{Guess I'm contagious, it'd be safest if you ran

[myheadisaprison]

PSL with tobeclosetohim & seekingvinland

Tattoo Scene #1 [Kol/Jo]

Tattoo Scene #2 [Kol/Jo]

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[seekingvinland]

Last Thorfinn had seen Jo and Kol had been in that village... he never remembered these things when he returned home each time. Life just went on and then he would be stolen again. He had been at a fine stand off, with Baldr under his blade, a willing captive to help him escape Jomsborg, to get back to those he cared about. Then things changed again. Suddenly he was coming through the fountain again.

"Fuck!" he yelled again like he does every time he comes through that cold water. The water was always colder than the river Thames, sometimes colder than the water of his home. He didn't remember leaving, he didn't remember much until he came out of the water and it all fluttered back in one glorious pop.

He scrubbed the water from his face and started walking. Thankfully, the gods were nice today, it was one of those warm days, the kind that made the frigid water make even less sense. He moved silently through the village to house 44. He didn't even bother knocking as he made his way inside. New grey scrubs on and new scars. Time had moved on for him again. Another year gone, but no reset this time. Just their viking returning home from another war.

"Jo!" He called, his accent thicker again. "Kol!" What had happened? How long was he gone?

[itchtokill]

The village hadn't changed much. And it had changed a lot. In that way that so much happens in such short periods of time that it seems so much more drastic when a person isn't living through it all in the day to day. There were new buildings and structures, old ones turned to little more than rubble, but the heart of the place? That was static, unchanging, and the rats-in-a-maze feeling never really left, just hung in the air, an unspoken known thing.

Kol had made a trip out into the woods for gathering purposes-- berries, edible flowers, whatever he might have caught in a snare trap that he set the night before-- and was on his way back to the house with less than he would have liked, but what should amount to 'enough' to sustain him and Jo.

His chest constricts, heart acting like it might try to escape his chest when he hears it--a too-familiar voice yelling his name. "Thorfinn?" He squints and goes toward the sound of the voice, finding him wandering, soaking wet, through the village. It was him, all right, "Thorfinn!" he calls to him, voice sharp and loud, to catch his attention.

[tobeclosetohim]

It's serrated edge. The day. The humidity. The sun on the black leather she never gave up. This whole fucking, footsteps on your grave, look of the same godforsaken mousetrap outside the same godforsaken window. It's never repeated. Never once. Milliways didn't count. Milliways was doorways. Not landings. Worlds never repeated. Almost a decade.

Bamboo slivers under nails, as Jo shakes out a pillow of dust.
She doesn't even want to know how dust gets inside these things.

She doesn't know if it annoys her more than the house is untouched, or that it isn't.
(The way she doesn't know if it grates more when Kol is right there, or now that he isn't.)

Jo has a sheaf of paper, from the number of things still there in bedroom untouched, and she's walking back from the main building, looking over the notes she wrote. Trying to get some idea of the scope of what's changed here. Over how long. How many people. At least it looked like people had kept the books going, even after she'd gone. Kate was still there, for whatever that meant.

It almost gets dropped when she hears Kol's voice yelling a name that should be impossible. Should be. Except she's here. And he's here. Jo's heart shot up, and her hands tightening, knuckle white on the sheaf, as she scanned down the road, seeing first Kol. And then --

Jo started running.

[seekingvinland]

Both voices caught his ears, he may not be a hunter, but he was trained in the old ways. A once utterly deadly assassin. Some skills never dull.

He hurried for the door, the scrubs still felt wrong on him, but that was just multiversal fuckery at it's finest. Things he learned from Jo. As he came flying out the back door his eyes widened seeing the brilliant flash of blonde hair and the booming of Kol's voice. He smiled then. That beautiful rare but happy smile.

"KOL! JO~!" oh he looked so happy.

[itchtokill]

[and then there was chocolate.]

"Mikaelson's don't beg." comes the accented voice from a doorway, Kol standing with his shoulder leaned against the wood of the doorjamb. There's an easy smirk on his face as he watches her stroll through the house, box in hand. "Get anything else, or is the chocolate the most important part?"

[tobeclosetohim]

It's leisurely, that smirk. The one, in every part of Kol, even his voice, that makes the edge of her mouth twitch to do the same, even as it sent her face in one direction to find his voice, and his face, and sent her braid slipping over her shoulder in the other. The box is large and still she shrugs partially over it and mostly around it.

"The normal," is easy enough, headed toward him with it. All familiar brown edges, against the black of her clothes and the gold of her hair. The clip of work boots and the smirk finally starting to curl out on her own lips. As flippant, as the words that followed. "But really the underwear are still just as boring as ever."

{ you should never let the sun set on tomorrow, before the sun rises today

[tobeclosetohim]

It's almost been a day. A full day.

Since she came up choking, spitting water, hair everywhere.

The more people tell her it's fine, and things are better, if not good, and it's good that she's back, the less it feels like that. It feels like razors tracing paths down every inch of her skin. Not only that normal one, that for some reason isn't negating the soft burn in her skin, again, yet. But the one where every cell in her body is saying this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.

