you stop remembering, after that? You couldn't say where you were in, I mean, the 1600s or something?"

"I remember. You just stop savoring it, around that point. Everything starts to flow a little differently." He takes another sip.

The sky is very clear tonight, he sees through the little pane of glass before him.

You see the stars, for instance.

Those he stopped noticing a very long time ago.

One of the few things older than him, mate. Certain freshness to them, he supposes, when you are only a boy beneath some trees, marveling at these far-away things which, unmoving, stalk still throughout your years, following the trajectory from birth to death.

But after a century or three, they too lose their shine.

"I was very afraid of you, when you first started coming to the Monteleone," Tim says quietly.

He drinks again.

He passes the bottle to the boy, who hesitates for just a moment before he puts his lips to the rim.

"And now, mate?" he asks, letting his head drop to the side to watch the boy test the liquor tentatively and then knock back a long swig.

The boy lowers the bottle.

He reaches one hand up to fidget nervously with the brim of his cap. "I still wouldn't turn my back on you."

Klaus flashes his dimples. "But there's a dead man in the back seat. Changes your perspective a bit, doesn't it?" He slides a little closer.

"Yeah," the boy says nervously, taking another long drink. He looks down at his hands. "Is Ma watching? I mean, have you ever seen anything like that?"

"No," he replies, and casually trails one finger up the inseam of the boy's trousers.

Tim twitches his leg a little, darts him a look, throws back the bottle once more, sloshes the liquid noisily round his mouth.

"The dead are busy with their damnation or their salvation, I suppose. They haven't got much time for those of us who are left. You can't tiptoe round their approval, Tim."

He nods, pressing his damp lips together, adjusting that little cap of his again, giving the bottle an anxious shake.

He listens to the liquid ricochet off the sides.

Tim's heart is so very, very quick.

He lifts the bottle smoothly from his hand.

He runs his finger a little higher.

The boy goes tight as a spring, his eyes owlishly wide, his right hand coming down to nervously squeeze the door.

He smiles, and pulls his hand back.

There is a little breath between the boy's lips, a slight relaxing of his leg, a subtle straightening of those fingers upon the door.

"Have you ever been to a whorehouse, Tim?"

"What? No. I'd have been killed. I haven't really had the time for that, anyway. Or the money."

"So you've never done anything of that sort."

He hesitates for a moment.

The cap is once more tweaked between his fingers. "I went with a girl for a while. It was very innocent, mostly chaperoned…but we had a few moments to ourselves, here and there."

"And what did she do to you, Tim?"

He gives a little cough. "Nothing, really. She let me kiss her. I, uh, I mean, that's it."

"And what did she do for you?"

The boy's throat hitches very suddenly.

His leg bounces.

He winches his fingers back down against the door. "She let me kiss her, like I said. That was it. She was a very nice girl. I'd a probably married her, if her mother hadn't found someone more suitable. You know, richer. Better connections. Ladies don't really marry porters, do they?"

"No, they don't," he says, and inches his hand onto the boy's leg. "But that's not really an issue anymore, is it? You've got a lot more ahead of you than some girl who thinks she's too good for you, Tim. You can go anywhere you like. You can have anyone you like." He runs his hand a little higher.

The boy inhales very audibly and holds it, staring at him from beneath the brim of that cap, his long lashes dipping just a bit, his mouth parting just a little.

He slides down onto the floor in front of the boy, and set his hands on Tim's knees.

He slips them up over the caps, onto the thighs, round the buttons of the boy's trousers.

What an innocent this one is, he thinks as he slips the boy's cock into his mouth and there is the sharp breath of one who has never been touched in such a way before, his hips coming instinctively up, Tim's hand seeking out the hair at the nape of his neck.

He wets the head with his tongue and slides his lips leisurely down.

There's always something entertaining to be had, in the tainting of such naïveté.

"Kol," Elijah says to him one morning as he darts briefly inside, still smeared with the night's revelry.

He stops.

Elijah reaches out to tweak his collar with a little disapproving frown.

"Nik! Inspection!" he calls up the stairs.

His brother appears in a flash, smirk on his face, paint on his hands, his shirt open at the collar, his tie swinging loosely round his neck, and smartly they line up before Elijah, who's at his jacket sleeves now, that little disapproving frown digging deeper, his lips pinching primly as Nik holds out his arms to either side and does a dramatic little spin.

"I think you missed one of my buttons, Grandfather," he offers helpfully.

"And I've made just a bloody awful mess of this whole shaving business," Nik puts in, scrubbing one paint-smudged hand across his stubble.

"Shoe lace missing. Trouser hems torn. And I left my jacket back…oh, somewhere. Who really keeps track of these things?" He smiles very broadly as Elijah gives his patented "revolting plebian" look and brushes off his hands.

"I don't believe it's too much to ask that you not embarrass me."

"Of course it is, big brother," Nik says playfully, reaching out to pinch his cheek. "Now what did you come thundering in here like a herd of bloody elephants for, Kol?"

"Someone rolled into town in that Fiat that took second place at the Indianapolis-500 last month. I stole it. You want to see how fast we can drive it through Storyville?"

Nik yanks his tie from his neck and tosses it to Elijah.

"Don't wait up, darling!"

"Yes, Mother- we'll be in late," Nik says with a flash of his dimples.

He hops up onto Nik's back and loops his arms round his neck, giving a little touch of his heels and a click of his tongue.

Nik catches him underneath the thighs and makes sure to bash his head against the door frame.

He punches the side of his head.

Nik swings round to break his spine against the wall.

"Prat."

"Tit."

Elijah sighs.

He still listens with his eyes closed and his fingers tapping and his heart sunk not in forgotten mire but pressed against his tight and aching throat.

Elijah is always smiling at him when the stage has gone silent and the applause rises round them like the firing of canons on all sides, and how very, very hopeful he always looks, this brother of his.

The boy is gone, Elijah.

Let him be, he thinks, and he stands just a little unsteadily.

Some monsters are just beyond.

Isn't that what Bekah saw, after all?

Because he sits and he listens to the lift of the sopranos and the thundering of the basses, his heart left open, his chest with the strange cracks that let down too many things, does not mean you have your brother back.

You've got to burn that sort of thing out of you. Niklaus the boy- he knows you loved him, Elijah, but there isn't any room for him among these centuries of steel cities, fragile men, nonchalant wars, Father'd have caught him in a moment, he'd have never stumbled beyond Mother with her heart in his hand and her eyes still coldly glancing away, he would not be here at your side now, brother.

He's sorry about the boy.

But you won't leave him anyway.

Will you, Elijah?

He wasn't always a monster.

He remembers this sometimes.

900 years leaves a lot of room for everything, but most especially thought, of which he is not a particular fan, because where else has it ever led him, but pathways he has neatly dodged with a careful and precise application of humor?

Does Nik love him; does Rebekah think of him; is Elijah ashamed to name him kin.

Is Mother watching.

The last is the bit which sneaks most frequently between all his little jokes.

Time is not quite the sandpaper it is presumed to be. It wears away at the years, yes, it scrapes to a harmless nub hurts which once stabbed with every breath, but an old injury is only ever made mild by layers of scar and skin.

Buried, not eradicated.

You will never smooth it flat.

He didn't have to take this magic she used to twist his bones to rubber and turn it back around, to make of it an atrocity, to smear beneath his boots all these little insects called human who were only going innocently about their time.

He knows that, Mother.

He's not Nik.

The world is not his own personal canvas, to paint in vivid red relief all the memories which will always bolt him down.

He just spent most of his life catching up. Couldn't let Nik waltz off in the arms of Bekah and Elijah, who locked in his love for good with that promise he never got, could he?

And you know, one day, he just started to like it.

It's very gradual, the tilting of your axis.

He was looking at Nik, they had a body between them, a shining sun, a smiling brother…

Perhaps he mistook the warm knot in his throat and the warmer one in his stomach which always tiptoe in on Nik's pride and root themselves in to stay for simple satisfaction in a job well done. Perhaps it all blossomed from there.

Perhaps he never liked it.

Perhaps he only ever liked the appreciation of this man who was once his brother.

Thinking: didn't he bloody tell you?

He wasn't always a monster.

He remembers this more than he likes to admit, it takes up space in his bed, when his brother is not there to fill the void, it makes a home in his throat, when he is left behind again, for some bloody adventure fit only for the elder Mikaelsons whose travels have not room for an anchor.

But not today, darling!

He strikes his match on the side of the brick and drops it into the pungent river he has dribbled down the street, watching it take hold with an angry hiss and burst forth to eat away the ladies in their combustible cotton finery.

It's a very nice fire.

He ushers in 1913 with the boy and a whore who looks like Mother.

He eats the whore.

He leaves the boy unsated on the bed, his shirt off, his trousers unbuttoned to the second buttonhole, his lean shoulders heaving with the touch of the whore's still-warm mouth on his nipples. "You didn't have to kill her," Tim breathes, looking down at the woman in a messy pile on his lap.

He rifles her bureau casually, tilting his head as he searches, knocking aside perfume bottles and powder jars, giving the drawers a good banging as he works his way through them, not a bloody letter to be had, didn't this little tramp have a single saintly customer who was to lead this pretty young thing with her sunshine hair and her cheeks still white with youth into the brightness of sun and salvation-

He slams the final drawer.

"It was quite the mercy on my part, I think. There are much worse things than death, Tim." He loosens his collar.

"Like what?"

Ah.

So young, mate.

He smiles as he undoes the top buttons of his shirt.

He picks the whore up by her hair and tosses her carelessly into a corner.

His jacket sails after her.

He sets his hands on the boy's thighs, and he leans in close enough to see the thickness of lash and brow, the dusting of freckles, the grit of blood and gut in a confectioner's sugar across tongue and tooth.

"Well, this rather nasty little business you've gotten yourself mixed up in, for instance," he says with a wicked smile, and though the boy swallows very visibly, Tim does not pull away when he leans in for a rough kiss.

He slams the boy one-handed down onto the bed and straddles him.

You see, Timmy.

A moment is to be lived in.

Regret is a future emotion.

So get your hands a bit dirty now, mate- you've an eternity to pick them clean after all, haven't you?

He bites the boy's pulse until it bleeds.

It's a clear night, the air as soggy as the Mississippi, each breath a hand upon his lungs, his sweat like a bloody mollusk down the back of his neck, that one particular spot on Nik's chest which for 900 years has made the finest of pillows damp against his head.

He dangles his bare foot lazily over the side of the wharf.

"Your feet are ugly," he points out, flinging open his arms, one going up across Nik's stomach, the other thudding down onto the wood of the dock.

"They're only trying to take after your face."

