[2088 – New Orleans]
“Family reunion?”
Klaus looked up to the all too familiar voice of the one woman he regret hurting all these years ago. She would have his balls for breakfast if she’d been able to kill him. Sighing, he returned his gaze to the scene below them. It was a bit silly that he and his siblings hadn’t been invited for the ceremony itself, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t have his way of watching three generations of Mikaelson witches bury their beloved mother, grandmother, great grandmother and aunt.
Bella and Kol became revolutionaries when they finally returned from their trip around the world. It had been a surprise for him that they returned with two children in tow and pregnant with the third. They became regents of the witches of New Orleans with ease, restructured the way magic was being used, that it wasn’t something to be feared but to be used as entertainment as well as a means to defend oneself. For years, the vampires lived peacefully amongst witches because of them.
Marcel, and Davina, were grateful that Bella and Kol made the harvest unnecessary. Old rules were gone, new rules were set in place. It had been amusing to see Bella go head to head with dead ancestors because of this, but in the end she had managed to convince them that change was for the better. And it was. Klaus’ night and day walkers didn’t have to worry about getting hexed, for one.
What was he? Not family enough? Had they forgotten that the other half that gave them life had been his brother? Or was it simply because he, Elijah and Rebekah were vampires? While he knew that Bella and Kol had been raising their offspring to keep an open mind, once they had been old enough to formulate a normal thought for themselves, they’d started to avoid coming to the compound and stayed with the rest of the witches.
Bella still came to visit, of course. Always loyal to a fault, especially after Kol’s death. It was as if she spent her day only to visit Kol’s grave and then check up on Klaus. Elijah and Rebekah had left years ago, fed up with Klaus’ constant manipulation, wanting everything to be perfect for his daughter Hope, who was now starting her own family with an idiot called Rafe. For years, Klaus had spooked off potential suitors, even killed one or two as no one was good enough for his girl. Until Rafe. Rafe was an idiot, sure, but unlike any of the others, he genuinely seemed to care, wanted to make Hope his priority and she was happy, so what could he do against that?
But Bella thought that Klaus had become lonely without Kol, without Elijah and Rebekah to keep him company. She disliked Marcel, still after all these years, and it wasn’t as if he was around much, always running around dealing with his vampire empire as Klaus’ second in command. For the last ten years Klaus had hoped that the old bat would just off herself, but she couldn’t. She had promised Kol on his deathbed that she would not follow him with self inflicted wounds. She had to continue live a full life.
For some reason, Klaus always thought that was a bit barmy. The two of them had been obsessed with each other, breathed each other in, day and night. For Bella to be on her own for 15 years was just torture. Then again, she was probably going to give Kol hell for that once they met up again.
“They’re consecrating a great witch,” Klaus evenly replied, not looking up from the scene below. “My sister in law. Those are her progeny.”
“Congratulations,” Sameen replied evenly as she leaned against the barrier he was leaning against and reached for his balls over his jeans. “I should rip these and feed them to you. You’re a fucking asshole.”
“I had to leave you behind. I had no right to intrude on your life like that.”
“If you mean changing me? Yeah. You had no right. I was willing to die for them. And I did.”
“And then you came back.”
“You could have stuck around long enough to teach me, you know. Instead, a witch whisked me away, taught me everything she knew before she got killed by the people I had died for as they thought she was part of Samaritan.” She tightened her grip on his balls. “I buried Root last week. She was the last one to go. I never bothered to ask the machine for a new team.”
“You were doing great work, you loved it.” Klaus groaned as he tried to pry her hands off his groin, it was starting to get unpleasant now. “I’m not going to apologize.”
“I don’t expect you to,” she said, releasing him. “I’m just informing you that I’ve relocated here. With the Machine. She’s evolved in something spectacular over the years, managed to upgrade herself. Of course, with Harold gone, she could do whatever the hell she wanted because I let her. We’re doing great things.”
“The humans of New Orleans are all yours.”
“What about you?”
He turned around to face her and smirked. “Sure, why not?”
[2288 – Mystic Falls]
“You fucker!”
Klaus dodged his brother’s fist. It was typical, wasn’t it? Resurrect someone and get smacked around as a thank you. “You should feed, you’ve been gone for too long,” he replied evenly as he nodded towards the people gathered in the Fifth incarnation of the Mystic Grill. It looked just as naff as it did all those years ago when he first came into town to kill the doppelganger and break his curse, but the food had gotten significantly better. “Have a Lockwood for lunch.”
The next hit connected to his jaw. “We left specific instructions, Niklaus,” Kol breezed as he kept hitting his older brother. “Under no circumstance were Bella and I to be brought back. None. Not even because you’re bored. We wanted to be left in peace.”
