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Look, Elijah didn’t really know how they’d gotten to this point. She’d put the twins to bed, she remembered, and then she’d settled down on the couch with Finn, opening up a few bottles of wine to share. Well, it’d initially been one, but then they’d finished it, so Elijah had brought a few back with her, so she didn’t have to make another trip.
Sage had left them around halfway through the first, saying something about going to pick up someone. Elijah didn’t really mind – it was why Sage and Finn’s room was on the far side of the house to Elijah’s and the kids’ rooms, so they wouldn’t be disturbed by the couple. Rebekah thought Sage a whore for it, Elijah knew, but Rebekah also thought that Sage was stepping out on Finn when she went out to pick up people, which was more understandable.
And Sage was a big girl anyways, she could take care of herself. Especially against Rebekah’s barbs.
Towards the end of the second bottle, Elijah started talking about her children. Finn had never met any of them before her twins, after all, and she really was proud of them. Elijah cried to her big brother about her firstborn, Emiliana, and how she thought she’d failed her as a mother.
After all, she was a vampire, and she didn’t really have any maternal instincts, Elijah thought. How could she have been a good mother, when she needed to leave so often to drink blood? When, during particularly bad winter months, she’d had to drink from her own daughter?
Finn was clearly drunk too, but he did try to comfort her. She’d raised their siblings, after all, and it was Mikael who’d really messed them all up. Without him in the background, terrorising them all, and with Elijah not also growing up at the same time, he was sure she’d done a good job.
But the mention of their father had Elijah crying over her third child, Nina. She told Finn of how he’d caught up to her, when her daughter was barely 3. The same age that her twins were now, give or take a few months.
“He was a good grandfather,” Elijah cried. “He was so good with my little girl. Why couldn’t he have been like that with us, too? Why weren’t we good enough?”
Finn hugged her, his tall frame almost dwarfing his sister. He didn’t know why Mikael hadn’t been able to love them, either. Finn still had memories of when he was a small child, before Freya was taken, when Mikael had been a loving father to both of them. The loss of Freya had broken him, and in return he’d lashed out at his own children.
Well, his own children and his wife’s bastard child. But none of them had known that at the time, Finn justified to himself. And sure, Finn himself had kept himself separate from his younger siblings, only being Elijah’s big brother when it was just the two of them, but he had his reasons for that.
“What about your next child?” Finn tried to change the subject from their father.
Mikael was nothing in his eyes, a monster who just wanted to hunt them all down and kill them. Even though, with Esther’s help, he’d been the one to turn his children into vampires in the first place.
“Jon?”
The distraction worked, thankfully. Elijah’s tears started drying up as she started talking about her son, although she did mention how she’d had to turn him. His own request, but she’d hated doing it.
Finn understood how she felt. After all, hadn’t that been how he’d felt, when Sage had asked him to turn her? To make her a monster like him, and his siblings, so they could be together forever?
He’d loved her enough to do it, despite his own misgivings about the situation. From what his little sister said, Elijah had given in, and done the same. She had a son out there, a vampire, at least one of her children that she’d never lose.
“And killing me won’t get rid of him, either,” Elijah beamed in pride.
“What?”
“Oh, it’s something the Strix found out,” Finn hadn’t known she was still in contact with the Strix. From what he knew, they’d parted ways centuries ago. “And one of my descendants, Anya, told me. She’s working as a witch with the Strix, you know,”
No, Finn had not known that. He hadn’t known either of those pieces of information, and his drunk mind was struggling to wrap itself around them. One of Elijah’s descendants, her children’s children that she was always so protective of, had infiltrated the Strix, something Finn knew Elijah wanted to keep far away from her.
Most of her sireline were in the Strix, but Finn knew that they scared his sister, just a little. They’d changed so much from what she’d wanted them to do, she’d mentioned sadly, and were now more interested in power than in changing the world for the better, like she’d hoped.
And the Strix hated Elijah, Finn knew that. Elijah knew it too, although all involved parties apparently pretended that they were all on good terms. Why, Finn had no idea, but Elijah seemed fine with it.
“What was that you said about your son not dying when you do?”
“Okay, so the Strix have discovered that when I die, they die also,” Elijah explained, looking slightly more sober. “So they’ve been looking for something that would unlink them from me, so they don’t have to live in fear of me dying.
“And Anya managed to send the ritual they have to her cousin, who sent it to another of my descendants, who sent it to me.
“And ‘cause I don’t want my son to be reliant on my life, even if he doesn’t know it, I got a couple of the girls, and we adjusted the ritual, so it’ll only unlink one selected person,”
“And that person’s your Jon?” Finn asked, just to make sure.
“Yeah,”
Thinking it over, Finn tried to arrange the facts in his mind. Their sirelines were reliant on them not dying. If an Original died, then their entire sireline would die with them.
If Finn died, Sage would die with him, he realised.
“Can you unlink Sage from me?” He asked his sister.
Elijah shrugged. “Uh, yeah... probably. I think there’s some of the girls in the area,”
Elijah’s descendants, also loving called her girls (and boys, but there were so many more women actively involved in the coven than men), were spread all around the world, as far as Finn knew. They were all part of the same coven together, which had been called the Lija coven, although Elijah had also mentioned once that it was also called the Lich coven. Lich, like the undead thing.
Finn knew that Elijah hated it being called Lich, but he still called it that anyways. He wasn’t as involved in her life as he could’ve been, but he was going to tease her about it anyways.
As it turned out, there were a few members of the Lija coven in the area. Admittedly, Finn wasn’t that surprised, but still. Like he’d said, Elijah’s descendants were everywhere.
