Who: Klaus Mikaelson klausmikaelson & Elle Bishop ellectric What: Drinking and such. When: Saturday, May 9th following this conversation Where: Test City Bar & Grill Rating: Mature Audiences Only Warnings: Frank discussion, rude language, violence, and more or less character death. Oh. Blood. There's that. We're making a vampire! Yeah. Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Status: Closed/Completed GDoc
~*~
Some people were good at being tactful. They had an air of reservedness to them which encouraged others to be on their best behavior. Elijah Mikaelson, for example, tended to ensure everyone remained quite civilized during any interaction. Rebekah had her moments. Even Kol had been one to use charm to suit his needs before resorting to violence or threats---but Klaus wasn't Kol, would never identify with Rebekah, and could never hope to achieve the nobility Elijah held within himself so casually as to make it look more effortless than breathing.
He had never been good at holding himself back. His emotions were a part of him in a way none of his siblings had ever understood. It'd taken learning he was a bastard son of a werewolf for him to understand it was simply his nature. Klaus refused to apologize to anyone for the way he conducted himself. Apologies implied shame or guilt or sodding well remorse. None of those things were currently wandering through his mind. All he was thinking about was how he was getting bloody tired of playing the villain in his family's Greek tragedy of an existence.
Test City Bar & Grill was shockingly populated. Klaus had managed to pull up a space at the bar by compelling away a few patrons. No one was likely to join him in his icy gap until his guest arrived. The woman had been blonde in her profile shot on their internal server. He hoped she was decent looking in person. It wasn't in him to entertain ugly women while they were down on their luck. It wasn't in him to entertain anyone in the mood he was in at present.
"Everyone hates me except the Glenfiddich family. What's your reason for drinking?"
Klaus announced it at the first sign of her approaching. She was passable, he supposed, though she was certainly no Caroline or even really a Hayley. There was too much of an edge to her for his tastes. If he wanted edgy, he'd take a cheerleader to bed with a blade. She could stab him a few times and they'd call it fair until he slaughtered her. It'd all work out for the best. For him. The girls tended to wind up dead or missing memories which he was certain they might have liked to have kept.
Offering her the bottle of scotch, Klaus reached over the bar to get another shot glass. No one bothered him about helping himself. They had been carefully coerced to leave him be. It was in their better interests to let him go about his business as he saw fit. Slaughtering a bar filled with people wasn't at the top of his priority list, but he did feel as if he could make it work in a pinch.
He poured her a drink into the glass he'd wrangled and toasted her with the bottle before pouring himself another double shot.
"I figure if I'm getting smashed? I might as well do it with something decent. This is a single malt. 18 years old. I think that's my favorite age for anything. Not that anyone cares what I want. Tell me you don't drink fruity concoctions with umbrellas. Actually, tell me anything pleasant about you. I could use the pick-me-up."
~*~
Elle didn’t know what to expect when she had agreed to have a drink with Klaus. He was certainly different than anyone she’d known before, but since she’d spent 16 years of her life basically locked up, that wasn’t saying much. Elle was 24 years old, she still had that air of youth about her. And there was something that made her more than a little childlike at times too. She could spit out pop culture references like nobody’s business, but as for the world...she found she knew very little about it. Especially this world.
Elle didn’t consider herself to be a particularly good person. She didn’t know anything about Klaus, but he didn’t seem to be a saint either. Not like Pom-Poms, or even Gabriel, whoever he was now. Hero or villain. She couldn’t keep up. But she had read enough comic books to know that Gabriel would be considered more of an anti-hero than a hero. She didn’t tell him that though, whatever he wanted to believe...she was just glad he wasn’t completely homicidal anymore.
There had been something broken in Elle at a very young age, and she never quite recovered from it. She remembered Bennet’s words of what her father had done to her, the experiments to see how much electricity she could discharge. She was never going to be normal after that.
Elle absolutely envied Claire, even if Gabriel didn’t think that she should. Claire had known love, granted it had been adopted parents...but Elle never knew any such thing. She thought she’d loved her dad, if she were capable of it. But he never loved her back. And nothing she did was ever good enough for him. Nor would it be. It was a sad tale that she didn’t feel like getting into. Bob was dead, and unlike Elle, he hadn’t been given this second chance.