“Yes. And you know how well I do with instructions,” Klaus smirked as he took hold of his brother’s naked body – resurrection does that, no clothes and all – and threw them towards the humans Klaus had compelled for his brother to feast on. “Let’s have some fun! Just like old times, remember New Orleans? 1821, that tenement building? That was such fun!”
Kol growled as he sunk his teeth into one of the humans out of frustration, drinking greedily.
Sameen looked at the scene before her in disgust. Niklaus had been bored, borderline depressed, the last 150 years or so and she had always managed to stop him from finding a strong enough witch to resurrect his brother with his ashes. There was no point in bringing in a third person in their little party, they had a good thing going. Even when his own line of descendants died out due to them unwilling to have children, Klaus came back from that darkness quite easily.
That was until around 30 years ago when Klaus had killed yet another one of his brother’s descendants and was banished from New Orleans. If there was one thing that Klaus didn’t handle very well it was rejection.
Not just Klaus, but also every other Mikaelson vampire. There were six of them, all blood relatives to Kol and Bella Mikaelson. Two had been sired by Rebekah out of pity as they had been ill, two had been sired by Niklaus and the last one had just been turned by Damon Salvatore, just to prove that he could get into New Orleans and to annoy Klaus.
Sameen had wanted to kill Damon, but Klaus wouldn’t let her. His reasoning was ‘the more family, the better, seeing as my own siblings don’t seem to care about me anymore’. She was fed up with his beaten puppy routine. And now that he had resurrected his brother, stories had told her that as a vampire, he had been just as bad as Niklaus, things were going to go downhill soon. She just knew it.
[2310 – New Orleans]
“Surely there must be someone who can help you guys?” Sameen asked one of the witches. Word had been sent for her to Mystic Falls and she had been granted magical permission to enter the city lines. They must have been desperate.
Sameen had been grateful for the little break she had received due to the witches’ problems. Klaus and Kol had been terrorizing Mystic Falls since 2288. Not killing anyone, just compelling everyone to do their bidding. It had been hard to do her own work with the Machine while she needed to keep an eye on the siblings, because she knew, she knew, that if she left, the number of people living in Mystic Falls would dwindle.
Fortunately, she had found an ally in Caroline Forbes and Stefan Salvatore, who, despite not being able to hold their own against two Originals, promised to keep an eye out and if things would escalate, they would call her and she’d be back immediately.
Vanja huffed. “As if my mum and grandfather would do anything against those Bennett witches. Everyone is scared shitless of what they can do and yet, they keep saying that they should have stayed in their own corner.”
“Well, it went well for so long, it was bound to go wrong at one point, yes?” It had been interesting to see how a long line of Salem witches had been scattering themselves across the United States, gaining power and followers and had even managed to weasel their way into New Orleans, which was mostly run by Mikaelson witches. “Who’s your regent again?”
“My mum. She took over from granddad a few years back, but she’s a pushover.”
Sameen made a disapproving sound. “That’s no way to speak about your own mother.”
“Are you kidding? She’s under some influence or something because she’s reinstated the harvest! Do you know what that means? Her own child, my sister, will be sacrificed soon for no reason. There hasn’t been any indication that our powers are getting weaker. In fact, it only seems to grow stronger and I’ve spoken to some ancestors and they said that if mum does this, if she won’t get stopped, our powers will get weaker because we’ve committed an act of violence against our own kind.”
“So what do you want me to do? Kill your mother?”
Vanja was quiet for a moment, as if she was seriously considering it. “No. I want you to find me a witch strong enough to stop her.”
She snorted. “Honey, I’m a vampire and I’m currently dealing with Klaus and some of your other vampire family members. Did you know that he’s resurrected Kol, your ancestor?”
“It’s true then? They’re in Mystic Falls?” Vanja said, suddenly turning pale.
“Snacking away. So. Why won’t you help me with my problem and I’ll try to help you with yours.”
“We can’t do anything about my cousin,” an older man, Duke, if Sameen remembered correctly. “She has the ancestors under her control, real power hungry. My dad shouldn’t have named her after Esther.”
“Ah.”
“And we have more problems than just the Bennett witches. They’re stronger than us, yes, but maybe it’s not so bad to hand over the reigns to them. It’s not as if our family has done anything significant for years.”
“That’s not true!” Malin, Vanja’s twin sister, piped up. “It’s just that technology and science have made us lazy. The Bennett’s aren’t stronger than us, if anything, we’re stronger than them. And if you think that we haven’t done anything significant lately… your father’s responsible for getting that protection spell up. Nearly every vampire has been purged from New Orleans.”