"Then they'd be the most handsome feet in all of creation." He pauses for a moment, resettling his head just a little, smiling as his brother's arm comes up round his neck in a loop which is not quite a chokehold. "Are any feet handsome? They're very odd. Remember Bekah's toes? Do you know one time I told some suitor of hers that she had six of them on each foot, and she got so mad, and I told her to think of how relieved he'd be, when he discovered that they were only a little webbed, and not sprouting some deformity she might pass on to his children, and then she hit me with one of Mother's cooking pots and knocked me out bloody cold, and when I came to she was in tears because she thought she'd killed me, and then she saw the knot on my head and she realized Mother was going to kill her for marring the most precious of the Mikaelson children, and you know, I always thought she very seriously contemplated murdering me after all and then spinning some lie about how I'd run off to join Finn on the ships."

Nik is laughing softly. "Yes, I know. She made Elijah and I move you out to the horses- I think she thought perhaps we could bury you in the hay and pass it all off as an accident if you didn't wake up. We kept trying not to laugh because we'd both seen you move, and she had her arms round Elijah and kept pressing her face into his shoulder and wailing about how she'd killed you, so here I've got you by the bloody feet and Elijah's trying to hold up the front of you while she keeps throwing herself at him, and all the while she's carrying on as we're trying to be stealthy about the whole thing. We kept telling her it didn't look good, but that we thought we might be able to help you, if she were to take on the burden of our chores for the next week, so that we might devote all our attention to nursing you back to health."

He lets out a sudden roar of laughter. "What did she do when she realized you'd been yanking her round all that time?"

"She threw me into the pond out back of the village and stomped Elijah's foot so hard he had to lie and tell everyone one of the horses had done it. She nearly broke it."

"You never told me that."

"I was nearly drowned by an angry thirteen-year-old girl half my size. What would something like that do for a man's reputation? It's bloody awful, trying to carry off a lie about getting caught in a sudden storm when there's not a cloud to be seen and you smell of bloody swamp." Nik's chest pumps another final few laughs beneath his head and then goes suddenly still. "What do you think she's doing?"

"Not moping about licking her wounded testicles." He pokes Nik hard in the ribs.

"That was a hideous metaphor. Or whatever in the hell you were trying for."

"You're a hideous metaphor."

Nik smacks his head. "You forgot two of the zeros in your age."

He pokes Nik in the ribs again.

"I will throw you off this bloody wharf."

"It's no matter to me- I can actually swim now, you know."

"Are you ever going to let that go? It was an accident."

"You were jealous that on Mother's fifth try she got it utterly perfect, rather than the third, so you tried to have me murdered under the guise of one of those little swimming hole 'tragedies' that are inevitable every so often."

"You almost drowned the bloody both of us, flailing around like that! And Bekah told me just to leave you, you know."

"I know. She was mad at me. I'd just eaten one of her dolls earlier that morning."

"You ate it?"

"She bet me a very nice rock that I wouldn't."

Nik bursts out laughing again.

He likes the sound of it.

It's not often his brother laughs for the right reasons, you know.

It's not often any of them do, really.

But you've lived 900 years, you've seen the rotten corpses of plagues, the little boys of war who put down to paper a false age and rode off down the front line with their immortality intact until along came one of the balls to carry it off from beneath them, you make your own humor.

Nik.

He's tried, you know.

You don't always deserve it, but he understands about the way Mother took you and she wrung you dry of sobs, how she hollowed you out for Mikael's hate and then she left you behind to fill with nothing else, and perhaps it's arrogant of him, but he was just hoping- he knows that for some reason he did not deserve your pact, that Bekah and Elijah have knotted their fingers first round your heart and will never relinquish their hold, but he-

He's always been here.

He's patched up a lot of you, Nik.

He thought it'd mean more.

He thought one day you might come to him and offer him a hand into this "always and forever", because Nik he bloody watched you bury their mother and do you know what he did- he rooted down past his revulsion and he found inside him all the bloody admiration he's pitched down inside this black hole that is his love for you, and he strained away until it made its way back into the light, and he just kept being your brother.

He was even happy about it, after a while.

If ever he is somehow killed, put it on his bloody gravestone.

His name was Kol.

He tried.

It is still sometimes surprising, how quickly time passes for those who are not beholden to it.

1914- he just closed his bloody eyes on the fresh new year of 1913, the shine not even rubbed off it yet, and in through the curtains blasts this next year to blind him from his bed.

It's already shaping up to be quite interesting, luckily for him.

For instance, it is barely February when Nik discovers that someone else has tried to sell them out to Mikael, and so one very fine day, the sun bright through the white winter sky, the air a combination of chimney smoke and young throats, they track this little man too clever for his own good to one of his favorite haunts, and they enter the bar quite grandly if he says so himself, coats flapping about their calves, mufflers up round mouths which they unearth to offer cheerful smiles.

"Hello," Nik greets them all pleasantly.

The man blanches, and nearly falls off his stool.

"Please! Do not be afraid," Nik calls out, holding up both hands with such an expression of earnest innocence he nearly believes it himself.

"He's just kidding, of course," he adds, and winks.

Nik slaughters his way down one side of the room, he the other.

"It's such a shame when one ruins it for the whole bunch," Nik comments regretfully, dropping a spleen. "Mate?" he asks politely, pointing one red hand at the bartender.

"Would you like to go and let all your friends know what happens not only to those who try to contact our father, but entire swathes of innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? And swing round the police chief's and tell him to come see me, while you're at it. I'll need to give him the official story for the papers, of course."

Such a courteous little tone, Nik.

Mother really raised you right, didn't she?

"I wish Marcel could have been here for this," he says sadly.

Nik slings one arm round his shoulders as the man runs for the door. "Ah, well. Got to get the traveling bug out of his system for a bit, you know. He's never really been anywhere else. But you know I'm always here for you, little brother." He knocks his head gently against Kol's own.

"That's true. And you did let me have the redheaded one. You know those are my favorite."

"You see? I'm always looking out for your best interests."

Tim is still quite despondent, following his best kills.

What would Ma say, he laments, head in his hands.

But mothers have no right to the judge's gavel, mate.

Leave her where she bloody lies.

He yanks the boy up by his arm and presses him back against the wall of the alley around which pieces of man have been smeared like rubbish, and he tastes first the boy's warm red neck and then his nervous tongue, his hand sliding down between the boy's thighs to work him beneath his trousers until with a breath and a shudder the boy comes so hard he sags forward against his chest, breathing in great sobs.

He forces the boy to his knees.

Tim reaches for his trousers.

He talks two pretty girls and an even prettier boy into a foursome, and breaks three pieces of furniture fucking them, two more murdering them.

Nik points at him as he walks through the door into a pile of these sex-scented corpses. "You're going to get it from Elijah."

He does, but it's quite worth it.

The one vein which throbs only very infrequently in Elijah's temple is quite fascinating, actually.

Will it pop if he prods it, brother?

Apparently that isn't very funny.

Some people.

No sense of humor, is he right?

In December of 1914, he and Nik welcome Marcel back with a drink and the crushed skull of one unfortunate pickpocket who tries to rob Nik at gunpoint.

In January of 1915, Bekah waltzes in through the front door like she never walked out in the first place.

He's never seen such a look on Nik's face.

He's lost all the wind from lungs that do not need to inflate, sieved himself out all over the bloody floor, sat down on the arm of the chair nearest him as legs which have walked him through a thousand battlefields full of grapeshot and wagon splinters fail him with newborn suddenness.

Elijah goes forward with a bright smile to kiss Bekah gently on the cheek.

He drapes himself casually across Nik's chair.

"Bekah," his brother says very roughly, all of this knotted up in his throat, and he tries to stand.

He gives Nik a little push to help him to his feet.

"I like your hat, darling. How many chickens threw themselves on the altar of good taste for such a winning combination of styles? We'll call it a truly inspired meshing of are-you-kidding-me and at-least-you-didn't-pay-for-it-right."

"Shut up, Kol," she snaps, and lets her eyes scan slowly round to Nik, her chin high.

"Bekah," he says again, and his brother's voice is so fragile it puts him on his feet, hands in his pockets.

It's all right, Nik.

He's got you.

"Hello, Nik," Bekah says politely, and kicks him in the balls.

New Orleans, 2013

Is the French Quarter Headed For Complete Anarchy?: Editorial

Long known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the entire country, New Orleans has recently baffled even jaded authorities with its sudden rash of violent crime. Leaving in its wake a string of victims attributed to the mysterious 'Vampire Killer', the French Quarter has taken a hit to its tourism that has many business owners worried for both safety and livelihood, and raised many angry questions about the competence of the NOPD, which has yet to make any headway in the 'Vampire Killer' case or recent attacks which have tentatively been linked to possible gang activity.

A sudden increase in drive by shootings as well as the vicious burning of seemingly randomly chosen victims and the recent bombing of downtown businesses certainly beg the question of how much worse things will get before the city steps in to clean up one of the most economically valuable sections of the city, but more interesting are the stories that have begun to circulate among locals. It should come as no surprise that many who belong to this city rife with tales of voodoo and spirits cling still to some of the superstitions of old, from which have sprung rumors that perhaps the violence cannot be attributed to mankind's willingness to make war upon itself, but to creatures who have been passed down from the legends of ancestors for centuries. Sightings of these creatures range from the disturbingly detailed to the ramblings of backyard Big Foot hunters whose cousin's wife's sister saw something vaguely human-shaped and furry among the trees of a dark night, but whatever the individual believability of these stories, it cannot be denied that something ominous can be felt in the very air itself, for those waiting for the next hammer to drop.

Whether the responsibility of man or monster, one thing is for sure- there appears to be no end in sight for the troubles that have recently inundated the French Quarter and dampened the spirits of holiday shoppers, resulting in one of the biggest slumps yet for business owners. As police scramble to stay on top of the escalating violence, the city is left to hold its breath and simply wait.

For what?

Who can say, but it would appear that something wicked this way comes, New Orleans. Batten down the hatches.

Death does not wear a hood.

He does not shoulder a sickle.

This is the part that's ok.

In the longest, coldest moment of your life, that eternal second between last beat and final slumber, who wants to look up into the face of this fearsome reaper with his eyes fresh from the pit and his hands that rattle like dice against the blade, and be carried away by this thing of bone and boredom, shuttling his souls along as factories convey parts awaiting their codes.

Maybe he looks like sweet cotton-haired Nana, who held your hand as you fumbled your way from first step to new stride.

Maybe he wears the face of a friend you lost too soon, maybe he takes the form of the childhood dog snuffed out by a needle.

Maybe he is none of these.

Maybe he is just a nice man with a warm hand, and he smiles when he picks you up and he carries you gently off into forever.

