¹ DEATHLESS ─ the originals

[ 002 ] everything looks better when the sun goes down

BOREDOM IS A FEVER, not so much an infection but a time-bomb set into motion, destined to explode, and although Alessia had stopped feeling most of her emotions a long time ago, this, she feels most potently under her skin. An itch that demands to be sated.

Outside, the daylight wanes, evening bruising the sky like a peach, and the house is uncharacteristically quiet. On a given day, if the girls weren't together in the rehearsal studio jamming out, they would be scattered in their self-designated corners of the house. Sonja would either be drifting about, singing to herself (or said plants), while tending to her plants, or inside her pottery room, the churning pottery wheel humming like a mounting static. If not hanging out with Sonja, Tyra would either be off in her room, brooding—or whatever she did in there alone—or fiddling with her guitar, her siren-like voice lulling the house into a trance. Alessia mostly hung out in the backyard, building on her tumbling skills, or, as a last resort, practicing on her bass guitar.

This evening there are none of those sounds.

As someone who averaged twelve hours of sleep on the daily, even in death, Alessia never rose with the sun, but Mallory had, startling awake from her comatose stasis of temporary death, and had woken to Tyra sitting at her bedside, a goblet of blood in her hands. After Tyra and Sonja had seen to Mallory's transition into vampirism, they'd left the girl alone to process her trauma.

All afternoon, as she'd been messing around in the backyard under the hot Californian sun, Alessia hadn't heard a single sound coming from Mallory's room. No proof of life. Almost as though she'd died again. Only when she'd passed Mallory's bedroom door in the hallway on the way to her own room, did she finally hear the softest, most distinct of sniffles, which eventually unravelled into quiet sobs, muffled by the sheets. Repulsed by the evident melancholy manifesting inside that one room, Alessia had left it alone, hardening her heart and ignoring the misery to turn her attention to something far less emotional.

It was that exact moment, as she was heading downstairs, that she'd caught onto Tyra and Sonja's hushed discussion in the living room, their heads bent together like girls at a sleepover. At first, she thought nothing of it, until she'd heard the panic in Tyra's voice, the urgency of her tone as she rattled on about contacts in France, and safehouses, and something about an Elijah who wouldn't take no for an answer. Stalling in her tracks at the top of the stairs, Alessia leant against the railing, watching the two older vampires exchanging worried looks, Sonja holding Tyra's hands, her thumbs drawing comforting circles over her knuckles. Hidden behind the bannister of the stairs like a child eavesdropping on her parents' conversation, Alessia listened.

One thing struck her as peculiar.

"—and Klaus," Tyra had said, eyes darting around the room as if the name sat in her mouth like an invocation, "he's going to kill me. I know my brother. I know he does not care for me. He wants what he wants, and won't stop until he gets it. He does not want me to come home for the sake of a family reunion, Son. He wants me home so he can trap me there. I will not be his caged bird. Do you understand? I can't."

Nothing shook Tyra. Not failure, or a bad record deal, or a flopping album. She'd always been a monolith of power, blazing a trail through the world from point A to point B, cutting down anyone standing in her way. She cared for nothing except where the music would take her. Tyra hardly ever broke composure—not even when irritable. But this—Alessia could hear it, the unmistakable tremor of fear beneath the tectonic plates of her voice.

Klaus scared Tyra.

Intrigued, Alessia propped her elbows atop the railing, cheek cradled in her palm, the ghost of a smirk tugging at the corner of her cherry-stained lips. In all the years she'd known Tyra, she had never once spoke of her family, and, when pressed about it, managed to evade the question with a smoke-like elusiveness, and the topic had become one such enigma Alessia always assumed that Tyra had simply stepped out of some rip in the fabric of the cosmos fully formed, a girl from nowhere.