𝐎𝐇, 𝐇𝐎𝐍𝐄𝐘 • PLOT SHOP [OPEN]

sankta olga - the originals | available

TITLE | Sankta Olga*
It means Saint in Russian
OC NAME | Olga Nikolaevna
FACE CLAIM | Jenna Coleman
SEASON(S) | S5 AU
LOVE INTEREST | Elijah Mikaelson
SUMMARY |

❝And if there's a reason I'm still alive when everyone who loves me has died, I'm willing to wait for it.❞

Olga Nikolaevna hadn't changed much as the years passed her by, for she was almost the same as when she were human. She was compassionate and loved to help other, a deep reminder of the times she nursed wounded soldiers in a military hospital during the First World War. Her temper was there as well, with a blunt honesty and moodiness.

It was how she came to know a musician with little to no memory, a man who thought he was the only vampire in the world. She thought of him silly, and stupid, and needed help. And how could she deny this man her help? Just like her, he was lonely.

OTHER |

• Olga likes to travel a lot, something that has been kept with her since she was human. She likes to see how the world has changed throughout time, how the wars shaped the cities and how the supernatural affected them as well. She's a curious girl, but sweet and compassionate and loves to help. It was how she became a nurse. And she keeps mementos of the places she's been, such as a postcard or a little fridge magnet. She doesn't like clutter, so she keeps them neatly stacked in a trunk in her bedroom. The postcards are all neatly stacked and the fridge magnets are all in a box. Why? When she was human, her father did have all the money in the world, but they didn't travel much. Well, she didn't travel much.
• She meets Elijah in New York. He was passed out in an alleyway and she found him. Her consistent need to help others made her try to help him. When she asked how he was, he pushed her off and tried to feed on her. She broke his neck, sighed, and decided she couldn't really leave him all alone in the centre of New York. He was a hungry vampire, and he was sure to cause a bit of destruction in the large city, so she took him home.
• Although Olga is simple, she loves luxury. Her apartment is large, with pristine white walls and the newest furniture collection and the most expensive clothes resting in her closet. Flowers decorated the rooms, the scent overwhelming at times. In her bedroom, there was a small section on her dresser dedicated to her old life: a music box that can only be opened with the key that hands around her neck, several silver coins dating back to 1898, a black and white photograph of two adults and five children nestled in the lower corner of her mirror, a jewelry box with necklaces and rings and bracelets, and a gold chain with an icon of Saint Nicholas.
• Elijah wakes up confused, startled to be in a comfortable bed and the New York sunlight drifting in through the windows. He is even more confused when he hears humming coming from somewhere outside the door. When he walks out of the bedroom, he encounters Olga humming as she tidied up the living room and cleans up spilled blood from the floor. Elijah is still confused, and doesn't really know who he is, so the first word he says to her is, "do you know who I am?"
At this, Olga scoffs and lays her hand on her waist as she glares at him. "If you ask me that question, then I should ask you the same: do you know who I am?"
Elijah shakes his head. "No."
"Then that is the same answer to your question," Olga says as she moves closer to him. She pushes her hand out in front of him and flashes him a bright grin. "My name is Olga."
Elijah stares at her hand, but takes it and shakes it. "E."
"E?"
"That's all I know," he says with a shrug of his shoulders. "I had cuff links with the letter E, I supposed that's for my name."
Olga tilts her head to the side and watches him carefully, studying him. This man was tall, stood straight as if he were part of royalty, and the most charming eyes. In all, he was very handsome. She wondered from what time he was, when was he turned, and how was he when human. From the many vampires she met throughout the years, she knew that there were some who changed for the better, and others for the worst.
She leaned against the kitchen island and stared at him. "E is a common letter for a name," she wondered out loud. "There is Eduard, and Ethan, and Eugene, and Earnest, and Edmund." She took a deep breath as her hand fell beneath her chin, eyes cast to him. From the way he stood, to the way he fiddled with his fingers inside the pocket of his pants, she took notice of it. "How about Elijah?"
It was as if something clicked for him. The correct cap of an ink pen, the seatbelt of a car; like the ring he found in his pocket that so perfectly fit on his finger. The name was familiar, a lot like the taste of blood on his tongue the night before. But a part of him told him that it was not his name, just a familiar word that he had heard so many times before. A random passing on the streets of the large city of New York. There were countless of possibilities, countless worlds, where that could have been his name.
He shook his head. "None of those names sound right."
"Then I'll just call you E," Olga said, shrugging her shoulders and smiling. She pushed herself away from the island and moved towards the fridge, pulling out a blood bag from a neat line of other blood bags. "Breakfast."
