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“Hope, honey.”
She does not know where she was one moment ago, but now she is sitting at a dining table, head pillowed on her arms. She sits up and blinks. She isn’t in any dining room — she’s in her house in New Orleans, kind of. It’s the same room, the same furniture up to the dent she left in this table when she dropped one of her Aunt Rebekah’s vases, but it’s so tidy. Her aunts and uncles accumulated hundreds of years of clutter, and Marcel’s vampires caused a lot of damage in the intervening time, but every surface is clean and empty. There’s only one book on the bookcase opposite – a fairy story about wolves she dimly remembers her mother reading to her.
“Hope?” The voice asks again and she jolts. It feels like someone tied a fishing line to her gut and yanked. She isn’t alone.
She turns and there he is, standing in the doorway. He looks like he did the day he died, and he looks at her the way he did when she was seven and terrified and desperate to know her father. Tentative, tender, like he’s waiting for her to turn him away.
Her throat closes up and she wants to do something stupid like cry. She manages to choke out, “Dad?”
He holds up his hands. “Hey. Hey, hey.” Slowly, he approaches her and tries to give her a hug. But she has been tricked before.
“Wait.” She wiped her face. “How do I know this is real?”
He stands back, hands clenched on his jeans. “I don’t know. I don’t know how this is happening, just that I’m so happy to see you. Ask me anything. Whatever you want, and if I answer right you’ll know it’s real.”
“No. I mean, that won’t work. This is my subconscious, anything I know, you can know. Tell me something I don’t know but that I’ll know is true.”
He swallowed, throat bobbing. “How do you know this is in your head?”
She sat back down, arms holding her middle tight. “I’m not in New Orleans right now. This is a place I’m very familiar with, but the gaps have been filled in wrong. It feels like it’s a dream.”
Klaus scuffed his boot on the ground, then cleared his throat. “Okay, I think I have a story. Can I sit down? Or would it be better if I didn’t?”
She exhaled, long and slow. “No, it’s fine.” He took a chair next to her, on the same side of the table, and put his hands on his knees.
“Okay. You might need to bear with me on this one.”
Hope tries to laugh. “It doesn’t need to be a whole story, just enough to convince me.”
“Something you’ll know is true but don’t already know is a tall ask, and I wanted to tell you this anyway. Tell me if you’ve already heard it, but I’m guessing Hayley wouldn’t have told you this one, so I can butcher it for the both of us.”
“It’s about Mom?” Hope jerked upright, unable to help the squeezing in her chest.
“Half. Like a lot of things. You’re going to have to let me tell you the whole thing though — don’t get upset. Okay?” She nodded, trying really hard not to feel like she was a little kid again. “Now, when we first found out Hayley was pregnant, we were living in the other house just outside of town. Have you seen it?”
She shrugged. “Once.”
“It’s not that nice. We were only there while I was scheming to get this one back from Marcel. Anyway, I… wasn’t very nice to her. I was cruel. I’m ashamed of it now, but I was going through a lot at the time.”
“Because you didn’t want me?”
“No, because I did. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We put her basically on house arrest even though she wasn’t that far along. I was mean when I wasn’t ignoring her. Rebekah was being herself, which is to say, a bitch. Elijah was the nice one, he had promised to be there for her and take care of her — so I staked him, gave him to our enemy, and told Hayley he had gotten bored and ran off.” He must’ve seen something in her expression because he winced. “I was in a foul mood and trust me, I know it’s bad, okay? But you aren’t a little kid — God, you’re so grown up,” he added, as if to himself, “and you deserve to know the truth about the bad bits. So Hayley was completely alone, and just starting to experience what it would be like to be the mother of a Mikaelson, to be a part of our family. And it was all pretty awful so she decided she didn’t want it. She decided to have an abortion.”
