Fic: Those Hard-Faced Queens of Misadventure
Title: Those Hard-Faced Queens of Misadventure
Author: lit_chick08
Pairings: Klaus/Caroline, Klaus/Rebekah
Warning: Incestuous overtones
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through 3x11 “Our Town”, very vague spoilers for future Originals and released stills from upcoming episodes
Word Count: 2171
Disclaimer: These characters belong to LJ Smith, Kevin Williamson, and Julie Plec
Summary: Loneliness is a powerful emotion.
”God knows what is hiding in this world of little consequence
Behind the tears, inside the lies
A thousand slowly dying sunsets
God knows what is hiding in those weak and drunken hearts
I guess the loneliness came knocking
No one needs to be alone (Oh, save me)” - People Help the People, Birdy
I.
When they were still children, Mikael taught Niklaus and his brothers how to swing swords. If he tried, he could still remember the scent of autumn leaves and dying embers of fires as the man who was nothing to him lectured.
“If you are not willing to kill your enemy, do not pull your sword.”
It was the only lesson Niklaus ever took to heart.
II.
Rebekah came last, golden-haired and red-faced. His brothers did not have much use for her, but Niklaus liked to sit by her cradle and just look at her. She was so pretty, and he took a certain pride in being the only one who could make her smile.
Mikael struck him hard across the jaw and told him men did not tend to children, that brothers did not prefer to spend their time with sisters.
Just to spite him, Niklaus vowed to love Rebekah even more than he had.
III.
The winter he was sixteen, Rebekah fell ill with a fever which left her on death's door. Kol was ill, too, and Niklaus remembered how angry he was that Mikael seemed to care more about his useless brother than he did about sweet Rebekah.
Esther ordered he, Elijah, Finn, and Henrick to stay with Ayanna until the fever passed, but Niklaus sneaked from the window back to see his sister. She was so very pale and her skin burned as hot as fire, but her eyes fluttered open, breathing his name like a prayer.
“I thought you left me forever,” she whispered hoarsely as Niklaus lifted the blankets, slipping in beside her.
“Never,” he swore, kissing her clammy forehead. “I could never leave you.”
“I love you more than the others,” Rebekah confessed, her words swallowed by darkness and moonlight. “I love you more than anyone.”
Rebekah was the only one who loved him.
IV.
Four days after Henrick died, Niklaus had his birthday. So wrapped up in mourning, no one remembered or, if they did, no one cared to acknowledge it.
No one except Rebekah.
She found him in the caves, a pilfered slice of berry pie in one hand, a square of cloth bound with string in the other. They sat and ate the confection from her palm, sticky fingered and filthy faced, laughing for the first time since Henrick fell to the wolves. As they licked their hands clean like cats, Rebekah thrust the package at him with a playful smile on her angelic face.
It was a necklace, two fine pieces of metal twisted together to form a circle dangling from a leather strap. Niklaus ran his finger around the edge of it, marveling at the work, and tears rose in his throat as Rebekah explained, “It's us. We can never be parted, and like the circle, the love we bear each other will never end.”
“I shall never take it off,” he promised as Rebekah's nimble fingers tied it tightly around his throat.
Rebekah kissed his cheek, her tongue playfully peeking out to gather the bit of blueberry which clung to his skin; the touch of it stole his breath.
V.
Settling in Chicago had been Rebekah's birthday gift that year, the culmination of months of begging to be somewhere full of life. He agreed because birthdays were sacred between the two of them, no request to outlandish, no want going unfulfilled.
After putting Rebekah in the coffin, after putting Niklaus in the coffin, Klaus would not celebrate another birthday for nearly 100 years.
VI.
Caroline Forbes meant nothing to him. She was a friend of Elena's and a vampire, but that hardly made her unique in Mystic Falls. His damned doppelganger had the most uncanny ability to attract supernatural beings to her, and, by his accounts, Caroline Forbes was of least use to him.
He would have let her die, poisoned by Tyler's bite, if he did not need to win her mother to his side. If nothing else, Elena and her merry band of misfits could consider it a warning shot, a reminder of just what he could do to any of them if he so chose. All he was going to do was give her a shot of his blood and be gone.
And then he entered her room to find her looking so pathetically weak, an assembly of birthday cards on her nightstand, and Klaus felt a physical longing for the Rebekah of his youth.
