Freya Mikaelson is Tired™ (frelsi) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-06-12 19:02:00 |
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It wasn’t so much that Freya had purposefully forgotten about the fact she had told Finn she’d stop by and they could talk about how it was she came to be in the future. It was just life had a habit of getting in the way. Which, when her job was impacted by the whims of an autocratic, white nationalist of a president, meant it was more or less a daily occurence. Especially as it began to overlap with her work at Pimpernel Outreach. Even so, it was an easy excuse to put off a conversation she didn’t necessarily want to have even though Freya knew that it wouldn’t matter to her siblings. It just wasn’t something she liked to think about.
Still, once Elijah had shown up at her office earlier in the week, Freya knew that she couldn’t keep putting it off. The fact that it was Mother’s Day weekend wasn’t lost on her either. All the more reason to drink, really.
Once at Finn’s, Freya knocked before letting herself in. It was mostly just to announce her presence, even if Finn had his vampire senses and it wouldn’t actually be necessary.
With the end of his dreams about possessing Vincent’s body came the return of Finn’s own reflection, which oddly enough had been shocking the morning he’d woken up to it. He’d gotten so used to seeing the other man’s reflection over the past few months that he’d nearly forgotten his own.
No longer possessing Vincent’s body, Finn also assumed that his dreams were once again over, but he’d thought that before and had obviously been wrong. He knew that Freya and Klaus were both ahead of him and he could simply ask one of them, but he wanted to find out on his own.
Speaking of Freya, at the sound of her knock, Finn answered the door promptly, smiling at his sister as he stepped aside to let her in, “How’re you tonight, Freya?” He asked as he led the way into the living room.
How was she? There were so many ways to answer that question but Freya figured she’d let it go for now. Stressed, overworked, worn thin…. No matter, it wasn’t important. She had already dealt with Klaus learning of Marcel’s temporary death and his expected reaction to that and then having to tell Elijah about Dahlia. At least with him, she hadn’t needed to go into what happened in the Dreams whereas with Finn she would.
Thus tequila. Or whatever alcohol she decided on.
Still, no need to worry Finn.
“Oh you know, another day another fire to put out. And you?”
“I’m alright. Finally have my own reflection back, so I can’t exactly complain,” Finn said as they entered the living room and he went straight to his makeshift bar, “What do you want?” Considering alcohol was part of Finn’s original invitation to Freya, he didn’t think that he needed to ask if she wanted a drink, but instead what she wanted to drink.
“You mentioned that. Still, that’s good to know.” It gave her some sort of idea on where Finn was in the Dreams. Their text conversation gave more information, but still. Things she was relieved she hadn’t needed to deal with - different reflection in the mirror. Though maybe it would have been preferable. Not that it really mattered. “Still, I am glad I didn’t have to bring you back to life.”
Even if she had everything she needed to heal Finn from Lucien’s bite should that be necessary. As for what she wanted to drink?
“Bourbon?”
Finn nodded as he started pouring their drinks, “I did, didn’t I?” He picked up both glasses and handed one to Freya then took a seat, knowing that Freya would decide whether she wanted to sit or stand. After all, Freya was beyond being a guest since she had spent enough time at Finn’s that it could practically be another home for her. She was welcome whenever she wanted to make herself at home, “Trust me, I’m glad you didn’t have to do that too.” He took a sip of his drink as he watched her, “I’d rather not have Elijah blow us up again.”
“That you did.” Taking the the glass from Finn, Freya made her way to the couch to sit down. It was true that she tried to split her time with her siblings as well as she could. Not so much at the moment with the constant stress and all of work. There was far too much to be done and not enough time in the day. But she was used to that as well. It was the nature of the work she did. At least in Orange County, she could make time to see her family even in the midst of that chaos. “Quite a mess, though I can’t say I blame him.”
It came with being further along in the Dreams. Finally being part of the family. Of having to raise Hope with Hayley. When she first showed up, Freya had been terrified of Dahlia and willing to do whatever was necessary to stop her. But it wasn’t surprising in the slightest that Elijah would do whatever in his power to protect her. Including blowing himself and Finn up.
“No, I can’t either. He was only trying to protect Hope while I was doing Esther’s bidding.” Finn might have gone a bit rogue when it came to Esther’s initial plan, but he had still been doing what he thought he needed to in order to finish what Esther had started. “Even I’ll admit, I was rather delusional while possessing Vincent.” Since the end of his most recent dream he had wondered what had become of the witch after Freya had pulled his soul out of him, “What did happen to Vincent, by the way? Do you know?” He took a sip of his drink.
Funny how that worked. Then again, it seemed seeing the Dreams was meant being mostly removed from the situation and seeing it more objectively (usually) as opposed to being in the moment and being ridiculous.
“Oh yes. Only a little.”
Freya would never quite understand it. Then again, she had been so desperate to see Mikael even after being warned he was different. But he hadn’t been with her, not that it mattered in the end. As for Vincent?
“He got control of his life back. Wanted to have nothing to do with us, ends up getting pulled into Mikaelson family drama all the time as seems to be the case for those who don’t die when they get too close.”
