**STILES**
Klaus Mikaelson came through the door like the door had personally insulted his mother.
It didn't just open. It *left*. It came off its hinges in one piece, flew the length of the bar, and took out the neon Abita sign on its way into the back wall. Glass rained down across the booths. Fourteen compelled people went on smiling pleasantly while little bits of bar sign landed in their hair.
"Hey, Klaus," Stiles said from the bar top. "You know you can knock, right? It's like a whole thing. Very popular."
Klaus didn't look at him.
That was the first thing Stiles noticed, and he'd think about it later. Klaus Mikaelson, the Original hybrid, the big bad wolf of the whole supernatural world, came through that doorway with murder in every line of his body, and he didn't even glance at the guy he'd come to murder.
He looked at Hope.
Stiles watched him see it. He watched it land piece by piece. There was the blood on her mouth and down her throat. There were the red eyes rimmed with gold, and the veins crawling up under her skin and sinking back down. There was the college kid in the Tulane hoodie on the floor at her feet, smiling at the ceiling fan.
And her heartbeat. It was slow and steady and *different*. It was the heartbeat of something that had died and decided not to stay that way.
Klaus's face did something Stiles didn't have a word for.
He'd seen people get hurt before. He'd seen Scott take a crossbow bolt through the shoulder. He'd seen Derek find out about Kate. He'd seen his own father's face in the hospital hallway when the doctor came out and said *I'm sorry*.
This was worse than all of those. For one second, Klaus looked like somebody had reached into his chest and done to *him* what he liked to do to other people.
"Hope," Klaus said. It came out barely above a whisper.
"Hi, Dad," Hope said.
Hayley came in behind him at a dead run, still half-shifted, eyes blazing. Elijah and Freya were a step behind her. They all stopped just inside the doorway, the way people stop at the edge of a cliff.
Hayley made a sound. It wasn't a word. It was just a sound, low and broken, like something tearing.
*Okay*, Stiles thought. *That's fair. That's a pretty fair sound, honestly.*
Then Klaus turned his head, very slowly, and looked at him.
"*You*," Klaus said.
"Me," Stiles agreed. "In my defense..."
He didn't get to finish the sentence. He hadn't really expected to.
---
It was, objectively, a pretty great fight.
Klaus hit him hard enough to put him through the bar. Not over it. *Through* it. There was a crunch of splintering wood and exploding bottles, and suddenly Stiles was lying in the wreckage behind the register in a lake of Jameson with a jagged piece of shelf sticking out of his stomach.
"Oh, come *on*," he wheezed. "That was a full bottle."
Klaus dragged him up by the collar and hit him again, and then again. Every punch was hard enough to kill a normal vampire. Every one of them rattled Stiles's skull like a bag of marbles and healed before the next one landed.
Stiles let him.
He could have stopped it. He could have put his hand on Klaus's wrist and drained him to his knees in three seconds flat, the way he had in the courtyard. He knew that. Klaus knew that. Everybody in the bar knew that.
He didn't do it.
He told himself it was because it would be boring. They'd done that bit already. There's nothing worse than a repeat, and he had standards.
That wasn't why.
It was because Hope was standing six feet away with blood on her mouth, watching. Something about beating her father into the floor in front of her, twenty minutes after she'd woken up dead, felt like a bad look.
*Since when do you care about looks?* said a voice in the back of his head.
He ignored it. He was busy getting punched.
Klaus's hand went into his chest.
"Oh, *here* we go," Stiles said thickly around a mouthful of blood. "The heart thing. Classic. Love a classic. You know it doesn't work, right? We did this. It's like a rerun..."
Klaus tore his heart out and crushed it in his fist.
It hurt. It actually hurt, which was something. Stiles's vision went white around the edges, and for about half a second the whole bar tilted sideways. He felt the hole in his chest yawning open, empty and cold.
Then it started filling back in.
