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A city somewhere on the water manifests itself before Klaus: eternal carnivals, bright processions, colorful feasting to exhaustion, and a lot of blood. He envisions Hayley, beautiful and eternally young; out of the corner of his eye, slightly afraid, heart squeezing, he glimpses Cami.
Klaus leaps away from Marcel’s red eyes, already having vanished somewhere in the eternal emptiness of his dreams. He slowly calms himself with Damon’s obscene jokes, and rolls his eyes at the sight of Stefan.
In the morning, the darkness gives way to calm, and he sees Hope, a thin blonde with green eyes.
Klaus never dreams of Elijah anywhere at all, because losing him was the most awful punishment.
* * *
“My dear brother, it seems it’s time for us to flee New Orleans,” Elijah said with his eternal light smirk, and took a sip from his tumbler.
“Dear brother,” Klaus spread his arms in a shrug. “What to say. I’m sick of running. Tell me, which of this world’s monsters have we not yet survived?”
Elijah stood a bit on the balcony, drained his glass and retreated to the wall. He and Hayley were having problems, but Klaus was surprised that his brother had appeared on his doorstep, because… well, in fact, he managed to say it all aloud.
“I know that we haven’t been talking for a fairly long time, but always and forever, you still remember that motto?”
Klaus huffed and nodded.
“Gathering the family together isn’t an option. Rebekah is married to an actor, Kol is god knows where, Freya… Why are you worried? Why did you come?”
“We didn’t abandon you.”
Klaus sighed and shook his head.
“I’m not talking about that at all. Yes, I know about the situation.”
“Brother, you’re brushing it aside, but you don’t know anything. I did some research… Collected information. Fine, so Hayley thinks I’m a paranoiac, but you!”
“You should come by more,” Klaus advised and left the room.
He didn’t have the strength to talk to Elijah. Yes, a strange pattern was visible in the city, and across the continent in general, a wave of inexplicable murders, but there were too few facts for analysis, and Klaus didn’t want to concern himself with it. As it was he already had too much of everything to occupy himself for his eternity.
* * *
Elijah’s answering machine always laughs at Klaus, and it’s hard for him to breathe. An answering machine is a strange joke. It seems to Klaus that it’s some sort of machine for the fulfilment of wishes, that he can leave any message until it’s called for, and he only wants one thing: for Elijah to be at his side once more. Klaus’s heart is very strong, but it seems that its strength is on the wane.
Sometimes he prays into the receiver: “Come back,” – and he’s ready to give up everyone else, ready to betray everyone else, just so that Elijah would.
It’s been a long time since he’s been bothered by the nature of this connection, that has grown into him and crippled him, but he knows with certainty that the only person he wouldn’t exchange for Elijah is Hope. Everyone else – he could.
* * *
“Phone,” Elijah demanded, and Klaus reached out towards the table for it.
His head was splitting. Normally he didn’t feel hangovers, but a dozen girls pumped full of drugs played a dirty trick even on him.
“You shouldn’t burst in like that, I could’ve been naked.”
“So pious, Niklaus.”
The telephone flew across the room, and in one imperceptible motion Elijah pulverized it between his fingers. Klaus actually jumped.
“Have you lost your mind?”
Elijah sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully pushing away a corpse lying nearby.
“Me – no. But you’ve lost your caution. Do you remember last year? The wave of murders?”
Klaus shrugged his shoulders and settled himself on the bed, leaning against the headrest.
“Niklaus, it’s them. I understand how this sounds, but hear me out. The machines. Artificial intelligence.”
Klaus stared at him wide-eyed, and burst into laughter until his chest hurt.
“I already sent Hayley and Hope farther away from here, to some back-country not ensnared in cables. I got into contact with Kol and Rebekah. I even tracked down Freya. Do you see, Niklaus, they don’t want humans. They want us.”
Klaus was silent for a few seconds.
“Let’s say you haven’t lost your mind. Though…”
“Get dressed, let’s go.”
“Considering all the movies…”
“Stop. Do you think there aren’t enough cars without computers inside left for this generation? Let’s go, you’ll see with your own eyes.”
* * *
Klaus rarely thinks about how hopelessly late they were and why. He doesn’t want to blame himself, but it’s the only thing he can do. His relationship with Cami probably didn’t help, he stopped, stuck at the point where “all the blame lies on me.” His analysis isn’t capable of going further. He counts endless “if only”s, and it turns out that he has enough for a lifelong prison of loneliness and self-hatred. He misses Elijah on a physical level, and it’s that closeness that he himself surrendered, with his own hands, when he stopped being a control freak.
Klaus never, ever dreams of Elijah, and he thinks that soon he will forget his face.
