I can't move mountains but for you I'd like to try.
[-]
All his life, he thought that he had everything under wraps. Even back centuries in the making when he seemed too human for his own well-being, the world and all in it seemed just an easy, careless idea at his fingertips. He's never had to work for anything. It all fell in a loose bundle, tied with scarlet ribbon at his feet. Everything, except her.
[-]
Always the girl with sunshine blonde curls cascading down her naked back, the hook of her grin so big that it seemed to swallow the moon whole, muddled ocean eyes looking straight through him. And initially, he stares right through her.
This is the secret that he doesn't tell. This is the secret that he keeps from everyone. Even his kin.
When he first sets his sights on the doppelganger, he trips and tumbles and catapults under the curse of her sleek mane of cocoa hair, the puzzled reprieve in her amber eyes, the tense pull of her lips in an almost captivating half-grin. He watches her from afar, how her slender form moves sneakily and quietly like a jungle cat through the wreckage, claiming lives of innocents and guiltier ones alike. She laughs and the world turns to gaze. Elena Gilbert, greatest granddaughter to the striking Katerina, greatest greatest granddaughter's great grandmother to Tatia is absolutely awe inspiring in her fluid bronze movement, in her irreproachable beauty, in her ferocious demeanor. There is none that make her equivalence and all the other creatures of the world sigh in jealousy.
Except one. And he doesn't see it until she is right in front of his face.
[-]
Caroline Forbes is an ordinary girl, even as an undead monster. She still wants to perfect her split for cheerleading practice because she is still team captain, and she wants to remind everyone about it. She wants to wear all the right clothes and fix her hair and her make-up every single day as to look her best because even though she is eternally seventeen, she has to stand next to Elena until after graduation or certain death. She wants the fucking stars to be hung from the fucking correct streams of crepe paper for the prom because it's really not that difficult and it's supposed to be a goddamn magical evening. She wants to fall in love and have the boy worship the ground she walks on.
There is absolutely nothing special about her at first glance. Just a perky baby vampire with an effervescent step, a fierce loyalty to her friends, a killer rack, and a penchant for dating boys on the football team. Klaus sees nothing but a vapid little plaything that is to be ripped to shreds with the mere flick of his fingers.
He quickly realizes that Caroline Forbes is so much more than that.
[-]
Tyler Lockwood becomes a fun toy the moment Klaus realizes that the boy has the ability to infiltrate without having to put a toe out of line. All he has to do is get to the doppelganger and the easiest way to piss off the brothers grimm is to threaten their precious circle of magical wanderings and well-beings, so he has the boy nibble at the succulent flesh of his tasty little girlfriend's neck. And when the boys come begging for forgiveness, he makes them wait, stringing them about like puppets dancing at his will. When will they learn that killing innocents doesn't mean a damn thing to the devil.
The girl, however, is anything but forgiven. One look in her eyes, walls up so high that he excepts them to reach to the farthest heavens, and he counts the watercolors in her palette. Murky deep ocean indigo, bleeding violet, the fairest robin's egg blue, all rimmed with a honeysuckle fireburst. She spits in his face, tells him to go to hell, and sits up welcoming death as long as it isn't at his hand. Involuntarily, he leans back at her words, the curl of her lip, sallow sweat leaking between the valley of her breasts, making constellations on her collarbone, the words barely escaping her chapped lips. She is not afraid.
Pouring his blood into her mouth and watching as one quivering wave of sunlight streaked blonde cascades over her face, she meets his eyes and glares. Without so much as a thank you, she hops out of her quilted bed wearing just a large t-shirt slipping ever so slightly off one shoulder, throws him out the front door and gives him the finger through her lace doily curtains.
He is so taken by her actions that he ignores the terrified look of the witch as she races past him on the sidewalk to the baby vamp's house. Caroline, her name is Caroline.
[-]
Klaus saunters into the grille to unnerve the doppelganger and the two dimwits with all guns blazing. Settling into a corner booth and ordering a whiskey neat, he senses tension in the air as the unholy Trinity enters. The girl squares her shoulders, that mane of cocoa hair sliding easily over her neck, amber eyes worried and stressed, the smile that could be birthed bitten away like she's saving it for later. And he drinks her in, up and down to her plain ivy sweater and narrow bony hips and her charming button nose. But something is amiss that he must have let beforehand.
There is no fire.
Both Salvatores stand on either side of her in some kind of messed up three way triangle, and Klaus, he really watches both of them admire her. It's in the purest sense for the older brother, wasted away under the amber eyes of the succubus before them, waiting with baited breath for her to answer at his will. It's a selfish reckoning as he sees the hunger in the eyes of the younger brother, glazed without the good intentions that everyone so often praises him for. Maybe the world is too blind to see what is there, he considers, swilling his drink in the glass tumbler. And his comparison?
Caroline has just entered the restaurant with that oaf of a human with the blue eyes and stupid smile that Rebekah finds so endearing. He is grinning at her with a wide spectrum of joy and Klaus observes her from his seat. Her hair is a jumble of messy sunshine tweaked waves, mouth wide open in uproarious laughter, stained with coral pink, water colored eyes alive and sparkling under the lights like the deepest blue runway lights of an airport in the inky night. She speaks loudly with authority and determination, crimson red fingernails securely wrapped around her gin and tonic that she has so sweetly compelled the bartender into serving her with a flirtatious wink and a flip of the hair. Without embarrassment, she snorts into her glass, and chews on the straw, the jocky boy nodding in kind and giggling right along with her. She peers up to survey the restaurant and its goings on and no one in the entire damn bar stops to save her a glance.
