Chapter Text
The day after her mother died, Caroline Forbes woke abruptly.
There was no blinking awake, no slow drift toward consciousness. She was simply asleep one minute, and awake the next. She lay on her back, feeling somehow small in her childhood bed, even though she had grown up and moved out and left behind the soft pinks and lace covers. Hands laced together and resting on her chest, she stared up at the ceiling and waited to feel something.
Elena had patted her arm soothingly the night before, hovering awkward and hesitant at the front door with a falsely bright smile that twisted the corners of her mouth until Caroline had wanted to scream right in her face. She’d said that this morning would be difficult, that she’d wake having forgotten the frantic drive to the hospital, the flash of emergency lights, the way her mother had lain unresponsive in the hospital bed. To be prepared for it to come back as she woke, that she’d have to remember it again as she wiped the sleep from eyes.
Not so.
Caroline remembered every second with an excruciating clearness. As soon as she opened her eyes, the knowledge was there already, sat heavy on her chest and in the pit of her stomach, creeping tendrils of it curling its way up her throat and into the back of her mouth, sticking to her ribs and spreading outward. She could feel the weight of it pressing down on every inch of her.
She sat up, the sun bright through the crack in her curtains, and she felt a brief flash of anger at that. How dare the sun rise so high and so bright? Didn’t it know? Wasn’t it aware? The only appropriate weather for today was mist and cloud, a grey cast to a sky that broke only to shed rain and send people scurrying for cover. Caroline swallowed the emotion down, tasting it hard and cold at the back of her throat.
Then, she got up.
Went about her day. Walking carefully to the funeral parlour, hearing the cheerful ring of the bell as she pushed open the door, nodding her way through a glossy brochure that offered coffin after coffin after coffin. Fighting back the wicked urge to giggle that rose up her throat and threatened to burst from her nostrils in a thundering snort, at the idea that she - Caroline Forbes, vampire extraordinaire - was flicking through options for caskets.
She signed form after form, all the while wondering vaguely what difference it really made to a dead person whether their coffin was veneered soft wood or solid hard wood. It certainly didn’t make a particular amount of difference to her, and she had more experience of being dead than most.
Caroline swallowed that hysterical thought back down as well, and shook the hand of the funeral director, who covered her hand with his own and fixed her with what she assumed he must believe was a sympathetic gaze. She fought the urge to bury her fangs in his neck just to break away from his limp grip, and instead forced a smile onto her face.
The day passed, both as slow as molasses and in the blink of an eye.
She nodded, and smiled, and nodded again. She went to lunch with people who did nothing but tell her over and over again what a loss it was, what a tragedy to be taken so young, as though she didn’t know. She spent her time comforting people who she couldn’t remember her mother speaking of even in passing. She blinked her way through an appointment at the florist with Elena and Bonnie, who patted her hand and fetched her water, and complimented her choice of funeral flowers as though it were something important.
She visited the Sheriff’s office, and nodded some more. Said yes to requests for flags, and call signs, and a full official send off. As though it mattered. As though her mother would see. Someone patted her head, and she blinked at the feel of it. At the incongruity of being treated like a little girl when she was in the process of organising her own mother’s burial.
The funeral came, and went.
She stood. She sat. She sang. She sat again. She was aware of eyes that lingered on her, filled with pity for the girl who had buried both parents before the age of twenty. Elena’s hand, softly caressing hers as she gripped the roll of the wooden pew they sat on. Stefan on her other side, stiff and awkward, sitting ramrod straight as though good posture would make any of this any better. As though she hadn’t been frittering away the last hours of her mother’s life kissing him, instead of at her side.
After, she smiled some more. Pressed hands as though she were campaigning, tilted her head to one side sympathetically and watched, numb and distant, as other people cried the tears for her mother that she couldn’t allow herself to cry. Gestured toward sandwiches piled high, fresh lemonade sparkling in hastily laid out glasses. Tilted her head to the other side, in case that looked more sympathetic. Thanked people prettily for coming, for their time, for their tears, for the limp way they laid clammy hands on her bare shoulder, and did not look longingly at the door until the last plates had been cleared away.
She walked back to their house alone.
Her house.
Her empty, dark, empty house.
She stood on the front porch, and waited. The house sat in silence, as if it were waiting for her touch. She hesitated with her key, hovering in front of the latch, the porch light flickering slightly overhead. She remembered promising her mom that she’d get it fixed, weeks ago when it had first started jittering. Another broken promise. Another failure. It flickered above her again, a low hum fading in and out of focus. A single moth fluttered aimlessly around the bare bulb. Caroline took a step back, and looked up at the winking light. Slipped off one heel and took aim.
The glass lay about her feet in pieces, like scattered stars sprinkled over the decking. She slipped her shoe back on, and opened the door in darkness, letting the shards crunch into dust under her heel.
She sat on the edge of her mother’s bed, the coverlet wrinkled slightly underneath her. She sat with her hands laid primly together in her lap, still clad in her funeral dress, the folds of dark fabric indistinguishable from the darkness around her. It enveloped her, and she breathed it in, letting it fill the spaces within her that weren’t already taken up with a twisting, roiling sickness. She looked up at the single photo frame that graced her mother’s dresser, and her own face stared back. Bright red cap and gown, a wide smile on her face and her arm around her mother.
Caroline blinked, and a rush of nausea rolled over her.
She could feel herself capsizing under the wave of it, as though she were bobbing in the ocean and nothing on the horizon in any direction. Alone, and drowning. She gasped for the air that she couldn’t taste any more, felt as though she were clawing her way against the sea of grief as it closed over her head. Her fingertips dug into the bedclothes and she tipped forward, bending in on herself, curling up against the world.
For a second, she looked into the future - her future, her immortal future - an endless stretch of days that filled the skyline and beyond, every single one of them empty of anything but an infinite tide of emotion, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, ebbing and flowing within her as it pleased.
She let out one, single, desperate sob.
Downstairs, she heard as the door clicked open.
Heard Elena call her name softly.
Caroline sat up abruptly, and wiped her eyes.