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Chapter Text

For as long as Harri Potter can remember, her first memory is not a lullaby but a curse: a sickly green light splitting the dark, a red-haired woman falling without sound, and a man with eyes red as coals.

And through it all — before she can even form words — there is a voice.

It curls in her bones when she is small enough to fit beneath cupboard stairs. It follows her out into Dudley’s fists, into Petunia’s sharp-edged scolding, into the heavy tread of Vernon’s boots. The voice is always there, steady as breath, impossible to ignore.

Sometimes it is mocking, sharp, sardonic — a drawl that bites but steadies, telling her stories of forests and rivers that run red, of siblings who love and betray in the same breath, of a family that devours itself and still clings together.

Sometimes it is crueler, hungrier, a whisper with no warmth at all. That one tells her of orphanages and cracked plaster walls, of snakes hissing secrets in the dark, of prayers and punishments, of death feared and sought in equal measure.

Two voices, yet one presence. She cannot tell the difference. She only knows she is never alone.

By five, Harri already understands that she is unwanted. The cupboard is her cradle and her coffin. The word freak is her name. When she dares ask, “Why don’t you love me like you love Dudley?” the answer cuts sharper than any switch.

So she stops asking. She learns to want elsewhere.

At night, when loneliness gnaws holes through her chest, she whispers into the dark: “Tell me a story.”

And the voice answers. Always.

Not with princesses or happy endings, but with kingdoms that burn, men who cannot die, women whose love turns to poison, children who carve their names into history with blood.

Harri listens, wide-eyed in the dark, and learns. That love is sharp as teeth. That survival is victory enough. That family is as likely to wound as to save.

It frightens her. It steadies her. It becomes hers.

The Dursleys cannot take it from her. They can strip her of food, warmth, dignity. They can set her to endless chores until her body aches.

They can laugh when Dudley chases her through the streets. They can sneer when strange things happen — Petunia’s hair turned blue, a window shattered without touch, Dudley lifted by invisible force.

But the voice remains.

Sometimes she hates it, hates the laughter that mocks her tears.

Sometimes she clings to it, desperate, when she cannot bear the silence. Either way, it is hers alone.

By seven summers old, Harri hears whispers in the world outside. Soulmates. Words drifting in playground chatter, in overheard gossip at school gates. She does not know the meaning, only that children speak of voices and dreams, of strangers who belong.

For her, it is no gossip. It is life.

She does not dare believe it. She does not dare speak it aloud. But she begins to wonder: what if this voice, sharp and cruel and constant, is not a curse but a thread? What if she is not mad?

And when she asks, trembling, “Who are you?” the voice only laughs, low and knowing.

By the time she is eight, Harri Potter is thin and sharp, with hair that refuses to be tamed and eyes too green for a world that despises her. She has learned that happiness is fleeting, that love is rare, that dreams are dangerous.

But she has also learned she is not alone.

Even if she cannot tell whose voice keeps her company.

On the morning of her eleventh birthday, the letters begin. Heavy parchment, emerald ink, addressed not to the house but to the cupboard under the stairs. Her name written with care, as though by someone who saw her.

The Dursleys rip them, hide them, burn them. Still, they come: through windows, down chimneys, in the very air itself. Until at last the doorframe buckles with the shape of a man too large for it, his voice rough but kind.

“You’re a witch, Harriet.”

The words fall heavy, inevitable.

She does not gasp. She does not cry. She laughs — sharp, unsteady, jagged as glass. Of course she is.

The voice inside hums smugly, amused. Did you think I lied, little one?

//

Diagon Alley is not a dream but déjà vu. The crooked shops, the cobbled stones, the owls perched in rows — all of it exactly as described to her in the long, sleepless nights of childhood.

It should be wonder. It burns instead.

Because every word the voice spoke is true. Every detail is real. Which means she has never been speaking to herself.

She walks the Alley in silence, hands brushing cold stone, and knows: somewhere in the world, the voice belongs to someone living. Flesh and blood.

And the thought terrifies her.

Hogwarts rises against the sky, vast and lit by torches. At the Sorting, the Hat’s voice coils in her mind like a serpent. Slytherin. Cunning, ambition, power — you would be great among them.

She hesitates. She remembers nights filled with stories of serpents, of brothers and betrayal, of ambition carved into bone. The voice inside her laughs, approving, urging.

But she refuses. Not Slytherin. Not Slytherin.

The Hat sighs, then shouts Gryffindor.

The table roars. A red-haired boy named Ron claps her on the back, grinning as though they are already bound. For the first time, Harri feels a sliver of belonging.

The voice in her mind chuckles low. Bravery over survival. Predictably foolish.

But he does not leave.

Hogwarts whispers of soulmates.

In the common room, older students swap stories: voices heard in sleep, phantom hands brushing theirs, names inked into skin. In corridors, parchment scribbles pass hand to hand: Have you heard yours yet?

Harri listens but does not speak. She knows if she admits it, they will ask who, and she cannot answer. Because the voice is not kind. Because sometimes it soothes, sometimes it mocks, sometimes it hungers.

Because sometimes she cannot tell if there are two of them.

Her first year spills into chaos. Flying lessons where the wind cuts her hair into wild ribbons and for a moment she is free. A troll in the dungeon, her heart hammering as rubble rains down. A dog with three heads, its growl rattling her bones.

At Christmas, a jumper knitted with love she has never known, a flute, and a cloak that belonged to her father. She presses the cloak to her chest and feels a pang — a relic, not a man.

The voice murmurs, sardonic. Relics cannot love you back.

Her throat tightens. “Then I’ll make my own family.”

He does not answer for three days.

The Mirror finds her in winter.

It shows her what she longs for most: a mother’s arms, a father’s laugh, a family that should have been hers. At first.

But with each visit, their outlines blur. Their shapes twist. Behind them stands another figure — tall, elegant, eyes red as blood. A stranger and yet familiar.

The voice hums, pleased. You see me now.

Her stomach knots. “You’re not him.”

Silence. Then a chuckle. And who am I, little one?

She runs from the room. But she cannot run from the voice.

At year’s end, Quirrell drags her before that same Mirror. His hands are clammy, his breath sour, his words frantic as he babbles of a master and a Stone. He demands she look.

And there he is again. The stranger in the glass, holding the Stone.

“What do you see?” Quirrell hisses.

“My parents,” Harri answers, defiant.

The voice laughs, low and cruel. Liar.

Another hum follows, softer, amused. But clever.

The Stone slides into her pocket. Quirrell rages. The fight tears through her, burns her, but she survives.

And when the master flees, when the chamber stills, she realizes: there are two voices in her mind. One sharp, mocking. One hungry, cruel.

For the first time, she feels the split.

By twelve, Harri Potter knows she is haunted. Not by one voice but two. Not by madness, but by threads of inevitability she cannot cut.

The world sees a Gryffindor girl with a scar.

Her housemates see a friend.

Her enemies see a threat.

Only she knows the truth whispered in the dark.

You are bound. You are mine. You will never be alone.

Whispers of soulmates bloom louder in her second year.

It starts in the common room, in laughter and ink-stained notes passed across the fire. Students compare stories: the brush of phantom hands, the echo of a stranger’s laugh, dreams that linger when morning breaks.

“They say you can hear your soulmate’s voice when you’re alone,” one girl murmurs, eyes wide with longing.

“They say it feels like belonging,” another sighs.

Harri listens, silent, her heart tightening. Because she has always heard a voice. Voices. And never once have they sounded like belonging.

The school year darkens. Words appear on walls, blood red: The Chamber of Secrets has been opened.Students whisper, grow afraid.

And in her bones, the crueler voice hisses. Heirs and serpents. Blood cleansed with blood.

It sickens her.

The other voice only chuckles, sardonic. Children playing at war. You’d think they’d learn.

She feels caught between them, one tugging her down into hunger, the other mocking but steadying.

The diary falls into her hands, blank pages that bleed ink when she writes. A boy’s name answers her: Tom Riddle.

For a moment, she feels relief. Proof that she is not mad. The voice has a name.

But the more she writes, the more she realizes this Tom is not the whole of it. His words echo the hunger, the cruelty. Not the sardonic steadiness that has kept her afloat all these years.

There are two, she thinks, ink blotting under her grip. I have always known, but now I see it.

The Chamber swallows her in stone and shadow. Tom stands before her, pale and smiling, his diary-self sharpening into life.

“You’ve carried me all along,” he says.

She laughs, bitter. “Not only you.”

His smile falters.

And in the silence that follows, the steadier voice murmurs in her bones: Good girl. Tell him nothing.

It steadies her enough to survive. To fight. To live.

When the Chamber is sealed again and the diary destroyed, Tom’s voice recedes, thin and ragged. But not gone. Never gone.

And the other voice remains, sharp and mocking, present as always.

That night, in the quiet of Gryffindor Tower, Harri stares at the ceiling and listens to her friends whisper of soulmates. Of bonds that promise love, safety, future.

She does not speak. She only thinks: If this is my soulmate, then destiny is cruel indeed.

By thirteen, Harri Potter has begun to understand.

There are two voices in her.

One that is hunger.

One that is steel.

And she is bound to both.

By thirteen, Harri Potter is also certain of one thing: one of the voices in her head belongs to Voldemort.

The diary proved it. The Chamber sealed it. His hunger thrums through her like a scar that will not fade. She knows him even in silence, a presence that coils and hisses at the edge of thought, promising power, whispering blood.

But the other voice — mocking, sharp, sometimes cruel, sometimes oddly steady — is not him.

Which makes her cursed in ways no one else is.

By fourteen, soulmates are no longer whispers or fairy-tales. They are real, tangible things happening around her. Dean Thomas wakes one morning grinning, claiming he heard laughter in his sleep that was not his own.

Parvati Patil blushes when a name blooms faintly on her palm. Hermione dissects her dreams with meticulous detail, certain they are a bond beginning to take shape.

Harri listens, silent, while envy twists inside her.

They have one voice, one bond, one promise. She has two.

And neither is sweet.

When she’s still fourteen, she knows the difference.

Voldemort’s voice is hunger, coiling sharp and venomous, pressing her toward cruelty, promising her a crown of ashes if only she’ll reach for it.

The other is no gentler in tone — sardonic, amused, cruel at times — but its cruelty is never hunger. It cuts, yes, but steadies. It mocks, but sharpens her spine.

She knows, without knowing how, that one voice means her harm and the other means her well.

And she tells no one.

That year, Sirius comes into her life. A godfather. A man with wild hair, a crooked grin, a love that feels fierce enough to anchor her. For a while, Harri tastes what it is to be wanted. She lets herself hope.

The steadier voice grows quiet when Sirius is near, as though watching. The crueler one hisses, resentful.

She chooses Sirius. Again and again, she chooses him. Until the night he is torn from her arms at the Ministry, the veil swallows Sirius whole.

The grief hollows her. She does not cry where anyone can see. She saves her tears for the dark, where the voice waits.

You see now, it murmurs, mocking. Love is fleeting. I am not.

That other voice comes soon after, almost gentle and soft — not mocking, not sharp.

I will give you one gift, little one. One hope.

Her breath hitches. She waits.

When your war is finished, find me. New Orleans. Niklaus Mikaelson.

For the first time, the voice gives her more than cruelty, more than steadiness. A name. A place. A promise.

She clings to it with the desperation of a drowning girl, clutching the syllables like driftwood in a storm.

A hope to keep her alive.

By fifteen, envy has sharpened into ache. Her peers lean into bonds that promise love, belonging, inevitability. She clings to hers because she cannot cut them free. One is a parasite. The other a companion she does not want but cannot lose.

And the war sharpens around her. Cedric dies in the Tournament. Voldemort returns, flesh restored, his voice stronger than ever, pressing against her thoughts until she can scarcely breathe.

Still, she fights him. She clings instead to the other — mocking, steady, cruel but never hollow. The one that tells her, Stand. Survive. Do not yield.

Sometimes she whispers, bitter: If this is you meaning well, then you are crueler than you know.

The answer comes, low and amused: Cruelty keeps you alive, little one.

And she does not disagree.

By sixteen, the war devours her days.

The world shrinks to blood and ash, to battles fought in corridors and forests, to names read aloud in memorial. Harri runs herself raw, fighting, leading, surviving. And in her mind, the voices war as fiercely as she does.

Tom is louder now. The Horcruxes scream through her veins as one by one they are destroyed. His voice lashes, cruel, furious. You think you can cut me away? You think you can live without me? You are me, Harri Potter. Who are you, if not a remnant of Lord Voldemort’s soul?

He mocks her in every silence. Two voices, two soulmates — tell me, which is curse and which is gift? Tell me, broken girl, who will ever love you whole?

She does not answer. She cannot.

Because part of her fears he is right.

Nik’s voice does not soften — it never has — but it steadies. When she falters, when her grief is too heavy, when she wants only to close her eyes and not open them again, it is his laughter that cuts through.

Stand up, little one. You are not finished.

Cruelty is love when it keeps you breathing.

He mocks her, teases her, berates her. But beneath it is a constancy Voldemort cannot mimic. She clings to it, even as she hates herself for it.

At seventeen, she walks into battle with both voices screaming in her skull. Tom rages, desperate, clawing for control as his Horcruxes burn away. Nik chuckles, low and sharp, urging her forward.

When Voldemort falls, when his body collapses at last and the curse breaks, the silence inside her is a thunderclap.

Tom is gone.

The absence is so sharp it feels like pain. She stumbles in the hollow of it, disoriented, as though a limb has been severed.

And then, in the quiet, the other voice hums.

He may have told you love is fleeting, and perhaps it is, but I am not. I am here Harriet. 

The war ends. The dead are buried. Her friends fall into the arms of those assigned for them. Hermione’s dreams have turned into a face. Ron clasps a hand not his own. Even Ginny blushes at whispers only she can hear.

Harri listens, smiling, hollow, but not lost.

Because she has a promise.

A name. A place.

New Orleans. Niklaus Mikaelson.

And when mundanity settles like ash after fire, she clings to it — not a dream, not an illusion, but a thread tied through her very bones.

The war ends, not with triumph, but with silence.

Hogwarts is rubble and smoke, its halls filled with ash and whispers. Bodies are carried out in white sheets, names inked in ledgers that blur beneath Harri’s tired eyes. She stands among the mourners, her scar burning faintly as though mocking her, and feels only hollowness.

They call her savior. The Girl Who Lived. The Girl Who Won. But she does not feel like either. She feels like a ghost, still walking, still breathing, when too many others are not.

Funerals blur together. Fred’s laughter remembered in sobs, George’s face hollow as if half his soul has gone with his twin. Colin Creevey’s small body lowered into the ground, far too young to be placed among the heroes. Lavender Brown, Dennis Creevey, nameless faces who fought beside her and died for a world they barely had time to live in.

Each funeral is a weight pressing down on her chest. The speeches blur — stories of courage, of sacrifice, of lives remembered — but Harri hears only the silences that follow, the gaps where laughter should have been.

It is at Remus and Tonks’s funeral that the weight breaks her.

The ceremony is quiet, windswept, filled with faces streaked by grief. Andromeda holds the child in her arms — Teddy, hair flickering from brown to turquoise, as if even sorrow cannot keep magic at bay. His tiny fists curl against her robes, his mouth opening in a yawn too soft for this hard world.

Harri stares, throat tight.

Remus, gone. Tonks, gone. Sirius, gone. All the adults who should have been anchors in her storm — stripped away. And here is their son, orphaned before he can even speak.

Her chest aches as if she’s staring at herself. Another child left behind. Another cycle repeating.

The voice curls sharp in her bones. You know what it is to be left behind, little one. Don’t let him be.

She nearly breaks then, not at the graves, not at the hymns, but at the sound of that voice — mocking, sardonic, but steady, always steady. A tether in her grief.

She swallows hard, steps closer, and whispers to Andromeda: “Let me help. Please. He’s all I have left of them.”

Andromeda looks at her with eyes too weary to argue. She nods.

So Harri takes Teddy in her arms, cradles him against her chest, and for the first time since the war ended, feels something like resolve.

The days that follow are a blur of mourning. She carries Teddy through ruins and wakes, through kitchens filled with Weasley grief, through nights that smell of smoke and bitter tea. She rocks him when he cries, though her own eyes stay dry.

Yet in those nights, she notices something she has not felt since childhood. Silence.

Tom is gone.

The hunger, the cruelty, the parasitic hiss that had coiled in her veins for as long as she can remember — gone. His voice is ash in her bones.

And for the first time, she has only one.

It frightens her at first, that absence. But then relief blooms. For all her envy, for all her difference, she is like everyone else now. She has one soulmate, one tether. Not two. Not broken.

The voice that remains is sharp, mocking, cruel at times, but steady. Always steady. Hers.

Life at the Burrow should comfort her. The house is warm — too warm — filled with laughter that strains to be genuine. The Weasleys cling to one another, weaving their grief into something almost bearable. Ron and Hermione drift closer, shoulders brushing, words exchanged in silences too tender for her to intrude.

It should feel like home. Instead, she feels like a ghost haunting their hearth.

She helps Molly with the washing up, listens to Arthur ramble about Muggle plugs, watches Ginny practice Quidditch in the yard. She holds Teddy while George sits in silence, as if the baby’s hair changing colour is the only thing left that can make him smile.

And yet, in the quiet moments, she feels apart. Removed. Their grief is shared. Theirs bends them closer together. Hers isolates.

The Ministry summons her often. Photographs, interviews, speeches she does not want to give. They dress her in robes she never chose, sit her before cameras and quills, call her savior, heroine, chosen one. Her name is printed in headlines she cannot stand to read.

She smiles when she must. She nods when they expect it. But when she goes home to the Burrow, strips away the heavy robes, rocks Teddy against her chest, she feels nothing but exhaustion.

At night, when the silence stretches too far, the voice comes.

Look how quickly they forget you when the fire burns low.

She clenches her fists. “They haven’t forgotten. They’re just—”

Living. Moving on. The voice cuts in, amused. And you, little one? You don’t know how.

Her throat tightens. She hates that it’s true.

She drifts between houses. Sometimes the Burrow, sometimes Grimmauld Place, sometimes Andromeda’s quiet flat with its faint smell of old books and baby powder. She helps where she can. She cooks, she cleans, she sings to Teddy in a voice too soft to be her own.

None of it fits.

Mundanity is heavier than war. In battle, every breath had purpose — fight, survive, save. Now her breaths feel wasted. Too many, too empty. 

The voice hums in her bones. Peace was never meant for you. 

She presses her forehead to Teddy’s soft hair. “Then what was?”

Silence stretches. Then, low and certain: Me.

At Grimmauld, the shadows still whisper Sirius’s name. She lingers in his old room, fingers brushing over the carvings on the wall. Teddy gurgles in her arms, oblivious, and she whispers promises into his hair. You’ll never feel this kind of loneliness. I won’t let you.

Hogwarts is rebuilding, but she cannot bring herself to stay long. The broken walls, the half-mended halls — it feels like walking among ghosts. She lays flowers where names are carved into stone, then leaves quickly, as though chased.

By autumn, the world has begun to stitch itself back together. New laws are drafted, shops reopen, children laugh in rebuilt streets. Even grief finds ways to soften into routine.

And everywhere Harri turns, she sees soulmates.

At the Burrow, Ron and Hermione drift into each other’s orbits with a tenderness so natural it almost hurts to look at.

Their laughter is softer now, steadier, stitched with inevitability. Ginny writes in her journal with a blush she cannot hide, words spilling from dreams she dares not say aloud.

Once, Harri overhears Hermione whispering to Ginny by the kitchen fire: “It’s strange, but it feels like he’s always been there. I can’t imagine being without him now.” Ginny sighs, resting her chin in her hands. “I hope mine feels the same when I finally meet him.”

Even Neville, awkward and earnest, admits to hearing a voice in his sleep — one that steadies him when doubt creeps in. He says it quietly, as if afraid the bond will vanish if spoken too loudly, but there is hope in his eyes.

The world is filling with bonds. With belonging.

Harri envies them still. Their soulmates are near, tangible, voices and touches they can reach for. Hers is far, distant, sharp as a blade.

And yet, beneath the envy, there is relief. She is not broken anymore. She has one voice. One soulmate. One thread.

And she clings to that as tightly as she clings to Teddy.

At night, when Teddy stirs against her chest, she whispers to him: “You won’t be like me. You won’t grow waiting for scraps of love. You’ll know it without doubt.”

The voice hums, sharp amusement threaded with something she almost mistakes for gentleness. Cruelty carved you strong. He will not need it. You will be his shield.

She closes her eyes, rocks Teddy until he sleeps again, and wonders if promises spoken in the dark can break the cycles written into blood.

Still, the weeks stretch long, and mundanity sits on her like a weight. She is tired of drifting, tired of envying, tired of watching life move around her as if she does not belong to it. 

The world turns, everyone finding their bonds.

And Harri sits apart, cradling a child not her own, with two voices stitched into her skull. One is gone now, quiet as ash. The other remains — mocking, cruel at times, but steady, always steady.

And when she remembers the promise given once — a name, a place — she knows she cannot stay here forever.

New Orleans. Niklaus Mikaelson.

A tether. A vow. A hope that is hers alone.

Chapter Text

Niklaus Mikaelson is born into stone and bone, not softness.

The huts are crude, the caves colder still, and the forests press against the village like a hand ready to smother. Wolves howl at night, their cries curling through the smoke-holes of homes and settling into children’s marrow.

The men call themselves settlers, Vikings, but in truth they are clinging to survival in a land that does not want them.

Nik grows with dirt under his nails and hunger in his gut. He learns to fish with Rebekah watching from the bank, her toes curled into mud. He learns to fight with Elijah’s hand forcing his wrist straight, Mikael’s fist striking harder when he falters. Kol is a wild thing beside him, laughing when the stick breaks skin, vanishing when chores turn heavy.

Mikael is not a father, not in any sense that matters. He is a hammer wrapped in a man’s skin. His love is discipline; his affection is scorn. When he looks at Nik, it is always with disappointment.

Elijah says it is because Nik has not yet proven himself. Kol says it is because Mikael hates all of them. Nik knows better — it is because Mikael sees weakness where he should see a son.

Esther, their mother, is gentler but no less distant. She whispers of balance and draws stories in ash, lays herbs against sickness, teaching her children that strength is both gift and burden.

She tells them to beware the wolves who prowl beyond the treeline, men and women who are not merely men and women but something older, wilder, cursed. Nik listens with both fear and fascination.

He sees the wolf clans from afar — their hunts under moonlight, their fires glowing in the trees. They are strong, untamed, belonging to the night in a way he never will.

Mikael spits when their names are spoken, calls them beasts who do not know the weight of honour. Nik watches them anyway, envy a knot in his throat.

The caves are where the children hide when Mikael’s temper grows too sharp. Dark hollows with walls slick from river seepage, floors scattered with bones of animals long dead.

They whisper stories there, Rebekah’s voice trembling, Kol daring her to go deeper, Elijah trying to hush them before Mikael notices their absence. Henrik, the youngest, clings to Nik’s side, eyes too wide for the dark.

It is in those caves that Nik first hears of soulmates. Rebekah tells the tale as if she has stolen it from their mother’s lips: of voices that whisper across distance, of names spoken in dreams, of bonds that do not break.

Kol mocks her, calls it a tale for girls, but Nik listens. He pretends disinterest, yet his heart catches on the idea — that somewhere, someone might be his, not out of fear or blood or command, but simply because it was written so.

Mikael drills his sons in the clearing, making them fight until their arms shake, until skin splits and blood paints the earth. Elijah always rises, steady, unyielding. Kol darts like a fox, quick and laughing even when he bleeds. Nik tries. He always tries. Mikael’s gaze finds him weakest, softest, unworthy. He learns to grit his teeth against it, learns to stand back up even when the world tilts.

At night, he dreams of wolves. Golden eyes staring from the trees. Fur bristling in the moonlight. A sound in his bones that feels too much like recognition.

He does not yet understand what it means.

But he will.

The forest is not safe on the night of the full moon. Every child knows it. Wolves do not belong to men then. They belong to the dark, to teeth, to hunger.

Nik knows this better than most. He has felt their eyes on him when he strays too close to the trees, golden and unblinking. He has heard the stories — of claws that tear through bone, of men who wake with blood on their mouths and no memory of the kill. Mikael calls them beasts, not fit for anything but slaughter. Esther’s voice is quieter, but no less heavy: beware them. Respect them. Fear them.

Nik intends to. He intends to watch from a distance, to sneak from the caves and crouch in the brush, heart hammering as the wolves change beneath the moon. He intends to keep this thrill to himself.

But Henrik finds him as he laces his boots.

“You’re going to watch them, aren’t you?” Henrik’s voice is bright with the certainty of a boy too young to fear properly.

Nik’s jaw tightens. “Go back to bed.”

“I want to come.”

“No.” Nik stands, grabs his cloak. “You’re too small. Father will—”

“If you don’t let me,” Henrik cuts in, eyes flashing with mischief that looks too much like Kol’s, “I’ll tell Father you’re sneaking out to see the wolf people turn.”

Nik stills. The threat is sharp enough to land. Mikael’s rage would fall like an axe if Henrik’s words reached him.

“You wouldn’t,” Nik hisses.

Henrik’s grin widens. “I would. Unless you take me.”

It should be an easy choice: cuff his brother’s ear, drag him back to bed, risk Mikael’s wrath later. But Henrik’s face is alight with triumph, with trust, with that look that says you’re my brother, and I know you’ll keep me safe.

Nik exhales, long and ragged. “Stay close to me. Do exactly as I say.”

Henrik nods, solemn as only a child can be, though his smile betrays him.

They slip into the trees. The night is colder here, shadows bending like teeth. Nik grips Henrik’s hand tighter than he means to.

And then — they see them.

Wolves. Not stories. Not whispers. Bodies rippling with the violence of change, bones snapping, fur bursting through skin. Men and women collapse into beasts beneath the moon, their howls thick enough to shake the leaves.

Henrik gasps, eyes wide with awe. Nik feels it too — awe tangled with fear, with something else he cannot name. The wolves move like the forest belongs to them, like the night itself is a part of them.

For a moment, Nik almost forgets why this is dangerous. For a moment, he is a boy watching men made flesh.

Then the wind shifts.

Nostrils flare. Golden eyes turn toward the brush.

“Run,” Nik breathes.

Henrik doesn’t move. His wonder roots him to the ground.

The wolves lunge.

Nik yanks Henrik’s arm, drags him through branches, his own skin splitting under claws. He shoves his brother forward, screaming for him to move. But Henrik is smaller, slower, and the forest is merciless.

The first wolf strikes. Henrik falls. Blood sprays across leaves slick with moonlight. His cry splits Nik open from the inside.

He fights — claws, fists, teeth — but he is only a boy. The wolves are stronger, hungrier. By the time torches blaze through the trees, by the time Elijah and Mikael’s men drive steel into fur, Henrik is still.

Nik kneels in the dirt, hands red, body torn, Henrik’s face pale against the earth.

Mikael’s gaze finds him first. Always him.

“You brought him here,” Mikael growls, voice low with disgust sharp enough to gut. “You killed your brother.”

The words hit harder than claws.

Rebekah screams, falling to her knees beside Henrik. Kol stands frozen, for once without laughter. Elijah’s hand clamps Nik’s shoulder, but it feels like restraint, not comfort.

Nik stares at the blood on his palms and knows it will never wash away.

Henrik’s death cracks the family like ice splitting on a river.

Esther weeps until her eyes are raw, then whispers words of protection, her grief a noose she ties around all their necks.

Mikael turns colder, crueller. He does not raise his voice often — he does not need to. His silence is worse. Every glance at Nik is a blade. Weak. Dangerous. Killer of brothers.

And Nik carries it. He carries it every day, every breath. Henrik trusted him. Henrik followed him. Henrik is dead.

Because of him.

The words root deep, coil around his ribs, bloom into truth.

Henrik is barely in the ground before Esther carves runes into the ground and draws blood from her children’s veins. “I will not lose another,” she says, voice ragged. “You will be strong. Stronger than the wolves.”

They drink. They die. They wake again. It’s unnatural. 

The hunger is like fire in the marrow, gnawing, endless. Nik stumbles through the days after, lips cracked with thirst, every heartbeat around him a drumbeat urging him to feed.

And then he does.

A villager too close, a stranger whose pulse was too loud. Nik tears into flesh, blood spilling across his tongue, and for a moment it is rapture — and then it is ruin. Because the blood stills, the body drops, and something deeper stirs.

Bones break. Pain sears. His skin feels like it’s tearing open from the inside. He collapses, convulsing, golden light bursting from his eyes. Fur pushes against skin that will not yield.

The wolves answer his cry.

Nik’s screams bring more than wolves. They bring Mikael.

Esther tries to hide it, to soothe, but Mikael sees. Mikael always sees.

“What is this?” His voice is terror itself.

Esther falters. Denies. Then confesses. Nik is not Mikael’s son. His blood is of wolf blood. His father — another man. Another clan.

Abomination.

The word strikes harder than the hunger. Mikael’s gaze on him is no longer disappointed; it is disgust sharpened into hatred.

A few days later, the trap is set.

Elijah and Finn tell him they are hunting. They smile too much, speak too calmly. Nik follows. He always follows — if only to prove he can.

The spell binds him. The wolf howls inside his chest and cannot get out. His blood feels split in two — one half silenced, the other sharpened into hunger. He cannot breathe without tasting chains.

Mikael watches him collapse. There is no victory in his face, only contempt. “You are no son of mine,” he says, as if carving truth into stone.

Nik claws at the earth, snarls like the beast they have buried inside him. He wants to lunge, to kill, but Elijah’s hand clamps harder on his arm. His brother’s eyes say forgive me, but his grip says obey Father.

The night burns red. Mikael goes to war against the wolves. Fire in the treeline, screams cracking the dark, steel flashing. Nik tastes the blood in the air but cannot move fast enough to stop it. Wolves who had once howled in recognition of him fall silent.

Days later, Mikael comes to him with a sack. He drops it at Nik’s feet.

“Here,” Mikael says, voice low and vicious. “The only gift you deserve, boy.”

Nik looks down. The sack spills. A head rolls free.

The face is his. Not exactly, but close enough. The same jaw. The same eyes. His true father.

Nik’s breath catches. For a heartbeat, the world tilts.

And all the thoughts come, unbidden, merciless: He was there all along. He could have wanted me. I could have been his. I could have been more than Mikael’s fists, more than Esther’s lies. I could have belonged.

Another thought follows, crueler still: Was he Esther’s true mate? Did she trade love for safety, and damn me with it?

The weight of it splits something inside him.

Rage surges. A rage older than his years, larger than his body. It burns through the bindings, through the hunger, through everything Esther ever whispered.

He turns on her first.

Esther steps forward, hands raised, lips shaping his name. “Niklaus—”

His hands close around her throat. His mother. His betrayer. His maker. His destroyer.

For all her craft, she is still flesh. He tears, and when her body falls, it is with the same thud as the sack at his feet.

The silence after is worse than any scream.

He stares down at her, chest heaving. If she betrayed her mate, what hope is there for his? If he is given  one, would they want him as he is — an abomination, a killer, a son who slaughters his mother?

Mikael stares. For once, fear flickers in the man’s eyes. He sees the true rage in his son, the monster no chain can hold.

And Mikael flees.

The destroyer of his childhood — the man who broke Nik with words harsher than blows — turns his back and runs.

Nik watches him go, his mother dead at his feet, his true father’s head beside her, his siblings scattered and silent.

He is alone. He has always been alone.

And the thought that claws deepest is this: if soulmates are real, then his will hear this silence too. And when they do, they may never come.

The family does not shatter all at once, but in aftershocks that ripple for centuries. In the wake of Esther’s death and Mikael’s flight, they scatter like birds startled from the same tree. When they return, they are altered.

Elijah stays nearest, though even his loyalty is cracked. He walks at Nik’s shoulder, the honest shadow, always preaching honour, restraint, balance. He says always and forever as if it is a vow, but Nik hears the hesitation behind it, the doubt. To Nik, Elijah’s presence is as much a chain as it is a shield.

Rebekah clings too tightly, love spilling from her like water with no vessel to hold it. She dreams of husbands, of children, of sunlight.

Nik cannot give her those things, cannot trust the world not to steal her away. He cages her again and again, telling himself it is protection. She calls it cruelty, and still, she stays.

Kol is chaos. He burns through decades with laughter too sharp, indulgence too wild. He does not weep for Esther, does not bow to Mikael’s memory, does not care for anything beyond his next thrill.

Nik loves him as only a brother can, and yet despises him enough to slide the dagger home when his chaos becomes too dangerous. Kol’s silence is almost a relief, though when he is undaggered, his first breath is always a curse on Nik’s name.

Finn drifts furthest. He speaks of Esther like she was a saint, despises Nik for what was done, for what cannot be undone. He walks away and stays away.

The circle reforms in fragments, never whole, never healed. Henrik is gone, Esther is ash, Mikael is shadow, and what remains is jagged. The vow of family is still spoken, but it tastes bitter now, poisoned by blood and betrayal.

And Nik — Nik wraps himself in the word abomination, shaping armour from it.

The centuries spool out. Empires rise beneath his hands and crumble beneath his fury. He crowns himself king and burns the crown when the game ceases to amuse him. He takes cities as playthings, builds them into empires, then tears them down to ash. Loneliness is his truest companion, sharper than any blade.

The tales of soulmates that once lingered in childhood fires haunt him now. Rebekah whispers of them with longing, Elijah dismisses them with solemn disdain, Kol mocks them when he is awake.

Nik scoffs too, outwardly, but in the hollow where no one sees, he waits. He waits through centuries of silence, through kingdoms turned to dust, through every dagger’s darkness. If this life is cruel enough to turn him abomination, surely it is cruel enough to give him no tether at all.

Yet still he listens.

In New Orleans, he does what Mikael never did. He takes in a slave boy left nameless on the docks, clothes him, teaches him, names him Marcel.

For the first time in centuries, Nik raises something of his own not born of blood or lies. Marcel is laughter in his halls, steel in his streets, sharp enough to remind Nik of his own beginnings but untarnished by Esther’s betrayals.

Nik loves him fiercely, as father, as son, as proof he is not entirely hollow. But always the question gnaws: will Marcel, too, leave me? Will he betray me when the world tempts him away?

Nik loves him anyway.

Time sharpens him. He bends witches to his will, commands vampires as his court, rules his city like a King cloaked in cruelty. But even he cannot ignore whispers of other witches beyond the veil.

Not covens, not lineage-bound spell casters, but wand-wielders who live across seas, who war in shadows, who call themselves pure and split their kind into blood and mud. Their world is strange, their wars stranger still. He listens. He learns. He adds it to the catalogue of cruelties he keeps like scripture.

The soulmate myth never quite leaves him. He dreams of it when Rebekah sighs, when Kol sneers, when Elijah preaches. He wonders if his mother’s true mate had been the wolf whose blood runs through his veins, if her betrayal damned him before his first breath.

He wonders, with bitterness that tastes like blood, if he will ever be given someone — one who will not flinch from what he is.

For centuries, silence answers.

And then, one day so nondescript he could not tell you the season, the silence breaks.

He is in New Orleans, his city, his throne. Marcel is off drilling the fledglings, witches bow their heads in his presence, the sun beats heavy against the Mississippi. It is an ordinary day, unworthy of memory.

Until a whisper brushes against him.

Small. Trembling. The voice of a child.

Why don’t you love me like you love him, Aunt Petunia?

Nik freezes, sharp as a blade unsheathed. The air in his chest stills.

For the first time since his mother’s betrayal, since Mikael’s cruelty, since Henrik’s grave, he is not alone in the silence of his own mind.

The voice is fragile, frayed, lonely enough to stop his breath.

And Niklaus Mikaelson, abomination, monster, destroyer of empires, feels something he has not felt in centuries.

Hope.

At first, he thinks it a trick. That some witch has slipped into his mind to taunt him. But nights pass, and the voice remains. A child locked away in shadows, begging for stories, clinging to dreams.

Her loneliness cuts sharper than Mikael’s lash ever did.

She whispers into the dark, small and desperate: “Tell me a story.”

So he does.

Not that she knows it is him. He curls his voice sharp, mocking, sardonic. He tells her stories of kingdoms that burn, of families that devour one another, of cruelty sharpened into survival.

She listens, wide-eyed in the dark, and though she does not thank him, he feels it: the tether tightening.

It becomes habit. Her voice, his answer. Nights upon nights, she is there.

Through her, he begins to piece together more. She speaks of oddities, of punishments, of teachers who stare at her as if she is cursed. Magic flickers in her like sparks, uncontrolled. He feels her shame when they call her freak, feels her fury when she hides.

His rage burns hot. He imagines tearing through the veil, slaughtering the ones who hurt her. But he cannot. So he steadies her instead. His cruelty shapes into armor, sardonic jabs into knives she can wield.

When she dreams, he follows. She dreams of parents she cannot remember, of men with laughter she aches for, of women who call her child. He feels her grief like his own.

And he begins to hope.

When she is eleven, the name comes.

Hogwarts, she whispers in awe, clutching a letter sealed with wax. Harriet James Potter.

Nik exhales a laugh sharp enough to hurt. At last — she has a name. She is real.

But he is not the only one who hears her.

It comes first as a hiss, then as a laugh. Another voice. Older. Crueler. Hungrier.

Tom.

Nik recognises it for what it is — the shadow of a Dark Lord, fractured, parasitic. He listens as Tom coils around the girl’s thoughts, mocking her, twisting her, pressing poison into her bones.

For the first time in centuries, Nik feels fear. Not for himself — he has long ceased fearing fear. But for her. His tether. His girl.

He tries to cut through, steady her with his sharpness, but she confuses them. His sardonic bite mistaken for cruelty, Tom’s cruelty mistaken for inevitability.

He rages in silence, helpless.

Years pass, and he keeps track of her as best he can.

Through her whispers he learns of her world. Diagon Alley. Flying on broomsticks. Sorting Hats. OWLs and NEWTs. Wands lifted in war. He pieces together a history of witches and wizards divided by blood and mud, by power, by fear.

He learns of Quirrell and the Stone, of chambers and serpents, of dragons and mirrors. He feels her laughter, her grief, her questions.

And he listens as Tom grows louder. As war brews in her halls.

When Sirius dies, he cannot bear her grief.

She curls in on herself, hollowed out, and Nik does something he swore he never would. He gives her a gift. A name.

I will give you one hope, little one. When your war is finished, find me. New Orleans. Niklaus Mikaelson.

The words taste strange on his tongue. To reveal himself. To open that door. But he cannot let her drown without a tether.

And she clings to it, he feels it. Like driftwood in a storm, she holds the syllables of his name and home close.

The years spiral into war. He feels her strength, her fury, her refusal to bend. He feels her grief sharpen into something harder. He feels Tom rage and claw, until the day silence falls.

The Dark Lord is gone.

And for the first time, it is only him and her.

One voice. One tether. One soulmate.

He does not say it aloud, but he waits.

Impatient. Sardonic. Sharp.

He waits for her to keep the promise.

New Orleans. Niklaus Mikaelson.

And she does, eventually.

Chapter Text

The decision is made in a quiet room, not a battlefield. There is no wand in her hand, no curse on her tongue—only the weight of Teddy’s soft breathing against her shoulder and the steadiness of a grandmother’s gaze across the table.

Andromeda’s flat still smells faintly of books and lavender polish. The curtains sway in the late September breeze.

Teddy gurgles in Harri’s arms, his hair flickering turquoise, then settling into a shade that looks heartbreakingly like Remus’s. For a moment, silence feels like another person in the room, pressing at the edges, waiting.

“And you’re certain?” Andromeda says at last. Her voice is not unkind, but it is iron-bound. “You would take him across the ocean, away from everything he’s ever known?”

Harri tightens her hold on the child, her throat working. “He won’t remember Britain,” she says softly.

“Not the ruins, not the funerals. What he remembers will be what we give him. And—” She falters, then pushes through. “I’ve found him. My soulmate.”

The words land like stones. Andromeda’s mouth tightens, her brows pulling low.

“Niklaus Mikaelson.” She says the name as if tasting ash. “A stranger. A dangerous stranger. And you would trust him with Teddy?”

“I don’t trust easily.” Harri’s voice is sharper than she means it to be, but she doesn’t retract it. “I know danger when I see it. I know cruelty. He isn’t—” She stops, exhales, and starts again, steadier this time. “He isn’t gentle, no. But he’s constant. He was there when Tom was in my head, when I thought I’d drown in it. He steadied me. I can’t explain it. I only know that when everything else was gone, he remained.”

Andromeda’s eyes glisten, though her mouth stays stern. She looks down at Teddy, brushing one finger along the baby’s soft cheek.

“He’s all I have left,” she whispers. “Nymphadora gone. Remus gone. My husband buried years before them. Teddy is my breath now.”

Harri swallows hard. “I know. And I’m not trying to take him from you. I just… I need to go. And I can’t leave him behind. He’s all I have left too.”

The silence between them stretches, heavy but not hostile. Teddy sneezes, startling them both into small, rueful smiles.

Finally Andromeda nods, once. “Then a compromise,” she says, her voice firm though it shakes at the edges.

“You take him, because I cannot cage you. But you write to me. Letters every week, more if you can. You send him back in summers, when he is older. You let him know me, not as a photograph, not as a story, but as flesh and blood.”

Relief floods Harri so quickly her knees almost buckle. She nods, fiercely. “I promise. I swear it.”

Andromeda’s hand trembles as she reaches out, brushing Teddy’s small hand with her thumb.“Then may life be gentler to him than it ever was to us.”

She looks back at Harri, something soft breaking through her grief-worn eyes. “And may your soulmate be worth what you are giving up.”

Harri doesn’t say it aloud, but in her bones she feels Nik’s laughter curl, sharp and low: I’ll make sure of it, little one.

The farewell dinner is set at the Burrow, though it feels more like a wake disguised with lanterns and stew. Molly insists on cooking a mountain of food as if she can stave off departure with shepherd’s pie.

Arthur tells stories that trail into affectionate tangles about plugs and ports. The house is full—Ginny perched on the stairs, Hermione pressed close to Ron, Neville clutching a wrapped bundle that Harri suspects is a plant.

She sits at the long table with Teddy in her lap, listening to the laughter that strains to stay bright. For once she lets herself simply look at them: her family, not by blood but by bond.