But it was not supposed to be like this.

He was not supposed to be a little girl who dreamed of prom, who wore her mother's shoes, who cried when Daddy left.

Mommy…

Time-

It's going to make ants of you all, isn't it?

One day, she will not care.

One day, she's coming for you all.

"Mom," she says into a voicemail that answers too often, and then she stops.

She's never really sure what to say after this.

She loves you.

She's sorry.

She will never stop trying to be better.

"I hope you're not answering because you're on some kind of fabulous vacation, cozying up to age-appropriate but still-hot old guys who struck oil at like the age of twelve and have been building their portfolios ever since, and can afford tons of new closet space for their favorite step daughter! Love you. Bye."

She hangs up.

For just a moment, she stands jiggling the phone in her hand, and she looks out this rain-streaked window, to the people beyond, to their fragile bones, their delicate skin, their terribly tiny years worn in grooves across their cheeks and in trenches between their brows.

Here is the part where she takes a breath as she looks out over the river of all these tiny little people who one day will dry up and wither away and be washed aside by new floods.

If she still feels within herself a beating heart and pumping lungs then she has not yet been eclipsed, she is still more girl than beast.

But today she draws no breath.

She will never know eighteen, she will not precede a generation, her children will never kick her belly or lay her head to rest beneath cool mint moss, she will forever stand idly by as death puts its hand to this planet and squeezes between its fingers the souls of sleeping children.

There is so much more than two inches of plate glass between café and street.

She never meant for there to be.

She was going to have a pool, you know.

She was going to get the happy ending.

Some of these people will venture forth into the world and some of them will chase their own fairytale, and some of them will run it to ground and others will not, but what they will all have is some kind of resolution to it all, a footnote to a chapter, an epilogue to a series.

She gets no endings.

Death is a circle, after all. You never break the cycle.

But sometimes she likes to think that hope is similarly shaped.

There are monsters who write love letters.

There are mothers who gave birth to girls who grew up to be demons, who wanted to hold them away, who flung their arms wide anyway.

So maybe she no longer belongs, she thinks, and she takes that deep breath, and she flips her phone back open.

Maybe she is no longer a girl.

Maybe one day she will open her mouth and she will drop her fangs and she will drink deep of this world that was going to crash and burn anyway, that will never last as long as she, but if time annihilates all, so does hope.

You should see how it crowds out everything else in the eyes of these monsters who write love letters.

'Deacon Favrot totally wrking w/ witches. top drawer. yllw file. 3rd page in. TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE AND PAY THE PRICE. dinner 7?' she types out, and then she flips her curls.

She exits the café and she enters the street like she owns them both.

"Caroline Forbes," someone says as she is crossing Bourbon St., both hands in her pockets, head ducked against the wind.

She looks up.

Her dead heart skips one very long beat.

Marcel smiles down at her.

She squeezes her fist closed around the notes she has made on all the little various arms of this network of his she has spent her whole day studying, and for a moment, everything just bleeds out of her.

Her knees go to water, her voice trickles to a drop, all of her just this freaking puddle at his feet, nerveless, limbless, helpless.

She blinks.

"Marcel," she says frostily.

"Ah, come on, Caroline- don't be like that. Klaus and I are friends now, remember? I'm not here to hurt you."

"What about annoy me?" she asks crisply, resuming her steps as steadily as she can, relaxing her fist, straightening her shoulders, leaving him to follow along behind, jogging just to keep up.

"I'd like to buy you a drink. To make up for all our past run-ins. Which, I'd like to add, were purely business. Nothing personal."

"I'm a little more expensive than that."

"Klaus really knows how to romance a lady, doesn't he? He's never been stingy with his presents, I'll give the guy that. Now, unfortunately, I don't have any fancy jewelry or mansions in the city on hand right now, so I'm afraid anything I offer is going to fall a little short. So take pity on a guy when he's trying to apologize, and accept whatever he's got."

She sees him motion out of the corner of her eye.

His two bodyguards move to flank her.

He whisks around in front of her.

"I insist," he says, still smiling.

Oh whither does man while away his days when the sun moves not an inch through yonder clouds of fleece, when the clock hands sift no minutes, when the sky shows not a single thread of marbled storm-

Or whatever flowery nonsense Nik's books were always putting in his head.

If ever you find monotony dragging away like a chain, a cross to be born, if it bears you down into the mud and it holds you there until you choke, just ask yourselves, darlings, what would Kol do?

The dead toil away in mute eternity, hands pressed always to the glass, watching forever from afar, do they?

That little hunter brat was not the only who saw spirits clear as men.

"Peekaboo," he says to the man plowing a woman who is not his wife, reclining on the bed beside their tangled limbs with his hands behind his head.

He smiles.

The man screams.

"Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick- time's running out, mate. Isn't the missus home in twenty minutes? Hope she hasn't packed her pistol today, darling."

"Just leave me the fuck alone," the man shrieks, putting his head into his hands.

His brother did that once, you know.

Just dropped his face right down into his palms, and cried until suddenly he couldn't.

You're not his brother.

His brother passes right through him when he sits down in a home that used to be his own and he shuts his eyes until he nearly believes that Nik is talking to him, that Bekah laughs at something he said, that Elijah cared not a bloody whit for that family who broke his own.

But the living feast; the dead live on scraps.

So excuse him his little amusements, darling.

"Beware the stare of Mary Shaw; she had no children, only her dolls. If you see her in your dreams, be sure you never, ever, scream, or she'll rip your tongue out at the seam," he whispers, and he scuttles disjointedly across the bed, curling one hand to a claw, ticking his head to the side, rolling his eyes back in his head, his tongue lolling with a hiss over his bottom lip.

The man pisses himself.

The woman launches herself with an undignified shriek from the covers.

"You have to stop doing this, Kol."

"Oh, good- you're here! Make it look like my head's spinning all the way around, would you?"

"Kol, get off the bed."

"What the fuck is your problem? Are you fucking crazy?" the woman is screaming as she dabs herself down with a clean sheet, the man cowering in the corner, the clock clicking on the wall, tick tick tick, he never did get rid of that bloody sound, did he-

"Kol," the little Bennett witch snaps, and she yanks him up off the bed. "You can't keep doing this to people."

"My head- look, I can twist it round pretty far on my own -Nik always said I had no bloody bones there- but if you could just make with the witchy little visions, darling," he says, and he stretches his arms out to either side. "Deliver your soul unto me!" he rasps, and he begins to foam at the mouth, fluttering his eyes, tilting his head back, smacking his lips with moist zeal, his neck muscles cording, his torso twitching.

"Stop," she snaps again, and she latches her fingers round his wrist, and she pulls him back to the Other Side with a little wrench.

He dips his face down very close to her own. "I love it when you get all pushy with me. Nik and I both like our women domineering, you know."

She rolls her eyes. "And hopelessly resistant."

"Nik got his, didn't he?"

"Just because Caroline's gone temporarily insane does not mean you're going to get the same lucky break."

He clasps his hands behind his back with a smile. "It's not temporary. It's inevitable. We Mikaelson men just have a way."

She takes off with a little huff, crossing her arms.

He keeps pace easily.

There isn't really a sky here, not for these souls who have crossed beyond, who no longer inhale the fumes of technology, who will never again breathe the ozone of summer storms.

He told you about the scraps.

Everything is a simulacrum.

Here the sky is very fixed, the ground very green, the trees with not an end in sight, not a bloody virgin to be found.

Well.

Let's not be too hasty there.

"Did the hunter ever put it to you, before you both went on to your untimely demises?"

"Excuse me?"

"Jeremy Gilbert. How was he? On a scale of you fell asleep halfway through to Kol?"

"Excuse me?"

"Mortal man," he bends down to hover his hand round his knee, "me." He lifts it as far above his head as he can reach. "Where did he fall? Or did you just not bother, because you knew far greater things awaited you?"

"I don't think that's any of your business."

He pokes her cheek. "You didn't. You're blushing."

"I'm annoyed."

"Tell me again about how you wouldn't touch me with a ten foot pole if I were the last supernatural being in this entire dimension. I love that story. There are going to be so many tears at the ending; everyone's a sucker for the triumph of the noble man's romantic persistence."

"Show me a 'noble man' and maybe I'll be there crying right along with them."

"Well, you've got to shine me up. I know how this works- I watched all those cable channel thingies. I'm a jerk, there's a plucky montage, then I'm pretty. Or is that you? I can't remember. Perhaps we should just skip ahead to the part where I take your innocence before you die tragically of cancer."

"It wouldn't be that tragic, if you were the one sitting next to my bed, waiting for me to wake up."

"Sharp tongues and pretty faces- didn't I tell you how I feel about those? And you say you're not interested in anything between us. Anyway, I'm going to pop off and visit Nik for a little while. Want to come? Caroline is probably there."

There is a little spasm across her face.

She thinks he doesn't notice it.

That's the benefit, to a mask like this.

When you don your humor like a mantle, when you wrap it in layers all round until not a piece pokes free, there is not a soul who thinks perhaps there is something underneath, who ever bothers to delve down for the center.

"No," she says quietly.

She swallows very hard.

She blinks very quickly.

"It doesn't hurt any less, not seeing them," he says.

He doesn't know why.

He slept in a box for nearly a century; cut him a bloody break.

She looks up at him.

He's never really been sure what love is. It's not measurable. Your dead heart does not skip so many beats, your deader lungs do not stutter so many breaths, you do not tick off exactly half a dozen boxes in the 'I suppose I'll give this one a bit before I eat her' column, there is no cut-off, this number means you've just missed it, that one tells you you've surpassed it-

But when he held Genevieve Devereaux in his arms and he broke her clean in half, there was…a stirring, he supposes you could call it.

Something raised itself in his stomach and boiled his guts to sickness and for years after he held that tiny little thing so gently in his arms and he snapped it all to kindling, he sometimes felt this boiling in his guts and a thickness in his throat, and what a bullet he dodged, he thought; what did love ever do for that aborted thing which barely passed for a scrap of a story between Elijah and that Katerina peasant; what an anchor for the boys in their rifle pits, terrified of the charge as they narrated letters to sweethearts who wanted them home; look at those yellow men of the pubs who drank away their livers over this stupid error of human nature that brings even kings to their knees.

"Just go," Bonnie Bennett tells him, and a thought takes him to the divan in the parlor where Nik is drinking.

Nik.

They say the dead don't talk.

It's not exactly accurate.

For instance, he spent all of what passes for a night in a place that never changes out its sky talking to the little Bennett witch and he thought about what a nice laugh she had and how small her hand looked next to his own and what a very sharp sense of humor she has, when she is not too self-righteous to laugh with him rather than at him, and there was this smile on his face that felt rather like yours looks, when Caroline Forbes winds you up a little more round that pinky of hers, and he just thought-

He just thought perhaps you should know.

