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OOI.
" the bastard runt "

*warnings for infertility, blood, and referenced child abuse*

987 A.D.

With the bite of a blade, Dagmar watched, brows knit, as her blood ran down her wrist and dripped from her fingers into the fire below her, sizzling on the hot coals.

Smoke rose above her, billows of silvery-white tendrils that filled the vast room more than they did escape through the hole in the hatch roof, leaving behind a sticky-sweet haze which made each blink burn more than the last. She felt a little vacant, like her mind was unknitting itself like milk mixed with whey, as she got lost in the flickering of the fire, eyes fluttering half-closed in a daze.

The visions became clearer as she grew older, but the things she saw never lasted long, and, even though she'd been cursed to have a mind that remembered nearly everything else, they tended to escape her as soon as they came. No matter what, little remained when she woke but fragments seen through eyes that did not belong to her. Sometimes, it was the dead. Bodies of all kinds, waxy flesh rotting and sloughing off bone, swords sinking to the hilt through skin then fascia then muscle, and mouths hanging open with silent screams. The prices that needed to be paid for eternal life in Asgard. Others, she saw women like herself, her mother, and Ayana. Völva sat around open flames, their eyes rolled back into their heads as they chanted spells in a language that Dagmar did not understand.

Most of the time, though, all that came to her was crows. Crows perched in the evergreen trees of a homeland that surely did not miss her as much as she missed it.

This one was like most.

Before she could pursue anything more than the sight of corvids looking down on her from above, their black eyes glittering with wisdom older than herself, her mother was yanking her back to consciousness.

"Dagmar," Esther's voice was sharp, her hands warm as they held Dagmar's wrist firmly, "what did you see?"

It startled her, slightly. Everything felt too dark around her as she blinked and stared at her mother with furrowed brows. "Birds. I saw birds."

Esther's face fell. Dagmar didn't know what she expected.

"The powers that be want you to find deeper meaning."

She knew that she was meant to find a deeper meaning. She just did not know where she was meant to find it.

She wasn't even sure whether these were premonitions or something that was, somehow, more sinister.

"Perhaps the gods just think it's amusing to mess with me." She drawled, wrapping a cloth around her wound.

Her mother, in response to her spiteful correction, looked at her scathingly, but Ayana cracked a smile. When Esther saw that Dagmar was fighting a smile of her own, she turned on her heel to face the dark skinned woman, and the both of them sobered up quickly.

"I fail to understand what you want from me."

"You are far more powerful than you realize." Esther said, voice sour. "I want you to realize it."

Dagmar stared and resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

A part of her, however small, resented her mother for their weekly meetings. When she was a child, she'd scream, face red and tears leaking from her eyes as her mother's knife sliced through her skin—— the pain white hot, electric, and deliberate, runic shapes being carved into her like flesh was wood, all to draw blood over the fire in hopes that she'd see something worth remembering. It was her rite; her blood was partly hers but mostly her mothers, and, with Freya long gone, she was the eldest, and eldest daughters in their family were meant to be frightfully powerful. (Dagmar doubted it all her life. She was not the eldest just because Freya was gone. She did not think that the gods played games that way.)

She didn't scream anymore, hardly even flinched as her mother became her butcher.

She knew now that there were worse pains than the cut of a knife.

The illusion that there was something more powerful within her had been Esther's excuse for this for her whole life. She was rabid with the desire to uncover it, but they had little proof for how awe-inspiring it would be beyond an extent. Nearly every attempt at using conventional magic yielded few results—— she still could not light a fire with her words alone like her mother or her dear friend, but she had, once as a little girl, sent Finn flying across the room with a shout for stealing her toy. The things she was best at, though, didn't need special books or incantations, or even letters in her skin. Just intention. She could heal wounds, sometimes, and could make the fish in the river do her bidding when she was bored, and force plants up through the soil if she really wished for a headache (and to just watch them wilt and die minutes later.)

