Chapter Text
7.1
Henry sees the video of Finn and Freya reuniting and just smiles. He tells all of his friends, who make fun of him while cooing at the video, but that's beside the point.
He also sends the video to his parents, who don't text back. They're on vacation in the Bahama's, so it's not unexpected. Emily, who is going to school in South Carolina (therefore not in the Bahama's like their younger siblings), called him to tell him how cute she thought is was.
Other than being cute, it makes him think about his birth family. He doesn't remember really anything about them, just the basics: he was the youngest, their mother was killed by their abusive father, they'd been split up, never to see each other again.
It would be like a dream come true to meet them all again. Henry's actually pretty sure his classmates in his genetics class are going to find his family for him - he's become somewhat of an anomaly in class, with his charm, grace, and bad luck.
He's sworn up and down it's normal - they don't believe his total opposite behaviors are something that can happen to just anybody. They're desperate to prove his siblings have it, too, so they're looking for the family he can't remember.
Emily thinks it's creepy.
"If that's creepy, then how is the Mikaelson Manhunt cute?" He asks, a little judgmentally, during one of their regular Skype calls.
"It just is, Henry."
"That's not an answer," Henry sing-songs.
Emily sighs loudly. She drags a hand over her face, and messes up her light makeup. "Fine, fine, dammit…. Oh! I got it." She gives him a smug smile, one she's been dishing out since he was adopted. "The Mikaelson Manhunt is being led by these people's grandparents and aunt. Your classmates wanting to know everything about your long lost family is weird due to it not being a familial person doing the searching, and you don't know most of them."
"Yes I do," Henry scoffs. He sees her point, though. She's right.
"Name one of the people who I haven't heard of before. Meaning, no Prof Matthews, no Jane, no Kelly, no Danny, no Sam, and no Carter."
Henry wracks his brain for a name. "Sarah," he finally says.
"Sarah what?"
"How am I supposed to know, Em? She's the T.A."
"You don't know your T.A.'s name? Henry - "
Henry sighs out, "welp, gotta go sis, love ya, bye!" He hangs up before he's even done speaking. He loves her but she lectures him way too much for someone who's only a year older than him. Plus, he wants to do something that isn't genetics-related or sister-related.
A good trip to the bookstore sounds in order.
5.4
Kol has to send in proof. So he scours for a picture of him when he was newly adopted, because apparently his face on the internet isn't enough. (Leif apparently can see the resemblance between him and the him in the picture, but it isn't enough for him.)
He finds one of him in a baseball uniform at eight years old, holding little two-year-old Hailie's hand. He puts it online as his proof, and tries to not think about how from the time he was adopted in early July of '96 to almost Christmas '97, he'd been inconsolable a lot of the time. He'd always wanted to show things to his siblings, the ones that weren't there, and when Hailie came around, she'd reminded him so sharply of Henrik it'd been hard for him to bond with her.
He forces the thoughts out of his mind.
To his fans and family alike, Kol explains that the picture was taken around his second Thanksgiving away from the hellhole in Mystic Falls, he was eight, that's his adopted sister, etc.
When he's on the phone with Leif and Aerona, he hears another voice in the background. He asks who it is, and instead of being told that it's his aunt (the one he just heard of, and apparently far from the only one), Aerona tells him it's Finn and Freya. "They're just catching up," she says kindly.
He chokes out a response and ends the call. It's not nice, but it is what it is.
He just got home, but shit. He wants to go see them. The video of them reuniting is everywhere. He wants that. He wants it more than he wants fame, more than he ever wanted Elijah and Nik's approval.
And even though he's got his heart and his lungs in his throat, he starts packing and calls Taylor.
1.6 and 2.3
Finn cries. He won't deny it.
He's waited to see Freya for so long, he'd be inhuman not to. (That isn't even mentioning that the last time they'd seen each other, he'd vowed to see her again. He'd shouted it down the hallways of that hospital and he'd woken up sleeping patients and he hadn't cared. He doesn't care now, either, all he cares about is that he's finally keeping up his promise.)
They hug for five minutes. A paparazzo tells him that they counted.
It's awkward, for a second, when they pull away. Finn can tell Freya really doesn't want to. He feels the same, but come on. He's not having this talk in front of the media.
He pulls her further into the airport, an arm around her shoulders. Freya's husband - Graham, Torunn had said - trails after them.
They don't speak, and they don't part, until they're all in the car that's going to take them back to the hotel.
