Work Text:
“Niklaus, give me your hand. I can take it off.”
Veins, growing black, crawl across Niklaus’s face, and suddenly Elijah realizes many things, and he thinks: right now, his brother’s heart is breaking – thanks to Davina, but his breaks too, just out of solidarity.
* * *
Elijah is not angry. Elijah is in a mad, hellish rage. His insides are the tall fires of the Inquisition. His insides are the screaming witches. His insides are Gia. He wakes up in the nights, starry and less so, but never makes a sound, just wipes the sweat, flowing in rivers, from his forehead. The red door slowly dissolves in his consciousness. That’s good, of course; he can start living in harmony with himself. But what harmony can there be when his greatest desire is to see Niklaus burn. To torture him, to watch how he suffers, how he hurts.
“Brother.”
Speak of the devil. Niklaus peeks into the room, looking as though he thinks that everything is alright between them. It goes without saying that any problem can be solved with a bout of drinking, and Elijah should just take his younger brother for an example: fully connected to his emotions, he does anything he wants.
“Who is going to play the good parent today, and who will protect Hope?”
Niklaus is wearing his favorite gray sweater, and Elijah hates it so much, to the very last woolen strand, that he wants to see blood. He wants to tear at it with his hands and fangs. He wants Niklaus to be afraid, not to act like…
“Brother?”
Elijah leaves the room, without saying a word, and goes downstairs. Hope, unsurprisingly, is already sitting in the stroller below, dressed according to the latest fashions, smooth, chubby, a satisfied infant, who has come to terms with the things going on around her and decided to accept Niklaus and Elijah as a strange cross of mother and father.
Even her bottle is laying in a special compartment.
Elijah slowly goes down the staircase, taking a breath every three steps. Otherwise the bottle with fly into the window, and he will race off in search of Hayley. He absolutely doesn’t understand how his half-brother, long no longer a functioning kind of psychopath, can manage to be a fantastic father, and even procure breastmilk without any real damage to the donor. It’s a round peg in a square whole and doesn’t fit at all with Elijah’s conceptions of Niklaus. And it’s always important to Elijah to discover, explain, then understand.
Niklaus cannot be bad and wonderful at the same time, and that shatters Elijah’s internal universe, which was already hanging by a frayed thread.
* * *
If you think a little, and don’t just jump from extreme to extreme, then the origin of the desire is understandable.
Because Klaus does everything for Elijah’s forgiveness. Because he’s been going crazy every day since the declaration of war. Because he knows why Elijah came back. The only thing that Klaus doesn’t understand is why Elijah strives time after time for a heartfelt union with some young girl that just can’t be interesting to him. What love can be there be between them, when Klaus has faithfully shared immortality with Elijah, when Klaus has understood everything that Elijah has experienced, when Klaus has always – some way or another – been close by.
Let’s say, Klaus thinks, methodologically mixing the red, let’s say that for the first few hundred years, love is the same concept as it was before. There are enough vampires in the world, and anyway you could turn whoever you’d like to. The complications upon complications begin a little later. When human logic and human aspirations fade away. There’s too much red. They are very stubborn, they hold out to the last. But later the game in search of the meaning of life becomes very complicated. The understanding that it doesn’t exist comes just after the turn of the second or third century.
Klaus clenches his teeth and belatedly realizes that he hadn’t taken off his favorite sweater, and he becomes a bit irritated, but there’s already nothing to be done. What are we on over there, damn everyone and everything, by mother and father, Adam and Eve… Ah, yes. Then comes the eighth century, when, in order not to lie down voluntarily in the grave for an eternal sleep, you need to make yourself out to be a human and – this here is irony, not whatever it says in the dictionary – come up with the meaning of life. While already knowing perfectly well that there is none, and that you are a shameless deity, while all around you are fragile flowers who were merely unlucky. But you sit down at the table, knock over a bottle and think up a meaning out of nothingness and emptiness. You take ashes, the remains of the ashes, that which remains after the ashes (his wrists already ache, but that’s for the best), a little bit of dust, roadside dust works perfectly well (yes, all the world’s witches should be jealous), a little bit of blood as a binding element… And everything comes out as it should.