She was also, to be bluntly honest, sick of seeing her own blood.

Dagmar opened her mouth to snark her mother some more but she found herself unable to speak as Esther closed her eyes and, placing a hand on the curve of her stomach, took in a deep breath.

"Are you alright?" She asked, allowing the older blonde to lean on her for support as Ayana reached for her other arm.

"I will be fine." Esther's tone was sharp, and her wave of a dismissive hand made the younger women exchange another look. "This discomfort will be yours soon enough, Dagmar. It has been mine, and it was Ayana's, and it will be yours. This I am sure of."

Ayana refused to meet her eye after that one, and the claim hung in the smoke-filled air.

In the seven years since she was wed a second time, all of the other children who had come to the New World with their parents had children of their own. All of them except for Dagmar and Hvitserk. They had tried a healthy amount (even if she spent the first year of their relationship hissing vitriol at him every time he dared to speak to her and spitefully wishing that her womb brought him nothing but a house full of screaming daughters all the while he refused to share her bed until she wished him to) but, still, her blood came. Consistently. Persistently.

Dagmar couldn't help but feel as though the gods were mocking her...

(Gods. She was ever so tired of her own blood.)

"I would not hold onto that hope, Mother." Dagmar said, then sighed. "You should sit down."

"It will be yours." Esther promised, her voice, again, as sharp as the blade that they'd just used for the ritual.

As Ayana silently coaxed her very pregnant mother to sit on something, Dagmar peeled the sticky, wet cloth Esther had placed upon her from her skin to assess the damage.

It wasn't bad. She'd seen worse, had done worse, and knew like she knew nothing else that worse would be done to her in the future.

Still, though, like most things she did with the power within her, it took a great deal of focus. Staring down at it with a pinched and stoic face, Dagmar felt her head start to throb before she saw that it was working, the layers of her flesh slowly but surely knitting back together until the only proof that she'd been cut at all was the smear of unnaturally dark blood and a few small, silvery scars to join all the rest. They were runes for the gods and the elements, an invocation to all the powers that be inscribed from the tips of her fingers to the middle of her wrist.

Dagmar thought that her mother would scar her whole body over if she got what she wanted in the end.

(Dagmar wondered why she still came and let Esther do this to her.)

The ache in her head made her want to close her eyes but she traced the new markings with the pointer finger of her unscarred hand. "It does not hurt as much anymore."

She didn't know why she said it. Esther ignored the comment. (Dagmar also wondered if she was tormented by the memory of all the various ways that she had to hold Dagmar down for these rituals when she was a child.)

"I must speak to you before you leave."

Dagmar nodded and crossed her arms behind her back.

"Privately."

Dagmar sighed Mother as Esther set a sour gaze on the woman who taught her everything but Ayana, ever polite, shook her head.

"I will wait for you outside, Dagmar."

After bidding Esther goodbye, Dagmar's only friend left and shut the door to the ritual room behind her. Esther did not address her until they were alone.

"I have a favor to ask of you."

"Pray tell me, Mother, what more of myself am I expected to give to you?"

It was Esther's turn to sigh. "Dagmar."

She seemed unable to get comfortable where she was sitting, touching her back and stomach both like they were each causing her as much irritation as the eldest of her remaining children.

"I... need you and Hvitserk to take a ward."

Dagmar's eyes briefly flitted down to where Esther's body stretched to make room for yet another sibling. "Running out of space for all of them, are you?"

Her mother was, pointedly, not amused.

"Which one?"

"Niklaus."

Dagmar sucked in a sharp breath and put her hands on her hips. "Mother, you can't possibly——"

"Niklaus is not safe here."

"He will resent you for sending him away, and he will resent me for taking him. It will be like abandonment in his eyes. I know this."

"He will be grateful that we protected him some day."

"This is how you protect him?" She scoffed. "Father has been violent with him for as long as I can remember. I do not recall you ever being the one to jump in to save the boy from his wrath."