Their hair, their smiles, the way grief has stitched them together with threads she does not quite belong to. She will remember this, she decides, not the funerals or the battles, but this—warmth straining against loss.

“So you’re really going,” Ron says, breaking the quiet lull of spoons against bowls. His tone is blunt, but his eyes are softer. “All the way to America.”

Harri nods, brushing Teddy’s hair back from his brow. “I have to. It’s… it’s not just a voice in my head anymore. It’s a tether. If I stay, I’ll always feel half here, half gone.”

Hermione reaches across the table, taking Harri’s free hand. “We understand. Soulmates—” her voice falters, a blush flickering across her face, “they aren’t something you can ignore. But promise us you’ll write.”

“I will.” Harri squeezes her hand back. “Every week.”

Neville clears his throat, then slides the bundle toward her. “It’s a cutting,” he says awkwardly. “From the Mimbulus. It’ll grow anywhere, even somewhere as strange as America. Thought maybe… you’d like something alive from home.”

Harri presses the gift to her chest, warmth threading through her. “Thank you, Neville. That means more than you know.”

Ginny doesn’t speak until the plates are cleared, when the chatter dips into silence. Then she crosses the room in a rush and throws her arms around Harri, clinging tightly. “I hate that you’re leaving,” she mutters into Harri’s shoulder, “but I’d hate it more if you stayed miserable. So go. Just… don’t forget us.”

“I couldn’t,” Harri whispers back, her throat aching. “Not ever.”

The night winds down with promises repeated—letters, visits, owl-post that will cross oceans. Molly fusses over Teddy, dabbing at her eyes. Arthur presses a hand to Harri’s shoulder, murmuring about bravery taking many forms.

When at last Harri steps into the night air, cool and sharp, she feels as if she has left pieces of herself scattered among them.

But the tether in her bones hums steady, waiting.

That night, Grimmauld Place feels heavier than usual. Shadows cling to corners, the walls holding onto Sirius’s ghost. Teddy sleeps soundly in the crib Kreacher had grudgingly repaired.

Harri sits by the window, the moon spilling pale across the floorboards. Her hands tremble, though with anticipation more than fear.

You’re restless, the voice hums through her, sardonic and amused.

She swallows. “You can hear that?”

I’ve always heard it. Tonight it sings louder. Leaving them frightens you more than any war did.

Her throat tightens. “They’re all I’ve ever had. And now I’m choosing to walk away.”

Choosing me. The words curl, not boastful but certain. You think I do not know what that costs you?

Harri presses her forehead to her knees, laughter shaking out of her in a rush. “You don’t sound cruel tonight.”

Cruelty has its place. But tonight— a pause, softer than she expects —tonight I would rather hope.

She lifts her head, heart hammering. “Then tell me something true.”

The voice—Nik—chuckles low. I paint when I cannot sleep. My brother mocks me for it. My sister says it’s the only time I look gentle. Both are wrong. It isn’t gentleness. It’s survival. Without it I’d have torn the city down long ago.

Harri smiles into the dark, a spark of warmth breaking through. “I sing. Only to Teddy. He doesn’t care if I’m out of tune.”

Perhaps I’ll be the judge of that one day.

Her breath catches. “One day. Soon.”

The bond hums, sharper, almost tender. Soon, little one. I’ll be waiting.

The morning she leaves Britain dawns pale and cool, mist curling low across the rooftops. Grimmauld Place smells of dust and polish, of rooms too long held in silence. Harri moves quietly through it, Teddy balanced on her hip, her other hand trailing over bannisters and doorframes as though memorising the texture of goodbye.

She has packed lightly. A trunk of clothes. Sirius’s cloak, folded last. Neville’s plant, swaddled in cloth.

A handful of photographs that feel more like antiques than memories. The rest she leaves—because if she carries everything, she would never go.

Andromeda waits in the doorway, eyes red from a sleepless night. She does not speak as Harri sets the trunk down, but when Teddy reaches for her, she gathers him close, pressing her face into his hair. Her silence is heavy but not damning; it is a silence full of love restrained.

“I’ll write,” Harri says softly. “Every week.”

Andromeda nods, still holding the child. When she looks up, her voice is rough but steady. “Go, then. Before I lose my nerve.”

Harri hugs her tightly, whispering into her ear, “Thank you.” Then she takes Teddy back, and with one last look at the crooked house that was once a sanctuary, she steps into the street where a portkey waits to carry them across the sea.

The crossing is a blur of ocean and sky. The portkey leaves her dizzy, landing them at a magical way-station in Lisbon before another jump takes them to a transatlantic vessel warded for wizardkind.

The ship is old but sturdy, sails snapping with enchanted wind. Teddy marvels at the gulls swooping alongside, his hair flashing silver as though echoing their wings. Harri holds him close against the chill, her heart caught between awe and ache.

Nights at sea are the hardest. The waves beat steady against the hull, and Teddy stirs often, waking with soft cries. Harri soothes him with songs, her voice low and unsteady, but enough.

When at last he sleeps again, she lies awake staring at the low ceiling, feeling the bond hum in her bones.

You’re closer, Nik’s voice threads through her, rough-edged and certain. I can feel it.

She smiles into the dark. “Is that relief I hear?”

A challenge, he corrects, amusement curling at the edges. If you are half as stubborn in person as you are in my head, New Orleans will never recover.

Harri laughs softly, careful not to wake the child. “I thought soulmates were supposed to be tender. Sweet. You sound more like a storm warning.”

Storms clear the air. Sweetness rots the teeth. You should thank me for honesty.

“Maybe I will,” she teases. “When I see you.”

A pause, then lower, steadier: You will see me soon. And then you’ll know whether hope was worth it.

Days stretch long. She watches the horizon shift from endless grey into streaks of gold. Teddy learns to toddle along the narrow deck, sailors laughing as his hair flashes with each mood—green at their applause, indigo when he stumbles, gold when he giggles.

He is a constant reminder of why she must keep moving forward: not just for herself, but for him.

At night, she and Nik talk more. Sometimes sharp, sometimes soft. He tells her about painting, about a city built on bones and music, about siblings who are both wound and salve.

She tells him about Sirius, about Quidditch in the sun, about the ruins of Hogwarts being stitched back together stone by stone.

“One day,” she admits, voice hushed, “I wandered the halls while they rebuilt. I found the Mirror again, covered in dust. I thought it would show me my parents like before. Instead, it showed a stranger standing in sunlight I didn’t recognize, sunshine hair, and dimpled smile. I hoped, still hope, that it was is you.”

A pause, the bond thrumming. That was me, Nik murmurs, low and certain. Not when you were a child. Not when Tom’s shadow still clung to you. But after, when the war was done. You saw me because by then, the thread had nothing left to fight through.

Her breath hitches. “So it wasn’t madness.”

No, he says, softer. It was me. Only me.

The words feel like a hand pressed gently against the hollow in her chest. She falls asleep smiling, the waves rocking her into dreams that for once are not nightmares.

Land rises on the horizon one morning like a promise: New Orleans, the port bustling with masts and banners, gulls shrieking as if heralding her arrival.

The air is warmer, spiced with salt and sugar, the sun heavy on her shoulders. Teddy wriggles in her arms, his hair flashing gold as though he senses the change.

Harri’s heart races. Every step down the gangplank feels like walking into a story she has half-dreamed her whole life. The bond thrums in her bones, sharp and sure, pulling her toward the crowd that gathers at the dock.

And there he is.

Niklaus Mikaelson stands at the edge of the throng, the city sprawling behind him like a kingdom he both owns and defies. Sunlight spills over him, catching in hair that gleams like molten bronze, shadowing the curve of his mouth. His eyes find hers at once—as though they have always known where to look.

For a heartbeat, everything stills. The noise of the dock, the creak of ropes, the gulls overhead—all fade until there is only this: him, and her, and the tether that sings between them.

His smile breaks slow, dimples carving deep. Hope and danger, both at once. He steps forward, his voice low and inevitable.

“Hello, love.”

Harri exhales, the weight of years loosening all at once. Teddy presses his small hand against her collarbone, as if sealing the moment. And for the first time since the war ended, she feels not haunted, but found.

New Orleans drips with jazz and chaos, and Nik has never been made for waiting.

And yet, as he stands on the port of New Orleans, he waits. He waits like the beggar children in the alleys and yearns like the mothers who cannot feed their own.

He waits for a woman who is no phantom, no dream, though she has been both to him for longer than he cares to admit.

He knows more of her life than any stranger should. Wars reached him in fragments — headlines snatched from crumpled papers, whispers traded across oceans, the shiver of her voice when grief cracked through her mind into his.

The world called her savior, martyr, miracle. He called her little one, half in mockery, half in something else he dares not name.

What a strange courtship it has been. No stolen glances across candlelight, no perfumed letters sealed with wax. Only her voice pressed raw into his skull, laughter spilling at odd hours, defiance sharper than steel.

Only the hush of confessions shared in the hollows of thought where no one else could trespass. A bond built not in parlors or taverns but in marrow and shadow. Intimate in ways that turn intimacy into a poor imitation.

And so he waits.

If Kol knew, he’d never be spared. Niklaus Mikaelson, brought low by a slip of a girl in school robes, Kol would croon, wicked grin wide enough to cut.

Rebekah would be worse — eyes shining, already weaving gowns and fantasies the girl would have no interest in.

Elijah would not speak at all, which is worse still. Silence is the sharpest blade.

Nik almost laughs at himself. He should be above this — pacing a dock like a jilted lover, restless as a hound on a leash. And yet here he stands, expectant, foolish, his chest tighter than it has been in a century.

A gull shrieks overhead, slicing the thought clean. His gaze fixes on the horizon, where sails gleam white against the sun, where a ship lists heavy toward port.

The tether in his bones hums sharper, more insistent.

Soon.

Soon the girl who has haunted his shadows and steadied his storms will set foot in his city, within his reach. And if the world has any sense of irony — and it always does — she will hate him at first sight.

The thought curls his mouth into a grin, dimples cutting deep.

The gangplank groans, lowering to the dock. Passengers spill like ants, weary and sunburnt, their chatter swallowed by the clamor of gulls and vendors hawking wares. He scarcely sees them. The bond tugs too sharply, narrowing his vision until there is only her.

A small figure, dark hair whipping in the river wind, a child balanced steady on her hip. Eyes that are too green, scanning the crowd as if she has always known where to look.

And then she does look.

Straight at him.

The noise of the port dies, as if the city itself knows better than to intrude. For the first time in a long time, Nik feels the stillness of recognition sink into his bones.

She is younger than he expected, older than she should be. Fragile and unbreakable all at once. And she is his — not by conquest, not by blood, but by a thread that has never once snapped, no matter how cruelly it pulled.

Her mouth parts, breath catching. The child in her arms presses a hand against her collarbone, as though sealing something sacred.

Nik’s grin softens into something dangerous. 

“Hello, love.”

The words leave him smoother than he expected, soft where he thought they might bite. For once, his voice carries no mockery — only the kind of inevitability that tastes like iron on the tongue.

She does not answer at once. Green eyes pin him as if trying to peel him apart bone by bone. He almost laughs at the audacity — she has looked at kings, monsters, tyrants, and still she looks at him like this.

And then, he turns to the child.

Small, quiet, balanced easily on her hip as though he belongs there, though the weight of him is too heavy for someone so young to bear.

The boy’s hair shifts faintly in the sunlight — a ripple of colour, quick as a bird’s wing, and his eyes flash that of amber. A little wolf child he is.

His smile turns razor sharp.

Nik tilts his head, lips quirking. “You bring company,” he murmurs, tone sardonic but low, as if they stand alone and not in the chaos of a port. “How very considerate of you. I was beginning to think introductions might be dull.”

Her grip tightens around the child, but her chin lifts, her gaze slicing into him with quiet steel. And then she says it — voice steady, threaded with dry humor.

“I thought you’d enjoy being a family man.”

The words puncture the air, sharper than he expects, and for a moment he almost startles. Family man. Of all the things he has been called, never that. The irony should sting. Instead, it curls warm in his chest, unwelcome but undeniable.

A laugh slips from him, low and rough, edged with surprise. “Careful, love. Say it like that and I might start believing you mean it.”

Something in her eyes softens then — not surrender, not sweetness, but recognition. The bond hums steady between them, no longer a storm, but a quieter current pulling them closer.

For the first time in years, Nik does not feel like he is waiting.

Chapter Text

The city refuses to be quiet.

By the seventh morning, Harri knows the cadence of the Quarter the way a sailor learns the tide. Dawn comes with mops against thresholds and curses sloshed with water, the night’s glitter dragged back into the drains.

Mid day swells riotous—vendors hollering about charms that would sour in her hands, tourists already a little drunk on sugar and brass, a woman with a parrot that shrieks like a kettle whenever Teddy laughs.

Evening crackles. Jazz horns lean out of open doors, cicadas needle the edges of thought, and the river keeps its own metronome, big and slow, a heart that won’t be rushed.

Teddy adapts faster than she does. He has opinions about beignets (wonder), brass bands (ecstasy), and street magicians (suspicion that dissolves into delight when coins appear behind his ear).

His hair adverts his mood before his face can—saffron-gold when he’s pleased, lake-green when he is intent on mastering the wobble of his steps, bruised-plum in the split second before tears.

He has taken to the courtyard as though he built it, to the cracked basin of the dry fountain as a citadel.

The house Nik found—old bones, stubborn shutters, a lemon tree attempting bravery in a chipped pot—has become a map of small discoveries: the cupboard that sighs, the stair that whines, the slant of amber light that pools in the late afternoon like spilled honey across the floorboards.

Harri walks the perimeter the first day, the second, the third, fingers trailing the fence pickets as if memorising a word she’s never been taught aloud.

She listens to the house learn her—Teddy’s night-cry, her kettle’s whistle, the soft tread of a centuries-old vampire who does not bother to pretend he is not there.

Nik is a habit she did not mean to acquire. He does not hover, but he arrives.

She will turn from the wash-line and find him already at the gate, the bond singing like a struck string; she will be pinning Teddy’s blanket and hear his voice in her head saying, Love, that knot will never hold a storm; she will step into the street for oranges and meet his shadow before his smile.

Sometimes he is only a hum behind her eyes, sardonic and amused and infuriatingly steady. Sometimes he is exactly where she can see him, taking up space as if space likes being taken.

She hates how, when he goes, the city sounds too bright. She hates how, when he is near, the city gifts like it exhaled.

On the fourth morning she takes Teddy to the market by the river. Heat sits low, not yet mean.

The stalls smell of spice and frying oil, of damp rope and oranges with skin like lanterns. A woman presses a string of wooden beads into Teddy’s hand; he offers them back with the solemnity of a magistrate.

Another woman insists on tying a red ribbon to Harri’s wrist—protection, child, against eyes that pry. Harri thanks her and takes them off, because superstition is only the shape fear makes when it wants to feel useful.

Nik ghosts beside them without announcement, and still she knows him, the way one knows the pressure change before rain: the bond sharpening, her spine admitting relief it has no permission to feel.

“You collect ribbons now,” he says, examining the ribbon she tucks in Teddy’s hair with a mouth too close to a smile. “Shall I be jealous?”

“You’d be ridiculous,” she answers, but the word lands gentler than it could have. Teddy tips toward him in greeting, as if the wolf in the room is the safest thing to reach for.

He scoops the child with that same look she is learning—like he’s been handed a live current and must decide whether to brace or be carried. “Good morning, little usurper,” Nik tells Teddy. “Have you supplanted me yet?”

“Dadah,” Teddy informs him gravely, which is neither accurate nor fair.

Harri makes a noise between a protest and a laugh. “He does that with any word that starts hard,” she says. “Door is ‘dah.’ Dog is ‘dah.’ You are not exempt from his laziness.”

“Not laziness,” Nik replies, eyes gleaming. “Efficiency.” He glances over one shoulder, where a trio of men pretend not to stare. “We should walk.”

“Why?” she says, already knowing the answer.

“Because eyes,” he murmurs. 

She bites her tongue on the retort. She is not naïve. Curiosity follows her as much as it follows him. New Orleans is a city built on watching—even the balconies lean to look.

They walk. He does something she is beginning to recognise as careful: not the obvious guard of a body interposed, not the arrogance of possession, but the geometry of presence—he arranges himself so she is simply… less visible.

A joke for the vendors, a barbed remark for a man whose interest is the wrong colour, a tilt of head that quiets a question before it becomes a problem.

It should rankle. It does. And also: she has been a spectacle on other people’s terms for long enough. The reprieve is not nothing.

He buys oranges with the kind of money that comes from time and ruin. He carries the paper sack in one hand, Teddy on one shoulder, and looks, for sixteen steps, like a man the world might have allowed to be ordinary.

The thought is dangerous. She lets it pass.

That night, after Teddy has fallen asleep in a nest of blankets without any respect for pillows, Harri finds Nik in the courtyard’s blue-dark. The lemon tree makes an argument with shadow. The fountain suggests a history of water without bothering to provide any.

“Tell me about them,” she says from the threshold.

He does not pretend to misunderstand, though his grin offers the option. “Them?”

“Your siblings.” She does not sit. “You talk around them like you’re walking a field that still has glass in it. I’d like to know where not to step.”

Something flickers in his gaze—amusement first, then a ripple of reflex anger, then the quieter thing that lives beneath both.

He sets his cigarette on the lip of the fountain and does not light it. A concession she did not ask for and will not name.

“Elijah,” he says, and his tone goes precise. “Is the brother people invent when they need a story about goodness surviving the winter. He is honour like a man can make a shelter out of it. He is also a liar, though he’ll call it diplomacy, and a hypocrite, though he prefers ’principle.’ He wears suits that cost more than this house and guilt that weighs more than it.”

“You love him,” she says.

“I love him,” he agrees, and the admission cuts clean. “When he keeps me, I resent it. When he leaves, I set cities on fire. That is brotherhood as we know it.”

She leans one shoulder to the doorjamb, the wood warm from holding daylight. “Rebekah?”

He exhales a laugh shaped like ache. “Rebekah, my heart, she is a dreamer that the world punished for dreaming. She wants what our hands spoil—human things, sun things, a front step with a child’s chalk scribbles and a neighbour who borrows sugar. She will carve your eyes out for threatening those impossibilities, and then she will bring you soup because you look thin.”

His mouth softens. “She is the best of us. She also thinks she’s the most wronged. Both can be true.”

“And Kol?” The name tastes like mischief even before it’s spoken.

“Kol is the sound glass makes when it breaks in another room and you cannot find the door quick enough,” Nik says, delighted and wary at once.

“He is brilliant, and he uses his brilliance as a knife. He is loyalty’s inverse—if he chooses you, he will burn the world because it’s fun to watch it bend around your silhouette. If he chooses himself, and he often does, he will sell you for a trick he hasn’t learned yet.”

He pauses, amused. “He will like you. He will pretend not to. He will be cruel because he thinks cruelty protects him. You may tell him it doesn’t; he will smile and be crueler.”

“You speak about them like weather,” Harri says. “Like they are systems that move through you rather than people you can refuse.”

“I have refused Rebekah more than once,” he says. “She forgave me eventually and has been exacting her revenge in petty domestic torments ever since.”

“Like what?”

“She once replaced every bottle in my cellar with vervain-spiked vinegar,” he replies, affronted and proud. “I did not notice until I had guests. Marcel wept. It was humiliating.”

“Marcel?” The name sits in his voice like a ring he doesn’t take off.

“My son,” he says without flinching. “Not by blood. By everything that matters more. He is this city made boy. He is hunger shaped into discipline. He is—” The bond shivers with pain that may be memory, may be hope. “He is not here for now.”

“And Elijah?”

Silence tightens. “Also not here,” he says at last, even, deliberate. “You will meet Rebekah first. Then Kol. Both will insist on being the first. Consider yourself warned.”

She nods like she has been told a tide time. “Thank you,” she says.

“For the warning?”

“For the truth,” she says, and does not add, you did not lie to me even when it would have been easier. He hears it anyway; the bond moves like water where words cannot cross.

Kol arrives before noon two days later, a storm that never learned subtlety. He does not knock.

He kicks the gate open with the heel of his boot and declares, to the lemon tree and anyone within five streets, “Brother, congratulations on your latest bad decision.”

Harri meets him in the courtyard with Teddy on her hip and a patience she has not yet used today.

Kol is all angles and sparkle, danger with dimples, a grin that tries to sell you both the knife and the bandage.

“This is her then,” he says, uninvited into her space, eyes bright with a cruelty so playful it would be easy to excuse it. “The little war-widow you’ve been courting between the ears. Smaller than I expected. Fiercer too.” His gaze drops to Teddy, whose hair flares indigo at the scrutiny. “And you’ve brought… a mascot.”

“A child,” Harri says, which is both correction and warning. “You’re Kol.”

“Deeply,” he says, bowing with a flourish that would be charming if it were not also threat. “And you are the girl who told my brother to be a family man in public.” He beams. “I have adored you from a distance for days.”

Nik is there then, the bond flaring with a heat Harri has learned means don’t. He places himself a fraction to her left, not blocking, not posturing, but drawing a line Kol can see.

“Play nicely,” Nik says without warmth.

Kol tuts. “You say that when you mean, ‘leave before I take your teeth.’ I’m not three, Niklaus.” He tilts his head at Harri. “He is very frightening when he glowers. You’ll get used to it. We did.”

“Is he…” Harri begins, watching Kol’s eyes track Teddy’s hair as if it were a flame, “always like this?”

“Worse,” Nik says.

“Better,” Kol says at the same time, delighted.

Teddy, who has been still with the intensity he reserves for new wolves, decides abruptly that Kol is interesting.

He leans toward him, small fingers splayed like a starfish.

Kol recoils half a step, then remembers he has an audience and allows an approach with a grimace so theatrical Harri nearly laughs.

“Why does it do that?” he asks, indicating the hair.

“It’s not an ‘it.’ He’s a boy,” Harri says, and Kol’s eyes flick to hers, assessing, pleased.

“Apologies, little boy,” Kol says gravely. “Your wig misbehaves.”

Teddy blows a raspberry that contains his entire spirit. Kol’s grin knives wider. He glances at Nik, mischief in every line. “You will hate how much you like him,” he says, sing-song, and vanishes before either of them can prove him wrong.

Nik exhales through his nose. “That went better than it could have,” he allows.

“He called my son an ‘it,’” Harri says.

“In Kol’s mouth, that was almost affection.”

She snorts, which is not, strictly speaking, dignified. “Your family is a hazard.”

“And yours?” he asks, soft without pity.

“Stubborn,” she says. “Wounded. Kind in inconvenient ways.”

“You will write to them,” he says—not a question, not permission. An acknowledgement of a fact. “You should.”

She studies him. “I intend to.”

“Good,” he says, and something unclenches that she didn’t realise she’d kept braced.

Rebekah comes at dusk like a verdict you want anyway. She does knock, three brisk raps like a gavel. Her dress is a thing of velvet and defiance; her mouth is a weapon she’s learned to sheath when necessary.

Her eyes go first to Teddy, soften without asking anyone’s leave, and then to Harri, sharpening with interest.

“You’re very small,” she says, not unkindly. “I mean that as a compliment. Small people survive catastrophes. We slip through cracks. Big men get crushed.” She spares Nik a sideways look so practiced it might be a family heirloom. “Ask him.”

“Do come in, Rebekah,” Nik says, because manners on his tongue always taste slightly like mockery.

“I will,” she answers, breezing past him. To Harri: “You truly called him a family man? In public? We owe you a monument.”

Harri discovers it is possible to like a woman before you trust her. “I was improvising,” she says.

“Keep doing it.” Rebekah leans out the window, inhales the evening—the street barrow clatter, the fry-smell, the sly hush of something supernatural keeping its feet up for now.

“This city,” she says, and it sounds like both prayer and threat. Then to Harri, quieter: “If you mean to stay, we’ll make a life that fits around you, not the other way. Do not let him bully you into his shape. He is very good at it.”

“Rebekah,” Nik says, a warning that cannot strip itself of affection.

“What?” she says, innocent as a saint. “I’m welcoming our sister.”

Harri stills. The word lands where her bones kept a space.

Rebekah sees it. “Forgive me,” she says, not embarrassed. “I do not mean to burden you with us before you’ve decided you want the curse. Sister is a heavy thing in our house. It endorses atrocities.”

“I’m familiar,” Harri says softly, and Rebekah’s hand grazes her forearm, gentle, fleeting, as if to say yes, I see the ghost you’re carrying.

They drink something Rebekah insists is not blood and not poison and tastes faintly of oranges that were allowed to think too long.

They sit with the window open and let the city spill in.

Rebekah tells a story about a dressmaker who tried to hex her into paying full price; Harri tells one about a hat she wore until it died because a man she loved laughed when she first put it on; Nik interrupts only to improve the dramatics, for which Rebekah tells him to go paint himself something honest.

When Rebekah leaves, she kisses Teddy’s hair and says, “If my brother breaks your heart, do it back.”

“I will,” Harri says, and something dangerous and true passes between the women that does not require Nik’s understanding.

They argue the next afternoon, because the city insists on being itself and men insist on being unwise.

A witch with too-plucked eyebrows tries to sell Harri a safehouse with wards that smell wrong. She declines politely, twice, then not politely, once.

The witch, affronted, raises her hand with a word on her tongue that tastes like compulsion. It doesn’t land. Harri is not a girl who can be shoved anymore. But the gesture is enough to push Nik from amused distance to motion.

He is simply there—between, around, entire. The word dissolves against him as water does when it remembers stone. He looks at the witch like a patient teacher looks at a knife. “Run,” he suggests, almost tender, and she does, because instinct predates pride.

“What were you going to do?” Harri asks, after the thrum in her blood stops imitating a snare drum.

“Remove a problem,” he says.

“She wasn’t a problem.”

“She thought you were prey.” His eyes are not cruel. They are something more dangerous: certain.

“I have been prey,” Harri says, steady. “I did not stay that way.”

“Is this pride?” he asks.

“It is information,” she says. “And reminder: I came here to belong to my own choosing, not to be curated.”

He watches her in that considering way she both despises and hopes for. “You will let me protect what is mine,” he says, softer than a command should be.

She should bristle at the word.

Mine.

It should smoke in her collarbone like a brand. Instead, what the bond carries from him is not ownership taught by empires but keeping learned in hunger. You, not from conquest, but from care. She swallows against the recognition.

“I will,” she says at last, and the words cost her some pride and no dignity. “When it is a dragon. Not when it is a woman with sharp eyebrows and a bad sales pitch.”

A curve of mouth that concedes. “I can distinguish between the two,” he says.

“Can you?” she counters.

“Usually when you tell me,” he admits, infuriating and perfect.

“Then listen,” she says.

“I am,” he says, and the way he says it makes the courtyard tilt a fraction toward something like grace.

He shows her the studio the same evening, not because he means to, she thinks, but because he cannot help it.

The door at the back of the hall she had mistaken for a pantry opens into a room with higher ceilings and a jealousy of light.

Canvases lean like bodies at rest. The smell is turpentine and patience and someone trying not to think too hard.

She stops on the threshold. “You told me you paint when you cannot sleep,” she says, even though the bond lets him feel the recognition slide through her.

“I tell you many things,” he says, which is, today, an apology.

The largest canvas faces the window. The river runs through it, not as a postcard does but as an artery would—there is a vein-blue that seems to move even when the air is still.

A figure walks the river’s margin, small and stubborn, shoulders set toward a dark that has teeth. She knows the slope of that back. She has seen it in shopfronts and in mirrors and as a child’s shadow in the Mirror of Erised, lonely and furious.

“Is that me?” she whispers, the old question worn soft in her mouth.

“It always has been,” he says, and it isn’t a trick, and it isn’t a romantic line; it is simply the truth standing without apology in the room.

She stands very still. He does not crowd the moment. He looks like he wants to, which is almost better.

“What do you see,” she says, “when you look at it?”

“Something I did not deserve,” he answers. Then, because he cannot leave himself soft for long: “And something that, inexplicably, did not run when I growled.”

“I did run,” she says, and the honesty tastes like metal. “I just ran toward.”

“Reckless,” he says, pride like a bruise.

“Cowardly would have been staying,” she says. “I’ve done enough of that.”

“Then,” he says, and steps back as if making space is a language he is learning, “we will build you a life that requires less running.”

“Promises are heavy,” she warns.

“I am strong,” he answers, not amused.

She looks at the river again and thinks of weights she has chosen, and of how choosing is not the same as being spared.

He tells her more about the siblings over the following days, not as confession, but as anecdotes that carry knives with the jokes.

About Elijah reading to him when they were children from a book that had fewer pages each winter; about Rebekah’s practice of adopting stray girls and teaching them to wield cutlery like queens; about Kol inventing a spell to make thunder taste of sugar and nearly killing the quarter-mile of people who believed him when he said it was harmless.

“They are terrible,” Harri says with fondness.

“They are mine,” he says like a benediction he doesn’t believe he has the right to speak aloud.

“Your mother?” she asks carefully, because the word is a mine in many languages.

“Made a curse,” he says, and does not blink. “Called it love. Wore both like a perfume. We learned to hold our breath.”

“And your father?”

“A hammer,” he replies, same as she has sometimes thought of another man she loved and survived. “He made sons the way some men make tables—useful until they break and then worth the wood.”

She inhales against the shared language of certain kinds of fathers. “I’m sorry,” she says, which is inadequate and correct.

“Do not be,” he says. “I have stopped being a table.”

She laughs despite herself, and it is ugly and good.

A week is only seven days to the clock. To a bond that has been humming for years, it is a storm’s eye. There are calm hours when she forgets that cities can drown. There are sudden gusts that remind her to find the high ground.

On the seventh night, the air tastes like copper. Thunder froths beyond the river as if the Gulf is irritated and intends to say so.

Teddy will not decide on sleep; he chooses instead to wage a campaign against it with all available artillery. Harri hums to him, then sings, soft and sometimes flat, because perfect things shatter quickest and she will not tempt it into being tidy.

He surrenders with honour, face sweaty, hair a puddle-colour one shade above dream.

She stays by the crib long past necessity, the old reflex of watching what she cannot bear to lose. When she turns, Nik is in the doorway like a promise she has not decided to claim.

“It will rain,” he says.

“Good,” she replies. “The heat needed a scolding.”

He comes in on quiet feet, the kind that learned their silence under trees that had names and wolves that answered. They stand side by side, looking at the sleep they are both learning around.

“Tell me something true,” she says, because the night has teeth and she refuses to flinch.

He huffs, amused and resigned. “I once tried to teach myself to play trumpet to impress a girl,” he says. “Rebekah threatened to dagger me if I continued. I respected her judgment and wooed the girl by other means.”

“What means?” she asks, unable not to.

“I took a man’s hand off when he cornered her in an alley,” he says, matter-of-fact. “She found it very romantic. We were ill-suited and parted amicably after a decade.”

Harri rubs her eyebrow as if smoothing that story could make it a different shape. “You are not allowed to dismember anyone for me,” she says.

“I have not,” he points out, maddening.

“Nor plan to,” she clarifies.

He considers. “I plan to prevent the need,” he says, which is a weasel’s sentence and also, possibly, grace in his grammar.

She decides to allow it, for the duration of the storm only.

“Your turn,” he says, amused. “Say something true.”

She watches Teddy breathe. “I thought,” she says, and her voice refuses to be clever, “that the Mirror showed me madness. That I made you up to survive.”

“It showed you a doorway,” he says, so gently she almost misses the edge. “You walked through. That part was you.”

Lightning hazes the room white and then gone. The thunder waits politely to be introduced. The house breathes.

“Sit,” he says, and they do, on the floor beside the crib like children exiled from a holiday table.

They talk about small things and one large thing—the question of safety, which is not a place but a verb. He tells her what streets he wants her to avoid when the air smells like metal. She tells him where she refuses to wear a veil of fear. They draft an accord in glances and the grace of concession.

It is imperfect and good.

When the storm finally remembers its appointment and commits, they lean against the same wall, not touching, and watch the window scribble.

He recites, without remarking on it, the names of every woman on the block whose husbands turn unkind during thunder. She stores the list, because she has magic and a spine and a city to belong to that will not become gentler on its own.

“Family man,” she says, very softly, not a joke now.

He does not deny it. “Say it again,” he says, as if repetition might turn the word into something true in his mouth.

“Family,” she says, and this time the bond thrums not sharp, but sure.

She writes the letters two days after the storm, at the small table by the window that has decided to be her desk.

The lemon tree throws a broken pattern across the page. The house keeps her secrets like a held breath.

She begins with Andromeda, because love that lets you go, even if it hurts them, deserves first reply.

Andy,

The city is louder than any church bell, louder than grief when it first arrives. Teddy loves it. He points at boats and forgives the gulls for their manners. We are safe. I do not use that word lightly. It does not mean spared; it means held.

The house Nik found is stubborn and kind. It is the sort that decides who may live in it; it has not evicted us yet. The courtyard pretends it remembers water. There is a lemon tree that tries. I am trying too.

I will write each week, as promised. Tell me what you are planting. Tell me if the window sticks. Tell me when you laugh.

He is constant. You may not like the word, but it is true.

Your Harri

She seals it with wax because traditions soothe the part of her that fought a war without instruction manuals. She sets it aside with a strand of the red ribbon tied around it.

Molly and Arthur next, because worry is a job they were born to. She addresses it as Mum and Dad, because it is what they have become. 

Mum, Dad,

Please don’t fret at the word ‘Niklaus.’ You can tuck it into a drawer with the other words you decided not to say aloud because they hurt your mouths. If you need a different word, try ‘someone who stays.’

The food is too sweet and then not at all; I like it. The shops sell everything and a little more. I am learning to tell the difference between a blessing and a sales pitch. I thought of you today, Dad—there’s a street where the lights hum like something alive. I will take them apart with you in a story when I have more names for the wires.

Teddy is learning stairs with a stubbornness you would admire and forbid. He calls doors ‘dah.’ Don’t tell him.

I will write.

Love, Harri

She smiles at the page as if it were a face and lets the smile stay.

Hermione and Ron, shared letter, because their love has become one room with two windows.

You two,

The bond is… what we thought. Not a chain. A compass. It hums when I lie to myself. I am trying to be interesting enough to deserve it.

Hermione, you were right about habits that feel like safety and are actually fear in a dress. I’m taking off the dress one button at a time. Ron, you were right that beignets are just doughnuts with better PR.

I like him. He frightens me. Both are true. I’m learning to speak in ‘both.’

Write to me about small things—the kettle whistle, the way the Burrow sounded in last week’s wind, what colour cardigan Mrs. Figg wore to market. I want a rope of ordinary to hold onto when the city tries to make me myth.

H.

She closes her eyes on that, lets the ache be a companion in the chair beside her, not a thing perched on her chest.

Ginny, separate, because sisters are a language of their own.

Gin,

You’d like the women here. They stare back when stared at. They wear knives like they are part of a matching set. I have learned to nod instead of smile when a man thinks I should.

I miss how we used to kick our heels against chairs in the kitchen as if we could shake a clock loose. I miss you in my ribs.

He paints. He didn’t tell me how well. You would be insufferable about the romance of it; I will allow it when you visit. Come in autumn. The air might be less feral by then.

I am happy in pieces. The pieces are arranging themselves.

Love you.

H.

Neville, because gentleness deserves an update.

Neville,

Your cutting is braver than I am. It has decided the windowsill belongs to it and is warming the wall with its stubborn chlorophyll. It smells faintly of Hogwarts when the sun remembers the lake. Thank you.

If you write back and tell me that I am doing an adequate job of being alive, I will believe you.

H.

She stacks the letters, ties them with the ribbon, and sets them where she will not lose them between storms.

“Writing?” Nik says from the doorway, casual as if he has always belonged there. He watches her as if reading the air for meaning.

“Warding,” she corrects. “Different ink. Similar idea.”

He comes closer, touches the ribbon bow with one finger as if it might bruise. “Good,” he says again. “Leave space for new people to live inside you without throwing out the old tenants. That is a trick even we don’t learn fast.”

“I thought you didn’t value tricks,” she says.

“I value survival,” he answers. “By whatever name you clothe it.”

She does not tell him he is getting better at saying the quiet things loudly. He hears the praise anyway. His mouth refuses the smile and then accepts it

Teddy barrels in from the courtyard with Rebekah behind him like a parade that has refused a permit.

He carries a lemon that is too green, a trophy from a brave tree. His hair is triumphant-gold. He thrusts the fruit at Harri, at Nik, at the future.

“Dah!” he declares to all of it.

“Yes,” Harri says. “Door.”

“Yes,” Nik says, mischief and vow. “Door.”

He looks at Harri then, something dangerous and promising both. “Shall we open one?” he asks, meaning a hundred things.

“We already have,” she says, and the chapter, if it needed a formal ending, could end there. But the city, indifferent to literature, keeps singing, and the river keeps its patient heart, and the lemon tree, stupid and brave, puts out one more leaf toward a sun that is not gentle and is, anyway, enough.

That night, when Teddy sleeps, Harri sits in the studio without touching anything and lets the rain-smell of turpentine and canvas etch itself into the part of her that makes anchors.

Nik paints with his back to her—river, sky, the edge of a woman who does not look away. She drafts three more letters in her head—to herself ten years ago, to herself ten years hence, to the part of her that believed she was a ruin disguised as a girl.

She does not write those. She lives them instead, in a city that does not whisper but shouts, with a man who would have been a storm if he had not decided to hope, with a boy whose hair refuses to pick a colour because happiness is loud and he intends to be it.

The bond hums. Not a chain. A compass.

Somewhere outside, thunder invents a story about distance. The house believes, and stays.

Chapter Text

New Orleans wakes loud the morning Marcel comes home.

The street drums start earlier, as if the city sniffed the air and found a familiar salt in it. A boy sells paper cones of sugared pecans like small miracles.

The river keeps time, big and patient. Harri hears it in the courtyard—the shift—the way sound bends around expectation.

Even the lemon tree looks a little taller, as if it were awaiting judgment from someone it wants to impress.

Teddy feels it first. He abandons his parade of wooden animals and toddles to the gate, hair bright gold, palms up for greeting as though he were an ancient magistrate accepting tribute. He announces something stern in toddler, all vowels and conviction.

“Who taught him to receive like a prince?” Harri asks the air, pinning a sheet to the line.

“I did,” Nik says from the doorway, unapologetic. The bond hums like a struck bell—anticipation, sharpened by something he will not call hope.

He is not still; even in repose he is motion written in the body. Today, the motion is held, domesticated for a moment by the promise of a footfall he knows better than his own.

“Marcellus,” he says, as if testing the name to ensure it’s not a trick.

Then the shadow falls just so across the threshold and the courtyard rearranges itself to include a man it had been missing.

Marcel enters like a stanza the city has had memorised for years. He is travel-dressed—dust on his boots, jacket cut to move, eyes laughing because life is better that way.

He carries the kind of grace that comes from practice: of survival, of charm, of not losing the room by blinking at the wrong time.

There is a scuff along his jaw where some other town tried to teach him its rules; he did not learn them.

Look at you, Harri thinks before she decides to think it—this city grown into a man and then made more.

He sees Teddy first. Because everybody always does.

“Well, now,” he says, hands up, palms open the way you greet a skittish colt. “Who’s the boss around here?”

Teddy answers by charging him—wobble, determination—hair flickering green, then gold, then a quick shy violet that means I have decided to trust you and it was my idea.

Marcel’s laugh is full and clean; he crouches, lets the boy collide, scoops him with an ease earned by a lifetime of smaller bodies being somebody’s responsibility.

“Hey there, little chief.” He taps Teddy’s nose. “You got opinions. Good. Tell me all of them.”

“Dah,” Teddy informs him, which currently means everything and, specifically, door.

“Door?” Marcel grins. “A man who knows his exits. You’ll do just fine.”

Harri realises she is smiling in the way that can ache afterward. She steps forward, offers her hand. “Harri,” she says.

“Marcel.” His grasp is warm. “I’ve heard enough about you to make a book and not enough to satisfy me. I figured I’d fix that.”

“You travel,” she says, not a question. It’s in the jacket, the boots, the dust that isn’t local.

“I do.” He glances toward the street as if it might overhear and be flattered. “Cities itch. I scratch. But I come home when the music changes.”

“And now?”

He tips his head at Teddy like a man acknowledging a flag raised. “Now the song’s different.”

Nik has not moved much, which is how Harri knows the storm under the skin is real. He walks forward only when Marcel stands, only when Teddy has declared the introduction successful by patting Marcel’s cheek as if knighting him for service.

“Son,” Nik says, and there is no irony in it, only the dark, old truth. For a heartbeat he looks like a man who has exactly one prayer and it has been answered so often he never stops checking.

“Old man,” Marcel shoots back, dimples as dangerous as any blade. His eyes flick to Harri, then back to Nik. Something like mischief, something like relief. “You did it.”

“I did many things,” Nik replies, mouth edged.

“Right. The least of which was wait.”

They don’t embrace at first; they stand near each other like stubborn magnets, the air between them aligning around a field you cannot see if you’ve never been needed.

Then Marcel steps in; Nik meets him; the hug is quick and brutal, the sort that checks for injury with a squeeze. Harri feels it in the bond—not possession, not rivalry. A relief that stings.

Marcel pulls back, eyes bright with unshed history. “You look good,” he says. “Too good. Suspiciously good. What are you breaking in your spare time?”

“Bad habits,” Nik says, with the arrogance of a man telling the truth as if it were a dare. “Come, meet the lemon tree. It pretends not to be impressed.”

“Bossy as ever,” Marcel mutters, delighted, and lets himself be dragged into the courtyard’s tour as if he hadn’t grown up learning every kind of brick.

Teddy insists on accompanying, issuing commentary in a language comprised entirely of one syllable and impeccable pointing. Marcel translates flawlessly, as the gifted often do.

“Dah,” Teddy says, pointing at the gate.

“Door,” Marcel nods gravely. “Ingress. Egress. Strategy.”

“Dah,” Teddy says at the fountain basin.

“History,” Marcel agrees. “And ambition.”

“Dah,” Teddy says at Nik.

Marcel laughs. “Trouble,” he says, and Nik does not deny it.

Harri finds herself watching the two of them. The bond hums; she tastes something copper-bright in it.

She has seen love handed loud as fanfare. This is not that. This is the long work of building a person and letting him walk away with your favorite tools.

Marcel notices her watching and refuses to make it awkward. “Come on,” he says, “you can’t just look at us beautiful creatures. You have to join the menagerie.”