“What?” Hope was in serious danger of falling out of her chair. She had known her mom had been through a lot before she was even born, and it had even occurred to her that she may have had second thoughts but…
“I’m sorry, I know, but please — stay with me. This is a nice story.” He must’ve seen the look on her face. “Really. She snuck out and bought some wolfsbane. She was getting ready to drink it when she was attacked by four vampires. This was when Marcel was King, so just being a werewolf on the street was a crime. But your mother being the woman she was, she killed them all by herself. Rebekah got there too late to help, but she hadn’t needed it. Rebekah brought her home. Later, Hayley said that when she was fighting them, she realised that she wasn’t fighting to protect herself — all she was thinking about was you. And that’s when she knew, without a doubt, that she wanted to be your mom. After I got home, Hayley threw the whole thing in my face — and I wanted to kill her. I was horrified, terrified by how desperate I felt about it all. Up until then I had tried to pretend that I didn’t really care either way but in that moment I couldn’t deny how badly I wanted to be your dad, how badly I wanted to meet you. So your mother and I made a truce. I started being kinder, and she stopped running away. We weren’t perfect, and that wasn’t our last fight, but we were a team after that. Because we knew that together, we would do anything to make sure you were born safe and healthy, and that you grew up that way too. So it was our choice. No one made us have you. You were a miracle, sure, but it’s a miracle that we chose. We wanted you, and that was a selfish choice, and I am sorry for every bad thing you have had to deal with because we chose us and what we wanted. But you have never been anything less than exactly what we demanded, Hope, you have never been a burden or a disappointment. We walked into loving you with open eyes and every moment that I have had the privilege to know you has made me grateful that you are my daughter.” His voice had gone thin and watery and his hands were shaking.
She finally let him hug her.
When Hope recovered the ability to speak, she said the words to his shirt. “I miss you.”
He exhaled, long and slow, hands rubbing circles on her back. “Me too. I wish I was here. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this all alone.”
She shrugged, eyes and throat watery. “It’s because of me, anyway.”
“No, it isn’t. I spent a thousand years being an asshole, hurting people and making enemies. You’re going to be finding them for the rest of your life. That is my fault and mine alone.”
“When I was little, when you couldn’t be around, that’s who you were killing in Europe, wasn’t it?”
He looked disappointed, instead of proud, when she said it. “It was killing me that I couldn’t be there for you, so I thought… killing some people who might one day want to hurt you was the best I could do. I’m aware that’s not a reasonable or rational or a good solution.” He put his hands in his pockets, hunching over in a way he never did in front of her in life. “I want you to believe me. I know you have a tendency to think everything is your fault. I’m sorry you had such a hard childhood, and I’m sorry for my role in that. But every hard part is something we chose, is a consequence of our choices, not of you, and none of us have ever regretted it for a moment. So if you need to be angry, if you need to be mad, then blame us for it. Hate us. It’s our fault.”
She couldn’t shake her head fast enough.
He put his hand on her cheek. “You are already so much better than I ever was. You’re so kind, and you only hurt people to protect those you love. That’s the best of being a Mikaelson.
“I hear what you say, about being a cosmic mistake, but you aren’t. We picked you. We fought like hell for you. No one in the world can make me do anything I don’t want to, just ask my siblings. And that’s the best part of all of this. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t need to deserve it. Just you existing is enough. I don’t know how I lived a thousand years without you in it, but just know they were miserable without being your dad.”
“But-”
“No buts. I wasn’t a good person, Hope, and I’m sorry for how much of that you’ve had to see. There are a lot of things I have done that I would’ve preferred you never having to know about, but such is life. You’re a strong girl. I just want you to be better than I was. And I know that’s a low bar. So I want you to be better than your mother was. That’s a lot harder, but she would kick your ass if you didn’t try.”
Hope let out a soft breath. “Did you ever love Mom?”
“I did, with all my heart. But I was never in love with her. We weren’t like that. I loved her like family, because she was family, and that’s the highest compliment I am capable of. There were few better in the world.”
“Were you ever in love with anyone?”
He chuckled. “Oh, yes. Not often, but yes.”
“How many?”
“Four. Some were truer than others, but I think that’s the honest answer.”
“Really?”
“The first one was unfortunate, the second was a psychopath. The other two were good choices.”
She looked to her hands for answers. “I don’t know how to do it.”
“What, be alive? That’s all right, sweetheart. You’ve got a thousand years to figure that out.”
The room was fading. She sat up, clenching his arm tight, but he only smiled at her, eyes shining. Someone was waking her up, someone at school needed her. Someone always needed her.
“Trust yourself. Trust that we did our best. Every part of you, even the mean and selfish and violent, is loved, and will be loved until you are dust. You don’t owe us anything, except to live as much as you can. I love you, Hope.”
She hugged him one last time, clinging to the last substantial wisps of the dream. “I miss you.”
“I’ll see you again. Just make sure it takes a long time.”
When Hope woke up, she didn’t open her eyes. She slapped Lizzy’s arm away and took a breath. She wanted to remember this forever, to tattoo this feeling onto the inside of her veins. She didn’t know how long it would be until the next crisis, until the next time she realised that her life wasn’t worth the cost.
But what she knew would never fade was this: She had had the best parents in the world.