Esther's gaze turned cold, then. "You dare to question how much I love my children?"

Dagmar thought back to the babe in Esther's belly, and to little Rebekah, and how long Mikeal had despised Niklaus before those children were conceived.

Yes. She did dare to question it.

But she knew better than to say it out loud.

"What changed, then? Why do you want to give him away now?"

"Your Father has discovered my betrayal." Esther was more quiet now than she had been for hours. "He knows Niklaus is not his."

Dagmar paused, the soft flesh of her inner cheek caught between her teeth.

She had only a vague recollection of her Mother's affair.

She was too busy raising Elijah to pay it much attention.

While unable to remember the man's face very well, she could remember that He was tall and stoic, yet kind, and that she had been fascinated with his hair, which fell like an ocean of black waves down his back when he didn't have it braided. He would only come to visit when Mikael, who had grown restless living a farmer's life as soon as he planted his first maize, was off exploring the woods around their village with his old warrior friends, and he'd always give her and her siblings little gifts that they had to hide in the hollowed knot of a nearby tree.

Finn, who'd been Mother's darling since that day in the woods in the Old World, remembered it, too. He remembered it better. It was he who discovered the truth behind the stranger's visits and was the one to, without coming to her first, swear them both to secrecy yet again.

Staring at her mother, though, Dagmar could not understand how Mikael came to that conclusion.

She might not have been able to remember her Mother's friend very well, but she did know enough to know that Niklaus, with his fair hair and skin and his blue eyes, did not resemble him at all.

Mikael had no reason to believe Niklaus wasn't his.

"How?"

"He—— Niklaus is... a very strange boy, Dagmar. Your Father knows this. The children in town know this."

The tone of Esther's voice made Dagmar's shoulders fall.

"He is angry and frightened, and he will never be safe with your Father around."

She took a deep breath and looked up, her hands on her hips as she wondered if the gods could feel her scrutiny through the layers that separated them.

Why, she wanted to ask them, did this responsibility always fall on her?

(Couldn't Finn, for once, do his part to take care of this family, too?)

"I make no promises." Dagmar said, half because she could not tell what her husband would say and half because she wanted to, in a small way, cause her mother some of the distress she was feeling. "However... I will talk to Hvitserk."

Esther's terse expression melted with relief, anyway. "Thank you, Dagmar." She reached out to grab her daughter's clean hand and squeeze it. "Thank you."

Dagmar hummed, her lips pressed together, and snatched her hand away.

"A day will come where neither of us will be grateful."

Esther faltered.

"I shall return in the morning with an answer." She continued, eyes transfixed on her mother's hand, stained red with her blood. "Hvitserk, should he agree to this, will be with me."

Her Mother nodded. She seemed almost saddened.

It made Dagmar want to roll her eyes again.

"Farewell, Mother."

"Farewell."

The door to the ritual room closed behind her with a thump. Dagmar leaned back against it for a moment, eyes shut to the bright world around her, and fought to breathe evenly as all of her emotions simmered under her skin.

Her eyes only opened again when the pitter-patter of little feet caught her attention.

Ayana stood across the longhouse with half a smile and a glimmer of mischief in her eyes. Dagmar pushed off the wood.

"I fear your parents may have a rodent problem."

"I fear so." The blonde hummed, following the sound of giggles to the writhing lump of fur on one of the beds. "I believe it went this way."

"I believe so, too."

Kol shrieked, giddy, as Dagmar uncovered him.

"This is no rat." Dagmar's voice was thick with amusement as she poked her littlest brother in the sides. "Just a little boy."

"Do not call me little!" Kol protested through his laughter.

"Be bigger then."

He squirmed until she stopped tickling him and pulled him to his feet.

"Were you trying to scare me, Kol?"

The boy shook his head. "No."

But Dagmar could tell by the way he rocked on the balls of his feet and sung his words that he was lying to her. She smiled and ran a hand through his thick hair as she stood to her full height again.