A thoroughly false, distorted – and the most genuine, real, visible and weighty – meaning of life. Without one no one lives beyond their eighth century.
His long sleeves are getting dirty, and Klaus asks himself what exactly his older brother has come up with. You can probably set yourself to the search for love and mutual understanding, the kind that would be eternal, the kind that would be without compromises. The kind that is brought about by kindred souls. It’s logical: the more impossible the task, the better, the longer you’ll drag it out. But why all these young girls? The sex? Probably. Though after a thousand years on this earth, pleasure is relative. The latest attempt to find someone who can make the imaginary reality?
But then why does he get so angry, why, why, why… Klaus tiredly lowers himself onto the floor. His bloodied wrists are torn to pieces. The sobriety of his thoughts rarely goes hand in hand with measured behavior. The walls of his room are decorated with red streaks up to seven feet high – or from seven feet high, depending on how you look at it – with the width of a wrist. His head spins, his vision swims.
Why is he angry? Isn’t Klaus doing everything just so that the meaning of his life won’t be obtained or realized?
* * *
“Davina, I’ll repeat myself…”
The girl stands up from the armchair that had belonged to Josephine, and points Elijah to the door in a very familiar gesture.
He shakes his head:
“I assumed that you bore no special affection for my brother.”
She powerlessly clenches her fists. Elijah shrugs his shoulders and adjusts the cufflink on his sleeve: he’s stalling.
“I don’t have any special affection for you either, elder Mikaelson,” And that heated, strict copper of her voice is something new. “You’re just asking in order to play around. You never wanted his death. I’ve asked about – you had your chance.”
I held his heart in my hands, Elijah thinks distantly.
“And then another and another. And another million missed opportunities,” Davina stands up from the armchair and impatiently paces about the room, touching, from the look of it, the knick-knacks that are unfamiliar to her. “You don’t want his death.”
Elijah raises his eyebrows: it sounds like a judgement.
“You want him to live only for your sake, but you’re afraid to admit it.” Her face turns into a perfect mask.
She’ll go far.
“And what does that mean?”
“You think about that in your free time, and don’t come throwing yourself at me with impossible requests.”
Elijah hums and finally relaxes. He approaches a small table where a grimoire is lying and turns a few pages, squinting from the sunlight streaming through the thick curtains.
“Now, why ‘impossible’? I’ve read a few books in my free time. You don’t need much of anything at all. The main ingredient, my blood, is at your disposal.”
Davina sighs, jerkily pulls the grimoire out from under Elijah’s fingers, and sits down in the armchair.
* * *
“Brother, I couldn’t be more serious.”
He needs to say something, otherwise everything will end up badly, it’ll end up that nothing works out for him, and moreover – he needs to maintain the illusion that he and Elijah are both together in the same room.
“And you can’t even begin to imagine, Niklaus, how serious I am. You can’t, and that’s it. Your sleeves are stained with something, take a look.”
Klaus doesn’t have to look to know what exactly the stains are. But he came, half-mad, to throw himself at Elijah’s feet and beg for forgiveness. Logic and attention keep telling him to kill Hayley, in order to totally, certainly save his brother, but his brother is already not talking to him because of just Gia, and Klaus is so sick of the silent treatment. He’s afraid that Elijah will stay silent for the rest of their remaining eternity. Klaus doesn’t know why, but this kills him even more than the feeling of fingers around his heart.
“Brother, let’s forget it. We’ve already forgotten so many times.”
The two sentences come out almost coherent. But who knows how they came out, when his sleeves aren’t completely cleaned off, but Klaus hasn’t even noticed. Doesn’t red on gray catch the eye, good God, how can he not notice?
“I’d prefer not to talk about this,” Elijah rolls a glass of whiskey between his fingers and doesn’t look in Klaus’s direction.
“You’re all quite fine yourselves, betraying me for some stranger,” Klaus resorts to his penultimate argument.
He passed the limit of acceptable humiliation long ago, almost sprawled out across the old rug, but it’s clearly not enough for Elijah. Elijah needs to concentrate on just one thing and remember it again and again non-stop. And doesn’t it matter that he killed Tati? And doesn’t it matter that Klaus needed to make that damned witch trust him? And doesn’t it matter, that…
Nothing, emptiness and cold in the place of the usual smile and the less usual jokes. Elijah only jokes with him, and the awareness of that wrenches his stomach.
