Archive of Our Own

Hope has known loss in her life – years and years of it, in total.  The sum of the years her family was absent, then the years where they were purposefully missing.  Five years of her father hiding away from her and leaving her with this nagging sense of being left behind.  She cried whole oceans worth of tears into her mother’s arms over it – she mourned the family she’d had so briefly and she let it make her desperate, always wanting for something she’d had a taste of and then was denied, over and over again.

But now – now, when nothing feels right, when nothing is right – now it feels like a joke to have called that loss.

The morning after, Freya comes into her room and finds Hope upright at her easel with paint staining her hands and her bed still made from the day before.

“Did you sleep at all?” her aunt asks, worry and her own grief making her voice rough. 

Hope’s fairly certain Freya already knows the answer to that, but she shakes her head anyway.

How could she sleep?  How could she put herself through – the morning after her mother’s funeral, Hope had woken up and, for however brief a moment, she’d forgotten.  And then she remembered, all her hurt made anew.  How could she do that again?  How could she do it twice over now?  How is she supposed to do it again and again and again and –

“You should eat, at least.  I can bring something up, if you don’t want to come downstairs – whatever you want.”

Hope shrugs, listening to the floorboards creak as Freya shifts behind her.  She was working on her painting through most of the night, but she couldn’t – Hope flexes her hands against her knees, happy for the ache.  She couldn’t quite get her parents’ faces right.  She’ll need to – she should start over.

“Sweetheart,” Freya says softly, coming up beside her and resting a hand on her shoulder and –

and Hope is so sick of crying.  She so tired of it, she never wants to cry again but – but where else would all this go?  She can’t keep it inside, there’s too much of it – whatever it is.  Something more than grief, she thinks.  Something more than guilt, too.  Some awful hybrid of a feeling.

Under the worried scrutiny of her aunt’s gaze, under the warm weight of her hand on her shoulder, Hope folds in on herself.  She tries – she tries her hardest to hold it in again, biting her lip hard enough to draw blood but letting out a strangled sob regardless.

Maybe even more than she hates crying – Hope hates how little control she has over herself, how she can’t even keep herself together long enough to answer a question or finish a painting or – or – or –

If Freya says anything beyond her initial pained gasp of surprise, Hope doesn’t hear it.  Her aunt gathers her up out of her seat, pulling her insistently into a hug no matter how Hope tries to push her away.  She doesn’t deserve it – she’s the reason Freya’s lost two of her brothers, a friend – Hope’s the reason they’re dead.  Hope doesn’t deserve anything from anyone at this point.

But – it feels really nice to be held like this?  Aunt Freya isn’t her mom, doesn’t feel like her or smell like her, but it’s close enough.  It’s familiar in a way that Hope has so desperately wanted, even if she hasn’t exactly found the words to ask.

“I – I don’t –,” she sobs into her aunt’s shoulder, her words quickly losing their shape in her tears.  “–‘m sorry – !”

Smoothing a hand down her hair and cradling her close, Freya shushes her.  “Don’t,” she says fiercely.  “Don’t apologize.”

She should though – she should be apologizing to Freya and Rebekah and Kol, to Vincent and Marcel, to – to everyone.  The dead are her fault.  It’s her fault and there’s no excuse, nothing to lessen the blow.  It’s her fault.

Hope’s too tired to argue the point – and maybe it’s not something to be argued, but something that she’ll just have to carry.  Hers and her alone to bear.

It’s easier to let Freya shepherd her to the bathroom, to let her aunt guide her through the motions of washing her face and brushing her teeth and hair.

“I can draw you a bath later, if you want.  I’ll even let you use my expensive bath salts,” her aunt offers sometime later.  She pulls a clean sweater out of Hope’s drawer and hands it to her, accepting her old one when she strips it off.  Hope doesn’t even remember leaving the bathroom.  “I’ll try and get laundry done soon, too.”

“It’s fine,” Hope says finally, blinking sluggishly and smoothing down her hair after changing, “I’ll be going back to school soon anyway.”  At Freya’s look, Hope frowns.  “…Right?”

In an instant, her aunt pastes on a smile, but it’s too tinged with worry to be authentic.  “If you want,” she assures her.  “But I spoke with Caroline this morning and the school is willing to give you the rest of the semester off.  You’d be a little behind by next year, but since you’re ahead in most of your classes anyway, I thought that –.”

“I just want to get back to normal,” Hope cuts her off, a little more forcefully than she was going for.  In the awkward beat after, she clears her throat.  “I just mean –,” she gestures around broadly.  “I don’t – I don’t think I can stay here.”

She lets it hang between them, leaving all the rest unsaid.  There’s too much here.  I’d see them everywhere.  At least at school, there’s a few places she’d never shown her mother, some places she can’t see her in clearly.  And it’ll be easy enough to avoid any ghost of her father – she can just never visit the local history section in the library. 

“No, of course,” Freya says, breaking a too long lull in conversation with another forced smile.  “We can talk about it later,” – which means no – “but you really do need to eat something, sweet girl.  Okay?”

Hope doesn’t answer, but she follows Freya when she turns to leave which seems like answer enough.  She trails her downstairs and into the arms of Rebekah and Keelin, who take over hovering over her long enough for Freya to disappear down the street and return with two bags worth of baked goods.

“I can be left on my own, you know,” she grumbles quietly even as she herself isn’t sure if that’s true.  That urge to put an end to things, to make this ache in her chest stop – it’s still here, even stronger than it was right after her mother – well.  It’s still here.  Even still, Hope chafes at the constant attention.  She might have basked in it once, when all she wanted was her family near to her, but now – now, she thinks they would all be safer if she were somewhere very far away.

Rebekah studies her warily.  “Maybe,” she says after a moment, reaching out to brush her hair back over her shoulder.  “But always and forever extends to you, too.”

. . .

The day crawls forward inch by wretched inch.  Hope lets her family shuffle her from the courtyard to the parlor, from the parlor to the study, from the study to the balcony – they try to fill her time with distractions, hesitant to let her sit with her own thoughts for company for too long.  At some point, she finds herself in the den, tucked up beside Rebekah and watching old cartoons on the single, ancient TV set.

“Darling, you should sleep if you can,” Rebekah murmurs, stroking Hope’s hair after she jerks awake for the second time after dozing off on her aunt’s shoulder. 

Hope shakes her head stubbornly, though she’s not quite so stubborn as to push her aunt away.  Not yet, anyway.  “Shouldn’t you be getting ready to leave?” she asks as her eyelids droop again.  She fights off the new wave of exhaustion.  “I thought you and Marcel were heading back to New York.”

“Eventually,” her aunt hums in response.  “Not today, though, nor tomorrow.”  She tucks Hope’s hair back over her shoulder and pulls the blanket they’re sharing up a little higher over her. 

It’s not as if Hope grew up with Rebekah around.  She has about as many tangible memories of her as she does of her father, but she has years of phone calls and video chats and postcards to fill the gap.  And having her here now – Hope suddenly, desperately doesn’t want her to leave again.

 She’s ashamed the moment the realization occurs – who is she to keep her here?  Rebekah has a whole life waiting for her anywhere, everywhere.  She shouldn’t be tied to New Orleans just because Hope’s selfish.

Hope has been selfish before.  It didn’t exactly pan out.

Reminded of her shame, Hope feels very small.  And Rebekah is a comforting presence and she’s keeping Hope tucked close and safe like she always has, but – but it’s not right.  Hope wants warmth and strength and the perfume that always reminded her of summer evenings in the bayou in the best way – Hope wants her mom.

She feels ungrateful, but it’s true.  Everyone is trying, making a point to pick up her favorite pastries or sit through her childhood cartoons, coddling her and tiptoeing around her, but none of it is helping because the person that could really help her is never coming back and Hope is so horrifically aware of that.

Hope snaps upright, filled with a sudden frantic, restless energy.

“I’m going to go paint,” she says by way of explanation, ignoring Rebekah’s obvious concern and waving her off when she stands to follow.  “I’m fine,” she promises, lying through her teeth.  “It just – it’s calming.”

It works, somehow.  Rebekah slowly eases back into her seat, letting Hope leave without questioning, even if Hope feels her aunt’s eyes following her as she retreats to her room.

She had actually intended to paint.  Normally, when she grew a little too restless and she was at school or otherwise unable to pester her mom into taking her down to the bayou to run around, absolutely wrecking a blank canvas was enough to settle her.

But the smell of paint in her room – the unfinished painting on her easel – it’s nearly enough to make her sick.

There was a reason she told Freya she couldn’t stay.  It’s not just the paint that makes her nauseous, it’s all the little things in her room that remind her of what it is, exactly, that she’s lost.  The little trinkets her father used to send her before he cut contact, the things that she pretended she forgot had been gifts from him in order to justify leaving them out on her dresser even after she went out of her way to hide all other evidence of him; the last birthday card her mother gave her, with a goofy little drawing of a wolf on the envelope and her mom’s promise to take her on an actual vacation this summer; a stack of Post-It notes her mom wrote her and snuck into her luggage before she left for school, embarrassing and hidden away at the time but something that Hope could never just trash, even before this.  There’s just – there’s so much.

Hope can try to blame Roman and Greta for this or she can say that it was the Hollow that bid her to kill those vampires or that there was nothing she could have done differently.  But deep down – deep down, Hope knows the truth.

So, no – she can’t stay here.  Not now, and maybe not ever.

Hope casts a cloaking spell on her way out the window, murmuring another spell to scatter the attention of the tourists on the sidewalk below her window as she drops to the ground, her newfound agility making her descent as easy as breathing.

There’s no destination she has in mind – it’s more that she just can’t be here, anymore.  She ducks down a side street to get off the main road and she just starts walking.

Anywhere – everywhere.  Wherever she can put some distance between her and the home she’s spent the last seven years in.  Maybe – maybe she could go to the country house.  It’s still in her mother’s name – it’s probably Hope’s now.  She could go there, maybe.

But that’s not an option either.  It might be worse, actually.  Almost all of Hope’s memories of the country house, of her life before New Orleans – it’s just her and her mom.  Sometimes Grandma Mary would visit or they might drive out to visit her, but it was Hope and her mother for most of those years.  How many weekends had they spent building blanket forts in the screened-in back porch?  How many summer nights had Hope spent camping deep in the acreage of the property, clumsily helping her mother set up their tent?

She’s sure it wasn’t all good – Hope knows her own life well enough to be sure that any idyllic vision of her childhood that she holds is missing some heartache, some loss.  Her mother had been so sad, so worried when she was young – Hope knows that, remembers how she would come skidding down the hall sometimes and find her mother stalled out in the middle of one task or another, frantically wiping away her tears. 

God – how much had she had to hide from Hope, just to give her some semblance of a childhood?  Sure, sometimes Hope was a little lonely that far outside of the nearest town.  Sure, sometimes she got more upset after a story about her father than usual.  But Hope had been happy – happy in a way that she doesn’t think she’ll ever get back to now.  There was this phantom family she had no memory of haunting the dark corners of the house, but she had her mom and her grandma and a garden to play in and all the crayons and markers and sketchbooks she could ever ask for.  Hope had been happy and she sees now how hard her mother must have worked to make it that way.

Hope wanders her city aimlessly, drawn into cafés when things smell good or lounges when the right music catches her attention.  There’s no rhyme or reason to her path, but with each step, she loses herself a little more into the crush of people around her.  Mardi Gras season has ended, but the Quarter is always full and busy.

There were times – especially as she got older – that Hope had looked out her window and seen the crowds of people and so badly wanted to be a part of them.  To be that carefree, that unburdened; she wanted that.

She wants that now.

Freedom suddenly sours on her tongue.  The few times Hope actually tried to act on the instinct, her mother always anticipated it, catching her at the front door or just outside the compound walls.  Usually it resulted in brief, increasingly frustrated lectures about safety.  But there were a couple times when her mom just narrowed her eyes and sized Hope up before she took her hand and started walking.

She thinks her mom knew – that she understood what it was that Hope wanted.  That she tried to give it to her in the safest way she knew how.

Hope wonders if her aunts and uncles have clued in that she’s gone yet.  They’ve been careful with her today – well, they’ve been careful with her for weeks, especially so today, but they’re all grieving too.  They have things to worry about and people to miss too, and Hope’s sure that her painting excuse will buy her at least a little time before alarms are raised.

Will they understand?  Will they know that it’s not that she’s trying to run away or anything, it’s just that – that she can’t do this.  She doesn’t want to be the girl that got her parents killed, the girl that sparked a war that could have destroyed the supernatural world as they all know it.  Hope just wants to be fourteen and home on break.

At some point, the sun shifts in the sky, casting longer shadows down the street.  The crowds around start to get a little rowdier, and Hope knows it’s time to go back. 

Her father would have understood too, she thinks as she turns to head towards a main thoroughfare.  Or he would have tried to.

The thought surprises her – Hope hasn’t thought about her father much since yesterday.  In fact, she’s been avoiding thinking about him.  It’s just – hard?  She still has so much anger spilling over from the last five years, but she had always wanted him near, had always adored him.  And she got him back – she got what she had wanted when this all started, but he’d still been – distant?  Hesitant?  It was just those last few, awful days that she really got her father back the way she had hoped for.

And now he’s gone too.  Even a half version of him would have been better than this.

She’s not sure exactly how to feel.  There’s grief, of course.  There will always be grief – because he’s dead, because he was gone for so long, because all she ever had and all she ever will have are stories of him.  Hope doesn’t know what type of person she would be if she had grown up with her father around.  There’s guilt, too – tied up with anger and what she thinks is love.  It’s okay for her to love him, right?  Even if she doesn’t remember all that much of him and even if he’s the monster other parents warn their children about?

He would have tried to be good for her, she knows that without hesitation or doubt.  He risked the world ending just to hold her hand – he would have tried, at least.

Hope can’t say if he would have been good at it or if he would have been able to step exactly into the space her mother left behind.  She can’t really picture Klaus Mikaelson decked out in school colors on Family Day or staying up late to wrap her presents for Christmas, but – but she knows he loved her.  That her safety was always at the forefront of his mind, no matter how he went about ensuring it.

Maybe that would have been enough? 

Hope doesn’t know.  She’ll never know.

Hope’s crying again before she can really register the ache in her chest.  Tears are always close at hand now – she’d pay money to just turn them off for an hour.  Her head hurts.  Her nose and throat are raw.  She just wants it to stop.

She stops at the edge of an alley, trying in vain to catch her breath.  The flow of people around her doesn’t change, only a few Good Samaritans pausing to check on her.  Even they move on quickly enough – she’s not the first teenage girl they’ll have seen crying tonight, and she doubts she’ll be the last.

She misses – something.  It can’t really be her father, can it?  She barely knew her father, never really lived with him, never really had him in her life with any consistency.  Even when they were speaking, his calls were erratic.

But still – she feels it, the ache and emptiness.  It’s not the same as how she misses her mom, but it still hurts.  Still stops her dead in her tracks and makes it harder and harder to catch a breath.