Finn couldn’t help but chuckle at that, “Why am I not surprised that he’d get roped back in with our family?” It seemed that no one could distance themselves completely from the Mikaelson family regardless of how hard they tried. “It’s as if we’re magnets for chaos and death. Why would he ever want to distance himself from that?” He could only imagine what happened to cause Vincent to end up being pulled back in with his family.
Freya just shrugged and took a sip of her drink. Wasn’t that the question. Why did anyone get involved with the Mikaelsons? It just led to death and suffering. Maybe Vincent had the right idea in peacing out of Orange County when the Dreams started. He got to keep his life a semblance of sane instead of all of...this.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“There are many ways to put it,” Finn smirked and took another sip of his drink as he watched his sister, “So, what was it that you wanted to talk about?” He knew that there was something important that she wanted to talk to him about and he didn’t want to push if she wasn’t ready yet, but he knew they could go on talking about random topics for some time and chance forgetting the topic that Freya had come to talk about.
A slight inclination of the head was given at the comment and smirk. There really were many ways to put what happened in regards to their family drama and everyone who got pulled into its orbit. And again with that phrase of her wanting to tell Finn. That was hardly it. But given she was in his Dreams now….
“You said you wanted to know how it is I came to be in the present time now that you’re up to that point.” Like she would have this conversation any other way? “Though I guess I should ask how much I told you in the Dreams, I don’t really remember who got told what and when anymore.”
She’d had this damn conversation so many times now between here and the Dreams that it was hard to keep track.
Finn set his drink down on a side table as he recalled the conversation he and Freya had had when she had first appeared to him, in the dreams. When she had needed to convince him of who she was, “You said you’d used magic borrowed from Dahlia to live as long as you had.” He had been shocked to see his sister, considering the fact that she hadn’t been immortal like the rest of them, but once she had explained how it was that she had come to still be alive, Finn hadn’t exactly been surprised. “You also told me that you had been running from Dahlia for about a hundred years.”
Right, so she hadn’t gone into too much detail with Finn, definitely not as much as she had with the others. Then again, that wasn’t too shocking. After all, she only had needed to prove who she was to Finn. He already knew what Dahlia was capable of. In theory. He at least had remembered her and her being taken away whereas their other siblings had only known her to have died thanks to Esther’s lies.
“Right. Well, that’s the very short version. She linked us to adjunct her power with mine. It was why she kept me alive.” Because Dahlia was just such the wonderful caregiver. Yes, there was truth to the damage a first born witch of their family could do but that was highly irrelevant with how she had been treated. “I was her slave. And after she found out that Esther turned all of you into vampires, she expected me to have a child in order to take the child and use their power as well.”
Taking a sip of drink, the witch shrugged.
“Well, I went and fell in love with someone in the early 1400s. Became pregnant and was planning to run away from Dahlia and start my family with him. Dahlia found out, killed him and I tried to kill myself and only succeeded in killing my unborn son. That was when I learned that not only did I lose 99 years for every year of being awake in the linked spell with Dahlia, but I couldn’t die while we were linked. And after that was when I went on the run from her given my ‘betrayal’ and everything she’d put me through by that point.”
That was the gist of it at least.
Finn listened to Freya’s story, sipping his drink as he did so and even after she’d finished he was silent for a moment or two, “That’s...that sounds exactly like something that would happen to our family.” As bizarre as Freya’s story was, it somehow made complete sense when he thought about the things that had happened to their family in the dreams. “I’m sorry about your son though.” He couldn’t imagine what losing something like that would feel like, even if it was just in the dreams, but surely it must have affected Freya in some way, “I’m going to assume that you, Elijah and Klaus are going to wind up tangling with Dahlia at some point.” Considering Finn’s soul was in Freya’s necklace, in the dreams, he didn’t think that he could end up being a part of any encounter they ended up having with their aunt.
“Essentially.” There wasn’t anything to be done about it. It was long past in the Dreams. And here as well, but that was irrelevant. Freya was fine. She had somehow managed to survive it all even when it had felt impossible at times. Even after she had given up. “Thanks I guess.” Freya didn’t know how to feel about the loss of a son she never had been pregnant with here. She tended to be good at compartmentalizing, and when things came up from the Dreams for Freya, it was more because it brought things up for her here that had been ignored. Not just because of something in the Dreams. But there was a strange sense of...something she couldn’t place and so ignored.
“Yes. We do, and then it's onto the next drama.” Because there was always another drama and enemy to deal with. Before the enemies had been names and known figures. Now it was an ideology.
Finn shook his head slightly and finished off his drink, “There’s always the next drama with our family.” It was inevitable really. As they had already stated, they were a magnet for drama. “Luckily we don’t attract quite as much drama here as we do in the dreams.” Sure there was drama, but it wasn’t always focused solely at them. “And at least you don’t have to run from anyone here.” Finn got to his feet to refill his glass.
Freya wasn’t so sure about the fact that they didn’t seem to attract as much drama as they did in the Dreams. Though she supposed Mikaelsons personally? They didn’t. Freya’s life in general with both the UN and Pimpernel Outreach? That was a different story all together. Though she did scoff some.