"Naughty boy," She murmured fondly, "where does mother think you are right now?"

Kol sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand before coming clean. "...With Elijah and Nik and the chickens."

"Ah. You have snuck inside to escape your chores, then?"

"No!"

Lying again. Dagmar laughed.

"Well, we best leave, then. Poor Elijah must be worrying himself sick."

Kol took the hand she extended to him without complaint. Ayana, still smiling, came with them, and entertained the young boy's babbling with a maternal tone.

Their other brothers were exactly where Kol said they would be. Elijah was in with the chickens, on his hands and knees in the mud and peering into their coop as they fretted about him, undoubtedly wondering if Kol somehow managed to squeeze himself inside. (Kol had, to her understanding, become a bit of an escape artist. With Elijah now taking up the role that Dagmar married out of and being so busy raising Rebekah and trying to protect Niklaus from the people around him to pay him much mind, their littlest brother found other ways to entertain himself. Mischief was his favorite.)

Niklaus, despite all of the words Elijah was hurling at him, half-begging and half-ordering, was not looking for Kol at all. He was holding one of their wooden toy swords and striking a bag of feed with improper form.

"Brother," Elijah jumped at her call and bumped his head on the opening to the coop as he pulled it out to look at her, "I believe I have found what you are looking for."

Elijah's face fell flat as Dagmar lifted her and Kol's conjoined hands.

"Were you in the house all this time?" He sounded, above all, defeated.

"No."

"Kol," Dagmar, still amused, scolded lightly. "Stop lying."

"I was asking him what to do but he was too busy scolding Niklaus to answer!" Kol huffed even as Dagmar helped lift him over the fence and Elijah caught him under his arms. "I did not think he would care if I was gone."

"Yes, well, he did care, did he not? You must be kinder to Elijah. He tries very hard to look after you."

Kol pouted as Elijah placed him back on his feet and looked up at his sister as she leaned against the wood. "You only say that because he is your favorite."

Dagmar's eyebrows lifted to her forehead, but Elijah beat her to the chase.

"I am not her favorite."

"Elijah is correct." Dagmar hummed. "I love all of you equally."

Kol looked at her like he had some reservations about that but resigned himself to his fate as Elijah held a broom in front of his face. Dagmar bit back a laugh as the boy of seven years took the tool and, hanging his head, sulked off to the chicken house to clean it.

"I only looked away from him for a moment." Elijah was breathless as he defended himself, eyes wide like he was a child that was in the wrong and not three years into being on the market for marriage.

"Do not fret, Elijah." Ayana mused from beside her. "Children love to disappear. You often did."

His eyebrows knit together, briefly questioning the validity of Ayana's statement, but he was distracted by Dagmar reaching over to brush some dried mud from his cheek.

"I did?"

"You did." Dagmar confirmed it with the bob of her head.

"I would watch from the house as your sister chased you through the farmland."

A flush dusted Elijah's face, and Dagmar grinned. (He thought Ayana was awfully pretty, Dagmar knew, and was thoroughly embarrassed by any reminder that she'd known him when he was a toddler.)

"Niklaus?"

"Yes, sister?"

"You are holding your blade wrong, my love."

Niklaus looked at her with a dent in his brow as she, leaving Ayana to entertain Elijah and Kol, approached him.

"How?"

She pushed his arm up by the elbow, steadying it and readjusting it to the right position, before standing behind him and clasping her hands behind her back.

"Try again."

He hit his target again. This time, Dagmar thought, he might've been able to kill with it.

She leaned in close to his ear. "You have to help Elijah mind Kol. They are your brothers."

The thirteen-year-old huffed, stopped pointing his sword, and turned to face her with a frown.

"I hate watching Kol. He bites me."

Dagmar smiled. "So did you, but I took care of you anyway." She put her hands on her hips as his face flushed, comically similar to Elijah, though both would vehemently deny the comparison. "One day, he'll be too big to be doted on, and you will miss the days when he was small and needed you."