Hope wants to go home – that’s it.  She wants to go home, but it doesn’t exist anymore, not how she wants it to.  She wants to go back to the country house as it was when she was seven, and all her family was back and they all were willing to play along with whatever game she came up with or sit through as many tea parties as she demanded and her father would have given her anything, everything.  She wants everything to be safe – wants everyone she loves to be whole and within reach.

The peak of it all fades as the evening grows darker.  At some point, Hope finds she can straighten up again, that she can draw a full breath without being reduced to sobs again.

She walks slowly, dread making her feet heavy.  When she steps back into the Abattoir, she has to face the fact that there’s no going back to how things were, at least not here.  At school, maybe – there’s a chance that not everyone knows yet.  She might stand a chance of normalcy there.

When she turns onto her street, busy and vibrant as always, Hope has half a mind to turn back around.  Vincent would probably let her stay with him, she thinks, if he hasn’t already been roped into looking for her.  Or she could go to Declan, maybe – he let her get away with murder over the last few years and she doubts he’d turn her away now.

If it's guilt that drives her forward at first, it's exhaustion that pushes her on.  If she can’t have her mother, she wants the next best thing.

When Hope finally crosses the threshold of the Abattoir, she finds Davina and Freya poring over a locator spell and she stumbles to a halt in front of them, swaying on her feet as her body threatens to give out. 

“Hope!” 

Her aunt is on her feet before Hope can truly register movement, Davina close behind her.  They urge her onto one of the chaises in the entry and Hope lets them, suddenly boneless now that she’s off the street.

“I’ll start calling everyone,” Davina says, pulling her phone out of her back pocket. 

“Thanks,” Freya breathes, eyes pinched with worry.  “I’ll –,” she looks back to Hope.  “I’ll stay with her.”

Hope’s glad she didn’t have to ask – she’s not sure if she would have, if she’s honest, or if what little pride that remains would have stood in the way.  She never had to ask her mom, never had to lay out how she was feeling or that she needed comfort.  She’s not used to it.

After Davina disappears deeper into the building, Freya joins her on the chaise, gathering Hope up into a careful hug.  Like she’s half afraid that Hope will just disappear.

“You can’t scare us like that,” Freya says, her voice thick.  “Hope, we can’t – we can’t lose you too.”

Hope doesn’t nod or answer.  She’s not sure if she would mean it.  They could lose her and still function – she’s half-convinced that they should, that they would all be better off without her to worry about.

But Freya seems to need this hug almost as much as Hope does.  It’s not the time to say anything like that or to push back or ask for more or less or – or – or whatever. 

It’s easier to stay quiet and still, to let her family fuss and fret over her when they return – easier still to pretend like she misses the looks the adults send each other when they think she’s not looking.

. . .

The quiet of the Abattoir is suffocating at night – Hope already knew that, but the fact is drilled into her as she makes another lap through the halls of the building.

Everyone else is asleep and Hope knows she needs to sleep, that at least some of the ache in her head is from exhaustion.  She knows that even if she can stay up for days, she shouldn’t. 

Freya had offered to make her a tea that would give her dreamless sleep, but it’s not the dreams that Hope’s worried about.  She’s had nightmares her whole life and – and maybe seeing her parents in her dreams would ease some of this just a little.  It’s not the dreams, then – it’s the waking that scares her.

In the days after the fight with Greta, Hope kept moving until she was dead on her feet, until sleep was no longer an option.  It kept her functional, if not comfortable, even with each morning its own new horror.

Now – how functional does she really need to be?  There’s no Big Bad lurking in the shadows, no malevolent spirit trying to make a home in Hope’s ribcage. 

Forget fighting.  Hope just wants to disappear.  There’s no tea or amount of sleep that can fix that.

So Hope walks the halls of the home she’s lived in for seven years – the home she shared with her mother and Freya and Keelin, whenever she was stateside.  She got used to it that way – the creaks and groans of the old foundation, the constant hum of the city outside.  For a while, she was able to know exactly who was coming up the stairs just by their footfalls.

It feels – not empty.  There’s more people here now than there ever was in the years prior, and Freya and Keelin are still here and familiar to her in a way the rest of her family is not.  But the house feels cold now, devoid of the warmth and comfort that Hope’s always associated with her home.

It shouldn’t feel like that, Hope knows.  There’s no lack of love here, no reason to doubt her family’s care.  But – but everyone is so quiet.  They’re quiet and careful with her and Kol won’t even rib her like he usually would and it’s so obvious that they’re all tiptoeing around her, trying to grieve whenever she’s not looking, trying to fix things without acknowledging what it is that’s been broken.

It’s not anyone’s intention – Hope knows enough to be sure of that – but it’s making her feel so alone.  Everyone’s sitting around trying to cater to what they think she needs, trying to get her to open up to them, but it’s at the back of her head at all times – they’re missing someone too.  They lost people that they loved and cared for, people that they’ll be missing until they die.  How can Hope add to that?  How is she supposed to decide that everything she’s feeling is more important – that she should just tell her family how badly she wants this all to be over, how much she wanted to die right after her mother sacrificed herself and how it’s not so much that she wants to die now, but it’s more that she’s tired of living like this and she can’t see any way through.

She’s just tired.  God – Hope is fucking exhausted.

Whenever Hope couldn’t sleep in the past, her mom would sing to her or read to her or brush her hair – all things Hope could ask any of her family for.  They’d do it in a heartbeat – they’d do anything she asked right now, she thinks.  But it wasn’t so much the action itself.  Her mom could have probably just sat in the corner of Hope’s room on her phone and had the same effect – it was her presence alone that sealed it. 

And that’s hard to admit.  Hope’s fourteen – she shouldn’t need her mommy to be in the room just so she can sleep.  She shouldn’t need anything more than a couple melatonin pills and some chamomile tea.

She just – she so badly wants to fix this.  Wants to get rid of the way her whole body hurts with this grief and this guilt, but she can’t even really want that unless she can just fix time – how else is she supposed to remember her parents?  What else will be as potent a reminder as this – this ache she feels everywhere?  She’s tired of how this feels and it hasn’t even been a month since her mother died, only days since her father – how is she supposed to do this tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and every day after that until she dies?  Hope can hardly stand it now – can’t quite straighten under the weight of it.

Hope can’t smother the sob that works its way up from her chest, a ragged gasp that leaves her struggling to breathe.  She claps a hand over her mouth, but it’s too late.

From down in the courtyard, Hope hears a door open upstairs, then another, and another after that.  The muffled, sleep heavy voices of her family are pitched high with worry, calling her name, and Hope can’t – she can’t deal with anything more right now.  She doesn’t want their pity and their worry – she wants to be able to just scream and still be understood.

When Rebekah’s pale, worried face appears first over the railing, then – suddenly – in front of her, Hope shrugs off her aunt’s immediate concern, pulling away and drawing in on herself, studiously ignoring the look of hurt that crosses Rebekah’s face.

“Sorry,” Hope says, swallowing the rest of her tears and pasting on a weak smile.  “I just couldn’t sleep.”

. . .

The days pass in a haze of hovering guardians and sleeplessness.  Hope passes out for an hour or two when her body gives out, waking up on the couch or at the dining table with a stiff neck and a new reason to never want to sleep again – each time she wakes up proves her point about why she shouldn’t sleep, always about to call out for her mother like this was all just a bad dream.

It’s sometime on the twelfth day that Hope finds herself restless again, pacing the length of her room in the bright, goldenrod of afternoon light filtering in through her windows.  Freya dodged her questions about going back to school again and Hope – Hope doesn’t know how else she can say it.  She loves her family, but she’s not good for them.  If no one else will recognize it or put words to it, she will.

She needs to be someplace where no one else can get hurt because of her.  What happens if she gets possessed?  What happens if some new self-declared leader of the supernatural world decides to draw from the deepest well of power they can find?  Her family would kill themselves trying to protect her, to save her and – and Hope doesn’t want that.

At least at school, there are barriers – more lines of defense than Hope can count.  Her teachers care about her, but not so much that they would sacrifice the wellbeing of every other student entrusted to their care.  Hope wouldn’t have to worry so much at school, right?

She’s at the window before she really knows where she’s going.

. . .

Hope’s never made the journey to the bayou on foot before, used to watching the passing scenery through the window of her mother’s passenger seat.  She could have ordered a ride, but she wanted an outlet for her extra energy, for the way that she feels like she’s shaking apart at the seams at all times.

It’s quiet when she arrives – everyone’s home, all the lights on and curtains surreptitiously twitched aside, but nobody’s coming out to greet her when she wanders down to the water’s edge, not like they did all the times she came with her mom in the past.  Hope’s never felt completely at home with the pack, but she’s never felt so isolated from them – not like this, not like the only thing linking her to them was her mother.  Isn’t she meant to be a part of them?  Isn’t she meant to belong?

She can’t even blame them for avoiding her, after all she’s done to damage the community.  If she hadn’t – hadn’t been so stupid, if she had just ignored Henry, if she had just accepted the distance between her and her father – how many people would still be alive?

She should be making peace with the pack, but – with her mother and Lisina both gone, Hope’s not even sure who the alpha is anymore, not sure of whose door she should knock on and offer an apology to, not sure if they would welcome her or officially turn her away.  It’s better not to ask at all, she thinks.

It’s Keelin that finds her sitting with her legs hanging off the edge of the dock, watching the sun set over the water.  It shouldn’t surprise her that it’s Keelin – it’s probably better that it’s her rather than anyone else.  Hope’s sure the wolves out here won’t be willing to speak to vampires for a while and it’s probably only a testament to how much they all loved and respected her mother that they haven’t sent Hope packing.  So – it makes sense that it’s Keelin that takes a seat beside her, following her gaze out to the middle of the water – out to where her mother’s pyre disappeared from view.

“You’re really giving us a run for our money, in terms of daring escapes,” Keelin says after a few moments of silence pass comfortably between them.  “I’m not sure how you managed to get past all of us again, but kudos.”

Hope’s always liked Keelin, always enjoyed her steady presence and sought her out for advice or gossip or company when they home at the same time.  And now, her easy warmth wrapped around her and extending itself to Hope – more similar to her mom than not – Hope leans against her, nodding absently.

Keelin takes her hand, warming it between both of hers.  “Do you want to talk?” she asks.

Hope shakes her head.

“Are you willing to listen?”

A nod.

“So,” Keelin hums.  “I’m not sure how much you know about my family – if Freya or Hayley told you.  It’s not something I love to talk about, so I don’t expect you would know that much.”

Hope nods again – she knows a little, gleaned from the few stories she’s heard about how Keelin and Freya met.  But she’s never heard it straight from Keelin, nor ever thought to ask.  She supposes it never felt relevant – it seemed like Keelin was happy to keep it in her past and it’s not as if Hope ever thought to pry into the subject.

“I figured.  But you know that they’re gone, right?”

Hope stiffens, realizing where this is going.  “Yeah,” she answers cautiously, eased back down against her shoulder by Keelin’s gentle pull of their joined hands.  “Keelin, I don’t –”

“I’m not trying to say that I know exactly how you’re feeling.  But we were all hunted and I survived, so I do – I do get some of it,” she says evenly.  “Not all of it.  You went through things that none of us will ever be able to truly understand – things you shouldn’t have had to experience.  But the some of the survivor’s guilt…feeling like they should have lived instead, like you’re living on their stolen time.  I get that.”

Around them, the bayou hums with life.  Hope remembers being younger and her mother bringing her out here to watch the sun set over the water.  I just love how alive this place is, she’d said once.  It makes me feel a little more alive, too.

Hope feels too alive, right now.  Or not alive enough.  It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference.

Keelin tugs her closer, reeling her into a gentle hug.  “I hope you know that you’re not alone.  And I hope you know that it won’t feel like this forever.  It’s okay to be angry and sad and scared right now.  Everything is going to hurt for a while,” she tells her, “but someday it’ll hurt a little less.”

And Hope wants to believe her, she does.  But – maybe she doesn’t want it to hurt less.  If it hurts less, she won’t think about it as much and she – she can’t imagine not thinking about it, not having the specter of her parents at her shoulder.  The pain is at least something tangible to hold onto.

Of course, there’s no way to say that in a way that sounds reasonable.

Hope stays silent instead.  It’s a cool sort of humid in the bayou tonight, her hair sticking uncomfortably to the back of her neck, but her arms covered in goosebumps nonetheless – it’s the sort of night her mother loved out here.  The minute it was warm enough for Hope to be without a jacket, they were spending as many evenings and weekends at the water’s edge as they could, watching the sun set and spending time with the pack around a fire.

When she was younger, she’d always wanted to show her dad the bayou in this light.  She supposes she got her wish, in a way.

That thought it enough to send her spiraling again.  And it’s so – it’s so frustrating, because she had been doing okay!  She’s been a mess, but she hasn’t been crying at the drop of a hat the way she did those first few days.  And she hates this – she never liked crying as a child and she likes it even less now, when she should be old enough to handle this, when her first instinct shouldn’t be to cry out for her mother.

She’d cried before this all happened – sometimes school would get overwhelming or she’d say something she didn’t mean to someone she cared about and not know how to fix it, but there hadn’t been this – this visceral need for comfort then.  She’d cry and then she’s pick herself up and figure it out.

There’s no figuring this out.  There’s only learning to bear it.

Keelin strokes her hair, murmuring comfort and care that Hope doesn’t hear.  It’s nice to be held – to be cradled close like this, for the wolf to settle a little.  She wonders if this new, frantic energy would have been calmed by her mother’s presence – would it have been better?  Would the rush of relief, cool against her heated skin, have been longer lasting?  Would there still be this emptiness taking up space in her ribcage?

“Let it out, honey,” Keelin soothes.  “I’ve got you.”

Does she?  Would she still want to even be near her if she found out how Hope still – still rages?  How the anger and the thirst for vengeance and for blood hasn’t been burned out of her, just buried deep enough that you can’t always see it at the surface.  How she’s so angry she shakes sometimes, magic slipping through her fingers unbidden.  How she sees people in the street and maybe their eyes will look like Greta’s or their hair like Roman’s, and all she wants to do is rip them apart.

Hope cries harder, disgusted with herself.  Her mother and her aunt always joked that she had something of her family’s temper, but they didn’t know the extent of it – how could they?  She was a child then.  She hadn’t felt the shuddering calm that followed revenge yet. 

She can’t put it to words – she doesn’t think anyone would want to believe her if she did.  It’s easier to let Keelin hold her, easier still to be gently shepherded away from the water and into a car once darkness has settled over the bayou, to be driven home and tucked back into bed with her aunts and uncles hovering, fretting over her well into the night as she fails to sleep once more.

They take turns sitting at her bedside, trying to soothe or trick or lull her into sleep.  It’s been – what, nearly two weeks without any real sleep?  Hope knows her stamina is different, that the wolf can keep her going for weeks if need be, but exhaustion is burning her eyes and she wants to sleep.  She just doesn’t want what follows.