Klaus watched it happen. He stood there with his fist dripping, staring at the hole in Stiles's chest as the ribs knit and the muscle sealed and something new grew back into the empty space. His face went through rage and disbelief and something like horror. It landed, finally, on a look Stiles had seen before, on his dad, across a kitchen table.
*What are you?*
Stiles grinned up at him through a mouthful of blood.
"Told you," he said. "Doesn't stick."
"*Dad*."
Hope's voice cut through the bar like a blade.
Klaus froze. So did Stiles.
She hadn't moved from where she was standing. The kid was still at her feet. Her eyes were still red. But her face had gone very calm, very flat. It was a Mikaelson face. It was her father's face, the one he wore right before someone died.
"Stop," she said. "It doesn't work. You're just making a mess."
Klaus turned to look at her. Stiles was still pinned against the wall behind the busted bar, a hand around his throat and the new heart pounding away in his chest. He watched Klaus Mikaelson's daughter look at her father with those burning red eyes.
"He *killed* you," Klaus said hoarsely.
"I know. I was there."
Stiles felt his mouth twitch. *That's my line*, he thought. *She stole my line.*
"Hope." Hayley took a step toward her, trembling, her wolf eyes wet. "Baby. Come here. Come home. We'll... Freya will... We'll *fix* this..."
"There's nothing to fix, Mom." Hope's voice didn't waver. "It's done. You know it's done."
Her mother made the broken sound again.
Hope stepped over the dead kid on the floor. She didn't look down at him. She walked across the ruined bar through the broken glass, past the fourteen people still smiling at their tables, to where her father was holding Stiles against the wall.
She stopped beside Klaus and put her hand on his arm, the one that ended in Stiles's throat.
"Let's go home," she said quietly. "Please."
Klaus looked at her for a long, long moment.
Then he let go.
Stiles slid down the wall and landed on his butt in the puddle of Jameson. He didn't try to get up. It seemed like the kind of moment where you stayed down.
Hope looked at him.
It was a long look, and he couldn't read it. That was new, too. He could read everybody. He'd been reading people his whole life, long before the wolf and the vampire and the siphon. He'd been the kid in the back of the class who noticed everything. And he looked up at Hope Mikaelson, standing over him in a bar he'd filled with compelled strangers, with the blood of the kid he'd made her kill drying on her chin, and he had absolutely no idea what she was thinking.
The thread between them was still there, humming quietly. He couldn't feel what was on the other end of it. She'd closed it off somehow. She'd shut a door.
He hadn't known she could do that.
"Hope," he said.
She turned around and walked out of the bar.
Her father went after her. Hayley went after her. Elijah paused in the doorway just long enough to look at Stiles, a cold, flat, careful look, like he was writing something down in a very old ledger. Freya was last. She stopped and looked at the fourteen people at their tables. She pressed her lips together, spoke three quiet words, and every one of them slumped forward over their tables, unconscious.
"Wow," Stiles called after her. "Rude."
She didn't answer.
Then they were all gone, and it was just Stiles, sitting in a puddle of whiskey in a wrecked bar in the middle of a sunny Thursday afternoon, with fourteen sleeping strangers and one dead college kid for company.
---
He sat there for a while.
He didn't know how long. Time did the thing again. The light through the broken doorway went from white to gold to orange, and the fourteen strangers kept snoring into their tables. Somewhere out on the street, a brass band started up, playing something slow.
He looked at Marcus.
The kid was still smiling at the ceiling fan. Stiles had picked him out that morning on the Tulane campus because he looked healthy. Good blood. Nice and fresh. He'd compelled him away from a coffee shop with his friends mid-sentence. The kid had been telling a joke, and Stiles never did find out the punchline.
He waited for it to mean something.
It didn't. It was a body on a floor. It was a tool that had done its job. He could feel the not-caring sitting right where it always sat, flat and calm and comfortable, like an old couch.
So that part was true. He hadn't lied to her about that part.
He'd lied about the other part.
Stiles let his head fall back against the wall and closed his eyes.