She took a seat at the bar, studying him for a moment. There was definitely something different about this guy. She just couldn’t quite figure out what that was. And she didn’t need to. Not in order to drink with him. They didn’t even have to use their real names, she didn’t care.
“I’m a sociopath with paranoid delusions.” She said, rattling off her diagnosis like she was just talking about the weather. “Or so my shrinks said anyway, but that was because I threatened to kill them.” She gave Klaus a charming smirk.
“I’m afraid I’m not that interesting…” She confessed. If he wanted interesting, he should try talking to Claire. But Miss Saintly wouldn’t be up for drinking, not that she could get drunk anyway. That had to suck. What was the point? Then again, Elle didn’t know much about that either. She’d lived most of her life locked up in the Company building in Hartsdale, NY. The only true taste of freedom she’d ever had was when she was with Sylar, and even that was short lived.
“I guess you could say I’m up for anything.” And that had to be interesting enough. But there was so much that Elle wanted to experience, so much she wanted to do. Now that she’d mostly let go of wanting to go back to being dead, she was looking forward to whatever she could get in this life. Not many people got a second chance, and Elle was going to do her best not to waste it.
***
Paranoia was one of Klaus's close personal friends. They spent every day and every night together in point of fact. Had done for at least nine hundred or so years. He decided the woman couldn't be too terrible if she knew one of his oldest acquaintances on an intimate basis. Diagnoses were always interesting to Klaus. He'd gotten his fair share of shrinking from Cami in New Orleans. She wasn't the first woman to try to tell him how to "get better" or how he could learn to "be more positive" or some such rot.
He'd been the source of someone's attempt to "fix" him since he'd been born. His mother had manipulated his very nature, kept him weak, let his false father abuse him terribly all because she didn't want to get called out on being the whore she was in truth. Mikael had hated him for being a weakling. He'd done everything he could to get Klaus to be a better son, a stronger son, a true hunter. It hadn't been until Klaus had gotten free of his mother's bindings he'd been able to show his dear old dad how truly good he could be at the hunting game.
"Seems we're sharing more than a drink tonight, love. I'm Klaus Mikaelson in case the name didn't come up. I can't hardly remember. Time's a slippery thing when you don't have to worry about it. My family tells me if it weren't for Paranoia, I'd sleep alone every night. Lucky for me? I don't ever sleep alone unless I choose to and it's not paranoia if everyone really is out to get you."
That was common sense.
She was a slight thing. Not much to look at in terms of size or physicality. Klaus had a feeling she was used to being taken seriously wielding the word sociopath around as she did. He couldn't smell the makings of a witch on her though she did have a scent not unlike the world after a thunderstorm. It was interesting, if a bit noxious in his nose. Klaus decided he could live with it.
"Are you particularly homicidal? I have that issue myself. Homicidal tendencies. It's a thing which unfortunately runs in the family. I've learned to live with it and kill the ones who protest. I'm shockingly comfortable with murder. I'm not sure who to blame more for that: my mother the witch and whore, my fake father the destroyer, or my real father the animal. It's all a bit of a wash really. Parent issues I have in spades. Family issues as well. I'm tremendously interesting. To other people. Personally? I'd just like to stop being the villain in everyone's story for a while. It gets old."
~*~
It seemed they had more in common than Elle had previously thought. Daddy issues for sure. She probably had mommy issues too, being that she’d been so young when her mother died. Had Mrs. Bishop ever truly loved her daughter? Would she have allowed her husband to put her through such terrible events and then had her memories taken from her? She didn’t know, and she never would because her mother had long since been in the ground. So whoever Elle might have been under the influence of her mother instead of Bob Bishop was not anyone that could ever be real.
He was shockingly cavalier in the way he spoke, and she wondered for a moment if he might be joking. He was a lot bigger than she was though, but Elle was used to that. Almost everyone was bigger than she was. In fact the only one up she had on Claire was that she was just slightly taller than her. Elle didn’t want to live her life defining herself through other people, but it was hard to let go of her jealousy and pain. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Claire exactly, she was just jealous of the life she’d had.