Finally, as the sun rises on the thirteenth day and Kol reads aloud from the battered copy of David Copperfield he found in the library, Hope succumbs.

Her sleep is dreamless – she’s sure she should thank Freya and Davina for that, or at least ask how they managed it so she can replicate it herself at school.  Instead, when she wakes sometime in the afternoon to Marcel posted at her bedside, she just rolls over and sinks back under.

. . .

“I want to go back to school,” Hope announces over breakfast on the fourteenth day.  A full night of sleep cleared her mind enough to build an argument that consisted of more than please don’t make me stay here, I won’t survive it. 

In the complete and abrupt silence that reigns over the table, Hope focuses on her plate instead of anyone’s face.  “I’ve missed more than a month at this point,” she continues unevenly, tensing at how her voice trembles.  She clears her throat.  “I – um.  I can’t afford to miss anymore without risking having to repeat the year.”

There’s a beat – the moment it becomes clear that Hope’s finished, the table devolves into chaos, her aunts and uncles talking over each other, raising their voices to try and be heard over one another.

“ – sure that’s the best choice, sweetheart?”

“ – let her have a say – !”

“I’m sure we can work something – ?”

“ – about transferring?”

She only catches snippets of each, but it’s enough to get a grasp of the general landscape.  Rebekah, Freya, and Marcel are solidly against it – Kol, Davina, and Keelin are for it, to varying degrees.  It’s split roughly how Hope anticipated, even if she feels a flare of guilt at forcing her newlywed aunts onto opposing sides.

“There are…a lot of things to take into consideration,” Freya begins once the initial din quiets.  “We haven’t decided which of us is going to be your guardian yet, for one thing.  For another – honey, you got your first full night of sleep in two weeks last night.  We haven’t gotten you into any sort of grief counseling yet or – or even had a memorial for your father.”

Hope raises her hand, ticking off solutions as she lists them.  “You and Keelin should be my guardians – you guys are already on all the contact lists at school and my permanent address wouldn’t have to change, so it makes sense,” she says.  One finger goes down.  “The nurse at school can prescribe me sleeping draughts if it gets bad again.”  Another.  “I don’t need to see a counselor.”  Another.  “We already had a memorial: dinner, the night he – died,” her voice breaks on the word, but she lowers her final finger.  “There – asked and answered.”

“I think what Freya’s trying to say,” Keelin cuts in, laying a hand over her wife’s when she starts to argue back, “is that there are some things that we need to take care of first, right?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rebekah huffs.  “We’re not really entertaining this idea, are we?  She’s in no condition to go back to that school!”

Davina glares at her from down the table.  “Hope’s fourteen – she should have some say in what she does and where she lives.”

“Yes, because you would know so much about making informed choices when you’re a teenager –”

“That’s exactly why I’m saying it!  I didn’t know anything or have any real power over my life, so I made bad decisions out of desperation – I don’t want her to go through the same.”

“Nobody does, but the matter stands –”

“Hope has already had to make hard choices, informed or not,” Kol cuts in, rubbing Davina’s back as she looks on the edge of tears.  “It’s about what would make her happiest, now, isn’t it?”

“It’s about keeping her safe, Kol,” Marcel says, even as he keeps one concerned eye on Davina.  “That should be our goal here.”

“Who says the school isn’t safe for her?  It’s safer than New Orleans, obviously – she’s gotten out without anyone noticing twice –”

“And whose fault is that?” Freya snaps.

“Hayley chose the school for a reason, sister, and it does her a disservice –”

“Don’t talk to me about Hayley –”

Everything’s spiraling now, her family sniping at each other and nobody listening and it’s too loud; no one’s looked her way once now that the argument is in full swing.  It’s like she’s been removed completely from the situation, like she has no stake in this, no reason to be included in a discussion about her very immediate future.  She’s – she’s not in control.  Not of this conversation, not of whether she goes back to school, not of – not of anything.

“ – Hope?”

All at once, there’s silence. 

No, that’s – that’s not exactly right.

There’s a heavy droning, an ache at the back of her skull and a tremble in her arms.  Hope drops her hands to her lap and clenches them into fists beneath the table, out of sight.  She’s fine – she’s fine.

“Sweetheart, can you take a deep breath for me?” 

Distantly, Hope hears Freya’s voice, but it’s like she’s not in her body right now – it’s like she’s experiencing everything through a closed door, in another room, the sound muffled and sensations absent.  She tries to focus on her aunt’s voice, on the pressure of her hand between Hope’s shoulder blades, but she just can’t –

“Hope,” Davina’s voice snaps through the room with a harsh crack, settling the wayward energy that Hope feels spiraling off of her in leaps and bounds.  “Are you still with us?”

As Hope comes back to herself, she realizes that everyone is staring at her; it’s like before, but worse somehow.  Where there had been a mix of betrayal and anger, hurt and frustration in equal measures, this – this is all fear.

“Sorry,” Hope stands abruptly, rattling the table.  “I’m fine, just – tired,” she hurries to explain, backing towards the stairs.

She can’t hold any of their gazes – she can’t do this.  It’s like they’re expecting her to have answers for this, but newsflash!  She doesn’t!  Hope can barely bring herself to eat or shower or sleep, shuffling through the motions of life in the vain hope that soon she’ll feel like living again – how is she supposed to explain this awful new thing she can do, this new facet of uncontrolled magic? 

Hope retreats instead of searching for the right answer to put everyone at ease.  Let them figure it out while they argue over where she should go.

Her family calls out after her when she turns and scales the stairs, but none chase after her.  Maybe they’ve decided to give her space – a little breathing room to process whatever it was that just happened.  Or, Hope thinks, the more likely reason is that they just don’t know what to do with her.

That’s fine.  She doesn’t know either.

. . .

Marcel capitulates first, faltering a few days later after volunteering to chaperone one of Hope’s walks around the Quarter.

“You really want to go back to school?” he asks as he deftly navigates her around a bloc of spring breakers.  Hope’s been sleeping, technically – it’s broken and light, leaving her exhausted and numb most days, but it’s sleep, even if she’s liable to walk into most obstacles in her vicinity.

She nods numbly.  “It’s like –,” she brings her hands up to her chest and forms them into the approximation of a tangled knot.  “There’s too much here.  I can’t really work through it.”

When she glances up, it’s clear that Marcel doesn’t quite get it – that he understands the general idea of what she’s saying, but the details are lost in translation.  She wants to make it clear to him – to everyone.  Every time she catches one of her aunts or uncles watching her with that careful, appraising look on their face, like they’re trying to figure out what’s going on in her head – she wants to make it crystal clear, but the words, when they come, always fall short.

The only person she didn’t need to use words with to be understood is gone, lost to Hope forever.  Now, it’s just - it’s easier to avoid interpretation. 

She thinks it boils down to this: Hope doesn’t know how to talk about this, the ache in her chest, so she just doesn’t try that hard.  Why put herself through the horrific ordeal of searching for the right words and still not being understood?  Why get her hopes up like that?

Whatever she says - nobody will know what to do with it, her useless words, half broken against her teeth before they even see the sun.  What good are words?  Who would even want to hear them?  They can’t change anything - Hope is still an orphan, still has enough blood on her hands to rival her lineage entirely.  Words won’t change the facts.

So she lets Marcel flounder – whatever he gathers from her first attempt seems to be enough.

“You know that we’re only hesitant about sending you back to school because we’re worried about you, right?” he asks as they round the corner back onto their street.  “It’s not that we’re not listening to you or that we don’t trust you.”

But that’s exactly the issue, she thinks.  They don’t trust her – they aren’t listening to her.  Sure, sometimes her mom pulled rank and made decisions for her, but – she always at least talked about it with Hope first. 

It’s you and me, kid, her mom promised once.  I always want to know what you’re thinking.

Her mom would have talked to her about it – about going back to school so quickly.  Maybe she would have wanted her to stay home longer too, but there’d be room for a negotiation – Hope could make her case and be respected for it.

Nobody listened to me as a kid, her mom told her, slipping it into one of the stories Hope would ask for about her life before New Orleans.

It hurts again; it’s always going to hurt, Hope knows that, but it hurts more now, renewed at this sudden thought.  Everything she knows about her mother’s childhood, the instability, the loneliness – she tried so hard to shield Hope from that.  No, she never laid it out as such, but – all the things she did, how carefully she listened to Hope, the weight she gave Hope’s opinions – Hope knows where it came from.

If it had just been her father that died – or, maybe, if it was one of her aunts or uncles; what would her mom have said?

Are you sure, sweetheart?  This is what you want?  Hope hears her mother’s voice so clearly.  We’ll work something out.

Hope scrubs at her eyes, warding off the sudden burn of tears.  She’s not going to cry again – she’s not.

As they approach the Abattoir, Marcel pauses, catching Hope’s elbow to stop her too.

“I’ll talk to Rebekah,” he promises her.  “Your – ,” he clears his throat awkwardly.  “Your parents would want you to be somewhere you feel comfortable and safe.”

Marcel – he’s almost Hope’s brother, she thinks.  The result of being raised by Klaus Mikaelson full time, hiding his soft heart behind power.  Would Hope have been like him if her dad had been around?  Would she have grown up to be like Marcel if her father had lived, if he was all she had left?

Hope wants to ask him, to press him for answers.  She doesn’t know the questions, not exactly, just the general shape of them.  What good memories he has of him – if her dad was a good father to him.  If he would have been a good father to her.

But this acquiescence – it has to be enough for her.  Marcel’s relationship with her father was complicated at best, with wounds that predate at least half of her history textbook.  It’s not her place to pry into them, to ask him to unwrap the dressings just so that she can study the fester.

“Thank you,” she finally says, her voice smaller than she would have hoped.

Marcel studies her and – again, Hope feels on display, unsure of what can be seen on her face, unsure of how to hide it best, fastest.  He opens his mouth to say something else and –

“Oh!” Freya startles, nearly walking into Hope on her way out of the house.  “I thought you guys would still be out.”

Marcel’s still looking at her, trying to catch her gaze and – and Hope won’t be able to answer whatever he’s about to ask, she knows that much.  She studiously keeps her eyes anywhere but him.

“I got tired,” she says with a shrug, brushing past her aunt.  It’s not exactly a lie, she thinks. 

. . .

Rebekah finds her the next night, poking her head into the attic and zeroing in on Hope immediately.

“Is this where you hide out?” she asks, climbing the last rungs of the ladder.  She sweeps over the space with a critical gaze.  “It’s certainly less dusty than it used to be.”

A few summers ago, when Hope was just starting to get serious about art, her mom helped her clean out the attic to let it serve as a studio.  It’d taken most of her break, both of them covered in dust and grime that had had centuries to accumulate, but by the end of it, Hope had natural light, enough room for a couple easels and drying racks, and a table stacked high with wire racks to organize her paint and brushes.

It was her favorite space in the house for a quite some time – it still is, or it still could be, she thinks, even if she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to paint here again.

She can only nod, then, in response to her aunt.  Anything more would ask too much of her, would drain what little energy Hope has in reserve.  She turns back to what she’d been keeping her hands busy with.  She has stacks of fresh canvases she could use, but there’s something meditative in stripping this old one – the last one her mom would have seen her messing with, a muddied mess of color with little in the way of focus or direction.

It makes Hope nauseous to look at it – the canvas she’d set her brush against while she ironed out the kinks in her plan to get her father back.  Better to strip it back down than face up to it anymore.

Rebekah perches on the corner of the table; Hope has the feeling of being studied again, of being put on display.

She had wanted her family close – she had wanted it so badly, she’d been willing to turn a blind eye to all that she might stand to lose.  But now – all these places she thinks of as hers – they’re moving through them and occupying the space like it’s theirs to possess.  And it is, in a way, but t’s weird.  It’s like her house is a museum and Hope is a traveling exhibit – all the visitors are coming to get a good look at her before she leaves.

Teenage orphan! the headlines should read.  Riddled with guilt!  For one week only!

“Marcel spoke with me,” Rebekah says when it becomes clear that Hope holds no interest in starting a conversation.  “You’ve swayed him entirely, but he’s always had a soft spot for you.”

It’s not an accusation or a reproach – Rebekah’s voice is as tender as Hope has ever heard it.

Still – it’s instinct to get defensive.

Hope shrugs noncommittally.  “He brought it up,” she says, not looking up from her work.  “It’s not like I argued him down or anything.”

“Oh, I know, darling,” her aunt says calmly, dismissing the obvious challenge with a flick of her hair.  “I simply – he brought up some…strong points when we spoke.  About the potential good it may do for you to go back to school.”

That’s enough to catch Hope’s attention, dragging it away from a stubborn patch of paint that refused to be scraped away.  When she looks up, Rebekah is still studying her, but her expression is open and honest, the same soft look Hope remembers from when she was young.

It was Rebekah that cared for her in her first year of life – Rebekah that had taken her far from the city and hidden her away.  Of everyone forced away from her – her father excluded – it was Rebekah she’d always missed the most, Rebekah who Hope had talked into tea party after tea party those few halcyon weeks she’d had her near, Rebekah who had patiently subjected herself to Hope’s clumsy braiding, Rebekah who never missed a video call or birthday card.  Whenever Marcel came through the city, he always had a small trove of Rebekah’s carefully wrapped gifts in tow, all the little things she found for Hope while she explored more of the world than Hope thinks she’ll ever see.

Maybe that’s why she’s the one Hope wants to keep furthest away now.  With no barriers in place now, her aunt could be as devoted to her as she’s always been, just in person this time – count her in with Freya and Keelin, then, with how easily Hope knows she’d set aside her own life to accommodate Hope’s.

Kol was always a little more distant – the cool uncle, promising to take Hope for her first drink as soon as her mother wasn’t looking with the assurance that he’d never truly be held accountable – and Elijah was missing entirely, her father nothing more than a shadow; Rebekah, she thinks, was the most open with how acutely she felt the distance. 

Now, under the weight of her open concern and care, Hope fights the urge to hide away – hiding only confirms that there’s something she wants to hide in the first place.  Better to hold out.

“Darling girl,” Rebekah hums, standing and moving closer, smoothing her hand over Hope’s tangled hair.  “The two things I care about most in this world are your safety and your happiness.  I don’t – I could never forgive myself knowing that I had a hand in keeping you someplace you’re miserable.”

Hope nearly startles at the easy acquiescence – she’d expected a protracted debate, having to defend her points.

What Rebekah says next is worse, somehow.

“Please be honest with me, Hope.  You’ll be happier at the Salvatore School than at home?”

It feels like a trap, a trick question to trip Hope up.  Will she be happier?  Hope doesn’t think it’s possible for her to happy at all – she doesn’t think it really matters the place, not when she knows that there’s this gaping absence waiting for her if she ever looks up from distracting herself.  She won’t be any worse off at school – the assurance that less people can be hurt by her is enough to make it the more attractive option, at least.

“I miss my friends,” Hope answers, neatly sidestepping the thorny root of the question.  “I miss my classes and having something to do every day.”  It’s not lying – the aimlessness she feels is both symptom and cause of how helpless she feels, she thinks.