Niklaus muttered something about doubting that. Dagmar's smile took a rueful turn (she could remember when he was a baby, born during the winter, wrapped in furs and worn on her back, holding onto her fingers when she wiggled them in front of his face) and she wrapped her arms around him, ignoring his petulant whine as she pressed several kisses to his cheek.

He was nearly taller than her, now. She hadn't been prepared for such a thing. It had been strange when Elijah overtook her in size, but this was, somehow, even worse.

Getting to see her siblings was her only solace when it came to these meetings with her mother. They did visit her quite often—— sometimes, she wondered if she didn't tell them to return to their home from hers that they'd just move in—— but not often enough. She felt like she was missing out on watching them grow up. Her and Hvitserk's longhouse was so far away. It pained her to know that Finn and Mikael got to witness more milestones than she did, and even more so that they did not appreciate all they had.

"I will return in the morning." She promised him, then turned to Elijah. "With the blade my husband said he'd make you."

Elijah, still flustered by his childcare blunder and holding little Kol's arm in a death grip, managed to smile.

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She was cooking when Hvitserk came in from work that evening.

He didn't announce himself. Dagmar knew his footsteps so well that he didn't have to. He had been walking the same way since they were kids, heavily because he did not carry his own weight with any sort of confidence but still as quietly as he could manage, brain still fogged by Mikael and his unwillingness to be kind to children, even the strong boy whose fragile parents could not survive the trip overseas. She memorized the pattern of it long ago, long before she spent half the night straining for the sound of him moving to see if he was telling the truth about his vow of celibacy; it was stored somewhere in her brain with the sound of her siblings' voices.

As soon as he crossed the threshold into their home, the creak of the old wood beneath his feet gave him away, and she was no longer skittish enough to flinch when he, still without uttering a single word, took her rune hand and pressed it to his lips.

"Wife." He murmured his greeting, holding her hand up as he spoke.

"Husband." She said in return, glancing away from his face briefly as his calloused, soot-ridden thumb brushed over the textured surface of her skin.

"I come bearing gifts." A grin found its way to his face. He held a pouch of coin up and shook it, the jingle of the metal filling the silence. "Do not look so happy to see me."

At that, she smiled despite herself. "How was it?"

"Fine. The heat of the forge is unforgiving, and I have made more farmer's tools now than ever, but I made profit. How was your mother?"

"Demanding, as always."

"Ah."

The stew bubbled in the pot behind her. He let her hand go when she turned back to stir it, and stood beside her, not too close as to irk her but close enough to be there if needed.

"You need not fret over me."

"My good mother cuts my wife to bits every seven days. How could I not worry?"

Dagmar shook her head at his exaggeration and glanced back at him with a cocked brow. "When have I ever needed rescue?"

"Never by my hand, but still I wait. We do not know what the gods will throw our way."

He pressed a chaste kiss to her cheek.

Together, they ate dinner. He spoke about his day, even the most minute details, through mouthfuls of stew without expecting her to reciprocate, and she, appreciating him, nodded without any interjection. Dagmar's home was full of noise when she grew up. She found it a comfort. But a barren womb meant an empty house, and nowadays she was thankful for anything that fended off the silence, even if it was only for a moment, and only about a day at the forge.

When they were finished, he gave her the blade that her brother requested (because behaving like the man he was growing into was rather difficult with their Mother's refusal to let him marry), and withdrew to fetch enough water so that they both could bathe.

It was sharp, and the handle was made from a stag's antler. Carved into the bone was their family's name, spelt the way it would be in their mother tongue, which Elijah, notably, did not speak, and could not read. Dagmar decided not to tell her husband his mistake and played with it in his absence, off-put by how lightweight it was and how long it had been since she held a weapon in her hand.

Her brother would never use it to cut anyone, she was sure, but she wanted to make sure that he was able to.

Just in case.