“I saved us from her. You can think whatever you like and behave however you’d like, but it was me who saved us from her.”
“Wonderful,” Elijah responds. “It would be difficult to expect less from Niklaus Mikaelson himself. He’s a multitasker, and so great. At the same time, he managed to punish his disobedient older brother, taking away…”
Klaus grabs a chest of drawers and hurls it at the wall. The crash is so loud that Hope breaks out in mournful crying upstairs. Elijah sharply slaps himself in the forehead and leaves the room so fast that Klaus can’t even do anything.
* * *
That full moon, the classic clear sky is missing, and Hayley has to wait a long time. Elijah almost gives up and leaves but then a shadow grows from the ground, taking on the form of the woman he loves.
Peacefully sleeping in her stroller, Hope doesn’t even try to wake up. Somewhere nearby Niklaus is wandering about in an unsightly manner, and Elijah is almost calm. Everything is the way it should be. He is angry, but he’s used to it. He’s used to seeing Hayley once a month, used to taking care of Hope. But in truth, he…
“Did you find a cure, an antidote, a countercurse?” Hayley impatiently spits out, as if choking on the words, as if she had forgotten what it’s like to speak.
She stretches her unkept arms to Hope, takes her out of the stroller, kisses her on the round crown of her head. The sleeping child, of course, bursts into tears.
Just like Niklaus, in fact, drives me to them, Elijah thinks, purposefully keeping his face calm, and even more purposefully breaking into a smile.
“Allow me, I’ll… She’ll calm right down, you’ll see.”
“What’s the progress on the countercurse?” Hayley asks, and her eyes shine with wolfish madness.
Elijah thoughtfully rocks Hope. He is sick of answering questions. He’s sick of absolutely everything.
“Elijah,” she almost hisses.
“You yourself know that it’s not that simple.”
“Well, it seems to me like you just don’t want to change anything. That you like living with my child…”
“Sh–sh–sh,” Elijah says, pressing a finger to his lips.
Hope has only just dozed off.
“And yes, the child is yours, and Niklaus’s. I don’t really like that you’re prone to forgetting that, Hayley.”
“Don’t say that name in front of me, you hear me, Elijah, I’d like to see you run in circles for a month and live on whatever crumbs you can find, I’d like to see you how you…”
“Hayley, I’m doing everything that it is within my power to do.”
He finally holds out Hope to her. He gives the child up reluctantly and with difficulty. Once, Hayley almost took her away from them. Even if it was due to the circumstances. Even if…
And, after all, Niklaus really did save them all.
* * *
For Klaus, every day is utter torture. He wakes up with a horrible feeling of guilt, knowing with certainty that Elijah will never forgive him no matter what.
Klaus does everything that’s possible, everything that’s impossible, but nothing works. Despair is certainly colored red. Now he is just a silent shadow, an appendage hanging off of Elijah and Hope, and it seems that even the bitch Hayley regards him more positively than his once-loving brother does.
Today, Klaus is planning on trying the latest impossibility. He sits up on the bed, feeling how cool air blows in from the half-open window, shivers, runs his hands along his forearms. He should stand up and open the thick shades, but even like this light breaks through their cracks, and in the room it isn’t dark, but rather something closer to a morning haze.
Klaus is planning on turning up at Cami’s, so that she will help him with Vincent – which is, of course, tantamount to suicide. But, maybe, if Hayley is returned her human form, while Jackson, let’s say, isn’t brought quite the same luck, or isn’t brought any luck at all, but brought to a different land, foreign territory… He has options, here. Elijah will not accept a dead Jackson, simply out of nobility, and anyway the bitch would sink into hysterics.
Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be bad to talk to Vincent to start with, because why make an unnecessary fuss if he is just going to incinerate (for example) Klaus.
Klaus lowers his bare legs from the bed. He really doesn’t want to stand up, he wants to lie around, since the pretty wet-nurse Lynn (almost like in the good old days) sometimes lets him and Elijah relax.
