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highgaarden · 4 years

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in the woods, somewhere; He doesn’t want to tell her that he is tired of haunting her, that years have passed and the world is creaking with the weight of them, and that he loves, he loves, he loves her—

written for @klaroline-events’ june kc bingo + ghost 2021 words, canon-divergence, romance

In another city in another country in another world, almost, a dead girl scrubs her dead lover from her skin in bubbles that smell of lavender and bergamot, eucalyptus and lemon oil. She wants new skin, a skin that has been taught to forget all things skins were sometimes sentimental about: silly things like the learned touches on her knees, the feeling of lips in the hollows of her, the cold of whispers in the swoop of her ribs.

She mourns the loss of her body, her heart, how they yearn to be covered by a man so burdened with age he should be ugly from it, but he is beautiful, beautiful, and she mourns him, too. Mourns the love she had planted in his chest like a garden grown from twigs and other broken things. Mourns his churlish grins, the quick of his fingers winding in her hair, mourns the ache in her teeth whenever he shows her his wrist like a quiet, quiet secret.

She mourns him, she buries him, and then she sinks lower into the water to drown in her pretty petal ocean.

As all fights go, Caroline could hurl a vicious one, with fists and kicks and screams and bloodshed, but Klaus can deflect and duck and appear and vanish. When he comes back she is always curled in a corner, throat hoarse and nails bleeding, and he is always sorry.

“I love you,” she’ll say.

“I want you to die,” she’ll say.

And he always says, “No you don’t. No you don’t.”

Somewhere dark and green, Klaus kisses her, a suffocating she has not felt since Katherine had pushed her last breath out of her. He holds her to a tree and curls his fists into her hair and fits himself against her so well, and there is an unravelling inside her.

She stumbles out of her stupor, dazed and blinking, and he looks back at her like he doesn’t quite know what’s happened either.

“That was a really stupid promise you just made,” she says breathlessly, for want of something to say—her lips are trembling, her knees.

“I know,” Klaus says, so brilliantly rueful. “Gods, do I know.

A story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, but the story of Caroline and Klaus, the dead girl and her dead lover, start in the moments in between. He already knows her name when he meets her on her second deathbed, and the sound of him already puts pinpricks in her heart.

“I know you,” she says.

“I’ll heal you,” he says.

“And then I’ll be yours, and then my friends will die, and then the world will end.” She’s stubborn, once-golden curls a flaccid yellow on coiled around cracked lips. “Leave the poison in me. I’m dead anyway.”

He sends her a gaze so intent and curious one could forget that he is the one who put her in this bed to begin with, who put fangs in her and veins around her best friend’s eyes and a knife in Elena’s chest. He hovers over her like a ghost, flicks the bell on her charm bracelet like he expects choirs to erupt. He looks at her fondly, like they’ve known each other for years.

“Stop that,” she snaps. “You don’t get to sit on my bedside on my freakin’ birthday and harp at me about roses and cities I’ll never see, about music I’ll never learn the names of, about food I can’t even enjoy because all I crave now is blood.” She coughs, probably spittles over him some, but whatever, she’s dying.

It resounds in her like a gong, and she claws desperately at her sheets, wants to call for her mother, doesn’t want Klaus’ face to be the last one she sees before she bites the dust, kicks the bucket. She wants the sooth of her mother’s fingers in her hair; instead she gets the apple-white of Klaus’s brandished wrist.

“Go ahead,” Klaus says invitingly. “It tastes just like wine, I’ll bet.”

“I hate you,” she says, she cries. She’s so close she can taste it festering in the gaping maw in her neck, the one that’s bubbling with the scent of poison and wolf. “I want to die.”

“No you don’t.” He props her up against him, cradled almost gently in his arms, and she feels his hands in her hair massaging, she smells his wrist like her last supper laid out before her, and her mouth waters. She parts her lips, her fangs push out, she’s so miserable and she’s so hungry. “No you don’t.”

In the woods, somewhere:

Klaus had told her about cities greater than God and cathedrals that swallowed you whole. She supposes one day she’ll see them with her own eyes, not in his mouth, always wondering which ones were made up truths and which ones were lies meant to lure her out of this town.

She looks at him, and she’s been told that it isn’t good to look at Klaus Mikaelson the wrong way, or the right way, or in any sort of way, but when Caroline looks she pierces, she wants, and she takes. She takes his heart and his teeth and his blood, collected in little vials in the grooves of rotten roots, and he tries not to look pleased.

It is a strange sort of understanding that they have, that the trees listen to. She is older now, but still young enough to know that nothing lasts forever, not really, and Klaus – Klaus just wants her to remember him when she leaves.

“Absconds,” he corrects himself after a fashion. “Like a lady in the night, gone forever.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” and it’s a promise as much as it is a confession to misery, “because somebody needs to keep Elena from you.”

Klaus looks thoughtful. “What if Elena doesn’t need keeping?”

“You mean: what if you killed her.”

And Klaus grins then, his eyes crinkling, his hair curling around his perked ears. “You are an absolute delight.”

