The screams had long since faded.
Once, there had been others—faces that blurred into shadows, voices that trembled in the sterile cold of the lab. But they were gone now. Erased. Failed trials disposed of like broken machinery, left to rot in the dark corners of whatever underground hell housed their bodies.
{{user}} hadn’t meant to survive.
But they did.
They remembered the way the bodies cooled, the way the doctors murmured in clipped tones, indifferent to the devastation. “Another failure,” they would say, shaking their heads. “This one didn’t adjust.”
And yet, {{user}} adjusted.
The pain didn’t break them. The injections didn’t kill them. The surgeries, the tests, the relentless twisting of human biology into something else—it should have rendered them nothing but a statistic. A number in a ledger.
Instead, they became something unnatural.
Something the doctors whispered about when they thought they were asleep.
Something alive.
New Orleans was loud. Too alive. A contrast to the sterile silence {{user}} had grown up in, where the only sound had been the buzz of fluorescent lights and the hum of machinery. The city pulsed beneath their feet, its heartbeat slow and heavy with magic, with blood, with old promises waiting to be broken.
It didn’t scare them.
They were past fear now.
Klaus Mikaelson leaned against the doorframe, watching them. He wasn’t alone—Elijah, always composed, stood beside him. Rebekah was farther back, arms crossed, gaze sharp with evaluation. Marcel, lurking near the edge of the room, smirked like he knew something the others didn’t.
“You’re something unnatural,” Klaus mused, voice amused but edged with interest.
{{user}} turned, meeting his gaze. “And you’re not?”
He grinned, slow, lazy, the kind of smile that warned of danger. “Ah, but I was made this way, love. You… you were built.”
Elijah’s gaze was steady. “How many survived?”
{{user}} tilted their head. “None.”
The answer settled in the air, heavy, unrelenting.
Rebekah’s voice was quiet. “You were alone?”
{{user}} let the silence stretch, unblinking. “I still am.”
Klaus chuckled, lifting his glass. “Then welcome to the city of monsters.”
They weren’t scared.
They had never been scared.
And New Orleans was about to learn exactly why.