They’d worked quick, too, setting everything up in time for Sage to get home. The alcohol was sticking around, too, but that was more because Elijah kept refilling her and Finn’s glasses, and drinking from them.
Sage entered the house, calling for Finn. She’d barely begun to think that something was wrong before her neck snapped, and the man following her screamed in terror as her body dropped to the floor.
“She’ll be fine,” Elijah, who’d snapped Sage’s neck, reassured the man. She looked deep into his eyes, compelling him. “Now, I want you to follow me, and do not leave the room I’m taking you to. You will also not freak out, or remember that anyone died in this house,”
Finn had rushed to grab Sage, to make sure that she was alright, despite her snapped neck, and to place her into the circle that would designate her as the vampire to be unlinked. He looked up at the decently attractive man his sister was leading to his bedroom, mildly impressed by her compulsion abilities.
Compulsion was a risky business, especially if you didn’t know if the person had taken vervain or not, and it got even more shaky when you were drunk. There was too many ways to mess up when drunk, but looking at Elijah right now, Finn could almost believe she was fully sober when compelling the man.
But then again, Finn remembered, Elijah was the best of all of them at compulsion. She’d been the one to discover it, although she’d never mentioned how she’d done that, and Finn’s little sister excelled at the finer details in a compulsion where the rest of them failed.
Elijah compelled the man to stay in Finn’s room, waiting for when Sage and Finn would come and... entertain themselves with him. Elijah didn’t want to know any details, and thankfully Finn was enough of a prude to not want to tell her them. Sage didn’t care, but she didn’t spill when Finn didn’t want her to, which was all good with Elijah.
The ritual itself was fairly simple, all things considered. It was more complicated to set up than anything else, and the ingredients weren’t exactly common things, but it was okay. They were witches, most of the ingredients had been back in their houses anyways.
Everything but the heart of an unsired vampire. Something that was rare, considering how vampires were made. There could even be an argument that the Original vampires were sired as well, although Elijah had never really paid attention to that.
She pulled her own heart out from her chest for the ritual, letting Finn catch her body as she fell. Elijah had had to do it before, for Jon’s ritual. She didn’t care as much about this one, but she still wasn’t going to make her brother pull his own heart out for it.
The only reason Elijah had done it for Jon’s was because she hadn’t had another option. There were only five Originals, after all, plus Mikael, and none of the others were close enough to provide their own unsired hearts for it.
When Sage woke up, about half an hour later, there was barely any evidence that anything had happened at all. Finn was lying on the couch, Elijah draped over him, telling stories of her daughter. Her brother was barely listening, more preoccupied with trying to braid Elijah’s hair.
Idly, Sage noticed that said hair had come loose during the hour or so she’d been out collecting a boytoy for her and Finn to share. Said toy was nowhere to be seen, although Finn mumbled something about their bedroom when she asked them.
Sure enough, there was a very confused man in her bedroom, although he looked no less eager to join her and Finn in bed. Sage just shook her head and headed back out to the living room, seeing Elijah and Finn in exactly the same position as she’d left them.
On the coffee table in front of her beloved husband and his sister, Sage saw a few bottles of wine, as well as two glasses. One was half full, whilst the other was empty, but she didn’t know which was which.
In the morning, Elijah would wake up in her own bed with a headache, and no recollection of how she’d gotten there. The last thing from the night before she would remember was pouring herself and Finn another glass of wine each.
Elijah would head to the kitchen, to get herself some water at least, and would find her brother and sister-in-law there, both looking (and smelling) like they’d had a lot of sex.
How, when Finn was just as drunk as Elijah was the night before, as far as she remembered, Elijah didn’t know. And she didn’t want to find out. Sage, at least, gave Elijah ready access to the water, to help her head.
“What happened last night?” Elijah groaned after a few cups of water.
Unfortunately, by the looks Finn and Sage shared, they had no clue either. Sage had left them, and they’d gotten drunk, and her neck had gotten snapped when she’d come home, although she didn’t know what they’d done whilst she was out, aside from compel the man she’d brought back to stay in Finn and Sage’s room.
Which apparently he was still in. Finn couldn’t undo the compulsion, and Elijah hadn’t thought to put a timer on it when she was drunk. Thankfully, Sage solved all Elijah’s problems by snapping Elijah’s neck. It could be counted as revenge for Elijah snacking Sage’s the night before, only none of them remembered that.
Later, much later, a member of the Lija coven would come to Elijah whilst she was out on a walk, her son on her hip. She would explain what had happened, how they’d performed the ritual on Sage, at Elijah’s request.
Sage was unsired now, Elijah registered. If her sister-in-law hadn’t cared for Finn aside from him being her sire, then she would’ve been free to leave him. And for a brief moment, Elijah considered telling Sage. Just to see what she’d do.
But logically, Elijah knew the truth. Sage loved Finn, had waited nearly 6 centuries to see Elijah’s brother again. She wouldn’t have done that if she only cared about him as her sire.
So there was no reason for Elijah to tell her. If Finn remembered what they’d done, then he’d probably tell Sage. Elijah knew that he was fully in love with his wife, despite all their time spent apart.
And anyways, if Finn died, then Sage would know what they’d done. So long as Finn didn’t die, then there was no reason for Sage to know. It wouldn’t change anything, after all.
Elijah paid no attention to the little voice in her mind whispering about ethics and morality. It held no weight in her decision after all.
Centuries later, when Sage called Elijah in a panic, after she was the only vampire of Finn’s sireline remaining since her husband had been killed, Elijah thought that maybe it would’ve been better for her to explain it when she’d first done it. Too late now, though, so Elijah started explaining.