* * *
The whole clique assembled in werewolf territory, under a massive tree: the wolves themselves, witches, and vampires. Even Marcel made an appearance. Elijah climbed out of the car first, though the low-slung vintage sportscar did not assist in a comfortable emergence before the audience. Klaus dawdled for a long time, massaging his temples, feeling an agonizing hangover and wondering, out of habit, when his immortal body would finally just give up.
The crowd greeted him with disapproving whispers. Elijah, meanwhile, was taking something wrapped in a rag and obviously very heavy out of the trunk.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, hoisting something onto the hood. “I have the honor of presenting you with a new type of threat, which, unfortunately, can hardly be compared with us.”
The crowd stirred once more, all clearly unhappy that the vampires wanted something from them. The Mikaelsons had declared their neutrality and renounced their rights to the city a long time ago, and in response, somehow or other, everyone had come to live more or less in peace.
The rag flew away following a sharp movement of Elijah’s hand. For some reason a deafening silence set in, and Klaus turned in order to finally see what could be lying there.
“Fuck the hell out of all these fucking people,” a familiar voice came out of the crowd, but Klaus couldn’t turn his eyes away.
Beneath warped skin, beneath human features, muscles and sinews was a completely artificial, metallic skeleton, with its ligaments and complex junctures of steel instead of joints. Fortunately, the being was dead.
“Damon, I would normally ask you to refrain from such expressions. Just two days ago I would have. But now I want to ask everyone here what we shall do with this,” Elijah sighed and adjusted a lock of the cyborg boy’s, apparently, completely human hair.
* * *
Klaus sometimes thinks that he needs to leave an impossible wish on the answering machine. Something like: “Make everything be how it used to be, come back to me, Elijah.” Actually, he has left so many such wishes that it’s hard to remember them all, but it’s also hard to admit it, since the feeling of guilt gnaws so deeply at him. It’s almost impossible to admit what he wants more than anything on earth. Klaus has time to think, and he comes to defined conclusions regarding their relationship and regarding what he would have wanted besides the love and devotion that he doesn’t have anymore either, but to put it into words now… No, it’s better just to forget it right away.
* * *
“I am not Skynet,” the holographic girl on the screen answered, offended.
Her messenger, a young, handsome boy with jerky movements, stood completely aimlessly in the corner staring at nothing.
“I don’t control anyone. You don’t understand. They’re their own race, they’re new people.”
Klaus snorted and looked at Elijah. He was warily examining the messenger, who had appeared right in their headquarters with the computer under his arm.
“Yes, I made them. But now they live by their own rules.”
“And kill everything that moves.”
“You don’t understand,” the girl was offended once more, and it seemed to Klaus that she was jamming, like in an old film. “They are coming to understand the world. Just imagine, mister Mikaelson, you just became vampires, you have your own rights, you aren’t living according to mankind’s laws…”
Elijah gave a cough.
“We have been trying not to violate mankind’s laws for a very long time, Miranda. And we were not born yesterday. And we control our young.”
“No, no. I want to talk to you all – as the beings closest to me by… by all parameters. How should we live?”
“You want to ask what we should live for, isn’t that right?” Klaus said, and tore his gaze way from the floor.
The girl almost shorted out, and the cyborg boy’s head plainly jerked with voltage. Klaus immediately remembered the stupid old jokes about how to break artificial intelligence.
“You know, we don’t have an answer to that question.”
“But… what if we kill people? What if we… conquer the world, won’t that be worth something? We’ll realize our rights?”
Elijah burst into laughter and Klaus understood him completely. It was worthy, however, of tears. Machines come to ask vampires for advice.
“Answer me. Immediately.”
* * *
Klaus gets tired of praying, gets tired of cursing himself, gets tired of everything on earth.
“Okay,” he says into the answering machine. “Okay, Elijah, let’s conquer New Orleans. Let’s build a time machine and go back to the past. Let’s do something impossible. Let’s fly to the moon. I love you.”
“As the only being that understands me and has lived through so many goddamn centuries,” he wants to add. But the phone disconnects and falls out of his hands.
* * *
Klaus and Elijah were sitting in a massive bunker somewhere in the middle of Nevada and laughing, howling with laughter to the point of tears.
“Maybe they didn’t make it in time?” Klaus choked on his tears and guffaws.
“They didn’t even try. For now. Niklaus, I think that they really were interested by us. They really are just like children. With a very cruel and authoritarian mother.”
Nearby, Junnie’s body was emitting smoke, the very same boy who had appeared with Miranda under his arm and now had brought them to her, who had managed to become their friend.
“Literally us, then,” Klaus once again burst out in barking laughter. “Elijah, we should have become their friends, instead of throwing this new race out into the dustbin of history. We would’ve had our own pocket robots.”
“You know,” Elijah said, suddenly serious. “You know, this time we did everything right.”