“You’re very much like your mother in that way,” Rebekah tells her, gently working her fingers through a knot in Hope’s hair.  “She always hated feeling helpless.”

It’s the first time anyone’s said anything like that so directly and it cuts through to the heart of it, precise and exacting.  The last few weeks, there have been comments about Hope reflecting all that was good in her father, people assuring her that she was the best of him, of them all, that he loved her more than life itself.  And it’s – it’s not that she doesn’t appreciate hearing that, of learning more of the parts of herself that carry him or being assured of her place in his heart.

But Hope doesn’t know how to miss her father – or she does, maybe, so used to him being gone that him being dead isn’t all that different.  It makes the grieving harder – weirder, really.  He was no communication for so long and – and it’s like, she always knew he was out there somewhere, but she had no way to talk to him and no real want to either – at least for a while – and now, he’s just gone again.  Nothing truly gained, nothing truly lost. 

Her mother, though - Hope misses her mother with every breath.  How could she not?  She had stories about her father, but she had real, tangible memories with her mom.  Birthdays and holidays filled with joy and laughter, years of people remarking how much she resembled her, stormy summer nights spent in a blanket fort in the den; how is Hope supposed to move past that?  Hope misses her mother and the easy comfort she could give her and the way she would always sort of burn breakfast a little unless she was making waffles; Hope misses being able to call or text her about anything, whenever she wanted or needed to.  Her father was always gone, but her mother was always there.

Swallowing hard around the lump in her throat, Hope can only bring herself to nod silently, turning her focus back to her canvas and her paint stained hands.  If Rebekah notices a few tears drop onto the fabric, she’s considerate enough to keep it to herself.

. . .

With how easily Marcel and Rebekah capitulated, Hope should have known Freya would stubbornly hold out and – as the only person that’s been around full time for the last several years, it’s her vote that holds the most weight.

Hope knows that Keelin has tried talking to her wife, that Rebekah and Kol banded together to try to sway their eldest sister from her position.  All the same – Freya still insists that Hope would be safer in New Orleans, with her and Keelin.

“What happens if a fragment of the Hollow finds root again?” Freya asks, sounding tired.  Hope, from her position on the landing while the adults discuss her future down in the courtyard, can already tell this is a losing battle.  “Evil like that is hard to stamp out.”

“Are you suggesting that Niklaus has died for nothing, then?” Rebekah snaps.

“Of course not.  Or – I don’t know, but that’s the problem!  We don’t know jack shit about this sort of ancient power; what if the Hollow wasn’t the worst thing out there?  What if the whole supernatural world comes breaking down our door trying to get their hands on the only tribrid in existence?  Are you really willing to trust the school to protect her?”

Keelin interrupts gently.  “What’s the alternative?  We keep her locked up in the Abattoir forever?”  She sighs.  “She’ll be eighteen soon enough – do you think we could really keep her from leaving the minute she’s an adult anyway?”

“Forgive me if I’m wrong,” Kol starts, “but weren’t you the one that once raved about the Salvatore School?  It’s been such a good place for her were your exact words, I believe.”

“Yes – before she witnessed her parents sacrifice themselves for her,” her aunt hisses.  “I’m not saying that we keep her here forever, but I can’t believe none of you think it’s unreasonable for her to go back so soon.”  Her tone softens.  “Keelin, were you making sound decisions after your family – ?”

“I didn’t have a choice, Freya, and I was an adult – I didn’t have a school tailor made for me to return to.”

“But it’s not tailor made for her.  As far as the majority of the faculty and students were aware up until a few weeks ago, Hope was the witch daughter of a werewolf alpha.  Not even really a hybrid yet!  And now we’re supposed to send her back when we don’t know how the curse is going to impact her magic, when we don’t know how her vampirism could be activated, when we don’t know what any of that means for her going forward – ”

“Caroline – ”

“Caroline has her own children to worry about!  Nobody at that school will take care of Hope like we can – like we have.”

“Have we?” Davina asks.  “Because it’s obvious to me that this isn’t really working for her.”

“D,” Marcel hums, a warning.

“What?  I can clearly see that she’s still not sleeping well.  She’s hardly eating, barely functioning, and she’s managed to sneak out twice – have we really been taking care of her?  Can we really say that we’ve been doing a better job than the school could?”

“That’s enough.”  Hope’s never heard Freya’s voice this cold before; she can almost reconcile the aunt she knows with some of the stories she’s heard about her, the two images knitting together in a way they’d never been able to in the past.

“No one’s been willing to say it before now, but Davina’s not wrong,” Kol says, defending his wife against his sister’s anger.  “Hope’s not doing well here.”

“I – that’s –”

“Nobody is accusing anyone of not doing their best to care for her,” Rebekah soothes.  When Hope peers over the edge of the railing, she can just barely see Freya’s back, tensed like she’s ready to bolt.  Rebekah’s hair slips into view just slightly as she moves closer to her sister.

“I helped raise her,” Freya sobs, hands coming up to cover her face.  “And Hayley – she –”

“Freya,” Keelin breathes, her voice soft with understanding as she reaches out to her wife.  “Hayley wouldn’t – you won’t be letting her down if you let Hope go back to school.”

Her aunt sucks in a shuddering breath, pulled into her wife’s arms.  “I – I know I should be listening to Hope and what she wants, but sometimes I look at her and all I see is –” Freya breaks off abruptly, falling silent for a moment before asking, “Do you hear that?”

Even before the sound catches up with her, Hope knows what it is: that droning from before, that awful, incessant noise, the horn heralding destruction.  She balls her hands into fists and retreats further into the shadows, away from her family’s worried, searching collective gaze.  If she can just get her magic under control – if she can just rein in this feeling, everything will be fine.

Now that she’s noticed it, it’s hard to hear over the sound, hard to figure out if anyone’s made the connection between the noise and her yet.

Afraid to be caught – no, she should be clear.  Afraid to be seen like this, for anyone to have more tangible evidence that maybe she’s not holding it together as much as she’s tried, Hope scrambles further down the hall, making a run for her room and locking the door behind her.

The mad dash away from the landing burns off a little of this vicious energy, but not enough.  There aren’t any spells for this, she thinks – at least none that she’s been taught.  Maybe there really aren’t any – the only other witch she knows that has ever lost control like this is Davina, when she was carrying the whole of the harvest witches’ magic.  Maybe nobody else is as bad at this as she is.

Hope sparks up a small flame in her palm, dragging in a ragged breath of relief when some of the pressure behind her sternum eases.  She snuffs it out and summons a palmful of water before burning it away to steam again.  Simple spells, sure – they do the trick well enough, drawing from the excess of magic that’s threatening Hope’s hearing until the droning has reduced to a quiet hum.

It ratchets up an inch when someone knocks on her door.

“Hope?” Freya calls out.  “Hope, will you please unlock the door?”  She knocks again.  “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

Focus, she reprimands herself, looking back to her open hands.  Another spell or two – that should fix this.

Maybe – ?   Hope spreads one hand flat over her heart, swallowing hard at how it pounds beneath her palm.  “Tardus pulsatio,” she whispers harshly.

A beat too late, she remembers the lesson they had to sit through on the first day of Intro to Biological Magic.

Intention matters, her teacher had intoned, pacing up and down the rows of desks.  That afternoon, Hope and her friends had mimicked him, lowering their voices and puffing their chests out, nearly delirious with how hard each impression made them laugh.  When dealing with breath or blood – with the life of one’s own or another – the intention behind the spell is paramount, he’d said.   It is imperative that one never performs a feat of biological magic while emotionally impaired.

Dimly, as her heart rates slows past the point of normality and her vision narrows to a single point on the floor as she’s crumpling to her knees, Hope thinks she could have benefitted from taking better notes on the topic.

. . .

Late into the night, Hope wakes to Freya settled in the armchair beside her bed, frowning down at the paperback in her hands. 

“Hey,” Freya murmurs the moment Hope shifts.  She sets aside her book and turns the weight of her concern fully to Hope.  “How are you feeling?” she asks, leaning forward to help her sit up, propped up against pillows.

Honestly?  Not great.

Hope feels roughly like she just ran hundreds of miles – winded and sore, her muscles aching with phantom exertion.

“What happened?” she asks instead of outright answering.  She thinks she knows – or has the vague shape of an answer, at least.

“Your spell had some complications,” Freya tells her plainly.  “You sent yourself into shock.”

Oh.

Hope finds herself without a response – she’s not sure there is any proper response for that.  “Sorry,” she offers in its place.  “I just – I thought I could fix – I didn’t think – ”

“Honey,” Freya murmurs, laying her hand over Hope’s and putting a gentle but firm stop to her increasingly frantic explanation.  “You didn’t know this was going to happen.  It’s not your fault – nobody is upset with you.”

But they should be, Hope thinks.  They should be frustrated by her lack of control, at the very least.  Furious with her inability to not cause problems that require other people to solve.

Hope balls her hands into fists, shaking off Freya’s gentle hold and deliberately ignoring the look of hurt that flashes across her aunt’s face.  Shouldn’t she be mad?  Shouldn’t she want to be as far away from Hope as possible?  Hope’s cost her a brother and a best friend in record time.  She should be furious.

“…Did you know what was going to happen?” Freya asks carefully.

Did she?

Not in whole, Hope’s nearly certain.  She knew what the spell would do – knew the general risks that accompany any biological magic.  She didn’t really expect to wake up hours later with a headache and what feels like bruises spanning the whole length of her and a family that can now add fall risk to her long list of burdens.

(A small, furious voice suggests that maybe she hadn’t really expected to wake up at all.)

“I was just trying to calm down,” Hope answers, honest as she can afford to be right now. 

Her aunt considers her for a moment, eyes narrowed in something like suspicion.  “Before – we were all talking,” she says finally, after the tense silence stretches out a beat too long.  “Everyone agreed that sending you back to school was the best thing for you and they were trying to convince me.  We didn’t get very far, but this –,” her aunt breaks off, her brow pinched in worry.  “I’m starting to reconsider.”

Hope nods along, like she wasn’t there for the lion’s share of the conversation.

“I…realize that I may not have been listening as closely as I should have,” Freya admits.  “But I want to know why you want to go back, if you’ll lay it out for me.”

I’m lost here, Hope wants to say.  It’s like all I see are places where they should be and I feel like I’m going crazy because I’m the only one that can’t seem to function because of it.  She wants to tell her aunt that she’s a beacon for danger – that they’re all at risk because of her, because she’s not good enough at keeping the consequences of her actions limited to herself.

But it’s Freya – her tenderhearted aunt who was always so careful with Hope’s feelings growing up, hedging the truth to try and preserve them as much as she could.  Freya was the second parent in the house in every way that mattered.  The phantom of her father was always hovering nearby, but it was Freya that put up with Hope’s temper tantrums and comforted her after nightmares, soldiering through alongside her mother.

Out of everyone, Freya would take it the hardest if Hope was truthful, if she told her all of the ways she’s tried to think about all of this and how the answer – the only real answer – is for her to be somewhere far enough away from the family that she can’t hurt them too. 

“Everything changed so quickly,” Hope tells her instead.  “Like – my whole life went up in flames in the span of a month and I just – I’m so tired of feeling different.  I just want something normal again.”

It’s not a lie – Hope’s been pretty good about not outright lying to her family; they’re all too honed in to miss obvious deception.  It works well enough, talking circles around the point.  Freya nods like it makes perfect sense, cautiously reaching out to fold her palm over Hope’s clenched fist.

“And school – that’ll help?”

Hope nods with as much energy as she can muster.  School might not help with everything – she knows that.  But it has to be better than never sleeping again, right?  At least at school, there are things to keep her busy and distracted; classes and homework and projects and friends to take up enough of her time that she won’t spend all of it wallowing in her own fury and self-pity.  It’ll be a change, at least – would give her a little room to breathe, away from the glaring reminders of all that she’s cost her family.

Freya studies her – scrutinizes her, really, silent and deep in thought.  “Promise me that you’ll come home if you need to?  Or call us – any of us.”

“I promise.”

“Hope, I’m serious.  If you get – overwhelmed or, or – if it’s too much, too fast – I want to know, okay?  I want to be able to help you.”

“I know, Aunt Freya.”  And she does, honestly.  The whole family – all her aunts and uncles – she knows that they just want to help her. 

That’s part of the problem, she thinks, because she doesn’t deserve it.  Even if she just tallies up the deaths she had a direct hand in, the number is well into double digits – if she includes all the collateral damage, she could easily pass into the hundreds.  Her family wants to help her, but she’s not sure she should be helped – she did terrible things, right?  She should be punished for them, terribly.

Her aunt’s eyes are shimmering with unshed tears when she leans forward, pressing a kiss to Hope’s forehead before she sits back.  “I love you so much, sweetheart,” she says, earnest as always.  “And I –,” she swallows hard, “will call the school tomorrow, okay?”

It’s a victory – at least, Hope thinks it should feel like one, no matter the exhaustion – like the general achy tiredness she’s felt since that first night just ratcheted up exponentially.  That’s probably just a holdover from her poorly executed spell, right? 

“Are you hungry?” her aunt asks, fussing with the blankets on the bed.  “I can heat up leftovers or run out if you’re craving something specific.”

Hope wants to ask her what it is she was going to say earlier, before she got distracted by Hope’s wayward magic again.  Sometimes I look at her and all I see is – what?

There’s an endless list of possibilities – sometimes I look at her and all I see is all the ways this can go wrong; or sometimes I look at her and all I see is her father; or maybe something worse.  Something Freya would never say in front of her at all.

There’s no way of knowing if whatever answer Freya would be willing to provide would even be true – so maybe it’s better if Hope never knows.

“I’m not really hungry,” Hope answers finally, slipping down under the covers. 

“Hope – ”

“I’m actually kind of nauseous,” she says, cutting off her aunt’s well-meaning concern.  And then, redirecting her attention – “Is it normal for spells to do that?”

Still frowning, Freya leans forward to press the back of her hand to Hope’s forehead and – and it’s almost enough to send her over the edge again, tears always at the ready.  It’s just so familiar.  Every time Hope was sick as a child – when every little stomach ache or fever was enough to worry her mother and aunt, enough to raise the possibility of the splitting ritual faltering – one of them would camp out at her bedside.  How many times can she remember waking to the gentle pressure of a warm palm on her brow?  She remembers how confused she was the first time she got sick at school, waking up in the infirmary alone, no warm presence at her side, watching over her through the night.

“ – not completely unheard of,” her aunt murmurs, gently smoothing Hope’s hair back out of her face.  “Especially when they go awry like that.  You might feel a little hungover for a while, but you don’t have a fever.  I can make you some peppermint tea for your stomach?”

Hope nods, mumbling a quiet thank you as her aunt leaves with a promise to return with tea and saltines.  

In the dim light of her room, Hope can’t bring herself to do much of anything – close her eyes or sit up again or even turn to her side.  It just feels like too much to move – to even make a decision feels out of her grasp.