Any thoughts, Nik?

No.

You can't hear him.

He knows that.

It's just-

It's not like he can kill this one.

Maybe he doesn't even want to. And that's the whole trap right there, isn't it, mate?

You could tell him a thing or two, about getting caught up with women who will not be bent to the blade.

He sits alone on a couch with his brother beside him for a very long time.

The scraps of paper in her pocket burn so freaking hotly.

She rattles the ice in her glass.

She taps her toe against the floor.

She tips her head back and she takes a nervous sip and across from her with his fingers steepled in this super creepily familiar way, Marcel smiles like he's going to eat her whole.

"Something interesting happened to a few of my people this week."

"I'm fascinated already."

He is completely unmoved. "Just took off their daylight rings and walked right out into the sun. Weirdest thing. The girl I can kinda' understand- that guy who lost his head at your party? They'd been together for about two hundred years. I sort of saw it coming. But one of the bodyguards that was with me that night? Now he was a different story. Happy guy. Comfortable with who he was. Cute girlfriend. Nice house. Great employer. Everything to live for, you know?"

"I guess sometimes you just can't tell," she says, taking another quick sip.

"Refill?" he asks politely.

"No thanks."

He tilts his palms forward where they rest on the table, and he snaps both his pointer fingers toward her, still smiling. "Funny thing about this story. Klaus missed. When we were attacked out on the terrace? He shot one of those hunters. Didn't kill him. Juuust missed his heart, by that much." He lifts his fingers and he holds them half an inch apart. "Which right there is pretty funny, because if Klaus wants to shoot you through the heart, he shoots you through the heart. I've seen him shoot a penny through the center from two hundred yards away. Now Caroline. Do you think a guy like that misses something the size of a fist maybe fifteen feet away? That's a hell of an off day."

She curls her fingers tightly around her glass, and she rocks one of her feet nervously from sole to side. "Everybody has one occasionally."

"But then we got the rest of these party crashers -waltz on into the guy's house like they own it, ruin his night, mess up his carpets- and what does he do? He works that smile -you know the one I'm talking about- and next thing I know, my girl's ripping out hearts left and right while he just sits back and let's someone else take care of all the unpleasant little details. Now, one thing you can say about Klaus -the man doesn't mind getting his hands dirty. So my question to you, Caroline, is why the sudden squeamishness?" He spreads his hands with another easy smile. "Now, no slight intended. I'm not in any way trying to downplay your extremely obvious charms, but I'm not sure I believe that Klaus has suddenly gone soft just because he has some pretty little blonde thing in his life."

She gives him her best bitch-please eyebrow and leans back in her seat, folding both arms over her frantically drumming heart. "Are you trying to tell me that you think Klaus purposefully set all this up so that he didn't have to kill anyone? Klaus Mikaelson? Who probably feasts on the hearts of puppies every morning before his ten mile grandma eatathon?"

"I'm telling you I'm pretty sure Klaus set all this up so that he didn't kill the men whose deaths mysteriously preceded the suicides of two of my people."

"Well, you're nuts," she says archly. "Are we done?" She scrapes the chair back to leave and in an instant there is a hand on its back, another on her shoulder, a surge of bile in her dry, dry throat, her breath squeezed through a pinhole, her heart sieved suddenly into her stomach.

"No," he says.

"I was taught by the best, you know, Caroline. I spent the better portion of the early 20th century watching Klaus manipulate his way through this town. And I know you never, ever take the guy at face value. Always something going on beneath the surface, am I right?"

He smiles again, he leans back, he puts his feet up on the table between them. "Here's what else I know, Caroline. Klaus does not just drop a grudge. If I'm not dead, he's not done."

"Greater good and all that. You know, uniting against a common enemy-"

"No no no no- shh. I'm going to talk right now, ok? Is that all right? Sorry- I don't mean to be rude. You just strike me as the type that can really get on a roll, when she starts talking. Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that my feelings have been slightly hurt, thinking that maybe Klaus didn't mean all those pretty things he said to me, and on top of that, may have contributed to the deaths of two people I genuinely cared about. But you know, I'm not the eye for an eye type, so don't worry, you're going to walk out of here all in one piece. I just have a thought I'd like to put out there. Just a few things for you to consider."

There is no smile on his face now, when he leans forward.

"Klaus is not your boyfriend, Caroline. This is not some high school kid who's gonna' tag along behind you all the way to prom."

"I know that," she whispers.

"Klaus and I were fairly close, back in the 1900s. Now, I'm not gonna' say it wasn't kind of a twisted thing, that friendship, if that's what you wanna' call it, but it was something. And look at us now." He looks up from beneath his eyebrows and he gives her a smile that is so eerily familiar she shrinks back just a little, the hand still on the back of her chair grazing the nape of her neck. "So you remember that I understand what you're going through, when he forgets all about you too."

"I told you to take him out back and be done with him, Tim. He's incompetent. I don't need this sort of bumbling-"

He smells Caroline's perfume just outside the front door and he flashes from his study mid-conversation, hopping down off the last tread of the stairs as she opens the door and she steps inside, unbuttoning her coat.

There is such a jump in his chest, at the sight of her.

"Hello, Caroline."

She has never seen any man beam this brightly.

You don't radiate like that, for something that will one day go away.

You don't shut your eyes and turn your face lips-first into a palm and spend so freaking long not replying for some flimsy little whim that in a mere decade will pale to nothing, that will burn hot and crash hard.

So screw this little chisel you have tried to tap into place between them, Marcel.

She is Caroline Forbes.

She went to sleep a girl, she woke up a monster, she laid a father to rest, she set down a friend not long after.

She squared her shoulders and she took a deep breath and she went on.

If there is one thing of absolute indestructibility in this almost imperishable new body of hers, it's her heart.

He takes a step, she three.

"Anything interesting today?" he asks, hands behind his back, his eyes just as bright as his smile.

She fans her notes between her fingers. "Do I ever disappoint?" she asks, and then she reaches up with these notes still fanned between her fingers, and she loops her arm around his neck, and she kisses him until he can only hang helplessly in her arms, his forehead pressed to her own.

"What was that for?" he breathes against her mouth.

"Just felt like it!" she says cheerfully, and then she slaps the notes against his chest, and she pushes him back out of reach. "Now go file these. And where's Rebekah? Because if she thinks for three seconds that she's getting away with that little stunt she pulled earlier this morning, than I have a coffin with her name on it, and I am not nearly as forgiving as you."

"Ok, so then on Friday nights he's usually at Pat O'Brien's around six…leaves at nine, walks home to his place farther down St. Peter-"

"All the way to his ugly little demise at the hands of one of Nik's twitchy little minions."

"Um, maybe you never stumbled across this particular piece of etiquette in a thousand years of wandering this planet, because it is totally a new concept and therefore completely understandable if you haven't yet heard of it, but it's actually rude to interrupt."

Rebekah leans back against one of the shelves in the cramped little storage room of The Brass Monkey and tilts her head imperiously, looking down her nose in that excessively freaking practiced way she has, but some people don't need a thousand years to cultivate head-bitch-in-charge vibes to curl your freaking toes, ok, so give her just one more let-me-just-clean-you-off-my-shoe look, she seriously dares you.

"Could you just give her the rest of your information and be done with it?" Rebekah asks the store owner standing awkwardly off to one side, glancing nervously between them both. "I'm sure she has a moustache to go home and tweeze or something."

"Ok, seriously? What are you even doing here? No one invited you. I thought you didn't have any interest in any of this."

"I was bored. You're not alleviating that."

"Well excuse me!" she snaps, throwing her hands up in the air. "If I'd known 'dancing monkey' was on today's repertoire, I'd have just stayed home and staked myself."

"Caroline, please- the circus animal is a noble creature. They're hard-working and actually quite talented; don't insult them with such a comparison."

"Remind me why I thought Klaus shouldn't keep you in a box for the next gajillion years?"

"So you'd have someone with actual fashion taste to emulate."

"Just. Go. Home. I'm working."

"No. Nik's annoying."

"He's your brother! He's supposed to be annoying."

"Yes, but he's worse than usual lately. What did you do to him?" Rebekah demands suspiciously. "He goes around all day with this stupid smile on his face. He's perpetually three seconds away from leaping up and clicking his heels together. I can't provoke him at all."

"Gee, what a tragedy- it sounds like he's actually happy. You know, that state of being I used to actually get to experience, before you came into my life."

There is the chiming of the bell over the front door, a booted step on the polished floor, the sudden swelling of an entire chorus of masculine laughter as beyond this cramped little storeroom autumn exhales into the shop a sudden gust of frost.

"Uh, I'm gonna' go see to my customers, Caroline. I'll be back in a few minutes, ok?"

"Great!" she snaps as the woman slips quietly away into the front room, her human heart beating like a drum. "You scared her off. Now it's going to take me three times longer to finish up for the night, because she's going to make all these excuses to stay the hell out of here with the Original Bitch lurking."

"So eat her."

"If I eat all my informants, then they will no longer inform for me. Do you see the problem here, or do I need to draw you little stick figures?"

"Heather Riker?" one of the customers asks hesitantly.

"I see one problem." Rebekah smiles nastily.

She rolls up the sleeves of her hoodie.

There is a sudden shot out front.

The gurgling of life spilled out, the loud cracking of bone hitting wood on its way down, the clicking of hammer, the sudden swelling of an entirely different chorus, half a dozen hearts beating not in orchestral sync but wartime chaos-

Rebekah kicks the door open.

The second shot is fired into her chest.

"Oh, please," she says, and picks the man up by his throat.

She throws him ten feet across the room, into a shelf that buckles and tips forward and spills itself in a gleaming burial mound across his spine.

His revolver slides noisily across the floor to touch itself to Heather Riker's wet red head.

"Shit," one of them cries out, and with a smile, Rebekah snags him by the collar of his shirt and tosses him easily down onto the cash register, holding him in place with one hand to the back of his neck as she backhands another across the face. "Does that mean you know who I am? It's so nice to be recognized- sometimes I feel like Nik gets all the glory in this family, you know?"

She breaks his neck with a casual twist of her hand.

One of them fumbles his way on hands and knees toward the revolver resting against poor Heather Riker's mess of brain and bone, and now as his hands close around it, Caroline boots him in the chin, catches the gun as it spins up into the air, gives him one to the head, shoots the fourth through the chest.

Rebekah grabs the fifth by the heart and squeezes until he screams.

