LOVE ²

1 ⋆ viva la vida

"I'm just gonna drop you off at your place," Annabel told Niklaus, "I think I'm gonna go to the compound - find Marcel."

"Do you really think that's a good idea?"

"Yeah, pretty sure. He did raise me, after all," she reminded him. "Besides, you probably have tons of evil-doing to make up for with all that time away helping Caroline..."

"Should I not have come and saved you from once again walking into enemy fire?"

"No, I guess you got a point... but getting myself into dangerous situations and then not knowing how to get out of them is kinda my specialty."

"Your specialty?" he repeated. "I couldn't agree more. Although, you may want to calm your attitude with all these vampires around."

"You know, Kol said the same thing to me. And then I got jumped by these two vampires, and it had nothing to do with my attitude. Well..." she paused, "okay, it had mostly nothing to do with my attitude."

He gave her a look, both amused and starting to get worried that she might actually get herself killed, just as they pulled up to the plantation.

"Have fun, loser," she called as he got out, then turning around with even more amused confusion while she just grinned, driving away.

⋆⋆⋆

"Okay, wait- even if the curse was lifted, Nik is still dead. He's still a vampire, whether his werewolf part is active or not."

"According to Sophie Deveraux, this is simply one of nature's loopholes."

Annabel sat back in the metal cafe chair, looking out onto the street, locals and tourists all smiling and laughing. She then looked back at Elijah, who was taking a sip of his tea, and said, "You think this would be good for him? A kid?"

"He doesn't seem to think so, but yes, I do."

"What about Hayley? You really wanna bring her into all this?"

"She already is, Annabel. She is carrying his child."

"And what does Rebekah think of all this?" Annabel asked, smirking as she took a sip of coffee.

"Well, last I heard, she and Matt Donovan were in France. She says she wants no part in any of it."

Annabel shook her head, "So she's lying to herself." Elijah squinted his eyes, confused by her words. "There is nothing that girl wants more than a family. Matt Donovan can only distract her from that for so long. She'll be home soon."

He smiled, then asking, "And if Niklaus rejects the child?"

"He's just afraid, Elijah, you know that. You run head first into any possibility of hope for your family, they run the other way. But you'll get them to come around, you always do."

"And why is it that you are more in touch with my siblings' emotions than they are?"

Annabel knew his words were meant as a kindhearted joke, but she took a deeper meaning to it. "Because your brother taught me that hiding from emotions never solves anything."

"Kol taught you that?" Elijah was a little surprised to hear that his youngest brother could impart any emotional wisdom on Annabel.

"He may have been good at hiding how he felt with you guys, but that doesn't mean he didn't feel. Before I met him the idea of telling anyone about how I was feeling inside terrified me. I think it scared him, too. But after a while, when you're stuck with someone for long enough, you don't have any opportunity to be afraid. Once you run out of good memories to tell each other, once you're forced to talk about the bad," she shrugged, not knowing quite how to continue without entirely exposing her best friend to his big brother. "Kol knew more about me than anyone. More than Jeremy, more than Marcel, more than Zach, more than my friends back in New York. We were going on those stupid trips to find all these witches, we spent every minute of every day together. I mean, I know things about him I don't even think he meant to tell me."

⋆

"If you fall, I take no responsibility," Kol warned from the swing next to Annabel's. He was sitting there while she stood up on her swing.

"I won't fall," she insisted, wrapping her hands around the structure and pulling herself up.

"For a human as lazy as you are, you have an astonishing amount of upper body strength," he said when she swung herself over the thick pole the swings were attached to. She sat up there, legs dangling, laughing at Kol's look of judgement mixed with a bit of worry. And then, clenching her knees, she pushed her body back, falling backward and nearly to the ground, until her legs tightened around the bar and she just swung upside down.

"What, you didn't have any playgrounds in ninth century Norway?" she asked.

"Can't say we did, no," he said.

"Right, you only had straw houses and Vikings."

"Beats traffic and pollution," he argued.

She grunted, "Okay, maybe. But vikings are scarier than traffic."

"You know, I told my father that once. Said I didn't want to be a Viking like he was. - Of course, this was before he killed us all and our mother turned us into beasts. I went to him one day, I was with a friend of mine from our village, Samuel. He was a witch, a little older than I was. And I told my father I wanted to focus on witchcraft, make a life out of it like Samuel had."

Annabel grabbed the pole her legs were holding onto and swung off, jumping down to her feet. She had seen his eyes, the sadness growing in them. "What did he do?"

"My father took out his sword and gave it to Samuel. He wanted him to prove that despite being a witch, he could still be a 'man' and protect his family Then he told Samuel to strike him– to defend himself. But Samuel refused. So he killed him."

⋆

"Annabel."

She snapped out of her daze, looking up at Elijah from her spot transfixed on the cup of coffee in her hand. "Nik won't be like Mikael was," she said. "He thinks he will but he won't." Elijah looked curiously at her. She sounded as if she was speaking only to herself, as if she was trying to convince herself of her own words.

"No," he agreed, "he won't."

⋆⋆⋆

Annabel picked up her head from her phone, where she was playing temple run on her bed for the past hour, when she saw something. A thin orange envelope, sitting on the drawing table.

She tossed her phone on her bed and stood up, walking over to it. Flipping it over in search of a message, some hint about the envelope's contents, she saw written on the seal: 'don't lose it'

Annabel smiled, unsealing the package and pulling out her high school diploma, enclosed behind glass, in a sleek black frame.

"Didn't think the fancy wood frames were your style," she heard a man by the doorway.

She turned to him and said, "No, this is perfect. Thank you, Diego."

"And now you've got Davina to do a locator spell in case you lose it," he added, cracking a smile at her eye roll as he walked in the room.

"I don't even know what to do with it," she looked back down at the diploma in her hands. "I never had a plan for what I was gonna do with my life, I still don't."

"You'll figure it out, eventually. For now, you just gotta be here, maybe you can stop the war between Klaus and Marcel before everyone ends up dead."

She knew he was joking, but she also knew his words rang truer than she would have liked. People would die, inevitably. That was what happened in war, Marcel taught her that a long time ago. And while Klaus had yet to make his first move, she knew it would come soon enough. But she didn't want a war, especially not between Marcel and Nik. She couldn't handle any more death.

"There's a festival going on in Jackson Square," he said when he saw her sudden wave of sadness, and she nodded before he could even ask her to go with him.