*Okay*, he thought. *Okay, fine. Let's do this. Let's be honest for like one second. Nobody's here. Nobody's listening. Greg's in a laundry chute. It's just you.*
*You told her you did it because she was breakable. Because some hunter would get lucky one day, and you'd be back to eating garbage for the rest of forever. You told her it was about the food. About not being bored. About you.*
*That was a lie.*
*Well... not a lie, exactly. Just not the whole truth.*
He opened his eyes and stared up at the wobbling ceiling fan.
The whole truth was the two hours.
The two hours between the *crack* and the first ragged breath, when she'd been lying on that pool table with her eyes open and nothing behind them. He'd sat on the bar drinking Jameson and making Gary do the chicken dance, and the girls in the sundresses had told him about Todd the dentist and his snake. It was all very funny. He'd laughed at all the right places.
And the whole time, every single second, some part of him had been listening to that silence.
Her heartbeat had been the loudest thing in the city from the first night. He'd heard it from rooftops, from hotel rooms, across the whole Quarter. It had been there in the background of everything like a song on the radio in another room. And then, just like that, he'd reached out and turned it off.
He'd thought it would be fine. He'd *known* it would be fine. He'd done the reading. He knew how tribrids worked. He knew his blood was in her system. He knew she'd come back.
He'd sat there anyway, for two hours, with a feeling in his chest he didn't have a name for. It was cold and tight and awful, like standing at the edge of a very high place and realizing there was nothing under your feet. He'd kept checking. He'd kept *listening*. Every few minutes he'd look over at the pool table, at her hair spread across the felt and her open, empty eyes, and think, *What if it doesn't work? What if I read it wrong? What if I just...*
Then she'd gasped, and arched up off the table, and her heart had started again.
He'd grinned. He'd said *there she is*. He'd said it like it was the punchline to a joke he'd been waiting to tell.
But what he'd felt, the first second, before the grin, had been *relief*. It was so huge and so hot and so overwhelming that it had nearly knocked him off the bar.
*That's not nothing*, said the voice in the back of his head. *You know that's not nothing.*
"Shut up," Stiles told it out loud.
One of the sleeping tourists snored in response.
---
He walked back to the Monteleone at sunset.
He didn't eat anybody on the way. He wasn't hungry. He was still full of her, from last night and from the thread. The quiet, warm feeling was sitting in his chest like it had moved in and started putting up pictures.
The presidential suite was dark. He didn't turn the lights on. He went out onto the balcony, sat down with his back against the wrought-iron railing, and looked out over the French Quarter going purple in the dusk.
Somewhere out there, about a mile northeast, was a stone compound with a melted gate and a broken fountain. In it was a girl with auburn hair and red eyes and a brand-new heartbeat.
He could hear it from here. He'd always been able to hear it.
It was slower now, and different. It was a vampire's heartbeat, a tribrid's, strong and steady and *permanent*. It wasn't going to slow down as she got older. It wasn't going to go thin and fluttery at eighty. It wasn't going to stop one day in a hospital bed while somebody held her hand.
It was going to keep going, the same as his. Forever.
*That's why*, he thought. *That's the real reason. That's the only reason.*
*Because she would've grown old. She would've gotten gray and slow and breakable. And one day she would've died, for real, the way my mom died. And I would've been sitting next to the bed, exactly the same as I am right now, twenty years old forever, holding her hand while her heart stopped. And I can't die. I can't follow. I'd just be here. Alone. Forever. With that silence.*
*I couldn't do that. Not again. Not with her.*
He pulled his knees up and rested his arms across them.
It was a weird thing to realize, sitting on a balcony at sunset in a dead guy's hotel room. He'd spent weeks telling everybody he didn't care. He'd told Klaus and Elijah and Freya and Hayley. He'd told a bartender and a pool-table vampire and a lady in a praline shop. He'd told himself, over and over and over, all the way from Beacon Hills.