She’s felt like this before; maybe never quite so acutely, but it’s more like a room she hasn’t been in for a few years rather than a foreign land entirely.  She knows the general shape of it – what she should do to snap out of this and function effectively.  But the last time she felt this – this adrift, this heavy – she was younger, with a mother who seemed to have all the answers for her.

She just – why can’t this be easier?  Why can’t someone sweep in with a checklist for her, a clear guide to how she’s supposed to navigate this?  When her father went no contact, her mom doubled down on filling up Hope’s days with things to do or see, anything to draw her attention away from the glaring hole in her life until she was ready to talk about it, and then – when she refused to talk about it – until it was time for her to go back to school.  Now, in the absence of her mother and in the face of the terror she feels at the idea of telling anyone of how empty she feels, it’s left to Hope to fill in the gaps.

So – decision one: Hope rolls onto her side and turns her bedside table lamp off, plunging the room into darkness broken only by the occasional flash of light that breaks through her curtains from the street below.

The dark is better, she thinks.  Gives her a little more room to breathe.

. . .

Hope didn’t bring much with her when she was suspended, so there’s precious little to pack for the trip back to school.  She swaps a couple sweaters out for lighter layers, the early spring chill already sliding into a stickier humidity – Virginia was a little bit of an adjustment from Louisiana when she first started at school, but she’s figured the weather changes out well enough after so many years there.

Her duffel bag still looks piteously empty on the corner of her bed, despite recent additions.

People have been popping into her room all morning, all in the process of packing up their own things for their own trips home – Davina dropped by to give her a set of books she’d found when she and Kol were in Peru that she thought Hope might be interested in; Rebekah appeared in her doorway not long after with a stack of clothes from Paris – “These were going to be part of your birthday present this year,” she’d told her conspiratorially, “but I figured I may as well give them to you in person while I had the chance.”

Marcel and Kol bumped into each other in the hall outside her room, both bearing gifts – by that point, Hope was nearing the edge of wanting to tell them all that she appreciated the gestures, really, but she knew as well as they did that they were just hoping to get her to feel something – anything.  From Marcel: new paints and pastels for her art at school, carefully wrapped in linen – “You mentioned you were running low on your favorites the last time we Skyped.”; from Kol: bags of sweets that were meant to share and a small bottle of sangria he’d bought when he and Davina were in Portugal – “Don’t tell Freya.  Or Rebekah.  Or Davina, for that matter – actually, maybe hide that at the bottom of the bag – ”

It’s enough to make her nauseous again because – god, it just – it’s so clear how much they care.  And logically, that should help – it should be enough, should help her to feel not quite so alone.  She has all these people that think about her and worry over her and care for her – they care enough to think to pick up gifts and treats for her, enough to remember throwaway comments she made months ago.

That’s what makes it all the worse.  She knows they’re all here for her – that if she weren’t so adamant about going back to school, they’d have all dutifully laid aside their own plans to stay with her.  But it’s almost like – like she’s watching it from a distance.  Like it’s not really her that they’re here for – just the version of her that they remember, the little girl they last spent any real time with.

Hope’s close to crying again – or hovering numbly right at the edge of what could either be a crying jag or another magic episode – struggling to find a way to keep the art supplies separated from the books and trying to figure out if she should wrap the bottle to keep if from breaking when Keelin knocks on the doorframe.

“Don’t tell me,” Hope hums, not looking up from packing.  “You come bearing gifts?”

“Someone beat me to it?” Keelin asks, stepping into the room and coming to Hope’s side.  “Ooh, don’t let Freya see that,” she says with a laugh when she sees the alcohol in Hope’s hands.

“Everyone’s been by – I think they’re feeling guilty or something.”

It’s a joke – at least, Hope’s pretty sure it’s a joke.  That’s how she means it, anyway, despite how her voice wavers.

Honestly, it’s ridiculous how much Keelin’s very presence sets her at ease – she doesn’t have quite the same energy her mother did, the weight and the power of being the alpha of one of the most powerful lines left, but the warmth that Hope’s come to recognize in other wolves is there, the same strength and staying power. 

She’s not going to cry over this again – she’s not going to get set off by every werewolf she meets from here on out – that’s just irrational.  She has to learn to keep this locked down, tucked away in some dusty part of her heart until she learns to ignore the feeling altogether. 

“That’s not it,” Keelin says, laying a gentle hand on Hope’s arm, stilling her constant fidgeting.  “They – we just want you to know that you’re not alone.”  When Hope finally looks up at her, she offers her a smile and shows off her own gift – “Presents are just the simplest way to do that.”

The box she hands Hope is deceptively heavy, wrapped with care in nondescript brown paper.

“Full moon care package,” Keelin explains preemptively.  “The first few turns take a lot out of you and – well, it can be hard.  Trying to remember to get enough calories in you or finding an outlet for all that energy leading up to it.”  She takes a deep breath and Hope gets the feeling that whatever she says next – Hope might be one of the first to hear it.  “My mom made one for me when I triggered my curse,” Keelin tells her, “her mother made one for her, and her mother before her…”  She trails off with a shrug, but the meaning is clear enough.

They’re both the last of their respective lines – the Malrauxes and the Labonairs were hunted to extinction and now it’s just Hope and Keelin left standing, no real traditions to speak of, no deep knowledge to pass on to following generations if they come.  Keelin had made a choice to distance herself, Hope had inherited that void from her orphaned mother – the result was the same.  Whatever they can preserve – it’s left to them to pass it on.

Like clockwork, Hope hears her mother’s voice.

It hurts, her mom had told her when she had finally worked up the courage to ask about the curse a couple years before.  She’d already learned the basics at school, or from passive absorption during pack nights out in the bayou.  The details had been fuzzy.  Usually it’s an accident – especially when you trigger it young.  I was with some friends and we were drinking and – I had no idea.

Hope had had more questions, but now she thinks she didn’t ask enough of them – what does a pack run feel like?  Do you sometimes not want to turn back?  Is that normal?  It’s a double-edged sword – she didn’t know to ask those questions then and now she’ll never have an answer.

Her mom had been so careful with her answers.  It might be one of the only times Hope can clearly remembering feeling like there was something she wasn’t being told – that the whole truth was just out of her reach and now – now she’ll never know what it was her mother was hiding, if she was hiding anything.

It’s okay if you never turn, her mom had promised her.  And it’s okay if you trigger it next week.  I’m with you no matter what, okay?

Maybe that was it – a premonition of doom.  An outright lie.

For the first time since this all began, Hope hears her mother’s voice and feels a flare of anger.

Because all she has is this feeling of missing something – like she skipped class last week and now she has to take a test on what was covered in that lesson.  It’s hard to find the words for it; she never felt one hundred percent a part of the pack when she was younger.  There was a wariness to everyone’s interactions with her that left her firmly positioned as Our Alpha’s Kid, but there was something – some semblance of a community that she could fall back on, a shared history that fell outside of Mikaelson territory.

Is it weird that she liked that?  Liked having something that was a little separate from the rest of her life, something she got to share with just her mom.  She appreciates the gesture from Keelin – maybe even understands the motive more than she’d like to admit to right now – but it’s still – she still wishes it was her mom passing on a tradition like this.

“Thank you,” she chokes out, her voice sounding strangled to her own ears – god, why can’t she just hold it together a little longer?  Holding the package close, Hope finds herself struggling to swallow around the lump in her throat.

“I know it’s not the same,” Keelin murmurs, her own voice cracking before she clears her throat.  “I just want you to know – if you have questions or just want to talk, I’m here for you.  Okay?”

There’s no – there’s no way she’ll be able to open her mouth and not just start sobbing, so Hope nods tightly.  That’s enough right?  To show how much this means?

Keelin reels her into a hug, loose enough that she could pull away if she wanted, but firm enough that Hope can actually feel it through the numbness and – maybe she knows more than she’s letting on.  Maybe she feels more of it – everyone else in the house that’s lost a mother either hated their mother, was betrayed by her, or was young enough that they don’t remember her much anymore.  And each of those is its own kind of tragedy, compounded by trauma and age, but maybe Keelin feels this particular brand the most similarly, the most acutely.

“Okay,” Keelin says when she pulls away, surreptitiously wiping her own eyes before she turns back to the open bag on Hope’s bed.  “What can I help you with?”

. . .

It’s late the night before she’s supposed to leave when Freya comes looking for her – when her bag is packed neatly and her room is clean in anticipation of her absence, all evidence of her restless nights wiped away.  Hope’s been waiting for this, if she’s honest – anticipating it and dreading it in turns.

It’s different – there’s no two ways about it.  She’ll miss them all, but it’s Freya that she grew up around, Freya that taught her everything she knows about magic, Freya that helped Hope bake her mother a birthday cake every year until she was old enough to be trusted in the kitchen alone.  Freya – who brought Hope along with her when she went to the apothecary or out into the mountains to gather the right herbs, taking all her own knowledge and forming it into something gentler for Hope, showing her the right plants to add to spells to pack an extra punch and never growing tired of the many questions that followed.

If she’s honest, Hope’s been avoiding her aunt for that very reason. 

When she was ten or so, there was a territory skirmish along the Mississippi border that required her mom’s presence to settle – Hope doesn’t remember much of the details, other than these facts: the neighboring Alpha was looking to expand his territory and figured the Crescents were a weak enough target after all they’d endured in the years prior, and that the negotiations were looking increasingly dangerous.  Her mother had to leave suddenly, waking Hope in the middle of the night to say goodbye and promising to be back by the weekend – it was only later, when she overheard her mom and aunt discussing what had happened, that Hope learned that her mom had designated Freya as her guardian.

I mean – obviously I would take care of her in a heartbeat, Freya had said.  But you can’t just spring that on me, Hayley!

Her mom had sighed.  Who else was I going to ask? 

Her mom made it sound so obvious – maybe it was.  Who else was there to ask anyway?  Marcel, maybe, but that would have torn him away from Rebekah.  Someone in the pack?  Unlikely, considering how they tended to keep a healthy distance from Hope.  Vincent or Josh could have been contenders in another life, Hope thinks now, but neither of them would have been half as prepared as Freya for something like that.

Hope was an introspective, borderline morbid child at times – she thinks it was probably latent anxiety, rearing its head in the form of detailed scenarios of what her life would be like if her mother died or left or – or vanished, just gone overnight.  If she really wanted to analyze the origins of this habit of hers – Hope knows she can trace it to her father disappearing from her life, to getting her family back just to lose them again.

But as it was – Hope would run through the whole scenario, and Freya being the one to raise her made the most sense.  Who else knew how she liked her PB&J sandwiches – heavy on the J and cut into triangles; who else already knew all her teachers and her classes or how to help her with her homework?

Of course it was Freya.  Of course it is Freya.

It all makes sense – Hope thinks that in any other universe, she’d be clinging to her aunt for stability right now.  If her parents had died of unrelated causes – would Hope be the way that she is?  Would she be this – this terrified to turn to her family, to her aunt?

In all the scenarios she walked through as a child – all the tears shed over imaginary situations – Hope never considered the possibility that she would be the reason her mother was dead.

There’s an incredibly dark and cold voice at the very back of her head that promises that she’ll be the reason they’ll all be dead, soon.

So she has to leave – and she wants to make it as painless as possible.  So what if she’s been avoiding Freya?  That’s better than her aunt thinking she’s done something wrong – done something to send Hope away.

“Hey honey,” Freya greets, knocking on the doorframe.  “Do you have a minute to talk?”

“Yeah, of course,” Hope says.  She sets her phone aside, molding herself into every inch the attentive niece.  “What’s up?”

Like she doesn’t know exactly what Freya wants to talk about – like she hasn’t been dreaming up more and more elaborate excuses to avoid the conversation, or ducking into dusty alcoves to dodge her aunt when she spotted her coming down the hall.

“I wanted to – check on you,” Freya says, hesitating slightly like that’s not the word she would have used under different circumstances.

Interrogate me? Hope wants to supply.  Convince me to stay?

Instead, she rolls her shoulders and gestures broadly at herself with a smile.  “Still in one piece,” she says, like it’s anywhere near true.  “Nothing’s on fire and I haven’t passed out recently.”

Freya smiles thinly.  “That’s good, but not what I was thinking of.”  She perches on the edge of Hope’s bed, picking at a piece of lint stuck to the comforter.  “So.  You’re all packed?”

Glancing at the sad pile of luggage stacked by her door – her half-full duffel, her school bag, the handful of items that would have to be packed at the last minute because she’d need them in the morning – Hope answers with a nod.  She hadn’t known when she was suspended that she’d be returning to what may as well be a different life entirely.  If she had, she’d have probably packed a little more when she was sent home.

“That’s – that’s good.  You’re still feeling good about this?”

Hope nods again.  It’s not like there’s another reasonable option for her – she’s made up her mind.  Maybe if things were different, or if there was more for her here than just serving as a living reminder of what everyone’s lost, but things aren’t and there isn’t. 

She’d never be able to take a full, deep breath if she stayed here, she thinks.

“I know it must seem – I must seem overprotective,” Freya tells her, frowning and not quite able to meet Hope’s eye.  “And hypocritical.”

“No –,” Hope starts, automatically jumping to her aunt’s defense before she stumbles to a halt when Freya raises her hand.

“Your mom – she was always so much better at this.  Letting you figure things out for yourself.  And –,” she swallows hard, “and that’s probably because of my past.” 

Hope wants to cut her off, to tell her she doesn’t have to talk about this – she knows some of what her aunt has lived through, enough to know that she shouldn’t have to talk about it again, to pull out her trauma and leave it on display to account for her actions.  It’s why Hope, despite her frustration at how powerless she’s been, has always stopped just shy of getting angry with Freya.  But – Freya knows the same sort of voicelessness Hope does and, if she’s found the words for this now, it’s all Hope can do to let her say this.

“Losing a child is horrific,” Freya continues after a quiet moment.  “I could never – no one should ever –,” she sighs.  “I think I’ve been so terrified of feeling that again that I just decided to never let you get hurt.”  When she finally meets Hope’s gaze, the shine of tears present and threatening to spill.

Hope wants this to stop because – god, how can she say this?  She’s full up, her capacity for sadness exhausted.  She can’t shoulder anything more, even though she wants to – she wants to understand her aunt more, wants to help her.  Freya was always so careful with Hope, always keeping an eye on her.  She wants to repay that care tenfold.

“Do you remember when you broke your arm?” her aunt asks.

“Yeah, I was – eight?”

Freya nods.  “You were so sure of yourself, trying to keep up with the older kids.   It was a pack night, so it wasn’t really my place to say anything, but I’d wanted you to stick a little closer – and I definitely didn’t want you scrambling up a twenty-foot-tall tree.”

Hope remembers that – the exhilaration of being accepted for something as simple as a game of tag; the need to prove herself capable and unafraid, accepting a challenge she’d have never thought twice about otherwise.  By that point, she was already attending the Salvatore School, but friends were still few and far between.

