{ klarolineauseason } - week 1: canon divergence
It's been one thousand years - Caroline has officially been alive for as long as Klaus had when he died, and yet, she has never forgotten him.
But a millennia is how long it took her to find a solution to her hybrid-less life, and now she's more than ready to go back and change the past. It turns out that an eternal existence without the warm comfort of Klaus' presence on the sidelines wasn't what she wanted - she had missed him for so long that his absence almost turned into an obsession, and Caroline was tired of dreams and memories.
So now, with the help of a few rare artifacts and some very powerful dark magic, Caroline is going to get herself back in time and prevent the tragedy from happening - no matter how much she will sacrifice in order to do so.
It's time for her to be selfish.
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"The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!"
[Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (chapt. XXXIII)]
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She had died; when the old crone had pierced her heart with a blessed wooden stake, as her chanting became louder and louder and the words lost meaning, Caroline had unequivocally died. She had to, so that her soul could travel backwards, annulling the last millennia like a hand swiping across a blackboard.
One moment she was, the next she was no more - and then it felt like being everywhere and everytime, as the spell warped reality, undoing it, and dragging her back to the time in which she had anchored herself through the little bit of hybrid blood that she had kept all of this time.
It felt like being in the eye of a hurricane, until abruptly everything stopped.
And she felt like being in a corporeal state once again.
A hoarse gasp echoes in the deadly silent living room, and the vampire laying on the couch blinks her eyes open.
The tangy taste of blood still lingers on her tongue, a blood she immediately recognizes - centuries weren't able to delete that particular memory from her brain - and instinct tells her immediately when the spell has taken her.
It was the chosen moment - before everything started going downhill for him, and for her too.
She turns her head, slowly, barely allowing herself to hope - and there he is, sitting on the leather lounge-chair next to the window, the warm glow of the lamp casting morbid shadows upon his stony face.
He looks angrier and more dangerous than she remembers - or maybe time had simply allowed her to grasp a bette understanding of him to the point of noticing even the smallest of his expressions - even so, she couldn't be happier.
Before she has fully made up her mind - she should probably evaluate the situation, come up with a plan, try not to fuck up too much the timeline as the witches had repeatedly reminded her, but those thoughts come a second too late - she's already up and across the room, a knot closing her throat as she tries not to cry, and --
-- in his arms.
((It doesn't feel real to touch him, hold him, feel his breath against her cheek after all this time. It would be a lie to say that her every waking moment was spent thinking of him, yet there was always something - a word, an object, a place - that made the memory of him go off in her mind, feeding her longing, alimenting her obsession. Exacerbating the void left by his absence. And the feeling of their last kiss still seared in her brain, the bittersweet taste of a goodbye that they weren't supposed to say.
He had promised her an eternity, but was gone long before that started. It wasn't fair - he wasn't supposed to die, not after everything.
She had lived missing what they never were.))
Klaus is not privy to the whirlwind going on inside her mind - he simply found himself holding the trembling bundle of a distressed vampire before he had the time to blink her back into focus. His ancient instinct works faster than his mind, and his hand circles around her throat in a manner both harsh and delicate.
Yet, despite the grief and the rage still cursing through his veins, his voice is surprisingly soft when he calls her name, confused and wary. "Caroline…?"
Her hands hold on tighter on the lapels of his jacket, and a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh comes from her lips.
"It worked," she murmurs, finally backing away to look him in the eyes. "God, it worked! You're alive."
That's when he notices it.
There is something different in the depth of her eyes, something that wasn't there only a few hours earlier - a weariness, a harshness that belonged more on one of his siblings rather than someone like Caroline - and it gives him pause, forcing to assess her, for the first time in a long while, as a potential enemy.
She doesn't look bothered by his hand around her throat, as if she trusts him, implicitly, not to overly harm her. Which is strange, considering that he bit her no less than twenty-four hours ago for much less than a potential physical threat.
Klaus frowns, barely noticing when his own thumb starts rubbing gently against her skin, lost in thought. The Caroline he has gotten to know wouldn't act this way, he is sure of it, even if she's apparently aware of his feelings - as she even told him earlier, in her attempt to coax him to save her.
If she was able to unleash this kind of gaze on him... He can almost taste her relief, see the yearning in the way she seems to physically restrain herself from - what? He swallows, his gaze dropping to her pale lips before catching himself - he must have given her more blood than he realized, if his brain has stopped working to this extent.
He almost calls her again to bring her back from whatever place her mind seems to have stuck, but in that moment Caroline backs away slowly, steel suddenly bleeding into her eyes.
"And I'm going to make you stay that way."
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