She looks the sixth square in the eye, and she crushes his friend's heart to pulp inside her palm. "Go on; off with you. Crawl back to your kennel. Tell them Rebekah and Caroline sent you."

"Or, more accurately, Caroline and Rebekah."

"Rebekah and Caroline," she snaps.

He catches up to her one day in this forest with no end.

"I've got a present for you," he announces brightly, and from out behind his back he takes the head still dripping its very recent death, giving it a jaunty little swing.

"Oh my God- Kol!"

"What? It'll grow back."

Nik used to talk about this camaraderie of the battlefield which supersedes everything that man slots between himself and his fellow human race until each of these bricks forms a wall.

If a man wears his color, his intelligence, his class with inferiority, if he does not fell into lockstep, if he is just a littler darker, dafter, destitute, he is cast over this wall, and he walks always along its perimeter, peering between chinks.

And then comes the whistling of the shells.

The rattling of the guns.

The canons reduce to medieval passion men who pride themselves on their letters, who know their wine as they can name their children, who grew up rich, who gambled themselves richer, who remember none of this that sets him apart, when the brass pings itself off his helmet and is sucked away into the mud beneath his feet.

Gas makes a friend of all.

She's only had a few too many moments such as these with this girl, that's all.

She doesn't like this Caroline Forbes with her bright hair, her brighter smile, her sticky little fingers wrapped so tightly round her brother's stupid heart.

She does not tuck away in a secret little corner of her soul these brief bright moments in which there is a real smile, a genuine laugh, an honest confession.

"I miss my mother," Caroline Forbes whispers one night while she is tapping away at her phone, and then she looks up, and how abundantly clear it is that this was not supposed to come out, that perhaps she could have acknowledged this to Nik, but not Rebekah, never this original mean girl with her claws perpetually sharpened, her tongue equally pointed, her heart untouched by all.

"So do I," she whispers back.

There is something freeing in murmuring a thing that cannot be shouted.

Let her go again:

She'd like the love of one who is not a brother.

She wants a friendship that will not succumb.

She is nastiest on days when she will later cry herself away to sleep.

Perhaps she'll tell you all about them some day.

He sits on Nik's head one night, when he has drowsed off over his papers and lies with his face cheek-down in the thick of them.

It's not as funny as it used to be.

Bekah's hair he ruffles, Elijah's tie he displaces.

This next part he's not particularly proud of.

It's in Nik's studio that it happens.

He's looking at a painting, he doesn't know which one, Nik never instilled that particular fondness for beauty in him, but it's interesting, perhaps one of Nik's, perhaps another of the myriad masterpieces Nik sticky-fingered from the variety of galleries he's patronized over the centuries, but whatever its origin, it's got this strange film over it, sort of a liquid thing, and it's oddly synchronized with this nasty prickling in his eyes, and when he inhales (dead and still breathing- isn't that a trick?) it's jagged, it's wet, it burns everything it touches.

They don't have to remember him every day.

That's not what he's asking for.

The living live: it's their job.

But if he could be allocated just a small portion of their time, if they could give up just a minute here and there, and devote it to memorizing the sound of his voice, the pattern of his smile- if they could just preserve him, because he had a lot of time, he lived so many things, but that's the rub, when you are brought into this world and you are made to treasure it in its own imperfect way, when you have just acclimatized yourself to the side-by-side existence of beauty and beast and then got it all ripped out from underneath you.

Some minutes are a chain.

You drag them round like your own personal penance.

But they'll pass.

It'll all smooth out again.

Consider the alternative, after all:

An old man, a painting, some dust gathered up round them both.

That's it.

Just a whole lot of dust, mate- that's all it'll amount to one day.

Perhaps if you're very lucky, if your family will not outlive the stars, if your friends cannot outlast the planet, you'll not be reduced to a speck, you'll spotlight at a drunken family reunion, a bittersweet reminiscing, you will not be phased out by a millennium.

He pops very quietly back to the Other Side.

"Maybe you just shouldn't go," she says next to his shoulder, and he thinks for a panicked moment that he forgot to wipe his eyes, that he did not dry his cheeks.

"Maybe it's just too hard…to be dead without them," she whispers.

He leans down and he tugs at her hair with a smile.

"I've been dead a lot of times. It's not so bad," he says cheerfully, and then he puts his hands behind his back, very like Nik when he doesn't know what to do with them, whether it's ok to touch, to reach out and put his fingers to something that will not end in annihilation, and he precedes her into this forest without end. "So Jeremy Gilbert- stallion or miniature pony?"

"Come in, Caroline," he calls out distractedly as a tap sounds at his door and he catches a whiff of her perfume in the hall beyond.

"Close your eyes."

He flicks a glance up from his papers, toward the door. "What?"

"Take those two pieces of skin, with the little bits of hair on them? Now pull them down over your eyeballs."

"Very funny, love."

"Are they shut?"

He leans back in his chair and obliges, twirling a pen between the fingers of one hand, lifting the other out to one side as the door creaks cautiously open and one heeled foot edges carefully inside. "You're not sneaking Stefan in here under my nose, are you?"

"Uh, yeah- like I'd have to sneak him in. Haven't you practically been throwing yourself at him for the last couple of weeks? We are seriously going to have to work on playing hard-to-get, because you are just radiating oh-God-I-hope-he-thinks-I'm-pretty desperation."

"I'm sure there's a reason I like you, isn't there?"

"I'm cute, I can alphabetize, and, I don't know, I am like the starving kitten to your crotchety old man with a secret heart of gold?"

"I ate a kitten once, you know."

"Oh my God- don't tell me that! Can't you just, like, go on about all the villages you've pillaged and the innocents you've cut down in cold blood and the family you've spent a trillion years murdering off and on?"

He bursts out laughing.

"It's not funny!"

"I was kidding, Caroline- I don't eat animals. Too bland. I am glad to know that you'd prefer to hear of the slaughter of hundreds of men over the demise of one unfortunate house pet, though."

"Kay, stop talking, or you're going to ruin this."

"What if I switch topics?"

"No. Nope. Not a peep."

"And if I choose to ignore your demands?"

"You mean like you're doing right now? Are your eyes still shut?"

"They're shut."

"Don't you dare peek!"

"I'm not peeking!" he protests, sitting back in his chair and sprawling his legs out in front of him.

There is a loud shuffling in front of him, the sound of the filing cabinet sliding open, the banging of its closure, the clicking of her heels across the floor.

An interminable moment of silence.

"Ok. Open them," she commands.

He is still fiddling round with the pen in his right hand when he blinks the momentary haze from his eyes.

He stops.

He lowers his hand very slowly across the arm of the chair, and leaves it dangling over the edge.

She has got on some scrap of a nightgown, a thing of black lace, red satin, just enough left to the imagination to entice it, her legs crossed primly at the knee as she sits perched on his desk.

He drops his pen with a smile and leans slowly forward, lacing his hands across his knees.

"No," she says brusquely, and she brings one little heeled foot up, and she jabs it into his chest, pushing him back.

"Take off your shirt."

He steeples his fingers.

He rolls his tongue thoughtfully round his mouth. "And when comes the part where I get to start tossing round orders?"

"It doesn't," she says, and rises smoothly to her feet.

She fists a hand in his hair and she yanks his head sharply up, the other hand straying to his chest, to slide over his pectoral, to graze his nipple, to tweak it bloody hard. "I told you to take off your shirt."

Truly his smile must be terrifying to behold.

He discards his shirt over the side of the chair as she releases his curls and watches him with one hand on her hip.

He spreads his hands with a smile, letting his knees loll open. "Anything else?"

"Bite your wrist, and hold it out to me."

He drops his fangs and digs into his radial artery.

He licks the excess off his lips, looking up at her from beneath his eyebrows.

"Don't touch," she says, and then she brings one leg up on either side of him, wrapping her fingers round his wrist, hovering herself just half an excruciating inch above his lap, and she sets her lips to his arm, and she begins to suck, just lapping away at him with her tongue, no touch of the fang, just the caress of lips, the gentle nudging of human teeth, the little vibrations of her moans against his skin-

He drops his head back against the chair, his eyes fluttering, his mouth opening, his cock twitching.

She pricks his skin with her fangs as the wound begins to close over, and now she gives such a pull with them, and he bows his back, he digs his hands into the armrests, he squeezes his eyes tightly shut.

She pulls away, and he flutters his eyes listlessly, lolling his head against the back of the chair, watching from beneath his lashes as she leans in, her mouth red with his blood, her curls shining, her breasts just barely contained, her little hand coming up to catch the drop that rolls itself from lip to chin.

He shuts his eyes again as she presses her breasts to his chest and she dips her tongue into his mouth, rolling it round his own, coating him in his own flavor, and with a little ragged breath, he slips his hands from the armrests and he trails them up her thighs, taking satin as he goes, running his thumbs along that soft sensitivity of inner thigh-

"No," she says again, and she grabs him by the wrists once more and pins them to the chair. "I said no touching." She kisses his throat once, twice, moves down his chest with her tongue, over his tattoo, across his nipple, slithers all the way down to the waistband of his trousers.

She kisses just below his navel and kneels on the floor, pushing his legs farther apart. "Hold onto the back of the chair," she says, and then she gives him such a smile as she hooks her fingers in his belt. "You're going to need to."

She feels him tense as she unbuckles his pants, his head sinking back once more against the chair, his lips slick with his blood, her tongue, his hands going up just as she said, to grip the back until all the tendons stand out in his forearms and the wood creaks beneath his fingers.

She slides her lips down over him.

There is a crack, another shuddering of the chair beneath his hands, a deep breath, a little noise in the back of his throat, entreaty or expletive, she is not sure, and then she licks his head, and she takes him all the way in.

His heart is beating so loudly.

She drops her fangs, runs them experimentally up as she pulls away, just lightly grazing, letting them trail along the underside of him, pulls off with a little pop of her wet lips, runs her tongue around the rim, flicks it up over the head-

Now that was a bad word.

She smiles, she slips her mouth back down over him, she retracts her fangs and begins to suck in earnest.

He thrusts himself into her mouth, his breaths jagged, his thighs tense against her, his toes curling inside his socks, sweat, arousal, cologne, all of these in a cloud around her, her panties wet, her breaths short-

She slips him out of her mouth before he comes, and tucks him back inside his jeans.

"My turn," she says, and stands up.

He slithers bonelessly down off the chair and kneels in front of her.

She takes a handful of curls in her hand and now he runs his hands shakily up her thighs, kissing along after them, his thumbs hooking the waistband of her knickers, his tongue darting out to briefly taste her clit as he yanks them down, ripping the band, tearing the lace, her hand tightening in his hair, her breath hitching in her throat-

She'll try to push him away before she's finished, to maintain her authority, to keep them always on this uneven footing she has established, but he's learned a trick or two in his time, love.

