Work Text:
Everything is green.
Green: not like his eyes, not like the sea in Ireland, not like an emerald; green like the sun behind a bottle. The wind ripples in the fields —wild horses, lazy hills, the foam-like dawn tinted with pomegranate and grazed-knuckle pink; the wind ripples in the fields and she is exhausted, tired to the bone.
She turns to him. "Where are we?"
"Darling," he says with a shrug, like he doesn't know or maybe won't tell her, "haven't you got a sense of adventure?"
Not really, before you, she thinks. Then again, there are a lot of things she didn't have before him. A reason to come here, for one. But she's too wiped out to argue.
"Does it have a cage?" she asks, squinting at the quaint little chalet that's a dot of brown in the ocean of vibrant green.
He smiles, just a little, an inch of red lip quirked at the corner of his mouth. "Who do you take me for?"
—
It hurts.
It hurts so, so much: more than dying the first time, a boneless slipping into ether followed by the quick crack of her neck, more than dying the second time, saying nonono through gloss-covered, strawberry-smelling lips, more than the first time she turned. More than everything. More than her first period, more than her dad leaving, more than drinking Elena's blood. More than losing, more than grief.
The way it hurts: every bone in your body breaking at once, and outside the silence, the hot weight of his gaze on her, spurring her on. Her blood rising to a boil and no pressure scoop: the feeling that everything would be better if she could just take off her skin and let herself melt into the ground. More than once she asks him to rip her heart out, just plunge his hand into her chest and do it, like he has done so many times before.
He says no, every time.
(The way it hurts: doubt, doubt in every crevice of her shattered mind, every nook of her battered body, so potent and pungent and strong, making her forget why she ever agreed to this. Doubt with a voice that spells her name, Caroline, a whisper —how will you know if it worked?)
—
Alright, from the beginning: there is a boy and there is a girl —no, scrap that. There is a girl and there is a monster —no, that's not it either. There is a thing with teeth, who used to be a girl; and there is a monster, who used to be a boy. Thing with teeth meets—
Long story short, Klaus Mikaelson has never been a good guy and he still isn't when he stabs Caroline Forbes through the heart, with a smirk and a whispered, "Sorry, sweetheart, needs must," cradles her head as she expires, her neck blooming with a lovebite stamped in blood. Pretty picture, he'll say after, but she doesn't forgive. Other things, yes, but not that.
(Years later, she'll still get that pinched look and say, "You could have warned me," but he won't bother answering, what difference would it have made? Those arguments never end well.)
And it's not that she doesn't know the taste of blood, she does, B+ is her favorite, the creamy unfolding of texture and taste on her tongue, drop after drop, straight from the vein if— so she does know, but there's a difference between a glass of warm red and this, breathing in life only to have a cup shoved under her nostrils, and drinking, drinking, drinking, only to find, when she looks up—
— Elena, her Elena trapped in chains, suicidally slouched with both wrists slit, for symmetry's sake, darling. And screaming, of course, who doesn't scream, and feeling in her blood something new, not easily recognizable at all, tangled in with her DNA, a solar dynamo installed at the right of her cold vampire heart, saying…
"Oh, do stop being melodramatic."
She snorts; tilts her head, arches an eyebrow —really?
—
You're mine, his voice echoes in her head, coming from everywhere at once, you kill for me, and she —the sirebond, nothing is her fault, the contingency is bulletproof— tips into him, helplessly, endlessly, like he's the sun and she's the new Icarus. It takes nothing, a flick of his wrist —it takes nothing, a word, a glance, and he sics her onto his victims, harmless or vicious, men, women, children, dogs, wolves.
What he has made her into is a warrior: his soldier, the blade in the elongation of his sleeve, the hidden ace, the teeth at the edge of his oakwood stake. Once she's fangs-deep in Rebekah Mikaelson's pale bejeweled neck before she realizes what she's doing; the urge lessens and she looks up only to meet Rebekah's glare, incandescent with fury, sweat already beading at her temples.
She slots back besides him, on instinct. One of his hands splays on the small of her back, the other coming up to her mouth to collect a drop of blood on his thumb. He swipes at it playfully with his tongue; she watches him, unable not to.
When Elijah comes into the room, perfectly pressed suit and slightly disdainful expression, he barely takes one look at them before he says, "It seems your little experiment was successful, brother."
She feels more than she sees Klaus grin, warming the air near her cheek. "Quite," he says.
—
Once, after her brother died, Elena did two things that were shockingly unlike her: she burned her house to the ground, and she turned off her humanity. This feels like that.