She's seen how many people are gone. She's seen how many people have come. She's taken some stock of what no longer exists on the horizon edges, and the fact there's so many more buildings, and more layout. Like a map unfolded a gameboard. She's been gone a year and half (in their time, at least). This is wrong. She shouldn't be here. She goes forward. Forward, and never back.

The reprieve she got with Thorfinn, and then, Krissy, was the only grace the fucking multiverse gave.
A torture sweeter and steeper than a bullet in the brain, or the heart, could ever promise.


And now this.


Jo glared at the fountain, merrily bubbling away under her judgment. "I still don't trust you."

[itchtokill]

Suddenly, the fountain's bubbles became less content and more frantic, the not-yet-visible visage of someone careening toward the only way out. It's only seconds later that the new arrival breaks the surface of the water, the same sputtering, coughing mess every person who shows up in that blasted fountain ever is.

"Oh, bloody hell. Not this again." He mutters once he's got something like air in his lungs again. Drowning is not a fun death, and he'd really rather not, thanks. "The fu--"

Like it isn't hard enough to realize his multiverse trips are being repeated, as he glances around to confirm it is the creeptastic village from before, his eyes land on someone familiar. Too familiar. The kind that breaks something in your chest just at seeing them because what if they aren't the right one? "Jo?"

[tobeclosetohim]

The shade and shape that comes into the water make Jo rock back a few steps. She's in no mood and no mind to need to mother anyone through their arrival, but her lips purse and her finger shift restless, then stillness, because try as she might, she not heartless enough to walk away either. Abandon a drowned rat. But when's that ever been new.

She stays; stands; frowns as the newcomer rears up, all dark shades and coughing.
Her eyes are already narrowing, and a breath coming in, when that voice comes out.

Hoarse, and sharp, only just nearly not swearing, and so familiar it's sharper than she's ready for.

The barest glance of the side of a face and her chest is tighter than even her own re-entrance in the fountain, not breathing, and she doesn't even have the time to get her thoughts to the right question, before his eyes are on her -- and they are his eyes -- and he's saying her name. Familiar confusion and an absolute soaked mess, that unruly hair all plastered, and it shouldn't hurt more to catch recognition than oblivion.

It's not even really a choice. Some of them were, and some of them have to be. But this isn't. And some part of her, somewhere chipped, and scatter, knows who he isn't and how she wouldn't do this if he was, but they've never had this problem. Whatever problems they had, here, once upon a time, it wasn't with this part. When she's somehow crossed the space and she can barely feel her knees, thigh, hit the lip of the fountain and grabbing some part of those soaked scubs and his hair, and her thoughts aren't even to saying his so so so very forbidden name once and she's kissing him with the kind of force that might knock her into the water.

And maybe there's a little more force than makes sense, maybe even a lot, but when hasn't anger been easier than relief? That absolutely fickle fucked up part of fate that only let you know how far you'd fallen off the goddam path when the forest was gone, mouse trap and world and all. And him with it. And then suddenly.

[itchtokill]

Of every possible reaction he could entertain in the mere seconds he had an opportunity to do so, Kol can't say he pictured this one. Her hands on him, in his hair, fisted in the scrub-top, lips crashing against his own with a harsh and familiar snap of something he can't put a word to. Familiarity. Relief? Annoyance. Everything at once and none of it at all, too. But it breaks, as these things always do, and Kol can't help it, can't stop himself at all as a smirk wider than the Nile falls across his lips, eyebrows searching for a home in his hairline, tone far too amused everything considered. "Well, I missed you too, Huntress."

[tobeclosetohim]

Her lips are still burning, and her fingers are still knotted in his hair and those crap scrubs, and he's still got a damn mouth and she still kind of hates that nickname, because it's not the word it should be. But he's the only person in the whol goddamn multiverse who she'll probably let get away with it. At least right now. Today. This moment. While her mouth still feels like she punched it with a wall and he's smirk with the fucking arrogant familiarity.

And she hates him, and she maybe loves him, and maybe she hates him and this place for that thought, too. Everything hurts and she hates this place and she hates his face and she just kissed him, and she hates that she wants to reach out and touch his cheek, like kissing him might not have been enough proof he was real. Which is just idiotic. And again, she hates it. She hates everything and all of it. Maybe except him. Him. Able to remember her.

It makes her wince and cringe away, her nose wrinkling up, like she's caught a bad smell, suddenly looking at him, up and down, in the chopping water, still half in her hands, with an overwhelming amount of distaste. "You look like a drowned rat. You should get out of the fountain already."

[itchtokill]

[first: this was what happened to be on my playlist when I opened this.] He doesn't dare actually try to move out of her grip. Not for fear of anything she may, or may not, do for it, but because right now, she's the only thing that might genuinely be grounding him. In the moment. In reality. In the realness of this. "You're gonna have to let go of me first." He points out, an amused lift of his eyebrows, that smirk still ever-present on his face. Part of him doesn't want it. What if it's all a dream? He's had them before, real as anything else in the world. Spells that break at the first hint of daybreak, or the first loud noise that filters through the haze of sleep. He desperately needs this not to end in an abrupt crash of awareness of something else altogether.