Finn takes the moment to introduce himself to Graham with a firm handshake and a look that says "I'm her younger brother and I haven't been in her life for almost twenty years but hurt her and suffer". Or at least, he hopes that's the point he makes. He isn't going to say it out loud, not with the circumstances (proud Freya and the fact that they don't know each other anymore), but it's important that he reestablishes himself in the role of brother before he has to deal with being the older brother.
Niklaus, whenever he comes around, is going to be tough; in the meantime, Freya and Elijah will be good practice.
Freya pulls his attention away from her husband when she says, "hi."
He almost frowns at her timid tone; he'd never, not once in a million years, call her timid. He smiles instead, thinking about how Philip hates to see negative emotions on his face. With a laugh, he replies, "hi, Freya." He makes sure his tone adds an unspoken, but playful, idiot to the end.
She gives him the stink eye, reading him loud and clear. "Excuse me if it's hard for me to talk to my not so little little brother for the first time in seventeen years."
He shrugs. "Freya, I promise you, I don't mind how weird you've gotten since we were teens. You won't be the weirdest when this is all over, trust me."
"Who will it be then, Mr. I Know Everything?"
He smirks that Elijah Mikaelson Gotcha smirk that all subsequent siblings (except Henrik, poor kid) and Finn himself picked up. "Henrik, clearly. I can make an argument for Rebekah, too. They were so young, they have less memories of us and more of their adoptive families. Plus, we're adults. Do you think 21 year old Rebekah and 19 year old Henrik will be completely fine and not weirded-out by us having kids?"
Freya thinks for a moment, then shrugs. "I don't know, Finn. I mean, I'm 34, and he's 19. It's already a jump." She shifts in her seat - a nervous gesture he'd expect from Niklaus or Kol - and doesn't continue until he motions for her to. She shares a look with Graham, who seems content to sit back and let them talk.
Then, she tells him the story of her oldest's conception. His sister being a sexual being doesn't interest him in the slightest, but Radley's father sure does. Especially since he was her foster father at the time.
3.3
Elijah skips school the next day. Everyone at the school seems to have watched Oprah last night, so, in a moment of flippancy he usually doesn't afford himself, he skips.
Katherine and Matt are both happy to have him, so he doesn't mind too much. He gets to play games with his son that college had been keeping him from, and when Matt goes down for a nap, he and Katherine take the time to reacquaint themselves.
When they're sated, they lie in bed, spooning. Katherine asks, "what do you think is going to happen? When you're all back together?" She's asked him before, what he would do if he and his siblings were reunited. She's always known about them. This time, though, the question is reality, not hypothetical.
He has to think on it; the thought of it not going well makes him tense up. "Well, Freya and Finn will go back to their old mother hen ways. I'll be too emotional to do much. Niklaus may be happy, he may be angry. There's no way to tell with him. Kol will be anxious, Rebekah excited, and Henrik curious."
Katherine snorts at how he has it all planned out. "I meant, what do you think will happen? Do you think you'll be separated again? Go you different ways? Will Kol take you to his movie premieres?" The last one is purely for his benefit; he laughs, and his tense muscles loosen up.
"Well, I will fight to keep in contact. My siblings on the other hand…." She giggles. After a moment, he sighs. "I'm not sure. But I'm going to try my best to keep us together. They might not listen to me, I know that already. But if that's the case, all I can hope for is that being together again makes it harder for us to separate."
Katherine nods understandingly. Quietly, she says, "if you want to go out to New York to see them, you should."
They don't really have the money for it, and Matt can only stand to be away from Elijah for so long. And it's a hard time for her, considering what anniversary just came up.
He's not going to leave her, he decides. "I'm not going to go unless you can come, too, love. And seeing as we don't have enough money for three tickets from Stanford to NYC, I won't be going."
Katherine turns around all the way to give him her patented 'you're an idiot' look. "Elijah." She pauses deliberately. "How about this? You go, and once you've had a few days to catch up with whoever is there, Matt and I come along, too. That way, you'll have some time with them, we can have a family vacation, and I can be there for you when you need me?"
"Katherine…."
"Think of Matt. He can have his first real vacation that isn't to Portland to see my parents, or to Santa Clara to see Jeremy and Elena. And he won't want to stay here, you know that. We can't leave him or he'll freak out."
Elijah takes in her obvious haggling. After a long moment, he sighs. "Fine. But I want to call everyday, to check in."
Katherine smiles and kisses his cheek. "Of course. I mean, the time zones will be an obstacle, but we'll get through it."
He smiles back and presses a kiss to her cheek, then her jaw, then down further. They shift so he's resting on top of her.
He's just gotten to presses kisses on her collarbone when the baby monitor lets them know that Matthew has woken up. Katherine laughs, and leaves him in bed, mind moving onto what he has to pack and what he needs to set up.