“Is that how you flirt with all your father’s soulmates?” Harri asks, deadpan.

“Only the ones who look like trouble,” he says, and winks without heat. She decides to like him before she is finished deciding.

They end up at the table by the window, the one with the habit of catching late sun like honey. Harri cuts oranges.

Marcel peels one in a single perfect ribbon and hands the coil to Teddy, who wears it like a victory sash until juice wins and gravity makes its case.

“So,” Marcel says, as if they’d paused in a conversation that started years ago. “You sing.”

Harri blinks. “I… yes. Badly.”

“He paints,” Marcel says, nodding toward the studio door. “Obsessively. Despite what he says, he’s gentle when he does it.”

From the hall: “I am not gentle.”

Marcel and Harri chorus, “He is gentle,” with the mean delight of co-conspirators.

Teddy claps because unanimity is his favourite art.

By late noon, the courtyard has collected more people than it pretends to fit. Rebekah arrives with the weather, claims Marcel by the ear, kisses his cheek, scolds him for being away long enough to miss three dressmakers, two scandals, and a harvest of particularly impudent lemons.

Kol appears with the scent of having been recently delighted by something the law would frown upon and challenges Marcel to a game of who can insult Nik with the most creativity without getting their tongues removed.

“You first,” Kol says, magnanimous.

Marcel bows. “What do you call a man who mistakes stubbornness for romance?”

“A poet,” Rebekah says.

“A Mikaelson,” Kol counters.

“A survivor,” Harri offers.

“A father,” Marcel finishes, and the yard goes quiet in the way rooms go quiet when honesty walks in without knocking.

Nik says nothing, which is worse than anything, and better.

Kol recovers with speed. “Well, since sentiment has defeated me, I’ll take my leave before I develop a rash.”

Rebekah shoves him, loving and lethal. “Go on then. Try not to get arrested before dusk.”

“Arrested implies witnesses,” Kol says, affronted, and vanishes to resume whatever chaos he was courting.

Rebekah stays. She and Marcel fall into the old choreography of their affection—teasing, threats, a fierce casualness that admits its loyalty by never naming it.

They decide, without asking Harri’s permission and somehow with it, that dinner will be at her table, that Marcel will tell stories of the road that are domesticated enough for Teddy’s ears, that Nik will try a new canvas while they talk and fail because listening will paint over his concentration.

“You see how they are,” Nik murmurs to Harri as Rebekah commandeers the kettle and Marcel instructs Teddy on the art of stacking wooden animals into precarious towers. “They arrive and make decisions.”

“You picked them,” Harri says.

“They picked me,” he answers, which is true and untrue, equal parts.

“And you let them,” she says.

He does not argue. He watches Marcel’s hands show Teddy where the balance lives in a giraffe and a bear. His mouth does something ungoverned by pride.

It should not be so easy. And it is not—the ease is a raft the river allows for an afternoon only. But for that afternoon, the house with two suns holds.

Marcel tells a story about a town out west where the wind learned to sing through holes in the church bell and made a music so strange the men stopped swearing for a week to listen.

He tells one about a girl who ran a tea stall under a cypress and cured loneliness with cardamom and advice.

He tells one about standing on a bridge in a city with a name like a hymn and deciding not to jump because he had an appointment with a man who would call him home by insulting his shoes.

Through it, Teddy’s hair narrates approval and outrage. Through it, Harri feels the bond carry Nik’s quiet—how he files away each detail like a miser with gold. Rebekah heckles. Nik heckles worse.

Marcel laughs like he built himself out of that sound. Harri realises, with the slow dread hope always requires, that this is not only survivable. It might be joy.

After, when the light has gone honey-lower, Marcel and Nik take to the roof with the excuse of fixing a tile that has been pretending not to leak. Harri lets them—understands enough about men and certain kinds of love to know when privacy is not a door but a respect.

She listens anyway, because wind carries and the house is old and kind.

“You left,” Nik says, not accusation; inventory.

“I did.” Marcel’s voice is all river. “Still do.”

“You make a name under other skies.” Nik’s mouth twists around the difficulty. “Without me on the sign.”

“I carry the sign,” Marcel says, amused. “It’s in my bones. But there’s a difference between inheritance and theft. I wanted the first without the second.”

“And you thought I would not understand,” Nik says. It is almost a question. Almost.

Marcel’s laugh is quiet. “I thought you would pretend not to and then let me anyway.”

A beat.

“Am I that readable?”

“Only to people who love you,” Marcel says. “Which is a small, loud club.”

Silence with edges. Then: “I missed you,” Nik says, so flat it must be true.

“Liar,” Marcel answers, fond. “You painted and glowered and terrified half the Quarter into good behaviour.”

“And you?”

“I danced where I could,” Marcel says. “Fought where I had to. Slept rarely. Wrote you a hundred letters I did not send.”

“Why?” Nik asks, too fast.

“Because home is better in person,” Marcel says. “And because I wanted the story fresh when I gave it to you.”

There is a sound like a tile giving up the ghost and then being persuaded to live anyway. Then the scrape of two men sitting shoulder to shoulder on a roof, pretending they are there for the view.

“Do you approve of her?” Nik asks, as if making a joke of an arrow.

“I don’t get a vote,” Marcel says. “That’s not how compasses work.”

“Humour me,” Nik says, which is to say, Tell me the truth and make it kind.

“She looks you in the eye,” Marcel says. “She tells you no when you mistake hunger for law. She can stand in a door and choose to let a storm pass through without giving it a room.” A smile in the voice. “And Teddy thinks I’m funny. That’s two votes to your one.”

“Teddy’s electoral credibility is in question,” Nik mutters.

“Then it’s unanimous,” Marcel says.

Harri retreats from the window because privacy sometimes means leaving the truth unobserved.

Night folds itself carefully over the Quarter. Lanterns throw their little suns against the dark. The river speaks its old language to anyone who will listen. The drumline at the corner gives up on a tune and tries joy instead; it fits better.

In the studio, Nik works a new canvas with the dangerous patience of a man who has decided not to be ruined by hope.

Harri sits on the floor beside Teddy’s cot, cooling his forehead with a damp cloth because the day took too much courage out of him and he must restock.

Marcel knocks once, then smirks at his own politeness and comes in anyway.

“Permission to brag?” he asks, dropping to the floor as if furniture is a suggestion.

“Denied,” Harri says, without looking up.

“I met a boy today who outranks every general I’ve known,” Marcel continues, untroubled. “And he promoted me to second-in-command with a single raspberry.”

“That tracks,” she says.

He leans his head against the wall, glances toward the studio. “He’s good,” Marcel says, meaning Nik, meaning the art, meaning the attempt.

“He is,” Harri says. She wrings the cloth. “You knew that before I did.”

“I knew the outline,” Marcel says. “You’re colouring it in.”

She laughs, low. “I am very bad at colouring inside the lines.”

“Good,” he says. “The lines deserve the trouble.”

They sit in a quiet that is not empty. After a while, he says without any drama, “Thank you for writing to the people who love you.”

Harri looks over. “How—”

“Nik told me you send letters,” he says. “He only admits that sort of softness when he’s proud of someone. He’s prideful as a rule; pride is just the cover story.”

She returns to Teddy’s hair with her fingers. “Do you write?” she asks.

“Less than I want to,” Marcel admits. “More than I used to. I’ll do better.” He nudges her shoulder with his. “I want him to know all my mistakes before someone else tells him the wrong versions.”

“He’ll write his own,” Harri says, because that is the only honest prophecy.

“Good,” Marcel says, and grins. “That’s how we keep the story moving.”

Later, after Marcel has stolen the narrow couch and promised to fix the wonky leg tomorrow (“No tools required, just insults.” “To the leg?” “To the leg.”), after Rebekah has draped a blanket over him with the tenderness of a woman who will deny it in court, after Kol has thrown pebbles at the window purely to say he did and then vanished laughing, after the Quarter’s music has filtered down to its bones, Harri sits at the table and drafts a letter she may or may not send.

Andy,

There is a man here with dimples like mischief and a history that grew up in our house and then walked away to learn other languages. He is Nik’s in the way that matters more than blood, which is to say: owed by love and paid back with the same.

Today he came home. Teddy chose him immediately because children are our best judges, and Nik tried not to smile and failed. The city changed key.

If you were here, you’d tell me to put the kettle on and stop hovering by the window. I am learning.

Your Harri

She folds it, tucks it under the red ribbon with the others. She thinks of Britain, of rooms that held grief like damp, of how letters can be scaffolds when houses are tired.

She thinks of the roof, of a father and a son sitting shoulder to shoulder pretending not to forgive each other because forgiveness has already happened and needed no ceremony.

“Teddy,” she whispers, watching his hair settle at last into a colour like river silt—peaceful, honest. “You have too many people. Lucky boy.”

The bond answers with a warmth that is almost a blessing.

In the studio, Nik steps back from the canvas. Harri doesn’t look—she will see it when it wants to be seen.

She knows what it holds, though: not a woman alone by a river, not tonight. A small boy in someone’s arms. A city-learning lemon tree. A door. A door. A door.

The house keeps all of it. The roof doesn’t leak. The night passes without event. When dawn arrives—humid, irreverent, full of brass—Marcel wakes first and steals Teddy from his cot with a conspirator’s whisper.

He returns to the courtyard with the boy on his shoulders, announcing to the morning that the king is indisposed and the prince is taking audiences.

Harri leans in the doorway, arms folded, pretending to be sterner than she is. Nik stands a pace behind her, pretending to be less happy than he is.

Rebekah appears at their flank with a hairpin she intends to use as a weapon or utensil depending on how breakfast behaves. Kol is nowhere and everywhere; that is his devotion.

“Family man,” Harri murmurs, for herself, for the bond, for the day that requires a name.

Nik’s hand finds the doorframe, not her, and holds. “Say it again,” he says, because he is greedy for the word when it is true.

“Family,” she says.

The city answers with music. The river lifts its old heart. The lemon tree puts out one shameless flower.

And Teddy, merciless, points at them all and declares, with imperial certainty, “Dah.”

Chapter Text

New Orleans stops announcing itself quite so loudly once you begin to answer back.

By the fifth week, Harri knows which stalls sell blessings that are only sugar, and which sell sugar that behaves like a blessing.

She knows the man who plays trumpet three blocks over will not touch the instrument on Thursdays because his mother taught him that certain notes should rest.

She knows how the river smells when it’s about to bully the sky into raining. She knows, most of all, how to let the house breathe through her rather than around her.

Doors open. Doors close. Teddy learns which ones mean no and which ones mean show me.

Nik learns, too, though he pretends otherwise. He arrives at the threshold of her mornings without knocking and then remembers himself and leans one shoulder to the frame, contrite by inches.

He takes her through the city as if he is translating a language she already half speaks. He lets her walk ahead to choose streets. He steps in only when a man decides spectacle is cheaper than respect.

“Information,” Harri murmurs when his spine rises into the quiet shape of violence.

“Pattern recognition,” he murmurs back, amused, and lets the impulse pass.

Teddy, flag-bearer of the new republic, patrols the courtyard with a wooden spoon as sceptre.

He presents his rulings: lemons are yes, puddles are yes, stairs are yes with supervision. He distributes this wisdom freely, including to the lemon tree, which accepts with good humour.

Letters arrive on a wind that smells like tea and damp wool.

A shy barn owl skims the roofline, startled by a gull, indignant at a pelican, and lands on the table with a thud that says civilization has its limits.

Harri unties the bundle with a reverence she does not mock. Red ribbon, wax, a sprig of something from a hedge she knows by feel not by name. The city pauses at the edges, as if giving Britain the room due to any old house that has fed too many people.

She starts with Andromeda. The paper is neat, the hand steady.

Harri,

Your letters were a door the house needed. It has been sulking less since. I keep the windows cracked the way you used to; the neighbors complain about drafts and I tell them to knit.

Teddy’s blanket still smells like the talc I like because I am stubborn. I am less afraid of the quiet when I have your words in it.

If he says “door” to everything, it is because he understands the point of houses. Let him.

Send me a lemon leaf when your tree is ready to be proud.

And yes—if he stays constant, tell him I am grateful to him for being a noun you can lean your sentence against.

— A.

Harri presses the page to her mouth and laughs into it because crying would be too easy.

Molly & Arthur have written together. The ink shows different pressures: Molly’s urgent, Arthur’s patient.

Our girl,

The kitchen feels taller without your feet on the chair rung. I told Arthur we should lower the ceiling; he suggested we lower our expectations. He is cheeky and will be punished with soup.

Your “someone who stays” can come for supper anytime he can tolerate shepherd’s pie done properly. Arthur says he’ll show him how plugs are really just stubborn runes.

We had a fright with the rooster but it turned out to be pride.

Take care of your throat when you sing to Teddy. A mother can hear through a letter.

Love, love, love,

M. & A.

She reads Hermione & Ron last of the stack, because they have earned the right to keep her in the room a little longer.

H—

“Both” is a word I wish we’d learned younger. Keep speaking it.

You once told me war made you allergic to gentleness. It will pass, the way a storm passes. Let it rain.

Ron says: Beignets are not a lie, but they are propaganda.

We sent a book on New Orleans birds because Ron insists our nephew should be bilingual in ducks.

We are fine. Write when you can. Write when you cannot.

H.

Neville’s envelope smells faintly of soil, in defiance of all the distances.

H,

Your cutting likes the windowsill. It leans toward river-light, which is different than lake-light but not by much.

If you can grow something in a place, it listens to you. Keep growing.

— N.

Harri writes back immediately, ink finding her steadier than she feels. Teddy helps by attempting to eat the quill. Nik watches from the doorway in a posture she has learned is I will leave if you need me to and I will not if you do not.

“Do you want quiet?” he asks.

“Do you know how to give it?” she asks back.

“Depends on the day,” he admits. “Today, no.”

“Stay, then,” she says, and the letters gain the grace of being written in a room that contains the life they’re describing.

The city asks something new of her that week: to choose a place where her feet remember her before her fear does.

Nik offers a list like a man offering keys. “The old atelier on Ursuline,” he says. “The courtyard behind the café with the terrible chicory and the perfect chairs.

The bell tower no one’s used since the storm that one summer.” A beat. “You can hear the river breathe from there.”

They go at dusk, when the day’s heat remembers manners. Rebekah comes because she dares the world to deny her entrance anywhere.

Marcel comes because Teddy is already on his shoulders and the boy’s vote carries the room. Kol arrives late because chaos is punctual only to itself.

The bell tower leans like a gentleman who has stayed too long at a party and is unsure whether to leave or marry someone.

The steps argue. The air has kept secrets tucked into its corners. At the top, the city exists in a new vocabulary: roofs like thought, alleys turned into lines on a hand, the river a sentence that never quite ends.

Harri steps to the ledge and grips the iron. “Oh,” she says, because sometimes a real word would insult a view.

“There are three kinds of silence,” Nik tells her, close enough that his voice arrives inside her ribs. “The one a house learns after the fight is over. The one a church makes even when it’s empty. And this.” He gestures at everything. “This is the silence of a thing too large to shout.”

Teddy bangs a hand on the railing and contributes his own philosophy: “Dah.”

“Yes,” Marcel agrees. “Door.”

Kol arrives with the air of a man who has just done something he won’t report because it will be funnier in two days. He sidles up, looks at the river, and hums a note under his breath that tastes of mischief and salt.

The bond inside Harri pricks—not with Nik’s familiar current, not with the city’s deep hum.

A quieter tremor, a thread flicking between worlds. She glances at Kol, then away, the way you look at lightning you can feel before you can see.

“Something wrong?” Nik asks, without looking; he’s learned the lintel of her breath.

“No.” She tastes the air again. The feeling lingers, not unpleasant, merely precise. A compass pointing toward a place she hasn’t drawn on the map.

Ginny’s name crosses her mind the way birds cross a line of sight—fast, uninvited, right. She stills. Kol hums the note again, absent. The thread gives a single, sure tug.

Teddy, delighted by familiarity, claps.

Harri inventories the thought and puts it on a shelf to examine when the room is less crowded. She says nothing. The city is not the only thing that deserves to keep its secrets until it is safe to tell them.

They descend. Back at the house, life resumes the business of being a life. Rebekah proctors Teddy’s bedtime as if the boy were sitting for exams.

Marcel improves the wonky leg of the couch without tools, only insults. Nik paints with the door open because privacy has graduated to choice.

Kol raids the pantry and finds nothing he wants and complains with artistry.

Harri sorts the letters, ties the new bundle to the old ribbon, and tucks them into the drawer that has decided to belong to correspondence. She writes replies that taste less like goodbye and more like place-setting.

She begins to draft one to Ginny and stops. The thread in her chest hums once, decisive. She moves that paper to the top of the stack.

Gin,

Are you dreaming more? Not nightmares. The other kind—the ones that leave you waking as if someone said your name from another room.

Do you hear… a note? Not music you can sing, deeper than that. Like the silence before a storm learns the word for rain.

This city has a man in it who hums that note without meaning to. He is trouble packaged as a joke. He is loyal like a knife. He is… not for me. Don’t throw that at me. I know the difference.

Write back with your truth. I won’t send this if I’m wrong.

Love, H.

She does not seal it. She lets it breathe on the table while the night decides whether to keep it.

The next afternoon, Marcel drags them all to a square that is more shade than sun. An oak rises in the center, its bark scarred with storms it has weathered. Around it, women sit in patient rows, voices low, the air sharp with old warding.

Nik angles himself to be present without being central. Kol plays the fool and misses nothing. Rebekah sits with Teddy, feeding him slices of peach and a steady stream of commentary that sounds like affection dressed in thorns. Marcel steps forward, palms open, charm tuned low.

“Ladies,” he says. “A courtesy call.”

“A courtesy from a Mikaelson usually has teeth,” the eldest replies, dry. Her eyes flick to Harri, to Teddy, back to Marcel. “Who is the girl.”

“Woman,” Harri says before he can answer. “Harri Potter.” She gives nothing else. Wars deserve fewer syllables than they’ve already stolen.

The circle studies her in silence, then nods once, enough to mean: you may stay. What follows is not talk of power, not directly, but the sideways language of a city keeping its own pulse — which streets cough at night, which doors are safer left closed, which children throw stones at windows and which songs the girls sing back. Harri listens, and they allow her listening.

When it is over, they leave without anyone bleeding. Marcel calls it a triumph. Rebekah calls it Tuesday. Nik says nothing, which is its own kind of victory.

Kol falls into step beside Harri on the walk home. He is humming — low, absent, not meant for anyone’s ears, and she hears it again. The second time from him.

A tune so ordinary it should slip past unnoticed. And yet , she still finds herself stilling

Harri looks at him sharply. “Where did you hear that?”

Kol blinks, caught but unruffled. “What, this? Just a song. Been in my head for as long as I can remember.” He shrugs, as though it were nothing. “You know it?”

“I grew up with it,” Harri says carefully. “My best friend’s sister — Ginny. She’s practically mine too. Always sang it.”

Kol hums another bar, distracted, and lets it fade. He doesn’t notice the way Harri’s chest tightens, or how her hand curls as if to keep hold of a thread she isn’t ready to name aloud.

Rebekah glances over her shoulder. “Why are you two whispering like conspirators?”

“Because we are conspirators,” Kol answers cheerfully.

Harri only says, “Because he hums familiar tunes.”

And she lets it rest there, for now.

That night, the house performs quiet. The river performs old. The sky performs mercy.

Harri takes out Ginny’s letter, adds a line, removes two. She sits with it until words agree with the hum under her sternum.

She seals it. She ties it to the ribbon. She does not tell anyone—not even Nik—what it says. The bond allows secrecy not as a wall but as a room you lock because some doors require ceremony.

The barn owl returns in the morning, less offended by the gull and outright contemptuous of the pelican. Harri strokes its head and sends the letter. The bird departs with the severity of a judge who has already decided.

In the hours between sending and receiving, lives keep being made.

Marcel teaches Teddy a clap-rhythm that proceeds in a logic only children and drummers understand.

Rebekah steals the lemon tree’s single small flower and tucks it behind Harri’s ear with a muttered apology to horticulture. Kol brings a deck of cards into the courtyard and shuffles like a man warming his hands over mischief.

“You do not win against him,” Nik informs Harri, drily. “You only choose the manner of losing.”

“I choose not to,” she says, sitting anyway.

Kol beams. “Brave.”

He deals in a rhythm that briefly matches the one Teddy is clapping. The bond slides over Harri’s skin like a cat deciding whose lap to occupy. Kol flips a card. Red queen. Her hair could be any shade and is currently all of them.

Harri thinks Ginny as if she were lighting a candle.

She discards it carefully.

Kol’s eyes flick to her, curious. She raises one brow. He smiles like he suspects an interesting crime is afoot and approves.

“Family,” he says, low.

“And the trouble it makes,” she returns.

They play without stakes. He lets her lose with dignity. It is, in its way, tender.

Letters back arrive just when the afternoon has decided to sag.

Ginny writes like she runs—a straight line with corners she chooses at speed.

H,

You’ll laugh, but yes. I still hum it. Always have.

Mum says I’ve done it since I could talk — that I stole it from Dad’s wireless one summer and never let it go. I thought it was just mine, something to keep my hands steady when the house was too loud or too quiet.

Lately I’ve been waking with it still in my head, as if someone else carried the tune into my dreams and left it there. It doesn’t feel like my song anymore, but I can’t stop.

You say you heard it in New Orleans? From a stranger? Then the world is smaller, or stranger, than I thought. Maybe both.

Don’t explain yet.

I’ve also been irritated all week for no local reason.

If this is your doing, stop. If it isn’t, say “magnolia” once more and I’ll consider believing the weather has a name.

— G.

Harri reads it twice. The thread in her chest loosens, not because uncertainty is gone, but because the world has grown a new room to contain it.

She writes back with only the word magnolia again in the middle of the page and nothing else. She adds: I love you. She adds: I’m here. She does not add: His name is Kol. That is not her gift to give and not her war to start.

She tucks Ginny’s letter under the red ribbon, right between Andromeda’s quiet and Molly’s soup.

Andromeda writes again some days later —short, a note like a hand pressed briefly to a cheek.

The lemon leaf arrived. The house smells like a place new things are allowed.

I am proud of you, which is a silly word for grown women and necessary anyway.

— A.

Harri sits on the steps and breathes until the pride finds a shelf it can live on.

The chapter wants an ending, the way rivers want a bank to lean on before they decide to flood. The city provides one.

They go back to the bell tower because repetition make the body gentle. The view has learned their faces. The river cracks its long old grin.

Marcel tells a story about a town where rain arrived upside down. Rebekah argues with a gull and wins. Kol hums and for once stops before the note can turn into trouble.

“Tell me something true,” Harri says, because the air is soft enough to carry it.

Nik does not perform. He answers. “I am learning not to love you like a siege.”

She looks at him until the bond steadies. “Good,” she says. “I am learning not to love myself like a ruin.”

Below, the Quarter answers with brass. The house with two suns holds. Teddy, merciless, points at all of it, as ever, “Dah.”

“Door,” Marcel translates, grinning.

“Door,” Rebekah repeats, fierce.

“Door,” Kol agrees, amused, as if he can already hear some future knock.

Harri folds Ginny’s letter into her pocket, weight small, meaning large. She does not tell Kol. She will not, not yet. But somewhere, three thousand miles away, a girl with hair like sunrise is turning toward a wind that has finally told her its name.

The thread hums. Not a chain. A compass.

And New Orleans, satisfied with the day’s work, leans back into itself and sings.

Chapter Text

The letter is short because Harri doesn’t know how to make it longer without saying more than she should.

Gin,

The humming still continues.

I think you’d like New Orleans — something silly, especially in autumn. The air tastes sharper then, and the leaves don’t fall politely; they swagger.

Write soon.

H.

She ties it to the red ribbon with the others. The bundle is growing thicker, heavier — a small archive of two lives held together by ink and distance.

Teddy tries to tug the ribbon loose, giggling as if secrets should be unraveled like string. She lets him for a moment before tucking the letters back into the drawer that has decided to belong to correspondence.

Outside, the Quarter is louder than ever — brass horns already practicing for festivals that have no patience for calendars. The air hums with heat that refuses to let go of summer, though the shadows are longer, the light ambering into the suggestion of autumn.

Rebekah insists they go. Not asks, not suggests — insists.

“There’s a parade on St. Ann,” she says, arms folded, hair pinned into something that could double as a weapon. “Teddy should see it. And you. Nik broods too much when he stays inside, Marcel can charm anything that moves, and Kol—” She rolls her eyes. “Kol will cause trouble either way. Might as well keep it where I can see him.”

“I don’t brood,” Nik says.

“You do nothing else,” Rebekah fires back, affectionate as a bruise.

Harri laughs before she means to, and that seals it.

The parade is chaos pressed into color. Lanterns sway like small suns. Drummers march with a rhythm that feels like a second heartbeat. Dancers sweep past with skirts wide as sails, beads flashing from balconies, laughter louder than the horns themselves.

Teddy claps from Harri’s arms, hair gold one moment, indigo the next, unable to decide which joy he prefers.

Rebekah walks beside her, steady, not dazzled. She has seen centuries of this, but she lets Harri see it fresh.

“It’s gaudy,” she says, half-smile tugging at her mouth.

“It’s alive,” Harri answers.

“Same thing,” Rebekah shrugs, but her eyes are softer than her tone.

They stop at a stall where a woman paints faces with quick hands. Teddy demands a star by pointing at one already painted on another child.

The woman obliges. His hair flashes silver to match, and the crowd cheers as if he were king of the season.

Rebekah leans down, close enough that only Harri can hear. “He has your stubbornness.”

Harri swallows, throat thick. “Or yours.”

Rebekah straightens, something unguarded in her expression. “Perhaps.”

Later, when the parade swells louder, Rebekah tugs Harri down a side street where the noise fades into a quieter kind of music — a man playing violin for himself alone, lanternlight catching on bowstrings.

They pause.

“You left your home,” Rebekah says abruptly, eyes fixed on the lantern. “Why?”

“Because I couldn’t stay,” Harri says simply. “Because I had to find something new before grief finished swallowing me.”

Rebekah’s jaw tightens. “I’ve wanted that more times than I can count. To leave. To start over.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Rebekah exhales, sharp. “Because Nik doesn’t let go. And because I don’t either.” She turns to Harri. “You’re braver than I am.”

Harri shakes her head. “Or just more desperate.”

They look at each other then, truth bare between them, no mockery, no shield. Two women who have lost more than they should and still choose to carry the weight.

Rebekah reaches out, tucks a strand of Harri’s hair behind her ear with a tenderness so fleeting it could be mistaken for accident. “Still,” she says softly, “I’m glad you came.”

Harri doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. The bond thrums steady, as if even Nik’s silence approves.

By the time they return to the house, Teddy is asleep on Marcel’s shoulders, star still smudged on his cheek. Kol is juggling stolen beads and pretending innocence. Nik is quiet in the way that means he has stored away the evening whole.

Harri lingers with Rebekah at the threshold, reluctant to let the night fold itself closed.

“Tomorrow,” Rebekah says, “you and I will go without the others. Coffee. Dresses. Or maybe just silence.”

“Silence sounds good,” Harri answers.

Rebekah smiles, quick and real. “Then it’s a date.”

And for the first time, Harri feels what it might mean to have a sister not by blood, but by bond — not the soulmate’s tether, but something parallel, fierce, and just as necessary.

The days after the parade stretch amber and loose. Rebekah makes good on her promise — she steals Harri away the next morning, leaving Nik scowling in the courtyard like someone left out of mischief.

They walk through the Quarter with no plan but shoes. Coffee at one stall, a ribbon at another, dresses they try on and mock together.

Rebekah is scathing and bright, sharp as glass, but when she slips her arm through Harri’s, it is with the comfort of someone who has long wanted a sister to walk beside her.

“You’re not like the others he’s tangled with,” Rebekah says, trying on a hat and discarding it with disdain.

“Others?” Harri arches a brow.

“Don’t play innocent. My brother’s history could fill a ledger.” Rebekah smirks. “But you—you have the nerve to call him a family man. In public.”

Harri laughs. “You’re never letting me live that down.”

“Never,” Rebekah agrees. But then softer: “I hope you meant it.”

“I did,” Harri says.

The words settle between them, weighty but steady.

Autumn folds itself into memory with the rustle of leaves that fall arrogant, not polite. The city smells of cinnamon and smoke, street corners lit with lanterns that drip wax like secrets.

Teddy learns to run without permission, Rebekah chasing him with mock threats. Kol teaches him nonsense rhymes; Marcel teaches him how to bow with flair; Nik teaches him how to scowl at Kol.

Through it all, Harri finds herself leaning into the rhythm of a life that has room for laughter, quarrels, and something like peace.

When winter arrives, it dawns with a different voice. New Orleans doesn’t freeze so much as sighs — mornings sharp, evenings thick with damp. The festivals do not stop, only change costume.

Harri and Rebekah spend evenings curled on the couch while Teddy sleeps, blankets around their shoulders, recounting stories that taste like survival.

Rebekah tells her about the centuries she tried to love and lost. Harri tells her about the cupboard under the stairs, about firelight in a castle rebuilt stone by stone. They do not pity each other; they recognize themselves.

“You’re my sister now,” Rebekah says one night, blunt as a knife. “Whether you like it or not.”

Harri swallows the ache in her throat. “I like it.”

And that is that.

Nik grows restless as winter wanes. Harri feels it in the bond — the pacing wolf under his skin, the way he watches her as though bracing for absence.

One evening, when Teddy is finally down, she finds him in the studio, hands smudged with paint, a half-finished canvas leaned against the wall.

“You keep waiting for me to run,” she says quietly.

He doesn’t look at her. “Everyone runs.”

“I didn’t.”

His brush stills. “Not yet.”

Harri steps closer, heart steady. “Nik. It’s not just tether, or bond, or inevitability. It’s love. That’s the name for it.”

He turns then, and she sees how the word lands in him like a blade and a balm at once.

“Love,” he repeats, slow, dangerous. As if tasting a language he hasn’t spoken in years.

“Yes.” Her voice doesn’t shake. “So stop pretending it’s nameless.”

For once, he doesn’t argue. He sets the brush down, closes the space between them, and presses his forehead to hers, bond humming like a compass finally admitting north.

“Love, then,” he murmurs. “But say it again. Say it until I believe it.”

“Love,” she whispers, and the house, the river, the city all seem to lean in and listen.

Spring arrives on a warm wind that smells of magnolia and rain. New leaves push their way out of stubborn branches, reckless and green.

Harri writes more letters, tying them with ribbon, sending pieces of her life across the sea. Ginny writes back, her words threaded with humming, with dreams she can’t explain.

H,

I can’t stop. The song won’t leave me now, even when I try.

I dreamed of water last night — wide and brown and loud, nothing like the lake. And when I woke, I could still hear the horns of a band I’ve never seen.

Does that sound mad? Maybe it is. But the world feels like it’s leaning me somewhere.

— G.

The letter comes folded with more creases than usual, as if Ginny read it over and over before she sent it.

Harri tucks it beneath the ribbon with the others, but her hand lingers. She feels it in her bones before she admits it in her head: Ginny won’t stay in Britain much longer.

Weeks pass, and the house breathes fuller. The courtyard is a riot of green, the lemon tree shameless in blossom. Teddy runs without falling now, Marcel always ready to catch him anyway.

Rebekah claims the role of co-mother without asking, fussing over scraped knees while denying tenderness with every breath. Nik paints spring into walls, into canvases, into Harri’s skin whenever she isn’t looking.

Kol still hums. Careless, distracted, but never gone. Harri notices the way it steadies him sometimes, how it slips out when the noise of the city grows too loud.

And then, one morning, the owl does not come.

Instead, a knock at the door.

Harri answers, Teddy perched on her hip. The street is wet with spring rain, the air smelling of sugar and stone. And standing on the step — hair damp from travel, cheeks flushed with nerves and defiance — is Ginny Weasley.

She is smaller than Harri remembers and larger all at once. The years have sharpened her, but the smile that bursts when she sees Harri is still the same one from school corridors and late-night kitchens.

“I told you,” Ginny says, voice trembling with joy and stubbornness. “I couldn’t stop humming.”

Harri laughs, half sob, and pulls her into the doorway, into the house, into the life that has been waiting.

Teddy squeals approval, hair flashing bright gold as if the city itself agrees.

And somewhere deeper in the house, Kol’s careless humming falters into silence.

The house knows before they do.

Doors creak sharper, boards flex as if bracing. Even the lemon tree in the courtyard leans, curious, its blossoms spilling scent like questions.

Harri has barely pulled Ginny across the threshold when Kol appears at the far end of the hall. He isn’t skulking — Kol doesn’t skulk, he prowls — but there is an edge to his movement, restless, all elbows and intent.

He stops.

She stops.

For a moment, neither speaks.

Ginny looks travel-worn, cheeks pink from rain, hair curling in damp strands against her throat. She is stubborn in stance even when still, the kind of girl who carries her fire like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.

Kol, meanwhile, studies her as if someone has played a trick. The hum is gone from his throat, replaced by something harsher — a silence that feels more deliberate than any word.

Harri feels the bond flick between them, quick as flint striking stone.

Ginny recovers first. She raises her chin, eyes narrowed. “And who exactly are you?”

Kol’s mouth curves slow, sardonic. “Someone with better manners than you, apparently. You barge into houses without introductions now?”

Harri pinches the bridge of her nose. “Kol—”

But Ginny cuts in, fire already sparking. “I’ve had enough men with sharp tongues trying to make me small. If you’re one of them, save your breath.”

Kol laughs — startled, delighted, dangerous. “Oh, she bites.” He steps closer, tilting his head, eyes bright. “Finally, something interesting.”

The air between them hums — not the bond Harri knows with Nik, steadier and deep, but something newer, raw, like a song just beginning to remember its words.

Harri shifts Teddy higher on her hip, heart caught between dread and relief. So it’s true, then. The tune had a destination all along.

Nik appears in the doorway behind Kol, gaze flicking between the three of them. “Well,” he drawls, dimples cutting sharp. “This promises to be loud.”

The silence holds long enough for Teddy to fill it with a squeal, reaching his hands toward Ginny like she’s already his. She takes him instinctively, and the boy’s hair flares copper-red to match hers. The house itself seems to exhale.

Kol’s smirk falters. Only for a heartbeat, but Harri sees it — the uncharacteristic flicker of recognition, like a card pulled from the middle of the deck instead of the top.

Rebekah sweeps in, heels clicking against the old wood. She takes in the scene with a glance — Ginny holding Teddy as if she’s always belonged there, Kol looking as though someone just turned his favorite game against him — and sighs.

“Of course,” she mutters. “Another redhead. Nik, really, was one not enough?”

Ginny arches a brow, unbothered. “You must be Rebekah.”

Rebekah tilts her chin, a queen acknowledging another. “And you’re trouble.”

“Depends on the day,” Ginny shoots back, smiling without softness.

Marcel appears next, clapping Kol on the back with deliberate cheer. “Don’t look so haunted, brother. She hasn’t even insulted you properly yet.”

“Oh, give her time,” Kol says dryly, eyes never leaving Ginny.

Dinner that night is chaos disguised as a meal. Marcel insists on cooking; Rebekah criticizes every choice of spice; Kol sulks theatrically until Ginny needles him into arguing with her instead of the stew.

“You think you’re clever,” Kol says, swirling his wine like he invented it.

“I don’t think,” Ginny replies, smirking. “I know.”

“Arrogant.”

“Confident.”

“Infuriating.”

“You’re welcome.”

Harri watches the volley, both amused and wary. She catches Nik’s gaze across the table — the dimples threatening his composure — and knows he is enjoying the spectacle too much to intervene.

Teddy babbles over it all, pounding his spoon like a judge declaring mistrial.

Later, when the house has quieted and the courtyard is silver with moonlight, Harri finds Ginny by the fountain.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Ginny asks before Harri can speak. “The humming.”

Harri exhales. “Yes.”

Ginny stares at the water, jaw tight. “I thought I was mad. Waking with it in my head. Hearing it when the world went quiet. And then—” she gestures toward the hall where Kol has retreated, “there he is. Flesh and blood.”

“Sharp tongue included,” Harri says wryly.

Ginny laughs, though it’s unsteady. “I don’t know whether I want to hex him or—” She cuts herself off.

“Both,” Harri supplies gently.

Ginny presses her palms to her knees, exhaling. “Both.”

Upstairs, Kol leans against the banister, listening without meaning to. He hums a bar of that tune again, quieter this time, almost reverent. For once, there’s no mockery in it — only the raw edge of a man who has been surprised by the shape of his own heart.

Nik passes him on the landing, glances once, and smirks. “Careful, little brother. You’re starting to look sincere.”

Kol sneers on instinct, but the tune lingers, refusing to leave his throat.

And so spring in New Orleans grows stranger still. Teddy learns to say “Bek” and “Mar” but calls Kol nothing yet — as if the boy knows his name is still being written. Ginny hums in the courtyard, absentminded, and Kol answers from the roof without realizing.

Harri ties their letters together under red ribbon and thinks: family keeps finding us, whether we ask or not.

The house quiets at last. Teddy sleeps curled with his wooden lion clutched to his chest, hair a peaceful brown. Rebekah has claimed the couch with the air of someone who owns every room she enters.

Marcel sprawls in a chair, still laughing at his own stories. Kol has vanished to the roof — no doubt humming — and Ginny, stubborn, has taken the guest room without asking permission.

Harri sits at the table by the window, ink pot open, letters spread before her like prayers.

She begins with Andromeda.

Andy,

She’s here. Ginny arrived this morning, damp from the rain, hair like fire, voice like home. Teddy adores her already. He matched her hair within minutes.

She is safe. I am safe. We are building something that feels less like survival and more like living.

Come and see. Please.

Next, Molly & Arthur.

Mum, Dad,

She’s here — Ginny. She came on her own two feet, stubborn as ever. You’d be proud, despite her leaving home. She hasn’t stopped arguing with Kol since she arrived, and somehow that feels exactly right.

Marcel cooked tonight; Rebekah criticized; Teddy banged his spoon like a king. It was chaos, but it was warm.

Won’t you come visit? I want to see you at this table, too.

Then Hermione & Ron.

H & R,

You already know — Ginny’s here. She crossed the ocean, following nothing but a song she couldn’t stop humming.

She’s fire in this house, and somehow it feels whole with her in it.

I miss you both terribly. Won’t you come? Walk these streets with me, argue with me in markets, laugh in the courtyard. Please.

And Neville.

Nev,

Ginny’s here. I thought you’d want to know first. She hasn’t changed, and yet she has — stronger, sharper. She hums in the courtyard and the lemon tree seems to lean toward her.

The cutting you gave me is thriving. So am I, maybe.

Come see it all. Bring dirt from your garden if you must, but bring yourself.

Finally, she writes one that isn’t addressed to any name, not yet.

Won’t you come? All of you. Visit, even if just for a season. The house is louder than it has been in years, but there is still room.

I’ve missed you all terribly.

She seals them one by one, ties them with the red ribbon, and sets them in the drawer that has become a treasury of voices.

Outside, the river hums its long song. Inside, the house holds its family — gathered, growing, waiting for more.

And Harri, for the first time in years, feels not only found, but surrounded.

Chapter Text

The humid air presses itself against the Quarter, brass horns swelling in the night, the air heavy with sugar and smoke.

The city bends in small ways to Harri’s presence — lanternlight catching green in her eyes, market stalls seeming to pause when she lingers. Teddy grows louder with it, laughing through leaves and chasing Rebekah down the garden path, curls flashing like stolen sunlight.

Nik begins to claim her evenings. Not in declarations, but in the casual way he appears at doorways, voice pitched low.

“Come with me, love.”

The French Market is the first of these stolen nights. He watches her as much as the vendors: the way her hand brushes over silk scarves dyed in river hues, how her smile flickers despite herself when he tells her of the duel once fought on the cobblestones, the stain never lifting.

“And you?” she asks, tilting her head.

“I collected the spoils,” he answers, smirk cutting sharp. “I always do.”

Her laugh slips out, unwilling, and the bond hums through his bones, pleased.

Later, when she bargains with a vendor over carved trinkets for Teddy, Nik compels the price lower before she can finish.

She notices anyway — the man’s sudden falter, the quick glance at Nik — and when they walk on, she looks at him sidelong. He says nothing. Her lips press together, fighting a smile, and for once she lets him have the silence.

Another evening, he takes her to a jazz hall that throbs with brass and sweat. The music spills from the floorboards into the bones of the building. He drinks little, watches much. Harri sinks into the noise like she was made for it, shoulders easing, eyes bright.

“You prefer this to silence?” he asks, leaning close.

“Sometimes silence is heavier than music.”

Nik studies her, the corner of his mouth curling. “You are learning my city.”

“And you’re letting me.”

He laughs, low and curling, the bond answering.

She sways when the trumpet climbs, not dancing, but not still either. For a moment, Nik imagines painting her not in oils but in sound — every brushstroke a note, every colour a brass chord.

He files it away for later, when he will paint her silhouette by lamplight and pretend it is nothing more than practice.

//

The tether between them grows textured. He feels her moods as clearly as the brush dragging paint across canvas. Sharp with amusement, low with unease, softened into quiet when Teddy startles awake and she soothes him.

One night in the library, books stacked high between them, she suggests muting it.

“You wish to be rid of me already?” he teases, though a curl of something sharper lies beneath.

“Not rid of. Just… to know.”

They try, and he feels the thread dull, curtain-drawn. For a moment he almost snarls at the loss, but then she breathes out, relieved.

“It feels strange,” she says.

“It is choice, then,” he muses aloud. “Not chain.”

Her small smile is certain. “That matters.”

But when she sleeps easily that night, curled soft with Teddy’s small weight in her arms, Nik lies awake. The silence gnaws like hunger. At length, he slips the thread open again, drinking in her steady dreaming.

He does not tell her.

By seasons edge, the Quarter grows fog-bound. The house adjusts itself to colder nights: fires lit earlier, Rebekah fussing with fabrics, Marcel coaxing Nik into games of chess that last until dawn.

Kol whistles Ginny’s tune softer now, not quite mocking, and Ginny ignores him with practiced grace. Nik notices the shift: Kol quieter, his edges less barbed, a rare steadiness taking root where he has always been reckless.

Ginny brings both the best and the worst of him — and somehow balances the sum.