Elle’s life was her own now, and she could do whatever she wanted here. No one expected anything of her. Well, Gabriel expected her to be a hero...but that was probably not ever going to happen. She wasn’t like the traditional heroes. She was a girl who had been isolated and abused for her whole life. How could a hero emerge from that? If anything, she was a work in progress and that was the best she could offer Gabriel for now.
She tilted her head at Klaus, thinking about what he’d said. Was she particularly homicidal? “I don’t know. Depends on my mood. I’ve killed a guy for lying to me.” Elle didn’t like to be lied to. Funny how Sylar had killed her on that beach for the very same reason. No one ever said Elle made sense to anyone.
“I’m sure we’ve both got more issues than Rolling Stone.” She pointed out. She remembered he’d said something about being dead for centuries but she wasn’t clear on what he meant by that. He certainly didn’t look dead, and he was too comfortable with all of this to be from the past...that far in the past, anyway.
“Everyone is someone else’s villain.” She added. “Evil is just a point of view.”
~*~
Evil was just a point of view…
Klaus chuckled, shaking his head, "I will drink to that, Elle. To evil being just a point of view."
He clinked his shot glass into hers as he downed another two fingers of whiskey. It was a shame to waste such a good vintage though, honestly, what was an 18-year-old scotch in comparison to the bottles he had in his cellar which were over a century in age? Klaus had lost his home only to regain it along with its contents. He was strangely touched Marcel had chosen to keep their things. He might have stolen the home, remade it for himself, yet he'd never tried to erase them as fully as he could have.
It had to speak to how the man felt about his sire.
Klaus had sired more than his fair share of vampires over the years. He had a few who he'd never give up as childer and others he hoped he got the opportunity to kill to erase his own mistakes. They were an embarrassment to their kind. His embarrassment in fact which made them doubly damned. That was likely why most of the ones he wanted rid of were in hiding. No one wanted to have a taste of immortality only to have it stripped away from them before they'd even gotten a chance to whet their appetite.
"I currently have more than a few hating me. My sister, for example, hates me because I've kept her in a death-like sleep on a few occasions to keep her out of trouble. She absolutely has the worst taste in men. You'd never believe it. My eldest living brother is a bastion of nobility who constantly seeks to find the good in me which I continuously disappoint him over seeing as there's really very little good about me. My noble brother? Also happens to be in love with the mother of my child. In case I forgot to mention that bit. Oh! She hates me too. The mother, not my child. She's an infant. I think she still likes everyone as long as they're interesting enough. Add in I'm in love with an eternal teenager who thinks I am insincere in my affections? I've got a stack of people who hate me who I, unfortunately, love."
Klaus didn't bother pouring out a dram of liquor. He chose to drink straight from the bottle after that proclamation. He figured he deserved it. Besides, it was his coin they were spending, wasn't it? She was hardly looking like a potential bed partner. The least she could offer up was a nonjudgmental stance on his crude drinking habits and an ear for his melodrama.
"Anyone here you're lamenting? Please tell me I'm not suffering alone in this place with all my lovely, lovely personal demons."
~*~
If they were playing a game of whose life sucked more, Elle thought that Klaus would win. But he had a thousand years of problems, in comparison to her 24. She wondered for a moment if the eternal teenager he was describing was Claire. Everyone loved Claire. Sweet, perfect Claire. But she realized that there was no likely reason that Klaus would even know Claire, so obviously he must be talking about some other eternal teenager.
Not all roads led to Claire Bennet.
She felt bad for Klaus in a way she’d never felt for someone before. They were kindred spirits, seen as villains because of the cards they’d been dealt in life and their willingness to do whatever they had to, in order to survive. Or protect the people they loved, even if they didn’t love them back. It was...interesting to meet someone like him. Klaus didn’t seem concerned with judging her for her poor choices or being a little more broken than she should have been. He was just nice company, someone to have a drink with.
She raised her glass in a sign of cheers. He definitely had it rough. But he seemed to be handling it all well enough, from what Elle could tell. He wasn’t falling apart, as she had been upon her arrival here. But she wasn’t supposed to come back from the dead. That was supposed to be the ending to her story. Instead, it was as if she was embarking on a new chapter. Life after death.