There are days where she wakes up and his influence hangs over her like a cloud, doesn't touch her, and she slides under it, feeling saved. There are days when she remembers all the things she's done and can't tell the difference between what she feels and what isn't hers. There are days when all the guilt in the world can't make her feel guilty.
On those days she makes her eyes yellow and she runs, the wind scorching her pelt. She remembers an ex-boyfriend with eyes like that, feral —but she can't remember his name. The ones she can remember —Elena, her mother, Bonnie, their vibrant faces fading in the mist of memory— she holds onto with desperate force.
The forest makes her feel clean, like a treasure of hope; the trees breathe out a song mixed in with their oxygen, building her bones back up from within.
He doesn't say anything when she comes back. He crowds her against a wall, two fingers pressing under her chin, his eyes unreadable; doesn't kiss her; never kisses her.
—
(He only kissed her once, when she was still a newbie vampire, almost human. She was asking him for a favor he didn't have to grant her; he liked her, inexplicably. Everything she knew about him was constructed on rumors, a fabric made from vomited lies and glances at his silhouette from afar. He sliced a head off with her graduation hat, kissed her cheek, and left.)
—
He's with her when she turns for the four thousand and eighth time, crouched beside her, his eyes dark and heavy, looking at her like she's the only thing in the universe. He always looks at her like that.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
She sifts through her answers: do I have any bones left; when is this going to stop; how will I know if it worked. "Like I was put through a meat grinder," she says instead, wincing with muscles she can't feel. "Twice."
He reaches a hand for a scar on her shoulder that's already disappearing, forgetting to take the ache with it. "Do you want to stop?"
"No," she says immediately, fierce.
But— "For today," he laughs, and then: "There's a river not far away, if you feel like a swim." She watches his eyes roam over her, tracing the outline of her body, the arch of her spine, the exhausted bend of her knees.
She snorts. "In your dreams, Mikaelson," she says.
—
(But she goes, of course. She follows him through the woods and she can't stop herself from thinking, not again, but she doesn't want to obey him, she wants to—
"Well," Klaus smirks, nodding pointedly at the expanse of crystal blue twelve feet below, "have at it, love. Take the plunge."
Does he mean…? He means: take the plunge, and so she does, her arms raised above her head like an arrow until she feels that she is one thing and she has one purpose, to dive and break the frozen blue surface of the water, bury herself into its folds.
Cold explodes around her when she reaches the end of her fall, and if she needed to breathe she'd probably be in trouble, but she doesn't. Instead she pushes herself down, opens her eyes and it's the infinite calm of the waterworld, silent and subdued, a declination on the endless shades of green and blue.
At some point, she couldn't say when, she goes back to the surface and she sees him, lips red, wet hair dripping into his eyes, and then his hands are on her face, fingers spanning her cheeks and jaw, thumb pressing on her jugular and in a loud whisper, "You look stunning like this, Caroline," drinking her in all the while, that unbearable intensity he gets when he looks at her.
He doesn't say her name often, but when he does he makes it worth it. He says it like it's the whole of his vocabulary, c a r o l i n e, like it's the only thing he ever wants to say for the rest of eternity. When he kisses her his lips are cool, still humming with his declaration.
This one, she thinks, opening her mouth to deepen the kiss —this one I'll keep.)
—
Some days, when she is swaddled in blankets and incapable to move, feeling like the marrow has leaked out of her spine, remind her of other times: when she used to be an open mouth, biting but wordless, entirely at his command. When did you find the time to fall for him? Elena would ask, judgment screwing her features. It's Stockholm syndrome, not love.
Maybe, she concedes in their imagined conversations. (But where did you find your love, Elena? In the hands of two men who looked at your face and saw another, who, too, slaughtered, hurt you… People like us take what they can.)
He brings her piping hot tea spiked with the too-expensive bourbon that he keeps in the charmingly rustic cabinets, fingers closed around the mug. "It'll make you feel better," he says as the waft of lemon and honey hits her, "it will soothe your bones."
And he sits by her, uncharacteristically patient, as she flushes with fever, grows unwanted teeth, hallucinates grieving people that aren't dead yet. (In her defense, though —it's hard to keep track.)
He holds her close, her head cradled in his neck, breathing almost as heavy as her; he doesn't have Elijah's brand of cautious immobility, that supernatural calm, as though the only thing he has taken out of immortality is the joy and the triumph of it, the way he grins like everything in the world belongs to him, is at his mercy. She knows —she knows he's thought of leaving a few times, it's not like he hasn't travelled before and leaving her behind would be a form of freedom, the bound between them stretching until it almost dissolved through absence and time.