• Olga allows him to live in her apartment, dressing him up in old clothes that used to belong to an old (accidentally dead) boyfriend. He finds suits uncomfortable, and prefers the comfort of simple trousers and shirts, but those cuff links stay with him. He keeps them on the bedside table, tucked beneath a journal he's taking a liking to writing in. A simple leather journal, a pressed E in the corner. A gift from Olga. In that very journal, he keeps the mysterious note that read: Don't look back.
• Olga brings blood bags from the hospital she works at, keeps them well stock in her fridge. She doesn't like drinking straight from the source, a terrible reminder of the night she died.
• She introduces E (Elijah) to Antoinette Sienna, a friend she had met when she was a few months old as a vampire. The woman are close, not best friends but close enough to keep in contact and go out at times. While Antoinette likes to be a true vampire and loves to go out in the night, Olga does wear a daylight ring. There at times, she confesses to E, that she thinks it would be best for her if she just took off her ring and lived in the shadows like the many vampires she's met. But, she likes helping people, even when it comes to the most mundane things. It was part of her as a human, and it is still part of her as a vampire. Her humanity is something she values most, and something that attracts Elijah.
• E shows Olga a nightclub for vampires, which surprises her. Sure, she's imagined it, but she never thought that it was a reality. The scent of fresh blood overwhelms her, reminds her of the night she was killed, so she hurried out of the club. E follows after her, asking what's wrong once they are far from the club. It's there that Olga tells him who she is.
• Olga is Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna Romanova of Russia, the first daughter and child to Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. She was sister to Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei. Her family had nicknamed her "Olishka", sometimes calling her "Olya."
• E is surprised to learn this, and confused because he doesn't know how to act. Olga waves a hand and tells him that it's no use to bow. She continues her story by telling him about that how she came to die.
Her family was arrested in early spring of 1917, imprisoned in their home in Tsarskoye Selo, then moved to a private residence in Tobolsk where they lived in relative luxury in the former house of the Governor-General. She wrote letters to friends, to old teachers, and tried to tell her siblings that it would all be okay. Olga has always admired her father, so she decided that she should be strong as him. She kept the facade of strength for as much as she could.
In early spring of 1918, they were taken to Yekaterinburg. Some months before, she had been separated from her parents and Maria, because Alexei had suffered another attack of his hemophilia (something they all had all thanks to her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria).
In Yekaterinburg they stayed at the Ipatiev House, a merchants house. She learned to do her own laundry and bake bread, and kept her mother company, and spent most of her time with her bedridden brother. She became pale and weak, lost weight and appeared sick. She took few walks in the gardens, and when she did go outside, she would gaze into the distance. She became angry with her sister Maria, for being too friendly with the guards that kept them prisoners in the lavish home. But she couldn't be that angry with her sister, after all, she too became friendly with the guards, especially Alexander Strekotin.
They met nightly in the gardens, and it was the bit of happiness that she had in the fullness that became her world. He would tell her that he'd try to get her and her family to escaped, go somewhere far—maybe America or Canada with her grandmother. When late June arrived, and a new command was installed, the family was forbidden from fraternising with the guards. It meant that Alexander and Olga had to meet each other in secret, and pray they didn't get caught. The conditions of their imprisonments became even more stringent.
On the 16th of July, Olga was woken late at night and told to come down to the lower level of the house, because there was unrest in the town and they would have to be moved for their safety. They sat in the lower basement for thirty minutes, in the quiet, their whispers the only sound they heard. She held her brother tight, mumbled sweet things as he rested his head on her shoulders. Her heart was beating wildly, and she didn't know what would happen in the following moments. Yakov Yurovsky, the head detachment and someone who became a professional photographer, directed her family and their servants (court physician Eugene Botkin, chambermaid Anna Deminova, cook Ivan Kharitonov, and footman Alexei Trupp) to take different positions, like a photographer would. Her mother sat to her left, her sick brother on her lap, and her father stood between her mother and her. Her sisters and the servants stood behind her. Tatiana has her hand on her shoulder, trembling. Anastasia held on to her blouse from her back, fingers pinching the fabric so hard that Olga thought it would rip. Her brother held her hand tightly, clammy fingers digging into the back of her hand.
Her mother whispered to them in English, telling them that it would all be okay.
Yurovsky came in then, ordered them to stand, and read the sentence of execution. Her mother attempted to do the sign of the cross, her sisters said a few incoherent sounds of shock and protest, and her father quickly stood in front of them to protect them. It all went by fast. The sound of gunshot echoed in the small cellar, the scent of blood became strong, and the royal Russian family was killed.