“Maybe then they wouldn’t have killed so many of our own?”
“Niklaus, Miranda is behind them. She takes control of any given individual whenever it’s convenient for her. That’s not love, it’s tyranny. The question is about her development, not theirs. We’re doing everything right.”
Klaus kicked with a foot at the box of the tactical nuclear warhead that they’d gotten almost completely for free, and sighed heavily:
“Well then, together ‘til the end? Look, if all the main servers and processors are here…”
“We’ve discussed this a million times. They have a backup plan in case we made a mistake. Stefan and Damon will cover us. And there’s a few more insurance plans. Let’s go.”
“And we’re not even going to say goodbye?” Klaus’s voice quavered.
Elijah leapt to his feet and held out a hand to him.
“It’s been a good run, and as for the rest, you know… Maybe we’re capable of surviving even a nuclear explosion. Science versus magic. Who’ll win, no one knows.”
“Maybe we don’t have to survive it. We can put it down, turn it on – and run.”
“Niklaus, you know very well that she’s blocked everything she could. It’s good that we had Junnie, or we wouldn’t have made it this far. I’m sorry for him.”
Klaus threw a last glance at the warped artificial skin and nodded his head.
* * *
He rarely thinks of what came next. He rarely thinks about how, at the last second, Elijah snapped his neck in order not to risk his life, and went on alone.
* * *
Morning comes too suddenly. The sun suddenly strikes at his eyes and slices at his flesh like a knife. Someone swears above him in a familiar voice, but it doesn’t seem to be Damon.
Then the sun stops burning. Then everything flits past in recurring flashes, a bright carnival of movements and colors. Then blood flows into his mouth and Klaus drinks, eagerly, not holding back, and then drifts off, because he has no strength.
…A blow to the ribs brings him to his senses.
The setting sun is visible through the window. He is lying in his bedroom in New Orleans, and the colors before him finally take on their normal shade of warmth and calm.
Klaus half-rises on the bed, and shakes his heavy head. For a second he thinks that he just woke up from his little binge with those girls, and everything else was just a terrible dream. But the eternally-youthful Hayley is standing before him, some unfamiliar girl is inspecting him shamelessly, Damon is settled in there as well, and Stefan is the only one who is smiling broadly.
“He’s awake, damn, the savior of humanity!” Damon says and suddenly is clinging at Klaus’s neck. “Anyway, skipping the unnecessary sentimentality, I’m off. Let’s get wasted sometime, maybe.”
To say that Klaus didn’t understand anything would be an understatement.
“I yelled at Elijah, of course,” Hayley says, and unfeigned pain is audible in her voice. “Klaus, but what were you…”
She leaves the room behind Damon, and Klaus tries to make sense the incoming information with his, obviously, failing reason. Well, well, everything is right. He saw this. He returned home, alone, Miranda was blown up, and Elijah…
“I believe we have some things to talk about,” Stefan pronounces, continuing to smile warmly. “But here’s a short news report: it’s been eight years since you snapped Elijah’s neck and went right into our disliked and unbeloved Miranda’s cave with the nuclear warhead. Miranda was successfully destroyed. The cyborgs have slowly started to get along with us. With all of us. A new era has begun, but the rumors about it, as usual, are overexaggerated.”
He stops smiling and also embraces Klaus, which completely breaks Klaus’s psyche. He probably needs to stop making himself out to be a good person. As it is things have already gotten completely out of hand. One hugged him, another…
Stefan leaves the room, and he’s left alone with the girl.
“You’re almost not radioactive,” she says instead of a greeting and suddenly bursts into tears.
“Hold up, now. Hold up.” Klaus’s head is suddenly split in two. “What did I do? What?”
“You broke Uncle Elijah’s neck and you… We didn’t think that you were alive… Dad…”
Klaus’s head is spinning, but the sun from the window lets him cling on to one murky hope.
“Where is he? Hope, I need to talk to him. I understand that you’re all angry, but he must be…”
She sobs and nods, and Klaus stands from the bed to hug her himself, for the first time in eight goddamn years.
* * *
Klaus cautiously knocks on the door of the modest house. It isn’t opened for him, of course, and so Klaus knocks out the glass with his shoulder and climbs inside.
Purely theoretically he is very interested in what happened and how they managed to find him, but his legs bring him immediately to Elijah. Now Klaus remembers that moment completely clearly. How his breath was coming shortly, how his heart was losing its rhythm, how he realized that they didn’t both need to go. He would’ve kill Elijah for doing such a thing, but snapping his neck and standing over the body for around a dozen seconds came out to be possibly even too easy. Entering, loading and blowing it up was even easier than that.