But he didn't. She has two reasons for it, depending on her state of mind: it's not like him, to let things go. Or: he loves her too much.
—
It's a story that you could tell only through touches:
the way he held her hand when she died in his arms that time, the quick and almost ineffectual tightening of his fingers around hers, except he did it, crouched down and watched as she choked on her own blood in his lap, with a sort of ill-timed tenderness, shushed, all right, love…
the time she collapsed backwards into him, mouth gurgling with blood, and he stuck two fingers between her lips, hard and unthinking, effectively blocking her teeth so that the only thing she could do was snarl —his body a long hard line burning through the back of her jacket, every sense heightened because of the change and because she was his, in a heavy and unnatural way.
their first kiss —well, not their first —the first time her eyes aren't glazed over and he looks genuinely taken by surprise, lips half-open as though he had something to say, something she doesn't hear, just before their lips touch and it's the match and the tinder, it's the trail of oil ignited, it's the spark and the old crumbling house. (Maybe that's when they decided to do this.)
a long time ago, maybe she imagined it: when his lips brush her cheek, the rasp of his stubble against her skin, her, too breathless after that first senseless murder in her name, and she thinks she feels the tiny pressure of two fingers at the nape of her neck, in her hair, nails scraping the skin just a little and she knows, she knows he could tear her spine out of her back without blinking, but—
when he touches her ear, fingers raking through her hair, her head pillowed against his thigh, master and pet to everyone else, but to them — when he says, an urgent whisper reverberating through his big empty mansion, "I want to break the sirebond."
And she shivers. Says, "Okay."
—
"How will I know?"
She wouldn't ask if the pain didn't act as a kind of drug, flowing in her veins strong and uninhibiting. She knows that, even with her, his first instinct is to stock up on weaknesses, tiny drops of acid to use whenever he wants to effect the final collapse —that he is more shrewd that his quick-temperedness makes it seem, smarter, learned in all the ways to exploit vulnerability. He loves her; but even his love has something vindictive to it, tainted with a little too much blood to be a regular love story.
"Know what?"
Her nails carve into the centurial flesh of his arms, her eyes crazy, pleading. "How will I know if it worked?"
And he gets it: it's that flash in his eyes, the pointed end of a blade, what she means to say: how will I know when I'm free, if I already feel like I belong to you, if when I'm lucid you're still magnetic, if you're forever silhouetted in light? Sometimes she worries she will stop loving him altogether, but this isn't one of those times: the fever makes her hyperaware, almost able to count every cell in her body.
He presses a hard kiss to her sweat-shiny mouth, eyes alight, "Caroline, love," he says in the lines between her teeth, "you will reinvent freedom."
(They will only sink in later, those words. Freedom. You don't get it if you've never truly been a prisoner.)
—
Between her changes —she's stubborn, almost as stubborn as he is: she turns and turns until she feels on the point of breaking, unlocking a darkness she won't be able to redeem, and then she sleeps for days on end, stocking up on much-needed strength— she takes a few moments to be alive. It would be a shame to waste all that picturesque landscape, he had said when they'd got here, smirking like there was something forbidden in it, and she's taken him to his word.
He cooks —he does that well, with the ease that can only come from centuries of practice, breaking eggs on the side of the pan without looking and sorting through the spices quickly, hming under his breath with irritation when he doesn't find what he wants— and she sits on the counter, legs bare and swinging, wearing one of the delightfully retro shirts that were probably his years ago. When she wants his attention she tugs on his necklace playfully and he comes, because he never minded obeying her. (Then again, he doesn't have to.)
"Did you know, Byron is the one who taught me how to make omelettes," he brags, dropping chives into the pan, over the sizzling eggs.
She laughs, just a hint of mockery. "I bet he did," but she still admits, "It smells delicious."
He grins. "Of course it does."
She rolls her eyes, snags a piece of bread from the basket at the same time as he angles his body towards her, and they just… —it happens sometimes, they collide, without touching, all the tension between them becomes a whirlwind and his gaze bumps on her lips and her eyelashes get caught in a flutter, breath stolen, for such a stupid little thing…
In the end he's the one to shake it off, reflexively opening his palm on the warm skin of her thigh, fingers sneaking around her calf. She's ticklish —a peal of laughter, her knee jerks, his eyes warm on her collarbones and the smell of butter in the morning, surrounded by this endless horizon of green, green, the window is open—
"We should go outside later," she says, her mouth still curled in a smile, like it's an expression you can forget yourself on.