“Well let’s see, there’s the cheerleader whose dad put a bullet in me. Twice.” Elle pointed out. “And then there’s Gabriel Gray, who used to be a nice and decent man, painfully shy until Bennet and I turned him into a monster at the request of my father. Orders were orders. So then he became a serial killer. Did I mention I wasn’t the best agent ever? I just wanted my father to be proud of me, just once.” She sighed, taking a swig of the drink. It was...bitter and burning a bit, she wasn’t used to drinking.
“I’m 24 years old, and I’ve never been on a date. Never been on a roller coaster, or swimming...and now you know just about everything there is to know about me.” Elle didn’t have the luxury of being more interesting than that, as she’d once told Peter in almost those exact words what now felt like a lifetime ago.
~*~
"Never been on a date? That's depressing. I can honestly say I've been on---does it count as a date if I compel them to like me, pay for everything, and then take them home for sex and drinks before sending them home with no memory of the night?"
Klaus had to think on it for a moment. He'd come from a time when 'dating' had not been a real option. People did courtships back in the older times. They'd arranged marriages through their ministers or their lords or their parents. Often they would marry someone who they had only met once, possibly without speaking to them. He'd fallen in love with the widow Tatia for her beauty as much as her outgoing attitude the same as his brother, noble Elijah.
Tatia was one of the only mistakes which could not be laid at Klaus's feet. He was strangely proud of that.
He knew he'd tried to court. Some women had proven worth the effort to get to know them. Cami had not been one he'd wanted warming his bed as much as warming the space beside him; Klaus had done all he could to try to encourage her to care for him in spite of himself. He'd never behaved particularly poorly to her. She had a few issues with his compelling her, but who didn't? It was as if they expected him to never do it and what was the point in having the sodding gift if he couldn't use it?
Vampires were predators. Wolves were moreso in many ways. Klaus was a mixture of both. He sipped at another dram of scotch while he considered how he'd rate the experiences of his life. Love seemed something denied him no matter what course of action he took. He felt as if he couldn't even get his own family to love him when all he'd ever done was try his best to look after them.
"I don't know how I'd classify myself. I suppose I could counter with I've never truly been loved. My mother had me out of wedlock as a bastard son of an animal. Literally. The man who raised me as his son loathed me. The man who sired me never knew me and when he did? All it got him was murdered. Twice. My family has a tendency to refuse to stay dead. It's something of a conundrum."
~*~
Elle wasn’t sure that counted as a date, but she figured his question was more rhetorical than anything else. She didn’t really mind most of the time that she hadn’t been on a date. Elle’s life was always kind of complicated. And it sounded like Klaus’s was too. It was nice to spend time with someone who understood. And not someone who seemed to want to save or change her. It was actually kind of funny considering that she’d helped turn Sylar into what he was, and for him to want to make her a hero now…
“I spent most of my life locked up in a building or out on missions trying to make daddy dearest happy. Never had the time to date someone. Oh, I had my crushes…” She told him, with a sly smirk. Elle could flirt with just about anyone on legs. She was flexible like that. It was mostly harmless. But she had really liked Peter once. And Gabriel. She’d really liked him, maybe even loved him. But how could a broken girl like Elle really know what love was?
“And I didn’t live long after being an agent so again, there was never time to date.” She explained. “Now there was one guy...the guy I mentioned turning into a monster. We had something. But then he said we were always just going to be damaged and he murdered me on the beach.” Talk about romantic. Now, Elle didn’t know who she was. She was free in a way she’d never really been before.
“So here I am, in this weird ass place with a new lease on life. Or something.”
~*~
Contrary to popular belief, even Original Hybrids could get drunk. Klaus had an incredibly high tolerance for alcohol, but he'd already made his way through a bottle of very good Glenfiddich before taking a second one. It was unpleasant to lose control. He did it mostly to annoy his family or to forget, if only for a few moments, how much they all despised him. Alcohol couldn't truly fix any problems for him. It could make him forget his problems however which was its own kind of blessing.
Blinking at her, Klaus took a drink directly from the new bottle of scotch, "So. You're in love with the man who murdered you. After you turned him into a murderer?"
Elle really was an interesting bint, wasn't she?