Once, Harri passes by the parlor to find Kol teaching Ginny a card trick. She rolls her eyes, but when she outsmarts him, Ginny’s smirk is sharp enough to make Kol laugh — an unguarded sound Nik almost does not recognize.

Nik watches and says nothing. If Kol can be softened, if he can be seen, perhaps Harri is not the only anomaly in this house.

And so the days stitch themselves in ordinary threads: Teddy’s ink-stained fingers, Rebekah’s sharp scolding, Ginny’s rare laughter ringing through the hall. Marcel slipping in and out with restless news, always returning as though pulled by gravity.

And beneath it, always, the bond.

They have not named it yet. But Nik knows its shape more clearly with each night.

It feels less like inevitability now.

And more like want.

One night, nearly half a year after she first set foot in New Orleans, Harri asks the question that has been burning since the beginning.

They are in the studio, Teddy asleep upstairs, the window cracked to let in a river breeze. Harri sets down her pen, stares at Nik’s back as he works a brush across canvas.

“And Elijah?” she says softly. “Where is he?”

Nik stills. The bond hums, sharp with warning, but she does not back down.

“You’ve spoken of him,” she presses, “but I haven’t met him. Why?”

Nik turns at last, face shadowed in lamplight. His smile is thin, dangerous. “Because he sleeps.”

Her chest tightens. “Daggered.”

“Yes.”

“For nearly a year?”

“For longer.” His voice hardens. “And he will remain so, until I see fit.”

Harri wants to lash out. She wants to throw words like curses: cruelty, arrogance, selfishness.

But the bond hums steady, reminding her — this is not her war. Not yet. She swallows it, though the fire lodges sharp in her throat.

One day, she promises herself. With time.

//

Colder nights softens into warmer days with no announcement, only the subtle insistence of longer days and heavier air.

The Quarter glitters louder, the river grows lazier, and the lemon tree in the courtyard fruits so shamelessly that Marcel jokes it’s in love.

The house itself finds a rhythm. Teddy learns to run in crooked circles, shrieking with delight until Rebekah scoops him up with mock severity. Kol plays endless pranks that Ginny refuses to lose at.

Marcel moves through rooms with the ease of someone who has left enough times to know how precious returning is. Nik paints more than ever, Harri watching from the corner until he pulls her into the frame whether she likes it or not.

Teddy’s words stumble into sentences, declarations loud and absolute. One morning he toddles to Harri, arms up, and says, clear as bell-metal: “Ma.”

She freezes, heart hammering. Nik, leaning in the doorway, smirks as though he had expected it all along.

That evening, Teddy blesses Ginny with “Gunny,” which delights her so much she refuses to correct him.

Rebekah follows soon after, becoming “Bekka,” though she insists the child address her properly — and then softens every time he does not.

The house laughs louder now.

Harri and Rebekah continue to grow something fierce between them — not soft, not gentle, but constant. They spar in words and clothes and stubbornness, but Harri learns the cadence of Rebekah’s silences, and Rebekah learns the shape of Harri’s scars. Sisterhood, not by birth but by bond, and all the stronger for it.

Kol and Ginny circle each other like storms. He provokes, she counters, their battles sharp enough to draw sparks. Yet Harri sees it — the way Kol listens when she speaks, the way Ginny hums without realizing when he is near. A thread wound tighter with each passing week, though neither admits it aloud.

Nik and Harri, too, carve deeper into each other. What began as a tether becomes presence, then love, then something steadier still.

They quarrel — often — his arrogance against her defiance, her compassion against his temper. But always, the bond pulls taut and then soft again, as if reminding them both: you chose this.

On quiet nights, he paints her. On braver ones, he lets her see him without his armor. Sometimes she laughs in his arms until Teddy wakes. Sometimes she kisses him until the city itself feels too small to hold them.

The days pass and turn into weeks, and they explore the bond. 

They read more.

Folios yellowed with time, stolen from convents, hoarded by witches, rescued from flames. Lovers who burned together, rivals who sharpened each other into ruin, pairs who severed the bond until only echo remained.

She lingers over tales of enemies. Nik feels the shift in her without needing to look — Tom’s shadow crowding her memory.

If I killed him, would it have killed me too? Or worse — left me alive, bound forever to absence?

He sets his book aside, watching her with a smirk faint and shadowed.

“If it had been him, little one, the world would not have lived long enough for you to ask the question. Fortunate, then, that it wasn’t.”

She swallows, nods. Fortunate.

They test further. She tries to shut him out — he follows. He leaves the house, wanders the Quarter — distance does nothing. She presses anger sharp into the tether, flint-edged, and when he returns, dimples flash.

“If you wished to wound me, you’d need claws sharper than that.”

She glares, then laughs, and the thread thrums clean.

One afternoon, he lingers across the river, watching the city’s haze blur. Even then, the tether tugs like tidewater. He imagines it would drag him back even if he tried to cut it.

Perhaps especially then.

The house settles into its spring shade, and then into something softer. Time folds in on itself here — days thick with sugar and spice, nights bleeding with brass, days passing like breath.

Teddy grows louder. He scribbles his sums on parchment, hair flashing gold when he’s pleased with himself.

Rebekah fusses over his handwriting, over Harri’s hair, over the state of the curtains. Kol hums Ginny’s tune so softly now it is no longer a barb, and Ginny smirks at him with a patience Nik finds almost alarming.

Marcel slips in and out, restless as ever, bringing news of other cities, other lives. Nik allows it. Marcel is his, and when he returns, it is always with the bond of son to father intact.

Harri has learned the rhythm of it all. She writes her letters, tends to Teddy, walks the Quarter with Rebekah, argues with Kol, humors Marcel when he’s back.

She lingers near Nik in the evenings, reading beside him while he paints. She does not name what they are, but she lives it.

Sometimes, when she thinks he is not looking, she studies the family portraits hung along the hall — eyes catching always on the one face missing.

Elijah’s absence hangs in the air heavier than the frames themselves.

//

It is almost a year and a bit since she first arrived when she asks again.

They are in the courtyard, Teddy asleep upstairs, Rebekah inside humming as she tidies the kitchen. The air smells of jasmine and damp stone. Harri sets down her book and looks at him with that quiet, unyielding gaze.

“Elijah,” she says softly. “You told me no before. But it’s been months. I’ve lived here nearly a year. Don’t you think it’s time I met him?”

Nik feels the bond shift — not sharp, but steady. She isn’t demanding. She is asking, and asking matters more.

He leans back, paintbrush still in hand, eyes narrowing with thought.

“If you meet my brother,” he says at last, voice low and certain, “it will be on Marcel’s terms, not yours. Not even mine.”

Her brow furrows, confusion flickering, but she doesn’t press. Not yet. She swallows the question she wants to ask — why Marcel, why not you — and looks away.

Nik watches her carefully, feels the thread hum with her disappointment. He does not tell her the rest.

That Elijah once tried to kill Marcel. That family, to Niklaus Mikaelson, is not a word thrown lightly, and betrayal is not forgiven cheaply.

He lets the silence stretch, broken only by the faint creak of the house, the whistle of wind between shutters, the steady drip of rain from the eaves. Harri lifts her book again, her jaw tight, her shoulders set.

Nik turns back to his canvas, the dimples absent from his face, and paints her silhouette into the corner of the page.

The days pass on. Teddy grows another inch, Kol and Ginny soften further into each other, Rebekah scolds, Marcel wanders, and Harri asks no more questions.

But Nik feels it — the thread tugging with every page she turns, every silence she holds too carefully.

He knows she will ask again. And when she does, he will decide what she is ready to hear.

And so the silence between her and Nik lasts longer than a night.

She does not raise Elijah’s name again, but it hangs in the rafters of the house all the same, caught between shutter slats and half-finished canvases.

Harri tries a different path.

One afternoon, she finds Rebekah in the sitting room, sewing Teddy’s shirt back together after another of his garden adventures left it torn and grass-stained. The natural rays falls soft through the windows, catching at the silver needle in her hand.

“Bekah,” Harri begins, careful, “what was he like? Elijah.”

The thread stutters in Rebekah’s grasp. For a heartbeat, the only sound is Teddy humming to himself on the rug, building towers from wooden blocks.

Then Rebekah sets the needle down too neatly and smooths the fabric as if it were whole.

“He was… proper.” Her smile flickers, brittle. “Always knew the right words, the right gestures. You would have liked him.”

“That’s not an answer,” Harri says gently.

Rebekah’s eyes lift, sharp and bright, then soften. “It’s the only one you’ll get tonight.” And with that she rises, excuses herself to check the stew, leaving the half-mended shirt folded in Harri’s lap.

Harri sits there a long while, staring at the uneven stitches.

Kol is less delicate.

She corners him on the balcony a few nights later, where he is tossing cards into the air and catching them, all restless grace. Ginny leans against the railing nearby, book half-open, pretending not to watch him.

“What was he like?” Harri asks, voice low. “Your brother.”

Kol snorts, flicks a card high enough that it vanishes into the dark. “Which one? I’ve got so many.”

“Elijah.”

“Ah, the noble one.” Kol smirks, though it curls too tightly at the edges. “Perfect posture, perfect manners, perfect bloody martyr complex. If you’re imagining a saint, love, you’ll be disappointed.”

“Is that all?”

Kol shrugs, eyes glittering. “He’s dead boring when he isn’t ruining someone’s life. Though I’ll grant he does it elegantly.”

Harri narrows her gaze. “You’re avoiding.”

“And you’re prying.” He grins, wolfish. “Careful — keep tugging at secrets and this family might snap at you.”

Then he turns back to his cards, whistling under his breath. Ginny snaps her book closed and mutters something about boys who think too highly of their wit. Kol only laughs.

Harri leaves them there, but the absence of an answer clings sharper than truth.

Later, when the house has quieted, Ginny finds her in the kitchen rinsing teacups.

“They never talk about him,” Harri says softly. “Not really.”

Ginny leans against the counter, hair falling loose around her face. “Then it must be a wound still open. Families hide those. Sometimes even from themselves.”

“Do you think it’s that?”

Ginny’s brow furrows. “Or it’s something they don’t want you to know yet. Secrecy can be protection. Or power. Or both.”

Harri nods, fingers tight around the porcelain. The bond hums low in her bones, restless, as though Nik is listening even here.

When Marcel returns, it is with the noise of the Quarter still clinging to him. He drops a bottle of rum on the table, kisses Rebekah’s cheek in greeting, ruffles Teddy’s hair until the boy squeals, and leans back in his chair like he never left.

Harri waits until the house settles around his presence — Rebekah bustling, Kol making some jab about Marcel’s taste in liquor, Ginny rolling her eyes. Then she asks.

“Why is it your choice?”

The table stills.

Marcel tilts his head, studying her with that sharp-eyed calm he wears like armor. “My choice for what?”

“For Elijah,” Harri says. Her voice does not waver. “Nik said I’ll only meet him if you allow it. Why you, not him?”

The air shifts. Rebekah busies herself with pouring drinks; Kol whistles low, deliberately careless. Nik is not here — or else she might not have dared ask.

Marcel does not answer at once. He leans back in his chair, swirling the rum in his glass as if the answer might rise from its depths.

The silence lengthens, taut, and Harri feels anticipation coil in her chest until her breath catches.

When he finally speaks, his voice is not warm, not teasing as it so often is. It is flat. Cold.

“Because Elijah —because he tried to kill me. And he nearly succeeded.”

The words strike like steel against stone.

Marcel lifts his gaze then, and Harri sees no trace of the easy smile, no trace of the boy who slips in and out of the Quarter with restless charm.

What looks back at her is harder, sharpened by betrayal and survival. In that moment, he looks so much like Nik it makes her throat tighten — the same ruthlessness simmering under skin, the same refusal to be made small by anyone, even family.

“That kind of thing,” Marcel continues, voice clipped, “doesn’t wash out with time. If Elijah walks again, it won’t be Nik’s choice. It’ll be mine. Because I’m the one who has to live with it.”

The silence after is heavier than his words. Rebekah sets her glass down too carefully. Kol flicks another card into the air, his whistle low, but neither breaks the weight of it.

Harri finds herself gripping the edge of the table. “And if I want to meet him?” she asks, softer now, though her eyes hold steady.

Marcel’s smile is faint, stripped of kindness. “Then you’ll have to wait, love. Some doors only open when the city itself is ready.”

The words settle between them like another lock on a door already barred.

The silence sits sharp after Marcel’s words, like a blade left on the table.

Rebekah is the first to move. She sets her glass down too carefully, knuckles whitening, and busies herself with folding the cloth napkins that don’t need folding. It is a retreat disguised as routine.

Kol flicks another card into the air, whistling low. The sound is careless, but the angle of his glance toward Harri is not. He thrives on sharp edges, yet even he seems to know this one cuts differently.

Harri swallows, fingers tight on the table’s edge. The air feels heavier, the tether thrumming faint with her unease.

She has seen Marcel laugh, charm, tease — but this coldness, this iron beneath his skin, is something else entirely. Something that belongs not to the boy who calls the Quarter home, but to the man who survived it.

For a flicker, she sees Nik in him — the same tilt of the jaw, the same refusal to yield, the same power pressed into every syllable. It jolts her, that resemblance. Marcel is not his son in blood, but in that moment, he looks more like Niklaus Mikaelson than any sibling does.

Ginny shifts, closing her book softly, and reaches out to brush Harri’s wrist. Her eyes are steady, questioning without words: you all right? Harri forces a nod, though the tension coils too tight in her chest to breathe easily.

Rebekah clears her throat, too bright. “It’s late. Teddy will be awake with dawn, and someone must make sure he hasn’t painted the nursery walls again.” She sweeps from the room with brittle grace, skirts swishing like punctuation.

Ginny follows more slowly, a soft hand on Harri’s arm as she passes, whispering low enough only she can hear: “Don’t take their silences for answers.”

And then it is just her and Marcel, the coldness still clinging to him.

He downs the last of his drink, gaze cutting toward the shuttered windows. “Some truths, Harri, are heavier than you think. Best not to chase them until you’re ready to carry them.”

He rises, chair scraping against stone, and leaves her there with the words lodged in the air like smoke.

Harri sits unmoving, breath shallow, the tether humming against her ribs. For once, it offers no steadiness, only the faint echo of her own unsettled pulse.

It is then she feels it — a shift, a presence — and looks up.

Nik stands in the doorway, shoulder braced against the frame, the faintest tilt to his head. His dimples are absent, but the glint in his eye is unmistakable.

“Well,” he drawls, voice low, sardonic, curling through the silence like smoke. “Leave my brother undaggered for too long and he does enjoy making enemies of everyone, doesn’t he?”

The corner of his mouth lifts, sharp and knowing.

Harri exhales, pulse catching, and fixes him with a steady look. “Enemies are easier to make when you keep everything secret.”

Nik steps further into the room, shadows folding around him as though they belong to him. “Secrets, little one, are what keep families from tearing themselves apart. Or haven’t you noticed?”

“I’ve noticed no one trusts me enough to tell me the truth.” Her voice doesn’t waver, though her fingers curl in her lap. “Not Rebekah. Not Kol. Not Marcel. Not even you.”

His brows lift, mock amusement flickering, but the tether hums louder, betraying him. “You wound me. I’ve been nothing if not generous. My city, my home, my brother’s endless company—”

“Daggers in the dark,” she cuts in, sharp, “and silences louder than answers.”

The smile fades into something thinner, edged. He circles the table, slow, until he stands just behind her chair. His presence bends the air itself.

“You think me cruel?” His voice is low, threaded close to her ear.

“I think you’re afraid,” she answers, tilting her head just enough to meet his gaze.

The bond thrums, fierce, alive. For a moment it feels like standing on the edge of a blade — one wrong breath and it will cut them both.

Nik doesn’t retreat this time. His voice dips further, rougher at the edges, and she feels the truth in it before the words even shape.

“What Elijah did that night,” he says, “was the closest I have ever come to bleeding. Because Marcel is mine. My son. My marrow. He is what steadied me when nothing else could. What taught me I was capable of… more than ruin. Emotions I thought I had carved out of myself long ago.”

His hand brushes the back of her chair, not touching, but close enough the air tightens. “Marcel became the exception to every rule I made for myself. And Elijah, in his sanctimonious wisdom, thought to take him from me. Thought Marcel’s loyalty would falter, that he would betray me, as though I hadn’t known his every step since boyhood.”

His laugh curls low, bitter. “My brother thought to rip out the one tether I chose for myself. And for that, he nearly lost my forgiveness forever.”

The dimples flash then, sudden and sharp, though the words are laced with iron. “So yes, Chosen One. If Marcel says Elijah stays buried, then so he will. Because my son has earned the right to decide who walks beside us.”

Harri’s pulse stutters. She doesn’t look away.

“Then I’ll take the truth,” she whispers. “Kind or not.”

The silence stretches, thick with jasmine and rum and the faint whistle of the Quarter beyond.

At last, Nik straightens, withdrawing the smallest step, smirk curling as though he has tucked something sharp back into its sheath. “Bravery looks well on you, little witch. Try not to waste it.”

Then — like a flick of a knife — the bond goes silent.

It isn’t a soft dimming but a severing, brutal and absolute. One breath he is in her bones, the next he is gone, leaving her chest hollow, as if someone has carved her open and scooped out the marrow.

Harri jerks at the absence, fingers tightening on the table. The silence roars in her ears, louder than the city beyond, heavier than any grief she thought she had survived.

It is cruel. Purposefully cruel.

And it hits. Maybe Nik’s sharpness is not something time will sand down, not something she can coax into gentleness. Maybe his cruelty is not a wall to climb but the ground itself — unyielding, inevitable.

And maybe her wanting him to be more, to be better, is the most foolish dream she has ever clung to.

The house breathes around her, shutters creaking, jasmine stirring in the night air. But inside her there is nothing — only the echo of where he was, and the wound of knowing he chose to leave her empty.

Chapter Text

The house feels different when he closes the bond.

At first it is only a silence, sharp and shocking. But days stretch, and silence hardens into absence — a hollow she cannot name without bleeding.

Nik is there, of course. She sees him in the courtyard, in the study, pausing at Teddy’s laughter, brushing past Kol’s taunts with a smirk that does not reach his eyes. He paints. He drinks. He smiles at Rebekah.

But he does not look at her. Not the way he did before. And the bond stays shut, iron-barred.

Harri tries. At night she lies awake, steadying her breath, reaching inward as though tugging at an unseen thread. Sometimes she thinks she feels it tremble, faint as a heartbeat across a sea. But it never opens.

By morning she is tired-eyed, and Ginny notices. Ginny always notices.

“Trouble with your lodger?” she asks dryly over tea.

Harri forces a laugh, but it catches in her throat. “Something like that.”

The days bruise into weeks. Teddy grows louder, Rebekah fusses more, Kol and Ginny sharpen their strange orbit. Marcel drifts in and out, the Quarter bending around him. Life carries on.

But Harri feels the absence like a wound beneath her ribs.

When she reads to Teddy, the tether is silent. When she laughs at Kol’s quip, the tether is silent. When she stands at the window and watches fog roll across the Quarter, the tether is silent.

Once, when she passes Nik in the hall, she almost says his name. The word lodges behind her teeth, unspoken, and the brush of his shoulder feels like cold stone.

It gnaws at her. How easily he could undo it. One thought, one breath, and he could be in her bones again.

Instead he chooses the knife’s edge of silence, and she begins to wonder if this is what cruelty really means — not the bite of words, but the denial of closeness. Not pain, but distance.

And she wonders how long she can bear it.

He keeps the bond shut.

It is not mercy, and it is not accident. It is choice.

He paints longer now, brush dragging hard against canvas, colors bleeding sharp and jagged. He listens to Marcel’s reports, to Kol’s endless barbs, to Rebekah’s fussing. He plays his role.

But always, beneath it, he feels the pull — the quiet, steady beat of her trying. Her reaching. The bond stirs against its lock, pressing like a hand against a barred door.

He feels it. Every night, every dawn.

And he denies it.

Because her bravery unsettled him. Because her wanting him better — softer, kinder — is the one demand he cannot abide.

He is not a man she can shape into gentleness. He is not a story she can rewrite with her green-eyed will. He is what he has always been: hunger, ruin, devotion carved in bone.

So he closes the bond, and lets her feel the cruelty of absence. Lets her learn that wanting him will not make him safe.

Yet even as he does, he finds himself painting her face into every corner of his canvases. Finds himself listening for the cadence of her footsteps on the stairs.

Finds himself wondering how long before he breaks his own command and opens the bond again, if only to breathe.

For now, he keeps it shut.

Because cruelty, he tells himself, is the only way she will learn.

It is Marcel who breaks the stalemate.

He finds Nik in the study one evening, the fire low, canvases leaning half-finished against the walls. The younger man leans against the doorframe, eyes sharp, voice steady.

“You think starving her out will make her stronger?” Marcel asks. “You think silence will teach her what love from you looks like?”

Nik does not turn. He dips his brush in dark red, drags it across the canvas like a wound.

“You presume to tell me how to handle what is mine?”

Marcel’s laugh is bitter, low. “She’s not a thing to handle. And if you keep this up, you’ll lose her before you’ve even had her.”

The brush snaps in Nik’s hand. He flings it aside, the splatter of paint marking the floor like blood. His voice sharpens, raw and uncoiled.

“She sought answers after I gave them, Marcel. I told her it was your choice — yours — whether Elijah wakes. And still she went to Rebekah, to Kol, to you, as though my word wasn’t enough. As though my command could be bent by persistence.”

He turns now, eyes burning, every word like glass. “Do you know what that felt like? To watch her pressing against the very boundary I laid? As though she thought me weak, or a fool, or worse — as though she thought I would betray you to appease her?”

Marcel doesn’t flinch. “Maybe she just wanted to understand.”

Nik laughs, short and sharp. “Understand? I thought she would. I thought, of all people, she would see that family is not a word I use lightly. That when I gave you that power, it meant something. But instead she gnawed at it like a dog with a bone, and when I refused to yield, she looked at me as though I were the tyrant she’s always feared I am.”

He presses a hand against his chest, as if the bond is still there, throbbing just beyond reach. His voice dips low, ragged.

“So I shut it. I shut her out. Better she learns now that my devotion is not hers to test. Better she learns I cannot be twisted into whatever softer thing she wants.”

The fire pops. The silence after is almost crueler than his words.

Marcel steps closer, his shadow long against the wall. “You think she’s undermining you. I think she’s trying to love you. And the difference, Old man, is the one thing you’ve never been good at seeing.”

Nik’s jaw tightens, but his breath falters.

Marcel’s gaze doesn’t waver. “You’re right — she went to all of us. But that wasn’t betrayal. That was her way of saying she wants to belong here. She wants to know the weight we carry. And you punish her for it? You think shutting her out proves strength? All it proves is fear.”

The bond stirs against its lock, restless, alive, like it has heard Marcel’s words.

Nik closes his eyes for a moment, the faintest tremor in his hand.

“She will never understand,” he whispers, though it sounds more like plea than certainty.

Marcel’s reply is quiet, firm. “Not if you never let her try.”

The study is quiet long after Marcel leaves, save for the crackle of fire and the slow drip of paint from a broken brush onto the rug.

Nik sits in the silence, hands braced against his knees, staring at the half-finished canvas. Marcel’s words coil in his skull, stubborn as vines: She’s trying to love you. Not if you never let her try.

The bond presses faintly against him, like a pulse behind stone. He has ignored it for weeks, but now it beats harder, restless, alive, as if Marcel’s presence has roused it.

He breathes once, twice. Then he lets his hand unclench, and with the smallest flick of will, he opens the door he had slammed shut.

The bond floods back in, not with warmth, but with ache.

Harri’s hurt hits first — sharp, immediate, unguarded. It cuts through him like glass. The emptiness she had borne, the nights she reached and found nothing, the weight of silence pressed into her bones — it spills into him in a rush that makes his breath falter.

Cruel, her thought whispers, unbidden, raw. You were cruel.

He swallows, dimples absent, and answers low across the tether: You sought answers I had already given. You went to them when I had said it was not for you to decide. Do you not see how that felt to me?

Her response is quick, aching. I wasn’t trying to undermine you. I was trying to understand. I’ve lived in this house a year, Nik. And still there are corners locked and shuttered. I thought— her voice breaks, I thought if I asked enough, I’d see what I was missing.

The tether hums, fierce and uncertain. He presses his hand to his chest, as though to steady it. And did you?

A pause. Then, soft but steady: I saw your family bleeding, and all of you pretending it was healed. I saw you keep me outside of it, when I only wanted to step in.

Her honesty spears through him. For a moment he cannot answer.

Finally, he exhales, slow. I did not shut you out to punish you. I did it because I thought you would understand that some scars must remain buried. That when I gave Marcel the right to decide, it was not for you to gnaw at like bone. I thought you would see my trust in him as the truth it was.

Through the bond, her hurt twists, but softens at the edges. I did see it. I do. But trust is not the same as silence, Nik. You want me to belong here, yet you bar the doors I try to walk through. How can I learn this family, this life, if I am never allowed to ask?

The tether vibrates between them, low and steady, like a string plucked.

Nik leans back in his chair, eyes shut. For the first time in weeks, he lets the bond breathe freely, no curtain drawn, no lock. He feels her exhaustion, her defiance, her hurt — but beneath it, still, the steadiness of her want.

His voice slips into her mind, rough-edged but certain. Then ask. But do not mistake my silence for weakness. And do not mistake my cruelty for lack of devotion.

Her answering thought is small, but it thrums through the bond like truth. And don’t mistake my persistence for betrayal.

For a moment, they are quiet, not reconciled but suspended — the bond humming low, the air between them thick with everything unsaid.

It is not peace. Not yet.

But it is not absence either.

The bond hums, tentative but alive. Not peace, not yet — but not absence either.

Harri breathes through it, her chest loosening for the first time in weeks. She dares to press further, voice a thread in his mind. Then tell me. Why Marcel? Why him, above all others?

Nik is silent long enough she fears he’ll close it again. But when he answers, his tone is jagged, as if dragged over stone.

Because he is mine.

The words thrum hard through the bond, reverberating in her bones.

Marcel is the heart I chose. My son. My blood, though not by nature. He taught me loyalty in a way no brother or sister ever could. He made me better than I was, pulled me from the ruin I carried. When he laughed, I remembered joy. When he defied me, I remembered I was still capable of pain. He is my tether, little witch — the exception I never thought I would grant even myself.

The bond shakes with the rawness of it.

And Elijah — his thought cuts sharp, bitter, Elijah believed he would betray me. That he was only ever a shadow to be cast off. And so he struck him down. My brother nearly killed my son because he thought he knew me better than I know myself.

Harri flinches at the violence in his words, the wound still open after all these years.

She whispers back, careful, steady. So you will not forgive him.

Nik’s laugh is hollow. Forgiveness? No. If he walks again, it will be because Marcel allows it. Because this city bends to him as much as it does to me. That is the framework, and you pressed against it. That is why I shut you out.

Harri swallows, her throat tight. I wasn’t trying to undo you, Nik. I just— She closes her eyes, and the bond carries the ache of her truth. I needed, no wanted to see Elijah because I need to understand the whole of you. Not just the parts you let me hold. You keep your family in shards and expect me to love the shape of it blind. I can’t. Not if I’m to stay.

The tether thrums sharp at the word stay.

Nik goes still, the bond thickening with his silence. Then, slowly, he exhales.

You would walk willingly into the ruins that made me?

Yes, she answers. No hesitation. Because I already live in them.

The tether pulls tight, fierce and intimate.

For the first time since he closed it, Nik lets the bond flow wholly open. He allows her to feel him — not just the hunger, not just the cruelty, but the raw bone deep of his devotion. The jagged, unyielding love he carves into those he claims.

Harri’s breath catches. It is overwhelming, too much, and yet she does not retreat.

Then we will tread carefully, his voice murmurs through her, rough as stone. You will have your answers. But you will not have them all at once. Some truths would burn you before you could bear them.

Her reply is small, certain. Then let me burn slowly.

The bond hums deep, molten, alive.

And for the first time in weeks, neither of them feels alone.

The night stretches long after their bond quiets into something steadier. Harri sleeps at last, exhaustion pulling her under, the tether humming low and warm through her ribs.

When she wakes, the house feels different.

It is subtle — the kind of shift only she would notice. The air no longer presses against her chest. The walls no longer echo with absence. The house breathes with her again, and though the ache of what he did remains, the silence is somewhat gone.

Teddy bursts into her room with ink-stained hands, chattering about a bird that nested in the garden wall. His curls are wild, his grin irrepressible, and Harri holds him tighter than usual, letting his warmth anchor her. He tilts his head at her sudden fierceness, but only laughs and squirms away to tell Rebekah instead.

At breakfast, Kol is already mocking Ginny’s handwriting in the margins of her book, and Ginny is ignoring him with regal disdain. Rebekah fusses over Teddy’s hair, Marcel sprawls in a chair with that effortless ownership of the room.

And Nik —

Nik sits at the far end of the table, knife in hand, slicing through a pear with slow, deliberate strokes. He doesn’t look at her at first. But the bond hums alive, steady, undeniable. When his eyes finally meet hers, it is only for a heartbeat — dimples absent, mouth curling faintly as though he knows exactly how she feels and will not spare her the relief of gentleness.

Still, it is there. He has opened the bond, and she is in his crevices again.

Harri swallows around the weight in her throat and eats quietly, the taste of fruit sharp on her tongue, the tether singing between them like a string drawn taut.

Life goes on. Teddy chatters. Rebekah scolds. Kol whistles. Ginny sighs. Marcel tells a story about the Quarter.

But Harri feels it beneath it all — the bond alive, thrumming, carrying hurt and want in equal measure.

And she knows the questions about Elijah are not gone. They have only been deferred.

For now, she lets the morning hold her.

For now, she breathes in the space between cruelty and devotion, where Niklaus Mikaelson always seems to dwell.

The evening settles heavy. Teddy sleeps upstairs, the Quarter murmurs beyond the walls, and the house breathes with a hush that feels expectant.

Harri finds herself in the library, the candlelight low. She traces the spine of a book, her fingers steady though her chest is not. The bond hums, alive but still quiet.

She knows he feels her here. She knows he always does.

The voice comes first, low from the doorway. “Do you hate me for it?”

She turns. Nik leans against the frame, expression carved sharp and unreadable.

“For closing the bond?” she asks.

He nods once.

Harri exhales. “I hated it, yes. I hated feeling like I was clawing at stone, shouting into a grave. But hate you?” She shakes her head. “No. I don’t think I can.”

He steps inside, the firelight catching his face. “Cruelty is the only language I’ve ever trusted to keep what I love alive. It was what I gave you.”

Her gaze sharpens. “Then hear me now: I will not accept it again. If you close me out like that, if you starve me with silence, don’t expect me to sit quietly waiting for your mercy. I’ll answer you in kind — or worse.”

The tether thrums, sharp at her defiance.

Nik tilts his head, eyes gleaming. “You would dare shut me out?”

“I would,” she fires back. “If you can lock me away without a thought, then I can too. I will not be your lesson in cruelty. If you try to teach me that way again, I will make sure you taste it tenfold.”

For a heartbeat, silence. The bond quivers, not weak but fierce, alive with the clash of their wills.

Then Nik’s laugh breaks, low and jagged. Not mocking, not quite amused — but dark with recognition. “There it is. The steel I felt in you from the start.” He steps closer, his hand lifting, not tender but deliberate as it grazes her jaw. “You threaten me, and still I find myself… devoted.”

Harri doesn’t flinch. She meets him, steady. “Then learn devotion without cruelty.”

The tether surges, rough and molten. His dimples don’t show; his mouth curves faintly, dangerous and almost tender. “And if I fail?”

“Then I’ll remind you,” she whispers. “And I won’t be gentle.”

The tether hums fierce, molten, their defiance forged into a vow neither will break.

Nik studies her, gaze unreadable. Then, slowly, he leans down. His lips brush against the edge of hers — not claiming, not soft, but deliberate, a brand pressed at the border of cruelty and tenderness.

The bond flares, sharp and alive.

And when he pulls back, his voice is low enough only she can hear. “Then teach me gently, little witch. But do not leave me cold.”

He does not leave her cold.

The kiss at the door is small — an edge pressed to the mouth rather than a claim — and it lands on her the way a promise does: precise, deliberate, impossibly heavy.

For a moment they stand with the house around them breathing slow, the tether thrumming between their ribs like a caged thing finally allowed to breathe.

They do not make vows like children who do not know the weight of words. They trade terms instead, each clause blunt and honest. She will not tolerate silence as punishment; he will not mistake her persistence for treachery.

If he ever bars her again, she will answer him in kind — not as spite, but as a weapon to remind him he is fallible. He will not use cruelty as a currency; he will try, if only to prove himself capable of gentler things.

They stipulate nothing grand — no declarations, no cures for the past — only the small rules that might keep two stubborn things from shredding one another.

Later, when the night has thinned into the kind of dark that keeps secrets honest, they sit with Teddy between them and speak in fragments: confessions that are less admissions than map-pins — here is where I broke, here is where I learned, here is the place I cannot go back to.

Nik’s voice is rough when he says the word devotion aloud; Harri’s laugh is a breakable thing that always heals itself. They practice the shape of each other’s names until the tether hums easier.

Days fold into each other in soft, domestic ways. She learns the cadence of his easiness: when paint stains his fingernails, when a silence means thought and not spite.

He learns the small mercies of living with a child: how a spat of ink on a cheek can ruin an evening or make it sacred, how laughter knits wounds for a while.

They bicker — about Teddy’s shoes, about whether he should sleep in the nursery or the study — and when they quarrel they are careful to fight with rules already laid down, the terms a buffer against the old, dangerous habits.

Marcel remarks on it once at supper, raising a brow over wine. “You look less like a war-torn widow and more like a queue for trouble,” he says, easy. Kol grins and calls them ridiculous.

Rebekah fusses and presses a plate into Harri’s hands like a peace offerint. The house settles into the rhythm of being full.

The tether between Nik and Harri does not seal as though nothing had happened. It thins and thickens like weather, sometimes taut with the memory of the closed door, sometimes humming with a quiet solidity that holds them both.

The question of Elijah remains an ember beneath the ash — not gone, only contained. Nik moves at his own pace to what he will tell; she asks with the steadiness of someone who knows slow is survivable if it is honest.

And time, as it will, keeps moving. The humid days soften at the edges; the river that once mirrored the Quarter’s heat begins to breathe cooler at night. Small things announce the change — a leaf that refuses to be green, the way the light angles differently across the courtyard.

They notice these things in halves at first, each seeing something the other misses, then together, as though the season were a test they choose to take side by side.

And so, the seasons turn again, and with it comes a knock on the door.

Harri answers the knock with Teddy on her hip, Ginny at her shoulder, Rebekah leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. The courtyard smells of lemons and rain, and the sky is low with clouds.

Her hand is steady on the latch — steadier than it would have been weeks ago — the bond humming low in her chest as though reminding her she is no longer alone when she opens doors.

On the threshold stand Andromeda, Molly and Arthur, Hermione and Ron, Neville — faces worn from travel, eyes wide with what they find.

For a moment, no one moves. And then Teddy squeals, hair flashing wild with colour, and the house erupts into welcome.

Harri laughs through tears, voice breaking as she breathes the words she has been writing all year.

“You came.”

For a heartbeat the doorway holds them — Britain on one side, New Orleans on the other — the gap between years of letters and the flesh-and-blood proof of their arrival.

Then Molly breaks it, rushing forward with a cry that is both laugh and sob. She gathers Harri close, Teddy caught between them, smothering both in kisses. Arthur follows, quieter but no less steady, his hand firm on Harri’s shoulder.

Hermione’s embrace is fierce, almost bruising. Ron pulls her in after, muttering something about “bloody time,” his voice gruff to hide the wetness in his eyes.

Neville waits until last, pressing a small packet of seeds into her palm as if to say I remembered.

The hall fills at once — Molly fussing, Arthur remarking on the wards, Ron demanding to know who painted the canvases on the walls, Hermione already quizzing Teddy on his speech.

Teddy squeals with delight at being passed from arm to arm, hair flashing like a rainbow of recognition.

Ginny hovers at Harri’s side, her smile small but proud. Rebekah watches, arms folded, pretending indifference though her eyes betray a flicker of something softer.

Marcel strides in and welcomes them all as though he’d been expecting company for supper.

And Kol — Kol lingers at the edge of the room, arms crossed, gaze fixed not on Harri’sand Ginny’s family but on Ginny herself, who pointedly avoids looking at him. The air hums faintly with the tune neither of them has yet dared to claim.

Through it all, Nik remains in the shadows of the doorway, dimples carved like the ghost of a smile he refuses to admit to. He doesn’t step forward, not yet. He only watches as Harri, surrounded by both worlds, glows with a fullness he has never seen in her before.

The bond thrums faintly against his ribs, carrying her joy, her astonishment, her breaking laughter.

For a moment, he allows himself the rarest indulgence: the thought that maybe, just maybe, this is what home was meant to be.

He does not step forward. Not yet. He lingers in the arch of the doorway, arms folded, letting the cacophony of Weasley chatter and quietude wash through the house he once claimed with blood.

The tether feeds him pieces of her: the sting of Molly’s kisses, the ache of Arthur’s steady hand, the fierce delight of Hermione’s embrace. Each sensation presses against his chest until it feels almost unbearable.

And still, she does not falter. Harri stands steady at the center of it all, laughter spilling from her like it belongs to her again. He has seen her in grief, in fury, in defiance, but this—this fullness—is something rarer.

He could resent it. He could sneer that their arrival has made her glow in ways he never could. But the bond betrays him. It tells him plainly: she glows because she is held, and she chooses to remain tethered to him even so.

Dimples threaten, and he presses his tongue to his teeth to banish them. He will not give Marcel, or Rebekah, or any of the noisy ambushers now invading his courtyard, the satisfaction of seeing him softened.

But when Teddy laughs—high and unrestrained, curls flashing colour as he is passed from one pair of hands to another—something sharp lodges in his throat.

The boy’s joy spills across the tether too, and for once Nik does not shove it aside. He lets it root.

The crowd shifts. Chairs scrape, voices overlap, the smell of tea and rain-soaked cloaks fills the air. He watches as Harri’s gaze lifts from Molly’s fussing, from Hermione’s endless questions, and finds him where he waits in the threshold.

She does not look away.

The bond hums in that unspoken dare: Your move.

For a long moment, he holds his ground. Shadows are loyal; thresholds never betray. And yet… what is the point of eternity if he is only ever the audience?

He exhales, slow, and steps forward.

The courtyard hushes by a fraction, as though even the air wonders if he’ll bare his teeth.

“Decided to join us, then?” Harri says, voice dry, already unimpressed.

Nik drops into the chair beside her, arm slung along the back as though claiming furniture counts as subtlety. “Well, someone has to ensure this doesn’t turn into a séance over tea.”

Rebekah snorts. Marcel grins. Kol mutters about hypocrisy, which Nik ignores.

Then Teddy totters over, wooden lion in hand, and climbs into his lap as though Niklaus Mikaelson were built for this, as though monsters make suitable chairs.

“Da,” Teddy mumbles, half-yawn, half-victory.

The courtyard goes very still. Ginny’s eyes widen, Ron sputters, Molly presses her hands to her mouth.

Nik raises a brow, sardonic. “First Ma, now this. Next he’ll be composing odes.”

Harri leans against him, not smiling, not triumphant—just steady. “Get used to it,” she murmurs.

And for once, he does not argue. Not tonight.

Because for all the noise, the quarrels, the absurdity of Weasleys and Mikaelsons breathing the same air—this is the year’s ending.

And the thought that unnerves him most is also the one he refuses to let go: perhaps this is the beginning, too.

Chapter Text

The house wakes louder than it ever has.

Molly is already in the kitchen, banging pots as though warding off evil spirits. Arthur trails after her, inspecting the gas lamp with the reverence of a scholar. Ron and Ginny argue in the hallway over who gets the last clean towel.

Hermione has stationed herself at the table, parchment spread, demanding details about New Orleans wards. Neville hums quietly in the courtyard, coaxing Harri’s lemon tree to grow straighter.

And the Mikaelsons—well.

Rebekah sharpens her tongue against every new arrival. Marcel plays diplomat with infuriating ease. Kol sulks and smirks in equal measure, circling Ginny like a wolf with a taste for fire.

Nik watches from the landing, arms folded, expression unreadable. The memory of the night before lingers—Teddy on his lap, small mouth shaping Da as if it had always been waiting there. The house had gone still. Harri had leaned against him, steady as an oath.

And beneath it, quieter but sharper, another memory echoes: her voice in the library, cutting and defiant. If you shut me out again, I’ll answer you in kind — or worse.

The bond still hums open between them, but every now and then he feels the ghost of that threat, sharp as a reminder carved under the skin.

He remembers another boy, years ago, standing in this same courtyard with blood on his cheek and defiance in his eyes.

Marcel had been ten, old enough to know hunger and fury, old enough to understand what it meant to be chosen by someone dangerous. Marcel had looked at him with awe, fear, and need, and Nik had thought: mine.

Teddy is different. Too young for awe, too small for fear. He clambers into Nik’s lap without hesitation, declares him Da as though it were simply the truth. No bargains, no defiance, no understanding of power. Just certainty.

Nik wonders which is harder to bear — a boy who chooses him because he must, or a child who names him father without knowing the weight of it.

Downstairs, Teddy bangs his spoon on the table, demanding breakfast. Marcel laughs, clapping him on the back like a little brother instead of a prince.

Nik almost smiles, dimples threatening. Family, it seems, keeps multiplying when he isn’t looking.

Harri glances up from the stove, hair loose, face warm in the light. She catches him watching. Doesn’t look away.

And Nik, who has stood on battlefields without blinking, feels undone by a kitchen full of voices and the echo of a word he never thought he would hear: Da.

By the time Nik descends, the kitchen is chaos. Molly is shoving toast at anyone who stands still. Arthur is quizzing Rebekah about her opinion on enchanted plugs. Ron has already eaten half the bacon and is shielding his plate from Kol, who looks far too interested.

Hermione has somehow cornered Marcel into explaining warding on the city’s borders, which he does with the patience of a saint and the grin of a liar.

Neville offers Harri a sprig of basil he’s coaxed from the windowsill, as though it were treasure. Ginny hurls a barb at Kol, who throws one back, both grinning like people who’ve already decided the argument will last all day.

Nik takes it all in with one sweep of his gaze, sardonic amusement curling low in his chest. A year ago, his house had echoed with silence. Now, it threatens to collapse under the weight of too many voices.