And then the mansion seems to shudder. Klaus jumps up from the bed, realizing only after a millisecond that it’s music, an urgent, persistent English beat. It’s surprising, but Hope isn’t crying. With alarm filling him from head to toe, Klaus himself almost let out a howl, but then Elijah tumbles into his room.
“Hope, that is, Hope, she’s with the wet-nurse, and I sent a few vampires with them for defense, and Davina also decided to take a walk with them, you got it, brother?”
Elijah is outrageously drunk, and Klaus feels how the boundaries of his consciousness have just now expanded, perhaps by as much as two miles.
Elijah sways. He doesn’t have on a jacket, his shirt is half-unbuttoned and has broken loose from his jeans…
Klaus bites himself on the forearm, then focuses his gaze on his brother. Elijah. In jeans. Completely drunk. And it’s not a dream.
In Elijah’s arms is a bottle of absinthe, and in the background a youthful voice asks on repeat: “Why’d you only call me when you’re high?” Klaus wouldn’t mind being a bit high. He tries to remember –
“So what, I don’t have the right to drink?” Elijah asks, indignantly and very, very drunkenly. “Why do you sleep without a shirt?”
Klaus comes to his senses, stands up from the bed, and takes away the bottle from Elijah. Then he grasps him around the waist and leads him into the bathroom.
“Listen, aren’t you a romantic,” Elijah fumbles with his words. “Hey, look, even candles, how beautiful. I never would’ve guessed. I also never guessed that you could be a good father, that’s why I got confused, and I got so confused, Niklaus, who to love, why to love…”
Klaus tunes out the meaningless drunken chatter and thrusts his brother under the cold shower. Who knows how much he drank if suddenly his lung regeneration stopped being enough to handle it, so the water certainly won’t hurt.
* * *
Elijah’s head is splitting into a thousand tiny bits. He tries to get his bearings: probably, he’s caught in some kind of curse, and the latest witch is torturing him, removing his soul. And just a moment later he smells a foreign scent, pleasant, however, a note of perfume and a bit of sweat, feeling softness beneath his head and warmth on his body.
All the same, he has to open his eyes. And then Elijah remembers his drunken debauch. And then Elijah becomes embarrassed, and tries abruptly to sit up, but – he doesn’t manage to. He groans incomprehensibly and falls backwards. One moment is enough for him to understand: the bed is Niklaus’s.
He thrust himself – with his whining about love, awful women, and his complete lack of luck – onto Niklaus. He asked him about how to be with them, those young, stupid creatures, if they are simply physically incapable of understanding what it means to linger on this earth for ten centuries, experience all feelings that are available to something human and to something inhuman, and for some reason continue to live.
Oh, holy saints above, you tried to get the meaning of life out of Niklaus.
“Awake?” asks a too-familiar voice. “Here.”
It smells of blood, and Elijah unthinkingly downs the bag, feeling a bit better, then nevertheless jumps up on the bed and hurries past Niklaus into the bathroom.
“Should I hold your hair back?” The question comes mockingly in pursuit.
Alright, but what did he answer? Something about family and power? About unattainability? Well, alright, that’s logical, you can’t reach your goal. Or was it just about family? Peace with your family ?
Elijah washes up for a long time, snorts his throat clear for a long time, and examines himself in the mirror for a long time. Jeans and a shirt. Jeans and a shirt. This is how much he had to have drunk in order to show himself to Niklaus in jeans and a shirt.
It’s good that at least he didn’t try to get undressed.
Or?
“Niklaus, did I put on a striptease?” Elijah asks, coldly and haughtily, thinking to himself that it’s possible that he did, and that it’s possible that it’s the end of the world after all.
His brother sits in his armchair, settled freely and insolently, just as usual.
“You don’t remember anything? You know, I was pretty surprised. And then I went and took a look at what your absinthe was infused with. Elijah, have you completely lost your mind?”
Niklaus feels about the floor with his hand and throws the bottle to Elijah. One of six, it seems.
In small, ornate font below the label is written: vervain. Elijah frowns; he was usually not in the habit of thoughtlessness.