“And if he hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.”
“Woah, what mess? What aren’t you telling me?” Sameen said surprised.
“The werewolves have chased us out of our homes. They’ve aligned themselves with the Bennett witches.” Vanja shrugged. “Which is why we’re across the river.”
“Fight back?”
“Hadn’t the vampires been purged from the city, the population of the werewolves would have been controlled. My father thought that it would be a good thing to have a New Orleans without vampires, but this really is a magical city. All four parts, human, witch, werewolf and vampire, need to be in the perfect balance.”
“Drop the barrier.”
“I got it!” A blonde girl ran into the loft, panting, carrying a grimoire. “You guys really don’t know your history very well, do you? You only know of Kol, the big bad wolf when he was a vampire, a kitten as a witch.”
“It’s irrelevant, Mandy.” Malin rolled her eyes. It was hard to believe that the girls were relatives, even so many generations apart. Besides, she was a geek, she’d get a total boner from old books.
“Hi, Mandy Claire,” she introduced herself to Sameen. “We Claire witches are still around too, not happy with how the Mikaelsons have been handling things but we’re not strong enough to dethrone them, yadayadayada.”
“Sam. Nice to meet you,” the vampire replied, amused by this little witch. She didn’t look like much, but her experience told her that it was always worth a shot to hear someone like that out. “What’s your idea?”
“Well, they seem to think that being a Mikaelson is the most important thing, you know. But it’s not.” She smacked the book on the table. “Everything’s digitalized, uploaded to their brains but the tech was made years ago and made by humans and humans are fallible. They forget things or leave things out on purpose. And who bothered with women back then anyway?” Mandy nodded towards her far removed cousins. “They’ve been relying a lot on new technology and barely look in books anymore. Their knowledge is universal, everyone knows the same thing.”
“Great, she’s insulting us.” Malin sighed.
“No, I’m not. You’ve just become slaves to having things handed to you thanks to technology. Nobody bothers with real books anymore. Like I said, tech made and coded by humans and that can be manipulated. Not handwritten stuff so I snuck to the tomb and…”
“You went across the river?” Vanja gasped. “Do you have a death wish?”
“No,” she looked at her friend, briefly, before pointing at the book. “The Mikaelsons even have power outside of New Orleans and they take that for granted.”
“It’s because of one of our ancestors,” Old Duke said, half shrugging, the story lost on him, really. He never realized that before Mandy pointed it out just now. “I just can’t remember the story.”
“Yeah, duh. The most important one! Resurrect her, and she can fix everything. The imbalance, Klaus and Kol, the Bennett witches, whatever.”
“No one’s that powerful.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Mandy cried out and opened the book. “Seriously, this is history. You’d think that the most important story of your line would survive generation upon generation. Read this, then come up with a plan!”
[January 15, 2311]
“What the fuck?” The woman said evenly as she sat up and looked at her surroundings.
“Welcome back,” Vanja Mikaelson smiled widely as she got to her feet.
The woman huffed as she looked at her hands, they were unfamiliar to her. She got a glance of strands of hair and blinked. She was a blonde! “What the fuck!”
“Relax,” Sameen said as she was leaning against the wall. She hadn’t believed it was actually possible to see another resurrection, and this wasn’t a real resurrection, was it? She was possessing a body. “The host of the body you are currently in has willingly given it to you. There wasn’t any force or anything else.”
“And how do you know?” She shot at the vampire.
“Hey, relax,” Vanja said soothingly. “You’re in my sister Daisy’s body. She’s 19 years old and she was more than willing to sacrifice herself for the greater good. She’s moved on.”
“This is fucked up.” She got to her feet, a little bit unsteady at first and then continued to walk around. “What year is this?”
“2311.”
“Fuck. How long have I been dead for?”
“223 years.”
“I left instructions.”
“We know and we’re sorry but we could really use your help,” Malin got to her feet and started to walk next to the woman. “If it’s of any consolation, your husband is back too.”
“No shit,” Bella huffed, tugging on her hair. She was a blonde? How did that happen? “He disappeared one day, Klaus had something do with it, didn’t he?”
“We really need your help.”
“You’re not getting it,” Bella said resolutely, angry because they couldn’t follow simple instructions. “Where can I find my husband?” Now that she was in a different body, she could play the ultimate prank on him. Oh yes. That was going to be hilarious.
“But…”
She growled and froze everyone in place before making her way over to the vampire. “Tell me where he is now, or I will kill you.”
Sameen smirked. “Unfreeze me, and I will take you to him. You have my word as Niklaus’ mate.”
Bella looked at the vampire, surprised. “Huh.”