“Everyone heard it, when you fell – ,” Hope remembers that too, the swoop of her stomach as the branch beneath her feet splintered under her weight, weakened with wood rot.  Freya shudders now, thinking back to it.  “Everyone heard you scream – I don’t think I’ve ever seen your mom move so fast.”

That too: the sickening blur of the world around her as she tumbled, the wave of pain that made everything irrelevant, until her whole world narrowed only to that pain and her want for her mother.  Hope was hardier than other kids in certain ways – she came down with the usual stomach bugs and colds, but despite her love for jumping from high places, she’d never come away with anything more than the odd bruise or bump.  This sort of pain – the only thing that came near to it was the Hollow.

Which feels naïve to think now, but at eight it was all Hope had to compare to for Serious Pain.  She doesn’t remember screaming, but she doesn’t disbelieve her aunt – she probably did scream.  She’d definitely sobbed, curled up in the fetal position on the ground, the other pack kids running for help, panicked at the sight of her.

And then her mom was there.  Now, Hope figures she must have been terrified, but all Hope remembers is how calm her mother was, cleaning her face of tears and dirt and snot, easing Hope up and into her lap, carefully inspecting the arm Hope was keeping close to her chest.

“I don’t think we’ll have to amputate,” her mom had whispered to her, stroking her hair and smiling at her reassuringly.  “How far up did you manage to get this time?”

Bit by bit, Hope had relaxed in her arms, her hiccupping sobs quieting to sniffles.  She’d shrugged at the question – maybe she managed to squeak out an answer, but that didn’t stick in her memory.

When Freya appeared over her mother’s shoulder, pale and frantic with worry, Hope was mostly calm, her hurt arm cradled close to her body as her mom was listing off all the sweets Hope was entitled to after today.

“Is she okay?” Freya had asked, a dangerous wobble in her voice.  “Jesus, what – what happened?”

“She took a tumble,” her mom had answered calmly.  “Are you good to drive us to the hospital?”

 Everything after that is hazier.  Hope remembers being tucked close to her mother on the drive, at the ER, waiting for the doctor; she remembers keeping her good hand in her mom’s, clinging to her and wailing as her arm was set and plastered.  She remembers her mother never flinching, the soothing stroke of her thumb over Hope’s knuckles and the sound of her voice as she assured Hope that she was so brave, sweet girl.

“One of the biggest arguments your mom and I had was after that,” Freya tells her now.  “I didn’t think you should be playing with the older kids anymore – at least not unsupervised, and – we disagreed.  A lot.”

That too – the unnamed tension in the Abattoir that lingered through the rest of the summer.  Hope only heard the tail end of one fight, but she was old enough to know that there had to have been others that preceded and followed it.

“I couldn’t imagine staying as calm as she was through that – or letting you go back to play with the other kids.  I just kept thinking that it could have been so much worse, that we could have –.”  She clears her throat abruptly.  “Anyway.  I think that was the first time I realized that I could care that much again – that losing my son didn’t mean I was incapable of loving you just as much.  But that fear was still there, at the back of my mind.  I lost him and I was – am – terrified of losing you too.”

When she leans forward to take Hope’s hand, Hope offers it readily.  “I’m so sorry,” she tells her aunt earnestly.  “I didn’t – I didn’t know all of that.”

Freya wipes her eyes quickly with her free hand, laughing wetly.  “That’s because you didn’t need to.  Honestly, you still don’t need to, but – I wanted to explain, at least a little.  And I wanted you to know that I’m going to try harder to not let that cloud my judgement as much anymore.”

For a moment – a split second – Hope questions her plan, questions leaving her family like this.  Maybe – she wonders if there’s a better way; some way to keep what little family she has left safe without removing herself from them entirely.

But – no.  She’s already thought it through, examined the problem from every angle.  Hardly sleeping meant she’s had hours and hours of extra time to obsessively explore every possible solution, to ruminate over whether she truly is the root of the issue and – surprise!  She is.  No matter how she turns it, no matter what way she comes at it – Hope is the reason her parents are dead.  And knowing her luck and the horrifying irony of the universe, she’ll be the reason her aunts and uncles die too, if she sticks around much longer.

So instead she focuses on the point of contact between her and her aunt, their clasped hands stretched between them over her bedspread.  She thinks she should memorize it – that she didn’t pay enough attention the last time she held her mother’s hand or hugged her, that her memory is spotty enough as it is that it’s nearly assured that she’ll lose these memories too.

She’s terrified of that – she’s terrified of a lot these days, but that might be the worst.

Hope doesn’t know how long she’ll live – if the near immortality of the wolf will win out over the way in which magic can drain a body fast, if her vampirism will muddle with her physiology more than stress or natural aging ever could.  But the reality is that she could live for a very, very long time – how much of that can she expect to live without the memory of her mother’s arms around her?  She doesn’t suppose she can pull off another near-death experience successfully.

It’s nearly unbearable to consider.

Even more – there’s no escape for her.  Even if she could – if her family was no longer a factor in her decision making – there’s no telling what could actually kill her.  Silver would hurt, but not fatally so; the same goes for wolfsbane and vervain and any other number of manners of death.  In short: there’s no out.  It’s just endless.

So she holds her aunt’s hand a little tighter, struggling to stay above the rising wave of fear and helplessness.  Like – what do you even do when you don’t know when – or even if – you’ll die?  Plenty of people die before they were meant to; Hope knows that more intimately than most.  But that’s an early death.  What about a late one?

“ – realize that you’re still young and that you need to be able to make your own decisions, to an extent,” Freya’s saying.  “Your mother was always so careful to give you choices and it’s – it’s selfish of me to go against that.”

Hope realizes she’s missed a whole monologue, picking up on the tail end alone.

“It’s okay, Aunt Freya.  I understand,” Hope responds, hoping desperately that there won’t be some quiz on this speech later. 

Frowning at her, Freya looks like there’s more she wants to say – like she wants to push back against the sentiment.  Like she wants to press just a little harder, to see if Hope will hold up under pressure.

Hope thinks she’d hold firm – at least, she thinks that what she’s trying to protect means more to her than any short-lived relief she might feel at being honest.

She doesn’t have to test it though.  In the end, Freya just sighs heavily and pats her knee.  “Try to get some sleep, okay?”

. . .

The drive to Virginia is long and boring as hell on a good day, but it’s torturous on a scant forty minutes of sleep, Hope discovers.

Tucked into the backseat of her aunt’s car, she’s long since given up on trying to nap, instead watching the bustle of cities fade out to large swaths of trees and then back again.  Freya’s knocked out in the passenger seat after driving for the first leg of the journey, and Keelin bops her head along to the beat of whatever’s playing on the radio from behind the wheel.

It’s so weird – she hardly remembers the drive back from school before the funeral.  It’s almost like how she woke up in her dorm that first awful morning; she didn’t remember how she got there exactly, but she knew it was wrong somehow.

Hope just feels – overstimulated is the wrong word, but there’s not really a better one.  Overtaxed, maybe?  Overextended?

It’s like she’s watching this drive, but also every other time she’s done this – her mom at the wheel and Hope in the backseat or, as she grew older, in the passenger seat.  They’d swap between carefully curated playlists and podcasts and audiobooks to kill time, stopping at every drive-thru Hope spotted on exit signs, and it was always fun.  Like – it always sucked a little bit, because she was going back to school and she’d miss her mother and her aunts, but the drive itself was fun.  She had her mother’s undivided attention for hours and hours, and there were some trips that they turned into whole vacations, stopping off in tiny towns and at weird roadside attractions, the day long drive turning into a week, easily.

She tries to picture the next drive, then the one after that – the handful of trips like this that she has left before she graduates – and she finds she can’t.  Or, rather, she doesn’t want to.

Keelin and Freya are trying, which is what makes it so much worse.  They’re trying and none of it is even close to helping, so it just feels – it feels like a show that they’re all putting on.  Like they all have a specific role to play and it just feels hollow to her, empty in the way most things have felt recently, like she’s experiencing it all from underwater.

Is it going to be like this forever?  Everyone has been telling her it won’t be, but – but who would admit that it’s like this to stay?  Certainly none of her family, not with how carefully they’ve been handling her these days.  And there’s no self-help book for it – So You’ve Killed Your Parents and Hundreds Have Died as Collateral Damage would have a niche audience of one, she thinks.

Maybe she’ll stay numb, but – but she’ll get used to it.  Because that’s what’s tripping her up so much, she thinks: the memory of how the world used to feel, the lingering evidence of her life Before to hold up against the After.

The blare of a passing semi’s horn startles Freya awake, her head snapping upright as she glances around, assessing the situation.

“You doing alright, sweetheart?” she asks moments later, her voice still sleep-heavy.

Not for the first time, Hope entertains the idea of answering truthfully – to tell her aunt that she’s not entirely sure, but she doesn’t think so and she doesn’t think she will be anytime soon.

Because, like – what about holidays?  Thanksgiving and Christmas, days she always spent with her mother?  What about her birthday, barreling down on her as spring deepened?  What about the summer, when she’s supposed to go back to New Orleans, when she’s supposed to figure out how to survive three long months when she could barely last a month in all that – that space?

“Hope?” Freya prompts again, twisting in her seat to look back at her.

She doesn’t know what her life is supposed to look like anymore, not without the easy framework she once had – like, how can she even consider college?  How is she supposed to be able to explain this to people time and time again, reliving it all with each new stranger she meets, with each well-intentioned acquaintance that asks about her family? 

There’s just – there’s so much that’s changed and she doesn’t even know the half of it yet, and it’s terrifying to consider all the new ways that this will hurt her, ways that she’s failed to consider, ways that she can’t even imagine yet.

And Freya’s still waiting on an answer.

Hope settles back further in her seat, pulling her jacket tighter around her body as she nods, then answers, “I’m fine.”  It’s a lie that she’s repeated so often, it’s almost the truth – she thinks that if she tells it enough, she can will it to be true.

By the time they arrive in Mystic Falls – when Freya’s crying and triple-checking all of Hope’s bags, and Keelin keeps assuring Hope that they’re always just a phone call away – Hope thinks she’s gotten better at it – lying, that is.  By the time she’s standing on the front steps of the school, waving goodbye as her aunts’ car grows smaller and smaller down the driveway, Hope thinks that she’s almost convinced herself that she’s okay.

. . .

The first days back are easy, at least in comparison to everything else.  Hope sleeps through most of the daylight hours, spending her nights in the kitchen or the library – any place that’s warmly lit and empty, save for the occasional fellow student sneaking out for a bit.  It’s the days, then weeks that follow that have her reeling, all her carefully considered plans thrown out the window in the face of her new reality.

Her roommate Jordan does their level best to adjust to her new schedule, rushing back from class to try and catch Hope just as she’s waking up so that they can get dinner together – “We can take it to the lake or something,” they offer on her second day, pointedly ignoring a group of older students staring at her and whispering a couple tables over.

And it’s sweet of them to offer – sweet of them to be trying to adjust so much of their own life to accommodate her, to be so stubborn in their loyalty to her despite the obvious damper it’s putting on their own social standing – but Hope shrugs off the offer and chooses instead to keep to off-hours in the dining hall as much as she can, bearing it only when Jordan insists.

Her teachers are uncomfortably forgiving of her obvious shortcomings in the classroom, shooting her pitying looks when she jerks upright after nearly dozing through the few classes she manages to attend. 

Ms. Highmore stops her after her third or fourth time dozing off in Intro to Magical History and levels her with that – that look that says something like I’m sorry for your loss, but get it together.  Hope’s seen it a lot since coming back to school – mostly from teachers and admin, their frowns tempered with pity as they clock her sneaking out to the kitchen after lights out, but from her friends, too, and acquaintances she knows from class or parties.  If she had the ability to wipe that expression from the face of the earth, she would.

“Hope, if you need more time –,” her teacher sighs, lips pursed.

“I don’t,” Hope says immediately.  More time is exactly the opposite of what she needs, she thinks.

Frowning still, Ms. Highmore settles back into her chair and steeples her fingers.  Hope wonders when her family’s most recent tragedy is going to show up in her curriculum; surely she’ll wait until after Hope’s graduated, at least.  Right?

Finally, her teacher sighs.  “Then no more falling asleep in my class, hm?” she requests, leaving no room for argument.

Hope doesn’t say anything else – even if she was willing to say more, it wouldn’t be to her history teacher, a woman who Hope respects and fears in equal measure. 

Well – maybe she doesn’t fear her as much.  Not after what she’s lived through.

Still.  That’s just one class; Hope learns by the end of lunch that most, if not all, of her teachers share similar sentiments, the morning turning into little more than a string of uncomfortable, stilted conversations with people she used to suck up to not even a few months earlier.  It’s almost like they don’t know exactly what to do with her; they can’t fail her – because who would fail a newly minted orphan? – but they can’t let her just get away with her slacking either.

It’s not like she’s trying to slack, either.  It’s just that – there’s so much to catch up on and only so many hours to do so.  It doesn’t help that she can hardly sleep in her bed, always terrified that she’ll wake up to that awful morning again, to aches and bruises and a pounding headache she can’t explain, to the gnawing feeling of something missing.

If she thought trying to sleep back in her childhood bedroom was hard – that has nothing on this.

Because here’s the sad truth: when Hope was young, she was so terrified, even when she was at her happiest.  It was constant.  She never knew what it was like to not be afraid – afraid that she’d lose her family for good, that if they weren’t within reach at all times, they’d disappear.

It was okay, though – it got a little better as she grew older, and the fear was always soothed the way most little kid fears are soothed.  Her mother was always near, close at hand in moments of panic, and there was a steady reassurance that if she ever were to leave, she’d come back to Hope.  After her first few years boarding, the terror had faded to a dull drumbeat at the back of her skull.  She only ever really noticed it around full moons, as if everything she knew about what it meant to be pack screamed out at once, wanting everyone she loved near to her and safe.  She never thought to ask her mother if that was a normal thing to feel.

The feeling is back, now.

Which – it makes sense.  She’s sure that if she ever told anyone about it, they wouldn’t think she was crazy for it.  It makes sense.

Even if it makes sense, Hope still feels a little crazy when she has dreams like this.

She’s alone.  She’s in the woods.  She’s in the bayou.

The warm water lapping at her feet, the heavy weight of the air on her skin – she feels it and she knows it, down in her bones.  Her mother calls out her name from shore, from above water.  Hope is drowning until she’s not.  Until she’s breathing through the water swallowing her whole.  Until she’s watching her family sink around her, desiccated and watching her with wide and accusing eyes.

She’s on the porch of the country house, the sunbleached boards familiar beneath her feet.  She’s at the end of the drive, looking up at her childhood home – the only place they were ever all together.  Her father slips his hand into hers and says something in an ancient language she can’t understand.  Her father is on fire; Hope can feel the heat of the flames on her skin even as he vanishes.

The country house is on fire and she knows instinctively that they’re all inside.  They’re all inside and she should be inside with them.  Hope has an iron stake driven through her foot, holding her in place.  Why can’t she be with her family?  Who would have done this?