“Did you want to feel a real, human hangover?” And that voice could freeze water. Did he sit all day with him, or something? “Or did you decide kill yourself because of Hayley? I assure you, there are more effective methods…”
“Which?” Elijah asks, and sits on the creased blanket across from Niklaus.
In response, the other is silent.
* * *
“Vincent, hey!” Klaus almost yelps, avoiding a marble vase that comes flying at him. “Vincent, hey, listen!”
“I want nothing to do with you,” Vincent enunciates each syllable – and then there’s already an armchair flying at Klaus.
“Vincent, I want peace!” Klaus shouts, taking refuge on the lower shelf of a bookcase standing right in the middle of the large room.
Whistling by, a poker becomes the last projectile in the round.
“That’s right!” Klaus slows his tone a bit. “I finally want peace and nothing else. You take over handling difficult situations, restore the balance, do whatever you want. I won’t interfere. I don’t need much at all, just return the werewolves.”
Vincent appears from behind the bookcase and looks at him suspiciously. Klaus finally returns to a vertical position (be more careful, idiot, witches are a nervous people), shakes down his jeans, and adjusts his stretched-out sweater.
“If I’m not mistaken,” Vincent begins, raising his prominent brows, “it was you yourself that started this whole story with the werewolves. And, anyway, I won’t ever believe that Klaus Mikaelson wants an additional player on the field. Either you reveal everything as it is, or I won’t do anything.”
This is a delicate moment.
“I fought with my brother,” Klaus announces frankly, squinting and shifting from leg to leg. “I only have one option to return myself to his favor.”
Vincent rolls his eyes. He has very lively and very amusing facial expressions, but Klaus isn’t in the mood for laughter.
“Don’t forget that I’m the fresh-baked first mate on Her Majesty’s Ship, the Witchcraft. I’m not up to date about your intrigues and little plots.”
He shrugs his shoulders and goes to the bar.
Everyone who plays this game definitely is stocked up with a lot of good drinks.
Klaus himself is the first proof of that.
“And it’s long overdue,” Klaus notes and spreads out his arms in answer to the knife-sharp gaze. “Hayley. It all comes down to her.”
“Will you really give me a carte-blanche for strategic movements just for… For Elijah’s favor?”
I’m a genius, after all, Klaus thinks. He didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe me.
“I suppose you’ll need my blood,” he says aloud.
* * *
Elijah’s universe exploded long ago. Rather, it narrowed to the size of one living being. Rather, not a living being, but, probably, still a creature? Or the pinnacle of creation? He can argue with himself, he can elaborate on each thought, going all the way to cold, measured madness, but he can’t do anything about it. All those little girls simply haven’t been there with him from the beginning of the world to its end.
Elijah adjusts his perfectly-fitting suit and is very afraid to finally formulate the thought to its necessary conclusion.
If truth be told, Elijah’s greatest fear is being ridiculous. To be a laughingstock. Niklaus is just as impossibly arrogant of a man, but for Elijah it is simply death. Much worse, much more biting than the loss of a woman he loves.
If only Niklaus knew.
If only Niklaus knew, he would destroy him on the spot, with all his little secrets, his shameful confidences, more than enough of which have accumulated over the course of ten centuries.
Elijah looks in the mirror, takes the ring (mademoiselle Davina’s gift) from a drawer, and puts it on his right hand. He knows well what a lover of trinkets Niklaus is. That very smallest of weaknesses that only family knows about.
In the ring is freedom. In the ring is death.
But Elijah does not care. No one will ever humiliate him again, no one will take away the latest woman he loves. No one will be a plague on his eyes.
He descends downstairs by the staircase, going into the living room, where the table has long been set.
“Brother! I’d gotten tired of waiting,” Niklaus smiles. “I sent Hope to be with Aunt Cami, well and with a pair of witches. I’m in their good graces right now.”
He fusses about, pours a drink. He sits down at the table, looks on almost as though he were in love. Well, of course, Elijah condescended to come down – from the staircase, and to him.
In that moment, Elijah really wants to descend into genuine or imagined insanity.
He is the meaning of my life.
“And what’s that toy you’ve got there, allow me to ask,” Niklaus asks delightedly, holding the fork in his idiotic, impossible way.