He didn't know why he started saying the things he did, why Niklaus's voice was slipping past his lips, but Caroline's eyes swelled with tears and it twisted him up inside, to have inspired something other than sorrow or fear. There was hope in this girl, vitality even balancing on the edge of true death, the promise of all which she could become; there was something wondrous in Caroline Forbes's beautiful face and Klaus found himself wanting to show her all the things of which he spoke.
Her fangs in his skin felt like an alliance, temporary for now, the weight of more settling around them, wrapping them; she drank long and deep, taking enough blood to make even Klaus lightheaded, but he didn't stop her. Klaus found himself cradling her in his arms the way he once had Rebekah, inhaling the sweet scent of her hair; she did not fit as naturally into the curve of his body, but Klaus was certain that would change.
When she pulled her mouth from the thin skin of his wrist, Klaus caught a stray drop of blood slipping from her lips with his thumb; Caroline's eyes zeroed in on it, the bloodlust still keeping her fangs out, and he pressed the thumb against the fullness of her bottom lip.
Her tongue burnt like fire against the pad of his thumb as she gathered the last drops of his blood.
“Get some sleep, sweetheart. You'll need it.”
Caroline settled back against her pillows, human eyes watching him with wariness, and Klaus smirked at the way her eyes bulged when he tucked the blankets around her, one hand sliding over her golden hair.
The bracelet he left her is the first genuine gift he had given in 90 years.
VII.
She was exquisite in her ice-blue gown, white gloves up to her elbows, soft hair in one of those upsweeps which had been fascinating him for ages. Rebekah used to let him take down her hair, purring when his fingers would sift through it, offering him secret smiles as he did so. He cannot imagine Caroline Forbes allowing him to do the same, but even across the room, Klaus could see the bracelet he gave her glittering above her right wrist.
Her shock when he asked her to dance made him smile; underneath all the strength and bravado she wore like armor, Caroline Forbes was still only eighteen, older than Katerina when he first met her but undeniably lighter in spirit; and he was the big bad wolf, come to terrorize her town and loved ones as the villain Elijah made him out to be.
“I could threaten to harm someone if it would make it easier for you to agree,” he quipped with a smirk, and he could see a smile threatening in the quiver of her lips, an urge she was fighting as vehemently as she fought everything else she wasn't supposed to want.
It was going to take him years to undo all the damage Stefan had done to her with his “mentoring.” He supposed to he could compel it out of her, but Klaus did not actually like compulsion.
He wanted it to be real.
The inherent grace in her body as they waltzed made Klaus instantly imagine what it would be like to see her hunt, to see her fight, to see her fuck. There was passion in Caroline Forbes, passion for everything, and Klaus could taste it as surely as he could feel the tremble she gave when his fingers idly stroked a patch of skin on her back.
“I want you to know that, whatever you're planning, isn't going to work. I'm full of vervain.”
“Who say I'm planning anything?”
“You're awake, so you're planning something.”
It was refreshing, the way this girl could be so utterly fearless even as he held her in his arms. “I wanted to dance, Caroline. I wanted to dance with a beautiful woman who is wearing the gift I bought her. There is certainly no crime in that.”
Her cheeks turned a delightful shade of crimson; he hadn't been able to make Rebekah blush in centuries. “It doesn't mean anything. Who turns down a diamond bracelet?”
“You know, love, we could agree to an amnesty between the two of us. It is so hard to meet people in this town, and I find I quite like you.”
She bristled but did not pull away. “You murdered Jenna.”
“Yes,” he easily acknowledged, “and in a hundred years, you will not even remember her face. And in another hundred, you will have forgotten her name. And then, someday, you will realize, in the grand scheme of life, Jenna Sommers meant nothing to you.”
Caroline's lower lip quivered. “That isn't true.”
“Oh, it is,” Klaus promised, bitterness creeping into his words. “I had a brother once called Henrick. He died before we were vampires. I could tell you everything we ever did together, but I cannot remember for the life of me what color his eyes were, what his voice sounded like, how tall he was. That which does not last forever will not last forever. When you are my age, you may still remember Elena and Bonnie, even young Master Donovan, but the rest...Dust in the wind, my girl.”
“Then what's the point?” she asked, a lone tear rolling down her porcelain cheek.
