seasons (waiting on you)
kc frosted exchange gift fic for the lovely @darkestgrays
It is always odd, the way these things go.
Blood, maybe.
A soul bond, definitely.
A quick cut of the eyes across a crowded room.
A mouthful of sharp teeth.
A heart full of want.
The stories are all one and the same.
And they all begin with someone walking into a room.
—
Once, in a diner somewhere:
Writer walks in. Writer is disgruntled, behind on his latest novel, needs a coffee and a caring hand. His hair hasn’t been touched by a comb in three days. There is a cut on his wrist, though he does not remember how that had happened.
Waitress swoops behind the till. She is juggling two coffees and a plate greasy with bacon and eggs, which she passes off to someone else, barks a quick order to get it to table seven. She is as organized as her hair is obedient: it is tucked back into a ponytail, swinging in the air like a lasso free and loose, about to latch onto some poor unsuspecting animal’s neck. And coiled-yellow. Her hair is so yellow.
A bit like the su—
“I think you’re an Americano, no sugar kind,” she says as he reaches the counter. “Very dramatic sweater, by the way.”
“Do I know you?” he asks, affronted. It is a new sweater, charcoal grey with rigid black stitching, and quite nice thank you very much.
“No, but I’ll know you,” she says, and how presumptuous she is—the thought is interrupted by her handwriting: in graceful, practiced movements she wraps up his order with her sprawling penmanship, efficient strokes and careless bends, spelling out his name. He has not given her his name. He is sure. “You wanted this to go, right? See you tomorrow.”
Klaus blinks at the offered bag. He doesn’t remember if he’d even specified, but somehow manages to ask, rather dazedly, “And what makes you think I’ll come back?”
She peers at him. Her eyes look beyond him, and for a moment she forgets who she is. “But you always do.”
Klaus’s hand moves of its own accord, reaching out through the space floating between them to grasp the bag – his thumb presses firm on the side of her hand, and how he looks at her—it is as if he forgets himself, too, when he says: “I will. I promise.”
Blue eyes meet blue.
A second bleeds into two.
Her lips part.
His mouth curls.
Somewhere, in the distance, mountains shiver and a long-forgotten question lingers in the air, like a half-remembered dream.
All you have to do is—
Sound rushes back into the room. It bangs on the counters jolting them awake. The waitress with the nametag ‘HELLO, MY NAME IS Caroline” frowns. “That… will be four dollars, thirty cents.”
“Keep the change,” Klaus says distractedly. His thumb presses firm around his coffee.
—
And sometimes, even like this:
There is a girl on the platform, running. Her shoes are worn, her clothes are air-light. Her hair streams behind her in bursting coils, the color of sun fragments, of gold—there are snowflakes falling but they melt, never touching her. It might have something to do with the blood on her neck.
He is sitting on a bench, reading Metamorphoses. His watch ticks where it’s clipped around his wrist. It’s almost two, and his hybrids are late. He’s angry, or hungry, or maybe both – he hasn’t decided yet. What he has decided, of course, was that two hybrids would have to go today. There will be room for more.
Steam whistles, metal screeches and grinds, and the smell of blood bursts in the air.
He looks up.
Two platforms away, the girl barely manages to catch her train. The door slides shut behind her, she slumps down. Through the window and a window and another window she sees him, book limp in his hand, eyes startled, Ovid quite forgotten.
The train starts to move, he starts to get up—
They never see each other again.
—
Or even:
“I need your blood.”
“You always need my blood.”
Caroline is sitting on his bed, glasses low on the bridge of her nose. She is smiling, wan. Her hair twirls golden around her, piled up into a bun. Light streams through the window and catches on some loose strands: they glint like the sun. Klaus stands at the foot of his bed, hands tucked into his pockets, frowning deep. “That was one time, sweetheart.”
“An act of kindness on my part,” she says, one eyebrow raised, “beyond what you’re actually due.”
Klaus sighs. He knows how this will go. He will probably have to grovel—he never knows with Caroline, volatile as she is. A thousand years on this earth has not been kind to her. He wonders if she wishes for death, he wonders how bored she must be. He wonders how she hasn’t just figured out how to just die by now. “How do I acquit myself, then?”
“You don’t,” Caroline says flatly. She stretches her limbs. Strong, lithe, graceful. Her nails are not painted. They are chewed and bitten. He is surprised by this. When one says Original Vampire, one does not think of imperfection, especially inflicted upon oneself. Quite suddenly he wonders what her fingers taste like between tongue and teeth.
He thinks of Stefan on his deathbed, Stefan choking on his own bile, Tyler’s bite festering away on his neck. “How do I gain another favor?”
Caroline tilts her head.
She looks as if she is measuring the lines of him, the way her eyes dart. Sizing him up. Testing his worth.
Cataloging him.
Pinning him down to a board, like a dead butterfly—dried up, drawn, diagrammed.
Klaus hates her, he decides.
“Are you sure you want to know the answer to that?” Caroline asks, both eyebrows raised now.
No, he thinks.
“Yes,” he says.
Klaus wonders why he is always Caroline-bait. Why he is the one Caroline is fascinated with.
“The doppelganger,” Caroline brings up conversationally, with the air of someone picking imaginary lint off their shoulder. “How’s she doing?”
Klaus clenches his fists, hidden behind pressed denim.