He grabs her roughly by the ass.

Oh god he hits her so freaking right-

Just a few flicks of his tongue, a rough thrusting, a careful grazing of his own fangs along her flesh and she is already so freaking close-

"Wait," she breathes shakily, and then he slips his tongue back into her once more, and she arches her back, grabs his hair brutally in both hands, comes with a loud gasp against his mouth, pulsating around his tongue.

He sucks her clit until an aftershock curls her toes and rips out a few of his hairs and dissolves her knees to water.

He catches her as she buckles, and tucks a curl tenderly behind her ear.

"I'm going to bend you over this desk, and I'm going to take you until you scream, sweetheart," he whispers in her ear.

She draws blood when she kisses him. "Then why don't you do it, instead of running your mouth about it?"

He slams her down against the desk.

He jerks that flimsy little skirt up over her hips and breaks the zipper on his trousers, fumbling it down.

She cries out when he pushes into her.

He sees her hands shoot forward to grasp the edge of the desk, her head turn to the side, her breath fog the polish, her lashes float down to touch her cheek.

He thrusts again.

"Oh my God," she hisses, pushing back with her hips, the desk groaning underneath her, the office vacillating around him, the floor uncertain whether it is to be solid ground or turbulent sea, their skin slapping, his breaths burning, her little gasps driving him up the bloody wall-

He curves himself over her, slides his hands down over her forearms to her hands, threads his fingers through her own, slams into her so hard the entire desk jumps, one of the drawers banging, all the handles rattling, the pens and the plans and the tacks echoing themselves off the walls like cannons-

He kisses her shoulder, the nape of her neck, the corner of her mouth, working himself brutally in and out of her, pressing his face to the crook of her neck, squeezing her hands so tightly in his own-

She snaps off part of the desk when she comes.

She shudders so hard around him he feels his own eyes roll back with the force of it, and now he empties his own release inside her, his mouth open against her throat as she rattles off a stream of expletives to shake the bloody rafters.

He kisses her neck again, relaxing his fingers against hers, just keeping himself pressed to her for a moment longer, both their legs shaking against one another, Caroline's breaths nearly sobs in her throat.

He slips himself out of her and does his trousers back up, pulling her nightgown gently back down over her hips, pressing a kiss to her spine as she cautiously straightens, his hands steadying her as she turns.

He is smiling so freaking happily, when he presses his sweaty forehead to her own and he leans in for another kiss, running both his hands down her face.

She smiles against his lips, and she tilts her head just slightly to kiss the bridge of his damp nose. "You're kind of a goober, for the most powerful creature in the world."

This little squad he has assembled is not entitled to all the fun.

Sometimes a man has only the weight of a gun in his pocket to make him feel truly alive.

If he has need of it, after all, it is only because there are things which knock about in the shadows that are not susceptible to his bare hands, his strength of arm, his speed of wit.

He curves his hand round the butt because he understands that all life is fraught with risk, that his bones are malleable, his legs like twigs, his head merely a melon which may be split right down to the fruit.

And what is life but a sentence, if it must not be fought for, grappled with, run down like a bloody hare?

It's raining, this evening.

His breath is white before him, his fingers tinged with the red remembrance of human cold, collar up about his ears, heels echoing on the pavement, the lights of the approaching holiday making of the street beneath him a funhouse mirror.

Thousand-year-old eyes gather so many images on the backs of their lids that to blink is to flick the slide of the projector, to superimpose one cold wet evening over another, to substitute holiday lights for the torches of peelers, the fog of an Irish midnight, the houses with their sudden thrusts from misty anonymity.

He walks with one hand in his pocket.

He smiles at the tourists he passes.

He slips from main avenue to side alley, and the sudden thundering in his chest, as he makes his way down St. Peter.

He has not run to ground a man whose name has been given to the bullet in nearly a century.

"Devon, Devon, Devon," he calls out, a little singsong he's pitched to a melody all his own, his thumb straying to the hammer, his finger slipping alongside the guard, all of him elevated, blood in his cheeks, adrenaline on his lips, just a touch of man's impatience in the hand he tightens round the butt of the revolver.

There is a rather cinematic flaring of the man's coat round his heels as he spins.

"On your knees, please," he orders with a smile, and he slips the gun from his pocket.

He likes to observe man in his final moments.

Does he plead, put up his hands, piss his trousers, crawl forward to touch his forehead to boot, to put his lips to the mud, to throw himself onto the mercy of this deified murderer who hears prayers from the mouths of the prostrate?

Or does he sew up his mouth, will he not give the satisfaction, does he wish to go out like a man?

He's seen them all, over these many centuries.

What he wants to find, among these myriad faces of the doomed, is his own final moment.

Did he weep, when he saw before him that great specter of death which should always remain a shadow and it wore the face of his father, who was never supposed to hate him?

Father put a sword to his chest, and pushed until he saw no more.

What he remembers is the strangeness that comes after death, when the corpse rises with his still-wet shirt and he reaches down to touch with fingers that are no longer attached to his hand the sealing hole in his chest, and he wonders with the clinical detachment of the deeply bereaved how on earth it bloody got there.

What he never recalls is that last conflict between boy and father.

What did he do, Mikael? How did he feel, as he put the point of this sword to the breast of his son and he struck home all the blows he must have so longed to finish?

And the boy, Niklaus? Did he reach out for that fabled bond between all father and son, and give it one last desperate tweak?

He's rolled this round a lot, you know, over the centuries.

He doesn't think the boy tried at all.

He thinks the boy shut his eyes, and prayed for Hel's swift resolution, for her black comfort, for the final calm after the taxing choice.

He remembers the choice, at least.

He wrestled with it long before that last conflict between boy and father.

To love a parent is not a preference but an instinct; to hate them is a resolution.

The boy clung to the first for all his days, but death is the final abyss, and it does not judge, and among its realms collecting souls as a storm gathers clouds, who is to know that there strides through the miasma a very inconsequential boy who made no dent, who left no mark, who loved his father for just as long as the father hated son, who has decided that love may be turned around and wielded the other way?

He levels the gun.

Have you a father, mate?

Yes?

Well, then, he's doing you a favor, now isn't he?

He squeezes the trigger.

The man's head sprays wildly.

He licks the blood from his lips.

He lingers for a very long time in front of the door before he brings his hand up to knock.

Stefan answers in a moment.

He licks his lips again.

He scrubs his fingers across the beard just showing its three-day-old strands.

He ducks his head just a little.

It makes him look smaller, a little less threatening, a tad more relatable, less monster, more man, someone who might, perhaps, be worthy of that elusive thing he grasped for just a moment in the 20s, when a man who didn't have to slung his arm round his shoulders and called him brother.

He doesn't always want to look like a predator, you know.

"Is Caroline here?"

Stefan leans his shoulder against the frame of the door. "No; she said she was heading over to your place, and probably wouldn't be back tonight."

He links his hands behind his back. "I must have just missed her."

He lingers awkwardly in the doorway.

Stefan lifts his eyebrows.

"Actually," he blurts with such unexpected volume that they both flinch back just a touch from this startling assault, "I came…to speak to you."

"You're speaking to me."

"I was wondering…if you might be interested in a drink." He looks down and he gives a little huff of a laugh, and why doesn't he just toe the carpet with his bloody boot like some bloody timid little child.

There is an eternal moment of silence.

The beating of his very loud heart.

Stefan's noisy blink.

"I'm sort of a, uh, recovering alcoholic, if you haven't noticed. And if I'm not mistaken, Caroline will literally rip your head off and put it in a very hard to reach spot, if she thinks you have anything to do with me falling off the wagon again."

"I didn't mean that kind of drink, actually. I was speaking of the bourbon variety."

There is another noisy blink.

His heart, drumming even bloody harder.

"Klaus. We're, uh, we're not friends. I'm here for Caroline."

He died on the point of a sword. He's taken a thousand other thrusts from them, in his myriad years on this planet.

What you never understand is how bloody dull they are, against these barbs of the tongue.

If they could only fashion these things called words a handle for man to fix his hand, there would never again exist a battlefield blade beaten smooth by the bellies of men and the flanks of horses.

"I thought maybe we could…bury the hatchet."

"Because of Caroline."

"Because I want to."

He lifts his eyes to Stefan's.

"Because…I liked you. Because you made me feel like I wasn't out of brothers after all."

There is a little frown between Stefan's eyebrows.

The shifting of his shoulders against the frame.

"Well, I'm more of a whiskey man, actually. I'm kind of hurt you didn't remember that." He tucks his hands into his pockets. "I'm not really in the mood to go anywhere right now, tell you the truth. But the Original Hybrid shows up on my doorstep, I suppose if he really wants to come in and empty out my mini-fridge or take a crack at the bottle of Crown Royale I just picked up the other day, there's probably not a whole lot I can do about that, right?"

His smile hurts his cheeks.

He saw Mother first, when he got to this other realm with its simulacrum sky, its forever lawn, its endless woods.

When last they met, she no longer loved them as a mother, who spreads out her arms and shelters beneath them the children who brought the bombardment upon themselves.

But you let that go.

You haven't resentment for the dead anymore.

The crimes of the living are far greater.

What is the betrayal of a deceased mother when there are siblings who shed him with hardly a blink, when he will idle here under this simulacrum sky with his feet upon grass that will never crisp to autumn or wither in summer while they carry on in air stained by smog, by breath, by sweat, when they feel beneath their feet streets slicked by snow, rain, vehicle.

It's not fair, he wanted to tell her.

He never got to not be a child, after all.

But that didn't come out. Ten centuries, nine of them with his foot to the pavement, watching plagues circle round and wars reel by and ten billion graves sprung up, you'd think he'd have control of his own bloody lips.

Nik was so sad, Mother.

That wasn't what he wanted.

That's never what he wanted.

He stood there for a moment, letting this hang between them both.

And then he went away.

He didn't really mean to.

Death is always a journey you will complete alone.

It doesn't mean you want to find the destination empty.

He just needed a moment to collect himself, to take a deep breath and to paste on his smile and to don his jester's cap and bells, to find once more this monster 'Kol', who took all his blows standing because round his dead heart he'd wrapped that greatest cushion of them all, humor.

That was when the witch found him.

In the woods, with his throat full, his heart empty, his hands in his pockets.

Where else was he to put them?

He'd touched the trees and the grass and taken a bat at the sky and everything coursed past exactly the same beneath his fingers, featureless bark, featureless leaves, featureless loam, so of what precise use were these things that couldn't even touch the shoulder of a crying brother?