He leaned in, close enough to kiss her. “To find someone who will live forever with you.”
VIII.
Caroline clutched his shoulders when she came, her breathy gasps and soft whimpers so different from Rebekah's unabashed shouts. He remained inside of her as long as he could, smiling as Caroline traced the lines of his faces with her fingers, learning the feel of him by touch.
This was still their secret, and, if he was smart, Klaus would play this card with Stefan, exploit it to his greatest advantage.
But he liked the way Caroline curled up beside him, her hair spilling across his chest. He liked that she teased him and challenged him and, more importantly, listened. To tell her friends what they did together would be to ruin the only connection he had left to this godforsaken world.
Most of all, he liked the way she called him “Nik” as she toyed with the necklace he always wore.
IX.
Some nights he found himself standing above Rebekah's casket, fingering the handle on the dagger. He wrapped his hand around the hilt, knowing it would take less effort to wake his sister up than it would to walk upstairs and attempt to wake Caroline. Sometimes he would stroke her hair, rough as straw in her daggered state, asking her if she remembered bits of their adventures throughout the centuries. On the worse days, he would talk about their brothers: Henrick and Kol and Finn and even Elijah, invoking their names as if they alone will be enough to make Rebekah sit up, sparing him the decision to wake her.
But even if he pulled the dagger, even if he explained why he did what he did to their mother, Klaus knew he would never get Rebekah back again. There were only two things Rebekah ever wanted through their unnaturally long lives, and those were their mother and the truth.
He ripped both from her.
Caroline really wasn't much like Rebekah. She would soothe where Rebekah would instigate; she would listen where Rebekah would shout. There were times when he would awaken in the night to see pale skin and blonde hair beside him, and, for just a moment, he would think everything was as it was always meant to be before reality would assert itself again.
He loved Caroline Forbes.
He just wasn't sure he'd ever be able to forgive himself for it.
X.
When he was barely more than a boy, there was a girl in the village Niklaus swore he loved. In one of her few moments of maternal affection towards him, Esther carded her fingers through his blond curls and kissed his forehead.
“If you are going to fall in love, you must do it with your whole heart.”
It was the only bit of advice which haunted Niklaus all his days.
Author: lit_chick08
Pairings: Klaus/Caroline, Klaus/Rebekah
Warning: Incestuous overtones
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through 3x11 “Our Town”, very vague spoilers for future Originals and released stills from upcoming episodes
Word Count: 2171
Disclaimer: These characters belong to LJ Smith, Kevin Williamson, and Julie Plec
Summary: Loneliness is a powerful emotion.
”God knows what is hiding in this world of little consequence
Behind the tears, inside the lies
A thousand slowly dying sunsets
God knows what is hiding in those weak and drunken hearts
I guess the loneliness came knocking
No one needs to be alone (Oh, save me)” - People Help the People, Birdy
I.
When they were still children, Mikael taught Niklaus and his brothers how to swing swords. If he tried, he could still remember the scent of autumn leaves and dying embers of fires as the man who was nothing to him lectured.
“If you are not willing to kill your enemy, do not pull your sword.”
It was the only lesson Niklaus ever took to heart.
II.
Rebekah came last, golden-haired and red-faced. His brothers did not have much use for her, but Niklaus liked to sit by her cradle and just look at her. She was so pretty, and he took a certain pride in being the only one who could make her smile.
Mikael struck him hard across the jaw and told him men did not tend to children, that brothers did not prefer to spend their time with sisters.
Just to spite him, Niklaus vowed to love Rebekah even more than he had.
III.
The winter he was sixteen, Rebekah fell ill with a fever which left her on death's door. Kol was ill, too, and Niklaus remembered how angry he was that Mikael seemed to care more about his useless brother than he did about sweet Rebekah.
Esther ordered he, Elijah, Finn, and Henrick to stay with Ayanna until the fever passed, but Niklaus sneaked from the window back to see his sister. She was so very pale and her skin burned as hot as fire, but her eyes fluttered open, breathing his name like a prayer.
“I thought you left me forever,” she whispered hoarsely as Niklaus lifted the blankets, slipping in beside her.
“Never,” he swore, kissing her clammy forehead. “I could never leave you.”
“I love you more than the others,” Rebekah confessed, her words swallowed by darkness and moonlight. “I love you more than anyone.”
