IOTA ⋆「multi-fandom oneshots #2」

13. in another life ; elijah/hayley (the originals)

SUMMARY: "Maybe in another life we'll get our happy ending..."

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He hates himself for what happened to her.

Every single moment that passes, every second that he lives without her, knowing that it's his fault that she's dead, Elijah is consumed by guilt. It's unlike anything he's ever felt before in his entire one-thousand-plus years of living; instead of just slowly eating away at him, this... this swallows him whole. It makes him wish that he were dead.

Hayley wasn't supposed to die. Ever. It's just not something Elijah was ever going to allow. The plan was that as long as he were to live, if she needed it, he was going to protect her, but... he ended up being part of the reason that she's gone instead. If he could go back in time to that bloody farmhouse, if he could relive that moment all over again – this time with his memories – he would make sure that she lived. He would take her place and die for her if it were necessary (he would die for any of his family, because that's what he's supposed to do). If he could go back... she would be alive right now.

But he can't go back. It's just not possible. And so he gets to live with the fact that she's dead, that it's his fault, and that she's never coming back. Now Hope is left without her mother at the young age of 15.

Elijah's haunted by Hayley now. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees her, he sees the look on her face when she thought he came to her rescue, and the way she looked when she realized that he wasn't there for her at all, because he didn't really remember her, his love for her, or her love for him. He hears her voice, saying his name. And he remembers not caring about her at all.

No... in that moment he didn't even know her as Hayley Marshall, someone he loved and cared for since the moment he met her over 15 years ago, but instead he knew her as Andréa, the woman he met in France, the one he'd danced with – someone he knew for only a day. And when he saw her in that farmhouse, he'd... felt betrayed by her, felt that she had only been in France to spy on him, felt that she was just working for this family that he knew he had but didn't remember, one he didn't want to be a part of.

If only Elijah had known how much he was going to regret letting her die to save Roman's life instead, how much he was going to regret getting rid of his memories in the first place. Of course, had he known that letting Marcel and Vincent take away the memories of his loved ones would technically result in Hayley's death, he would've never done it. He would've struggled to stay away from Klaus, especially, but also Rebekah and Freya and Hope and Hayley and New Orleans in general, but he would've figured it out. He never should've rid himself of the memories, no matter how hard it would've been to keep them otherwise.

But he did get rid of them. And in the process he fell in love with another – Antoinette. And she's nothing like Hayley ever was, but he loved her so. Because he didn't know better. Because he didn't know that he'd already given his heart to someone else, someone who he just couldn't let go even when he should have. And when he found out about Hayley, he didn't care. Because he didn't have those precious memories of their time together. And he didn't want them, didn't think he needed them.

But he got them back anyway, and now those once precious memories are just painful. Every kiss, every look, every touch... they all play on repeat in his head. The memory of her invades his thoughts, his dreams; she haunts him. And in these dreams, she's harsh and merciless, making him feel the guilt and the pain he knows he deserves to feel for being the reason she had no choice but to sacrifice herself.

"I died because you chose to forget about all of us," she tells him in another one of his dreams, and she sounds so angry, so sad. "I died, unloved and forgotten by you. I died, knowing that you weren't there to save me, knowing that you didn't really remember me – not the way you were supposed to. I died, knowing that I would never be held or kissed by you again, never... never loved by you again, because you didn't know or care about who I was."