Harri stands at the stove, hair loose, sleeves rolled. She looks up when she feels his eyes. “Are you going to help,” she asks, “or just brood?”

He leans against the counter, smirking. “I find observation far more entertaining.”

“You find laziness entertaining,” she shoots back.

Rebekah rolls her eyes. “And somehow you find him tolerable. Miracles do happen.”

Molly catches the exchange, lips pursed. “You ought to treat her better, young man.”

Kol chokes on his orange juice. Rebekah barks a laugh. Harri groans, muttering, “Don’t encourage them.”

Nik only smirks, dimples cutting deep. He has survived wars, curses, centuries of betrayal — and yet this, apparently, is the battle he will lose: a kitchen full of people who insist on belonging.

And the worst part?

He almost doesn’t mind.

But when Harri presses a piece of toast into his hand without looking at him, the bond jolts with something else: the echo of silence, the ache of weeks where her voice never reached him.

She doesn’t speak of it now, not here, but he feels it — the small hesitation in the way her fingers brush his. He swallows it down, unwilling to break the fragile ease of the morning.

Molly insists on washing up, Rebekah insists on stopping her, and the two nearly duel over a dishcloth. Arthur follows Marcel into the courtyard, pointing at the wards carved into the stones as though they’re exotic insects. Hermione demands ink and parchment; Kol steals her quill and almost loses a hand for it.

Ginny slips outside, fire-red hair catching the sunlight. Kol follows at a distance, pretending indifference. Nik notes it, files it away. He will let it play for now — there’s a certain amusement in watching his brother circle someone who bites back.

Teddy, sticky with jam, barrels into Harri’s skirts and tugs until she bends to scoop him up. She rests him on her hip with practiced ease, hair falling into her face. For a moment, she looks absurdly ordinary, as though war and loss never carved their names into her bones.

Nik feels the bond hum, steady, inevitable. She catches his eye across the chaos and smirks — yes, I see you watching.

He should look away. He doesn’t.

And the silence they survived flickers like a ghost between them — a warning, and a vow.

Later, when the house is quieter — the Britain family napping off jet lag, Rebekah dragging Ginny out to see dresses she’ll mock but secretly enjoy, Marcel taking Teddy for a walk through the Quarter — Nik finds himself with Harri in the studio.

She trails a finger across a canvas, one of his newer ones. A skyline. A storm. Too sharp for beauty.

“You still paint like you’re fighting,” she says.

“And you still speak like you’re unafraid of the answer.”

She tilts her head. “Am I wrong?”

“No.” He sets down his brush. “But storms are survival. Without them, I wouldn’t remain.”

Her eyes soften. “Then maybe one day you’ll paint after the storm.”

He laughs, low, bitter. “Hopeful little one.”

“Realistic,” she corrects, lips curving. “There’s a difference.”

The bond hums low between them — steadier now, but still haunted. He thinks of the weeks he starved her of it, and the way she threatened to starve him in return. He almost apologises. Almost. Instead, he lets the moment breathe.

At supper, Arthur tries to bless the food. Kol interrupts with a toast to chaos. Molly nearly hexes him. Harri sighs, pours wine into Nik’s glass without asking. He takes it as victory.

The night ends with Teddy asleep across Harri’s lap, his small fingers still clutching Nik’s shirt. The boy doesn’t let go, even in dreams. Nik sits beside her, listening to the drone of voices, pretending irritation, feeling something stranger.

This is not peace. He doesn’t trust peace. But it is… something.

A year ago, his house echoed with silence.

Now, it shakes with life.

And he — who has never been good at choosing — begins to think he already has.

Marcel sees it the moment her family steps through the door.

Everyone else notices only the laughter, the tears, the way Harri lights up like a lantern at last — but Marcel’s eyes are on Nik.

On the way his smile stays sharp at the edges, how his shoulders hold just a fraction too tight. Even with the bond reopened, even with words finally spoken, hesitation lingers in the air, thin as smoke.

And Marcel feels it too. Not in his chest the way they do, but in the way the house carries it — a pulse off-beat, a tension coiled through the walls. The bond between them hums faintly like a string pulled too tight, and the air itself aches with it.

He has watched his old man put down crowns and accept loyalties before; he knows how Nik walls himself with cruelty to keep people whole.

He has watched Harri press and not relent, demand transparency the way some people demand air. They have talked. They have bled truth at one another. But Marcel can feel the hesitation threaded through Nik’s movements — the half-steps, the restraint that smells of old wounds.

Conversation opens the door; fear keeps them on either side of the threshold.

So Marcel chooses movement instead of waiting. If hesitation holds the house together like a thread, he will pull at the knot until it loosens. He will make a choice that forces the next one out into the open.

He goes to the cellar.

The coffin waits in the cellar, stone walls slick with damp, the air rank with old earth and candle smoke. The Quarter presses even here, its breath heavy through the cracks, fog coiling beneath the door like a patient ghost.

Nik stands in this chamber as he has countless times, watching Elijah’s face carved into stillness, lips parted around silence, lashes dusted like frost. A portrait of nobility undone by iron and ash. But tonight the air hangs thicker, as though the walls themselves listen, eager for what choice will be made.

Marcel stands beside him, broad-shouldered, steady. The lamplight catches sharp along his jaw, and for a moment Nik sees not the boy who once chased through these streets with laughter at his heels, but the man carved by centuries of his making.

“I’ll never forgive him,” Marcel says, voice low, steady as stone. “Not for what he did. Not for what he tried to take.”

Nik lets the words linger, tasting their weight. His mouth curls — half-smile, half-snarl, sharp as glass. “Nor would I ask you to.”

Marcel exhales, sharp as flint against tinder. “But I can see what this is doing to you. To her. And maybe letting him out doesn’t mean pardoning him. Maybe it just means giving you both space to… shift. To breathe.”

Nik tilts his head, sardonic glint sparking in his eyes. The cellar lantern flickers as though amused with him. “So the son instructs the father now?”

Marcel does not flinch. “If that’s what it takes.”

The silence bends around them, thick as blood. Nik studies him — this boy he pulled from battlefields, this man who dares to stand before him unbowed. Something sharp stirs in his chest, a marrow-deep ache that feels like pride and pain in equal measure.

He looks back to the coffin, to Elijah’s pale stillness, the mask of virtue that has so often cloaked betrayal.

My noble brother, who killed what was mine and thought it righteousness.

The memory burns, vivid as the night Elijah’s blade nearly ended Marcel — the closest Niklaus has ever come to bleeding.

And yet — Harri’s green eyes rise unbidden, steady and unyielding. The persistence in her voice, the tether humming with want, her promise to burn slowly until even his cruelty bends to flame.

Nik steps forward. Fingers curl around the dagger’s hilt, its silver chill sinking into his palm. The air leans closer, thick with expectation.

For a moment, he does nothing. The cellar holds its breath, the city above humming like a dirge.

Then he pulls.

The dagger slides free, slow, deliberate, and Elijah’s chest heaves a breath — the gasp of the drowned.

Nik does not watch him stir. He turns instead, eyes on Marcel.

There is no mocking now, no grin to twist the edges of his mouth. He crosses the narrow space, grip firm on Marcel’s shoulder before pulling him close, arms tightening in an embrace that carries all the weight of centuries.

His voice is low, rough as gravel. “You are mine, Marcellus. In all ways that matter. Do not forget it.”

Marcel stiffens, then exhales, the fight leaving his body in a rush.

Nik pulls back enough to catch his gaze, and the dimples flash, sharp but stripped of humor. “You are as much Mikaelson as any born of Esther’s womb. More, perhaps. Blood makes nothing — choice makes everything. And you were mine long before Elijah thought to rip you from me.”

The cellar exhales with them. Stone drips, the lantern gutters, the world folds into shadow. Behind them, Elijah stirs, noble mouth parting for breath, but neither man looks his way.

For this moment, it is only father and son.

Nik tilts his head, smirk curling faint and sardonic. “And should our noble brother dare forget it, we will remind him. Together.”

The bond hums faintly at the back of his mind — Harri’s presence steady, waiting above. He thinks of her defiance, her hurt, her persistence. Of her promise to burn slowly.

And for the first time in years, he allows the thought of Elijah walking again without reaching for rage first.

Not forgiveness. Never that.

But perhaps something adjacent to it, dark and sharp and dangerous.

A beginning.

Nik turns from the coffin, the weight of the dagger still ghosting his palm. Marcel follows his lead, the silence between them thick with unspoken truths.

Behind them, Elijah’s breath hitches again — ragged, desperate, the sound of lungs remembering how to hold the world. His fingers twitch against the wood, struggling for purchase, for grace.

Nik does not look back.

Let him wake to the dark alone. Let him drag himself upright with no hand offered, no familiar face to soften the silence.

Marcel glances once over his shoulder, jaw tight, but says nothing. His footsteps follow Nik’s up the stone stairs, boots echoing against damp walls.

The cellar door groans shut, cutting off the flicker of lamplight, leaving Elijah to the cold and the dripping stone.

The house is brighter, louder, as though refusing to acknowledge the ghost waking beneath its floor.

In the courtyard, Teddy totters across the stones on unsteady legs, curls bouncing, cheeks flushed, a wooden spoon clutched like a sword.

“Da! Da-da!” he babbles, striking the air.

Nik plucks the spoon from his grip before it smacks against his boot. “A poor strike,” he murmurs, though his mouth curls with warmth. “But you’ll learn.”

Teddy squeals, sticky hands reaching. Nik gathers him up with ease, the boy’s weight solid against his chest, curls damp with heat.

The bond hums faintly at his ribs, her presence brushing against him, watchful. He does not hide from it this time.

I’m taking him out, Nik threads into her mind, low and certain. Marcel as well.

The answer comes soft, sure, carrying the press of her worry and the steadiness beneath it. It’s okay. Just—come back safe and sound. All three of you.

The tether thrums once, like a promise.

Nik glances at Marcel, at the boy in his arms, and lets the smallest smile curl his mouth. “We’ll return,” he says aloud, voice curling like smoke into the air. “My sons would hardly allow otherwise.”

They step into the Quarter together, city noise rushing to meet them — jazz horns swelling, vendors shouting, sugar and smoke thick in the air.

The city plays itself loud — brass bleeding from open doorways, preachers crying sermons at corners, dice rattling in alleys. Drunken sailors curse in a half-dozen tongues, while the scent of frying shrimp coils thick with sugar.

Nik walks at Marcel’s side, Teddy in his arms, and thinks of how easily the world bends itself to him. His city. His son. His claim.

Below, Elijah stirs in darkness. Alone.

It pleases him.

The day bleeds into dusk, the air heavy with magnolia and ruin, jazz horns curling like spells into the sky. Teddy half asleep against his chest, curls damp with heat, his small body rising and falling in rhythm with Nik’s.

Marcel walks at his side, broad and steady, shoulders set against the city’s chaos. Men call greetings, women glance twice, but he belongs here as much as Nik does.

He always has. And the world has always known. And if they forget… well, Nik has always been good at reminding others.

Nik’s gaze lingers on the two of them — boy and man — and the thought coils sharp inside him.

This is what matters. Not forgiveness. Not peace. Not Elijah’s righteousness or Harri’s persistence.

This man — his choice, his defiance, his loyalty carved across centuries.

Together, they are the kingdom he claims.

For now.

The door groans on its hinges as they step inside. The Quarter’s heat clings to them — smoke, brass, sugar — but the house itself feels altered, as if the air has been cut and stitched into something denser.

Nik carries Teddy against his chest, the boy awake with drowsy sleep, curls damp, fingers locked stubbornly around a wooden spoon. Marcel keeps close, steady as the shadow he has always been.

But the sound that meets them is wrong.

It swells from the parlour like a tide — Molly’s voice sharp as a hymn out of tune, Ron sputtering protests, Hermione’s questions spilling one atop another, Rebekah’s clipped retorts slicing through it all.

The cadence of foreign voices, British vowels slamming into Southern lilt and French undertone, makes the house itself shudder.

And then Nik feels it — the bond thrumming hot at his ribs, not a plea but a flare. Harri waiting. Bracing.

They step into the room.

Elijah stands there.

Awake. Composed and half-ruined. A portrait of nobility dragged raw from dagger-sleep — pale, still grave, but breathing. His suit is the same as the day he was entombed, creased and stale, but he wears it as though the centuries never touched him. 

He looks like a man dredged from a grave and convinced he is still a prince.

His eyes sweep the room, cataloguing, measuring, dismissing.

The Weasleys gape.

Molly clutches Arthur’s arm, whispering a prayer under her breath. Ron blurts, “Bloody hell, why’s he look half-dead if he’s meant to be a vampire?”

Hermione hisses at him to hush but cannot stop herself from staring, lips moving with unvoiced questions. Arthur peers as though Elijah were some broken Muggle contraption that ought not to run but somehow does.

Neville mutters something about the colour of his skin being wrong, as if death itself still lingers in the pores.

Andromeda does not flinch. Her eyes are flint, flicking from Elijah’s ruined face to Teddy cradled safe against Nik’s chest. One hand hovers near her wand, her expression steady and merciless. If this man so much as breathes threat, she will end it.

Elijah ignores them all.

His gaze cuts over Molly’s fuss, Ron’s gawking, Hermione’s restless parchment-and-ink hunger. Past Ginny, arms crossed sharp as a blade; past Marcel, broad and unmoving; past Kol, lounging like a wolf too pleased with his own joke.

For the briefest heartbeat, his eyes find Harri. Green eyes meet dark, but only for a moment. There is no warmth, no curiosity. Only dismissal — the cool cataloguing of a man who sees an interloper cluttering his house. A distraction. A passing whim. Nothing more.

He looks away.

The tether sears Nik’s ribs. Harri’s sting slices through him, raw and immediate, sharper than words.

Teddy stirs against his chest, eyes blinking open. A small hand reaches up, curls tangling in Nik’s shirt. And then, clear as a bell, the word falls from his mouth:

“Da.”

Elijah blinks once, slow, at Teddy’s small voice. Not with surprise — he has heard that word before, in another mouth, a life Nik claimed as his own.

But the sting is sharper now: another child naming Nik father, another life woven into his orbit while Elijah lay silent in the dark.

Kol’s laugh cracks the silence, sharp and delighted. “Ah, brother, welcome back to the theatre. A year gone, and already you wake to find roles rewritten. Quite the cast, don’t you think?”

His grin hooks toward Harri, sly and dangerous. “Don’t mind him, darling. Elijah has a fondness for pinning butterflies — all wings, no weight. He’ll catalogue you and move on.”

“Kol,” Rebekah snaps, though her voice trembles between fury and shame.

Nik steps forward before silence can thicken. Teddy shifts against his hip, clutching his wooden spoon like a weapon. Marcel shadows him, broad and certain, presence iron at his side.

Nik’s smirk carves sharp, dimples flashing without mirth. “Ah, Elijah. You wake into a house you once fractured, into the presence of a son you nearly stole, and into the company of a woman you presume to dismiss.”

His eyes linger on Harri, the bond flaring molten. “And yet you compose yourself as though you chose the terms of your return.”

Elijah’s jaw tightens, but he does not speak.

Nik tilts his head, voice curling low, venom sweet as smoke. “This is no distraction. No ornament. She is mine. And you will treat her as such.”

The Weasleys exchange bewildered glances — Molly with scandalized dismay, Arthur with cautious calculation, Ron muttering disbelief, Hermione already composing questions too dangerous to ask.

Neville stares as though Elijah had clawed his way out of the soil. Andromeda remains unyielding, her eyes locked on Elijah as if daring him to so much as breathe wrong in Teddy’s direction.

The parlour swells with it — the stench of old betrayal, stew cooling on the table, jasmine heavy from the courtyard, brass curling faint from the Quarter beyond.

Chaos. Family. Reunion.

And Elijah, pale and grave, stands among them like a wronged dragged into a world he does not recognise, a chorus he cannot command.

Chapter Text

The house does not return to ease after Elijah’s waking. It sharpens instead. Voices drop lower, footsteps measure themselves against stone, laughter rings thinner. Even the air feels denser, as though every wall listens for the sound of him moving.

Elijah sits in the parlour now, posture precise, eyes cataloguing the room with the same cold efficiency he has always worn.

He speaks only when addressed, and then only to Rebekah, to Kol, to Nik. Everyone else — Harri with Teddy in her lap, Molly hovering by the teapot, Marcel steady at the far end of the room — he passes over as though they were furniture.

It is not insult. It is worse. Indifference sharp enough to cut.

Kol sprawls along the chaise, grin hooked cruel. “Our noble brother has not even asked your name, darling,” he says toward Harri, delighted in the tension he stirs. “Imagine that — you live here, shake up the whole house, and Elijah cannot be bothered to notice.”

Elijah’s gaze shifts, slow. His expression does not change. “If she were of importance, I imagine I would have been informed.”

Something hot coils in Nik’s chest at the words. He does not need the bond to tell him Harri feels the sting; he sees it in the small tightening of her jaw, the way her fingers curl against Teddy’s curls as if holding fast to him steadies her.

He steps forward, smile sharp and merciless. “You imagine too much, brother. She is here because I want her here. That alone makes her of importance — more than you, who only managed to return because Marcel allowed it.”

Rebekah inhales sharply. Kol laughs, thrilled. Marcel does not move, but his silence presses as heavy as iron.

Elijah regards Nik with that old, infuriating stillness. “You speak as though choice were virtue, Niklaus. It has never been so. Not for us.”

“Perhaps not for you,” Nik answers, voice velvet, deadly. His hand brushes lightly over Harri’s shoulder as he passes behind her — not bond, not magic, simply because he wants to. “But I decide what is mine. And I do not dismiss her.”

The room holds still a beat too long, everyone aware of the fracture widening between them.

Elijah looks away first.

Later, when the others drift away — Molly shepherding Arthur toward supper, Ron and Ginny quarreling upstairs, Hermione demanding parchment of Neville — the parlour empties until only Elijah, Nik, and Marcel remain.

The silence between them feels older than the brick.

Elijah studies Marcel with eyes carved from memory, familiar and estranged all at once. “You remain here still,” he says at last, his tone measured to the point of bloodlessness. “After everything.”

Marcel leans against the wall, broad shoulders set, expression unreadable but for the faint curl of his mouth. “This is my city. My home. That hasn’t changed because you blinked awake.”

“Your city,” Elijah repeats, clipped, precise. “A claim stolen from my brother and paraded as loyalty.”

Nik moves before Marcel can answer, the shift in his weight sharp enough to split the air. “He had every right.”

The words ring like steel struck on stone, drawing both sets of eyes to him. Elijah’s brow arches — faint, superior, as though even outrage must be catalogued before it is dismissed. Marcel narrows his eyes, waiting for the turn.

But Nik does not falter.

“You speak of theft,” he says, his tone velvet and venom both, words curling like smoke and snapping like whips.

“But what is there to steal from cowards who fled? We abandoned this city when Father came — ran from him with our tails tucked, the proud Mikaelsons scattering like frightened children. And I—” his jaw clenches, the dimples hollowing sharp as knives, “I thought Father had killed him. Killed my son. I mourned him, brother!”

The silence wavers, thick with the ghost of grief. Marcel’s face flickers — not quite surprise, not quite forgiveness, but something rawer, buried too long.

Nik takes another step forward, voice deepening, growing darker. “If Marcellus had not clawed this place from the swamp, if he had not filled its streets with blood and chaos and made it thrive in our absence, I would never have known my son still lived. He raised this city in our shadow. He carved it with his bare hands, and it rose because of him.” His mouth twists, sardonic and bitter. “Because we were not here to do it.”

Elijah’s jaw tightens. Pride cracks faint at the edges.

“And when we returned,” Nik continues, merciless now, “you thought to reward his survival with your hand. You dared to make that choice for me. Marcel is mine — my creation, my consequence, my son. He is mine to punish, mine to forgive, mine to undo, if I so choose. But not you, Elijah. Never you.”

He steps closer still, his voice low, his dimples cutting cruel and humorless. “I left him for dead once already. He had every right to take what we abandoned. Every right to claim the throne we forfeited when we ran. Every right to defy me. And I would have dealt with him on my own terms — not yours.”

The words echo, thick as blood spilled on stone.

Marcel does not speak; he does not need to. His silence is a weight, a gravity, a claim of its own. Elijah’s stillness holds, but cracks spider thin across the marble of it, as though Nik’s words have wormed into bone.

Nik’s gaze is merciless. “So do not speak to me of betrayal, brother. Not when the only betrayal that matters was yours - and worse than even Rebekah’s, when she called Father down upon us. At least she acted out of despair. You acted out of choice.”

Harri does not see Elijah first in the parlour, standing like a painting dragged from the grave. She sees him in her mind before she ever lays eyes on him.

For months she has built him from scraps of words — Rebekah’s fond sighs, Marcel’s grudges, Nik’s silences sharp enough to draw blood.

She wove him from expectation: the brother who tempered Klaus’s rage, the man who once held family together by sheer force of will. Noble, Nik once spat, and Harri had almost believed it.

Almost.

But when she finally sees him, he is none of that. His gaze slides past her as if she were made of smoke. Past Teddy, warm and heavy in her arms, curls catching the light. Past the clatter and life of the house itself. He looks only at his siblings, at Kol’s grin, Rebekah’s trembling defiance, Marcel’s quiet steel. Everyone else is clutter.

And that is the wound.

She tells herself she should not care. What is he to her, really? Another Original with too much history and not enough heart. But expectation has a cruel way of turning into disappointment, and it sits heavy in her chest.

She thought Elijah might look at her and see something different: not a witch, not an interloper, but someone who had chosen this house too.

Someone who had chosen Nik, half because of bonds and magic, and the other half because of the man he was when the world fell quiet. Instead, Elijah looks at her and sees nothing at all.

The house shifts uneasily around his presence. Molly, normally loud as bells, moves quieter, setting plates with the caution of one who has felt too many tempers.

Arthur asks questions with his usual curiosity, but even his enthusiasm seems smaller, more brittle. Ron and Ginny snap at each other in the hallway but do not burst in; Hermione scribbles notes about bloodlines and protection wards but glances up too often, ink blotted where her quill falters.

Rebekah lingers at Elijah’s side like someone torn between blood and air. Kol needles, grinning too wide, enjoying the splintering silence more than the words themselves.

And Marcel — oh, Marcel is steady, arms folded, watching the cracks spread across the house with the calm of a man who has weathered storms larger than this one.

Nik says little. He doesn’t need to. Harri sees it in the sharp tilt of his smile, the weight of his stare whenever Elijah speaks as though the room belongs to him.

She has seen Nik fight with blade and fury before, but this quiet, controlled venom unsettles her more. Not because it is cruel — but because it is deliberate. Choice, not compulsion.

She lowers her gaze to Teddy’s curls, presses her lips to his hair. “You’re enough,” she whispers, though the words sit strange on her tongue, half truth and half prayer.

Later, when the house settles into an uneasy supper, Harri lingers by the kitchen doorway. Elijah sits like a ghost at the table, posture perfect, conversation minimal. The lamplight throws hollows across his face, making him seem more corpse than man.

Nik eats with lazy elegance, but Harri sees the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw works when Elijah speaks of loyalty, of order, of betrayal.

She sees Marcel across from him, steady as stone, and Rebekah between them, torn like fabric stretched too thin. Kol fills the silence with mocking barbs, and Andromeda watches everything with the cold steadiness of someone who has survived worse.

It should feel like a family meal. Instead, it feels like a trial.

Harri sits with Teddy, coaxing him to eat more than bread and jam, and wonders what kind of man Elijah truly is — beneath the stillness, beneath the blade of his voice.

Is there any nobility at all, or is that just another myth carved by those who needed to believe in something steadier than Nik’s storms?

She doesn’t know. But she does know this: whatever Elijah sees when he looks at her, it will not decide her place here.

Not any longer.

The house feels wrong after supper. Too quiet in its bones, as if the walls themselves are holding breath.

Harri and Ginny’s  family  gather into the smaller parlour, where the lamplight burns low and the fire gutters tired. Teddy sleeps in a basket near the hearth, curls damp, thumb tucked against his mouth. His small breathing is the only steady rhythm in the room.

Molly perches on the sofa, hands wringing one another to knots. Arthur lingers by the mantel, adjusting the lamp though it needs no tending. Ron slumps in an armchair, muttering bloody hell under his breath every few minutes, while Hermione scratches furiously at parchment, ink pooling into dark stains.

Ginny leans against the window frame, arms crossed, reflection sharp in the pane. Neville hovers close to the fire, gaze down.

Andromeda sits straight-backed in the corner, calm as a blade sheathed, her eyes cutting through the quiet.

Rebekah keeps to herself, posture perfect, face a mask of restraint. But her hands twist faintly in her lap, betraying the storm beneath.

It is Molly who breaks the silence at last, voice hushed but fierce. “Harri, love… what is going on? Who was that man? You said you lived with Niklaus and his siblings, but you never said—” she falters, unable to shape it, “—that.”

The question settles heavy in the room.

Harri lowers herself into a chair, brushing Teddy’s curls where they spill across the blanket. She keeps her voice careful. “Elijah. He’s Nik’s eldest brother. He was daggered for some time, I don’t know how long. And well, now… now he’s awake.”

Ginny’s laugh is sharp. “Awake? He looked like a corpse dressed for a wedding. Sour as vinegar and twice as unpleasant.”

Hermione frowns, quill stilled. “But why? Why dagger him at all? Why would his own family—” she glances at Rebekah, falters, “—why would anyone do that?”

Rebekah exhales, brittle laughter cracking like glass. “Because that is how we survive each other. When we cannot kill, we silence. And it has always been Nik. He has daggered each of us — me, Kol, even Elijah — again and again, whenever we became inconvenient.”

The words fall into the room like a dropped stone.

Molly gasps, scandal sharp in her throat. Arthur’s brows draw together, his voice low. “Your own brother?”

Ron mutters something about insanity. Hermione scribbles so fast the ink blots through. Neville looks horrified, his mouth working but no sound escaping.

Andromeda does not flinch. “Then that man’s silence wasn’t chance. It was chosen for him.”

Harri swallows, the weight of the room pressing against her.

She threads her fingers through Teddy’s curls and says softly, “I can only tell you what I know. And even that… this is not my story to tell. Their history is carved deep, and I’ve only ever seen the edges. I can give you truth as I’ve learned it, but not the whole. That belongs to them.”

Rebekah’s gaze lifts then, storm-bright, brittle. “And perhaps it’s best if you don’t dig deeper. Harri, yes — and Ginny, perhaps. They are already bound in ways none of you understand. Nik and Kol have made certain of that.”

Her voice cuts, more warning than kindness. “But the rest of you? Proceed with caution. Curiosity can be dangerous in this family.”

The fire cracks.

Molly wrings her hands tighter, Arthur looks older, Ron mutters again. Hermione’s quill stills mid-scratch. Neville stares into the flames as though they might answer him.

Ginny stiffens at the mention of her name but says nothing, arms folding tighter. Defiance sparks in her eyes, but beneath it coils something unsettled, something she cannot yet name.

Teddy sighs in his sleep, curls damp with warmth, the only sound in the room that does not break under the weight of silence.

Molly’s voice breaks it at last, small but fierce. “Just promise me you’ll be careful, Harri.”

Harri lifts her gaze, weary but steady, and gives her mother a faint, wry smile. “Careful doesn’t survive here. But I will.”

The fire hisses. No one speaks again.

Days drag, and Elijah’s presence continues like a splinter the house cannot work free.

He moves through the rooms with that same grave precision, pale hands smoothing lapels as if centuries of dust could be brushed away by posture alone. His voice is clipped, his courtesy brittle, and yet his silence weighs heavier than his words.

Nik watches the house bend around him.

Molly’s fuss sharpens, every spoon and ladle wielded like a ward against the ghost in their midst.

Arthur’s curiosity curdles into wariness; Ron mutters curses under his breath, Hermione blots her parchment with restless hands, Neville refuses to look up at all.

Ginny burns bright at first, all barbs and fire, but even she grows quieter, her laughter dimmed, her eyes turning sharp with questions she does not voice.

Harri feels it most. Nik sees it in her shoulders, in the hesitation before she speaks, in the way she clutches her child as though Teddy’s warmth might stave off the cold Elijah drags into every room.

This was meant to be her and Ginny’s reunion — the soft thing she has not had in a year, family gathered, laughter stitched back into her days. Instead, Elijah’s silence sours it, turning every meal into a trial, every gathering into a reckoning.

And Rebekah — poor Bekah — she bends beneath it. Hope flickers and dies behind her eyes each time Elijah passes her with nothing but cold courtesy, each time she reaches for her brother and finds only the grave. Her hands tremble when she thinks no one looks.

Even Kol is not untouched. He laughs louder, sharper, needles more viciously, as if daring Elijah to break the silence.

But Nik sees it — the shadow at the edges of his grin, the hurt masked in wickedness. Kol has always loved too hard, even when he hides it behind cruelty.

And Marcel — steady, unbowed — bears it in silence, but Nik can see how it grates. The old wound Elijah carved into him is not healed but buried, and Elijah’s presence drags the earth from it grain by grain

The house cannot survive this.

Nik knows it in his marrow. He has survived centuries of Elijah’s brooding, endured the weight of that sanctimonious silence. But this house is not what it once was. It breathes now. It laughs. It fills with voices and quarrels and life. It cannot endure Elijah’s ruin pressing down upon it.

And Nik — who once thought silence was strength — finds himself loathing it now. Not because it wounds him, but because it wounds them.

Harri, who deserves softness. Ginny, whose fire is dimmed. Rebekah, whose hope is breaking. Kol, who pretends too well.

Elijah may cling to his coffin-born gravity, but Nik sees the truth with perfect clarity: it cannot remain.

The house will choke on it.

And if Elijah will not shed it himself, then Nik will see to it personally.

So when night drags its shadow across the Quarter, and the house grows quiet at last, Nik makes his choice.

He finds Elijah in the library, standing as though the room belongs to him, pale fingers smoothing the spine of a book he has not read. Always posturing, even half-ruined, as though nobility were cobwebs in his bones.

“Brother,” Nik drawls, voice curling like smoke. “Your brooding has soured the air long enough.”

Elijah turns, brows lifting, composure sharp as ever though his suit still reeks of coffin-staleness. “And what would you have me do, Niklaus? Pretend?”

Nik steps closer, each footfall deliberate, his smile sharp and without warmth. “I would have you live, Elijah. This house will not endure your graveyard silences. You leech the joy from it, and it is not only mine you poison.”

Elijah’s jaw tightens. “I have wronged you. I have wronged Marcellus. That is truth. But would you have me stand at your hearth as though the last decades have not happened? As though I did not…” His voice falters, the mask slipping just an inch. “…try to take what you claimed?”

Nik’s smile fades. For a moment he is very still, then he speaks, voice low, cut from iron. “I mourned him, Elijah. I believed Father’s wrath had snuffed him from the earth. And when I returned, it was Marcellus who had built this city from ash, who held the Quarter in his grip. He lived because he chose to, because he clawed life from ruin. And you—” his voice sharpens, “—you thought to reward that with death. You would have stolen from me what I had thought already lost once.”

Elijah’s eyes close. His shoulders shift as if the weight of centuries press harder now than the dagger ever did. “I thought it was betrayal.”

Nik’s laugh is low, cruel. “And perhaps it was. But it was his to make. He was mine to deal with, not yours. You call yourself noble, Elijah, but there is no nobility in stealing a son from his father. That wound cuts deeper than Rebekah’s treachery, deeper than Kol’s defiance.”

The words strike like blows. Elijah does not move, only swallows, eyes shadowed. His hand trembles against the book spine, the faintest fracture in his perfect composure.

Nik steps closer still, until his voice is a rasp between them. “You will not survive here, Elijah, if you carry on like this. Not with Harri’s kin under this roof, not with Marcellus in these halls, not with Kol and Rebekah and the girl who steadies them all. Your silence is not strength. It is rot. And I will not allow it to spread.”

For a moment, only the fire crackles in the grate.

Elijah lifts his gaze at last, dark eyes meeting his brother’s. The mask has slipped enough that guilt seeps through, raw and unpolished. “Then what would you have me do, Niklaus?”

Nik tilts his head, smile curving, dimples cut without mirth. “Begin again. Not with me — not yet. But with them. Earn what you shattered. Or be content to remain a ghost in your own house.”

Morning comes pale and reluctant, light bleeding through the shutters like it fears being seen. The house stirs unevenly — Molly already fussing in the kitchen, Arthur poking at the wards along the courtyard stones, Ginny and Ron arguing over the last of the coffee. Mundane sounds, ordinary life pressing against the weight of centuries.

Nik lingers on the landing, gaze sharp over the railing. Below, Rebekah sits at the table, posture tight, hands folded too carefully around her cup.

She has grown quieter these last days, laughter tucked away like a secret, her sharpness dulled to a brittle edge. She watches the doorway as though expecting — or dreading — a ghost.

And the ghost comes.

Elijah enters with his usual precision, though the set of his shoulders betrays strain. His suit has been brushed, but it still hangs wrong, as if memory alone keeps it straight. His face is pale, drawn, but his eyes — his eyes seek. For once, not past, not over, not beyond. They find Rebekah.

She does not speak. Her chin lifts, defiance and hope bound so tightly they look the same.

Elijah hesitates by the sideboard, fingers brushing a decanter he does not pour from. Then, slowly, he crosses to her. His hand comes to rest on the back of the chair opposite hers, as though he must anchor himself before he dares sit.

“Rebekah,” he says, voice low, formal, but softer than it has been since waking. “I owe you more than my silence.”

Her laugh is sharp, cracked at the edges. “Silence is all you’ve ever given me, Elijah. Even before the coffin.”

The words strike. Nik sees his brother falter, shoulders bow ever so slightly. But Elijah does not retreat. He lowers himself into the chair, gaze steady, and after a breath he says:

“I owe you an apology.”

Rebekah’s lips part, but no sound comes. He leans closer, and with a gravity that feels older than the house itself, presses a kiss to her cheek — not perfunctory, but deliberate, reverent in its own strange way.

A promise stitched into touch.

When he draws back, his voice is quieter still. “I cannot change what I’ve done. But I can say this: I am sorry. For the silence. For the wounds I left to fester. For being the ghost you feared I had become.”

Rebekah’s chin trembles; she closes her eyes, lashes wet. “You always come back with apologies,” she whispers, “but never with answers.”

Elijah swallows, the mask slipping, a fracture showing through. “Then let me begin with listening. Speak, Rebekah. Even if it condemns me, I will hear it.”

From the landing, Nik watches, arms folded, dimples threatening but never breaking. He does not step in. This is not his work. He has set the blade to the wound; now it must bleed or mend on its own.

Still, he cannot help the flicker of something sharp in his chest — not forgiveness, not yet, but recognition. His noble brother, at last, bending.

It begins with Rebekah. A soft word, a kiss pressed to her cheek, an apology weighted in old-world gravity. It is not enough, never enough, but it is something — a crack in the marble, a shift in the silence. Nik watches her tremble, watches her fold her hands tighter around her cup, as though she might hold herself together by sheer force. And he allows himself the faintest curl of satisfaction.

From there, Elijah turns to Kol.

He finds him in the courtyard, tossing dice against the stones, laughter sharp even when no one else is there to hear it. Elijah pauses in the doorway, his shadow long in the morning light.

“Kol,” he begins.

Kol doesn’t look up. “Ah, the prodigal corpse speaks. To what do I owe the honour? A lecture? A dagger in the back? Or will you simply ignore me again and spare us both the performance?”

Elijah does not flinch. “I owe you an apology as well.”

Kol laughs, bright and cruel, the dice clattering against the stones like bones. “Apologies, is it? Careful, brother, you’ll run out of them if you spend too freely. And I have no interest in your scraps of remorse.”

But Nik sees it — the way Kol’s shoulders tighten, the way his hands linger over the dice too long. His cruelty is armour, and Elijah’s words pierce it, if only slightly.

Elijah inclines his head, formal to the last. “Nevertheless, you have it.”

Kol spits a curse in a tongue older than the stones beneath them, but he does not walk away. That, in itself, is something.

After that, the days blur, and Elijah wanders.

Wonders through the parlour, where Molly folds linen with brisk hands, muttering to herself about torn hems and spilled ink. Through the kitchen, where Arthur makes it a home, hovers fascinated by the rattle of pots and hovers over the gas stove.

Past Ginny and Ron arguing in the hall, their words as quick as flint sparks, sharp but fleeting.

He moves like a shadow at first, watching, measuring, but the house presses back.

There is Hermione who sprawls with parchment across the table, books splattered in all corners, chewing the end of her quill as she frowns over wards she does not yet understand.

Neville, who hums under his breath, coaxing green from sprigs that shouldn’t thrive in this heat. Teddy totters after Harri with sticky fingers and a wooden spoon, babbling nonsense as though it were gospel.

Ordinary sounds. Ordinary life.

Nik watches him take it in — the weight of it, the strangeness. This is not the house Elijah remembers. It is not silence and stone, not the echo of knives. It is something else now, stitched together by more than blood.

And perhaps Elijah realises it too, because when at last he finds Marcel in the courtyard’s far corner, blade in hand, whetstone rasping, his steps falter. His spine is straight, his expression grave, but Nik sees the flicker beneath.

The ghost has seen the house living without him. Now he must face the one who dared build life in his absence.

“Elijah,” Nik murmurs under his breath, from his place at the balcony rail. “Let us see if you’ve learned.”

Elijah stops a few paces away. “Marcellus.”

Marcel does not look up. “That’s a bold mouthful, coming from you.”

The silence stretches. Nik leans against the balcony rail, watching.

“I have wronged you,” Elijah says at last. His tone is steady, but softer than Nik has heard it in years. “I sought to end you. I called it loyalty, but it was cruelty. There is no excuse sufficient.”

The scrape of blade against stone continues, deliberate, unhurried. “No,” Marcel says, voice even. “There isn’t.”

Elijah’s hands fold behind his back. “Still, I would offer what I can. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But recognition.”

Marcel lifts his gaze at last, eyes hard, steady. “Recognition?” He laughs once, sharp.

“I built this city while you were fleeing and rotting in your coffin. I bled for it, carved it from nothing, made it mine. And you — you would have cut me down for daring to stand where you weren’t. And now you want to recognise me?”

Elijah bows his head slightly. “Yes. Because it is truth. You endured where others would not. You thrived where I presumed only betrayal. You are here, still. And I—” he falters, just for a moment, “—I am the one who faltered.”

The blade stills in Marcel’s hand. His jaw tightens.

Nik watches the two of them, the ghost of pride and fury coiling sharp in his chest. He sees Marcellus, his son not by blood but by choice, meeting Elijah’s gaze with iron. He sees Elijah bend, in his own stiff, solemn way, toward something like humility.

It is not forgiveness. Marcel’s silence makes that clear.

But neither does he walk away.

The stalemate hangs between them, sharp and heavy, but it is a beginning.

The house learns to breathe again. Slowly, haltingly, as though lungs long unused are coaxed into filling. Elijah moves through its halls with less silence clinging to his steps, and the weight that pressed on them all begins to ease. Not gone, never gone — but thinned, like fog torn apart by morning.

And outside, the city stirs.

New Orleans does not wait for grief or grudges. It rolls on, brass horns braying, drums beating, voices swelling in song.

Carnival spills into the streets, parades winding through the Quarter, laughter carrying like smoke. Beads flash, skirts whirl, the air thick with spice and sugar, rum and ruin.

They go out together. All of them.

Harri with Teddy on her hip, curls bouncing, his fist clutched around a string of cheap beads as though it were treasure. Ginny’s hair catches the torchlight, a flame bobbing through the crowd. Kol keeps too near her, sardonic grin flashing sharp, though his eyes soften when he thinks no one looks.

Rebekah lets herself be drawn into the press of dancers, skirts swaying, a laugh breaking free at last. Marcel walks with his easy stride, shoulders straight, nodding at every familiar face that calls his name.

And Elijah walks among them.

At first he is stiff, posture carved from marble, every movement too deliberate. But the city will not allow it. Children run past with painted masks, a trombone slides low, a trumpet wails, and Elijah is forced to step aside, to shift, to move with the tide of it.

The world will not bend for him — he must bend to it.

Nik watches from the edge of the crowd, smile sharp, dimples threatening. He sees his noble brother jostled by dancers, hears Molly’s laugh ring out as Arthur drags her into a reel, watches Hermione as she dodges a man on stilts. And in that chaos, in that mess of voices and heat and joy, Elijah is swallowed whole.

The city takes him back, not with ceremony, not with forgiveness, but with noise.

Nik tilts his head, amused, almost fond. Yes, he thinks. Let New Orleans teach you, brother. This house, this family, this city — it breathes. You will breathe with it, or you will drown.

//

The city presses louder, brighter. Music swells like a tide, laughter spilling into every corner of the Quarter.

Teddy wriggles in Harri’s arms, sticky hands grabbing at the stream of beads that swing above the crowd. His weight is warm against her, but the dancers surge, the brass blares, and she laughs, breathless, glancing to Nik.

“Here,” she says, thrusting Teddy toward him. “Take him.”

Nik takes the boy easily, settling him against his chest. Teddy squeals, chubby fists clutching at Nik’s shirt, and for a moment it feels almost ordinary — father and son folded into a parade.

But Harri is already tugging at hands. “Come on,” she insists, eyes bright, pulling Rebekah first — who pulls at Marcel — then Ginny, then even Andromeda, reluctant but unyielding.

They vanish into the dancers, swallowed by colour and rhythm. Skirts flare, beads catch the firelight, laughter spills from them like wine.

And Nik, left with Teddy in his arms, turns — and finds Elijah beside him.

For a moment, they stand in silence, the city raging around them. Then Teddy twists, small arms stretching, reaching for the new face.

Nik’s body goes rigid. Instinct coils sharp, memories sparking — Elijah standing over Marcel with his hand deep in his chest, loyalty sharpened into cruelty. The thought cuts quick: what if he—

But it dies just as quick.

Because even at his worst, Elijah Mikaelson would not harm a child. Not this boy, not two years old with curls damp from heat and eyes too bright for cruelty.

That, at least, Nik knows. His noble brother may falter, may betray, may wound deeper than any blade — but he would not dare stain his hands with a babe’s blood.

Still, hesitation lingers. Teddy wriggles impatiently, small fists grabbing at Elijah’s sleeve, babbling nonsense as though the man were already his.

