(I thought I wanted this scene to be with Cami or Hayley, but I couldn’t find a place where it might fit during the episodes where it would have been appropriate. It’s better this way, I think, with Klaus -- it only ever should have been with Klaus. Set during the interim between “I Love You, Goodbye” (the wedding) and “They All Asked for You”)
Elijah thought he had been careful. Niklaus’ ears really were that much more keen, just keen enough to hear the rustle of leather and paper and shoes on a library carpet.
His brother was framed in the light of the hallway, suddenly, and just as quickly as his feet had carried him, his brow quirked at a supernatural speed to see him standing there, parchment in hand.
Klaus made to speak, but something stopped his mouth. Elijah could not move, could not breathe, in the scramble to find some excuse that would not require an ounce of the truth.
“I wanted to show Marcel a -- the -- that text, about...”
Klaus took several steps forward as Elijah spoke, slowly, somewhere between stalking and soothing in his gait. “About...?”
His brother’s eyes scanned the table, the animal skins near to dust in age and the careful archival binding he himself had compelled an expert to perform. These were not texts. These were not for Marcel. Elijah watched the confusion bloom in Klaus’ face and felt as though the weakness he felt, heavy and ugly and tight, was filling the room and choking his vestigial breath.
“What could Marcel possibly want with...” Klaus reached and brushed his fingers over the air atop a drawing of Rebekah, young and smiling and small and human. “With any of this?”
Klaus looked back up to Elijah, and realized there was anguish in his eyes. “Elijah?”
Elijah smoothed his hair and smoothed his slacks. Smoothed his hair again. “I know -- I know you drew her. Often. And I wanted... I didn’t want to ask. I couldn’t. Ask you.”
Klaus saw faces of his family on the table, and knew that the pages beneath would hold sketches of brooks and livestock and neighbors and not a single one would depict a woman with wild brown hair, and fire-brown eyes, and a mouth that cut and kissed like no other. He nearly fell into the chair beside him, staring over Elijah’s shoulder at memories he had not wanted to archive.
He did not want to speak. He did not want to give this ancient grief a voice. But Klaus knew it was not so ancient now, for either of them. “I burnt them.”
Elijah’s jaw fought not to tremble. “Why?”
“Every time I looked at them, all I could see was the fear in her eyes on that last day, when she saw... And you...” Klaus swallowed the rest, revising the well-trod events with what must have really happened.
The room filled with a breathy sob. “I thought after the binding ritual, she would see that I was still myself. It was --” a bitter smile cracked between his words -- “it was the first thing I was going to do when it was over.”
Elijah slid to the floor, and neither of them could see the other’s face, and neither wanted to. “I’m so sorry, Niklaus.”
“I know.”
Paper rustled on the table, and Elijah kept his eyes on the space beneath the table for what could have been minutes or hours watching Klaus’ foot as it tapped restlessly against the floor. Rebekah had gotten him those pajamas for Christmas. Elijah had helped chain Klaus’ hands and feet to that cross and watched while he was cursed using the blood of the girl they both loved. Would Esther have been able to do it without killing Tatia? If Elijah hadn’t brought her to his mother, would Klaus have never been shackled? Would he have been able to keep them both safe --
“Brother -- Elijah, Elijah!” Klaus was before him, blurry and unformed against the lens of tears that would not, could not stop now for the world. “Brother...” Klaus’ hand was trembling beside his face, half-clawed, and Elijah sensed it more than saw it and in the same instinctual way he gripped his brother’s wrist so that he could feel that Klaus was still alive, in a way, and with him, in a way, and free.
Klaus’ other hand fell to his shoulder, gripped it tight and pulled Elijah forward as he leaned in to not so much offer as demand his shoulder be used as a pillow. Only then did a tear or two escape from him as well.
“I’m a coward,” Elijah whispered into Klaus’ shirt. “You cannot possibly forgive this.”