After she deemed it suitable enough for Elijah, she packed it away in a piece of deer leather and left it by the stack of things she was to do tomorrow so she would not forget it.

By then, her husband was done with his bath, and she joined him at their bed. When she sat down on the edge, he sat between her legs like he was a child, allowing her to do his hair, unflinching even as the comb snagged on small knots in the long, tawny strands.

"I have a favor to ask of you." She said, nimble fingers slowly working their way through the tresses, starting at the base and braiding their way down.

"A favor?" He looked at her over his shoulder, eyebrow lifted suggestively.

She flicked him on the back of the ear.

When they were young, she thought him to be solemn, a sad orphan who had nothing to say. Now, with her, he was anything but.

She hadn't yet decided which she preferred.

"A real favor."

"Go on."

"My mother..." Dagmar sighed. How was she meant to go about this? (Even all those years later, she did not know how to handle a man who was not angry all of the time.) "She is having issues with Niklaus."

Hvitserk cocked a brow, again, but this time his face wrinkled with confusion.

"With Niklaus?"

"Yes."

"I have a hard time believing that. The boy has hardly ever been a problem. Kol on the other hand——"

Dagmar shook her head and held his steady, turning it to face forward again.

Hvitserk had, it seemed, been victim to Kol's mischief streak, too.

"She says that he is strange."

"Of course he's strange," Hvitserk mused. "You raised him."

That earned him another flick to the ear. He did flinch but chuckled heartily, anyway.

"I am being serious, Hvitserk. Mother says that he is a strange boy and that the other children are taking notice. That Mikael is taking notice."

Hvitserk's shoulders squared. The suddenness of it, of his change in expression, made an emotion that had long since been dormant bloom in the pits of Dagmar's stomach that hadn't been there in some time.

"What did she ask of you?"

"She wants us to take him in as a ward."

Before he could say anything, she rushed to continue.

"I am unable to bear you a son." She said, half-pleading and half-reasoning. "This may be your only chance."

"Dagmar——"

"We cannot just let him kill the boy."

Dagmar knew it was pathetic to beg.

Begging had never served her well.

But, still, that horrible feeling from childhood crept up her throat and made it hard to breathe.

"Dagmar," Hvitserk said her name gently as he turned to face her again, a hand holding her calf through the fabric of her skirt. "Look at me."

Reluctantly, she did.

"I do not care that you have not fallen pregnant with my child."

"But——"

"I have no legacy to protect. I am content to let my name die out if I must."

Dagmar swallowed thickly. There were no words within her that she could use to explain why she was not content to let him.

"We will take the boy," He continued, and she could breathe again, "because he is your blood and you have love for him. Not for anything else."

She, slightly dazed, nodded.

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Her siblings knew what was happening when they arrived the next morning.

Dagmar saw it in their sorrowful faces as their horse-drawn cart drew nearer, unease filling her as several pairs of red-rimmed eyes stuck to her, wordlessly pleading for her to somehow change their mother's mind.

Niklaus would not meet her gaze, though. He shrugged Elijah's hand from his shoulder, the rejection making the older boy's face scrunch up, and she was still climbing down when he heaved the sack full of his belongings into the wagon.

She looked at Esther.

Do you not see what you have done?

Esther looked away and at the ground as Dagmar put a hand on Niklaus' upper arm.

"Do you have everything?"

Niklaus nodded, still silent, and sniffed, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

"Do you have nothing to say to your family, boy?"

Mikael's words wheedled through the air and into Niklaus' bones, making the boy flinch.

"There is no need for farewells." Hvitserk spoke up before Dagmar could even look up at her father. "You can come see the boy whenever you wish."

The boy looked less than pleased about the idea of that but Mikael said nothing more.

"Can we really?" Elijah asked, the hope dripping from his voice.

Dagmar nodded. "Of course... Would you like that, Nik?"

She had to crouch, slightly, to see his face as he ducked his head. He shrugged nonverbally and kept looking anywhere but her.