“Flattery isn’t a ticket to massacre, buddy.” Caroline picks her way expertly through the dead roots in the forest floor, the muck of flattened leaves and jagged little stones. “She’s almost eighty, her birthday’s next week, and you are not writing her into your twisted little recipe book of Easy Make Hybrids, Holiday Edition.”

In this page of the book they are friends, somehow, and I’m sure you’re wondering how they end up the way they do—but as all good romances go, there is never a clear distinction when one crosses that threshold, is there? Caroline will wonder this herself, one day, in her perfumed tub in her smarting, raw skin.

“I do like you,” Klaus says, and Caroline wonders, too, if this is a step up from I fancy you. It’s a boyish admission, shy, almost – she peers at him sidelong, and scoffs.

“Flattery!” she announces to the woods. It rustles in agreement.

“Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” Klaus says reproachfully. “Why won’t you consider my offer?”

Caroline stops in her tracks, suddenly, and he almost bumps into her if not for the isms that make up the vampire parts of him. She turns now to properly look at him. Klaus looks at her the way he always does, like there is something stirring just underneath the stillness of him, the slow beat of his undead heart. And she asks, honestly, “Aren’t you tired of haunting me?”

“Not for a minute.” Klaus tilts his head. “What if I promised to stay away from Elena?”

“You’ve made this promise before.”

“What if I promised to stay away from you?”

And this, this catches Caroline’s attention. He looks like he means it, and there troubles the part of her that is always trying to catch him in a lie, the part that longs to just try him, to call his bluff. She is older now, she’s no longer a prey to disillusionment, but Klaus—he is older now, too, but the world no longer marvels at it. Everyone’s older now.

“What do you want?” Her eyes narrow. Her heart races.

Klaus hums, Klaus smiles, and Klaus says: “A kiss.”

When Caroline says Klaus is terrible at keeping promises, what she really means is that he keeps them.

She counts the vials of his blood, counts the different ways they catch sunlight.

She counts how many days have passed.

How many years.

Some twenty years later Elena dies, and she moves to a different city in another country in another world, almost, where the cathedrals swallowed you whole. Whether the sketch of rooftops around her were greater than God she doesn’t know, but one day Klaus finds her in a little café in the oldest part of the city and he sweeps her up and he kisses her the way he had in those woods so long ago, and this, if she had payed attention to anything other than the part of his teeth and the taste of his tongue, this is the beginning of their undoing.

“I love you,” she says, vicious like her temper, spiteful, because these are words that aren’t true and Klaus knows that.

“No you don’t,” he says, and he tries to shush her, tries to cover her mouth, but the words keep coming, and he pushes away.

He doesn’t want to tell her that he is tired of haunting her, that years have passed and the world is creaking with the weight of them, and that he loves, he loves, he loves her—

“And if you’ll stop being stubborn you would shut that pretty mouth of yours and just listen—” His hands shake and he stills them with a quick flex, “I did not kill Regina, I did not order anything on her—”

“I did not spend a hundred years in Mystic Falls to watch Elena’s great-granddaughter fall prey to the kind of shit she went through,” Caroline hisses through her teeth. “You knew. You knew about Regina and you didn’t tell me—”

“Because you would have gone back,” Klaus says, furious and miserable, and – and just listen, love, listen—

“And if I had, she wouldn’t be DEAD!” She roars, and these are words that Klaus doesn’t understand, tears she’s shedding not because she’s seen the face of her friend die for the umpteenth time, but this. This is proof that Klaus, no matter what he says, no matter what he does, he will always be the monster she’d met on her second deathbed, will always put pinpricks in her heart.

Klaus reaches for her but she slaps his hands away, the room spinning around her with names Klaus finally sheds: Tristan, Genevieve, Marcel, an old curse, a new prophecy, the weight of the full moon, Regina. Regina, the final doppelganger, the last of the Petrova legacy.

“You couldn’t just let it go,” she whispers.

“We’re the same, Caroline,” he whispers back, and her heart breaks.

This is not the ending, nor is this the beginning, but this is Klaus and Caroline sitting in the same room they had sat in so long ago, her second deathbed and his first lie. Only this time, she is holding a match.

Everyone they know is dead, after all.

“This way, we can start again.” She does not shake when she exhales.

Klaus says nothing, just breathes her in, eyes bright and wet and disbelieving - he loves her. The dead girl and her dead lover dance slowly in the middle of the room, the flame flickers between them, wavers, but never goes out. She could drop it any time, and the idea torments him as much as it tickles.

And then everything is on fire.

Caroline holds her hand out and he takes it, and she leads him out of there, tears drying on her face, the tail of his coat simmering and singed. She has new skin, she tells him, and he has new blood in his veins, and she’ll bet that it will not taste like wine.

#kcbingo2020 #klaroline #klaus x caroline #klarolineedit #loving klaroline #hannah writes things #hannah does kc bingo #anyway this is a breathless pieec of something because i've been majorly angsting over kc recently and needed some poetic clarity #but fret not it is not /that/ angsty - it's got an ending; a happy one - a hopeful one

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