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Autumn has ripened to its vermillion glory between the days of anticipation towards October end. Enthused folks sport carved faces of horror on pumpkins at their doorsteps, children’s messy scrambling distinguishable from adults’ dexterous hands. You raise your head and spot the artificial cobweb decorations Mrs. Windham had set after clearing the true spinnerets of neglectful months. As a fellow victim of arachnophobia, you sympathize wholeheartedly.
“Like every event in Mystic Falls, Halloween month is also being celebrated with quite a flair.”
Your heartbeat jumps at the verbal ambush on your internal monologue and breakdown of roundabout traditions. Klaus's smile widens, undoubtedly hearing the surprise in your pulse.
“When you don't know if you're going to get the next one, every occasion becomes special,” you say, straining a smile as you meet his incomprehensible azure eyes. (What you wouldn't give to understand a fraction of him.)
Klaus's amused visage falters into whatever faulty mimicry of pity his warped ideologies allow until he regains the cutting slope of his lips and the mischievous lilt to his voice. “A tad dampening, aren't they? Your words.”
Sat on the bench, his silhouette towers over you still. Hollowness uplifts the corners of your mouth as you intone mockingly, “My apologies. Are my thoughts intruding on your serene evening?”
Klaus's eyes flatten, narrowed blades drawing and lacerating the veracity of your jeers, the intents behind—or so you think.
In a reality he wishes and conjures alone, Klaus steps forward and grabs your frail hands, clears the suspicions flickering so ignorantly in your eyes how he washes the carmine off his hands and its dried flecks under his nails. He'd be disingenuous to claim that he does not abhor your void eyes, continual pits of imminent despair chasing him amidst herbages illuminated by an equally haunting, lone moon; his dreams are prisons of his own making.
Each syllable of doom passing your pallid lips and even the mere sight of your emaciated figure strikes vervain laced whips across his back. Klaus welcomes the burns with a starched smile and leans back against the withered wooden bench by your side.
“Must you be so obstinate about awaiting your demise in this tragic, backwater town?” Klaus questions, implores, voice tossing around like shattered glass and gravel. The sight is as unsettling as a lion ambling in the harried streets of New York City.
You blink languidly, head tilted and an inquisitive itch scratching the back of your brain. It's somehow a familiar conversation, a familiar situation.
“And where should I live out my final moments if not with my family?” Your reply is as mellowed as they come. Klaus asking after your well-being doesn’t mean he will tolerate insolence, even if the delivery of his words was condescending as fuck. (He probably doesn’t think he’s wrong in any capacity or aspect. Ever.)
Perhaps a bit offended, he favours a contrived silence instead of an actual reply, watching and observing. You recall the scaled, beastly alligators afloat and lurking in plain sight for their prey to announce its presence at the shores of their territory; conclude after a brief contemplation the unseemliness of such a comparison. Klaus, for all his dramatics and lineage, bears the defining traits of a viper. Honing poisonous fangs inside the soft muscles of its mouth and nurturing venom within the tender pouch beneath its mandibular gland, coiled and guarded for a window of vulnerability.
Except that one does not need to display an ounce of weakness because Klaus Mikaelson shatters and creates his fate with his own hands, a chain of fates entangled with his and he carves their tales in wood and bones.
“Family above all. Isn't that right, Nik?” You reminisce a smile, from far away eons and blizzards and knolls and streams. From mud houses and caves and knives and swords. From that ecstatic rush of magic coursing your veins and those dreadsome full moons and that paralyzing fear and the numbing sorrow.
Klaus is by no means foolish and he accompanies you on this trip down memory lane because he remembers, perhaps more so than your addled mind and he adorns a grieving expression uncharacteristically familiar. (You're getting used to this looming sense of Deja vu every step of your rather short life.)
His pondering gaze across the swathe of manicured grass is terse and it is you who explores the fleeting nuances on his face this time. Somewhere on the spectrum of longing and desire and hatred and exhaustion, the scale tips over to fondness as he finds you staring unabashedly.
Klaus raises a brow and smirks, the mischievous little artist whose crimson paint brushes transfer on the sharp canines pulling above his bottom lip till forevermore.
You feel not unlike a comatose patient. Hearing the metal carts bump and stroll, the chatter and urgency in commands of a crowd, incessant beeps of the monitor that acknowledges your harrowed heart, warm hands encompassing yours and they whisper with utmost conviction but you flail in this ocean of onomatopoeia anchorless. Stuck in the middle of an interminable limbo, you continue drowning and the voices drift furthermore until the lamps of hope are extinguished decidedly.
(Again, Klaus's questionable sentiments serve as your source of amusement as he tries to swallow you whole with his eyes, attempting to grab a semblance of comprehensive thought in this torpedo you call your brain. The efforts are in vain.)
When he finally speaks, Klaus wears that forlorn look which feeds everybody’s delusions, as though you are the sole audience in his theatre of presumed weakness. “The construction of my mansion is completed. Would you like to see it?”
You let the request hang for an unnecessary moment or two as you make a heart-stopping discovery because in those few seconds of incertitude, the fearsome Klaus Mikaelson falls victim to the humane flashes of insecurity breaking through a millennium old veneer and it is indescribably beautiful. For a rushed, split glance, your vision blurs and blond tresses touch his broad shoulders on which hangs a loose sage tunic fastened with a leather pelt. You witness an innocent boy’s wondrous nature instead of the callous man fate has nurtured him to become.
You relish in your Nik’s presence. Chase the elusive happiness flitting atop your fingers as the blond boy slips through them, sand granules indifferent and equal and lost forever. The man replaces the boy. The world spins irrevocably. Your throat denies your lungs air.
Your lips pull in response, blanched. “I assume you have gotten everyone back then?”