He tried to imagine someone loving him after he'd killed them. Marcellus was the best option for the part, yet they were hardly lovers. Klaus also hadn't murdered the man. He'd given him his greatest wish: he'd made him a vampire. Eternal life in death. It was poetic almost. Klaus could appreciate it from an artistic standpoint. His family likely never recalled he was the artist of their lot. There was art in his soul however no matter how dark it might be. Klaus could appreciate beauty and Elle's love of her own killer?
That was beautiful.
"Does it matter if you're both damaged if you love one another? Isn't it something about making one another whole? That's the whole soulmates bit, isn't it? Why can't you do that with your killer? Make one another better. Be happy together. Get the fairytale monsters are supposed to be denied. Defy them all!"
Klaus was getting louder without realizing it. He raised the bottle triumphantly with his pronouncement. He wanted to see a Happily-Ever-After for someone of his ilk. A kindred spirit. He could see the makings of it in Elle.
~*~
Was she in love with Sylar? Oh, God. Was she? Was she even capable of love? Either this conversation was too confusing for her, or the alcohol was going to her head. Either way, she didn’t feel too in control. That wasn’t exactly new, she’d been losing control when it came to her abilities until Sylar had fixed her. He’d broken her and then he’d fixed her, like she was one of his little watches.
“Is a sociopath even capable of love?” Elle asked, with a hint of sadness and sincerity in her voice. She felt something like a lost little lamb right now. She wasn’t supposed to have this. She was supposed to be dead, not here drinking expensive liquor with a handsome stranger.
And if she ever left this place...she’d just go right back to being dead. So what did it matter? What did any of it matter? She didn’t know. All she did know, was she wasn’t willing to give up, not just yet.
Elle shrugged, her head swimming. She was definitely a lightweight both due to her size and the fact that drinking wasn’t a normal activity for her. “Except he’s not Prince Charming and I’m no Cinderella story.” Elle sighed. “Oh and then there’s the fact that he’s going to live forever with the cheerleader and I’m not.”
~*~
Klaus poured her another drink while he nodded to everything she was saying. He was certain it was terribly important. Every word. Listening was a skill he'd---never quite mastered as well as he should have over the centuries. He could blame it on the alcohol though he doubted anyone would believe him if he did. No one understood how hard it was for him though. He had a bloody hard time understanding people considering he'd never actually been one.
He drank a few more drams before he bit into his wrist to get it bleeding. No one paid any attention to him as he allowed nearly a half-ounce of his ancient hybrid blood to drain into a shot glass right at the bar. Klaus didn't bother hiding his fangs as he licked his wound to seal it. They weren't looking. Who cares if they were besides? What'd they do to him? Hang him? Burn him? Throw him out? He'd been kidnapped to this place! No one was tossing him out any time soon.
Test City wanted Klaus there.
Pouring scotch over the blood, he swirled it before handing it to Elle, "Here, here, love. This is the answer to all your problems. Bottoms up. We'll get you your eternal murderer loverboy and possibly a cheerleader who you really will have to tell me about. I love cheerleaders. It's the enthusiasm. Or the skirts. It might be the skirts. I am a man or at least I've the proper appendages."
No one actually looked as he 'helped' Elle to drink the glass filled with blood and scotch. Klaus was glad for it. His head was spinning. The place was really quite smashing, wasn't it? How had he not realized how fun it was to be in the Test City Bar and Grill? They were the very best of bars. All their patrons were different. Some had eight or possibly ten eyes. He was certain he'd been waved at by a man with tentacles. It was all very nice. Really. Klaus enjoyed how nice the place was while he held the back of Elle's head upright for her. She'd gotten dizzy or some such from the blood or, more likely, the scotch. She was a very small thing. How much had she drank?
No matter.
Klaus broke her neck neatly, lowering her head to the bar while he finished his own drink, tossed his cash onto the bar with the empty bottles, and gathered up her limp body to walk away whistling.
"We're going to get us a Happily-Ever-After. One for us! Not for them. Bastards. We're going to have fun. You'll see."
He figured he'd pick up someone for her to eat when she woke up on the way home. Surely there'd be someone interested in helping a pretty blonde out. Klaus couldn't imagine there not being. Test City had denizens left to spare. He'd seen them rambling about. It'd be lovely. Really. He'd get to see someone like himself get a forever love. Just. Lovely.