“Not anymore at any rate.”
The comment was muttered under her breath as she finished her own drink. Because that was just it. She had been running under the guise of work. But Dahlia was dead and so there was no more need to run.
Whether or not Freya meant him to hear it, Finn’s heightened hearing picked up what his sister said and his brow furrowed as he turned back towards her, “What do you mean, not anymore? Who were you running from?” Finn didn’t like the idea that someone had been after his sister and he hadn’t known about it, “Are you alright? What happened?”
Right. She probably shouldn’t have said anything but there was still a lot of bitterness and well, pain, whenever Dahlia was involved. It didn’t matter how long it had been, it didn’t matter that she had moved on. There were just some scars which didn’t heal. Not completely.
“Who else? Dahlia.”
After all, the parallels between Dreams and reality were well known. And Freya had always been Dahlia’s ‘favorite’. And the fact she had been required to live with her while she went to school in England.
“It was more than wanderlust that had me taking on contracts that lasted a year and a half at most all over the globe.”
It was a good way to avoid their aunt. But now Finn was worrying about the past and Freya knew she couldn’t just leave it like that. So getting up, Freya went to refill their glasses before returning to the couch.
“But right. What happened. Well, there were always these snide comments she would make that I never put much thought into when I ran errands for her when we were younger. In England things changed. She kept me isolated. Probably lied about calls with everyone to add to said isolation. I really only left the flat for school related things or to run errands for her. She was also determined to find me a proper husband,” so that expectation of Esther’s that she had been trying to avoid when going to England had failed, “I wasn’t interested. Second year, I met someone. Christina, she was wanting to be a doctor. We tried to keep it secret, Dahlia found out and had her kicked out while saying that if my ‘secret’ was known, I’d be disowned, reviled, the typical things you’d expect.”
Just as Mikael and Esther had been and reacted before Finn had used his compulsion on them.
“It got worse. I tried to kill myself, another secret for her to hold over me. I spent the summer between my second and final year in an institution. In my third year, I started looking graduate school to get away from her and then jumped from contract to contract before she could try and track me down.”
Shrugging, Freya took a long drink and stared ahead. Well, it could have been worse. She wasn’t on edge at least. Her tone was fairly straight forward though it did waver at points.
“But she’s dead probably three times over at this point, I’ve moved on and I’m fine.” And that was all there was to it. Though Freya really did hope that this would be the last time she had to tell the story. Which it probably was unless Rebekah showed up on the network and wanted answers as well.
Finn couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Him and Freya were so close that he’d thought he knew everything, but he could understand why she would have wanted to keep things like that a secret. “Jesus Christ, Freya. Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?” Finn had always hated the idea of anyone hurting Freya so finding out that their aunt, of all people, had hurt Freya in the dreams as well as the waking world upset him greatly, “And what do you mean, she’s probably dead? How do you know that?”
Even if she and Finn shared basically everything, there were just certain things Freya had kept to herself until it became impossible for her to do so thanks to the Dreams and her siblings sharing the Dreams and most of them thus learning about the Dream issues which led to conversations like this. So when Finn asked why she had never told him? All she could do was shrug.
“I’m the oldest sibling, I’m supposed to be the one to fix things. Besides, I wanted to just put it behind me and it seemed the best way to do that was to not talk about it.”
No one said it was healthy, but that tended to be Freya’s way. Take on everything in the world while ignoring her own issues.
“Klaus.” Which really should explain it all, “She showed up for the holidays when we all first got back… Klaus overheard us talking and you can imagine the rest.” Esther may have shown up on the streets but had never shown up to family things - something that had confused Esther though Freya didn’t much care about that. “When the dead were suddenly walking around, she showed up and so I killed her reanimated corpse. And she’s dead in the Dreams now.”
Finn sighed and nodded, “I understand. I just wish I’d known.” He didn’t know what he could have done if he’d known sooner, but if nothing else, he wished that Freya hadn’t had to go through all of that alone.
“Right. Klaus. Why does that not surprise me?” He shook his head slightly. Normally Finn wouldn’t condone his brother killing someone, especially someone in their family, but this was a special case and he wasn’t exactly sad about hearing that their aunt was dead. “In this case, I might have to thank him for it.”
There really was nothing that could have been done at the time. Her siblings had all been stateside and it wasn’t like Dahlia would have let them in should they have been made aware. She would have come up with some lie to keep Freya isolated and under her control. Besides. Freya had gotten out and was living her life despite their aunt.
“Because it’s Klaus?”
Even before he had transitioned into a hybrid, there was a good chance that Klaus would have done something had he learned what had happened with Dahlia. Admittedly he only learned when he did because he had his heightened sense but that didn’t really matter either. Like Finn, Freya tended not to condone killing or compulsion. Dahlia though?
“I’m sure he’d brush it off, especially since it’s been over a year now. But that’s how I come to be in the present with the rest of you in the Dreams and everything that happened with Dahlia here and there.”