So he had them deep within the trousers he died in, and he turned, and he said, "We can still shag here, right?", and she never did reply to that, she said, "I'm eighteen, and I'm dead."

And then she did the same thing Nik did, and he was perhaps even more useless than the first time round.

But.

So went his life.

Shall his death suddenly reveal some new facet of value, mined from the depths where all middle children are cast?

He found out later that though he was certain he'd only left his mother minutes ago, perhaps an hour at most, the witch's death succeeded his own by nearly a month, and he almost laughed, you know.

That brutal, so very, very unfunny kind, that tears more than it heals.

Nik would grieve, he'd move on.

And how fresh it was still going to be for him.

But didn't he know that already, that life is merely a blink, death a pair of bars? The romantics call it an escape; he knows it for a sentence.

Today Mother is nowhere to be found, but the witch has gravitated back to this spot he has privately come to know as their own, a stretch of wood the same as any other, but with this sort of pull that exerts itself somehow on a part of him he probably doesn't even really have anymore, and she falls into step beside him, and he lets his shoulder subtly touch hers, and it's funny, really, because he never was shy about taking what he wanted, not even as a human, he just crooked his finger really, and the women fell about him, and what sense was there in being all cringing about it, the way Nik used to act anytime he got some little thing making her doe's eyes at him, but there's just something about these women who will not touch their knees to the ground, isn't there, brother?

"How was Caroline today?"

"Nik's shagging the hell out of her."

She rolls her eyes. "I did not need to hear that. I'm still not even sure I believe you. Caroline? With Klaus?"

"My brother's very persuasive," he says, and flicks his tongue obscenely at her.

She puts her hand on his face and pushes him away.

That's the one thing that never loses texture, you know.

People: they will never be sanded bland.

"Why don't you come with me this time? I'm going to hang round for a while, right? Until they start going at it again, which shouldn't take very long, and right when Nik's about to-"

"Don't even go on."

"You never let me get to the end. Do you know how many brilliant plans you've not had the privilege of being privy to, because of this strange little tic of yours? Not letting people end their sentences, I mean."

"You're being disgusting."

"You wouldn't have me any other way."

"I wouldn't have you any way."

"You don't mean that, darling."

"I really do, Kol."

"You'd miss me if I was gone."

She levels him with a look.

He gives her a crook of his eyebrow.

They walk on.

The grass does not crunch, or sink, or perfume the sky with all the broken-off stalks he can't crush beneath his heels.

But that's all right.

Her shoulder is warm, she died in short sleeves, he can feel her skin against his own, he'll take what he can get.

You remember about the scraps.

"Do you know why I never go back to see Caroline, or Elena, or any of them?" she asks quietly, and then she takes a deep breath, and she stops. "Because I'm so angry that it was me. That it's always me, losing my Grams, my mother, myself. But that's not what I want, is it? I don't want them to take my place, do I? I just wanted a little bit more." She takes another breath, and how terribly unsteady it is. "But sometimes I ask myself that question, and I'm not sure if that's really the answer. What if I really want one of them to take my place?" she whispers. "What kind of person would that make me?"

Just a person.

Better than some, worse than others.

Not unlike the rest of this strange creature called man, who murders his own child and throws himself away for a stranger.

And that's all right; he was worse than all of them put together, after all.

"Knock, knock," he says.

"What?"

"That's not what you say. You say, 'Who's there?' Nik taught me that."

"Are you telling me a knock knock joke? Now?"

"Well right now I'm just an idiot who's spouting off random phrases because the audience participation portion of the joke is falling short." He gestures with his hand. "You can't leave a man hanging at his microphone, Bonnie."

She lets out this little thing, maybe part of a laugh, perhaps half a sob, but he'll take it, because she blinks her eyes and she begins to walk once more, and finally she relents. "Who's there?"

"Ben Hur." He gestures again.

She looks at him. "Ben Hur who?"

"Ben Hur over and give it to her doggy style!"

She stops. "I feel like it really might be worth seeing if it's possible for me to still dessicate people on this side of the veil. Did Klaus teach you that too?"

"Nik's humor is not nearly that sophisticated."

"I really hope that was sarcasm."

"I actually wish it was. Once when we were in China, it was raining, just a really soggy morning overall, and he wandered off in it for a while, and when he came back, Bekah asked him what he'd been doing, and he said, 'I was trying to catch some fog, but I mist.' And then he smiled like it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said, and that was right about when Bekah made a legitimate attempt on his life."

"So one of the oldest, worst monsters in the entire world tells bad puns."

"And drools in his sleep. And did you know that for that ball we threw, he gave Caroline a dress, and instead of having one of his minions take it round to her house, he decided he was going to deliver it himself, only he panicked after he rang the doorbell, and then he ran away? He made Bekah go with him. She told everyone."

There is not the laugh he expected in her voice, when she replies. "How can you still talk about him like that, after everything he's done? Like he's just your brother? Like you've forgiven him?"

"Why would you have forgiven your friends?"

"What?"

"Your friends. Half of them are immortal, right? Why would you have forgiven them for all the horrible things they were going to go on and do for the next several centuries? They would. They will. It doesn't matter how nicely you start out. You get bored. You get sad."

"That doesn't excuse anything."

No.

But you love them.

You always love them.

He likes the approach of winter.

It burns his lungs.

It makes him feel.

Snow is unlike anything else. The softest of flakes chaps the toughest skin, the most innocuous of drifts buries a man to his nose, an hour of a blizzard will cover a car, a day will inter a city.

Men die differently in it.

In the trenches, their blood spilt out the same color as the foam beneath them, absorbed into this cold brine of bowel and vein.

But snow-

Now there's a backdrop.

Whitest white, reddest red-

Wasn't there a fairytale about that?

Let him start again.

White snow, red hand, who is the fairest in all the land?

Oh, that's right.

Him.

He smiles.

Tim and his little team descend upon the wolves they have cornered in the ruins of Fort Macomb.

"Come on," he coaxes the final survivor. "I know you've got a few names for me."

The boy stands his ground like a man, give him that.

He pops off his head in one merciless wrench, and underhands it to Tim. "Catch, mate."

The corpse stands for a moment longer, and then it sways, it folds forward, it splatters such a nice abstract over the pale blanket beneath it.

He thanks you for the inspiration, mate.

"If Stefan is tolerant of this, what else do you think he could maybe, one day, perhaps, come to accept?" he asks one night when they are lying in bed, his head on her chest, his arm draped lazily across her waist.

"You mean you." She looks down at the top of his head for the space of three heartbeats, and then, impulsively, she leans down to kiss it. "Klaus, if you want to be boyfriends with Stefan, you're going to have to learn how to actually be a friend. Specifically, Stefan's friend. One- no cold-blooded murder. Two- no little digs about Elena, ok; he won't talk about exactly what happened, but it's over, and he's still hurting. Three- you have got to stop thinking you're funny."

"What do you mean?"

"Hello! The other day, he said, "So then all three of us walked into the bar", and you cut in with, "And the first of us says, 'I'll have a pint of blood.' And the second one says, 'I'll have one too.' The third says, 'I'll have a pint of plasma.' And the bartender replies, 'So, that'll be two Bloods and a Blood Lite?' And then you just stood there, and you stared at him like the creepy guy who has a crush on you, but instead of doing anything about it just watches all intensely from afar, and you just know that at night he sleeps with a pillow that he dressed in a pair of the underwear he stole from your gym locker and the wig he spent five hours online matching to your exact shade and style." She pauses. "You don't have a Stefan pillow, do you?"

"I don't have a Stefan pillow, love. I am, however, in possession of a shot glass and a T-shirt."

"Ok, but which picture of him did you use? Because, oh my God, trying to get something out of him that's not him pushing up his biceps and trying to convey to us how deep he is through the power of his broody eyes and his freaky hurricane-proof hair is like pulling teeth."

"Bekah and I spent a good portion of our time with him making fun of his hair, actually."

"Do you ever get the feeling it's judging you? Like seriously- gale-force magical Bonnie wind and it doesn't even bat an eye. It clearly has a mind of its own. Like maybe Stefan is the most zen, we've-all-done-shitty-things-I-don't-point-fingers-I-mean-just-look-at-how-I-haven't-eaten-Damon-yet guy ever, but his hair sees everything, and it finds everyone lacking from its little Redken for Men pedestal."

He presses his face to her chest, and laughs until he is nearly in tears.

"What?" she laughs, whacking him lightly across the head.

He tilts his head back beneath her chin and he gives her one of those dimpled smiles that is so full of all the genuine little things he has spent most of his very long life ignoring until they wilt, and she just- there isn't-

She's had many problems, but among them has never been a torpidity of the tongue. Some people struggle with words bricked between lead throat and crystallized lips, gummed shut with all the things that seal off mouths which are otherwise busy.

But she's always broken herself open and spilled herself everywhere.

She doesn't do that now.

She strokes his hair up off his forehead, and she gives him back the same smile, and this is where she sort of just stretches out and she basks, because she always thought there were moments in life that freeze and are suspended, that somehow are stretched though they immobilize clock, breath, heart, and one day, she's not going to have that anymore. One day she's going to understand about time, and how it flows forever forward, how it is the only thing in this world that will never stop when all around it engines stall and generations die out and chests pump their final failing wheeze, but you're only nineteen once, you are invincible for so long, and then time comes, and it marks you up, it dings up your insides even if it doesn't so much as bump your outsides, so for just a while longer, she's going to sit here.

He shuts his eyes as she strokes his hair, and he lets his cheek settle back down on her chest, and he makes that little sound through his nose of sleep just within reach.

She doesn't know what it is to have waited ten lifetimes to be given love by someone whose shackles are not forged of DNA.

But it must have overwhelmed him so much.

He must have forgotten what it felt like, he must have never even had it, because his heart beat so loudly, his hands shook so badly, she had to make the first move, to surge forward and take his shirt collar in her fingers and kiss him until finally one of those shaking hands found her hair and the other brushed her cheek and he just sort of fell over, pulling her down on top of him, and if she'd had to breathe she would have died, because he never broke for air.

Her story went like this:

She met a boy.

She had his children.

She died in bed beside him.

But this world is not comprised of boys.

They are not an ambition, they should never be an end goal, existence does not hinge upon what they spill inside a womb.

She's going to survive.

That's all figured out.

But to live-

That's where she fills in the blanks.

He's not going to be everything, this boy. He will not be the sun around which she revolves, burning as she orbits.

But she'll love him.

He will never need anything else, this boy.

"Do we have any pictures where Elijah's actually smiling?" Bekah asks as he squints his eyes and he carefully adds a dab of phthalo blue to the corner of his canvas.

"Or any pictures where Kol isn't making an ass out of himself in the background? What do they call it nowadays- 'photobombing'?"