Klaus shrugs and he doesn't resemble the man who had threatened to kill your family members one by one for his own in the least bit. Quite unfair.
“Of course, love. Did you ever doubt me?”
“Not for a secon—”
Before you know it, your epiglottis begins flapping ferociously like a ball of mildew and bacterium is scratching against your trachea. The thing is pertinacious as it crawls upwards and upwards and upwards along the thin membranes lining your oesophagus. Coughing and hacking, you imagine your throat must be inflamed whilst you try to expel the pieces lodging in your air pipe.
(Vaguely, you feel a hand caressing your back, soothing you.)
Metal shocks your taste buds, filling your mouth and finally you gargle the nuisance out. Dizziness sways your torso, eyelids drooping heavy and low. Your fingers steady your ostensibly weightless form in the fabric of Klaus's shirt as though you have exerted your life force. He doesn't oppose but the reassuring patterns are long gone. Your heart sinks a little.
Holding back the bitter, acidic chyme formed inside your rumbling stomach, you clutch tighter onto him, gain the strength to halt the revolving world and open your eyes to whatever gnarly substance you must have puked now. Nausea threatens to overwhelm you. Dying slowly from an illness is a torture in itself, one you will be rid of soon enough.
Red. The first thought that greets you at the sight of the gooey liquid sprayed across dew laden grass blades is its identification. When the discombobulation wears off a bit, your tongue's sensitivity tunnels on the coppery flavour. Even amidst your haze, you cringe at the fetid and repulsive attack to your perceptive abilities. Blood staining your rotten entrails and rising as a clump of dead cells now colours the innards of your buccal cavity and the grass patch in front.
“What is this?” Klaus loses his impish demeanour instantaneously, grim and interrogative, an untimely witness of your journey to the grave. Knowing something and accepting something are two wholly different things, as will be demonstrated. (It feels like a familiar conversation somehow.)
Using whatever saliva that is stuck aridly in the back of your throat, you spit the macabre remnants below. “Oh, I forgot to introduce you. Klaus, this is blood. Blood, this is Klaus.”
His hand is a vice around your arm as he affirms your attention, a quiet fury simmering on his fingers that travels the underside of your arm, intoned within his query—order. “I'll ask you one last time and I expect a proper answer. What is this?” Klaus's words ricochet off your skin like hails amid a storm, but his grasp is a comforting warmth against your bicep and the contrast is maddening.
You would have rolled your eyes had it not been for your frontal lobe's subjugation, a swinging and rotating and ever moving scenery increasing your queasiness. The glaring hybrid sitting next to you is a huge factor too.
With slumped shoulders, you commence an enjoyable evening's destruction. “To recap, I have been cursed by your mother that I am destined to be reborn without magic as the doppelganger’s sister. And as I grow, I will regain my memories—but hold on! There's a twis—”
Klaus's impatience boils over and he jerks you close, an eerily stagnant countenance hiding the turmoil of heart-breaking love (whatever warped version he believes he can give and receive). The cyan in his eyes bleeds golden, an unspoken warning.
Your sigh is audible in its exhaustion. “Bonnie said it’s the curse manifesting itself. Its foothold is getting stronger.”
“What about the herbs then?”
The obsolete urgency lacing his tone gives you pause, hesitation sewing your lips momentarily. Should there emerge a way of breaking such precarious news to Klaus without attracting his ire, you’d give a limb for it. Alas, you resign and decide to rip the bandage off at once, hopeless and despairing as life has kinda defaulted for you.
“They won't help.” You fight tooth and nail to smooth your cadence. “I have a week at most, one and a half if I'm lucky.”
One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Three heartbeats.
“No,” he snarls, vehemence rippling throughout.
(Predictably so.)
Despite your self-preservation and better instincts, you do roll your eyes this time and the gesture does not go unnoticed or appreciated by Klaus (nothing concerning this matter really does).
“What are you even saying no to? Fate? Me? Like I have any control over this train wreck?” You grumble blithely.
Klaus's head raises defiantly, a victorious mirage woven through his promise. “I have lived and preserved past the destiny written for me. I am certain a witch with proper tutelage will prove better for your dilemma.”
You notice the lack of further jibes towards Bonnie and more than the vulnerability shining through his eyes, you solely hear the desolation modulating his vows and hefty claims that—though true—hold little relevance right now.
“Come with me.”
Sequenced fireworks must have burst near your hearing with their concomitant silence screeching inside your eardrums as your body stuns into quiescence, tongue leaden and incarnadined within your mouth.
Your response feels barely cognizant. “What?”
This time, Klaus looks at you and the possibility of him being a thousand-year-old murderer seems inconceivable as he pleads (and isn't that a miracle?) with the softened edges of his face, with the drooping corner of his eyes, with his tender and all-encompassing and maniacal gaze.
“Come with me. I assure you; I will find the most talented witches from the most powerful bloodlines. By any means, I promise, you will be rid of this ailment,” he beseeches softly, despite the implicit nature of his oath to you that can so easily be interpreted as threats against households and families till all your quandaries are solved and some more.
“There's nothing we can do now, Klaus,” you reiterate your situation’s direness for the umpteenth time, similar to how you comforted a sobbing Elena and an evasive Jeremy this week, crumbling away in front of their damp cheeks and quivering lips whilst they wept helplessly in your embrace.
Klaus freezes into that marble façade he’s constructed so meticulously over the fickle ages and centuries. “There's nothing you can do now. My abilities expand far beyond your comprehension.”
Your brows scrunch. “What do you mean?”
The frosty winds carry a compunctious morsel into the sky of his eyes before the words he utters are lost in them. “I am truly sorry for this.”
And that is the last of your remembrance before the world blurs into a Monet of rushed strokes and hurried spots.