That afternoon, the sky carried a soft hue, but the tension in the air was palpable. Ethan wore a worn leather backpack on his back, packed with a few hurriedly organized clothes. The weight of what was to come seemed to rest silently on his shoulders.
"So, Hope... is your aunt coming soon? Have you talked to her about me yet?" asked Ethan, adjusting the strap of his backpack.
"Yeah, I told her you were coming along," Hope replied.
On the inside, Hope's thoughts resonated with much greater depth. She had already spoken to Freya about Ethan a long time ago. Her aunt, always cautious and perceptive, had shown an almost magnetic interest in that whole imprint story, knowing full well the weight a supernatural bond of that magnitude carried in their world.
"Good... because I really hope none of your family members try to kill me or something for getting too close to their beloved niece," Ethan joked, letting out a light smile and tilting his head to observe the clear sky above.
Hope stared at his face, raising an eyebrow with a hint of irony.
"Are you getting too close to me?"
"Well, I mean... I'm your friend," Ethan gave a half-smile, scratching the back of his neck. "To be honest, I don't think I've ever said that out loud to anyone."
"What?" Hope stared at him, surprised. "You've never had a friend?"
"Of course I've had a few friends," he corrected, laughing softly, "but never anyone this close. To be honest, until a few days or weeks ago, I was completely different from what I am now. Not just in appearance, but even emotionally—saying something like that would have been impossible for me."
Hope observed him in silence.
"I remember when you first arrived around here," Ethan continued, his voice growing more thoughtful. "I never thought that, in such a short time, all of this would happen."
"The world has strange ways of bringing people together, Hope. Maybe it was fate..."
At the sound of that word—fate—Hope's heart took an involuntary leap in her chest. The idea that none of this was mere coincidence brought a chill and an uncertain surge of emotion.
Before she could answer, the subtle rumble of an engine interrupted the moment. A black Polo turned the corner and pulled up slowly in front of the main gate of the Salvatore School.
"Look, seems like your aunt is here," Ethan pointed out.
Hope looked toward the gate and immediately recognized the vehicle.
"Yeah, that's her. Let's go," she said, walking toward the car, accompanied by him.
As soon as they reached the vehicle, the driver's side door opened and Freya stepped out. A warm smile appeared on her face upon seeing her niece, and she wrapped her in a tight embrace.
"Hope, my dear! How have you been?"
"I'm good, Auntie. How about you?" Hope replied, returning the hug.
"Well... I can't say I'm 100% fine with everything that's been happening," Freya sighed, releasing her gently.
Hope nodded with a restrained smile and remembered she needed to make the introductions.
"Oh, right, Auntie," Hope turned to the boy beside her. "This is Ethan. Ethan, this is my aunt, Freya Mikaelson."
"Hello, Miss Freya. I'm Ethan, nice to meet you," he said, politely extending his hand.
Freya looked at the boy, assessing him for a brief second with her sharp witch's gaze, before relaxing her expression and smiling.
"Hello, Ethan. It's great that you're with Hope right now. Thank you so much for that," she replied, shaking his hand.
"It's no problem at all for me. Besides, I've never visited New Orleans," Ethan joked, lightening the mood.
Freya let out a soft laugh and gestured toward the car.
"Get in, let's go."
They loaded the luggage and settled into the car. Freya started the engine, and the vehicle hit the road. After a few minutes lulled only by the constant hum of the engine, Ethan broke the silence.
"So, Miss Freya... could you tell me a little about yourself? Or would that be intrusive?"
"Sure, I can talk about myself... if you talk about yourself first," Freya replied through the rearview mirror, keeping a light tone. "Oh, and you don't need to call me 'Miss.' Just Freya is fine."
"Talk about myself?" Ethan stole a quick glance at Hope, who kept her eyes fixed on the scenery outside the window. "What do you want to know? There isn't much to know about me... But well, if I'm going to talk about my life, let's start at the beginning: my mother."
He adjusted himself in the backseat and took a deep breath before continuing.
"I grew up in Reseda with her. It wasn't easy at all. A young mother raising a child alone, with no father around to dictate what should or shouldn't be done. She always did her best for me. She worked—and still works—incredibly hard. Deep down, I don't even know why she works so hard, considering that guy left a massive amount of money... enough for us to live the rest of our lives without a single financial worry."
"And why does she keep working?" Freya asked, attentive to the conversation.
"She used to say the money could run out one day," Ethan explained. "So she decided to take a risk. She opened a liquor store, then a convenience store, and later a clothing store. To tell you the truth, these days I don't even know how many stores she has. All I know is that it worked out really well; she's doing very well financially."
He paused briefly, and his tone shifted subtly, growing heavier.
"Now, about my father... since we're all supernatural here," he joked with a bitter laugh, "I'll tell you everything I know. You two probably know way more about him than I do. To start off, he met my mother when she was still a teenager. He went to the same school as her and was the kind of guy who..." Ethan made a face of visible disgust. "...any girl would fall for his talk. At least, that's what my mom told me."