Klaus sighed and swallowed against his sadness and his total, yawning helplessness in the so-foreign situation where Elijah needed comforting that only he could provide. “But I do. You do. I mean -- I might not be able to forgive it, except.”
“Family?” Elijah scoffed. “You have begrudged me far more for far less, brother.”
“You’ve forgiven far more from me when I was far further from any kind of deserving, brother. And you are. Deserving.” He squeezed the shoulder he still gripped, rough and real and he hoped it would do something to ground him. “Coward or no.”
Elijah pulled back from their embrace, eyes red and cheeks wet and totally disbelieving. “I’m so sorry.”
“Christ, Elijah, I know it. I can’t say,” his voice fell to a whisper, “that I would not have done the same.”
Both of them knew the omitted confession there, the acknowledgement that Klaus had nearly done the same, after killing their mother. But Elijah felt more rage now in the fact that she had not stayed dead, and could not muster that familiar judgement for Niklaus now.
Klaus leaned back on his heels and stood, holding out a hand to help his brother up. Elijah sniffled. He wiped his face with a kerchief quickly (vampirically quickly) before taking the offered hand.
A baby wailed three stories above their heads, but both were attuned to the sound by now and no brick or mortar in this home could stop them noticing. “’S my turn,” Klaus said awkwardly, proudly, and Elijah relaxed into the wonder at his brother being a father to such a precious, tiny, new, beautiful girl. This feeling was True North to him now.
Klaus licked his lips, scanned the floor and the ceiling.
“Don’t keep my niece waiting,” Elijah found himself smiling with another unavoidable sniffle. “I’ll clean up the mess I’ve made.”
Klaus nodded, and there was something to it that was strange and knowing, but he was gone as quickly as he came. Elijah turned to the mausoleum of humanity on display before him.
On the desk, a yellow legal pad laid amongst the art from a millennium ago. A woman’s face was sketched in blue pen, smiling over her shoulder. Flower petals in her unruly hair. Eyes that were too enchanting, even in a portrait, to be believed as real. Elijah had seen that same face several times since, but it was never the same. The women who later wore that magic-steeped smile had never wielded it quite the way that Tatia had; the doppelgänger descendants that had been born from her ornery, observant babe. Klaus’s pen knew the difference.
Elijah traced his fingers over the lines, stopping when he realized that the deeper shadows had not yet dried. Hope’s crying had calmed now, and Elijah longed to kiss her goodnight, but he knew when he had decided to leave the compound that he would miss these precious moments with his niece. And he did not know how to thank Niklaus for this.
When the ink set, Elijah folded the unmarked edges back so not to crease her face. He grabbed a book from the other side of the library -- some poetry that Rebekah loved and Klaus loathed -- and pressed the drawing between the pages to keep it safe before tucking the sonnets into his suit pocket and stealing out into the bright New Orleans night.
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A canon-compliant Originals story about the woman who was the love of both their lives. Klatia + Talijah.
Klaus set his bow, arrows, and pack of supplies at the riverbank and took off his boots, wading into the icy water. He made his way to a bed of reeds, determined to get a few strong, straight stalks that he could use to practice for the bone flute he was planning on carving for Elijah. Klaus had decided that he should do it in wood first, so that when he stole one of the bones primed for weaponry and other tools, he would only need one try to get it right.
Realizing only just now how shaky his balance was on his sore legs, Klaus carefully stripped his shirt off and threw it onto the bank with the rest of his things. If he were to fall, he’d be glad of at least one dry piece of clothing when he got back to the trail.
Directly after he heard the sound of his shirt hitting the ground, though, another sound came from the trees. He turned towards the sound, but slipped… and with a slap he hit the water, face-first.
When he managed to get up on his knees, sputtering and blinking and shaking his ears out, a loud laugh was pealing across the bank. Klaus pushed the wet hair out of his face to see Tatia, laughing so hard she had to brace herself against a tree.
Klaus began trudging out of the water, his head half down in embarrassment, but he could not tear his gaze from the sight of her. She was so gorgeous, and she was smiling…