Nik studies Elijah — the stiff posture, the grave mouth, the flicker in his eyes as the boy reaches.

Slowly, deliberately, Nik lets the child go.

Teddy settles into Elijah’s arms with an ease that is almost disarming, small hands patting at the lapel of his coat, leaving sticky prints on fabric too old, too grave.

Elijah stiffens, breath caught, as though the child weighs more than the centuries he has carried.

The brass surges, drums thunder. Elijah looks down at Teddy, then up at Nik, and something unspoken flickers there — raw, almost human.

Nik’s smile is sharp, but his eyes glint with something else. Dimples curve without mockery. “Even the city welcomes you back, brother,” he murmurs. “One way or another.”

Elijah holds Teddy closer, uncertain, but he does not hand him back. Not yet.

And when Harri, Rebekah, Ginny, and Andromeda spin back into view, skirts catching the firelight, hair wild from dancing, it is to the sight of Elijah Mikaelson — pale, grave, half a ghost still — holding the youngest life among them.

For once, he does not look like a ruin. He looks like a man trying to remember how to breathe.

Chapter Text

The night after the parade tastes of sugar and smoke. Beads litter the courtyard like shed skins, and the house hums with exhaustion — laughter burned out, music still echoing in their bones.

Harri lingers by the window, Teddy curled heavy in her lap, his curls sticky with sweat and sweet. The Quarter still roars beyond the glass, horns and drums, but inside, it is quieter. Breath steadier.

Nik leans against the doorframe, shirt open at the collar, hair mussed as though even he could not hold himself aloof from the chaos. His dimples flash when he catches her watching, sharp as ever, but there’s no cruelty behind it tonight.

“You’re staring, little witch.”

She rolls her eyes, though her mouth betrays her with the curve of a smile. “You’re used to it.”

“True,” he concedes, stepping closer, voice low as smoke. “But not from you.”

The bond hums faint at her ribs — not the whip it once was, not the chokehold. Softer now. She does not answer it. She only adjusts Teddy in her arms, smoothing damp curls from his forehead. “You surprised me, you know. Letting Elijah hold him.”

Nik’s mouth curves, not quite a smile, not quite a sneer. “Did it surprise you that I trusted him? Or that he returned the boy unharmed?”

“Both.”

For a moment, silence. Then Nik huffs a laugh, sharp and self-mocking. “Perhaps I am learning, Harri. Or perhaps I simply know my brother’s limits. He may wound me, betray me, strip me raw — but even Elijah would not stain his hands with a child.”

Harri studies him, his profile sharp in the low lamplight. “You sound almost… forgiving.”

He turns to her then, eyes glinting. “Do not mistake me. Forgiveness is beyond me. But beginnings —” his gaze drifts, dimples flickering like scars, “—beginnings I can permit.”

Her chest tightens. She does not answer. Teddy stirs, sighs, curls tighter against her.

Later, when Teddy is laid in his basket and the house falls deeper into quiet, Harri steps into the courtyard. The air is cooler now, heavy with jasmine and smoke. She finds Elijah there, half-shadow, half-statue, hands clasped as though even the night needs his composure.

He turns when she approaches, eyes dark, unreadable. “Miss Potter.”

“Harri,” she corrects softly. “If we’re to share a roof, best we start with names.”

His mouth tightens, then loosens, a faint nod. “Harri.”

They stand a moment in silence, the city’s echo pulsing beyond the walls.

Finally, she speaks. “I owe you an apology. For expecting things of you. For thinking you would be the brother they described in stories, instead of the man you are now.”

His gaze sharpens, but his voice is low. “And I owe you one as well. For my dismissal. You stood in my house, and I looked through you as though you were nothing. That was… unworthy.”

She laughs softly, brittle but warm. “We’re even then?”

Elijah studies her, head tilting. “Not even. But perhaps aligned. If you permit it.”

Her lips curve, a smile ghosting. “Alignment I can manage.”

The jasmine stirs in the night air, and for the first time, Elijah’s composure bends, just slightly. His shoulders ease.

And Harri realises she is no longer staring at a ghost, but at a man learning how to breathe again.

She folds her arms, gaze slipping to the stones at their feet. Then, carefully: “Tell me something about him. About Nik. Something I wouldn’t know.”

Elijah blinks, the mask faltering. “Why?”

“Because you’ve known him longer than anyone,” she says softly. “Because I want to see him as you do. Not just as the man he is now, but the boy he was. The brother you remember.”

For a long moment, Elijah says nothing. His jaw works, his gaze fixed on the shadows. Harri wonders if she has pushed too far — if silence and dismissal is all he will give her again.

But then, quiet as breath: “When he was small, he would carve dragons into the dirt with a stick. Crude little things. Barely more than scratches. But he would trace them over and over, as if by doing so he might summon the beast whole from the ground.”

Harri blinks, startled by the softness in his voice.

Elijah goes on, eyes distant. “He wanted freedom. Even then. A creature that would bear him beyond the village, beyond Father’s hand. He has always longed for escape, even when he called it conquest.”

Nik, she thinks, and her chest tightens. The boy in the dirt. The man in the city. The same hunger, only grown sharper.

She swallows. “Thank you.”

Elijah inclines his head, formal even here. But his gaze lingers on her, and something gentler sits in it now. Not dismissal. Not distance. But something like recognition.

And so, the night hums around them, heavy with jasmine, with brass faint from the Quarter, with something that might almost be the beginning of kinship.

The house learns to live again after the parades.

Life folds back into rhythm, though it is not the same rhythm as before. The Weasleys, Neville, and Andromeda do not leave at once. They linger, as though unwilling to tear themselves too quickly from Harri, as though New Orleans itself has claimed them for a season.

Their presence stretches the house into something fuller, louder, heavier — Molly’s scolding voice echoing through the courtyard, Arthur muttering about wiring and wardlines, Ron’s footsteps clattering on the stairs, Ginny’s laughter carrying sharp and bright through Kol’s smirk.

Harri watches it all. She feels the house shift under the weight of so many lives, as though the walls themselves must stretch their bones to hold them. It should feel crowded, but it does not. It feels… alive.

Nik is quieter in these days. Not withdrawn, not brooding as Elijah once did, but quieter. His eyes track Harri more often, though his lips still curl in that sardonic sharpness whenever she catches him at it. There is something softer beneath the edge now, though — something he does not name.

It is in the courtyard, one dusky evening, that he begins.

Teddy toddles across the stones, wooden spoon clutched like a sword. The basil Neville planted still leans stubbornly, though it sprouts new green leaves under his care. Harri sits with her dress bunched at her knees, watching the child bang spoon against stone, laughing at the echo.

Nik leans against the wall, arms folded. Shadows lengthen behind him. He looks at Teddy, then at her, then at nothing. His voice is low when it comes, almost careless.

“Father believed sons should be broken.”

Harri’s head jerks toward him. He does not look at her. His gaze is far, fixed on memories she cannot see.

“A hammer wrapped in skin,” he continues, lips curling in something sharp but not quite a smile. “That was my father. His love was the lash. His affection was a fist. To falter was to bleed. To resist was to break harder.”

The spoon clatters against the stone again, and Teddy shrieks with delight. Nik flinches almost imperceptibly.

Harri’s chest tightens. She wants to say something — anything — but words feel too small for the wound he lays bare. So she stays silent, steady, waiting.

At last, his eyes flick toward her. The dimples flash, bitter as knives. “You see, little witch, monsters are not born. They are beaten into shape. I learnt cruelty and silence from him.”

He pushes off the wall, strides away into the shadows before she can answer.

Teddy drops the spoon, claps his hands, laughs at nothing at all. The basil sways in the evening wind.

Harri sits very still, the weight of Nik’s words settling like ash in her chest.

The days that follow hold the echo of them. She carries his voice with her, the lash of it, the quiet breaking beneath it. And though he does not speak of Mikael again, the silence between them is altered. It is not empty now. It waits.

//

The days stretch long in New Orleans. Heat clings to the air, brass hums from the Quarter even at dawn, and the house settles into a rhythm that feels almost ordinary.

Harri learns to watch the others as much as she watches Nik.

Kol circles Ginny like a wolf with a scent he refuses to lose. He taunts, teases, needles — and Ginny answers him sharp for sharp. Their quarrels start over everything and nothing: dice games, broomsticks, the best place to find firewhiskey in the city.

Yet when Kol laughs, sharp and delighted, Harri sees how Ginny’s mouth betrays her with the faintest curve. And when Ginny hurls her last barb and storms from the room, Kol’s eyes linger longer than they should.

Harri tells herself it is none of her concern. Yet she cannot help noting the way Kol softens, just slightly, when Ginny’s fire burns brightest.

Elijah, meanwhile, becomes Hermione’s reluctant pupil. She corners him at the table, parchment spread wide, and demands he explain how the wards breathe along the city’s edges.

He answers in clipped tones, formal, precise — but he answers. When Ron joins, blunt as ever, asking if Elijah is always so pompous, Harri nearly laughs at the way Elijah’s jaw tightens, as though centuries of composure have no shield against Weasley candor.

Still, he does not walk away. He sits, listens, endures. Slowly, Harri realises, he is learning to bend where once he would have broken.

Neville spends most of his hours in the garden, coaxing green from stubborn soil. Rebekah finds him there more often than not, leaning against the stone with her arms folded, heels scraping the dirt. She does not mock him as she once might have.

Instead she tilts her head, curious, as he explains the way roots twist beneath the soil. Her voice, when she speaks, is softer than Harri is used to hearing — almost gentle, as though Neville’s own quiet has tugged something matching from her.

Harri catches the moments between them — Neville holding out a sprig of rosemary like treasure, Rebekah taking it with a small smile that looks almost shy. It is nothing, not yet. But Harri has lived long enough to know how nothing becomes everything when given time.

Andromeda drifts with Molly and Arthur into the Quarter. Harri watches them return with paper bags stuffed with trinkets, Arthur enchanted by the mechanics of pocket watches and Molly appalled by skirts cut too short.

The house breathes with all of this. With arguments and laughter, with ordinary mess.

And always, Nik is there.

Sometimes at the edges, leaning against a wall, smirk carved sharp, eyes following Harri. Sometimes closer — brushing against her arm as they pass in the hall, pressing a hand lightly to the small of her back as he steers her through crowded markets. Nothing overt, nothing claimed aloud. But enough.

One evening, she finds herself in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, stirring a pot while Teddy clambers on the counter beside her.

Nik enters silently, as he always does, and she does not notice until he reaches past her for a glass. His shoulder brushes hers; she inhales sharply at the closeness. He notices, of course. His smirk curves, lazy, deliberate.

“You cook now?”

She huffs. “Some of us know how to be useful.”

He chuckles low, dimples flashing. “And here I thought you’d leave me to starve.”

Her heart stutters. She busies herself with the spoon, pretending not to hear.

Later that night, when the house stills, he tells her more. Not much. Just a shard.

“Esther,” he says suddenly, as though the name has burned in his throat too long. “She caged the wolf. Called it mercy. But a cage by any other name remains a prison.”

This time, he does not leave her with it. He remains where he is, leaning in the doorway, the lamplight catching the edge of his profile. The silence stretches, heavy but not empty.

Harri smooths Teddy’s curls where he has fallen asleep across her lap. She does not press for more. She only stays with him, in the quiet, letting the weight of his words settle between them.

And Nik — who has walked away from every confession he has ever given — stays, too.

The quiet that follows settles differently. Not brittle, not sharp, but steady, like a breath drawn and finally released.

It lingers through the week that follows, into the small moments of ordinary life: Teddy’s laughter echoing down the stairs, Molly fussing over the last of her unpacked trunks, Arthur pestering Elijah with questions about runes, Rebekah brushing dirt from her skirts after too much time in the garden with Neville.

The city calls to them, though. New Orleans is not a place that allows its walls to hold people forever. It sings from the streets, brass curling up to their windows, spices threading the air, riverboats groaning under the weight of tourists and traders.

Life presses in, louder and brighter than any house can contain.

And when the chance comes, Harri and Nik step into it together.

The Quarter is alive in a way England never was. Harri accustoms to it as soon as her feet touch the cobbles — the press of voices, the heat of the air, the music spilling from doorways. It is chaos stitched into beauty, ruin dressed in colour.

Brass swells from open doorways, dice rattle in the alleys, hawkers cry their wares beneath strings of beads. The river carries its heavy breath into the streets, sweet with rot and salt.

England had been hedgerows and grey streets, the polite quiet of markets where neighbours whispered behind hands. Even Diagon Alley, with its bustle and trickery, had always seemed hemmed in, pressed narrow by brick and soot.

But New Orleans spills over itself. Lanterns hang crooked from balconies, beads swing from doorframes, and brass rolls thick through the air. Sugar and shrimp, smoke and rum — the scents tangle together until Harri feels dizzy with it.

The streets are crowded, chaotic, alive.

She walks through it with Nik at her side. People part instinctively around him, though few know him truly. He carries presence like a cloak, heavy and undeniable.

She tells herself that’s why she feels steadier in the crush of the Quarter, why she doesn’t flinch at the jostle of shoulders or the call of hawkers. But she knows it isn’t the whole truth.

They pause at a stall where ribbons and combs glitter under lamplight. Rebekah would have adored it — Harri almost says so. But Nik speaks first, his voice low, as though the sight has loosened a memory.

“Flowers suited her better,” he murmurs.

“Rebekah?” Harri asks.

He nods. “Our mother used to braid them into her hair. Wildflowers from the woods. She’d say it made Bekah beautiful, worthy of all her attention. And in the same breath…” His mouth twists, not quite a smile. “She would look at me, and I knew she meant to make me different. To bind what I was.”

He moves on before Harri can answer, leaving her clutching the image — a girl crowned in wildflowers, a boy already marked for a cage.

The crowd thickens near a corner where children cluster around a boy with a lute. He plucks it badly, laughing as his friends jeer. The sound should be jarring, but it makes Harri smile.

Nik’s jaw tightens. “Father would have broken it.”

Harri glances up. “Broken what?”

“The lute.” His eyes are sharp, unreadable. “He despised music. Said it softened us. Rebekah begged him for one once. He snapped the neck of it across his knee before she touched a string. Made Elijah and I spar that same night. Said bruises built men better than tunes.”

Harri frowns. “And did you believe him?”

A huff escapes Nik, half laugh, half snarl. “At the time? What choice had I? A boy believes what the fist teaches him.”

They move on. The air grows heavier with frying shrimp, with spiced rum spilled on the cobbles. Harri wipes sweat from her brow, adjusts her bag, tries to steady herself against the press of people.

Nik stops at a stall where masks hang on hooks — some painted with gold leaf, some grotesque, some delicate as lace. He studies them, smirk faint. “Half the world is easier when masked,” he muses.

“Then take your own advice,” Harri says before she can stop herself.

His eyes flick toward her, sharp, amused. “And what would you have me wear, little witch? A hero’s mask? A lover’s?”

Heat flushes her cheeks. She turns away, pretending to study the painted feathers.

They leave the masks behind, moving into the heart of the Quarter where jazz bands play beneath gaslamps. Music swells, drums beat, skirts whirl as dancers spin in the street. Harri feels caught in it, lifted. It is nothing like the stiff dances of Britain, the restrained steps of Yule Balls. This is raw, loud, alive.

Beside her, Nik watches not the dancers but the fire-juggler who flares torches in the dark. His voice comes low, as though speaking to himself. “Hope was not something we were taught. Only survival. Only endurance.”

Harri looks at him, at the way the firelight carves his cheekbones, and aches at the weight he still carries. She wants to ask, but his gaze is already elsewhere.

They stop at a praline stall. The woman presses sugared paper into their hands with a wink. Harri bites into one, sugar thick and rich on her tongue. Nik holds his longer, staring at it until the music nearly drowns his voice.

“Henrik would have liked these.”

Harri stills. The name is soft, almost swallowed by the trumpet’s wail.

“Henrik?” she asks quietly.

He nods once, sharp. “The youngest. Too small. Too bright. He chased the world with open hands. And I was meant to protect him.” His jaw tightens. “But I failed. Wolves came, and when he fell—my hands were empty.”

Her chest tightens. “You were just a boy yourself.”

His gaze snaps to hers, sharp, almost angry. “And what comfort is that to him? He is still dead. My baby brother is still gone. Every drop of blood since has been to atone for what I let slip through my fingers.”

The praline is cloying now, heavy in Harri’s mouth. Words would only fracture against his grief. So she does the only thing she can: she threads her fingers through his where his hand hangs at his side.

Nik looks down. His dimples flash faintly, not cruel. Just tired. His grip tightens around hers.

They walk on like that, hand in hand, through the noise and colour — brass, beads, smoke, laughter, jasmine trailing from iron balconies. Life presses loud against grief.

And Harri holds him steady, not with speeches, not with denial, but with presence.

For the first time, she feels him allow it.

By the time they turn back toward the house, the Quarter is burning itself louder — torches flaring, music swelling, voices rising in chorus. Harri feels the press of it still clinging to her skin when they step away from the lantern-lit streets and into the narrow road that leads home.

Nik has not let go of her hand.

It feels strange and steady all at once, like holding on to something inevitable. She does not think on it too deeply; she only follows his stride until the familiar courtyard stones lie beneath their feet.

The house hums quieter than the city — not silent, never that, but gentled. A lamp glows in the parlour. Someone laughs faintly upstairs. The air smells of wine and herbs and wax.

Harri shrugs off her bag, sets the half-touched praline on the table. Teddy’s wooden horse lies abandoned by the hearth, one wheel bent. She bends to pick it up, thumb tracing the dent in the paint.

When she straightens, Nik is watching her. His hand still hangs at his side where hers had been.

For a moment, neither speaks. The quiet of the house feels heavier than the Quarter’s noise, weighted by all he said — and all he didn’t.

At last, Harri crosses to him. “Nik—”

But his gaze flicks to Teddy’s toy in her hand, and he speaks first, voice low. “He would have liked you, Henrik. He liked all things gentle.” His mouth twists, dimples carved sharp without humour. “He had a way of finding softness even in the darkest places. Perhaps that is why he never survived.”

Harri’s throat tightens. She sets the toy down on the mantel and steps closer, until the space between them is only breath. She does not tell him he is wrong. She does not offer absolution. She only stays, steady, as though presence itself is an answer.

For a heartbeat, she thinks he might turn away, vanish into the shadow as he so often does. But he doesn’t. He stays too.

The house exhales around them, settling back into its bones. The city’s noise lingers faintly through the shutters, brass curling in from the Quarter.

And in that hush, Harri knows this night will live long in her memory — not because he bared his grief, but because he allowed her to share it. She also learns, later that night, it is the anniversary of Henrik’s death.

The night lingers in her bones long after the lamps are doused. Harri lies awake, Teddy curled warm against her side, and listens to the house breathe around her — floorboards settling, shutters creaking, the faint pulse of music still drifting in from the Quarter.

She thinks of Nik, of the way his hand had closed around hers, of the weight of Henrik’s name on his tongue. She had not known what to say then; she does not know now. But perhaps words were never the point. Perhaps staying was enough.

By morning, the city moves on, and so does the house. It always does.

The days blur, bright and ordinary, though nothing in this house is ever simple.

Harri watches it all, caught between wonder and weariness. The Weasleys and Andromeda and Neville have lingered longer than planned, and the house stretches around them like fabric pulled taut. It should fray. Instead, it breathes.

Kol prowls after Ginny, shameless. He finds her in the courtyard, sprawled on the sofa, perched on the kitchen counter — always with some sharp remark curling off his tongue. She bites back every time. And when Kol laughs, sharp as a knife, Harri notices the way Ginny’s lips twitch, traitorous, toward a smile.

It is maddening, obvious, inevitable. Harri wants to tell them to stop fighting if only to save the rest of the house from the fire of it, and for them to just kiss already. But she doesn’t. She lets it burn.

Elijah continues to be Hermione’s reluctant scholar.  Ron needles him. Elijah still stays.

Slowly, Harri realises, he is learning to bend where once he would have broken, and wonders if he realises that his endurance itself is an apology.

Neville finds his peace constant in the garden. He kneels among basil and rosemary, coaxing stubborn roots, humming softly under his breath. It is patient work, slow and unseen. Rebekah finds him there more often than not.

One afternoon, Neville holds out a sprig of rosemary, awkward and earnest. Rebekah laughs softly, takes it, tucks it behind her ear. Her lips betray her, curving before she can stop them.

Andromeda continues to drifts into the Quarter with Molly and Arthur. 

Her smiles faint, quiet in their wake, until she slips something small into Teddy’s eager hands: a carved wooden horse, a tin soldier, a handful of beads. Harri catches her eye once, sees the softness there, and knows she is thinking of Dora.

And always, Nik threads through it.

He laughs more often now — rare, sudden, bright as lightning. Teddy clambers into his lap as though born to it. Harri watches them together and feels something catch low in her chest.

The bond still hums, faint, but steady. But it is not only the bond anymore. It is choice, in the smallest of moments. A hand not withdrawn. A gaze not averted. A laugh not hidden. A grief shared. A secret whispered behind doorframes.

//

The season burns itself out. The air cools, the jasmine fades from the balconies, and New Orleans hums differently. The city does not quiet — it never does — but the light shifts, the nights grow sharper. Even the house feels it, as though its bones ache with the turn of the season.

The Weasleys, Neville and Andromeda begin to gather their things. They mutter of England, of duty, of work waiting for them across the sea. Molly folds clothes with fierce precision, Arthur tucks away his pocket watches, Andromeda leaves toys in Teddy’s crib with a wistfulness she does not name.

The house knows they are leaving. It feels it in the silences between laughter, in the way footsteps linger on the stairs, in the glances held a little too long.

Kol and Ginny quarrel still, sharp as ever, but there is something underneath it now.

Rebekah spends more time in the garden. Neville kneels in the soil beside her, sleeves rolled, dirt on his hands. They speak quietly, voices barely carrying through the window. Harri does not hear the words, but she sees Rebekah’s smile — small, real. It startles her every time.

On the eve of their departure, Neville lingers longer than the rest in the garden. Rebekah plucks rosemary from the earth and presses it into his hand. “Write,” she says simply, almost sharply. Then, softer: “Or call. I’ve… enjoyed your presence.”

Neville flushes, stammers, but promises. Harri turns away, her throat tight. 

The morning of departure comes grey and cool. Trunks are packed, cloaks buttoned. Molly fusses over Arthur’s collar, Arthur counts wands twice, Andromeda lingers at Teddy’s side, her hand brushing his curls.

Harri stands with them at the door, her chest heavy. Hermione hugs her fiercely; Ron claps her shoulder, awkward but earnest. Andromeda whispers something sharp but fond into her ear and presses a kiss to Teddy’s forehead.

Rebekah stands a little apart, heels brushing the threshold. Her chin tilts, brittle and proud. Yet when Neville passes, she catches his hand briefly, squeezes, and lets go before anyone can remark on it.

The goodbyes stretch long. Molly weeps, Arthur fusses, Andromeda glances back twice. And then they are gone, their voices fading down the road, the sound of trunks rattling into the city’s noise.

The house exhales. Quieter now. Less crowded. The absence hums heavy in its bones.

Harri lingers in the doorway long after the street has emptied. New Orleans stretches out before her, restless and alive, and behind her the house waits — still full of chaos, of Mikaelsons, of slow-burning ties that will not unravel.

She breathes it in, the bittersweet weight of change. Families leaving, families staying, families remade in strange, impossible ways.

Hope curls low in her chest. Fragile. Fierce. Inevitable.

The house is quieter without the Weasleys, without Andromeda’s soft gifts and Molly’s clattering care. Quieter, but not silent. It never is. The city hums beyond the shutters, restless as always, but inside, there is room to breathe again.

Harri finds herself in the courtyard after the farewells, her hand trailing over the stones, over the carved grooves Neville had once traced for her. The jasmine has gone, but the air still carries its ghost.

Nik finds her there. He doesn’t announce himself — he never does — but she feels him before she sees him. The bond hums at her ribs, softer now, not command, not demand. Simply presence.

“You mourn them already,” he says, stepping into the light. His shirt sleeves are rolled, his hair unbound, the picture of a man not trying to be anything but himself.

“I don’t mourn,” she answers, though her voice is quieter than her words. “I just… notice the space they’ve left.”

He studies her for a moment, then steps closer, until the lamplight pools them both. “You’ve grown used to fullness. Noise. Laughter.” His smile curves sharp, but without malice. “You’ve grown used to family.”

The word hangs. Harri swallows. “And you haven’t?”

For a moment, silence stretches. Then Nik exhales, dimples flashing faint, almost weary. “I’ve grown used to the idea that it slips away.”

She turns fully to him now, searching his face. “But not me.”

The bond hums sharper for a moment, like a string pulled taut. His gaze locks on hers, unflinching. “Not you.”

It is as close to a vow as he has ever given her.

She steps closer, so close that the distance between them is only breath. Her voice softens. “What do you see when you think of… later?”

His brow furrows faintly. “Later?”

“The future,” she presses. “Us. What comes after all this.”

Nik’s mouth curves, sardonic, almost cruel — but she sees the hesitation flicker in his eyes. “After? My future is not a thing to be spoken of. It is a thing stolen, bargained, burned, rewritten. What is a creature like me to dream of, except survival?”

She reaches up then, fingers brushing the edge of his jaw. He doesn’t flinch, though she sees the war in him, the instinct to turn away. “Maybe survival was the dream once. But it doesn’t have to be the only one.”

The bond hums again, softer this time, as if echoing her words.

“And what do you dream of, little witch?” His voice is low, rough as smoke.

She considers, eyes slipping to the stones beneath their feet, then back to him. “Of Teddy growing up safe. Of laughter in the house, even when it hurts. Of not running anymore. Of choosing to stay.”

He studies her, long and intent. Then, slowly, almost reluctantly, his hand lifts, fingers brushing hers where it rests on his jaw. His voice is barely more than breath.

“Then perhaps… I can dream of the same.”

The courtyard exhales with them, shadows shifting under the lamplight, the city’s music bleeding faintly through the walls.

For the first time, Harri feels that the bond is not pulling her, not binding her. It is simply there — a thread, a hum — while choice stands beside it, steady and real.

She leans into him, and he does not pull away.

Chapter Text

The house feels thinner when the visitors leave, though it is hardly empty. Rebekah still clicks across the floorboards, Elijah still debates too long over wine, Kol still provokes laughter and irritation in equal measure, Marcel’s music drifts through the courtyard.

But the quiet left behind by Harri’s kin lingers. Red hair, soft grief, the warmth of borrowed belonging — all gone, leaving the air altered.

Nik watches the silence pool in the corners, a silence different from war or grief — this one shaped by absence, and pretends indifference.

The Weasleys, Andromeda, Longbottom… they take their noise and warmth with them when they leave, and the walls seem to exhale, weary.

He pretends it does not matter. That he is glad to see them gone, glad to have his house to himself again. But even Rebekah notices the way his eyes linger on the doorway a moment too long, as if testing the weight of loss against him.

He tells himself it is better this way, fewer strangers under his roof. Yet he catches Harri looking at the doorway one too many times, as if expecting another farewell, and he finds himself restless.

It unsettles him, because he knows what it is to lose, to have things ripped away. But this—this is gentler, almost merciful. A departure, not a death. And still it leaves a bruise.

Rebekah’s gaze has shifted too. She sits longer in the garden these days, letters folded neat in her lap, Neville’s name inked at the bottom. Nik once would have torn the thought to pieces, declared him unworthy of her.

But Neville is Harri’s — her loyalty threads through him — and for that alone, Nik lets it stand. Strange, how that quiet boy has softened his sister’s sharpness. Stranger still, that Nik does not rage at it.

He thinks of the night in the courtyard, shadows thick around them, Harri steady in her silence as he dropped his father’s ghost at her feet. Words and feelings he had never spoken aloud, not to siblings, not to Marcel, not to anyone.

A confession disguised as cruelty. Monsters are not born. They are beaten into shape.

Her eyes had not flinched. She had not looked away. And in that stillness he had felt something shift, as if naming his ruin aloud allowed her to share its weight.

Now, with her family gone, the echo of that moment grows louder. He wonders what madness made him give it voice. Wonders more what madness made her stay after hearing it.

The bond hums low, not the storm it once was. A quieter thing. Choice woven into inevitability.

And Nik, who has never trusted either silence or softness, finds himself listening for both.

//

Life slides into rhythm again. The house swells with noise, but it is the noise of their own: arguments sharp as knives, laughter too loud for the walls, quiet pockets of tenderness Harri weaves between them all.

Teddy wakes earliest. The boy pads through corridors with unsteady steps, curls wild, voice piping “Da.”

Nik, already awake, lays aside sketch or blade and lifts him without hesitation. The child presses his cheek to Nik’s shoulder, sighing as though the world has already worn him thin.

Harri finds them one morning like this, her hair tangled from sleep, and murmurs with a wry smile, “He always knows where to find you.” Nik does not answer, but his hand rests firm against the boy’s back until his breathing evens.

By afternoon Teddy is a storm, trailing paint through Nik’s study, smearing colour across parchment. Kol eggs him on, delighted by the chaos, while Harri scolds until her cheeks flush.

Nik sighs, hands the boy another brush. Teddy presses it clumsily to the page — not aimless, Nik notices, but with a surprising sharpness, as if he is imitating Nik’s own strokes. Harri groans. Kol cackles.

Nik smirks. “A prodigy, clearly.”

Evenings pull them to the courtyard. Rebekah twirls Teddy until his laughter rings out like bells, curls flying, limbs flailing. Harri watches from the steps, arms folded, eyes warm with amusement.

When Rebekah tires, Teddy bolts across the stones — running faster than he should for his size, balance too sure for a child barely two.

He barrels straight to Nik, tugging at his trousers until he lifts him high. “See, Da,” he pants, flushed with triumph, “I fly.”

Nik snorts, murmurs, “More like you fell with style,” but holds him close anyway.

Nights are softer. The fire burns low, shadows stretched across the parlour walls. Harri hums an old tune, Teddy curled in her lap. Nik sits nearby, carving wood to keep his hands from pacing.

But Teddy stirs, clambers free, and crawls into his side. Harri teases, “Stolen again.” Nik arches a brow but does not move him.

Later, when she whispers, “He knows you’re his,” Nik lets the words stand.

It feels ordinary. Almost safe.

But even in the ordinary, he notices.

Teddy’s eyes flare gold when his toy is snatched, and the air seems to tighten, if only for a breath. The low growl in his throat when Kol spins him too fast, so instinctive it silences even Kol’s laughter for a beat.

The way his midnight cries bend not into wails but into keening, so close to a wolf’s call that Harri rocks him fiercely, whispering lullabies until the sound fades.

Other things too. The boy hears just as quickly as they do   — a knock at the door, footsteps in the hall — and turns his head sharp, alert, as though the world hums closer to him.

He plays at chasing, at pouncing, with Kol, his small body moving with strange precision. His moods shift quick as summer storms — laughter spilling bright, then anger flashing fast, always fierce, never meek.

The wolf is in him. Small, but present. Free.

It stirs the cage inside Nik’s chest. Esther’s chains. Mikael’s cruelty. Centuries of hunger denied. He should be proud that Teddy bears the wolf without fear. He is. But pride twists to ache — because his son will run one day where he never could.

The ache festers into restlessness. He paces the nights, jaw tight, the cage rattling louder with each breath. Harri watches but does not speak. She knows.

At last, he decides. Marcel will find the doppelgänger, test the line. If it lives, the path to freedom is not gone. He will not wither another century in chains while the moon sings.

He finds Marcel in the hall, his son tuning a guitar with careless ease.

“You’ll go,” Nik says, voice low but edged. “Follow the whispers. See if the doppelgänger line still breathes.”

Marcel looks up, sharp, weighing him. “And if it does?”

“Then the curse is not lost to me,” Nik answers. His hands flex, restless, as if already reaching for freedom.

But Kol hears. He always does. Mischief glints in his eyes as he leans against the doorway, smirk cutting the hush. “A hunt? And you’d send Marcel alone? Brother, you wound me.”

Nik’s jaw tightens. “This is no game, Kol.”

Kol steps in anyway, grin wolfish. “Every hunt is a game. You just prefer to pretend otherwise.” He casts a look at Marcel, sly. “Besides, wouldn’t you rather two sets of eyes? You can trust him to be loyal, of course—but loyal doesn’t mean clever.”

Marcel exhales, long-suffering. “I’m sitting right here.”

“And I’m agreeing with you,” Kol says brightly, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’ll thank me when you’re knee-deep in doppelgängers.”

Nik’s gaze sharpens, but he doesn’t forbid it. Perhaps part of him wants Kol gone, his chaos aimed outward instead of festering inside the walls.

By dawn, Marcel is gone, Kol at his side.

Ginny slips after them, her excuse thin as smoke. “Someone has to keep them from burning the world down.”

Nik meets her eyes, sees the flush that lingers when Kol’s name is near her tongue, the way she squares her shoulders as though daring him to stop her. He does not.

And the house, though still full, feels emptier again.

The house settles uneasily in their absence. Laughter echoes softer, arguments cut shorter, the walls holding their breath as though waiting for news that has not yet come.

It is in that hush Nik finds himself at the window, watching the night fold around what remains.

He lingers there, eyes tracing the sway of the lemon tree, the cruel silver of the moon. The bond hums faint, carrying both comfort and unease. One day, the cage will break.

But the night offers no relief. Even when Harri carries Teddy upstairs and the house settles into hush, restlessness prowls his veins. Walls feel too close, shadows too shallow. He drifts to the courtyard, though it offers no comfort.

It is there Elijah finds him.

The courtyard is quiet, moonlight dripping silver over the stones. Harri has gone in with Teddy, leaving only the echo of the boy’s laughter clinging to the walls. Nik paces slow, as though the night itself cannot soothe the cage rattling in his chest.

He knows Elijah watches before the voice comes. His brother always lingers too long in doorways, as if weighing whether to enter the moment or leave it undisturbed.

“You are restless,” Elijah says, not a question, not a reproach — merely observation, veiled and deliberate.

Nik huffs a laugh without mirth. “Astute as ever.”

Elijah descends the steps, his tread measured, his hands clasped behind his back. “Restlessness often leads you to unwise places.” He does not say the doppelgänger line. He does not have to.

Nik’s mouth curls. “And wisdom, in your hands, led you to chase a girl who wore Tatia’s face and none of her edge. Centuries wasted on a shadow. Do not speak to me of where roads lead, brother.”

Elijah does not flinch, but his eyes close for a breath too long. When he opens them again, sorrow and regret lies beneath the stillness.

Nik steps closer, voice quiet, sharper for its restraint. “And Katerina — if she had not slit her wrists, drained herself dry, stolen the moonstone and fled… perhaps I would not stand here, watching a child who is mine by choice, not blood, and envy him the wolf that runs in his marrow while mine claws in silence.”

Elijah’s gaze lifts to the moon, silver cutting his profile. “Envy is a cruel tutor, Niklaus. Be wary of how it speaks to you.”

Nik smiles without warmth. “I am wary of nothing, least of all my own nature.”

He turns, leaving his brother in the courtyard’s hush. The fountain trickles on. Elijah does not follow.

Harri does not always stay within the walls of the house.

On certain afternoons, when the Quarter hums thick with voices, she slips away. Nik dislikes it, but he does not chain her, and she clings to the hours of anonymity like breath.

The Quarter opens itself differently when she is alone. The stones are warm beneath her shoes, the air heavy with smoke and sugar.

Children race past with ribbons in their hair; old women sit on stoops, muttering in tongues she cannot place.

Harri lingers at stalls where glass jars hold things she recognises and things she does not. Bones strung on thread. Vials of blood too bright in the sun.

She learns in pieces. That vervain is a shield, though most who drink it do not survive the taste. That salt lines doorways here not to keep ghosts out, but to keep them in. That the witches watch everything, even when their eyes are closed.

She makes odd acquaintances. A fortune-teller who refuses her coin but presses a card into her palm with trembling hands. A tanner who sells her scraps of leather with a wink, telling her they carry wisdom and lessons. A boy who leaves chalk sigils on walls, each one shaped to ward off something unseen.

Most pass like shadows, here and gone. But one remains.

The first time she meets him is outside the church, where candles flicker behind stained glass. He is no witch — human, plain, robes dark against the heat — but his eyes are sharp, seeing more than he should. When she asks for directions, he studies her a moment too long before pointing her on.

They cross paths again, and again.

Sometimes in the churchyard, sometimes in the market, sometimes by chance in streets that are not chance at all. He speaks sparingly, but never with suspicion. There is patience in him, and a gravity that pulls her words out despite herself.

One evening, as the bells toll over the Quarter and dusk presses blue into the stones, he pauses beside her at the church gate. His eyes rest on her, calm and unwavering.

“Are you a believer?” he asks.

Harri stills. The question is too direct, too heavy, yet his voice carries no judgment. Only curiosity, mild as the smoke curling from the candles within.

She answers slowly, careful. “I believe God exists.”

The faintest smile touches his mouth. “That is good enough.”

A beat passes before he inclines his head, almost formally. “Kieran O’Connell.”

She mirrors the gesture. “Harriet Potter.”

His eyes sharpen, something like recognition stirring there. “Yes. I have heard of you. Your kind of witches live here too, though they are few. They speak of England’s saviour in whispers.”

The words root her to the stones.

He does not elaborate at once, only watches her with a faint, wry smile, as though waiting to see whether she will deny it. Harri does not. She only nods, throat tight, and something settles between them that is not quite friendship but more than acquaintance.

A space where truths might be spoken.

Heat rises to her cheeks, a weight pressing at her ribs. She shakes her head lightly, and finally says: “They exaggerate.”

“Perhaps.” His voice is steady, threaded with something gentler than belief, but firmer than doubt. “But names endure. Yours more than most.”

Harri grips the iron rail, glancing away from his gaze. The candles inside flicker against the glass, throwing shadows that dance over her hands. She does not move.

//

They cross paths again the next evening, this time not at the church but in the market where lanterns sway in the heat. Harri is looking over jars of herbs when a shoulder brushes hers. She turns and finds the priest at her side, hands clasped loosely behind his back, expression wry.

“Miss Potter,” he greets her, as though they are long acquainted.

“Father O’Connell,” she returns, though the title sits oddly on her tongue.

He glances over the stalls. “Strange place to find an English girl.”

“I could say the same for a priest,” she answers, more boldly than she means.

He laughs, quiet, indulgent. “Touché.”

They fall into step as the market spills into streets perfumed with incense and frying oil. He points things out without ceremony — charms nailed into doorframes. “This Quarter runs on its witches. Their magic is in the stones, the air you breathe.”

Harri hesitates, then admits softly, “I’ve tried to follow it. Their magics. The chants, the rites. But it doesn’t… answer me. Not the way it does for those born here.”

Kerian regards her sidelong, eyes calm, unreadable. “No. It would not.”

Her brow furrows. “Why?”

He lets a beat pass before answering, his voice measured, almost reflective. “Because what they weave is bone and blood. It bends to those who carry their lineage in their veins. You are… different. Yours runs on word and will. A river of its own.”

Harri swallows, fingers brushing the wand hidden in her sleeve. “So no matter what I try—”

“It will not be the same,” he finishes gently. “Two rivers side by side, but never the same water.”

The words sink into her like stones. She nods, though her throat is tight, and he does not press.

They part at the end of the street where the lamps burn low, but the truth follows her home.

Their meetings become habit. Not planned, never spoken of — but the Quarter bends strangely, and somehow she always finds him, or he her.                                                      

In the market, in the churchyard, beneath balconies strung with beads. He greets her with a nod, never surprise, as if her presence has been expected all along.

With each crossing, trust grows by increments. He tells her stories of the Quarter — its witches, its strange pacts, the way the city itself seems stitched from rebellion and blood.

She listens, storing the knowledge like coins in her palm. In turn, she offers him pieces of England, of battles fought and scars carried. Not all of it, never all, but enough that he knows she is no child.

One evening, as the bells fade and they walk side by side through lamplit streets, he studies her quietly before asking:

“How does it feel?”

Harri glances at him. “What?”

“To be bound,” he says simply. “Soul to a Mikaelson. To the caged hybrid, no less.”

The question knocks the air from her. She gathers herself, answering with care. “It feels… like being tethered to fire. Terrifying. Warm. Dangerous. And yet, I don’t think I could walk away, even if I wished to.”

His mouth curves, faint and knowing. “A fire to warm or consume.”

“And you?” she asks, voice tentative. “Do you… have a soulmate?”

His gaze turns inward, shadows darkening his face. “I did.” A pause, soft as breath. “She died.”

The silence that follows is heavy, but not unbearable. Harri does not press. They walk on.

It is some time later, beneath the hush of a courtyard fountain, that she dares another question. Tentative, couched in vagueness. “What of cages? Things sealed away. How are they unsealed?”

Kieran’s eyes are steady on her. “It depends. Some bindings break with time. Some demand sacrifice. The severity shapes the cost.”

Her throat tightens. She looks away, fingers brushing her sleeve.

After a long pause, he adds quietly, almost gently: “You are asking about Klaus’s caged wolf.”

Harri freezes. The words land like stones dropped in water. Her mouth opens, no sound at first.

Kieran only smiles, small and wry. “Do not be stunned. My line has always kept an ear to that curse. Watched for the day it might be undone.”

She finds her voice, low. “And?”

“And the ritual,” he says, the softness never leaving his tone, “is not one that would sit easily with your morals. Klaus’s freedom will come at a cost. One you may not be willing to pay.”

The fountain trickles on. Harri stands very still, the weight of the truth pressing into her bones. Kieran does not touch her, does not press further — only lets the silence carry what words cannot.

She leaves him at the fountain, his words circling in her mind like smoke she cannot clear. Not one that would sit easily with your morals.

What does that mean, exactly? Sacrifice, yes. Blood, yes. But what weight is measured against freedom? If a curse can be broken, should it matter how?

She has seen too much death to pretend innocence lasts long in this world, and too much cruelty to believe freedom comes without cost.

The Quarter feels altered as she walks. What once seemed curious — jars of herbs, chalk sigils, beads strung bright above — now glimmers with sharper edges, as if all of it hides bargains waiting to be struck.

She wonders which of these faces in the crowd would be willing to bleed, and which would scream.

She knows Nik will want it. Of course he will. And the thought unsettles her not because she doubts him, but because she does not know yet what she would say. Whether she would stop him. Whether she could.