Rebekah was the only one who loved him.
IV.
Four days after Henrick died, Niklaus had his birthday. So wrapped up in mourning, no one remembered or, if they did, no one cared to acknowledge it.
No one except Rebekah.
She found him in the caves, a pilfered slice of berry pie in one hand, a square of cloth bound with string in the other. They sat and ate the confection from her palm, sticky fingered and filthy faced, laughing for the first time since Henrick fell to the wolves. As they licked their hands clean like cats, Rebekah thrust the package at him with a playful smile on her angelic face.
It was a necklace, two fine pieces of metal twisted together to form a circle dangling from a leather strap. Niklaus ran his finger around the edge of it, marveling at the work, and tears rose in his throat as Rebekah explained, “It's us. We can never be parted, and like the circle, the love we bear each other will never end.”
“I shall never take it off,” he promised as Rebekah's nimble fingers tied it tightly around his throat.
Rebekah kissed his cheek, her tongue playfully peeking out to gather the bit of blueberry which clung to his skin; the touch of it stole his breath.
V.
Settling in Chicago had been Rebekah's birthday gift that year, the culmination of months of begging to be somewhere full of life. He agreed because birthdays were sacred between the two of them, no request to outlandish, no want going unfulfilled.
After putting Rebekah in the coffin, after putting Niklaus in the coffin, Klaus would not celebrate another birthday for nearly 100 years.
VI.
Caroline Forbes meant nothing to him. She was a friend of Elena's and a vampire, but that hardly made her unique in Mystic Falls. His damned doppelganger had the most uncanny ability to attract supernatural beings to her, and, by his accounts, Caroline Forbes was of least use to him.
He would have let her die, poisoned by Tyler's bite, if he did not need to win her mother to his side. If nothing else, Elena and her merry band of misfits could consider it a warning shot, a reminder of just what he could do to any of them if he so chose. All he was going to do was give her a shot of his blood and be gone.
And then he entered her room to find her looking so pathetically weak, an assembly of birthday cards on her nightstand, and Klaus felt a physical longing for the Rebekah of his youth.
He didn't know why he started saying the things he did, why Niklaus's voice was slipping past his lips, but Caroline's eyes swelled with tears and it twisted him up inside, to have inspired something other than sorrow or fear. There was hope in this girl, vitality even balancing on the edge of true death, the promise of all which she could become; there was something wondrous in Caroline Forbes's beautiful face and Klaus found himself wanting to show her all the things of which he spoke.
Her fangs in his skin felt like an alliance, temporary for now, the weight of more settling around them, wrapping them; she drank long and deep, taking enough blood to make even Klaus lightheaded, but he didn't stop her. Klaus found himself cradling her in his arms the way he once had Rebekah, inhaling the sweet scent of her hair; she did not fit as naturally into the curve of his body, but Klaus was certain that would change.
When she pulled her mouth from the thin skin of his wrist, Klaus caught a stray drop of blood slipping from her lips with his thumb; Caroline's eyes zeroed in on it, the bloodlust still keeping her fangs out, and he pressed the thumb against the fullness of her bottom lip.
Her tongue burnt like fire against the pad of his thumb as she gathered the last drops of his blood.
“Get some sleep, sweetheart. You'll need it.”
Caroline settled back against her pillows, human eyes watching him with wariness, and Klaus smirked at the way her eyes bulged when he tucked the blankets around her, one hand sliding over her golden hair.
The bracelet he left her is the first genuine gift he had given in 90 years.
VII.
She was exquisite in her ice-blue gown, white gloves up to her elbows, soft hair in one of those upsweeps which had been fascinating him for ages. Rebekah used to let him take down her hair, purring when his fingers would sift through it, offering him secret smiles as he did so. He cannot imagine Caroline Forbes allowing him to do the same, but even across the room, Klaus could see the bracelet he gave her glittering above her right wrist.
Her shock when he asked her to dance made him smile; underneath all the strength and bravado she wore like armor, Caroline Forbes was still only eighteen, older than Katerina when he first met her but undeniably lighter in spirit; and he was the big bad wolf, come to terrorize her town and loved ones as the villain Elijah made him out to be.