And it was *true*. That was the thing. It was true. He didn't care about Dwayne. He didn't care about Terrence or the witch on Dumaine or the tourist from Ohio behind the dumpster. He didn't care about Marcus smiling at the ceiling fan. He'd kill every one of them again tomorrow and not lose a minute of sleep.
He didn't even care about Beacon Hills. Not really. Not anymore. Scott and Derek and his dad could all have Nemeton-shaped apocalypses every Tuesday for the rest of their lives, and he'd shrug.
But he'd sat on that bar for two hours listening to Hope Mikaelson not breathe, and it had been the worst two hours of his entire life.
He tipped his head back against the railing and looked up at the first stars coming out over the river.
"Oh no," Stiles said quietly.
He laughed. It came out a little shaky.
"Oh no. Oh, that's so *stupid*."
*I think I love you, Hope Mikaelson.*
It wasn't a big dramatic thing. It didn't come with music, the way it did in movies. It just sat there in his head, a very simple, very quiet fact, like noticing it had started raining.
He sat with it for a while. He turned it over and looked at it from all sides, the way he used to turn over a problem at three in the morning with his murder board and red string. It didn't change, no matter which way he looked.
*I think I love you. I've known you for four days. I've put a head in a box for your dad. I've drained your mom, your aunt, and your uncle. I've broken your neck and made you kill a kid in a Tulane hoodie. You called me the most selfish person you've ever met, and you were right.*
*And I think I love you.*
*Wow. Okay. That's gonna be a fun one to explain.*
---
The thread hummed.
It was faint, and he almost missed it, but it was there. The door she'd slammed shut in the bar had opened, just a crack. It wasn't enough for him to feel what was on the other side. Just enough to know she was still there.
He wondered what she was doing right now.
He wondered if she was sitting in her room with the curtains closed, listening to her mom cry downstairs. He wondered if she was in the kitchen, with her dad on one side and her uncle on the other, looking at her with those heartbroken, careful faces, asking her how she *feels*. He wondered if she was hungry yet, and if she knew what to do about it. He wondered if Freya had a fridge full of blood bags, or if they'd make her hunt, or if they'd try to put her on some kind of *diet*, like she was a golden retriever.
He wondered if she'd looked at herself in the mirror yet. The red eyes. The veins. The face that was still hers, and also something new.
He wondered if she hated him.
*Probably*, he thought. *Definitely. She said so. She said "I'm always going to hate you," which is a pretty clear statement of intent.*
But she'd also said *I understand*.
And when her father had his hand around Stiles's throat and his heart in his fist, Hope had walked across that bar, put her hand on Klaus's arm, and said *stop*. She could have let him keep going. It didn't work, sure. But she could have watched. She could have let her dad beat him into the floor for an hour and enjoyed every second.
She'd said *stop*.
And she'd looked at him. That long, strange look he couldn't read.
*Maybe she's going to hate me forever*, he thought. *That's a real possibility. She's a Mikaelson. Mikaelsons are great at hating people forever. Her dad's been mad at his own family for like a thousand years. It's basically their hobby.*
*Or...*
He let himself think it. Just for a second, just to see what it felt like.
*Or maybe we can love each other.*
*Two monsters who don't care. Two people who felt the quiet and didn't flinch. Nobody looking across the table asking what we are, because we both already know. Forever, because that's what we've got now. Forever and a city full of heartbeats.*
*Maybe she'll figure out that the quiet isn't lonely if there's two of you in it.*
*Maybe.*
He watched the stars come out, one by one, over the river.
Somewhere a mile away, her heart was beating, slow and steady and forever. Down in the Quarter, somebody was playing a trumpet, something slow and sad and a little off-key. The hotel air conditioning hummed. A mule-drawn carriage clopped by beneath the balcony, and the tour guide was telling a ghost story about a woman who'd waited at her window for a man who never came home.
Stiles listened to all of it. Mostly, he listened to her.
"I wonder," he said softly, to nobody at all.
He sat there until morning, wondering.