Hope turned slightly in her seat, paying attention to every word.
"I don't really like talking about that guy, even if he is my father," Ethan continued, his voice carrying an old resentment. "Everything I heard from my mother about him involved pain and suffering. She tried to talk about it in a light way to spare me, but I know exactly what I saw when I looked into her eyes. He destroyed her... disappearing or doing whatever he did before he vanished."
The silence in the car was absolute, broken only by the boy's narration.
"I have a theory about why she's so obsessed with work," he said, staring at his own lap. "It's to try to forget him and whatever he did to her. Whatever happened... tied my mother to him in a literal way. In a way that she simply can't move on. She constantly thinks about him, never got with another man after that, never even considered the possibility."
Hope and Freya listened in total silence. It was clear that this wasn't just a surface-level story, but a profound outburst from someone who carried the scars of a family broken by magic.
Hope's mind was racing. The way Ethan described his mother's unbreakable obsession... everything pointed to a single word: imprint.
Freya glanced through the rearview mirror, picking up on the same connection as her niece.
"Hope mentioned something called an imprint to me earlier, Ethan," Freya said calmly. "What do you know about it?"
"Ah, about that, to be honest, I only know the basics of what my mom explained to me... but I already have a pretty good idea of what it is," he admitted.
Hope's heart took an involuntary leap upon hearing that.
"Why do you say that?" Freya asked, keeping her voice steady and curious.
"How can I put this...?" Ethan muttered, staring at the landscape passing quickly by the window, the reflection in his eyes revealing the uncertainty gnawing at him from the inside. "I didn't read about the imprint in some ancient book, and nobody handed me a manual. I lived it. I spent my whole life watching my mom act like she was under a spell for a man who wasn't even there. She's completely human—no magic, no wolf blood, nothing. Yet, she was completely consumed by him, unable to ever move on or even look at another man."
He took a slow breath, his voice dropping.
"The way I see it, the imprint isn't some romantic bond. It's an overwhelming, one-sided force that comes strictly from the wolf side and locks onto someone else, whether they want it or not. My father carried the curse, but my mom was the one who paid the price for it."
In his thoughts, Ethan was thoroughly fed up with having to explain or talk about the imprint all the time. Beyond being embarrassing, it was emotionally exhausting. He knew all too well that the girl sitting right next to him was his own imprint target. He couldn't choose who it was—it just happened. But there was no way he was going to reveal that to them now; it was far too early, and definitely not the right time.
"I see," Freya said. "I don't know if Hope told you, Ethan, but I 'met' your father."
"Yeah, Hope told me all about it, about my half-brother and everything that happened. It's a real shame, all of it."
"This world has strange ways of turning our lives upside down."
"Yeah, tell me about it," Hope said.
Ethan offered a small smile at that.
"Anyway, that's pretty much all I can say about this thing. Freya, now it's your turn. I've already heard a bit about your family from Hope, but I want to hear it from someone who was actually there, over 1,000 years on this earth. What was it like? How was it living for so long?"
Freya let out a short breath through her nose, a sound that hovered between nostalgia and a centuries-old weariness. Her hands adjusted slightly on the steering wheel, and the witch's eyes lost themselves for a brief moment on the wet asphalt ahead before returning to the rearview mirror.
"A thousand years is a very long life to sum up in a car ride, Ethan," Freya began, her voice dropping to a more intimate and deep tone. "And, to be honest, I didn't live those thousand years the same way my siblings did. I didn't spend ten centuries running around the world, building empires, or running from shadows. My story was much more solitary."
Hope tilted her head slightly to the side in the front seat, paying close attention. Even knowing her family's past, hearing her own aunt narrate the wounds of the 10th century always brought a solemn weight to the room.
"My mother, Esther, was a powerful witch, but before having my siblings"—Klaus, Elijah, Rebekah, Kol, and Finn—"she had a firstborn daughter. Me," Freya continued, maintaining the vehicle's steady speed. "Only, to get pregnant with me, she made a pact back in the Old World with her own sister, my Aunt Dahlia, who was one of the darkest and most power-obsessed witches to ever walk the Earth. The price for that fertility was high: the firstborn child of every generation of our lineage would belong to Dahlia."
Ethan raised his eyebrows in the backseat. The tension from the previous conversation about his father and the imprint seemed to dissolve momentarily before the gravity of Freya's story.
"So you were given to her?" the boy asked, his voice laced with respectful curiosity.
"I was torn away from my family when I was only five years old," Freya corrected, with the firmness of someone who had processed that pain decades ago, but without ever forgetting it. "Esther told my siblings that I had died of a plague. For a thousand years, they grew up and became vampires believing their oldest sister was dead, while I lived under Dahlia's control."
She paused briefly, shifting gears.