A small breeze wafts through the dark house – and Elijah himself appears before him. Klaus tries to absorb the changes: he’s wearing a shirt and jeans, he has stubble, there’s a bottle in his hands – but Klaus doesn’t manage to finish, because he immediately receives that very bottle flying into his head, and the broken bottle neck that’s left goes somewhere into his stomach.
He wants to answer in kind, but he just jumps back to the wall so as not to catch anything else. The wound heals very quickly.
“Come on,” Klaus raises his hands, because Elijah, it seems, is planning a continuation. “I wasn’t expecting a warm welcome, but this!”
“What do you want?” Elijah almost spits out, and Klaus tries to understand what the problem is, why he’s so mad.
“Well, nothing, probably. You already gave me something to drink,” Klaus notes, licking off the whiskey flowing along his chin. “But we haven’t seen each other in around eight years, right? I wanted to say hello. To say that I’ve already adapted, gotten used to it. The cyborgs are pretty sweet.”
“Out,” Elijah says in a familiar cold tone, and Klaus shrugs his shoulders, moving away towards the door.
True, he doesn’t make it. That same fresh breeze catches up to him, turns him, presses him against the wall, and holds him by the throat.
“How dare you come here,” Elijah hisses, and Klaus does nothing, but breathing becomes a bit more difficult. “How dare you…”
He, unlike usual, is completely illogical. He lets go of Klaus the same way he grabbed him, and adjusts his cuffs in a familiar gesture. But the fury in him is unfamiliar, fiery.
“I understand,” Klaus answers. “You’re angry. That’s normal. I would definitely kill myself in your shoes. By the way, no one has told me how you found me. Want to share? I’d be interested.”
“Share?” Elijah blazes up, like a crimson fire, and Klaus would’ve shied away, but as it is his shoulder blades are already propped up against the wall.
For the first time in his life, Elijah frightens him. For the first time in his life, Elijah seems like him, and Klaus tries to imagine, not in hallucinations under a stone slab, but for real: how would he have managed if Elijah had… betrayed him like that. He finally understands, and he stands, taken aback.
“Share what with you?” Elijah asks again sharply.
Klaus would explain that he didn’t have a choice, but it’s completely obvious that he did, he just didn’t see it that way.
“Tell you what I did?”
Elijah disappears for a moment – and reappears with another bottle, opens it with his teeth, and drinks from the neck.
“Well, besides being the leader in this whole friendship with a new race…
“Oh, I conquered New Orleans and worked on building a time machine, can you imagine?” Elijah asks, before immediately pouring half the bottle into his mouth.
And Klaus remembers the missing element. That was, of course, not an answering machine, it was just an amulet, a silly toy that Freya made some time ago, a little recorder that would remember a couple dozen words and play them back if you brought it to your ear. A breeze, a whisper, a lot more accurate than any answering machine. And he said that all before leaving for the servers, having forgotten that the toy was hanging somewhere under his shirt.
Now everything becomes more clear.
“I listened to that message for eight goddamn years, Klaus, that’s what I did. I listened to it and built a time machine, with the help of our dear friends. Their brains work better than ours. They came to the conclusion that it’s impossible to do that. Irreversibility, you know, all those jokes about physics.”
“I’m to understand,” Klaus said, unsure how to look at Elijah, “that after eight years my recorder recovered from the radiation and connected to yours? We got the gift as a pair…”
“And Junnie helped, we found him nearby. He dug you two out year after year with all his remaining strength. It’s kind of hard with only one working finger, you know.”
“He's being… what to call it. Healed. Or repaired, even.”
Elijah nods jerkily and once more turns to the bottle. Klaus carefully approaches the table.
“You understand, Elijah,” Klaus knows that he should at least try, but he’s shuddering unbearably. “I can’t imagine a world without you. It’s undoubtedly a betrayal of us both. But for me it doesn’t look like that.”
Elijah carefully places the bottle on the table, approaches Klaus and shoves him, just slightly.
“And what does all that look like for me? Did you think about me when you broke my neck?”
Klaus looks at him and receives yet another shove to the chest.
“I was only thinking about you,” he justifies himself with irritation. “Only about you, Elijah.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” A shove. “Let’s conquer New Orleans.”
Shove.
“Let’s build a time machine.”
Shove.
“Let’s go back to the past.”
Shove.
“Let’s fly to the moon.”
Shove.
“Let’s do the impossible.”
Klaus is pressed against the wall, again, and expels a harsh sigh.
“I love you,” Elijah says, and kisses him, deeply, to the point of hysterics, and Klaus is lost, he doesn’t know what to do, then he kisses back, and they are finally alive and together.
After a second Elijah nonetheless snaps his neck, and, losing consciousness, Klaus thinks that lying in wait another hour and a half for such a perspective is worth eight years of delirium and ten and a half centuries of a lie – and one small nuclear explosion is also worth it.