She’s in the Abattoir, holding matches and a hammer.

What did you do?  Freya’s screaming.  What did you do?

Hope wakes up in a cold sweat for the fifth time in as many nights, halfway to screaming even as she registers the familiar space of her room and the even breathing of her roommate in the opposite bed.

She’s safe.  What family she has left is safe, so why does it feel like they’re all gone too?  Why does Hope have this crushing resignation settled in her chest that they’re all gone and she’ll just – just have to live like this forever?  Alone and floating in the waves left behind because she can’t figure out how to drown in them.  What’s the alternative for her?

From the other side of the room, her roommate stirs, sitting up sluggishly and peering at her.

“Are you okay?” Jordan asks, rubbing sleep from their eyes.  “Should I get Ms. Tig?”

Hope drags in a ragged, deep breath.  “I’m fine,” she manages, not quite able to face them.  “I’m just – I’m going to take a walk.”

If her roommate says anything else, Hope misses it, out the door the moment she can get her legs to hold her weight.

The quiet of the school halls at night is oppressive, but it’s at least better than being in her room, surrounded by evidence of what she’s lost.  She’d thought it would have been better to be at school, away from the home she grew up in, away from all the people she’s so scared to hurt – thought that maybe distance would soften the blow somehow.

Here’s what she’s found, since coming back to school: very few will meet her eye in the halls or at meals.  The handful of friends she had had dropped by a few times in the first week she was back, awkward and uncomfortable as they tiptoed around the elephant in the room.  Since then, they hadn’t quite avoided her, but they certainly hadn’t sought her out.

Part of it is Hope’s fault, she knows.  She just can’t – can’t quite bring herself to try.  It just feels useless, like she’s asking the universe to be hurt again and again.  Why let anyone else behind the curtain?  She can’t push her family out, not completely, but she can limit the rest of her interaction with the world.  She can keep herself and everyone else safe.  She can.

Except right now, it feels impossible.

Because Jordan is still here and trying to take care of Hope, and the Saltzman twins keep trying to check in with her, and even Penelope Park – who Hope has had maybe two conversations with prior to this – is going out of her way to be kind, running interference on the majority of rumors that have cropped up since she’s returned.  And it would be so easy to lean into their care, what they’re offering her.  Maybe her friends from before need a little time to relearn how to be around her, but there are people here and now that are offering her something she knows she wants.

But giving into what she wants won’t keep things safe.

Since – everything.  Since everything changed, Hope’s world has been redefined into what is safe – what keeps her and the people she loves intact and breathing – and what isn’t.  Self-imposed isolation?  Safe.  Taking a maybe-friend up on their offer to talk?  Not safe.  If she keeps to herself, no one else will get hurt because of her.  If she keeps to herself, no one else can hurt her.

Her feet take her to the front door, well-learned lessons navigating her away from creaky floorboards that could wake a teacher.  Back before, there was a group of them that would sometimes sneak out to the Mill just because they could.  Not on full moons, of course – she could sneak out tomorrow to see if they’d let her join, but she doesn’t want to risk finding out the answer.

But why even bother with that when she can have the whole of the woods to herself tonight?  When she can run under the moon and maybe, just for a moment, forget what grief feels like?  She’s only turned once, but there was an immediate relief in it, a gift of returning to base instincts and setting aside all the rest.

She hadn’t wanted to turn back, afterwards.  The wolf was crying out to stay, please, stay.  Why should she live with complex emotions?  Wasn’t it enough to run free?  To miss someone, but to know that to breathe and be alive was better than following them into death?

It’s hard to reconcile what the wolf wants with what Hope wants – harder still when she carries the guilt of her turning with her everywhere she goes.  If she hadn’t been selfish – if she hadn’t caused her mother’s death – if she wasn’t so filled with rage and a need for vengeance, there was a man that might still be alive.  And if she had never killed him, if she had never needed to turn at all, her father might still be alive too.

There it is – the sequence of events.  No matter how she tries to examine it, the path always leads back to her.

Hope Mikaelson killed her own parents.

The moon bids her to run, so she does, stripping down as she goes.  It’s easier than sitting with the feelings of loss and guilt and grief and rage, all tangled together in her chest and throat.  Easier still to welcome the change.

Would her mother have taken her on her first pack run?  Would her father?  Hope should have asked when she had the chance.

The pain is still new; every bone in your body snapping at once will take time to get used to, time that Hope doesn’t want anymore.  It should be painful, she thinks.  It should hurt.  Better her body breaking than her heart.  Better to feel every wretched inch of the turn than to feel nothing at all.

Under the full moon, Hope is made anew in her parents’ image.

. . .

She wakes just before the sun rises, the shift back having left her spent on the forest floor.  Hope finds her clothes scattered through the woods, marking her first desperate flight through the trees and guiding her back schoolbound, and she pulls them on while still hidden deep in the tree line.  It’s still dark enough that she knows human eyes wouldn’t be able to make her out in the dim light of pre-dawn, but there are few human eyes incapable of improvement at the Salvatore School.

Hope takes a winding route back to the main building, weighing her options.  She could risk going in front doors, possibly running into one of the floor dons or an early rising staff member.  She could try the back door if she wanted to run the risk of paralysis – the wards on full moons packed a heftier punch than on other nights.  If she really wanted to, she could always try to scale the wall to her bedroom window.  She and Jordan both run hot and so it’s usually left cracked open accordingly.

The decision is made her for when Caroline Forbes comes into view, waiting on the steps of the main entrance.

Just as Hope starts to calculate the chances of her making it back to the woods, she hears her name.

“Hope, I can see you,” Ms. Forbes says, sounding as tired as Hope feels.  “Please just come inside.”

And Hope is tired – she’s so tired, and all she wants is the easy draw of clear instructions.  Just come inside.  She could go and she could tell Ms. Forbes about how little she was prepared for this, about how much it all still hurts, and she knows her headmaster would do her best to help; that she would give Hope more and more sets of clear instructions to follow, would try to build out a routine for her to bridge the gap between who she was and who she is now.

It would be so easy.

But Hope doesn’t need easy – she doesn’t deserve it.  She made her bed and now she has to lie in it, for however long it takes for her to be absolved, however long it takes to find her own forgiveness.  Her mother may have pardoned her, but she’s her mother.  She never wanted Hope to suffer, but she’s not here to push back on this.

“What were you –?” Ms. Forbes sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose as Hope nears her.  She softens when Hope’s close enough to study closely.  “You know how dangerous full moons can be on our grounds,” she says rather than finishing her question.

Hope shrugs.  “What’s going to happen to me?” she grumbles, brushing past the older woman and heading straight for the stairs.  She doesn’t have it in her to listen to another adult telling her it’s okay to be sad.  “I’m the most dangerous thing in those woods.”

Behind her, Ms. Forbes sighs again.  “I think we should speak soon, Hope,” she says finally, reaching out to stop her with a gentle hand on her shoulder.  “I’m worried that the school isn’t doing enough to support you right now and I want us to figure out a better plan.”

All at once, the careful numbness Hope had worked so hard to build around her shatters and she’s so angry she could die of it.  “Who cares?” she snarls, shrugging off her headmaster’s hand.  She feels the wolf snapping beneath her skin, ready to bite.  Her wrist snaps in anticipation of another shift and Hope barely flinches.  “Nothing’s going to help.”

When she turns, she meets Ms. Forbes’s horrified eyes – maybe there’s worry for her there too, maybe there’s fear or care or concern.  Mostly, Hope reads horror.

In an instant, she deflates – her anger leaves her in a sudden rush, gone as quickly as it had been summoned and leaving her unsteady on her feet in its wake, the fragile bones of her wrist knitting back together as easily as they had broken.  “Sorry,” she mumbles, drawing in on herself, cradling her arm to her chest.  “I’m sorry, Ms. Forbes.”

“No, sweetie, no,” Ms. Forbes rushes forward, but stops just shy of touching her.  “Hope, honey, you have nothing to apologize for.  I – we can talk later, okay?”  She reaches out after another moment of hesitation, giving Hope’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.  “I just want to be sure that you’re getting the support you need right now.”

Hope knows exactly what she needs – and she knows that no one alive can help her with it.

“I’m – um,” Hope stammers, blinking back sudden tears.  She feels so out of control all the time now, always swinging back and forth between anger and relentless sadness, always caught around the throat by grief.  “I’m really tired,” she nods towards the stairs, “I’ll make sure to schedule an appointment later?”

It’s a weak response, but it’s enough to satisfy Ms. Forbes for now.  “Be sure that you do,” she says after a brief moment, studying Hope with a watchful eye.  “I’ll excuse you from your classes today – make sure you get some rest, okay?”

Hope can only nod, not quite trusting herself to speak anymore.  At this point, there’s no telling what could come out of her mouth – another plea for forgiveness from the wrong person, a scream at how much she feels all the time now.  She turns away from her headmaster before the first tear can fall.

. . .

Hope sleeps through breakfast and most of lunch, making it to the dining hall just in time to snag a couple bowls of pasta to eat in her room to try and make up for the calories lost last night.  She’s barely halfway down the hall when the first whisper reaches her.

“ – hear she went batshit and broke out last night?”

Hope stiffens.  It’s moments like these that she wishes someone had taught her how to ignore what her heightened senses might try to bring to her attention. 

“ – swear I  saw her sneaking into the woods – on a full moon!”

She can’t even – she can’t tell where the voices are coming from.  To her left?  Behind her?  Everywhere?  Her own heartbeat thunders loud enough to make pinpointing the whispers impossible. 

“ – wouldn’t want to share a room with her – ”

Hope clutches her bowls of pasta so tightly she hears a crack. 

“ – should even be at school?”

The sharp snap of heels echoes down the hall, making Hope flinch – how long as she just been standing here?  Just listening and making herself an even bigger target?

“Scatter,” Penelope Park instructs dismissively.  From the sound of it, the other kids aren’t stupid enough to ignore a direct command from her. 

Hope should have known better – she does know better.  It had been hard enough to make friends when she was a kid, when it was just a little shyness and the need for secrecy that left her stumbling for her words.  No one had been scared of her then – she’d just been easy to overlook, too used to playing by herself to seamlessly transition to boarding school.  That alone had taken months to overcome. 

Now, there’s no timeline for how long it would take for people to stop looking askance at her, how long it’ll take before whispers stop following her down the halls.  Maybe until graduation?

God, Hope can’t – she can’t fathom that.  She had a routine before this, a quiet and regular life that yeah, maybe sometimes she wished for more from, but it was hers.  She called her mom three times a week and Skyped with her and Freya and Keelin – whenever she was home – on Sundays.  She and Jordan had roommate dinners every Wednesday night and she went with her friends to the hall movie nights on Fridays if she didn’t have any better offers for her time.  Every few weeks, there was a party in the woods and she would go with a group and she’d have a good time, even if she was usually teased for ducking out earlier than most.  She ate breakfast in the bay window in the common room, lunch at the table that looked out over the pitch, and dinner at the corner table nearest to the kitchens.  There was a pattern, a rhythm that she knew by heart and that kept the worst of her fears at bay. 

Now there’s nothing.  It’s just all – all blank.  She’s stumbling around in the dark.

Hope picks up her pace, the back of her neck and tips of her ears prickling with heat.  She’s aware of the eyes that follow her all the way down the hall, aware of Penelope calling out after her until Hope ducks around the next corner and down into one of the tunnels that connects her dormitory to the main building.

In theory, the tunnels are for quick escapes – the Salvatore family had had plenty of uses for them, but now they’re mostly an emergency plan for the building’s current occupants.

It feels like a bit of an emergency right now.  Hope can feel her magic, leashed and unhappy under her skin.  Sometimes she feels like too much is trapped inside her – a wolf and enough magic to bring down buildings and something else, something colder lying dormant.  For now.

There’s not enough room for them all – for all the different parts of her and for herself.  Maybe something should win out, just to make it a little easier for the rest of the world.  Which part – well, she’s less sure on that.  But trying to balance it all – it’s too much.

When she surfaces in the entry of her dormitory, there’s a group of her floormates heading to class.  They won’t meet her eye as they pass.

It’s then that she knows exactly what she needs – or, at least, what it is that she doesn’t need anymore.

. . .

The bus rides blend together, one stretch of trees turning into the next, every pass-through town looking the same as the one before it.  Hope’s not really sure what her plan is.  The Abattoir will be empty – Kol and Davina left for Belize a few weeks ago, Rebekah and Marcel heading back to New York not long after that, and Freya and Keelin had dropped Hope off at school before continuing on to their impromptu honeymoon.  It’s Hope’s own fault that she’ll be alone, her fault in more ways than one.

She figures that she could call someone if she really needed to, but – but she won’t need to.  She just needs to be anywhere but at school, anywhere but surrounded by rumors and staring and the constant whisper of she’s a Mikaelson following her everywhere like a curse.  She’s not ashamed of her name, of her family, but sometimes it feels a little heavier than she can bear.  She needs something familiar enough to ease a little of the ache.

She gets into New Orleans close to midnight, the streets full as she navigates from the bus station to the Quarter.  When Hope lets herself in and pushes the door closed behind her, the sudden quiet is a relief.

And then – it’s not quite a decision that she makes.  Hope hadn’t really thought it through where she would sleep, since she knows well enough that she won’t be able to in her own room.  But without necessarily making the choice, she finds herself outside of her mother’s bedroom door.

She hasn’t been inside since – since before.  Probably since Christmas, when they upheld their yearly tradition of hot chocolate and Christmas movies on her mom’s laptop, wearing nearly matching pajamas that Hope never failed to roll her eyes at.  At the time, Hope had been a little annoyed that she’d fallen asleep in her mother’s bed like a little kid, but – well.  Now she’s glad she did, glad that she can remember how safe she felt curled up against her mom like she always did when she was younger and slept in her mother’s bed more often than not.

When Hope finally gathers the courage to push open the door, she finds everything basically as she remembers it.  There’s an open book on the bedside table, a few more chapters read than there had been the last time Hope saw it in her mom’s hands.  Old drawings Hope had made for her are still tacked up around the window, shitty pinch pots that she gave her mom for Mother’s Day over the years lining her vanity, filled with rings or different shades of lipstick or loose change.

It feels like her mom just stepped out and – Hope actually likes that?  It hurts almost more than she can take, but it’s nice to feel at home and safe in a way that she hasn’t in weeks.  She smells her mother’s perfume everywhere, feels her lingering presence like an embrace.  Everywhere else – everywhere else is just cold.  Bereft.  Hollow.

Maybe this is what was missing during those first weeks.  Hope had been surrounded by all the things she had grown up around, but all the things that were so distinctly her mom were absent – tucked away in her room, behind a door Hope couldn’t even bring herself to look at during those early days.

There’s a discarded sweater hanging over the back of the vanity chair and Hope recognizes it as one of her mom’s favorites.  It’s well-worn and soft to the touch when she picks it up, familiar as her own reflection.  On the few occasions her mother was away overnight when Hope was little, she’d leave this sweater with her to sleep with because it smelled so strongly of her.

