You'll Find Me in the Shallows

Chapter 1

Klaus wandered around the dark alleys of the quarter alone, trying to block out the images and thoughts that had been tormenting him. It was one of the first times In months he’d actually decided to take his drinking public, choosing instead to use his home as a fortress against the miserable city that had taken everything away from him. The air smelled like her, the cityscape reminded him of her, and the moon made him yearn for her, his daughter, his Hope.

  He, along with his brother and Hayley, had stayed isolated for over 5 months after he tearfully gave Hope away to Rebekah. Part of it was for show, to make sure everyone believed that he and Hayley were really grieving parents, but part of it was real, often times too real, because although she wasn’t dead they still lost her, she was still gone. That was his reality and there was no escaping it so he let his grief consume him. For months he holed up in his quarters unwilling to hold an entire conversation with neither Hayley nor Elijah. Marcel would visit occasionally to check on him and Hayley but he never stayed long, Klaus would always find some kind of way to get him to leave him alone in his sorrow. Elijah tried to get him to come out of his depression as well but it never worked and he focused most of his attentions on Hayley, who had no desire to be around him anyway.

She was worse off than he was. He knew that if there was anyone in the world who felt this hurt more deeply than he did it was Hayley.  She had not only been forced to give her child up but she had died just before her daughter was ripped from her arms and had come back to life as an entirely different species. There were several occasions where he wanted to go to her, to share in their grief, to help her cope with some of the changes and feelings she might be experiencing but he couldn’t bring himself to do it because as much as the city reminded him of Hope, there was nothing that reminded him of what he lost more than Hayley. When he saw her face he saw Hope’s, her hair, her nose, her cheekbones, her smile. Everything about Hayley reminded him of her so his only escape was to avoid her as much as possible. Besides, Elijah smothered her with affection and kept a watchful eye on her so it wasn’t like she really needed him, or so he thought.

 She was the reason he had finally decided to leave his fortress; escape would probably be a better word to describe what he was currently doing. She had been spiraling out of control the last few weeks. Her sadness started to manifest itself in fits of rage and several emotional breakdowns. They found out she had gone out and viciously fed on and killed a group of tourists after she found out one of them was a witch. The girl was innocent but Hayley couldn’t stop herself. That was only the beginning of her destructive behavior. Her blood thirst threatened to control her and if they didn’t stop her she wouldn’t be able to live with herself later on and there was nothing Elijah could do about it no matter how hard he tried. When it first started Klaus tried to stay out of it, to let her deal with her grief and her issues on her own like he had done time and time again but the more he saw her loose it the more he knew he couldn’t just stand idly by while she deteriorates.

 Elijah was there every step of the way of course, trying and failing at tending to her every need. He knew why Elijah couldn’t get through to her no matter how hard he pushed; it was the same reason he could never get through to him. He treated her like she was broken and needed to be fixed, not like someone who needed to tackle her demons head on and try to cope with them. Like to solve her problems she just needed to revert back to the old her, not realizing that the old Hayley, much like the old Klaus, was gone and would never return.

 Klaus knew that if he let her slip into that deep abyss of darkness she would never return, he would loose the mother of his child and that wasn’t a loss he could bear, especially since the only thing keeping him from completely loosing it like her was the hope that they might be able to have the life they thought they would have one day. Sure he and Hayley might not be a couple, she might have feelings for his brother, but she was his family and he cared about her deeply, sometimes more that he even realized or liked to admit. They were supposed to be a family, an untraditional and extremely complicated family, but a family nonetheless, and even if that dream was shattered into 1000 pieces the moment they gave Hope away he still had a slither of hope that those pieces could one day be put back together. That’s why he finally decided he needed to help her, he needed to at least try even if helping her brought him even more grief it was still something he needed to do, he could find his way out of his darkness, but she couldn’t at least not on her own and he owed it to his daughter to make sure she had at least one parent who wasn’t completely consumed by their demons.