All of their fucking eyes have swiveled back to the girl with the borrowed blood and lifetime of lovers lost and found in the till at her feet. Elena spots Caroline and rushes over to convey what appears to be dreadful news, because oh, shit, is that Klaus over there in the, fuck, yeah you bet it is. The blonde turns and sets her sights on him like a hawk on its prey, stands up, raises her drink and salutes him with curt jerk of the head. His jaw drops to the floor and he sees her smirk as Elena launches into a diatribe about how dangerous and how stupid and blah, blah, blah. If only she'd look over and see the dumbstruck shock on his face.
Klaus tosses a fifty pound note on the table and high tails it out the back door, but not before he hears the softest whisper land on his eardrum. Jesus, Elena, maybe he just wanted to have a drink. Even demons need a break every now and again. He chuckles the whole way home.
[-]
He sends Caroline an apology gift in the form of diamonds stolen from the wrist of Marie Antoinette, speckled with blood, and a half-assed forgiveness note.
He sends Caroline a cornflower colored organza gown that he hopes will shame her eyes, and a handwritten question for what he could only call in the foulest terms of the day, a dinner date with dancing and champagne. When he sees her that afternoon at the grille, she ignores him and shies her face when he strolls by, leaving the scent of mahogany and leather in his wake.
She arrives forty three, not that he was counting, minutes late, wearing the dress that her eyes put to shame and the bracelet that looks like cheap tacky jewels when adorning her wrist. Grinning at his efforts shot to hell, she advances forward and he meets her head on like two warring countries going to battle. If this is what equality is like, he thinks he could get used to it, as she slinks away, flirting eyes smiling at him over her shoulders.
[-]
He confesses his secrets and smiles like a lovestruck teenage boy when she blushes as much as a vampire can under the candlelit ballroom, pink champagne flushing in the apples of her cheeks, and premature giggles lolling off her tongue. She holds herself back, he can tell her guard is up as she flits from painting to drawing and runs her gloved fingers over the bumpy textures, appreciating without words. From what he has been able to tell, she likes to talk, likes her opinions, thinks highly of everyone else's more so, and all he can see right now is an angel slow dancing in a burning room with the devil in the details.
Bother someone else with your hollow wishes, she tells him, yanking the jewels from her arm and throwing them aside, a flare for the dramatic, he notes with an irritated twitch, as she leaves with nary another flirting glance over her shoulders.
[-]
Got to admit that Kol has a point. Caroline certainly looks good walking away with that little swerve to her hips and that point of her heel grinding into the carpet of the grille's floor. Outside, the combination of the intoxicating lilac and honey coming off her skin, the pale bath of Virginia moon, and a quick chill in the air, only heat rolling in waves off her figure provides warmth, and he can feel himself dive headfirst along wherever they are going because honestly, he hasn't felt this, whatever this is, in a forever. And he's going to sacrifice hybrids and doppelgangers and idiot siblings to sit on this here bench and challenge this force of nature to be by his side. If not for all time, then for now will do.
With a toothy smile, she sighs, and turns her eyes once in their sockets. It's playful and downright adorably rude. He smiles and feels like a man instead of a monster.
[-]
With her loyalties pledged to the ridiculous Lockwood boy, the hope that he squelched within seconds of the brimming thought of what he considered for the briefest time. It was a foolish silly mistake and it is why you don't play with fire because it isn't something that can be controlled and why you don't play with water because it can knock you out and send you packing to somewhere that you don't understand the way, and so he shuts the hell up and goes back to looking at the dull as a doorknob doppelganger and destroying the brothers grimm and trying to survive the disheartened and clearly messily planned white oak stake attacks.
And then his god forsaken excuse for a parent goes and attempts certain death for all of her children like some fucked up kind of soap opera and he is for some reason holding a gas can and a match until he hears her name like some kind of curse and blessing all at the same hitch and he is off and going as fast as his legs can run because even though he was blindsided, he isn't blind.
He's heard it said that love is a vampire's greatest weakness; he's heard it from his own lips before like some kind of ancient biblical text that he has always believed even when there was Tatia and Katerina with their sleek cocoa manes and amber eyes and astonishing half grins. But that was before he had ever seen or believed that there was somewhere, a girl on fire that came back from her own ashes. A phoenix. Klaus doesn't love without repercussions.
[-]
She glides so simply into his hands, his own fingers twisted in the knots of her dimmed sunshine curls, smears of coral on the chin of her jawline, terror racked in her muddled Mediterranean orbs. His other hand is on the small of her back, bare skin under the tips of his fingers and it's the first time he's felt a woman in perhaps a fortnight and her flesh is creamy and golden and he feels tarnished next to her. The wild fear streaked in her eyes is what stops him from the enjoyment. Pure unadulterated horror and disbelief at the end of a world and a lost generation that he has stolen by convincing the world that the devil didn't exist. But for once she is looking right through him and his heart that doesn't exist thunders in his chest.
Seeing this girl, how he perceives every curl wrought on her collarbone, the coral pink tainted on her mouth, the universe of ocean and sky in her eyes, the one so strong, so beautiful, so not like anything he's yet encountered, he realizes that he cannot nor has he ever been able to move mountains, but for her, he thinks that he'd like to try.
[-]
It's one of the last things he remembers before the sky goes raven and the clouds slur a wreck of scarlet and violent mustard yellow, unearthly turquoise.
If he has to go, he is willing to go like this: forgiven. Not by all, but at least by her.