"Very well, then. We best be off."

At Hvitserk's urging, both Dagmar and Niklaus climbed into the back of the cart. She wrapped an arm around him as it lurched to a start and held Mikael's gaze as they departed, wondering if Niklaus would ever be able to do the same.

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Niklaus still hadn't spoken a word by the time they'd reached their longhouse. Hvitserk had to return to his forge, leaving them alone to speak if they wished, but the boy still clung to her like a second skin—— fingers grasping for the creases of extra fabric in her skirt, holding himself against her like he used to when he was small and afraid of the New World's thunder—— as they brought his belongings into their home and placed them by where he'd sleep.

When she finished and turned back to him, she found that his eyes were sparkling with unshed tears.

"Niklaus," Dagmar spoke his name gently and reached out to rub his arm, "What is troubling you?"

He didn't respond, so she sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. Niklaus begrudgingly sat beside her when she patted the furs but still refused to meet her eye.

"You are allowed to cry, you know." She said after a moment of silence. 

"I do not wish to cry."

Niklaus must have sensed her doubt before she could voice it, though, because he huffed and shuffled on his legs.

"Father says that I am a man, so I cannot cry. Crying is for women and children."

At that, Dagmar rolled her eyes. Niklaus was frowning with confusion, like her blatant disrespect of his beloved Father was startling—— blasphemous, even. (Though, she supposed, if they never bothered to teach the boy his culture, he was bound to make a god out of anyone.)

"Father says and believes many things. That does not mean that they're all true" She tilted her head as she looked at him. "Finn cries. Do you think Finn is any less of a man for that?"

Niklaus, even though she knew that he and the rest of their siblings did not think of Finn very fondly, shook his head after brief hesitation.

"This has been a very trying day, Niklaus, and you are still a child. I will not... scold you if you want to cry."

He seemed to think about that for a time. 

"I am not a child." He denied in a quiet voice. 

Dagmar smiled. "You will always be a baby to me." She spoke. "All of you. Even when you are old, and your children have children."

The boy groaned and pushed her good hand away when she reached across to pinch his cheek but could not hide the hint of a smile that played at his lips. They fell silent again, not a sound between them beside an occasional sniffle from him, before he broke it.

"He hates me, doesn't he?"

"Who?"

"Father." Niklaus looked at her again. 

He did not look sad or upset, but there was something in his eyes that concerned her.

"He might." She gnawed on the inside of her cheek, molars grinding the soft flesh to bits as she struggled with whether or not keeping her mother's secret would not only save Esther but help keep Niklaus safe, too. "Father hates everyone and everything. He is a hateful man."

(Very suddenly, Dagmar found herself mourning the faceless man of her past—— the good, kind one who had actually sired him. Was he still alive? Would he take Niklaus if he knew what they'd done to him?)

Niklaus turned to look back at the floor. Dagmar waited a moment before she went to grab his hand and squeeze it.

"That does not matter now, Niklaus——"

"How could it not!?"

The sudden shout startled her. Dagmar swallowed, however, and released his hand to grab his chin.

"Look at me." She insisted in a low voice. "It does not matter now because he will never, ever touch you again. Do you understand me?"

With eyes full of an anger that she'd never seen, Niklaus shoved her away from him and stood up. She watched, her heartbeat in her ears and her chest aching, as her brother stormed away from her and out into the open air.

It became suddenly clear to her, then. Her mother's underlying motive.

Esther was not as afraid of what Mikael would do to the boy as she was of what would happen to both of them when the little bastard wasn't so little anymore...

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GRACE'S VIKING FUNERAL:

word count: 5746

I told you guys the plot was going to be very different from the original story. I am once again reminding you of that.

"but grace, doesn't this change how klaus will be in the future." nah. I promise he's going to be certifiably crazy.

comments and votes are super appreciated! they let me know that you guys like my writing and I cannot stress how much they motivate me to continue! thank you