He's busy with the record player when the light sound of her footsteps drift to his ear.

It's been two hours since he left Rousseau's, the minutes ticking by like a dripping faucet in a silent house, his thoughts puddling and shrinking in paranoia as his brief interlude with the witch began to feel more and more ephemeral. He can still taste her lips, his hands still thrum with the feel of her waist, her scent clings to his clothes. But like vestiges of a dream that linger after waking, he fears them melting from his grasp to return a cold reality.

He puts the needle down, and Alice Coltrane's voice blooms around him.

"Hey...,"

He waits to turn around, not for lack of eagerness, but because an Orphean impulse clutches him. Perhaps he should've left well enough alone, maintained the comfortable distance they'd once enjoyed. Perhaps, even now, she's preparing to tell him so herself.

There's the shuffle of a jacket being removed and he hears her settle on the couch. Force of habit has Klaus reaching for the bell, intending to ring the kitchen for the tea she usually takes at this hour when her voice stops him, "I'll actually have what you're having, if that's okay."

Her tone is wry but warm, pulling a smile from him as he fills a second glass with bourbon and turns around at last. He finds a rain-speckled witch with her feet tucked beneath her, clearly comfortable and not going anywhere, her cheeks warming at his gaze.

The music is a river again and he forces himself to wait on the banks, to not seize her in his hands and re-acquaint himself with the dream. It's an effort that stretches him thin, so he downs the rest of his drink and pours himself another before she speaks.

"I went to see Graham."

"Can I come in?"

Graham stuffed his hands deep in each pocket, frowning as he contemplated her question. He wore his grey tracksuit and his hair was mussed no doubt from falling asleep on the sofa. She remembered their afternoon naps together and how he never complained when she inevitably stole the blankets. Guilt tightened her gut again and she wished she'd had the self-awareness to never involve him in any of this. But involved he'd gotten and she had to make it right.

Graham took the box of food from herand moved aside by way of reply. She stepped inside, assuring him lightly that she'd left the delivery guy a decent tip.

"Good to know, I was worried you'd whacked him."

"What?"

"That's what your sort does, isn't it?"

Bonnie froze a little. "My...sort?"

"The mafia." A tired smile passed across Graham's face. "Just a joke, love."

Klaus can't repress a quiet chuckle. Graham is right, in his own way. New Orleans has no shortage of supernatural groups vying for power, but none dented the authority of the Mikaelsons. His family no longer engaged in open warfare with the other clans, but their position was unchallenged. It was a mutually beneficial acquiescence. He wouldn't stand any threat to the city, and the city repaid him by conceding his little domain. And having a Bennett witch at his side had only curried him more favor.

His thoughts sober a little, however, when he notes the pensive look on her face. He takes a sip of his drink. "And I presume you disabused him of that notion?"

The witch is silent for a long while before releasing a heavy sigh. "Do you remember what I told you about...about Jeremy? And why we broke up?"

Of course he did. He's catalogued every little morsel of her she's allowed him to and then some. But he only offers an attentive nod and waits for her to continue.

"When I realized he was still hung up on Anna I was so angry...I kept thinking if he hadn't seen her ghost he would've gotten over her. That he'd finally be the boyfriend I wanted him to be. Then we broke up and I told myself I'd never be in that position again...," she pauses, biting her lip as doubt sweeps across her face. She seems to be wrestling some inner conflict, trying to master her thoughts before she can express them.

He can't look away.

He'd never imagined he would be privy to such moments, that she'd let him glimpse beyond her careful doors.

"What happened, love?" he asks softly, afraid she might retreat again.

"It wasn't you, and I wanted to make sure you heard that again," Bonnie said, looking down at her lap. "It was my fault. I was running away from my real feelings, and you got caught in the middle."

Graham gave a humorless chuckle. They were seated on his couch, him nursing a beer while she chose her words as carefully as she could. "You know I think I've heard enough for one night," he said, focusing on the bottle in his hands. "You can see yourself out now."

Bonnie sensed the injury beneath his tone. It's a familiar one, she'd borne that same wound for years, lived with it and inside it, laid it on her pillow every night. The last thing she'd wanted was to inflict it on someone else.

Which is why the next few seconds were crucial.

"You can forget about all of this, you know. Me, Klaus, the break up...everything."

Graham snorted. "Is that so?"

She raised her hand to his forehead. A tender, ministering touch like when she'd tend to his headaches. His eyes widened at the bulb of blue light glowing around her fingers. And for a moment, between the shock and fear, a flash of wonder crossed his face.

"Yes," she said simply, her hand poised in the air. Bonnie smiled, meeting his gaze in a soft flicker of understanding. A feather of a moment, too light to grasp.

Then Graham leaned into the light and magic filled his head, swift and clean as a river.

He slumped forward into her arms as the spell took effect, and Bonnie lay him there on the couch where they'd often lain together, under the blanket someone else would one day steal from him. When he awoke, she would be gone, and the river would have receded, taking the memories, the wound, with it.

"I took his memories of me," Bonnie confesses, looking into the bottom of her empty glass. "So he wouldn't have to try and make sense of it all. I couldn't tell him the truth about - about the necklace and what I really am -,"

"So you spared him the painful confusion of having to wonder how he let you slip through his fingers," Klaus finishes for her as her green eyes slowly rise to meet his, their depths gleaming with that particular blend of steel and vulnerability he'd come to think of as quintessentially Bonnie.

"I know it wasn't the right thing-,"

"It was the necessary thing," he reminds her, his hand moving to caress her cheek.

"And a task I might have happily carried out on your behalf, had you asked," he adds fondly. "It was I who Compelled the bloke."

