A quick kolijah thing I wrote on my lunch break. Enjoy.
Kol comes back in layers.
There is the first awareness of shape—limbs arranged where they were left, a spine remembering its shape—and then the mouthful of dryness, as if time has been poured in there and forgotten.
His eyes open.
The absence in his chest is a fresh wound all its own. The dagger is gone, and yet he can still feel the shape it left behind, a precise little hollow where Nik—his brother—decided he belonged.
He turns his head and finds Elijah close, kneeling beside the open coffin. There is blood on his fingers. Not a dramatic amount—no dripping, no mess—just a smear caught at the seam of a knuckle. A careless mark.
It makes something in Kol’s stomach twist—it is Kol's blood from where Elijah pulled the dagger out of his chest.
Klaus is not in the room.
But Kol did not expect him to be. Nik is rarely in any room anymore, not in any useful way. He’s always somewhere beyond the door, beyond reason, loud enough to be present without the courtesy of entering. Even after decades, Kol can still recognize the rhythm of it—the looping accusations, the breathless certainty, the way Nik's mind catches on one idea and worries it raw until it bleeds.
It began after Rebekah’s disastrous boy-toy and the work that followed. That was the first shift: Nik furious in a way that didn’t burn out. Nik furious in a way that started to look less like temper and more like something caught alight on the tinder of him and refused to cool.
It got worse until Kol had found a witch—had offered her jewelry, blood, a favor he didn’t want to owe—and together they’d learned that this was not a curse that could be unmade.
It could, however, be shifted and passed to another.
And so Elijah had sent dozens—hundreds—of his compelled sirelings to be slaughtered at the hands of hunters to see who might trigger the awakening of whatever new blood would take the curse next.
It worked—it helped.
But Nik had not become himself again.
Kol doesn’t know if there is a “himself” to return to now. Nik keeps the same face, the same voice, the same hands—but everything underneath has been rearranged. The rage stays. The sweetness curdles faster. The tenderness, when it appears, has teeth in it.
And Kol—despite everything—still feels the betrayal like a hot coin on his tongue.
Kol’s throat locks on the feeling.
Not fear. Not even fury—those arrive easily, like dogs that know the whistle. It’s the other thing: the simple, nauseating fact of being stored. Put somewhere and left there. As if… as if Kol is something so easily set aside, tucked into a box and forgotten—as if he is Finn.
It is humiliating how quickly the it arrives, as if his body has been trained to expect it.
He tries to sit up. His muscles answer late, sluggish with the aftereffects of stillness, and the movement comes out wrong—too slow, too heavy, the kind of motion that shows a weakness he would rather die than display. It is clumsy, childish. He hates that too—hates being seen by his older brother in the moment before he can assemble himself.
Elijah’s hand lands at his shoulder, steadying—
Kol flinches.
The last time Elijah touched him like this—close, intent, careful—it was to hold him down. Elijah’s grip on his wrists. The braced weight of him. Klaus leaning in with the blade while Kol fought hard enough to tear his own skin.
Elijah had been gentle then too, in his own maddening way.
Now the hand at Kol’s shoulder is kinder. Not because the action is kind—nothing about this is kind—but because Elijah is trying, visibly, to treat Kol as a person rather than a problem.
Kol thinks this should mean nothing after what Elijah did to him.
And yet—it means everything.
Kol’s anger rises—he is not stupid. He knows that he is not entirely innocent in this affair and he knows that he does not get to pretend he does not know what he did. He knows the way he’d pushed too far because pushing is what he does when he feels cornered, when he wants a reaction, when he wants the world to look at him and admit he’s bleeding. He had drawn their father’s eye closer than it should have come. He had made noise in the wrong year, in the wrong town, when Mikael was already hunting the scent of them like a starving animal.
He understands—but understanding does not make it hurt any less.
This is the worst part of him: not the violence, not his appetite. It is the need. The gnawing, humiliating insistence that someone should notice—that someone should name his hurt and treat it as real. He can feel it in his chest like a second heartbeat.
He would rather be punished loudly than ignored quietly.
Elijah’s gaze holds his. It’s infuriatingly calm. It is also—if Kol is honest—tired.
Do not be angry with me, Kol wants to say, it was not me who put it—the exhaustion, the bone deep weariness—in you, brother.
Kol opens his mouth to say something cutting instead.
Elijah lifts his hand before the words can spill from Kol and, with a care that feels almost too intimate to be allowed, touches Kol’s cheek. Just the pads of his fingers. A brief, deliberate contact. Not checking for injury. Not wiping blood.
Simply touch—
And Kol goes very still.
His body reacts before his pride can catch up. His skin warms under the contact in a way that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with being handled gently. He hates himself for it, for the way he leans—almost imperceptibly—into Elijah’s hand like a plant turning toward light.
He feels it then, the dangerous thread: how easily this could become a pattern. How quickly his worst instincts could learn to court the moment that follows the damage. Cause the problem. Earn the attention. Take the tenderness as payment.
He imagines it—only for an instant—Elijah’s hand on his face again, Elijah’s voice low, saying his name like it matters. The image lands in him and sticks.
Disgust and longing twist together until he can’t tell them apart. Kol’s eyes burn, which is absurd. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t—
He swallows and his jaw aches from holding himself in.
You are my brother—
You are not supposed to hurt me.
He wants to shove Elijah away. He wants to pull him closer. He wants to be forgiven and he wants to be avenged and he wants—most humiliating of all—to be comforted.
Elijah withdraws his hand slowly, as if he’s aware of the risk in it. As if he’s offering Kol the dignity of choosing what comes next.
He hates Elijah for that. He loves Elijah for that.
The feeling tangles up in his center, deep in his belly. Kol turns his head just enough to catch Elijah’s wrist with his fingers—
His voice is quiet when he finally speaks.
“Don’t do it again.”
Elijah’s eyes do something small and painful—and he nods.