And Elijah, with a sinking heart, throws him the ring. The phrase “a gift for you” is already beyond his capabilities.
And when Niklaus starts to gasp for breath, Elijah suddenly realizes that he didn’t laugh when Elijah filled the whole house with British rock, that Niklaus didn’t mock him, that his brother offered to hold his hair back… And that he would have – of course – held it back.
* * *
“Niklaus, give me your hand. I can take it off.”
Klaus hasn’t been breathing for several seconds. His chest is being crushed. Something black breaks out across his veins. The suggestion reaches him easily, but he is too tired. They’re back to hatred, and now there is nothing to fix.
Klaus can tell him about Hayley. He can tell him about the werewolves. He can tell him that he’ll become different, better, more moral and noble. But Klaus doesn’t need that.
He knows exactly who is the meaning of his life. He purposefully came up with this at the end of his eighth century. He purposefully chased himself into an emotional trap. He cannot be with Elijah, so he can live.
He starts to physically feel his suffocation, and Elijah repeats the sentence.
This is, probably, the end. Because an unattainable meaning of life is just too much. Well, let him go. He’s sick of this.
Klaus recalls all those moments when Elijah was vulnerable, when he didn’t want to seem ridiculous (because he knows about that secret, just as Elijah knows about his trinkets), and he closes his eyes. He almost doesn’t believe that he will die, and that’s the most important thing for death.
Somewhere – like a bell – forks and knives clatter. And Klaus thinks that this is the time to admit to himself that his meaning of life is nonsense, that he didn’t come up with anything, that he remembers Elijah at twenty, that he was just born this perverse, well, that isn’t so frightening, actually.
The most important thing is to hold his hand clenched in a fist, so Elijah can’t take it off by force.
Klaus feels how his heart is stopping, bit-by-bit. And then he is being shaken by the shoulders, and he opens his eyes. In front of him is a howling, sauce-covered (of course, he ran across the tabletop), frightened, despairing twenty-year old boy, not at all afraid to seem ridiculous.
Klaus unclenches his hand.
* * *
Elijah stands and looks carefully at Niklaus, who had very nearly perished. He just flung the ring away to what seemed like a different universe, but he needs to pick it up. It’s a weapon, it’s… He feels sick from what he almost did, he tries not to think, and stares at the meaning of his life.
The meaning of his life looks in response like a beaten dog, and Elijah wishes that heart had actually broken. Only he’s not thinking of Niklaus’s. Tears and panic are flowing across his cheeks, and Elijah wipes them away with a quick movement.
“Idiot,” his meaning says, exhaling, and through clenched teeth. “Sauce. You’re covered in sauce.”
Elijah doesn’t hear him. He only has one option: to go completely and irrevocably off the rails. Then something stings his heart. Then he feels warmth and realizes that he really is smeared in orange, that he fell into the sauce boat while he was racing across the fifteen-foot tabletop to get to his brother. And he simply has nothing to say.
“I love you, Niklaus,” he says, and lowers his gaze defeatedly.
“How nice your love is, then,” His brother says angrily, and Elijah doesn’t see, but hears, how he inhales deeply, the first since…
Elijah cannot bear it, and covers his face with a hand. He gets himself even more dirty.
“Like a little piglet,” Niklaus sighs, already somewhere far off.
Elijah lowers his hand. Niklaus feels about the columns, extracts the ring, and looks it over with interest. He slowly approaches Elijah.
“I assume this toy isn’t to be melted down. In that case, you’re the best safe in the world.”
Niklaus takes him by the hand and carefully puts the ring on Elijah’s finger.
Elijah feels the sauce run across his face and everything within him turn into prickly, dead salt crystals.
“By the way,” Niklaus, completely recovered, declares impudently, taking a step backwards and examining Elijah from head to toe, “at the next full moon, Hayley will be free, so you are completely free as well. I free you, brother. Get out of my sight already.”
“Oh,” Elijah reacts.
He needs to do something.
He heads to the exit.
* * *
Sometimes Klaus has astounding insights. Overall he’s completely astounding anyway, from top to toe. But sometimes he realizes completely unbelievable things.