By the time she reaches the gates, the house looms like a sanctuary and a cage both. She presses her palm to the iron, breath shallow, and lets the question press harder into her chest: if freedom demands a price, what would she pay?

The question follows her inside, threading through the hush of hallways where the lamps burn low.

The others have gone to their rooms, the house holding its breath in uneasy silence. Yet one light still glows, faint beneath a door left half-open, spilling a sliver of gold across the stone.

Her steps turn toward it without thought, drawn as if the answer she cannot name waits within.

The studio smells of turpentine and oil, sharp beneath the sweetness of candle wax. Canvases lean against the walls in restless ranks — some half-finished, some turned deliberately to face the plaster, as though their eyes are too much.

The floor is scattered with rags and brushes, paint clotted in jars where water should be.

Nik stands before one canvas, brush poised but unmoving. The moonlight slips through the high windows, silvering the line of his jaw. His hand trembles once, almost imperceptibly, before he stills it against his thigh.

Harri lingers in the doorway, the weight of Kieran’s words still heavy in her chest. The hush of the room presses close, thick with colour unshed. Her heart pounds in her ears before she speaks.

“I learned something.”

The brush stills entirely. He does not turn. “From whom?”

“A friend,” she says carefully. “Kieran O’Connell. A priest. He knows of the witches here — and of witches like me. He told me…” She breathes deep, forcing the words. “He told me the ritual to unseal your wolf may not align with what I believe in.”

Nik lowers the brush, laying it down with deliberate care. Only then does he glance over his shoulder, mouth curved without mirth. “You think I do not know of O’Connell? I know of your… budding friendship with him. Tumultuous, yes. But I am not blind, little witch.”

She steps into the room, the paint-scent sharp around her. Her eyes catch on the nearest canvas — violent swathes of red and black. “Have—have you ever come close? To breaking it?”

Silence spreads. He moves past her, sets the brush among the jars, smears of paint staining his fingers. The bond hums between them, stretched tight, sharp as wire.

Finally he says, low, “Once. With Katerina. She slit her wrists, drained herself dry, stole what I needed and ran. She even made certain to become a vampire — to sever herself from the ritual entirely. For a moment, it was nearly within reach. And then it was gone.”

Nothing more.

Harri waits, throat thick. But he offers no marrow, only the husk: no confession of how it felt, no rage, no wound. Just the clipped edge of truth.

Nik turns then, crossing the paint-stained floor in three strides. He lifts her chin with paint-spattered fingers, gaze dark and steady. The bond is muted, distant, offering no sway or comfort. This is not inevitability pressing at her ribs — it is her own morals skewering, bending, for a man who is becoming something more than inevitability.

A thought slips in, sharp as glass: if this were her fifteen-year-old self, the girl who bled in war and carried the weight of graves, she would not have let it stand.

She would have fought tooth and nail against even the whisper of such a ritual. But that girl is gone, carved into stone with Voldemort’s shadow. Perhaps her saviour complex died with him.

And so she stands, no longer the child who saved a world, but the woman who wonders — if freedom demands blood, how much would she truly fight to stop him?

“Do not let O’Connell plant doubts where they do not belong,” he murmurs. “The curse is mine. The choice will be mine.”

He brushes his lips to her temple, the faint trace of turpentine clinging to him. Then he is gone from her touch, retreating to the canvas, to the colours that keep his silences.

Harri stands very still, surrounded by unfinished faces turned to the walls.

The vow lies in her chest like a chain, heavy with all that he withholds — and heavier still with what she now withholds too.

Chapter Text

The studio smells of turpentine and oil, sharp beneath the sweetness of candle wax.

Canvases lean against the walls in restless ranks — half-finished, half-abandoned, faces turned away as if they accused him. He stands before one, brush slack in his hand, but colour refuses to obey him tonight. The wolf rattles its cage too loud.

He hears her before she speaks — her steps, her pause at the threshold. Always she hovers, as if she belongs and does not belong both at once.

“I learned something,” she says.

His jaw tightens. Of course you did, little witch. You cannot keep your nose out of other people’s secrets. He does not say that out loud.

Instead, He asks “From whom?”

As though he does not know who she spends her time frolicking with.

“A friend. Kieran O’Connell. The priest.” Her voice falters, but she pushes on. “He told me the ritual to unseal your wolf may not align with what I believe in.”

Nik sets the brush aside with deliberate care, rage curling tight in his gut. He glances over his shoulder, mouth curling. “You think I do not know of O’Connell? I know of your… budding friendship with him. Tumultuous, yes. But I am not blind.”

She steps into his domain anyway, eyes catching on the canvases he has not let her see. He watches the way her mouth tightens at the red and black slashed across one of them. Always searching, always judging.

“Have—have you ever come close? To breaking it?”

His breath stills. She does not know what she asks. He moves past her, rags smearing his fingers with old colour.

“Once. With Katerina. She slit her wrists, drained herself dry, stole what I needed and ran. She even made certain to become a vampire, to sever herself from the ritual entirely. For a moment, it was nearly within reach. And then it was gone.”

He offers no more. Let her choke on the half-truth.

She waits, throat working, eyes bright with some unspoken thought.

He sees it — that flicker of temptation in her, that skewering of her own morals. Not the saviour now, are you, girl? Once she would have railed against the very idea.

Now she only stands, silent, teeth sunk in her own tongue. Perhaps the war carved that out of her. Perhaps her precious saviour complex rotted in Voldemort’s grave.

He steps close, tilting her chin up with paint-stained fingers. The bond is muted, distant, no magic humming between them to force her stillness. This is her, wholly her — bending, fraying, for him.

“Do not let O’Connell plant doubts where they do not belong,” he murmurs, voice a knife of velvet. “The curse is mine. The choice will be mine.”

He brushes his lips against her temple, a claim more than comfort, and then withdraws, back to his canvas, back to silence.

She remains there, surrounded by his unfinished faces turned to the wall. He does not need the bond to feel the weight of her unspoken thoughts pressing close.

She withholds, as he withholds. And in that symmetry he wonders whether they will consume one another before the wolf ever runs free.

When she finally leaves him to his canvases, the silence claws too close. The wolf rattles louder, but it is not only the cage that gnaws at him.

It is O’Connell’s name on her lips, the way her eyes held questions sharpened by another man’s voice.

He does not tolerate interlopers. Not in his city. Not in his bond.

By morning, his decision is set.

The Quarter bends beneath his tread, wary, watchful. And at its heart, pale against the sky, the church waits.

The church doors creak wide beneath his hand. Candlelight flickers across stone, shadows stretching long over the pews. The air smells of wax and smoke, faint but clinging. Nik steps inside without hurry, his tread echoing soft and certain.

O’Connell kneels at the altar, posture steady, lips moving in words too low to catch.

Nik does not speak at once. He lets the sound of his approach fill the space — each footfall deliberate, measured, until the priest looks up. Their eyes meet in the shimmer of gold light.

“Father O’Connell,” Nik says, voice low, velvet edged.

The man rises with quiet composure. His gaze does not waver. “Niklaus. I expected you to come along far sooner.”

They stand in stillness, the silence heavy but unbroken. Only the faint hiss of candles dares stir the air.

At last Nik tilts his head, a faint smile curving his mouth. “You’ve become… familiar company to her.” His tone is smooth, but weighted. “She carries your words home in her eyes. Repeats them with a conviction that is not her own.”

The man does not bristle beneath Nik’s scrutiny. His voice is even, unhurried.

“I want nothing from her,” O’Connell says. “Not coin, not favour, not leverage. I am only curious.”

Nik’s smile hardens. “Curiosity is a dangerous indulgence where she is concerned.”

O’Connell inclines his head slightly, as though conceding the point, yet his gaze holds steady. “Perhaps. But she has been here two years now, has she not? And no one truly knows her. She has only made herself home in the Mikaelson manner — under your roof, at your side. To the Quarter she is a foreign beauty who happens to be bound to you. That is what they see.”

His tone is calm, reflective, carrying no mockery. “Yes, they’ve heard whispers — scraps of tales carried across seas. The girl who lived. But nothing more. The wizarding world keeps itself on a tight leash. Only a few even know her kind exists, fewer still understand it.”

Nik’s jaw tightens, but he lets the priest continue.

“I wonder,” O’Connell says at last, “only because the mystery is there to wonder at. She stands at the crossroads of too many worlds — and yet, she belongs fully to none.”

Nik closes the distance in two unhurried steps, his voice dropping to velvet edged with steel. “Be careful, Father. Let the Quarter whisper if it wishes — but take care with your own tongue. What lies between her and me is not yours to weigh, nor to shape.”

The candles hiss in their wax, the silence stretching taut. O’Connell does not move, does not lower his gaze. But he does not press further either.

Nik lets the quiet spool out, holding it between them like a blade balanced on air. He studies the man, the calm set of his jaw, the faint stubbornness in his eyes.

A priest who does not cower, who dares to be curious.

He lingers long enough that the silence itself feels claimed, as though the very stones of the church now carry his shadow. Only then does he turn, steps unhurried, echoing soft against the stone floor.

At the doors he glances back once, smile thin, merciless. “Curiosity, Father, is best practiced at a distance.”

Then he is gone, leaving the smoke and silence to close in behind him.

The days merge.

The house hums with its ordinary noise — footsteps across boards, Elijah’s measured voice from the study, Teddy’s shrieks of play echoing down the halls. Kol and Marcel’s absence is loud in its own way, a gap filled by irritation and relief both.

Nik feels it in the seams of the house: the quiet strain that threads between him and Harri. She moves beside him, across from him, her silences stretched taut.

They do not argue, not outright — but the spaces between words carry more weight than the words themselves.

At night she sits with Teddy by the hearth, humming lullabies low and steady, while Nik sketches in silence. The fire paints her face in amber, her eyes lowered to the boy curled against her chest. Nik catches fragments of what she hums — old songs, too gentle for this house — and feels the oddest friction in it, like softness pressed against stone.

Sometimes she speaks, little things dropped into the air as though by accident. “I don’t think there are easy ways, Nik.” Or, “Sacrifice is never clean.” She never names the cage, never dares frame it plain. Yet the words fall close enough that he hears the echo.

He glances at her then, but she keeps her gaze on Teddy, or on the flames, as if the comments were nothing at all. He cannot decide if she means them for him, or if his own hunger twists them into shape.

The bond remains muted, and so the distance grows — not with fire but with slow erosion.

Their shoulders nearly touch, yet the space between them feels ocean-deep. And still, he thinks he hears it in her voice, subtle and dangerous: that she is tethering at the edge of her morality, that fear has not turned her away.

That, perhaps, she is choosing him, even against herself.

He is not sure. He does not trust the hope in it. But the thought gnaws at him all the same.

The house moves around them regardless — doors opening, footsteps echoing, life threading on with or without their silence. He feels it in the air, a restlessness he cannot name, each member of his family drifting toward their own hungers, their own secrets

Rebekah has grown fond of the balcony that overlooks the Quarter. She takes her letters there in the late afternoons, when the air cools and the street below hums with music.

She leans on the railing with ink-stained fingers, pages pressed close as though the world might try to steal them.

Nik sees her sometimes from below the lemon tree , her hair lit gold in the last light, lips moving silently over words she has already written. Once, she even laughs — low, private, a sound he has not heard from her in years.

He does not interrupt, though the sight unsettles him. Neville Longbottom — quiet, steadfast, unremarkable Neville — has drawn this softness out of her.

Once, Nik would have torn it apart, condemned her choice outright. But Rebekah guards those letters like a secret treasure, and perhaps that alone disarms him.

She folds them carefully, tucks them away, her smile fading when she notices him watching. Nik never asks what she writes, but he already knows whose name waits at the bottom.

And so, the days thicken with heat. Rain rolls in and out. The tension holds.

And then — news.

It comes in a letter, ink hurried, Marcel’s hand steady but quick. Kol’s words scrawled across the bottom, taunting even in haste.

The line lives. Virginia. Mystic Falls.

Nik reads it once. Twice. The words blur, sharpen, blur again. He feels the cage rattle harder in his chest, iron biting bone. Freedom, closer than it has been in centuries — but tangled in a place he swore never to crawl back to.

The letter trembles faintly in his hand, though he does not let it show.

The days blur again, thick with heat and doubt. Nik turns the letter over and over, as if repetition might undo the words inked there.

The line lives. Virginia. Mystic Falls.

He does not believe it. Cannot. He has seen too many lies spun from witches’ tongues, too many promises of freedom turned to dust. Freedom dangled always just out of reach, the key always missing, the door always sealed again before his hand could close around it.

And yet, the thought claws at him.

A chance.

After centuries of chains biting bone. The wolf sings in his marrow at the possibility, restless, ravenous. It is not song so much as a keening, a low howl vibrating in the hollows of his chest. He feels it when he wakes, when he sketches, when he touches Harri’s hand — always there, a reminder of what he does not have.

He tells no one, not at first. Not Harri, not Elijah, not Rebekah. He lets the days stretch, pacing the halls, prowling the courtyard long past midnight, his shadow pacing with him, hunger gnawing at the edges of his composure. Disbelief curdles into certainty.

He can ignore it no longer.

But when he thinks of telling her, his steps falter.

The bond hums faint in the back of his mind, a constant thread, and for once he does not know if it is strength or weakness.

He could leave it open, let the inevitability of it carry her to him, let it soothe the edges of her fear until she agrees. He could lean into the very thing that has bound them since the moment she first breathed his name.

But would that be her — or the bond? Would she stand by him because it is who she is, or because it left her no escape? No choice?

The thought festers. If she is to stand with him now — through wretchedness, through madness, through blood — it must be her choice, stripped bare of inevitability.

And so he debates, pacing himself into knots, the wolf in him howling at the risk of silence.

At last, he makes the cut.

The snap is quiet, but it resounds in him like thunder. No hum, no whisper, no tug. Only silence where she should be. It is absence sharp enough to bite.

And he does it not from spite, not from cruelty, like before, but because what comes next must be hers. Her choice, unshaped by the tether between them. If she stands with him, it must be in her own right, not pulled by bond.

He cannot bear for her to go against him in this. Not after everything. Not when he has clawed so much out of nothing, only to find himself holding her in the end.

He remembers too much.

The long years when he believed he had no soulmate at all, that he had been denied him what is given so freely to others. The shock of first hearing her — not words, not warmth, but the echo of a girl’s breath trembling across oceans, carried in the marrow of him. The way it startled him, infuriated him, how he resisted even as his heart knew.

Learning of her childhood, the cruelties carved into her too young — a girl beaten down by her blood, by her own kin, and yet still standing, just like him.

The war she fought while still half a child herself, the graves she carried in her bones, the shadow of her enemy etched into her skin.

He remembers the fear of losing her back to that wretched world, the disbelief when she crossed oceans to stand at his side.

At first it had been desperation, the need to answer the bond, to claim what had be classified as inevitable. He thought she had come to him hollow, driven only by bond.

But the days became more. Their first confessions, their first secrets — words exchanged like weapons and then like lifelines. The vows spoken in the hush, fragile but binding.

He had shown her his cruelty — not by accident, but deliberately. He cut her off when she pressed too hard about Elijah, when she demanded what he could not yet give.

He had severed the bond in coldness, knowing it would wound her, testing whether she would endure. She had. And when the silence broke, when she refused to leave, when she pressed still — they had clawed through it, bloodied but alive. They had learned, in their fractured way, to speak what words they could.

Her family had come, and he had watched them fill his house with warmth he had long forgotten, watched them weave themselves into the bones of his life.

He had seen them as hers, and so by extension as his. Teddy had called him Da, small arms wound around his neck with trust too pure for him, and Nik had claimed him in his heart as surely as Marcel.

Through it all, she never cut him off. Never once.

And now — Mystic Falls. The wolf uncaged. The chance of freedom and ruin both. The place where his ruin began, where Mikael’s shadow still lingers in memory and ash. This will be the test. If they are truly compatible. If there is something in them worth the sacrifice, worth the madness, worth the centuries of silence that led them here.

He will not dress it in tenderness. He will not pretend it is anything but wretchedness and insanity. But if she stands with him through this, then perhaps — perhaps — they can survive anything.

And so, he sends for her.

He waits in the study, light dim, the air thick. The letter lies folded on the table, its words seared into him. His hand rests against it, steady, but his eyes burn with the storm he refuses to name.

When Harri enters, he looks up, sharp and merciless, but with something raw flickering beneath.

“We need to talk.”

She closes the door behind her. The sound is soft, but it lands like a mark drawn across the floor between them. She looks at him, then at the folded letter beneath his hand.

Her voice is steady, though he hears the question in it. “What is it?”

Nik does not answer at once. He studies her, the tilt of her chin, the way her fingers press into her own arm as though bracing. She does not know the bond is severed, not yet, but he feels the absence in every breath.

At last, he slides the letter across the table. She hesitates only a moment before picking it up. Her eyes scan the words, once, twice. When she lifts her gaze again, he sees the flicker — fear, yes, but something else too. Calculation.

“The line lives,” she murmurs.

“In Mystic Falls,” Nik says. The words are low, dangerous. “A town I swore never to crawl back to. And yet here it is — the key to my cage.”

She folds the letter with care, sets it back on the table. Her silence stretches, taut as wire.

Nik leans forward, voice sharp, sardonic. “This is where we stand, little one. A chance for freedom. But freedom is never clean. It demands a price. The kind that stains.”

Harri meets his eyes. Her mouth opens, closes. When she speaks, it is quiet, but steady.

“You think I don’t know that? That I haven’t lived in stains?”

Her hand tightens at her side, nails biting her palm. “There are things I regret, Nik. Not the battles I fought, but the choices I didn’t make. Times I clung too tightly to being good, to being what they needed me to be. If I had let myself bend more, if I had compromised sooner… maybe some of them would still be alive. Maybe some of my friends wouldn’t be in graves. Maybe my family wouldn’t have broken under the weight.”

Her voice does not rise, but the words cut like glass. “If I had let the darker thoughts have their way, just once — if I had scared them enough, fought dirty enough — perhaps it would have been different.”

He watches her carefully. There it is again — the edge of her morality fraying, bending toward him. And yet he cannot tell if it is choice, or if he only sees what he longs to see.

“You would stand with me in this?” His tone is cutting, but beneath it lies something raw, almost pleading. “Even if it drags you further from the sainted saviour they whisper of? Even if it damns you?”

Her throat works. She does not look away. “I’ve never been a saint, Nik.” A pause, weighted, heavy with everything unsaid. “And I’m not sure I want to be.”

The words strike him harder than any vow. For a beat, he says nothing, only stares, the storm in his chest roaring against its bars.

He rises slowly, steps around the table. Paint still stains his hands from an earlier sketch, smudging dark against his skin. He tilts her chin up, the gesture sharp, claiming, but not cruel.

Something savage stirs in him — a dark thrill, sharp as broken glass. Hope, twisted into something dangerous. To hear her admit it, to hear her choose the shadow over the light she once clung to. It tempts him like blood on his tongue.

And yet he knows the weight of such words. He knows how change resists, how compromise grinds down the bone before it bends.

He has seen too many promises falter beneath the strain of time. To walk with him in shadow is no fleeting vow — it is surrender, and surrender rarely holds.

His mouth curves anyway, cruel and sardonic, masking the ache beneath. Relief and amusement twined like barbed wire. “Ah, so the little saviour bares her teeth at last.”

But beneath the cruelty, his chest tightens — because perhaps she means it. Perhaps she truly is his.

“The bond is closed,” he tells her, low, velvet edged with steel. “What you choose is yours alone. If you stand with me, it is because you do, not because the bond drags you to my side.”

Her breath catches, but she does not flinch.

Instead, her gaze sharpens, cutting into him.

“I realised,” she says softly. “The moment you showed me the letter. The line lives — but the hum was gone. You’d already closed it.”

For a beat, silence stretches taut between them. Then Nik’s mouth curves — a cruel smirk, sharp as broken glass.

Relief and amusement tangle there, indistinguishable. “Clever little witch. Always too quick for her own good.”

The words hang, suspended between them, neither pushed further nor withdrawn. She does not ask why. He does not explain. The understanding sits, unspoken, heavy as iron.

Chapter Text

The night after, their words hangs heavy.

Even muted, the bond thrums faint in the marrow, a silence that is not silence at all.

They do not speak of it again — not of the severed tether, not of the choice left hanging between them. Instead, they move through the days like actors in a play they both know by heart.

Breakfasts are quiet. Harri takes Teddy’s hand, steadies his steps through the corridors, hums while she brushes curls from his eyes.

Nik sketches, paints, prowls the courtyard, his shadow a constant presence at the edges of her vision.

Their eyes catch often, linger too long, but neither breaks the stillness.

The house feels suspended, every breath holding weight. Waiting.

It is in that tautness, that half-life between confrontation and decision, that the next letter comes.

It arrives, pressed into his hand by one of Marcel’s men. The seal is broken before he reaches his study.

Ink sprawls quick and clipped across the page, Kol’s taunting scrawl crowding the margins of Marcel’s steadier script. Nik reads, silent, each line a weight.

The town is crawling. Vampires breed like vermin, every street humming with blood and hunger. And of course, the Salvatores linger where the doppelgänger treads. Ever the loyal hounds. Two Bennett witches remain, sharp as their lineage promises. The line lives, brother. The line lives in Mystic Falls.

Nik lowers the letter, breath tight. Mystic Falls. A backwater town, a place that should have faded to dust. And yet it has always drawn them — wolves, witches, vampires, doppelgängers — as if the land itself were a snare for the supernatural.

His thoughts flicker unbidden to the younger Salvatore brother, to Stefan.

The boy’s smile painted in blood, the ripper’s laughter echoing through Prohibition nights. For a time, they had been companions — predators sharing the same hunger, the same ruin.

Nik had admired him then, in a way. A friendship of sorts, if such things could exist between monsters. He wonders what remains of him now, leashed by a brother who never could stomach the truth of what they are.

His gaze drops again to the words. Two Bennett witches remain.

The name slices sharper than he expects.

The Bennetts have always been blades in his story — Ayanna, who had helped raise him and his siblings when Esther’s hand was too cold, who whispered stories by firelight and warned against the spell that would twist them into monsters. She had begged Esther to stop, and when Esther did not, Ayanna turned her back.

Nik’s jaw tightens at the memory. “She abandoned us,” he murmurs, half to himself, half to the fire. “And still, I loved her. Resented her too. Both truths cut the same.”

That contradiction lives in him still, making his voice rougher when he goes on. “Every century since, her line has found a way to remind me of that first wound. Always there to bind us, to stop us, to sacrifice their own if it means standing in our way.”

That evening, the house is quieter than most. Teddy sleeps in the parlour, sprawled across Harri’s lap, curls damp against her shoulder. The fire burns low, shadows stretching long.

Nik sets the letter on the table between them. Harri reads quickly, eyes scanning with a focus that sharpens when she finds the words. Mystic Falls. Vampires breed like vermin. Her hand presses faintly against Teddy’s back, steadying him though he does not stir.

She says nothing at first. Only sits, lips pressed thin, gaze caught somewhere between the paper and the boy.

Nik watches her, silent. The weight in his chest grows. He knows she will ask — she always does, peeling at him like bark until the heartwood shows.

Her fingers tighten around Teddy’s curls. “The witches,” she says at last, quiet but steady. “You flinched at their name.”

Nik leans back, mouth curving into something sharp. “Bennetts. Always Bennetts.”

Her brow furrows. She waits.

“They were there at the beginning,” he says, tone laced with mockery though the edges bleed raw. “Ayanna — my mother’s friend, her confidante. She raised us as much as Esther ever did. She told us stories, steadied us when Mikael’s fist struck too hard. And then she warned against the spell. Begged Esther to leave us be. When my mother went through with it anyway…” his voice dips lower, harsher, “she left. Abandoned us to the monsters Esther had made.”

He laughs, but it is low and mirthless. “I hated her for it. Loved her still. I’ve learnt since then that both truths can live in the same heart.”

His gaze darkens. “And every daughter of her line since has cut me in turn.”

The fire pops. Teddy sighs in his sleep.

Harri strokes his curls absently, though her eyes never leave Nik’s. “And they will be there when we arrive.”

Nik inclines his head, sardonic smile twisting. “Like stalactites in the dark. Waiting. Drip by drip, they sharpen until they cut.”

She tilts her head, catching the strange note in his voice. “Stalactites?”

His gaze drifts from the fire to the shadows above, memory dragging his mouth into a bitter line. “The caves we hid in as children. When Mikael’s hand grew too heavy, we’d run beneath the earth. Water dripped from the stone — steady, endless. We told ourselves it was safer there, though the dark was as cruel as the man above.”

He laughs again, quieter. “I used to watch them grow. Stalactites, stalagmites. Years upon years of water carving stone into spears. Slow. Patient. Deadly if they break loose.”

Harri’s throat works. She says nothing, but the silence between them hums, raw with what he hasn’t said.

He looks back to her at last, eyes catching hers across the firelight. “The Bennetts are the same. Patient. Inevitable. They drip and drip until one day, the stone falls, and someone bleeds.”

Harri’s hand stills on Teddy’s curls. Her voice is quiet, almost unwilling: “And you think it will be us.”

“I think,” Nik answers, velvet edged with steel, “that we are walking into their cave.”

The words hang, sharp as dripping stone. The fire crackles, low and restless, shadows moving like the breath of something larger than the room itself.

Neither of them speaks. Teddy shifts in his sleep, a small sound caught in his throat before he burrows deeper into Harri’s shoulder. She presses her cheek to his curls, eyes fixed on the letter still lying open on the table, Kol’s scrawl like teeth across the page.

The silence grows heavier. The weight of it is no longer just Bennetts and stalactites, but what waits unspoken between them — the boy, the journey, the truth neither wants to shape into words.

She says nothing still. Only sits, lips pressed thin, her gaze caught somewhere far off between the paper and the boy.

Nik watches her, silent. He feels the conclusion forming in his own chest, slow and reluctant, a truth he does not want to name. Mystic Falls thrums with too much danger, too much history, too much hunger.

He sees it as clearly as he feels the wolf clawing in his ribs: they cannot take Teddy there.

Harri’s shoulders shift, a small, weary motion. Her hand smooths over Teddy’s curls, tender, almost desperate. She does not look at Nik when she whispers, “We can’t…”

The rest of the sentence breaks off, but it does not need finishing.

“No,” Nik answers at last. His tone is quiet, unyielding. “Teddy would be swallowed whole before he could draw breath.”

The words linger between them, heavy as stone.

Harri’s fingers do not still. She strokes Teddy’s hair, presses her lips to his temple, and finally lifts her gaze to Nik. Her eyes are tired, steady. “You won’t let me stay.”

“And you won’t let me go alone.” His reply is cruel, but softened by certainty.

Her silence is answer enough.

So they sit there, the three of them bound in quiet. The child sleeping between them, the fire dying low, the letter’s weight pressing down harder with each breath.

Nik leans back, gaze still fixed on the child. The conclusion tightens around him like a noose. “Then plans must be made. He cannot stay here. Not when the Quarter will turn restless in our absence. Not when Mystic Falls waits.”

The admission leaves him colder than he expects.

Harri exhales slow, reluctant, her mouth set against the words before she speaks them. “Andromeda.”

The name hangs, sharp and inevitable. England. Safety. Distance. A choice neither of them wants but both know is the only one.

Nik glances once more at the letter, at the names bleeding through his mind. Mystic Falls, with all its ghosts. The Salvatores. The Bennetts. The cage rattling louder in his chest.

“Yes,” he says at last, voice low, final. “His grandmother will take him.”

The fire pops, scattering sparks that die before they touch the rug. Teddy sighs in his sleep. The house holds its breath, as though it too knows what storm waits beyond the horizon.

//

The silence that follows is deeper than before, weighted with the choice they have spoken into being.

Teddy shifts in Harri’s arms, a small sigh, his lashes brushing her collarbone. She clutches him tighter for a breath too long, as though she might fold him back into herself, keep him from the reach of distance, of time.

Nik watches her, and for once he does not speak. The words he could say — necessity, strategy, survival — feel like knives in his mouth. He swallows them whole.

Hours pass like that: the child asleep, the letter sprawled forgotten on the table, two souls pressed into silence too sharp for speech.

But when the candles gutter low and the house settles into its midnight hush, Harri rises at last. She lays Teddy down in his cradle, fingers lingering on the curls damp against his brow, and then she does not return to the fire.

Instead, she crosses to the desk.

The quill waits there, black against parchment, as though it has been expecting her all along.

The quill scratches too loud in the hush. Ink seeps heavy into the paper, each word a weight Harri does not want to give shape to.

Andi—

She pauses. The name alone feels like a surrender.

The candle guttering beside her throws her shadow long across the desk. Teddy’s toy wolf lies abandoned at her elbow, its ear chewed ragged, its button eye loose. She stares at it, then at the half-formed sentence beneath her hand. The words blur, sharpen, blur again.

She tries again. Teddy needs you. No. Too bare. She blots the ink, starts anew. We ask this of you, though it is no small thing… The phrasing collapses under its own weight.

The silence thickens. Nik does not speak; he only watches, his gaze steady, unyielding, as though the weight of his presence alone might press the words from her hand.

Still, she writes, though her grip trembles faintly. He cannot stay here. Not now. Not when—

The quill falters. Ink pools in a black blot that spreads like a wound across the page.

She dips the quill again, steadying her hand with effort. He cannot stay here. Not now. Not when—

Her throat tightens. She forces the next words out, each stroke jagged. Not when danger follows us like shadow. Not when blood waits at the threshold.

She stares at the line. It feels too bare, too brutal. But perhaps honesty is kinder than comfort. She does not strike it through.

Nik’s gaze lingers, catching the curve of her shoulders, the strain in the set of her jaw. He does not speak at once. He only watches her fight the page, the same way she has fought wars, as if a letter could be another battlefield.

At last, his voice cuts through the quiet, velvet edged. “You write as though you are sending him to a grave.”

Her hand jerks; the quill scratches a line too hard, splintering ink across the page. She exhales sharply, setting it down with care as if the motion alone could undo the smudge.

She turns her head just enough to glance at him. “And isn’t it? We’re asking her to raise him as her own again. To take him from us.”

Nik pushes from the chair by the fire, slow, deliberate, until he stands near enough to read the words she has struggled over. His mouth twists faintly. “Dramatic little witch. You would think the boy were being banished, not placed into the arms of family who already proved they can keep him alive.”

She narrows her eyes, lips parting with a retort, then closes them again. The fight drains too fast. Her shoulders slump, hands curling into the edge of the desk. “It feels like betrayal,” she whispers.

The words hang, raw, before she forces herself to go on. “I begged for him, Nik. Do you remember? I swore to Andromeda I’d raise him as mine, that he’d have summers with her once Hogwarts started — that was the compromise. And it hasn’t even been two years. Barely two years, and I’m sending him back to her like a promise already broken.”

Her voice catches, the weight of it pulling sharper. “What kind of mother does that make me?”

Nik watches her carefully, the quill abandoned on the desk, the ink bleeding like a wound. He feels the sharpness of her words — not accusation, but grief flung wide.

“Better betrayal than burial,” he repeats at last, velvet over steel. But his gaze lingers on her, on the curve of her shoulders bent toward the child sleeping in the room. His tone is cruel only because he cannot bear the softness pressing in from every side.

Silence stretches, but she doesn’t let it settle. She turns toward him fully now, eyes bright, jaw set. “Tell me, Nik. Say it. Because I don’t know if I can live with this and still call myself his.”

He meets her gaze, sardonic retort poised — but it dies before it can cut loose. The fight in her face, the grief carved into her voice, holds him still.

Slowly, he steps closer, one hand braced on the desk beside hers. His other reaches, unthinking, to brush a strand of hair from her cheek, leaving a smear of ink in its wake.

“You are the only mother he has,” Nik says, low, steady, stripped of cruelty. “And that will not change because you choose to keep him alive. You keep him. Even when he sleeps an ocean away.”

Her breath trembles, but her eyes do not leave his.

Nik’s mouth curves, faint and bitter. “You think Marcel ceased to be my son when he left this house? Blood or no blood, claim does not vanish with distance. The boy is yours, Harri. Nothing will sever that.”

The words are quiet, almost tender, and in them lies the truth he does not speak: that he knows what it is to lose, and he will not name her choice as loss.

Her breath trembles, but her eyes do not leave his. For a heartbeat she looks as though she might argue, might press again — but the fight drains out of her shoulders, leaving something smaller, more fragile in its place.

She leans into his hand where it rests against her cheek, ink smearing faint against her skin. “You make it sound so simple.”

Nik’s thumb brushes along her jaw, a touch almost reverent for all its roughness. “It is not simple,” he admits. “But it is truth.”

For the first time that night, she lets her eyes close. The letter lies unfinished on the desk, ink blotched and bleeding, but for a moment she does not look at it. She only leans into him, the silence between them softer than it has been in days.

Nik bends, presses his mouth to her hair — not a claim, not a demand, but something quieter, steadier. A promise he cannot quite name.

When she finally draws back, her hand lingers over his, fingers tight for a breath before letting go. Her gaze flicks once to the letter, then back to him, and though grief still shadows her eyes, the tremor in her mouth has eased.

“We’ll send him to her,” she says at last. Her voice is low, but steadier. “And when it’s over, when we’ve survived it… we’ll bring him home again.”

Nik inclines his head, not trusting his voice to hold the shape of that vow.

The letter is sealed before dawn, though Harri runs her fingers over the wax as though she might undo it by touch alone.

Sleep becomes an enemy in the days that follow. She lingers by Teddy’s cradle long after his breathing has deepened, humming songs until her own voice frays to nothing.

She braids ribbons into his curls though he tugs them free within minutes. She insists on holding his hand through the corridors, as though the walls themselves might swallow him if she lets go.

Nik watches it all and says nothing. He paints, sketches, prowls the courtyard — but his eyes are never far from her, or from the boy she clutches like breath itself. He feels the bond muted still, but it thrums at the edges with her grief, her stubborn tenderness. He does not reopen it.

He does not need to.

Rebekah notices. She spends her afternoons in the parlour now, coaxing Teddy into games, teaching him old rhymes, twirling him across the tiles until he collapses in laughter. She lets Harri sit and watch, lets her keep her hands clasped tight in her lap without comment.

Even Elijah bends. His composure softens under the boy’s delight, his hand steady when Teddy clambers into his lap and demands a story. He obliges, voice threading myths into the air until the child’s eyes grow wide. Nik sees it, and though bitterness tightens his jaw, he does not intervene.

The house shifts with it. The air grows heavy with the awareness of time running thin.

And then, at last, the absentees return.

Kol bursts through the door with his usual chaos, Marcel trailing at his side, Ginny close behind with cheeks flushed from the journey.

Their noise fills the manor again — Kol tossing Teddy high into the air until Harri nearly shrieks, Marcel steadying the boy with an indulgent grin, Ginny smoothing his curls with a fondness that makes him squirm.

But even Kol’s laughter cannot mask the weight in their eyes, the truth carried back with them from Mystic Falls.

So the family is called together.

The dining hall, usually a place of quarrel or feasting, takes on a different air. Candles gutter low, shadows pooling deep across the table. Nik waits at its head, the letter from Virginia heavy in his hand, the cage rattling louder in his chest than it has in centuries. Around him, his siblings gather, Harri at his side, Teddy pressed close as though she can still hold him from what comes next.

The dining hall breathes with silence before the first word is spoken. The air is thick with wax and wine, the long table shadowed by guttering candles. Nik sits at its head, posture loose but coiled, the letter from Virginia folded beneath his palm like a blade hidden but ready.

Elijah is the first to break the quiet. “We are to discuss what must be done,” he says, measured as ever, though his gaze flicks toward Teddy where the boy clings to Harri’s skirts. His voice softens at the sight, then hardens again when he turns to Nik. “Tell us, brother. What path you mean to walk.”

Nik lets the silence stretch, savoring the weight of their attention. At last, he leans back, mouth curving into something that is not quite a smile.

“Preparations must be made. Mystic Falls calls us, whether we wish it or not. The doppelgänger lives. The line breathes. And where the line breathes, my freedom waits.”

The words ripple through the table — Kol smirking as though entertained, Ginny shifting with restless energy, Marcel unreadable but tense, Rebekah folding her arms with sharp patience.

Harri does not look at him. She keeps her eyes on Teddy, her hand stroking his curls with a tenderness that betrays her silence.

Rebekah is the one to speak next, her voice cool, deliberate. “And what of the Quarter? You would leave it untended while you chase shadows in Virginia?”

“Not untended,” Nik replies smoothly. His gaze drifts to her and Marcel both. “You two will remain. Keep the city breathing. Hold it until I return.”

Rebekah’s brows rise, but she does not argue. Marcel inclines his head slowly, though his jaw sets. “And if it doesn’t hold?”

“Then build it stronger,” Nik says, dismissive but edged.

Kol chuckles, breaking the tension like a crack of glass. “And here I thought you’d send Elijah to play mayor while you went gallivanting. But no — Bekah and Marcel get to hold the fort while we chase witches and Salvatores.” His smirk widens, but there’s a flicker of interest beneath it, sharp and wolfish. “I’ll admit, brother, I’ve missed the thrill of a hunt.”

Elijah’s voice cuts across the laughter, low and controlled. “And when you reach Mystic Falls?” His gaze pins Nik, steady and unyielding. “Do not be cruel in this.”

The words land heavy, sharper than any rebuke.

Nik tilts his head, smile curving without warmth. “Cruel?”

“You have a habit, brother,” Elijah continues evenly, “of letting ruthlessness overtake reason when what you seek is nearly within reach. Freedom, vengeance, victory — all have slipped through your fingers because you crushed them too hard in your grasp. Do not repeat the pattern now.”

The hall stills. Even Kol, smirk lingering, falls silent. Ginny’s eyes dart between them, sensing the weight beneath the words.

For a beat Nik only stares at him, storm flickering in his eyes. Then he laughs — quiet, cruel, bitter. “Ah, ever the moral tutor. You think me a child to be warned against touching fire?”

Elijah does not flinch. “I think you are a man who has burned himself often enough to know the warning is needed.”

The air tightens, thick with silence. Rebekah shifts, Marcel looks away, Harri’s hand stills where it rests against Teddy’s curls. Even the boy senses it — he burrows closer into Harri’s side, thumb slipping toward his mouth, eyes wide and watchful.

Nik leans back at last, mouth twisting into something sardonic. “Then watch closely, brother. Perhaps this time you’ll learn that cruelty is not always ruin — sometimes it is the only path to freedom.”

The words hang, cutting, before the meeting pushes on — provisions, travel, the names that haunt them all: Salvatore. Bennett. Mystic Falls. Each syllable a ghost returned, each plan another stone laid on a path that can only end in blood.

Chapter Text

The month loosens like a ribbon

The manor learns to breathe again, slow and careful, as if lungs have to be reminded. Morning slides through shutters in thin pale bands; the floorboards remember the weight of last month’s arguments and hold them without creaking.

Harri walks the corridors with Teddy on her hip and the house answers in small domestic tongues—chicory left to steep too long, linen sun-warmed on the banister, the faint metallic tang of Kol’s experiments clinging to the doorframes like weather.

She does not clock time by calendars. She counts it by the way Teddy says new words—“more,” “grapes,” “again”—and by the way worry settles into everyone’s posture the way dust settles into the velvet on unused chairs.

A month stretches ahead, thread pulled between two pins: the meeting’s end on one side, Andromeda’s return on the other. In between, the days are beads she insists on choosing: bright, ordinary, stubborn.

“We’re going to make memories,” she tells Teddy, and he laughs as if memory is a game he already knows how to win.

Kol appears first because of course he does; trouble and comfort share a door and he keeps the key. He catches them in the gallery and flicks a carved whistle toward Teddy, who clutches it with kingly satisfaction.

For the road,” Kol says, and then, lighter, “or for when you require my dramatic rescue to your side, little wolf.” Kol says, leaning his shoulder to the window as if he can hold the whole house up with bone and intent alone. Then, more softly, as if the words were a coin he’s reluctant to spend: “You’re doing right.”

“I hate that right looks like this,” Harri says.

Kol’s grin tips, not unkind. “Right rarely bothers with flattering angles.” His gaze slips past her to the lawn where the magnolia makes its own weather.

“He’ll tear Mystic Falls apart by its gears and put it back together with fewer knives. It’s how he loves: loudly, with architecture.”

A beat; the smirk returns like a shield he knows how to carry. “Bring me back something gaudy. Preferably cursed. I’m bored.”

She snorts despite herself. “Praline, then.”

“Two,” Teddy declares, and Kol bows to his liege.

Ginny builds a sun in the kitchen and refuses to let it dim. She moves like resolve made tender—apron smudged with flour, hair roped into a ribbon. “You’re not sleeping,” she says without turning from the cutting board.

“Not well.”

“You will,” Ginny answers, slicing strawberries with purpose. “Not because you will feel less—because your body will insist.” She slides the bowl toward Teddy and he smears sweetness on his cheeks until he looks canonised.

“They’ll write every week,” she adds, casual as rain. “Andromeda won’t have time to worry, not with me underfoot.” Her mouth wobbles once; she smooths it with a joke. “Wash comes back cleaner when it’s shared.”

“Thank you,” Harri says, because some gratitude must be spoken aloud to count.

“Don’t thank me. Come back.” Ginny’s hand finds Harri’s wrist, a pulse checking another pulse. “Hands open. You hear me? Don’t come back with fists.”

The days acquire repetition that look like nothing and hold everything. On Wednesdays the praline table sets up early; Teddy learns to say “please” with sticky teeth.

On Fridays, brass warms the corner on Royal Street; the cornet’s first notes lift dust into glitter. Harri names colours into Teddy’s curls—ochre, lapis, verdigris—because naming is a spell that anchors a thing where love can find it again.

She takes him out whenever the air threatens to sit too heavy, pushing Kol’s too-smooth pram he gifted her through the Quarter’s old bones.

The city presents its theatre without asking for applause: a pigeon auditioning for pelican; laundry like flags of truce between balconies; a cat hosting afternoon on a railing with the indifference of royalty.

She buys Teddy a small wooden alligator; he rewards it in his own drool and looks very pleased with theology.

They nearly walk into Father Kieran by the fence along St. Louis; he steps back with a courteous half-bow that acknowledges both pram and mother as sovereign.

“Ms. Potter,” he says, her name careful but not distant. He smells faintly of old paper and the cool of stone. “I hope the city is treating you kindly.”