When Hope starts to cry again, it’s not a surprise.

Whatever this is – it’s been building for a while now, she thinks, just building and building until she found the right place.  Until she felt safe.  And this room might be the only place she’s ever felt truly safe.

There’s just – there’s so much.  So many things she wants to say to her mom, so many things she wants to show her – she was supposed to come to Parents’ Day at the end of the year and watch Hope’s class presentation on amplified barrier spells and have dinner with her in the dining hall and – and it’s so stupid that that’s what Hope cares about, but she can’t help it.  It hurts to try and picture what that will look like without her mother there, practically glowing with pride the way she always was whenever she came to visit Hope at school.

Hope remembers how hard the transition had been when she first started boarding, how used to her mother’s constant presence she was and how many nights she cried herself sick because she missed her.  And more importantly, she remembers how many weekends her mother made the grueling drive to Virginia to see her, always bringing Hope a box of beignets or something new to decorate her room with, something to make it feel more like home.

People at school, all her old friends – it was like they were expecting her to be fine just because she was back in class.  But how is Hope supposed to be okay after losing someone like that?  She wasn’t lying or exaggerating the point when she told Roman that her mother was her best friend – it had been just the two of them for so much of Hope’s childhood.  Even after the rest of the family returned, it was Hope and her mom at the core of everything. 

It feels impossible to try and picture a way forward without her.  No one else will ever be willing to drive fourteen hours every week just because she’s sad.  No one, she thinks, will ever love her like that again. 

Maybe she should feel more settled after seeing her mom as happy as she could be, at peace and waiting patiently until Hope joins her.  But it’s just – she doesn’t, is the thing.  There’s some cold comfort in knowing that her mother is safe, that she’s not suffering, but the fact remains: her mom isn’t here.

The thought echoes, pounding in Hope’s head as she sobs, using her own sleeve to wipe her face because she’s not willing to let go of her mother’s sweater even long enough to search out tissues.  Her mom isn’t here and her mom is the only person that Hope really wants around right now.  She loves her aunts and her uncles, but they have their own lives to get back to or restart – Hope doesn’t belong with them.

It’s nothing in how they treat her; she knows that they love her, that they would bend over backward to see her happy, that they’ve all sacrificed for her time and time again.  But she’s not – she’s not theirs.  Not in the same way she was her mom’s, and they’re not hers in the same way her mother was.  Outside of Freya and Keelin, she only really knows her family through the phone.

All at once, Hope is exhausted.  Weeks of sleeping poorly catch up to her in the beat between one ragged breath and the next and she feels like a little kid again, overtired and crying for her mother to put her to bed.

But her mom isn’t coming.  Hope mothers herself in the dearth instead. 

She staunches the flow of tears long enough to brush her teeth and wander to her room to search for pajamas.  When she was small, her mother would brush her hair before bed – Hope does the same, eyes closed in front of her dresser, clinging to the ghost of her mother’s hands on her shoulders.  It’s not the same, but it never will be.  It’ll have to be enough that Hope thinks her mom would be pleased to see that she’s trying to take care of herself – that she’s doing what she can to not just lay down and never get back up again.

After she’s changed and her face is washed and she’s feeling marginally – not better, but maybe less terrible – Hope goes back and crawls into her mother’s bed.

She leaves her mom’s side untouched, the covers half-made like she left them.  It would feel wrong, she thinks, would make it feel more permanent.  Maybe if she leaves everything like it is – maybe she’ll wake up and be eleven again and sleeping here because she insisted she could handle watching World War Z with Josh when he babysat her.  Maybe she’ll wake up and this will all have been a terrible dream, a nightmare that her mom can chase away with a plate of slightly burnt pancakes and an ungodly amount of whipped cream to hide the darker bits.

It feels a little dreamlike now, the room warm and familiar despite the emptiness of the house around her and the chill of spring in the night air.  Hope almost manages to convince herself that she feels a weight on the bed beside her, a hand reaching out to brush her hair back.

Of course it’s just the wind, slipping in through the cracked window.  Hope falls asleep easily, comforted, for the first time in weeks anyway.

. . .

“She’s not in her room.”

“Shit.  Okay, I – I need to do another locator spell.”

Hope stirs at the sound of voices in the courtyard, turning blearily to her mom to see if she’s heard them too. 

She’s alone, of course.  Reality snaps into place around her quickly, sharpening her senses as the ache in her chest twists and grows.  She’s alone, but it’s Freya and Keelin in the courtyard – the school must have figured out she was gone sooner than Hope had thought they would.

“Wait,” Keelin says.  “I think –”

“What?”

Whatever Keelin says next is lost in the sound of a jazz band starting up on the street below the window, loud and brash and sounding like home.  The Salvatore School is rarely quiet, but it never has the same noise as Hope’s city.  In an instant, she can imagine never going back, never having to face another former friend giving her a look that’s half-pity and half-fear.  She knows she could never stay in New Orleans, but – but maybe she could just wander.  Carve out a new kind of life, entirely separate from any life she used to have.

She was naïve to think that she could just go back to how things were before – that, like, it would be okay.  It’s never going to be okay, not with everyone at school clued in on the secret of what she is, not with how her father’s death has been celebrated throughout the supernatural world or the way her mother’s death will be a footnote in the entry about the Faction War in her history textbooks in the next couple of years.  What – is she going to have to turn in an essay on the socio-political impact of Klaus Mikaelson’s death on werewolf-vampire relations?  Answer a quiz question about the ways in which the deaths of Crescent Alpha Hayley Marshall and Vampire Supremacist Greta Siena signified the climax of a long-brewing war between supernatural communities?  God – would Hope become an answer on a final exam in a few years?

“Hope?  Honey, are you in there?”

Like – what’s the point?  All Hope is in this world is a case study, a child that shouldn’t have ever even existed – she should have appreciated the anonymity her mother worked so hard to provide her when she still had it, when no one was looking at her as anything more than a try-hard and she wasn’t basically a walking death sentence to everyone she cares about and –

“Sweetheart, I need to know if you’re okay –”

and who cares anymore?  Her family might be sad for a little while, but they’ve lived through worse before, so why can’t she just leave?  That has to be better than the alternative, something better than watching everyone she loves end up dead because of her –

“ – locked it.”

“Can’t you – I mean, I’ve seen you blast open doors –”

even as Hope recognizes what’s happening on the other side of the wall, even as she wants to get out of bed and open the door and pretend like everything’s fine – it’s like she’s not in control of herself anymore.  What is she supposed to do?  What is she supposed to say?  Sorry I bailed on school and ruined another important thing for someone I love – I didn’t mean to, promise!  How is she supposed to explain that she hasn’t really made a decision for herself once in the past months – that she’ll find herself in the middle of something without knowing when or how or why she got into it in the first place, that it wasn’t so much a conscious decision she made to leave school, but it was more like Hope got tired of being looked at like she was a freak or something to be pitied, and the next thing she remembered was being on a bus somewhere in the middle of one of the Carolinas –

“Dissera portus.”

it’s only when the door to her mother’s room flies open that Hope realizes that the windows are rattling ominously, unnaturally – that there’s magic seeping out of her hands, her pores, threatening all that she has left of her mother – that she can’t stop it, doesn’t have the ability or the will or the energy to –

“Ligare sangue,” Freya says forcefully, still barely heard over the droning roar of Hope’s leaking magic.

Hope watches the scene with tired eyes, torn halfway between horror and resignation.  If she brings this house down on top of her, maybe then she can rest.  Maybe then her family will see what she sees in the mirror – someone too powerful, someone not meant for this world.  She should never have been born.

“Ligare sangue!” Freya shouts again, throwing her hands out in front of her to channel the spell.  Hope’s never heard it before, but she recognizes each word and parses out the use – bind the blood.

Make it stop, she hopes futilely.  Just make it all stop.

One of her mother’s framed photos crashes to the floor, the beam running across the ceiling groaning ominously.  Hope can’t even bring herself to worry – what damage would being crushed to death do?  What else is there to lose?

It’s on Freya’s third try of the binding spell that Hope feels a change in the air, her magic settling back beneath her skin, anxious and snapping at being restrained, a wild animal in her chest.  “I’m sorry,” she sobs, crying again now that she’s not just a vessel for wayward magic, now that the weight of what was about to happen settles fully.  “I’m so sorry,” she cries, bringing her knees to her chest and hiding her face, “I just want my mom.”

There’s a moment where Freya and Keelin hover at the edge of the doorway, trying to see if it’s safe to be in the room, if Hope is safe to be around.  And It’s smart to be cautious.  Hope knows that. 

She also knows that her mother would never have waited – that she would have rushed in and gathered Hope up in her arms without a thought.

Hope’s still sobbing out apologies when they finally breach the threshold – god, it seems like all she does now is apologize.  Always breaking things and regretting it right after, always begging for forgiveness from anyone that will offer it.  Isn’t she a Mikaelson?  Shouldn’t she live unapologetically?  Isn’t that in her blood?

She can’t put it to words and maybe it’s better if she can’t, if all she sobs out is feverish nonsense, frantic pleas for absolution she doesn’t even know if she wants, let alone deserves.  But Hope feels so unsettled in her own skin.  She looks the same as she did last week, last month, last year – how can she look the same after something like this?  She should be marked, scarred as punishment.  Something to make everyone else understand.

When Freya hugs her, Hope wants to pull away – she doesn’t deserve to be comforted by her or anyone else.  She should be fine and – and even if she isn’t, even if she sometimes lays in bed late at night and finds she can’t breathe – even if sometimes she’ll lock herself away somewhere quiet and listen to the last voicemail her mother ever left her – even if sometimes she finds herself staring at the only photo of her father she has in her dorm and just sobbing –

“Sweet girl,” Freya murmurs, pulling her close, careful with Hope like she always has been.  “Oh, Hope.”

She sounds so helpless – Hope did that to her.  Add that to the list of awful things she’s put her family through: reducing her ever-capable aunt to tears.

Keelin’s a warm presence at her back, sandwiching Hope into a hug and she can’t – Hope can’t do this ever again.  She knows this now.  She can’t keep falling apart like this, can’t keep pulling everyone back from their own steps forward.  She was selfish once: her mother died.  Selfish again: her father died.  Who else could she kill with this?  What else could she destroy?

Her aunts want a family and Hope wants that for them.  Freya’s helped parent Hope the last seven years and Hope know she’ll be a wonderful mother and if Keelin’s behavior these last few months has been any indicator, she’ll be just as well suited to the role.  But Hope knows – they can’t do that if they’re still worrying over her, waiting to see how she’ll crack this time.  If she’s constantly falling to pieces, she’ll take up too much of their time.

She can’t do that – she won’t.  She refuses.

There’s so little she can control in this world, in this life – she knows this intimately now.  All these doors closed to her by forces beyond her reach.  She’s sick of it.  Hope’s tired of hurting and she’s so tired of hurting others in the process of trying to find a way to make herself hurt less.  She can’t choose to put an end to this feeling and she can’t choose to take it all back, but she can choose how she deals with this.  She can hide it from others – it’s her burden to bear, after all.  She can do better.  She has to.

So when her aunts shift away, giving her space, Hope dries her eyes and straightens her back and shoulders despite the ache in them.  No – maybe this isn’t what her mom would have wanted for her; she would have wanted her to talk about it, try to put words to it all.  But what good are words now?  Nobody would understand them – Hope doesn’t even understand them on the rare occasions when she can conjure them up.  It’s all – it’s deeper than rage, more potent than grief. 

It’ll remain nameless, then.  Nameless and shapeless, a specter over her shoulder.  She’ll have to learn to live with it.

So she lets her aunts keep her home through spring break; she sits for her grief counseling sessions when they ask her to, carefully mapping out the right answers to give Ms. Tig every other afternoon over Skype so that she’ll turn around and assure her family that Hope does seem to be getting better.  She gets better at holding her wayward magic within herself, pushing it back down until she hardly feels it anymore.  She gets better – this is getting better, right?

Midway through break, she puts in the request to have her room switched to a single.  The school keeps a few reserved for exigent circumstances – the handful of mono outbreaks, for example, or when someone doesn’t respect toxic plant handling procedures and can’t risk exposing their werewolf roommate to wolfsbane.  Hope submits her statement of need in the morning, and by the afternoon she has an approval waiting in her school email inbox.

When Jordan sends her a series of texts after they’re informed of the change, Hope sends back a couple lines of surface level response – the space will be good for her to acclimate to her new normal, she doesn’t want to keep waking them if she has nightmares.  There’s a twinge of guilt – more than a twinge, because Jordan’s probably the closest thing Hope has to a best friend or a sibling – but it’s easier this way, right?  It has to be.  The less people Hope has to let in, the less people she runs the risk of hurting or losing.

Hope knows they’re hurt right now, but this hurt will be temporary.  They’ve got other friends and they’ll adapt – Hope has to believe that.

Hope doesn’t tell her aunts about the housing change, or about how she chooses to change her schedule around so she shares as few classes as possible with her old friends.  It’s easier this way too.  They’d worry more than was warranted, second-guessing Hope’s choices until Hope herself would be left wondering if she was wrong.

When she returns to school, she builds herself a new routine to follow.  She sleeps in during breakfast, opting instead to keep a stash of granola bars on her desk; lunch is out by the lake, where it’s quiet and damp and feels a little more like home than anywhere else on campus.  She eats dinner in her room, either studying or watching Netflix, studiously ignoring the sounds of her floormates laughing and chatting in the hall.  She video chats with Freya and Keelin every Sunday, then every other Sunday, then one Sunday a month.  She sets aside Friday nights to answer her aunts and uncles’ texts if there are any she missed during the week and Wednesday nights become laundry nights, up at three in the morning when she can’t sleep and the laundry room in her building is quiet, save for the soothing rumble of her clothes running through the wash.  When she hears rumors of a party out at the Mill, she makes a point to find out if she can get a key to a classroom instead, opting to practice, and then practice some more – reciting her Latin and her French and her Old Norse, perfecting her spells and brewing until she can carry them both out in her sleep.

When the school year ends, all her extra time and effort pays off; she’s not behind in her classes and, perhaps more importantly, she’s carved out a new reputation for herself.  She’s not Hope Marshall, class nobody, or Hope Mikaelson, devil incarnate.  Maybe some people still fear her – there were always going to be a few holdouts.  Most people just think she’s a bitch.  That’s fine, too.  Nobody bends over backwards to befriend a bitch.

She spends part of the summer bouncing between her family in their respective cities – a little time in New York with Rebekah and Marcel, a couple weeks in New Orleans with Freya and Keelin, a week with Davina and Kol in the Caribbean.  She applies for early return for the rest of the summer, returning to campus in the middle of July when the buildings are stripped down to bare bones functions for the handful of year-round kids.

Next summer, she just doesn’t leave at all.

So – Hope gets better.

This is better, right?