“I could threaten to harm someone if it would make it easier for you to agree,” he quipped with a smirk, and he could see a smile threatening in the quiver of her lips, an urge she was fighting as vehemently as she fought everything else she wasn't supposed to want.
It was going to take him years to undo all the damage Stefan had done to her with his “mentoring.” He supposed to he could compel it out of her, but Klaus did not actually like compulsion.
He wanted it to be real.
The inherent grace in her body as they waltzed made Klaus instantly imagine what it would be like to see her hunt, to see her fight, to see her fuck. There was passion in Caroline Forbes, passion for everything, and Klaus could taste it as surely as he could feel the tremble she gave when his fingers idly stroked a patch of skin on her back.
“I want you to know that, whatever you're planning, isn't going to work. I'm full of vervain.”
“Who say I'm planning anything?”
“You're awake, so you're planning something.”
It was refreshing, the way this girl could be so utterly fearless even as he held her in his arms. “I wanted to dance, Caroline. I wanted to dance with a beautiful woman who is wearing the gift I bought her. There is certainly no crime in that.”
Her cheeks turned a delightful shade of crimson; he hadn't been able to make Rebekah blush in centuries. “It doesn't mean anything. Who turns down a diamond bracelet?”
“You know, love, we could agree to an amnesty between the two of us. It is so hard to meet people in this town, and I find I quite like you.”
She bristled but did not pull away. “You murdered Jenna.”
“Yes,” he easily acknowledged, “and in a hundred years, you will not even remember her face. And in another hundred, you will have forgotten her name. And then, someday, you will realize, in the grand scheme of life, Jenna Sommers meant nothing to you.”
Caroline's lower lip quivered. “That isn't true.”
“Oh, it is,” Klaus promised, bitterness creeping into his words. “I had a brother once called Henrick. He died before we were vampires. I could tell you everything we ever did together, but I cannot remember for the life of me what color his eyes were, what his voice sounded like, how tall he was. That which does not last forever will not last forever. When you are my age, you may still remember Elena and Bonnie, even young Master Donovan, but the rest...Dust in the wind, my girl.”
“Then what's the point?” she asked, a lone tear rolling down her porcelain cheek.
He leaned in, close enough to kiss her. “To find someone who will live forever with you.”
VIII.
Caroline clutched his shoulders when she came, her breathy gasps and soft whimpers so different from Rebekah's unabashed shouts. He remained inside of her as long as he could, smiling as Caroline traced the lines of his faces with her fingers, learning the feel of him by touch.
This was still their secret, and, if he was smart, Klaus would play this card with Stefan, exploit it to his greatest advantage.
But he liked the way Caroline curled up beside him, her hair spilling across his chest. He liked that she teased him and challenged him and, more importantly, listened. To tell her friends what they did together would be to ruin the only connection he had left to this godforsaken world.
Most of all, he liked the way she called him “Nik” as she toyed with the necklace he always wore.
IX.
Some nights he found himself standing above Rebekah's casket, fingering the handle on the dagger. He wrapped his hand around the hilt, knowing it would take less effort to wake his sister up than it would to walk upstairs and attempt to wake Caroline. Sometimes he would stroke her hair, rough as straw in her daggered state, asking her if she remembered bits of their adventures throughout the centuries. On the worse days, he would talk about their brothers: Henrick and Kol and Finn and even Elijah, invoking their names as if they alone will be enough to make Rebekah sit up, sparing him the decision to wake her.
But even if he pulled the dagger, even if he explained why he did what he did to their mother, Klaus knew he would never get Rebekah back again. There were only two things Rebekah ever wanted through their unnaturally long lives, and those were their mother and the truth.
He ripped both from her.
Caroline really wasn't much like Rebekah. She would soothe where Rebekah would instigate; she would listen where Rebekah would shout. There were times when he would awaken in the night to see pale skin and blonde hair beside him, and, for just a moment, he would think everything was as it was always meant to be before reality would assert itself again.
He loved Caroline Forbes.
He just wasn't sure he'd ever be able to forgive himself for it.
X.
When he was barely more than a boy, there was a girl in the village Niklaus swore he loved. In one of her few moments of maternal affection towards him, Esther carded her fingers through his blond curls and kissed his forehead.
“If you are going to fall in love, you must do it with your whole heart.”
It was the only bit of advice which haunted Niklaus all his days.