Curiosity {Kol Mikaelson}

Prologue: Lonely Grave

The stone marking that lonely grave was faded, to say the least. Of course, without anyone to maintain it, and taking into account the frequently abusive weather of New Orleans, such wear was only to be expected. Regardless, it saddened Kol to see the lettering so faded. It reminded him of just how long he had been unconscious in a coffin - of how much time he'd missed while the world kept turning without him. The barely legible dates on the grave marker were the sole remaining evidence of a life akin to a firework - beautiful and vibrant and brief - even by mortal standards. 

In a way, he envied the dates on the stone. Kol had existed for a thousand years yet he hadn't lived a single day. If someone were to ask him to think of a time before he'd been tossed into Davina's life in which he'd been truly happy, Kol didn't think he would be able to come up with a single moment to answer with. Sure, there had been brief periods of contentment - fleeting glimpses of satisfaction - yet, in one thousand years, he'd never known true happiness. Before he'd been tossed into Davina's life - not the other way around because she was the one with life in her, not him - he had never known real joy. 

But there had been a time - just a few short years, really - when, just maybe, he'd almost come close. Of course, he only realized that now, after more than a century had passed him by. Kol just wished that he had better appreciated what he'd had at the time. Though, that's just it with things of a nature similar to daylight, isn't it? One never really notices the gradual influx of light as dawn becomes day. The change in visibility from moment to moment is so minuscule that, without stopping to properly appreciate each passing second, it's much too easy to take for granted and, just like that, the beauty is lost completely. 

(Happiness is like daylight; it comes gradually.) 

Such was a lesson that the person buried six feet below the grass he stood on had understood better than anyone. Such was a lesson Kol had been too blinded by arrogance and pride to learn all those years ago. Such was a lesson he'd only learned recently. He was lucky he'd learned it at all. Most people don't get a second chance - let alone a third.

As Kol stood over that lonely grave, his thoughts wandered to the bones that rested in a sealed granite coffin beneath his shoes and to the six feet of dirt and approximately forty-thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight days between them. (Because it’s not the years that change you - those are just numbers and they don’t have that power. It’s you that changes things and you don’t change your years. You change your days - each one of them, one at a time - every hour every minute. Then when you look up, hopefully, you can say you made something better.)  It was strange to think that those bones had been a person once. The concept wasn't strange to think about in passing, of course. In passing, that was just a fact of life. The Earth goes around the sun, what goes up must come down, nothing comes from nothing, the cow goes moo, and dead things used to be alive things but they're not anymore. (Ashes to ashes and everything dies.) But when he thought about it - when he really thought about it - it was nearly impossible to register that those bones really truly had been a living breathing person. It was even stranger to think that he'd known them - that, in the face of an infinite number of possibilities for how events could have played out, he'd been among a precious handful of people who'd had that privilege. And it was a privilege, though he hadn't known that at the time. If he had, then maybe things would have turned out differently. (But it wouldn’t have, because your hindsight is only as strong as your vision; though the former is ultimately useless in the long run.) For a brief moment, Kol tried to connect that battered tombstone and that lonely grave and the bones contained therein to the only friend he had ever known. It didn't take him long to stop trying; that wasn't how he wanted to remember the person for whose burial he'd been absent - as something confined to the past, though that was the harsh truth of these things.