She shakes her head. "You wouldn't have had to Compel him if I wasn't in denial. Not just about you...," she adds with a wry smile offsetting her blush, "but a lot of things. I wanted so badly to keep the supernatural away from my love life, as if the two could ever be separated...,"

Her words trail off and they both fall silent with the music, the air between them thickening warm and golden like honey. Her neck arches slightly into his touch, and he permits his fingers to trace the line of her jaw, her lips, the flutter of her pulse. His movements are slow. Her expression, open, soft, inviting, holding him entranced. So much so that he finds he'd rather not move, rather not dislodge the crystalline moment. He's an artist, he knows how things break, how you spend centuries trying to restore the unshattered moments before.

It's Bonnie who inches closer, her lips about to brush his when the clamor of his siblings' footsteps in the courtyard alert him to their impending presence. They move apart as the other Mikaelsons pour into the room: Kol, roaring drunk with more alcohol tucked under his arm, Rebekah swaying against Marcel's elbow, and Elijah behind them, his usual hauteur lightened into something more genial. In high spirits, they each make themselves comfortable while bursting into stories about their night in the Quarter and the festivities ensuing in the wake of the feud between two covens being peacefully resolved.

Kol insists on refilling Bonnie's drink as they all commend her efforts in preventing a mini war, and Klaus watches her accept the praise with her usual flustered modesty.

Occasionally her eyes would stray to his, bright and knowing, and time would thicken again, and he would thumb those precious seconds like gold-leaf.

Much later, when everyone else had wandered off, he walks Bonnie to her room. She seems quiet and contemplative again, and he finds himself oddly content to keep pace beside her as they traverse the compound.

Bonnie glances over her shoulder and sees him lingering at the threshold.

"Aren't...you going to come in?"

He clasps his hands behind his back with a small smile. "Is that an invitation, little witch?"

She flushes slightly. "It's your house."

"It's your room."

His eyes drink her in with quiet hunger as her runaway heartbeat fills his ears.

Her face flickers softly. "...come in."

It's as though a spell had fallen from her tongue. His feet move of their own volition, his hands take hold of her waist, his mouth finds hers without looking. He tastes her, breathes her deep. There's a river behind his temples, rushing, filling his senses and drowning him quietly. Bonnie's arms go around his neck and he presses her closer, taking her lower lip between his teeth, drawing a soft sigh out of her. It's a bit like being back at that rose festival again, only this time he welcomes the intoxication, sways into the dizzy sweetness of it.

They end up on her bed, pressed together, his hands molding her to him while he kisses her deeply. She's catlike beneath him, supple and warm. He inhales her with each pass of their lips. Every breath a pomegranate seed, precious and narcotic and dissolving on the tongue. Her shoes fall off and he feels a bare, delicate foot run along his trouser leg. It makes him smile into the kiss before he pulls away to trail his nose and lips down her neck, the urge to savor and devour warring inside him. He draws back slightly to soak in the sight of her, her parted lips and tousled hair, the soft warmth in her eyes.

Bonnie tucks her head against his shoulder and he holds her close.

At length he glances about, finally taking measure of the space she's made her own. The simple frames on the wall, the sage-green curtains, the small altar tucked into a corner piled with herbs and crystals.

"So...this is your room," he says with a knowing look, making her blush and roll her eyes. Her hands idle on his shirt and she appears to be thinking again.

Her glaze flicks to his. "Klaus...how are we going to do this?"

She isn't merely speaking of the physical, but the scope of her life here, the doors they're about to walk through that can't ever be undone.

He tilts her chin up and claims her mouth again. They have time, enough to draw out like taffy, to make it last, to melt. He promises this, his lips traveling over her jaw and throat, pausing at the swell of her breasts. Lifting her lilac-colored blouse, he bends to kiss the smooth slope of her stomach, tongue circling her belly button until she arches up, trembling.

"Slowly," he breathes against her skin.

epilogue

He finds himself in Paris. It's early spring and the city is still silvered with traces of winter. It's not really a holiday he can afford (his day job as an animator for a startup studio paid the bills modestly at best) but lately he'd been feeling impulsive, adventurous, hungry for something he can't quite name. Most of all, he wants to draw. Not for work, not for the indie project he's developing with his friend, not for anything but simply...simply that he desires to, that something inside him's swung open like a window and a bird flown through, and that flight is a pattern he must understand, some meaning to decode and hold in his hands.

Graham finds a spot by the Seine, among the pigeons and the loitering couples, and takes out his sketchbook. With the river for company, he begins to sketch.

A/N: I hope y'all aren't too disappointed by the lack of smut; but so much of this fic is about the unknowability and mystery of certain experiences that I felt "showing" Klaus and Bonnie's more intimate physical exchanges would depart from the spirit of the story. You're free to disagree with me in the reviews tho! Thank you to every single one of you who's followed, favorited and most of all reviewed this story from the beginning. I started writing this as a oneshot, a glimpse really, and y'all helped me turn it into a six-chapter mini story that's honestly become one of my favorite AUs for my OTP.

Now that Klaus is "officially" dead in TO canon...literally nothing has changed as far as I'm concerned lol. I still plan to keep writing for Klonnie, both updates and new projects ;) However, I am in the crunch stage of dissertation writing, so if you don't see any updates for a month or so, that's why. I'm mostly done with the next chapter of "a case of you", and thefudge and I are co-planning another Klonnie event around Halloween, so I'm definitely not gonna be away for long. In the meantime, do check out "The Wager" by TheHedgeRider especially if you needed something to wash down the TO finale.

Thank you again! Until next time xoxox