Olga remembers it vividly, a memory that replays itself at every waking moment of every day.
The first shot killed her father, and the following her mother and two male servants, wounded her sister Maria, the doctor, and the maidservant Anna. The gunmen left the room at that moment because of the smoke and fumes from their guns. It was silent in the few minutes they were gone, with Olga on the ground with her dead parents and wounded siblings. She tried to help Maria, but the gunmen came back in. The doctor died in the second round. Olga watched as another gunman tried to shoot her brother several times, but the jewels down onto his clothes shielded him. The guard tried to stab Alexei with his bayonet, but then got frustrated. Olga watched him shoot two shots onto her brothers head.
The same guard came close to her and her sister Tatiana, both crouched against the wall as they cried for their family. Olga pushes her sister behind her, glaring at the guard. He stabbed both women with the bayonet. They tried to stand, but Tatiana was killed instantly when he shot her in the back of the head. Olga tried to fight the guard, tried to take the bayonet and kill him just like he had killed her family. That earned her several shots to her stomach, and one to her jaw, killing her.
She woke up in a pit on Koptyaki Road, an abandoned cart track twelve miles from Yekaterinburg. The bodies of her family rested besides her, their blood soaked on her clothes. Olga let out a yell, trying to wake up each of them.
A man came by then, Alexander Strekotin, the same soldier she had fallen for. He helped her out, led her to a small house in the countryside, and let her get cleaned up. It was the initial shock that she was alive that made her attack the old woman that owned the house, but was stopped by Alexander. He gently told her what he did for her to live, put his blood on the wine they drank daily when they were at the garden. She had died with his blood in her system, and in that became a vampire. She unknowingly completed the transition when she fed from the old woman.
• A few weeks later, after the death of her family didn't make her fall to her knees in sorrow, she visited the pit they were buried in and planted flowers on top of their bodies. It is the reason why her apartment is full of flowers, a sign that her family had been given peace after such a horrendous death. It's while she plants the flowers that she decides to get her revenge.
• The first person she killed was a man named Ermakov, the gunman who had killed Alexei and Tatiana. She hunted him down like a wild animal, played a game of prey and predator with him for weeks. She would appear to him as a ghost, go into his dreams and give him nightmares, and then she fed from him when he woke one night in terror. The room was covered in blood, the sound of him choking to death being a reminder that he was a monster. And now so was she.
• She continued this game of prey and predator for every gunman that killed her family, until she came to the last one—Yakov Yurovsky, the man who initiated the murder. She followed him to the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, where she walked inside every once in a while to scare him. There were times where would come up to her and ask her name, and she would smile and say some other name. Sometimes, that name was Tatiana, after her sister. Another time, she used Maria, then Anastasia, then Alexandra, and Nicola. Until that night in 1938, where she called him by his name and told him that she was the Grand Duchess Olga, the same one he murdered twenty years before.
• E is utterly surprised at this, and speechless. He doesn't know what to say or do, because everything he knew about the Russian family that had been assassinated was little. The little trinkets in her dresser made sense to him at that moment.
• It's is then when Marcel arrives.
Olga, being the ever protector that she is, tries to fight Marcel off from E, but Marcel is strong so he easily pushes her off. It is there where E learns that his name is actually Elijah, and that he needs to leave the city.
• He takes Olga back to the apartment they share, and begins to write a letter of goodbye when he thinks she's sleeping. Before he can even slip out, Olga is waiting for him in the living room with her arms crossed.
"Do you think you can just leave," she hissed between her teeth, "after I told you the story of my family?"
"It would be better for me to leave without you knowing," he said, standing straighter. The letter he had just written was neatly stuck between the pages of his journal, a weight on his arm as he stared at the woman that had helped him for weeks. He cleared his throat and looked out the window to the bright New York skyline. "I don't want my presence to be a threat to you."
"You think I am afraid of some other vampire who has threatened to kill me?" she asked, her left brow rising. "I was murdered once, a second time would be a blessing."
Elijah stares at her for a long moment, took her in just like he had taken in blood the first time he woke up. A part of him knew he would terribly miss her when he left, that strong part that knew that Elijah could have been his name before that other vampire confirmed it.
Olga stares at him from her spot. She sighed and let her hands fall to her thighs, standing. "If you want to go, I won't stop you," she said as she moved towards the kitchen. "Why would I?"