He sees a little smile on her lips out of the corner of his eye. "Do you remember this one?"

He turns round to take the photo from her hand, and inside him is the dual tragedy of this pang that is grief, sharper than it ought to be, duller than he feels is fair. "Yes. That was just shortly after you'd come to New Orleans. It was on my little Kodak Autographic."

"Your hair is just bloody awful, Nik," she says, coming round to stand next to him as he studies it, her shoulder touching his, her cheek for just one sentimental moment resting upon his sleeve as they study this encapsulated history.

"Because the prat had just come up behind me and slicked it back the wrong way."

He feels her smile against his shoulder. "Better yours than mine."

He tears his eyes from the photo to cast them down on top of her head, and what a knot tenderness makes in your throat, when it is hidden away where it has no room to unfurl.

"This was just a few months before you daggered him," she says, and then she shifts her cheek against his shoulder, and she drops her voice. "Do you regret it? Knowing now that we had so little time left with him? You could have let him out, Nik. You should have."

Yes, Bekah.

Fear is every man's peak to surmount or be defeated by, and though a monster's heart shrivels where once a boy's took up far too much room, he is never not shadowed by this specter of cowardice.

He just didn't know-

He kept him in a bloody box, Rebekah.

He was always going to be there.

When last he grappled to the ground this terror of love taken away and respect snatched back and he flung open that coffin to allow his brother his own freedom to hate or to forgive, they'd have another twenty bloody lifetimes to work it all out amongst themselves.

All they had was time.

It smoothes away everything.

And so one day Kol would not hate him, one day, perhaps after a tour of every continent and a thorough besmirching of all untouched by the soot of perversion, he'd show up on his big brother's doorstep, and what he wouldn't say with his lying jester's mouth, he'd communicate through his eyes, his hands, his simple bloody presence.

He'd smile.

Nik, he'd say.

The handsomest Mikaelson has returned.

Give us a kiss, darling.

"I should have," he says, and he lets her reach down to slip her fingers between his own.

She turns her face into his shoulder, this unbreakable, fragile, fragile sister of his.

"Nik," she says thickly, after a very long moment of silence. "Are you going to keep this girl?"

"What?"

"Do you love her more than me?"

It's like the bloody ass has to think about it.

She takes her face off his shoulder.

She snatches the picture from his hand.

"Never mind," she says with such brittle brightness. "It's not like I didn't already know that your taste is somewhat suspect. But there at least you two will make quite the match. She was involved with Damon Salvatore after all, which doesn't speak much for her discrimination. Or perhaps it says everything you need to know."

He is so instantly alert at this little bit of news that he forgets to call her out on her own brief little tryst with the eldest Salvatore. "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, you didn't know that? Caroline had a torrid little thing with Damon. Elena told me all about it while we were in New York."

He has put down his brush.

She watches the coming storm gather itself in his brow and sweep itself in wooden hostility down his fingers.

She smiles.

"If it makes you feel any better, it sounds like most of it wasn't consensual on poor little Caroline's part."

Off you go with that nasty little temper of yours, brother.

Do you see, Nik?

She can always turn back upon you whatever you have used to wound her.

"What happened between you and Damon?"

"Ok, you're not getting it- I don't care. Don't care. Just get it to me, ok?" she is saying into her phone when he slams aside the door of his office and he snaps this into the space between them.

His entrance yanks her feet down from his desk and her ear away from her phone, and he hears so very clearly the pattering of her heart, knocking round inside her.

"I have to go," she says, and abruptly hangs up.

"What happened between you and Damon Salvatore? What did he do to you?"

She fiddles the mobile round her hand, sets it down on the desk, touches one visibly nervous hand to her forehead, to the curl that hangs down in front of it, to the speck of dust detectable only by the most anxious of eyes.

"Who told you about me and Damon?"

"I asked you a question, Caroline."

"I asked you one!" she replies sharply, those terribly perceptible nerves switching themselves from hand to voice.

"Rebekah and I were having ourselves a little chat. It just happened to pop up."

She gives the mobile a little spin with her finger.

He listens to it rattle against the wood.

"Well, I don't think it's any of your business."

"I'll rip out his throat with my bare hands, and then I'll make him watch as I eat it. What I'll move onto after that I haven't yet decided, but I can only imagine how terribly unpleasant the whole ordeal's going to be, watching yourself be consumed bit by bit like that."

"You can't do anything to him, Klaus. He's Stefan's brother," she whispers, but there are hearts unmoved by the most touching of entreaties, love.

You bloody wanted him, didn't you, his most grotesque of layers, every dirty little nook, each festering cranny?

Well here he is, sweetheart.

"What. Did. He. Do."

"Damon and I dated. Briefly. It wasn't even really a thing, it was…me, wanting to feel like someone wanted me for once, and not Elena. And it turned out that's all it was for him, just a means to the endgame that is Elena Gilbert. Ok? Are you happy? That's the story, Klaus. It's not even a new one. Somebody didn't want Caroline Forbes- I have an entire encyclopedia full of those particular entries."

"What did he do, Caroline?"

"You know, I'm getting really tired of that question, especially when I just answered it, like, half a second ago. I know age and memory are kind of-"

He reaches the desk in one elongated step and he slams his hands down on top of it, the surface cracking, papers jumping, pens rattling, his chair giving a sudden creak as Caroline levitates herself a good half inch off the seat, her eyes with their touch of fire going wide in that fresh young face suddenly devoid of color.

He leans forward and drops his voice. "If you tell me one more lie, I will leave this instant on a plane for Mystic Falls, where I will proceed to rip Damon Salvatore's head from his shoulders, and then I will parade it, on a stick, in front of Stefan himself. I'll have it stuffed. It will grace my mantle for the next ten centuries."

A blink regains her composure. "You can't bully me."

"Do you think I'm bluffing, Caroline?"

She swallows.

"No," she whispers.

"Then tell me the whole story."

There is a very long pause.

He listens to her frightened young heart, to the air she has to scrape down past leaden tongue, to the slow working of this breath inside lungs gone nearly to stone.

She still has within her the instincts of prey, the intuitive stillness of victim.

Don't twitch, sweetheart.

He smiles humorlessly.

"It was ok at first. And then he…fed on me, and he compelled me to forget about it. I mean, I knew what he was, I was just…I was trapped. I couldn't tell anyone. I had to just…lay there and try not to scream while he did whatever he wanted, knowing that when it was all done, when he didn't have any use for me anymore, not even as an object for him to play with, and manipulate, and use, he was going to kill me. And that's why you were right," she whispers, looking down at her hands. "That's why I wouldn't go back to being a human. Because I never want to be that powerless again."

Does a heart really go to pieces, when it takes a blow from which it cannot recover?

So much is made of the breaking of this particular organ.

He knows that once damaged it is never quite the same, that with the indifference of war and the nonchalance of the reaper with his arms full of children comes a certain calcification, that there are men who, rich with circulated blood, still appear to exist without its functions, that the softest of them harden most quickly, that a mother's is easily bruised, a father's even more easily stopped up, but why his makes its way in little slivers into stomach, throat, boots, he will never understand.

You can't feel it.

Not without hand pressed to chest, carotid, jugular.

It is merely understood that it is there, that it pumps on, that it will somehow carry you through.

He goes for decades without ever noticing it.

And then she takes her little broken voice, and she thrusts it straight through him.

"Everyone just sort of…forgot. So I've tried to do the same thing. Because Stefan is my friend, and because Elena has feelings for him, and maybe I don't understand that, and I don't like it, but I still love her more than I hate him."

She's trying so hard to smile. "It's not the first time I've been overlooked. I just marathon The Bachelor, and I eat something that's going to go straight to my hips, and then I get over it. Damon is a miserable little man, who's never going to be happy, because he can't get out of his own way long enough to be a decent person and to deserve anything good. But I'm going to go on, and I'm going to make the most of things, and I am going to be happy, as often as I can. And that's how I'm going to win."

She slowly stands and makes her way round the desk with careful human strides, and then she takes his cheeks in her hands, and she turns his face toward her. "Ok?" she says quietly, stroking her thumbs along his cheekbones. "So let Damon go. He will screw over any little good thing in his life at every single freaking turn. That's his punishment."

He shuts his eyes and turns his face into her hand, nosing at her wrist, softly kissing the pulse, letting himself just breathe in her scent for a moment, and then he brings his own hands up, and he tenderly presses his forehead to hers as he pulls her palms from his cheeks.

"Well, you see, love- I'm very different from your 'friends', if you can in fact even call them that."

He smiles.

"Just imagine what would have happened to the little hunter who killed my brother, if he hadn't tragically given his life in the quest for the cure. Or the doppelganger, if I didn't want her to feel every moment of what it's like to lose a younger sibling who depended upon you for protection, for love, for something better than dying alone, believing right to the very end of their final moments that you hated them," he says with a little catch in his voice.

"People do not hurt my family, and simply walk away, Caroline."

She goes white.

She storms into his studio two days later.

He calmly adds another stroke to his canvas.

"So Stefan was just telling me about how his phone's gone missing."

"Was he now."

He tilts his head, swirls his brush round his palette after a moment of consideration. "I assume there's a reason you thought this would be of interest to me?"

"Well, let's see- one of us here is kind of a notorious pickpocket, and I'll give you a hint, because I'm sure you're going to play dumb, but it's not the one who actually paid for the Jimmy Choos she's wearing right now."

"Compelled the salesgirl into handing over completely free of charge, along with a matching handbag. I watched you 'buy' them, sweetheart."

"Whatever, Klaus. She was really bitchy, ok?"

"Well, then, contrary to your earlier accusation, we have two thieves at hand. So was it Miss Scarlet in the billiards room with the candlestick, or perhaps Colonel Mustard, the library, the dagger?" He smiles to himself as he stipples a splash of green onto the corner.

"This isn't a joke, Klaus."

Well it certainly won't be very amusing to some, love.

But you can be assured he'll get quite the kick out of it.

A/N: Well, I'm guessing you guys probably have a good idea of who the crossover character is going to be. Klaus and I are going to enjoy this so much. *Heavy breathing*

All bad jokes are sadly the property of various pun websites. I really need to up my pun game if I'm going to keep writing this dimply nutjob.

Lots more Kol and flashback to come in the second part of this, not to mention a pretty big plot point, and Damon wishing he'd never even set eyes on Caroline Forbes.

Also, I SORT OF ACCIDENTALLY MADE MYSELF SHIP KENNETT? CAN YOU HELP?

Edited to add: Remember that this series actually goes AU after episode 4x19, so Jeremy is indeed dead, since the show resurrected him in the finale, and I never chose to make that a part of the narrative.