He cocks his head. "Whatever you want, mylady," he says off-handedly. He means it, though.
The point being, it's not all writhing on the floor and iron chains around her ankles and him yelling, sometimes, to provoke her, and it's not only the days where that string of consciousness between them stops fraying and instead firms up, like all this work was for nothing, and now that she can tell the difference between that dog-like urge to do whatever he wants her to and the other thing it makes bile rise to her throat. It's not just that. It's also that he's managed, god knows how, to find a place where there are actual wild horses, which is probably a list of locations only crazy billionaire magical creatures have access to, and he says he'll teach her to ride and she says I took lessons when I was young —young-er—, thank you very much and they ride and he tells her about how ladies used to sit sideways on the saddle, how uncomfortable that looked, even though he doesn't seem very sorry about it, and it turns out she's a better rider than him in the end. It's how sometimes they walk aimlessly in the fields and let themselves be pushed by the mountain wind and find out that all that endless green that looks the same from the chalet window is actually subtly different in every individual spot, the give of the ground beneath their feet, the density of the grass, its color, its smell; how they don't talk but only touch, the press of fingers at the bloodflow on the wrist, you are beautiful and formidable, his breath on the shell of her ear, the way she still —of her own will— tips into him and curves around his footsteps and he does the same with her, for her, like they're one instrument, remarkably well-attuned. Sappy stuff. Stupid stuff.
Anyway. "I want…" she starts, rolling the anticipation of the end of her sentence on her tongue, teasing; he crooks an eyebrow; she falls into his arms with a burst of laughter and he holds her, his fingers slick with butter when he slides his hands under her shirt.
—
There are a bunch of sensations Caroline will never be able to explain: for example, dying —such a simple thing, when you think about it, and it's not like it doesn't happen to —almost— everyone, right? But it's impossible to tell, the experience of it (and besides, she suspects it's different every time, for everyone). Or the sirebond (but she doesn't want to talk about that), or even turning: that feeling of being a tree made out of bones, a sprawling ivory construction, but alive —yeah, you just can't describe how it feels.
Breaking the sirebond is one of those things. She expected —well, she doesn't know what she expected, but not that: not that gradual unraveling, not the click of a lock and that sudden loosening around her soul, not that dizziness or that bubble of tears in her chest, not her vision blurring and Klaus kneeling in front of her, not any of it. And it happens after so long she'd almost given up, resigned herself to living in that tentative state of half-slavery —or, well, would've if she weren't Caroline Forbes, stubborn as a mule once she gets it into her head that she's going to do something.
"Is it done?" is the first thing he says when she wakes up, selfish and hurried, eager —but Caroline doesn't mind, only flexes her fingers, as though the sirebond were something you could see, a pair of handcuffs biting into the skin of her wrists.
She breathes in, takes a look outside: still the vibrant green. She can see in the distance a solitary horse, the one with a brown patch on its forehead that she named Princess, refusing to change the moniker even when Klaus pointed out the horse was male. Everyone should be able to be a princess, she'd said petulantly, her chin high, and he'd laughed.
"It's done," she says.
—
Does it go some way in making them equal? She wonders, sometimes. And it's sick, it is, judging her love life on whose stack of corpses is higher, who has torn more throats open, whose blood is parceled out in an infinity of bodies; but she does it all the same. The lines of morality blur when she's with him, especially here, where she's got no Katherine to remind her of what she doesn't want to become and no Elena to make her feel guilty about what she is.
Well, anyway, the answer's probably no: he's been around since the dawn of times, and if he was Stefan's ripper buddy back in the twenties he must have done his part to keep up, not to mention that he enjoys it. Killing people. He told her once, it's an acquired taste, which, sure, sounds horrible and fucked-up, but blood tasted like drinking nail polish for the longest time and now—
"Love," he says in his warm drawl, trailing his finger on her naked shoulder, "do you want to go back?"
She doesn't even have to think about it. (She thought she would be bored up here, in between all the excruciating pain: no shops and no cinemas, no use for her cute little summer dresses and that Prada clutch her mother got her for her sixteenth birthday and which will never go out of fashion; but she isn't. Maybe she's growing up.)
"No," she says, curling in closer to him. "Let's stay for a while."
He smiles in her hair —that bastard, she thinks, he has a heartbeat; and she falls asleep to the sound of it.
—
Everything is green.