I'LL REMEMBER APRIL // KLAUS MIKAELSON

THESE FOOLISH THINGS

"Yes, Odette, with all my wickedness I killed my own sister." His sarcasm wasn't lost on Odette, so she looked at Elijah for confirmation. He rolled his eyes.

"He didn't." Elijah said as he looked at his smirking brother. Odette took a deep, relieved breath.

"Thank god."

"Niklaus, it has been a month. Now, I feel our sister's loss as deeply as you. But, you must stop distracting yourself with this ridiculous behavior and channel it into some kind of action."

Klaus planted his brush onto the canvas, leaving behind a white streak that Odette couldn't really place. "Why must I, exactly?"

"Because over the course of Marcel's tenure, the city grew accustomed to having a king. You wanted this throne. Now, you must accept the responsibility that accompanies that."

His brother was right, of course he was, but Klaus only half paid attention to his words.

"Apologies, but I'm rather ensconced in other pursuits." Elijah didn't take this disrespect well and snatched the paintbrush out of Klaus's hands.

"If you can so easily neglect your home, I wonder what will become of your daughter. Have you forgotten what it was like to live beneath the threat of violence? We must work together, Niklaus. Let's make this city whole again."

Klaus shrugged, and Odette followed the lines of his shoulders and only now realized that this burning feeling inside her? It was jealousy.

She had been jealous of the girl on that couch, half naked, looking at Niklaus in his element. Odette didn't even know what she wanted from Klaus, but it hurt that he felt that someone else deserved his attention, and it hurt that it wasn't her. Her jealousy consumed her so fully that she couldn't even comprehend the word that had come from Elijah's mouth. Daughter.

He looked at her too, as he took the paintbrush back out of his brother's hands.

"Perhaps it is too broken to mend."

"So, this is what you've been up to this month?" Odette asked as she sat down on the couch. Klaus quickly swallowed the scotch still in his mouth.

"I wouldn't sit on that if I were you, love."

"That's disgusting," Odette exclaimed as she got up from the couch and wiped down the back of her dress. Klaus smirked in return, as she dragged her small hands over her thighs.

The door opened, "Oh, you're still here." Walking in came the woman from earlier, now waring a robe over her earlier nudeness, dressed in the prettiest lingerie Odette had ever seen.

"Odette, Genevieve. Genevieve, Odette." He slathered more paint onto his canvas as Genevieve's long legs sauntered towards Odette.

"She is a beauty." Genevieve whispered, Odette looked down at the ground. A long finger nail reached to underneath her chin, where she gathered her courage, and forced her head up to look into her blue eyes.

"Look at you." And Genevieve did, look at her, but Klaus didn't, couldn't force himself to watch as the most innocent girl he knew got mixed in with the most evil.

Genevieve placed her lips on Odette's carefully, breathing in the force coming out of her. Then she felt a shock, a shock that went through both her and Odette. She let go of her lips.

"I-" before she could finish her sentence, someone walked into the room.

"I saw the light from the courtyard and took a chance that-" Cami stopped speaking when she spotted a half-naked Genevieve standing in front of her friend.

"You were with Odette and not with a half-naked psycho-witch. Seems only half of that is true." Genevieve backed away from Odette and smirked at Cami, "ten minutes ago, I was fully naked."

"Oh! Then you served your purpose. Don't let me hold you up." Cami responded sarcastically. In the meant time, Odette hadn't spoken, so shocked by the violation that Klaus had enabled. She didn't mind kissing or touching girls, but she did mind when someone used their power over her to do so. And Klaus, Klaus had done nothing, had just sat there and painted his dumb art.

"You O'Connells sure do love to piss off witches." Genevieve shared her grievance, yet she left the room to leave the three alone.

"Really? The woman tried to blackmail me into stabbing you with the mystical knife of excruciating pain!"

He raised his eyebrows, "Well, New Orleans breeds nothing if not strange bedfellows, but I assume you're not here to question me on my leisure activities."

"I'm here to pick up Odette. And about my uncle. He's deteriorating. The pills, the meditation, they're not working. His lucidity's shrinking by the day. A witch did this, a witch can undo it. You seem super-tight with Genevieve... maybe you could persuade her to help." Laying the accent on 'super-tight."

"It won't do any good. These hexes, they start with magic, but as they take root, they alter the very chemistry of the brain. I'm sorry, Cami. The damage is done." He shook his head.

"I refuse to accept that, and you would, too, if you had any concept of family. Come on, Odette." Odette woke from her paralyzed state and took Cami's hand, who guided her from the door.

"Little swan," she stopped as she heard the nickname only he and her sister had ever used and turned around to look at him.

"You should stay away from me."

Odette grimaced and shrugged as she looked at the canvas in front of him.

"I'm not the one painting swans, Niklaus." He looked back at his own artwork, and when he tried to return his gaze to the brunette girl, she had already gone.

That night, she scrubbed her skin raw and red and still felt the grime of that woman. That witch, who had hurt Cami, who had used her lips as some type of machine of war. She didn't want to be a pawn to be used, not again.

This sin inside of her, it emerged when the sadness was too big to deal with, when it drowned her. And she hoped, somewhere inside of the evil parts of her brain, that Klaus would hear the difference between the water falling from the showerhead and the tears spattering onto the tiles.

She thought he did, when he played Brenda Lee's 'I'm sorry."

For the first time since she arrived in New Orleans, even through all the nights that no one had been there to hear them, she didn't play a song back.

oops, that was a bit dark.