The city was breathing.
He’d been standing at the study window for twenty minutes with his hand against the glass — not pressing, just resting, the pads of his fingers at the cool pane — and New Orleans was doing what New Orleans did at four in the morning: continuing.
Someone three streets south was dismantling a drum kit with more optimism than technique.
A cat argument two rooftops down, conducted in the serious register cats used for things that mattered.
The compound itself exhaled in its old-wood way, the settling of a building that had been settling for two centuries and intended to go on doing it.
He brought his attention inward.
The fragment was still there.
It had been there since Davina’s attic and it had stayed — not growing, not fading, not doing anything as useful as making itself understood.
It sat in him the way an object sits in a pocket you keep forgetting you have: present, specific in shape when you found it, otherwise inert.
He’d confirmed this much twice already tonight.
He reached for it again, more deliberately this time, the way you try to open a door whose latch you haven’t learned yet.
The resistance arrived before his reach completed.
Not pain.
Something softer and more frustrating: a faint vertigo, like standing up too fast, that had nothing to do with the room and everything to do with the act of reaching inward.
He’d had it once in Davina’s attic — the body staggering before Marcel could read it — and here it was again, arriving the moment he tried to deliberately access anything that was his.
Adjustment, he told himself.
The body is old.
It has particular habits about what lives in it.
He released the reach.
The vertigo cleared in under a second.
He turned from the window and sat in the study chair with the particular care of a man who had learned that this body’s composure didn’t require his maintenance — it would hold itself — but that he appreciated the chair nonetheless for being the same temperature and angle it had been yesterday.
He tried again from a different direction.
Not reaching for the fragment itself — reaching around it, feeling the edges of the ambient magic the city was producing.
New Orleans was soaked in the stuff, which he’d known intellectually and was now learning physically: it was pressure, like humidity, layered differently at different heights and angles.
The cemetery six blocks east produced a specific low-register thrum.
The river was different again.
Davina’s attic had been — loud, relative to this.
He felt the fragment shift slightly, responding to his attention the way a sleeping animal responds to a nearby sound.
Present.
Aware, in whatever limited way a piece of magic was aware of anything.
But when he tried to take the next step, to draw it toward something more deliberate —
The vertigo again.
Harder this time.
He put both hands flat on the desk and waited it out.
Interesting, he thought, with less interest than the word implied.
Every time I reach toward myself specifically, the body objects.
He filed it as adjustment friction, which was the correct interpretation in the same way that every wrong interpretation was correct until it became expensive.
He was in a body that was old and particular and had been doing things a specific way for ten centuries; of course it had opinions about being accessed sideways by someone who had arrived without a map.
Footsteps on the gallery.
The heartbeat he’d been hearing for twenty minutes — elevated, restless, the pattern of someone awake and refusing to acknowledge why — was now outside his door.
A pause.
Then a knock that was more of a statement than a request.
Two fingers, once, the kind of knock that said: I am informing you of my presence, not asking permission.
“Come in,” he said.
Hayley Marshall came through the door in what appeared to be Klaus’s borrowed flannel shirt and something that had once been pyjama trousers and was now held together by strong feelings, and she was carrying a glass of water that she appeared to have brought mainly to have something to hold.
She was twenty-something and four months along and currently doing the face she had made in every episode of this show where something was frightening her and she’d decided the way to handle it was to pre-empt any sympathy.
“The baby moved,” she said.
Not I think the baby moved.
Not something happened.
A statement.
Filed.
“All right,” he said.
“It’s early.
Like — probably too early, if I’m counting correctly, which I might not be, but I think the calculation is right.” She took a drink of water.
Set the glass on his desk like she was daring him to rearrange it.
“I’m not asking you to do anything.
I’m telling you it happened.”
He knew what it meant — the child was exceptional in ways Hayley didn’t yet have words for, the pregnancy a thing without precedent in the history of this family, the precedent-without-precedent being precisely what made the next six months dangerous in specific and nameable ways.
He could not name them.
He could hear the shape of what she wasn’t saying, which was: I am frightened, and I will be furious if you try to rescue me from the information I just gave you.
“Has it happened before?” he asked.
“Once.
Two weeks ago, I thought it was something else.” Brief.
“It wasn’t.”
Option one: reassure her and lose her.
Option two: manage the moment medically and she’d put the glass through the window.
Option three — the only one that actually worked, the one Elijah had never quite managed, because the version he knew had let it burn slow — was to treat the information as information, which was what she’d asked him to do by delivering it as information.
“You’ll want to know if it happens in any pattern,” he said.
“Times.
Duration.
Whether it correlates with your own stress or hunger.”
She looked at him.
Not warmly.
The Hayley-look that was doing a calculation.
“That’s it?”
“That’s where I’d start.”
“You’re not going to —” She stopped.
Looked at the glass.
“What?”
“The other Mikaelson in this house is going to want to know everything immediately and treat it as a political event.” She said it flat, which was Hayley’s version of understatement.
“I wanted to — I wanted to tell someone who wasn’t going to do that.”
Ah, he thought.
And there it is.
She’d come to him at four in the morning not because she wanted medical information or even reassurance.
She’d come because the compound had two Mikaelsons awake at irregular hours and she’d made a choice about which one she could afford to trust with this.
She was testing whether the choice was right.
“I’m not going to tell Klaus,” he said.
She said nothing for a moment.
Then she pulled the chair from the corner and sat in it — not asking, not commenting on the fact that she’d sat — and she held the glass with both hands and looked at the window, which was the same one he’d been standing at five minutes ago.
“Sophie has a theory about the baby,” she said.
“I know.”
“She told you?”
“I’ve inferred.” He’d inferred it from five seasons of television and several hundred foreknowledge-shaped facts, but the sentence was technically accurate.
“Sophie needs the child born healthy.
That’s an incentive she hasn’t examined yet.”
Hayley looked at him again.
Something shifted — not trust, not yet, something earlier than trust.
A provisional downgrade of suspicion.
“You should get a nap,” she said.
“You look like you’ve been up all night.”
“I have been up all night.”
“See.” She stood, taking the glass.
“Sleep.” She said it the way she said most things — like an instruction that was also barely-concealed concern she’d deny if asked.
“And — thanks.
For not being weird about it.”
She left.
He sat for a moment in the empty study and did not reach for the fragment again.
The vertigo was still present at the edge of his attention, a reminder of the door that didn’t have a latch yet.
There was something in him that knew Hayley was going to be fine.
There was also something in him that knew the specific shape and timing of every complication between now and fine, and the gap between those two facts was where he’d be living for the next several months.
The choice he’d made — to give her steadiness rather than knowledge — had been the only one that made sense.
He was going to need to be reliably steady.
That seemed like a reasonable use of the suit.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
see you in the next loop.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
P.S.
— in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.