"Dahlia wanted absolute power. To achieve that, she created a bonding spell between the two of us. She used my magic to amplify hers. And so that we could live eternally without dying of old age, she placed us in a cycle of magical slumber: we would sleep for an entire century and wake up for only a single year. In that year of vigil, we lived, fed, and absorbed magic, only to fall back into sleep for another hundred years."
"Wait..." Ethan frowned, mentally calculating the temporal math. "So you lived a thousand years, but in reality, you were awake for only about ten or twelve years over ten centuries?"
"Exactly," Freya nodded with a sad half-smile. "I saw empires fall and the world change completely every time I opened my eyes. It was a horrible existence, Ethan. I was a slave to my own blood, chained to a woman who only saw me as a source of energy. I spent centuries looking for a way to break that spell, to free myself, and above all, to find the family that was taken from me."
Hope stole a glance at her aunt, feeling a lump in her throat. The silent parallel between Freya's magical bondage and the tie Ethan's father had inflicted on his mother did not go unnoticed by either of them.
"And how did you free yourself?" Ethan asked, completely absorbed in the story.
"I finally managed to escape and found them in New Orleans, centuries later," Freya said, her gaze softening as she recalled her arrival in the city. "It wasn't easy. My siblings were paranoid, broken, and traumatized by a thousand years of wars and curses. Klaus, in particular, didn't trust me. He thought I was a spy or a threat. But over time, I proved that blood is blood. I faced Dahlia alongside them, we broke the curse, and I finally got what I wanted most in my entire existence: a real family."
She stole a quick look in the rearview mirror, locking eyes with Ethan for a second before turning her attention back to the road.
"What I'm trying to tell you with all of this, Ethan, is that the supernatural has a miserable habit of trying to trap us in roles we didn't choose. Whether through pacts, curses, lineages, or this imprint thing. I spent centuries thinking my life was mapped out by someone else's will. But the moment I decided to fight for my own path, I stopped being a prisoner. You don't need to carry the weight of what your father did, nor let yourself be defined by how he used his own nature. You make your own destiny."
A contemplative silence settled over the interior of the black Polo once again. Freya's words hung in the air with an almost tangible force, offering not just an answer about her past, but a veiled piece of advice for the fears Ethan harbored in his chest.
Wow, was all Ethan could say at that moment. Hearing Freya's story truly gave him a new paradigm of what family meant.
"Family must mean a lot to you now that you have them, right Freya?" Ethan asked.
"Yes, they are everything I have. I would give my life for every single one of them."
"Yeah, I liked your story. Even though it sounds tragic, in the end, you got your happy ending."
Freya smiled and looked at Hope through the rearview mirror. "I've already had my happy ending. Now I want hers," Freya said, referring to Hope.
Hope looked at her aunt in the mirror and smiled, even if it was a small, somber smile.
Ethan stared at Hope for a few seconds, taking in the weight contained in that small, melancholic smile.
"You're going to get your happy ending, Hope," Ethan said, breaking the silence with an almost involuntary sincerity. "If there's one thing I've realized since I met you, it's that you carry the whole world on your shoulders, but you're still standing. If even a family over a thousand years old full of curses managed to find each other again... you'll find your happy ending too one day."
Hope blinked slowly, turning her face toward him. She hadn't expected that direct statement. Ethan's gaze had no apparent hidden motives or flattery; it was purely empathetic, coming from someone who also knew what it was like to grow up under the shadow of a past he hadn't chosen.
"Thank you, Ethan," Hope replied, her voice coming out a little softer. "But in our world, 'happily ever after' usually comes at a steep price."
"It might," Freya chimed in, keeping her eyes glued to the highway as the road signs indicated they were getting closer to the state line, "but that doesn't mean it isn't worth paying."
The conversation gradually slowed down as late afternoon gave way to twilight. The sky took on orange and purplish tones, casting long shadows over the road. Little by little, the exhaustion of the journey and the emotional weight of that day's revelations made silence prevail inside the vehicle once more, but this time it was a comfortable silence, free of the initial tension.
Ethan rested his head against the cold window of the black Polo, watching the treetops pass by as dark blurs in the gloom. Inside, his thoughts were racing. He couldn't take his eyes off Hope out of the corner of his eye. Knowing she was the target of his imprint brought a mix of comfort and terror. He didn't want to be like his father; he didn't want fate or a supernatural biological force to impose anything on her or him. He wanted every conversation, every gesture, and every step closer to be real—his choices, and hers.
In his thoughts, Ethan couldn't help but feel a little nervous. It was all so new, and the idea of facing his father's past while stepping onto the turf of one of the oldest and most dangerous families in the world made his chest beat at an uncertain rhythm.
A few hours later...
Hope had fallen into a light sleep. Ethan was still awake, having watched every landscape that passed before his eyes for hours. To him, all of this was new; he had never gone this far or traveled by car for so long before.
"Is it going to take much longer to get there, Freya?" Ethan asked her.
"We'll reach New Orleans in less than an hour," Freya whispered softly, so as not to wake her niece.
"Alright."