#;event 10

     It was C U R I O U S because something that had seemed so certain in his world was the lack of promise, the lack of chance for the family to be more than a dying myth but it wasn’t simply about that. Perhaps it took the man who had made so many mistakes to see with the eyes of the same man who didn’t have to make them here. This Elijah. The one that got to be an Uncle, the one that though logic and listened to his heart could do what he believed he couldn’t anymore. Because he had no family to protect, not merely because he’d CHANGED or because one lay dead but rather that he’d stopped fighting so long ago now. He liked to call it or even pretend it was some semblance of F R E E D O M but a man without a family to love was hardly free at all. At least this was a nice thought (painful in its own way) but at least standing before a niece he could’ve had if circumstances were different, gave him the softness he rarely showed any longer. 

   Something that seemed so U N S U R P R I S I N G in its own right happened to be the rather similar relationship he and the Elijah who belonged here, both shared with this particular brother granted in the end he could hardly imagine that Kol’s disdain was anything but DESERVED. Because despite everything, he had never quite been blind to the needs of his siblings outside of Klaus; he knew that in some ways all his brother had wanted was to be a part of the family, to belong within it as much as the rest of them seemed to and the truth was within Elijah’s mind he’d never stopped belonging there (even if in truth his priority and perhaps the priority of this Elijah had made him appear uncaring toward it). He was only here because of himself, the double meaning to that seemed to offer a strange I R O N Y that he hadn’t expected but alas no matter the place or the path he took...each Elijah was the same to their core. Family mattered and even more so when this Elijah seemed so stuck in a place of protecting them, of sacrificing it all without a word. 

  Nothing about being here was I N T E N T I O N A L  or in any way done on purpose; he hadn’t woken up one day and planned to run into some other version of himself with some HEAVY dilemma and decide that if he himself was doomed...then no other version of himself had to be...-nor did his family and that gave him a small thread of HOPE in whatever this meant...that maybe he wasn’t so lost after all. And yet he remained so because some of this still remained new (different even) and it wasn’t as if the Elijah here had every detail written down for him. So he could only guess of the relation. He could only assume the younger male was, in fact, Henrik because of the eyes, that he subtly shared the looks of at least Kol. 

   A past of R E G R E T about most situations, often those that he could not change but would like to imagine had he by some miracle did so, then the future he found himself in wouldn’t be what it was. Each Petrova Doppelganger represented a different part of that regret, of the way his mind placed each of them within the confinement of what they BECAME. Unlike her Predecessor or the very consequence of the night E V E R Y T H I N G changed, she presented a middle ground of something different of some part of him that was left to wonder that had he told her sooner of his plans..that his brother may never have to have died by his hand. BUT as always that was of his own regret, his own hand in the matter. 

    Not the E X A C T version he knew, the one that got to live her perfect little life however she chose..as perhaps one of the only few good deeds to follow in the act he committed that night. The one that had led him down a path of change, he often wondered if this was what it felt like for parents that lost a child, for a brother that had often felt like a father trying to GUIDE his younger brother into a path that was at least slightly better than destroying the world in his battle for control...-he didn’t succeed BUT some part of him found comfort in the chance Elijah from this place had. That he may, in fact, find that the future his choice would lead to would be FAR better than the life of a man who chose logical sacrifice over love. “Always so gravely compassionate; it truly is a gift, Elena.” A quote from a letter, one he hoped he’d written here too and one he was certain was the perfect proof as to who he happened to be.