You have the freedom to chose, she wanted to add. Something I wasn't given.
Elijah hummed. "Would you come with me?" he suddenly asked, laying the sweater he had over his arm over the back of the white armchair.
Olga turned. "Why would I leave?"
"New York is lonely," he said as he moved towards the window. He liked to stare at the skyline, the way the cars moved by bellow him and the humans who looked like ants. They were all much smaller than he was, even when he was in the centre of all of them.
Olga watched him carefully, tried to get her racing mind to give her an answer. Yet, all of the answers she was getting was none that she wanted. She had visited as much as the world as she could in the past years, travelling with her lonesome self to the most lonesome parts of the world. And yet, she desired to see those same places with someone. Someone who was just as lonely as she was, even in a world full of humans and vampires and witches and god knows what else.
"Okay," she finally said after a long moment of silence. She laid two glasses on top of the kitchen island and filled them halfway with her concoction of wine and blood. "Where to, Elijah?"
Elijah, he thought. The name sounded sweet coming from her, like one the lullabies she hummed every morning.
"Somewhere far." He watched her reflection from the window, saw her move towards him with the glass of wine in hand. When she stood next to him, he looked down at her. "I'd like to visit Russia."
• For the following years, they travel the world together. At first, their relationship is a slow burn, both of them a little scared to get close to the other. She tells him little stories of herself from her human days, and sometimes from the time she was a vampire. Even then, they never truly went to Russia.
• A few years after travelling and moving around, they settled in the large town of Manosque in the Alpes-de-Haute-Province, in Southern France. Elijah likes music and became a musician in a bar, playing the piano as much as he could. He even bought a piano, large and black and expensive, and kept it in a grand room full of other instruments. And to the other side of their grand house, a garden full of flowers that reminded Olga of the ones she had planted in the place her family had been buried.
• Olga and Elijah are not romantic, even years into their friendship, but those that meet them think they are. Antoinette, whom they met again in France, thinks there is something going on since they pair know each other's body language just with a single glance.
• When Elijah meets "Andrea", Olga is a bit jealous of the connection they share, but does nothing, because her and Elijah are nothing.
• After six years of friendship, it's Olga who makes the first move. In the silence of their apartment, half drunken on blood and wine and champagne, she asks him, "What are we?"
Elijah takes a long look at her, at the red of her lips and the way her glossy eyes stared back at him. He inched closer to her. "Whatever you want us to be."
"I want us to be more," she says, laying her hand on his neck.
• IN THIS STORY ELIJAH DOESN'T DIE.
• Olga doesn't know that Elijah is an Original until Klaus comes to France for the first time. He takes her to the side to ask her who she is and what she is to Elijah, and after she answers he then asks, "Do you know who is he?"
"His name is Elijah," she sternly says, holding her head high as she glanced at the said man on the piano. "I don't need to know who he was or who he is."
Klaus grabbed her by the arm and pulled her deeper into the bar, by the restrooms. "He's an Original," he hisses. The anger and betrayal on his face was vivid, as if a cloud of red covered his features. He pointed his finger down at her. "And whoever you are, whatever you are..." The finger fell down with his hand, a defeated sigh escaping his lips. " He is my brother, and if he is happy with you then let it be."
Olga was surprised at the words that left this man's mouth. She had heard little of the Original family, like that they were ruthless and had been alive for thousands of years. There were a few things that were obviously not true, she knew, but it came as a surprise for her to know that not only had she been in presence of one Original vampire, but two. She had slept with one, had spent the past four years of her immortal life with a lonely man whose past had been erased. She hadn't cared about his past, never bothered to ask him or try to get him to remember.
But he was an Original, royal in the world of the supernatural beings.
"Why has he forgotten who he is?" she asked, curiosity grabbing the best of her. She had always been a curious girl, something that had gotten her into trouble when she was human.
"It's best if you didn't know," Klaus answered, head turned to stare at his brother. "Just keep him safe. By the way, I never got your name."
"Olga." She held out her hand. "Olga Nikolaevna."
Klaus grabbed her hand and shook it, a small smile appearing on his lips. "The Grand Duchess," he muttered.
Olga's eyes widened. "How-how do you know?"
"You look exactly like your painting," he admired. He cleared his throat and glanced back at the pianist, the smile faltering. "I believe you two are well for each other."
• She doesn't divulge to Elijah that she knows who he is now, because she doesn't care about his past life. She just wants to keep him company, and for him to keep her company, and for them not to be so lonely anymore.