Enigmatic Fears: A Klaus Mikaelson Story {7}

Chapter 82: You Broke Me

Klaus and I walked hand in hand through the quarter with my husband becoming increasingly hopeful on keeping his death at bay. He stopped when he came across a painter in the French Quarter, delicately running his brushes against the canvas.

"It's nice, right?" I told him with a smile. He wrapped his arms around me, and I let my back rest against his chest, which gave him free reign to press a kiss to my cheek.

"You know, I met Camille here." He told me. "We mused about art for a moment, but even that was enough to convince me that she would like you."

"I do have a type." I teased. "What did you say about me?"

"Oh, just the usual." He said with a wry smile. "Intelligent, beautiful, fierce, a heart bigger than the sun."

"And don't forget the patience of a saint." I added as I leaned up to kiss him.

"You keep kissing me and you'll miss his whole process." He warned me.

"I'm not bothered. I've seen it, it's pretty. Let me kiss you more."

"You have to look past the paint and the technique to fully understand the deeper meaning of it all." Nik began, gently leaning his cheek against mine. "Take this piece for example, it's about time. The way it rises, falls, races and slows. Human beings in all their brevity feel it but we feel it more. The fiction of the clock, the lies the calendar tells. I have lived a thousand very small years, but a handful years that were lifetimes of their own. Years in the city, moments with you, with Elliott, with Grace..."

He trailed off as he thought to the people he loved most, that he now was never going to see again.

"I'm getting hungry." I began. "You can take me to my favourite restaurant and buy me a drink. Or six."

When we arrived at our favourite restaurant, we sat by the window, gazing out at the water and he turned to me with a puzzled look.

"You know, not six months ago, you despised me." My husband reminded me.

"A lot can change in six months."

"What if you hadn't? Perhaps you wouldn't have even been here with me right now." He mused.

"Nik, if you were dying, of course I would come to your side." I said with a roll of my eyes.

"And if not, how long would it have taken you to forgive me?" He questioned.

"I'd probably give myself a decade to get over the anger, then I'd let you chase me for a century or two." I told him with a smile, that got him to crack out a laugh. "You have to say goodbye to your children, baby. They deserve real closure. And it was wrong of us to deny them that."

"Closure is a myth."

"Nik, this is the most noble thing you could ever do, and I mean that." I said with a sigh. "But if you leave them with questions, if you don't say goodbye...you'll leave them with anger and pain, and it'll haunt them."

"Fiore—"

"Elliott just lost his mother." I reminded him. "He only just got you back and now you want to leave him orphaned without so much as an explanation? You'll break him. And that was never the plan."

"I don't know how to say goodbye, Blossom." He confessed. "Not to you, not to Elliott, not to Grace. Nothing has ever been this final in my life, and I am lost."

"I wish I could tell you how to do it and how to do it perfectly, but I'm not good at goodbye either." I told him. "But if you are brave enough to sacrifice everything for your children, then you are brave enough to say goodbye. To everyone."