One day, he thinks—
—
“I’ll kill her,” Caroline growls, face in the dirt, blood in her teeth. Her chin is scraped raw against the stone of the floor: she’d been thrown in with such force she tastes blood in the back of her throat. It almost replenishes her. Almost. Her wrists are bound in vervain-soaked rope, and her cheerleading uniform is in tatters. She hasn’t eaten in days.
“You and me both,” says her cellmate wearily.
Caroline eyes the way his bones seem to peek through the skin of his wrist. “How long have you been here?”
He casts her a sidelong glance. “That’s a depressing question.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s alright.”
“So.”
“Yes.”
“Got a name?”
“Does it matter?” he asks. “We’re about to die.”
Caroline mulls this over. “It matters to me. You’ll die first, I think. Wouldn’t you want someone to remember you?”
He looks at her, then. His eyes are so, so blue. She spies a speckle of moles on his neck, hidden behind the grey collar of his henley shirt. She wonders what color it was originally. “I used to think that being forgotten was the worst thing in the world.”
Caroline shuffles back, leans against the wall, rests her bloodied scalp against green-mossed brick. She tries not to think of what the damp will do to her hair. “It’s not?”
Her cellmate breathes a laugh through his nose. He is still looking at her. For some reason, she thinks of the sway and dip of a large hall, of a dress with too long a train, of being dipped and turned and twirled and breathless and young. So, so, young. She’s not felt that way in years.
“No,” he answers. He closes his eyes, and doesn’t elaborate.
—
“The worst thing about having you,” Klaus confesses, “is knowing that at any minute you might disappear.”
“I’d hate to be predictable,” Caroline responds airily. As if that’s enough of a balm to the quiver of his heartbeat whenever she so much as breathes around him.
They are in the forest.
They’re always in the forest.
She walked into the clearing where he is burying twelve witches for her, her wrists cramped from endless wringing. His shoulders are sore. He has not felt this tired in a long, long time.
“Are you done yet?” she demands, and he has to take in a sharp breath so he does not plunge the tip of the shovel into her perfect, smooth abdomen.
“Clearly,” he says back waspishly. “Can’t you count?”
“Twelve graves.” She looks approving. “Bonnie didn’t die for nothing, then.”
The ground beneath them hums with the sort of energy that comes from blood spilled too soon, from a life ended too young. From magic, interrupted. From love, unbloomed. He wonders if it’s her, or him. They’ll never tell, that much is certain.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he grunts, and packs the last of the earth over the mound covering broken bones and bloodied necks. “How about coffee, one of these days?”
Caroline doesn’t answer.
He turns to look at her. He is sweaty and disarmed and too fucking old for this. He should have had his hybrids do the dirty work, but Caroline had been crying earlier—
“What?” he asks of the look in her eyes.
Caroline blinks.
“What? ” he orders, now.
“Nothing,” she says, belatedly. “I could have sworn…” she trails off and looks to the side. Her cheeks redden. He is struck at how young she looks. But then again, she is only a baby vampire. Too young to know the meaning of death. True death.
He glances at the graves. Twelve.
True death indeed.
“Could’ve sworn?” he prompts.
Her eyes look far away. “I—nothing.”
Klaus turns back to the graves, pretends he misses a spot. His movements are practiced, like he’s done this before. Muscle memory tells him he has, but he is rational enough to know the truth of things.
And the truth of things, is that he is—
—
“We’ve met before,” Klaus says, crouched low like a predator, teeth bared like a killer.
“Have we?”
“Of course,” Klaus answers, as if it’s obvious. “You may not remember. You were supposed to be my sacrifice for the ritual.”
“Oh,” Caroline says, frowning, like she hasn’t got a huge, gaping bite festering away on her neck or anything. “Right.”
He bends over her on her bed. He looks out of place in her room: like tar smeared against pavement, like blood welling in a nearly healed wound. “Well, I don’t know you, so.”
“But,” Klaus says, and he doesn’t know why he fucking says this— “I’ll know you. If I heal you, I presume you’ll leave town and it’ll be a few more decades until I see you again.”
Caroline doesn’t look at him. “And what makes you think I’ll come back?”
Klaus reaches for her—is surprised when she lets him turn her face to his. His palm curves around the column of her neck, he feels the softness of her cheek, juxtaposed by the sharp cut of her jawline against his wrist.
“But you always do,” he says, almost like a vow. “You always do.”
Caroline closes her eyes. She’s dying, but not dead yet. Her lips move wordlessly. He watches the way they move in fascination. Is she praying? What an odd little vampire.
His hand is still around her neck.
He could choke her, if he wanted.
He could heal her, if she asked.
He waits.
He feels, on some distant plane, that he is always doing this.
“If you let me die,” she says, eyes still closed, “I’ll come back and haunt you.”
“Oh, love,” he breathes, and leans in close—crushes his lashes to hers, warms her forehead against his, brushes his lips against the defiant downturn of her mouth, “Promise me that.”
“I will.” At last, her eyes open. “I promise.”
Blue eyes meet blue.
A second bleeds into two.
Her lips part.
Ready for his wrist, the one he’s just offered to her.
He would call her utterly presumptuous if he wasn’t so utterly charmed.
—
The stories are all one and the same.
A heart full of want.
A mouthful of sharp teeth.
A quick cut of the eyes across a crowded room.
A soul bond, maybe.
Blood, definitely.
Blood, blood and blood.
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