“It is, when I mind my step,” Harri answers. Teddy reaches for Kieran’s collar, fascinated by the white square; the priest lets small fingers pat once, then gently redirects them toward the wooden alligator. “We’re learning by taste. He approves of pralines.”

“As any discerning soul should.” Something like humour softens the lines at his mouth; something like vigilance remains in his eyes. “I hear there may be travel.”

“Soon.” She doesn’t ask how he knows. New Orleans knows what it loves and what it loses; it keeps track.

Kieran nods, gaze flicking to the cathedral as if listening to a bell only he can hear. “Some places keep the memory of old quarrels in the soil. Walk lightly. And if you ever need a door left unlocked, you know where the church is.”

Harri hears the offering beneath the words—practical, humane, no questions sharpened into hooks—and inclines her head in the same language. “Thank you, Father.”

He gives Teddy a brief blessing—more wish than rite, soft as breath—and steps away without shadowing them with advice he hasn’t earned. Respect, folded and put where it won’t bruise.

Evening stretches gold and long. Marcel finds her on the balcony that faces the river later that day, one palm around a bottle, the other open to the breeze.

He stands like a man who has made peace with gravity and uses it to his advantage.

“You and me,” he says after the easy silence, “we were built for siege and handed a dining chair.” He tilts his head, amused at himself. “Peace is a muscle. Gets stronger if you stop flinching at it.”

Harri huffs. “Feels like gristle most days.”

“Chew anyway.” His smile slips gentler. “My old man’s the best strategist I’ve ever seen. People think storm when they hear his name. They forget he can thread a needle in a hurricane. Mystic Falls?” He gestures as if moving unseen pieces across an unseen board. “He won’t just fight. He’ll rewire the town so the fight has to end.”

“He thinks in centuries,” Harri murmurs.

“And you think in promises.” Marcel knocks his knuckles twice on the iron rail, a little vow that leaves a hum behind. “Between the two of you, that’s a blueprint. I’ll keep things standing here. Morale, logistics, keeping Kol from trading the dining chairs for tigers.”

“Tigers are a strong visual,” she says, and it’s almost a laugh. He lets it be one.

Rebekah folds small shirts with the solemnity of a widow. They sit on the rug with the trunk yawning like a paused decision.

“Am I cruel?” Harri asks, because the question has been chewing the inside of her mouth for days.

Rebekah’s fingers smooth a sleeve that will be too short by winter. “Cruelty—” she begins, then changes her mind.

“You are a mother. That word is sharper and kinder than the other, and it fits.” She glances up, eyes bright and unflinching. “You promised him he wouldn’t be left behind the way you were. You are keeping that promise. Nothing about that is cruelty.”

Harri’s breath seesaws. “I wanted to keep him within reach.”

“You are,” Rebekah says, and taps Harri’s sternum. “Here. And here.” She taps the trunk. “Love travels better than luggage.”

Harri laughs wetly. “Poet.”

“Don’t tell Kol,” Rebekah says. “He’ll write an ode that stains the draperies.”

Elijah becomes a paragraph that appears and resolves. He passes through the parlour with a sheaf of letters that smell like old ink and expensive restraint, pauses at Harri’s shoulder, and inclines his head as one commander to another. “If I have seemed… severe,” he says, the word tasting unfamiliar, “know it was fear by a different name.”

“I know,” Harri answers, because she does, even when she doesn’t like it. Elijah’s mouth eases one degree closer to peace, and he goes to fence the afternoon into sense with correspondence.

Nik is the last constant, the quiet gravity even when he leaves a room. He doesn’t take the bond off its latch. He lives next to her like a shore—near enough to set the shape of the tide, far enough to keep them both from drowning in it.

Whole hours pass where they speak in ordinary nouns and never mention what the house can smell on them—strategy sharpening in a back room, the word Virginia held like a match you’re not ready to strike.

When he does approach, it is without ceremony. Harri is on the back steps, laces Teddy’s shoe, presses a kiss to the soft place above his ear because the day might disallow it later.

Nik sits beside her, forearms balanced on his knees, watching the boy attempt to put his own foot in his mouth and then reconsider on logistical grounds.

“You took him to the Quarter,” he says, voice low enough that the map on the table inside doesn’t hear and get jealous.

“We saw a cat that thinks it is a bishop and a man who plays the cornet like he’s making glass.” She lists more because lists are a way to prove the world is still here. “Kieran said to walk lightly.”

“He would,” Nik says, and there is no disdain in it—only a dry understanding of men who try to keep their people unbroken. He turns his palm up on the stair between them. He doesn’t reach for her. He just leaves the invitation there, unadorned.

She sets her hand in his, and it feels like a door in summer—swollen, honest, a little difficult, worth the push. They sit like that while Teddy narrates a complicated plot about a shoe and a blade of grass, and the cicadas invent a clock neither of them pretends not to hear.

“First light,” Nik says eventually, and the words make the air shiver as if a string has been plucked. “We go then.”

Harri looks at their hands. “He’ll be with Andromeda by then.”

“Yes.” He doesn’t dress it in comfort. He speaks it clean.

“You’ll get us there and back.”

He huffs something that is not quite laughter and not quite disbelief. “I’m insulted you needed to say it.”

“I didn’t,” she says. “I needed to hear it.”

He tips his head, grants her the smallest, most feral smile. “I’ll give you every victory you can carry.”

The month keeps moving, stitched together by details the world would not think to keep: Ginny’s handwriting drying in a neat parade; the way Marcel counts heads at dusk without seeming to; Kol’s whistle trilling from Teddy’s cot at impossible hours; Rebekah teaching Teddy to draw an A that looks like a tepee while telling him, gravely, that the alphabet owes him nothing and he must bully it into obedience.

Harri writes to Andromeda in careful, unsentimental lines: lists of sizes and habits, the way he prefers one lullaby to another, the exact angle the cradle needs to sit to catch the untroubled breeze, the baker whose bread is kinder to small stomachs. She doesn’t use the words I am afraid or I cannot breathe without him close. She trusts Andromeda to read them in the margins.

On the last morning before arrival, the light has that pre-storm hush to it even though the sky is clear.

The manor knows.

Harri knows.

She takes Teddy into the courtyard one more time and lets him chase bubbles she charms to float with the dignity of planets. He shouts at them as if conducting a tiny universe.

Kol pretends to be offended by their insolence and pops one into a frog that hops exactly three times and then remembers it is joy and pops into water with a soft clap.

Marcel leans in the doorway counting smiles instead of soldiers and pronounces the tally good.

Elijah brings a ribbon and ties it to nothing in particular because some things deserve to be marked even if you cannot write the right words.

Ginny wipes Teddy’s face with a tenderness that wants to be anger and refuses.

When the carriage finally clatters at the gate, no one startles; the house has been listening for that particular rhythm all month.

Harri lifts Teddy, imprinting the weight again, the way his breath catches on laughter, the damp heat of his neck where curls stick.

She has not been rehearsing a goodbye; she refuses to insult love with rehearsal. She has been living a month of hellos so the farewell knows where to land.

“Ready?” she whispers into hair that still smells faintly of sugar.

“Again,” Teddy says, the only prayer he knows.

Harri kisses his temple. “Again,” she promises, and turns toward the door.

//

The gate groans its old complaint as the carriage rolls up the drive. Sunlight splinters off its brass trim, the horses sweating under their glossed coats. The air smells of dust and magnolia and something faintly metallic — like the sky thinking about rain. Harri feels the house hold its breath. Even the cicadas stop their sermon.

Andromeda steps down, unhurried as always, travel cloak still immaculate, eyes sharp beneath the brim of her hat. There’s grace in her stillness, but not gentleness — more the composure of someone who knows too well how the world takes and what it costs to keep anything.

Kol is the first to move. He whistles low, admiring the efficiency of her arrival, then catches Rebekah’s glance and wisely fades into the background.

Rebekah smooths her skirt and lifts her chin, the picture of polite welcome; Marcel stands beside her, all easy posture and unspoken readiness, as if guarding the threshold.

Ginny clutches Teddy’s blanket, folded neat, the way one might hold a fragile peace offering. Elijah lingers in the archway, solemn and silent, presence alone enough to make the moment feel witnessed.

Nik comes last, out of the house like a shadow breaking from its master. He doesn’t greet Andromeda with words — just the faintest nod, a tension under his jaw that says he knows what this costs.

Harri walks down the steps, Teddy balanced on her hip. He waves as if he understands, curls sticking to his forehead, eyes bright with the thrill of company. The sight punches something deep in her chest.

“Andy,” Harri says. The name wobbles between them, shaped by months of letters, prayers unsent, exhaustion folded neatly into every line.

“Harri.” Andromeda’s reply is smooth, but the edges are visible. She steps closer, boots clicking on stone. “You’ve kept him well.”

“I’ve tried.”

“You always try.”

The air shifts; a bird calls from somewhere in the magnolia, the sound too sweet for the tension it lands on. Andromeda glances around the courtyard — the cracked fountain, the climbing ivy, the lemon tree, — and then back at Harri.

“This is not the peace you wrote of.”

Harri exhales, the smallest surrender. “No.”

“You found your chosen one, and now you chase war again.”

“It’s not war,” she says. “It’s something worse — it’s unfinished.”

Andromeda’s eyes soften and sharpen all at once. “You think finishing it will let you rest?”

“I think not finishing it will haunt me more.”

A long pause. Then Andromeda lifts her arms, the motion steady despite what it means. “Give him here.”

Harri hesitates — just a heartbeat, the kind that leaves bruises. Then she presses Teddy forward. He wriggles, uncertain, then settles in Andromeda’s embrace with a sigh that sounds like trust. His small hand clutches her collar.

Andromeda’s breath catches, barely audible. “You’ve grown,” she whispers to him, brushing a curl from his temple. “You look too much like your mother.”

“He’s himself,” Harri says. “Always has been.”

Andromeda nods once, still looking at Teddy. “I don’t approve of this.”

“I know.”

“But I understand.”

“I know that too.”

The quiet that follows isn’t empty. It’s full — of everything they can’t say, of every goodbye they’ve already rehearsed in dreams.

Marcel steps forward first, clearing his throat like he’s afraid to break something. “We’ll make sure the road is clear,” he says, half to Nik, half to Harri. “No surprises.”

Rebekah kisses Teddy’s forehead, murmurs something about letters and lullabies. Ginny presses the folded blanket into Andromeda’s free arm. Elijah bows slightly, more formality than blessing.

Even Kol — reluctant, irreverent Kol — ruffles Teddy’s hair once and mutters, “You’ll forget me and I’ll be offended,” earning a faint, knowing smile from Andromeda that almost counts as grace.

Then Nik steps forward, quiet cutting through the rest. “He’ll be safe?” he asks. Not as a demand. As a vow waiting to be matched.

Andromeda meets his eyes without flinching. “With me, yes.”

“Then that’s all I need.” His voice doesn’t rise, but it carries — a finality that makes even Kol stop fidgeting.

The moment folds in on itself. Andromeda turns toward the carriage, Teddy balanced against her shoulder. He waves once, clumsy and radiant, and calls, “Mama!” The word splits something in Harri clean through, leaves her smiling like a wound that knows it won’t close yet.

She stands very still until the carriage rounds the bend and the sound of hooves is swallowed by distance.

Only then does she breathe again. Something warm slips down her cheek; she doesn’t register it, not at first. The air feels too bright, too thin. Her hands hover, empty and useless.

The family lingers near her like gravity — no one speaking, no one daring to be first. Rebekah’s eyes are wet; Ginny’s hands twist the edge of her sleeve. Kol fidgets with a coin; Elijah looks toward the river as if manners forbid watching grief too closely.

Marcel moves first. “You did right,” he says, gentle as he can. “And you did it beautifully.”

Harri nods, but the motion unbalances her. More tears slip, catching light like beads; she still doesn’t notice until Nik steps closer.

He doesn’t speak. He only reaches up, thumb brushing the curve of her cheekbone. The touch is soft, deliberate — a man smoothing dust from marble. She startles at the contact, blinks, realises what he’s done, what she’s done.

“I—” The word catches; her throat is raw. She hadn’t known she was crying.

“You kept your promise,” Nik says quietly, as if explanation is needless. His thumb stays for a second longer, grounding her back in the moment.

“Feels like breaking it,” she murmurs, voice hoarse.

“That’s what keeping promises often feels like.” His voice is rougher than she’s used to hearing.

The house exhales at last — shutters creaking, curtains swaying in a slow rhythm. Somewhere upstairs, the whistle Kol gave Teddy trills faintly from the nursery, a last echo of small magic.

Harri looks at the empty gate. “It’s quiet.”

Nik’s gaze follows hers. “It won’t be for long.”

She turns to him, eyes red, voice steadier. “Mystic Falls?”

He nods. “At dawn.”

She exhales, half a laugh. “Of course it’s dawn.”

“The only time the world remembers how to start.”

He offers his hand, palm open. This time she takes it without hesitation.

//

Inside, the family begins to move — Kol fetching bottles, Rebekah lighting candles, Ginny at the hearth murmuring small comforts. The night hums low and alive.

And outside, thunder murmurs far across the bayou — soft, distant, inevitable.

The storm, at last, is on its way.

But not yet.

For now, the night holds. The air outside tastes like iron and rain-not-yet-born, and the manor glows with the half-light of candles that Rebekah refuses to let die before morning.

Harri stands by the window, her reflection faint against the glass — eyes rimmed red, jaw tight, the ghost of a smile that has forgotten what to do with itself.

She hears Nik enter before she sees him — the quiet shift of air, the soft click of a floorboard. He has the kind of presence that doesn’t need footsteps. It announces itself in the way silence changes shape around him.

“Everyone’s gone to bed,” he says, voice low, rough at the edges. “Even Kol’s pretending.”

Harri hums, neither yes nor no. She doesn’t turn. The city beyond the window hums softly, lanterns trembling in the wind.

“She’ll keep him safe,” Nik continues after a moment, moving closer. “And he’ll have stories of sugar and laughter, and a childhood worth remembering. He’ll have something we never had.”

“I know,” Harri whispers. Her throat still burns. “It doesn’t make it hurt less.”

“No.” His reflection joins hers in the glass. “It never does.”

They stand like that — two ghosts watching their own living selves. Nik’s shoulder almost touches hers, and the air between them crackles faintly, bond or not.

“I thought it would feel cleaner,” Harri admits. “That there’d be relief in knowing he’s safe.” She presses her fingers to the glass, smudging her reflection. “But it’s like losing a limb and pretending it’s for the best.”

Nik’s gaze slides to her profile. “You mistake survival for absence. He’s not gone from you, Harri. You’ve just put him where your hands can’t reach yet.”

She lets out a brittle laugh. “You say that like you’ve done it before.”

“I’ve been putting things beyond reach my entire life.” His tone is dry, not self-pitying — a truth spoken from long practice. “Sometimes for family. Sometimes for war. The ache feels the same either way.”

Her head turns slightly, enough to meet his eyes in the reflection. “And does it ever get easier?”

He considers that, quiet. “No. But it becomes… familiar.”

Something inside her loosens — not regret, not comfort, just understanding shared between people who’ve bled for what they love and still find the courage to love again.

The thunder rolls closer now, soft but certain. She realises she’s crying again, quieter this time, the tears hot and clean. Nik’s hand finds hers without thought, without ceremony.

“Cry if you must,” he murmurs. “There’s no shame in it.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Neither was I,” he says, and it almost earns a smile from her.

She turns fully to face him, finally. His expression is unreadable — somewhere between calm and exhaustion, the kind of face carved by centuries of both.

He reaches up, not to wipe her tears this time, but to brush a loose strand of hair from her cheek. The gesture is unhurried, reverent.

“You have a terrible habit,” he says softly.

“Of what?”

“Carrying the world until it notices you’re breaking.”

Harri huffs, a sound halfway to a sob. “Someone has to.”

“Not tonight,” Nik replies. “Tonight, let it carry itself.”

The words aren’t grand. They’re enough.

She leans her forehead against his chest, only for a moment — not seeking comfort, but balance. His hand settles at the back of her neck, steady, anchoring. They stand like that until the thunder becomes steady rain against the glass, the kind that softens everything it touches.

When she finally steps back, her voice is smaller but sure. “We leave at dawn.”

Nik nods. “Yes.”

Harri’s gaze drops to his hand still resting at her wrist. She doesn’t move away. “We’re walking straight into the heart of it, aren’t we?”

He almost smiles. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

This time, she does smile — faint, tired, real. “You’re impossible.”

“So they tell me.”

Outside, the rain swells, beads clinging to the window like the city’s own tears. Harri watches them trace paths down the glass and realises, for the first time that night, she can breathe again.

Tomorrow will come, and with it, the road. But for now — just this: the storm whispering, the house breathing, and Nik beside her, silent as prayer.

Rain gentles toward midnight and fades again, leaving the air rinsed and new.

By the time the sky begins to pale, the house already knows: footsteps, whispers, a door closing without echo.

Dawn is not a colour but a temperature — cool on the skin, thin in the lungs, a beginning that tastes like endings reheated.

Harri dresses in quiet layers, fingers clumsy on the last button.  Nik stands by the map-strewn table, sleeves rolled, checking his phone once, the faint buzz of received coordinates breaking the silence.  Neither of them speaks; the space between them has its own vocabulary.

Elijah appears at the doorway, immaculate even in fatigue.  His eyes travel from Nik to Harri and rest there a moment, softening by degrees.  “The car’s ready,” he says.  It sounds like both announcement and benediction.

Rebekah meets them in the hall, robe thrown over her nightgown, hair half-braided.  “I hate goodbyes,” she declares, voice rough with sleep and everything else she will not name.

  She folds Harri into a fierce hug, the kind that promises both protection and retribution if the world misbehaves.  “Write.  Don’t make me come drag you back.”

“I’ll write,” Harri says against her shoulder.  “You’ll hate how often.”

“Good.”  Rebekah kisses her temple and steps aside, wiping at her cheek like dust.

Kol leans against the banister, keys spinning on one finger, already pretending this is casual. 

“Try not to die; it’s terribly unfashionable.”  Then, quieter, “We’ll mind the walls.  Rebekah and Marcel play regent, Ginny runs diplomacy, I’ll handle mischief.”  The grin is for show; the sincerity underneath is clumsy and real. 

He tips two fingers to his brow.  “Bring back news worth drinking to.”

Ginny stands behind him, boots unlaced, hair a tangle of determination.  “I’ll keep them from turning the manor into a zoo,” she says, shooting Kol a pointed look.  “And I’ll keep Rebekah from forgetting to eat.” 

Her eyes find Harri’s and hold.  “We’ll keep it breathing here.  You keep breathing there.”

Harri nods; her throat is a thread about to snap.  “Deal.”

Marcel steps forward last, rolling his shoulders like the city itself.  “You’ve got a route, you’ve got supplies, you’ve got each other.  That’s enough.”  He looks at Nik.  “You call, we move.  No hesitation.”

Nik clasps his forearm, the gesture old as loyalty.  “If the tide changes, you hold the Quarter.”

“Always do.”  Marcel’s grin flashes, brief and genuine.

They move out together, the three of them — Harri, Nik, Elijah — into the pale wash of dawn.  The SUV waits at the edge of the drive, black paint still wet-looking from the rain, headlights cutting the mist into ribbons.  The air smells of wet stone and chicory and riverlight.

Elijah slides behind the wheel with the precision of someone who has driven through wars.  Nik takes the back seat, a silent sentinel.  Harri hesitates at the open door, glancing back. 

The others fill the porch like a family portrait blurred by breath — Rebekah’s hand lifted in farewell, Ginny’s smile trembling, Kol’s lazy salute, Marcel’s shadow steady behind them.  The house seems to lean forward, listening, reluctant.

Harri settles in next to Nik.  Her hands twist together once, then still.  Nik glances over at her; their shoulders bumping into each other.  His thumb presses once against her pulse — not reassurance, simply confirmation: still here.

Elijah shifts into gear.  The tyres roll over the damp gravel with a hiss like a sigh.  The manor recedes in the rear-view mirror, lanterns dimming one by one until only the wrought-iron gate remains — then even that vanishes into the soft dawn light.

The hum of the engine fills the quiet.  Harri watches the trees blur into green streaks, mist curling low over the road. 

Nik studies the horizon as if memorising it.  Elijah drives with that patient, mathematical calm of a man who distrusts haste.

Behind them, New Orleans exhales — a city keeping its heartbeat steady under new guardians: Kol with his restlessness, Ginny with her grace, Rebekah with her steadiness, Marcel with his impossible faith that family can outlast centuries.  The wards hum low and content, the promise of return stitched into every brick.

Ahead, the road winds east.  The sky bruises, then blushes, then breaks into light.

Somewhere beyond that horizon, the word Mystic Falls waits — quiet, dangerous, inevitable.

Harri leans her head against the cool glass, fingers tracing the condensation there.  Nik reaches without turning, rests his hand briefly over hers.
 
No words pass between them; none are needed. The bond hums faintly — not open, not closed, simply alive.

The road unspools before them.  Dawn, obedient at last, opens its eyes.

Chapter Text

The road hums like a promise

Morning blooms pale and unfinished.

The world feels washed clean, edges softened by mist, the kind that clings to the windows and blurs the horizon into breath.

The car hums along the highway, steady as a heartbeat.

Elijah drives. Hands precise, posture faultless, gaze fixed on the long stretch of road ahead — the picture of composure that has outlasted centuries.

Nik sits behind him, elbow propped against the window, chin in hand. The hum of the tyres becomes a rhythm his thoughts fit themselves to. He has never liked stillness; it makes his mind pace. Motion, at least, feels like control.

Beside him, Harri leans against the glass. She hasn’t spoken in miles. The sunlight catches the curve of her jaw, the faint shadow beneath her eyes. He can feel the weight of her exhaustion — that delicate, quiet sort of ache she hides under steady breaths. She’s always hiding it, always trying to make herself smaller when she’s breaking.

He lets her. For now.

Outside, Louisiana peels away behind them — bayou melting into forest, the scent of rain giving way to dust and pine. The further they go, the more Nik feels something like relief prick under his skin. He loves New Orleans, but he doesn’t belong to peace, not always. He’s built for sharp edges, for movement, for consequence.

New Orleans had been warmth and laughter, the strange domestic hum of family gathered under one roof — Rebekah’s stubborn heart, Kol’s chaos, Marcel’s command, Ginny’s wit.

And the child, Teddy.

He closes his eyes.

Teddy’s laugh echoes there, sticky with sugar and sunlight. The sound hurts more than he expects.

He tells himself it’s because distance makes all things louder.

He doesn’t think of his grandmothers expression when she took the child. Or Harri’s. The small tremor in her fingers when she let go. He’d seen warriors die with less dignity.

He’d wiped the tear from her cheek himself.

Nik shifts, glancing toward the front. Elijah’s eyes flick briefly to the rearview mirror, meet his, and slide away again. That’s the closest his brother ever comes to conversation before dawn.

He wonders what brought Elijah along. Guilt? Duty? Or some unspoken fear that leaving Nik and Harri alone might end in ruin. It’s possible. He’s ruined better things with less reason.

The miles pass.

He watches the scenery change — the highway narrowing, the trees crowding closer. There’s a taste to the air now, metallic and old, like the world is remembering something it meant to forget.

Mystic Falls is close. He can feel it in his bones, that dull vibration of ancient magic sunk deep into the soil. The kind that recognises him before he arrives. The kind that never forgives.

Harri stirs beside him. Her hand moves absently against her thigh, searching for something to hold. He lays his palm open between them. She doesn’t hesitates, and fits her fingers through his. Small, cold, certain.

He watches the light shift across her face as they pass beneath the canopy of trees. She looks peaceful, but he knows better. Grief makes quiet look like indifference.

He should say something — reassure, distract, promise. But words from his mouth always arrive too sharp, too late. So he gives her silence instead, the kind that doesn’t ask anything of her.

The sign appears before they’re ready for it:

WELCOME TO MYSTIC FALLS.

The paint cracked, the smile in its lettering brittle.

Nik exhales, a sound that could almost be a laugh.

So this is where the ghosts begin again.

But as the car rolls past, something catches his eye — a glint beneath the flaking paint, the edge where weather has gnawed away the varnish.  Pale grain, fibrous and familiar.  His mind stutters.

White oak.

For a heartbeat he forgets to breathe.

He turns in his seat, craning to see the post receding in the mirror, the faint shimmer of morning dew across it.  The recognition strikes like a blow — the memory of fire and ash, of screams in forests that no longer exist.  The wood that once could end them all.

He sits forward, voice suddenly stripped of all pretense.

“Elijah.”

His brother glances up from the road, brows drawn. “Yes?”

Nik’s hand presses against the seatback, urgent but quiet. “Turn around.”

Elijah blinks. “What—”

“Turn the car around,” Nik repeats, low, sharp, almost reverent. “The sign.  The bloody sign, brother — it’s carved from white oak.”

A beat of silence.

Even the engine seems to hesitate.

Harri straightens beside him, confusion flickering across her face. “White oak?”

Nik’s pulse hammers. “Not a replica. The grain, the hue — I’d know it anywhere.”  His words tumble fast now, half-whisper, half-breath. “Do you understand what that means?  Who would dare build with it — who would find it—”

Elijah’s hands tighten on the wheel. “Niklaus—”

“Turn. Back. Around.”

There’s no fury in his tone, only fear and the cold, bright thrill of discovery.  The strategist in him, the survivor, is already awake.

Elijah exhales through his nose, measured, resigned.  Without another word, he eases the car off the shoulder, signal ticking loud in the hush, and begins the slow turn.

The road curves back on itself.  The world seems to hold its breath.

And Nik — eyes fixed on that distant sliver of wood waiting in the mist — feels the first true rush of anticipation he’s known in years.

They pull up beside the welcome sign as if the town had laid out its teeth for them to see. Elijah kills the engine; the sudden silence is almost as loud as the road. Mist curls low around the wooden post, catching on the carved letters like the town is trying to hide its own name.

Nik is out of the car before the door is fully open, breath rising in the cold, a small, precise animal. He moves with a calm that is all calculation until he is close enough to run the pad of a thumb along the grain. The wood is colder than morning air, the fibres tight and true beneath his skin. White oak—he tastes the word in his head like metal.

Harri follows, stumbling after him as if the world pressed at her heels. She stands beside him, smaller against the sign than she is in the rearview, cheeks flushed with the bright indignity of fear. Her fingers curl into the fabric  of her cardigan; the sunlight cuts across hair and bone and makes her look too fragile to belong in the frame of anything temporary.

“It’s white oak,” Nik says finally, and his voice is the dry thing of someone naming an animal he has trapped. “Not a facsimile. Not a veneer.”

Harri leans forward, the light in her eyes changing from curious to cold. “That’s—” she starts, but the sentence fails; she does not yet know the grammar of what this means.

“It’s the thing that discovers us,” Nik explains, not gentle. He enjoys the sound of his own words the way a general enjoys the taste of a victory speech.

“The wood that finds the unquiet, the wood that remembers how to finish a story. It is rare for a town to put something like that in a place everyone knows to look.”

He watches her as she processes, seeing the quick slide of comprehension across her face — the moment a person realises a knife isn’t myth but a tool someone kept sharp. A small, sharp pleasure pricks him at the sight. There is cruelty in him, sometimes, and it delights him to be allowed it.

“Do you know what that means?” he asks, voice low enough that only she can hear, though Elijah stands a respectful distance away, hands folded in the old posture of a man who has seen too many houses collapse and understands the value of quiet oversight.

Harri’s hand finds his sleeve, fingers tight like a question. “That— that’s what can kill you.” Her voice is only a breath. Shock makes her younger for a second, and he savours the line of that surprise, how exposed and incandescent she is when the scaffolding of the world shifts.

He nods. “It is one of those things.” He lets the sentence hang between them like an accusation and a promise, watching the play of light on her face. “There are objects this town collects. Objects with teeth. Some legends are costumes. This one is bone-deep.”

A slow smile curls, small and feral. “Which is useful information for you, now that you’ve agreed to travel with me.” His tone is light, almost conversational. “If I ever betray you — if I ever hurt you in ways you cannot forgive — you will know what to look for.” He leans in the tiniest fraction closer, so close her hair brushes his mouth. “You will know how to end me.”

The words are sharper than the wind. They are not instruction, only fact: he is not immortal to everything. He watches the change in her mouth; the shock blooms into something like a reevaluation.

For a second she looks as though she is tallying possibilities, weighing the slates of warning and power between them. He enjoys that tilt of calculation — a private, dangerous commerce between two people who can both break and be broken.

Harri’s fingers tighten on his sleeve, knuckles white. She does not laugh, and she does not melt. She lifts her chin, the way she does when she hardens for a fight, and the small, fierce light in her eyes answers him without softening.

“Don’t be cruel,” she says, and it is not an accusation so much as the putting down of a rule.

“I’m not being cruel,” he says, and there is a truth in that line he allows himself. “I’m being honest. You should understand the theatre you walk into.” He lets his hand find hers and folds her fingers against his palm in a covering motion — not to hide the fact of the sign, but to anchor her where he knows she wobbles.

Harri laughs softly, but it catches halfway, trembles into something that sounds too much like confession. “You speak as if I could ever bring myself to do it,” she murmurs. “To end you.”

Nik tilts his head, curious. “Could you not?”

Her gaze lifts to his, eyes green and sharp and trembling. “No,” she says simply. “I adore you, something ridiculous. If you ever hurt me in ways unimaginable, I’d hurt you back the same way — not to kill, not to end — just enough to make you live with it. I’d make you breathe through it. Because that’s worse, isn’t it? You’d keep breathing, and you’d know it was me who made you.”

Nik’s breath hitches, soft and delighted. The cruelty in his smile turns tender, reverent. “There it is,” he says quietly, tracing the back of her hand with his thumb. “That’s the creature I adore. You see, love — that’s why we belong to each other. Because you’d never let me die easy, and I’d never let you stop fighting.”

She smiles at that — a broken, dangerous little smile — and Nik swears the air itself bends toward her, as if the world recognises the truth in it.

For a moment, there’s nothing else. Just her hand caught in his, her pulse fluttering against his thumb, the faint sound of the wind moving through the trees — an audience too polite to breathe.

“Are you quite finished?”

Elijah’s voice cuts through the quiet like a violin bow against glass — not harsh, only precise. He stands a few steps away, hands tucked neatly into his coat pockets, the edge of his patience tempered by years of practice.

Nik doesn’t turn. “We were having a moment, brother.”

“I’m aware,” Elijah replies dryly. “But the moment would be better spent determining how a material extinct to our kind has found its way into municipal signage.”

Harri’s hand slips free, the spell breaking with it. She steps back, cheeks still flushed, a faint smile ghosting her mouth. Nik follows her glance toward the sign, the pale grain now less like a revelation and more like a warning that’s learned how to sit quietly.

Elijah crouches, tracing the base of the post with two fingers. The mist clings to his sleeve. “It’s been here for years,” he murmurs. “At least a decade, perhaps more. No decay. No replacements.”

“Which means someone preserved it,” Nik says.

“Or someone planted it,” Elijah counters. “And wanted us to find it.”

The wind picks up, carrying the distant sound of a church bell, the faint, wet whisper of leaves. The morning light has turned colder, the kind of light that makes the world look brittle.

Harri crosses her arms, staring at the wood. “Why would anyone leave this here? To scare you?”

Nik hums, eyes narrowing. “Fear is a tool, love. But this—” he gestures toward the sign, toward the grain glinting faintly under the paint “—this feels like a message. A reminder that the soil here still remembers our names.”

Elijah rises, brushing invisible dust from his trousers. “Then we should tread carefully.”

“Careful,” Nik echoes, almost to himself. “When have we ever been careful?”

“Perhaps it’s time we tried.”

Nik smirks. “And risk dulling the story? Never.”

Elijah gives him a look that could be both reproach and resignation.

Harri glances between them. “You’re not just going to leave it there, are you?”

Nik’s mouth curves, slow and wolfish. “Of course not love.”

He steps forward, rolling his sleeves up as though about to perform something tragic. The mist curls around his boots. The sign towers above him — absurd, domestic, welcome to mystic falls smiling down at him with naïve cheer.

“Welcome,” he murmurs, and then drives his hand clean through the base. The crack is sharp, obscene in the morning air. The post shatters under the force, splinters raining across the wet ground. Elijah flinches — only slightly, but enough to betray disapproval.

Nik rips the sign free with practiced ease, muscles taut, veins singing. The painted letters split along the middle — WELCOME severed from MYSTIC FALLS.

Harri watches, silent, breath quick. The smell of sap fills the air — sweet, old, faintly metallic.

Elijah exhales through his nose, the sound of a man accustomed to futility. “Subtle, as ever.”

“Subtlety is for men who can afford to be ignored,” Nik replies. He turns the splintered wood in his hands, studying it like a weapon. The grain gleams faintly beneath the flaking paint — a pulse older than the town itself.

Harri steps closer, voice low. “You’re taking it?”

“Of course.” He glances up at her, smile wicked and almost fond. “One does not simply leave the instrument of one’s destruction by the roadside.”

He lifts the slab easily, tucks it beneath one arm as if it weighs nothing. “Besides,” he adds, tone turning lazy, dangerous, “if anyone went to the trouble of placing it here, I’d rather they know who has it now.”

Harri shakes her head, half in disbelief. “You’re unbelievable.”

Nik’s grin widens. “Darling, that’s why you adore me.”

He strides to the car, the mist parting around him. Elijah mutters something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like prayer, then moves to open the trunk.

Nik fits the sign inside, snapping the longer splinters until the pieces rest neatly. Harri watches him — the economy of motion, the ease with which he handles danger like it’s art. When he shuts the trunk, the echo rolls through the trees.

“There,” he says, brushing his hands off. “A keepsake.”

Elijah looks skyward, patience fraying. “You’re bringing cursed timber into a confined vehicle.”

Nik smirks. “You say that as though I’ve never done worse.”

Harri lingers beside Nik for a heartbeat longer. Her fingers brush his — a quiet, private touch, a small claim.

He turns his head just enough for her to hear him when he says, voice low and wickedly amused, “You see? The theatre begins before the curtain even rises.”

And then, with the air between them still humming, they return to the car — Elijah already in the driver’s seat, the engine rumbling back to life.

As they pull away, the sign vanishes behind them in the fog, but Nik can still feel it, that faint pulse of power, that glimmer of memory that refuses to stay buried.

Mystic Falls is already watching.

And Nik — for all his calculation, all his ancient weariness — cannot help the small, wild smile that finds him again.

The game, at last, has started.

By the time they reach the square, it is noon.

Sunlight glazes the roofs and windows, bright but without warmth. The air carries that strange in-between chill — not winter, not spring — the kind that hides beneath the skin.

Elijah steers the car into the centre of Mystic Falls. The town looks cleaner than memory, but too careful — fresh paint over old blood. The clock tower gleams, the fountain sings, and the people move as if the ground beneath them hasn’t been rewritten a dozen times by grief.

Nik leans back in his seat, watching. Every inch of this place hums with familiarity — streets that once ran red, corners that still smell like history. He can almost see ghosts pressed behind the glass storefronts, reflections caught mid-breath.

Elijah parks beside the fountain, the car’s engine softening into silence. The sunlight hits the windscreen, scattering across their faces. For a while, no one speaks. The town looks asleep, but Nik knows better. Mystic Falls never sleeps; it listens.

Then Harri shifts beside him, voice small but certain.

“I’m hungry.”

The sound of it — quiet, human, almost bashful — breaks the air like a ripple through still water.

Nik turns his head, studying her. Her cheeks are flushed from the drive, curls loose around her face. She looks delicate in this light — not fragile, just real, achingly alive.

He realises he hasn’t seen her eat since dawn the day before.

A smile curls against his mouth. “So you are.”

Elijah glances at them through the rear-view mirror. “You could have mentioned it sooner.”

Harri shrugs, still gazing out at the square. “I didn’t want to stop the drive.”

Nik’s tone softens, just enough to slip past his usual armour. “Then we’ll stop now.”

He opens his door, the sound crisp against the hush of noon. The air greets him — cool, edged with the faint scent of water and wildflowers. He rounds the car and opens her door, a gesture caught somewhere between habit and devotion.

She steps out, the sunlight brushing across her face. “You don’t have to—”

“I do,” he interrupts gently. “Indulge me, love. I’m attempting civility.”

Elijah joins them, straightening his cuffs. “A rare performance. I suggest we enjoy it while it lasts.”

Nik throws him a sidelong look. “You may keep your applause, brother. I find it cheapens the sincerity.”

The town square lies before them — flower stalls spilling colour, iron benches dappled in shadow, the faint hum of bees. Somewhere nearby, the clatter of cutlery and laughter drifts through an open café door.

Harri’s stomach growls quietly. She flushes, mutters, “Betrayer.”

Nik chuckles under his breath. “At least one of us is honest about what we need.”

She shoots him a look that could kill a lesser man. “Don’t start.”

He raises both hands in mock surrender, smiling. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Elijah gestures toward the café tucked at the corner, its windows fogged with warmth and the faint clink of porcelain. “That seems adequate.”

“Adequate,” Nik repeats. “Your enthusiasm overwhelms me.”

Harri shakes her head, amused despite herself. “You two can argue about adjectives; I’m going inside.”

She moves toward the door, and the breeze catches her coat, lifting the hem like a small spell. Nik follows, his gaze trailing her with a kind of quiet hunger that has nothing to do with blood. Elijah lingers half a step behind, patient as a shadow.

When Harri pushes open the café door, a bell chimes overhead. Warmth spills out — butter, coffee, bread. She exhales, the first real ease since dawn softening her shoulders.

Nik pauses just inside the threshold, scanning the room automatically — exits, faces, rhythm. He always calculates, even here. But there’s nothing threatening, only sunlight and chatter and the absurd normalcy of people living lives untouched by monsters.

Elijah claims a table near the window. Nik slides in beside Harri. The chairs creak, the table rocks faintly — a flaw that makes him oddly fond of it.

Harri rests her chin in her hand, eyes flicking toward him. “You’re staring.”

He doesn’t bother to deny it. “You look less tired when you’re hungry. It suits you.”

She laughs softly, shaking her head. “You’re terrible.”

“Unquestionably.”

Elijah hides his amusement behind a folded menu. “If you’re both finished,” he says dryly, “perhaps we can focus on the task at hand — nourishment.”

Harri reaches for the menu. “You sound like someone’s father.”

“Someone must,” Elijah replies.

Nik leans back, gaze flicking out the window — the fountain, the street, the signboards, the distant shimmer of trees. The sunlight may be gentle, but something about it feels too still, like a stage light before the first line is spoken.

He looks back at Harri, her eyes scanning the page, her fingers tapping lightly against the table in rhythm with her thoughts.

He smiles, quiet and to himself.

For the moment, she’s human.

For the moment, they all are.

He watches the sunlight fall across her hands, pale and trembling at the edges. It catches on the gold band of her ring — not a token, just an ordinary piece of jewellery — but it still feels like something sacred.

The small things always do.

He tells himself this is enough: her next to him, the hum of voices, the smell of coffee. A scene stolen out of a life that might have been. But beneath the quiet, something aches — that restless, gnawing thing that never learned peace.

It’s been just over a month since he closed the bond.

A month of silence where once there had been the hum of her thoughts brushing against his own, half-formed and unguarded. He had done it for her — he’d told himself that — to give her space to breathe without the echo of him in her chest. But he had also done it for himself. He hadn’t known what to do with the sound of her.

Now he finds he misses it.

Not the words, not even the closeness — just the awareness of her. The pulse at the edge of his mind that said alive, alive, alive.

He’s learned her differently since then — the small, human ways. The shift of her shoulders when she’s tired. The way she tucks her lip between her teeth when she’s deciding whether to speak. The rhythm of her breathing when she’s lying.

He’s always been good at reading tells, but with her it feels less like strategy and more like surrender.

And she’s learned him, too.

She knows when his anger isn’t anger, when his silence means regret. She knows how to touch him without crowding him, how to soothe without diminishing.

It should frighten him — it does — because he’s not sure who taught her that kind of mercy, but he knows it wasn’t him.

A part of him is angry at himself — for missing the small things. For not noticing she hadn’t eaten, hadn’t rested. For letting his mind run ahead into ghosts and war when she is sitting right here, human and hungry and real.  Two years of careful closeness, and he still fails at the simplest kindness.

The thought must show in his face because she looks up, catches it, and without a word slides her hand under the table. Her fingers find his, warm and certain. She squeezes once — gentle, grounding.

She is good, he thinks, and the thought wrecks him.  Not the blameless kind of good that breaks under pressure, but the fierce, enduring kind that rebuilds.  The kind he’s spent centuries destroying in others.

He wonders how she always knows when to reach for him — how she manages to read the parts of him even he avoids. For centuries, understanding had been a currency he refused to spend. But she gives it freely, as if it costs her nothing.

He doesn’t move for a moment, just watches their hands, her thumb tracing slow circles across his knuckles. The gesture is small, almost nothing. But it still undoes him.

She always knows. Even without the bond, she knows.

He turns his hand, lacing their fingers together. Her pulse hums against his skin — proof of life, proof of everything fragile he doesn’t know how to keep.

He exhales through his nose, a sound close to a laugh. “You’ll ruin me,” he murmurs, not quite meaning to say it aloud.

Her eyes flick up, curious. “Too late for that, isn’t it?”

He huffs something that might be amusement. “You’d be surprised how long I can drag my feet on redemption.”

She smiles, faint but real. “I’m not trying to redeem you, Nik.”

He tilts his head, studying her. “No?”

“No.” Her voice drops softer. “I just don’t want to watch you forget how to be kind.”

The words land where all the centuries can’t reach.

He swallows, slow, deliberate. There’s a tremor in his chest — not fear, not love, something older than both. He wants to tell her she’s already too late for that too, but he can’t lie to her as easily as he lies to the rest of the world.

He leans closer before he can stop himself, before logic or pride can intervene. The café hums softly around them — the clink of cutlery, the murmur of strangers — and he lowers his head until his lips find the side of hers.

He presses a kiss to her temple, soft and sure. Not apology, not even promise — just a quiet acknowledgment: I hear you. I’m still trying.

She doesn’t move, doesn’t startle, just breathes in slow. Her free hand curls around her mug; her other remains entwined with his beneath the table.

He feels it then — that stillness she brings, that impossible calm. He doesn’t deserve it, but for now he’ll take it.