Elijah sets off for the door, covered from head to toe in idiotic orange sauce. Elijah is very emotional with regards to Hayley. Elijah was just sobbing, like a child, when he thought that he was going to lose him.
And to hell with that dubious sentence about love, it doesn’t count.
Elijah is going outside, completely stained by that damned sauce. Outside. Stained.
It only takes Klaus a fraction of a second to block him from the exit.
“What are you doing?” Klaus asks, sprawling across his path, ready to go so far as to seize hold of the doorway with his hands, because Elijah is moving forward somberly and unstoppably. “You’ve thought something up.”
Brilliant insight, indeed.
“Let me pass,” Elijah requests, and it’s like he’s not Elijah, but some kind of orange-colored shadow.
Insight. But Klaus does sometimes have brilliant insights.
Elijah got drunk and listened to British rock. He sobbed, like a little boy. And that suspicious “Oh.”
He doesn’t have enough insight. But Elijah is suddenly no longer straining to leave. He simply stands there, silently, simply not Elijah at all.
“Tell me what you’ve thought up,” Klaus says, feeling like a complete idiot. Somehow, everything seems too simple and too complicated at the same time.
And to hell with that dubious sentence about love, it doesn’t count.
“Let me pour us something to drink, we could both use it, and I’ll put that newfangled British rock of yours on the gramophone. Or play it on my iPhone, I don’t care.”
“Niklaus, just let me leave already.”
“With sauce on your face and across your whole suit?! El, don’t make me laugh.”
And then Elijah looks at him. And that stare almost makes Klaus move to the side. But then he thinks for one very, very, very long moment that he will not move from this spot even if all the witches of New Orleans arise from their graves and come to take him from it, even if only in pieces.
And to hell with that dubious sentence about love, it doesn’t count.
Klaus looks up and stares for a long, long time at the orange sauce, at the small wrinkles, the five o’clock shadow, the dark hair of the man before him. And to be on the safe side, he spreads his arms, leaning against both sides of the doorway.
And to hell with that dubious sentence about love…
“Hayley will be free,” he repeats, just in case.
Elijah stares confidently at the floor, as though something were written there. It seems as though Hayley’s fate doesn’t interest him at all.
“Are you not interested in Hayley’s fate?”
“Oh,” Elijah pronounces, and everything becomes clear to Klaus, from A to Z, from alpha to omega.
And that dubious sentence about love…
“So,” Klaus says, torn between dozens of desires. “So.”
About love.
* * *
“So,” Niklaus says, for what is probably the fourth time. Elijah has gotten tired of counting, and he finally walks away from the exit.
Only in order to rip the handle from the door, leaving the lock untouched.
Elijah tries to become indignant, but doesn’t have the strength even for that.
Niklaus, smiling, like a mix of magician and Cheshire Cat, goes to the gramophone, and really does find that same record.
The unreality of what is happening spikes, and Elijah realizes that it’s best to register information simply and coldly, just as it comes.
“Drink. Let’s drink,” says Niklaus, pouring out bourbon.
Then he flings both glasses at the wall, right on two beats of “Why’d you only call me when you’re high?”, leaving fairly artistic stains, clears his throat, and says, with embarrassment:
(embarrassment?!)
“We bricked up some of the best wine in history in the basement for a good occasion, remember? It seems its time has come!”
Elijah finally bids farewell to his reason.
Niklaus sets off for the cellar, but halfway, as though rethinking, approaches Elijah, licks his finger, and tastes the sauce off of his cheek –
(Elijah really wants to become indignant)
– and then presses their lips together, lightly and affectionately, and stands as though lost in thought, and suddenly everything is returning to Elijah all at once.
The warmth disappears. Elijah opens his eyes.
Niklaus, almost whistling to himself, disappears into the cellar, and, with enthusiasm, sets to breaking down the wall (with his bare hands?).
“That was the most idiotic way possible of making me put a ring on you!” Judging by the sounds, he is roaring with laughter, there, down below.
But, appearing on the top of the steps with two bottles of the best wine in the world, mouthing the words, he whispers: “I love you, Elijah,” – and Elijah doesn’t really give a damn about anything else.
He goes to get the wine glasses. Later, Niklaus will deal with the sauce somehow or other.