A/N: Do your eyes deceive you?

No, dear reader, they do not. This is an update under not just thirty thousand words, not just twenty, but fifteen. Please alert the press, and maybe take out a missing persons report, because clearly the girl formerly known as Jenn has either been body hijacked, or is currently gagged and bound in her closet while Julie Plec sets about fixing what this little plebian has done with her world. (Ok, so you'll find the latter pretty unlikely after you read this, but look into the body jacking thing.)

There is plenty more story to come (you had to know, of course, that I wouldn't just drop off this little ol' thing and call it good), but I wanted to end on the particular note with which this chapter closes and not cram anything else into it. With that being said, let's kick this off. This one-shot takes up almost immediately where the previous left off, say within half an hour or so of the tenth one-shot.

Also, the title of this is a line taken from Allen Ginsburg's poem 'Song'.


For those of you just tuning in, we're reporting live from St. Louis' Cemetery, where reports of gunfire were called in just minutes ago. NOPD has deployed their SWAT team to negotiate what could be a potential hostage situation; as you can see behind me, officers are attempting to contact anyone who may still be inside the crypt from which those shots appear to have originated.

So far, there has been no response.

One witness says they did not see anyone leave the cemetery following those shots, which begs the question: what exactly is awaiting officers inside that crypt?


Before the break, we brought you up to speed on a SWAT team deployment at St. Louis' Cemetery- let's check in now with Dani to see if there are any new developments in this unfolding story.

Hello, Tom!

Dani, do we have any updates? Are there any casualties- do we know exactly what happened? Gunshots in a crypt- that's a very unusual situation. We've seen a recent huge upsurge in violence throughout the French Quarter- could this be related?

Well, we don't have very many answers right now, Tom. SWAT officers have breached the crypt after receiving no reply or demands, and are now securing the scene. So far there are two- three victims, and no survivors. These bodies appear to have been mutilated; we've been instructed to keep our crews at a distance while the investigation is ongoing, but a brief glimpse I got of the first body showed what looked to be large chunks of skin missing from the face and neck.

Mutilated? By some kind of animal?

Well, that's what we're hoping to find out. It's a grim speculation, Tom, but it appears that perhaps those gunshots were unrelated, and what officers may have stumbled upon is the lair of a potential serial killer haunting New Orleans. We'll provide updates as soon as we can.


This is Dani Germaine reporting live from St. Louis' Cemetery- officers have now retrieved six bodies, all of which appear to be similarly, and in a possibly ritualistic manner, mutilated about the face and throat. We spoke briefly with Officer Mike Seifer, who would provide no specifics, but did reveal that there appear to be more victims, and that this was a very recently committed act. You are urged to immediately report any suspicious activity within the vicinity of the cemetery; officers believe the perpetrator could not have gotten far.


We're back with Dani on-sight at St. Louis' Cemetery, with reports of more shots fired, is that right?

That's right, Tom. Just minutes ago, we received reports that there might be a sole survivor, and seconds later there were several screams from inside the crypt, followed by shots from either law officers or perhaps what's not a survivor, but the murderer themselves- we just don't have any details, Tom. But wait a minute- here's a man approaching the scene, in plainclothes, but perhaps he's some kind of hostage negotiator-

Turn off your camera, love.

Excuse me, sir, who are you? Can you tell us what's happening? Are you affiliated with the police department? Can you-


His hands are trembling as he steps inside.

At his back the unblinking complacency of these men who have folded at his whim, and wait in ready silence, to his front the smog of a fresh shot, the stench of gunpowder, stench of death, drip drip of these fresh and mouth-watering veins, the faint mildew of old death, the bones baked in their southern kiln, the puddling of man's final moments-

He stumbles down a step.

Man and beast in their haphazard sprawls, and their lurid fates in Cadmium red over the walls, splashed to the ceiling, unrolled before him in glittering Hollywood salutation-

He stumbles down another step.

She stirs amongst the ruins of her mother.

He stops.

She looks up at him through her red curls, her red lashes, all of her soaked to the skin, mother in her hair, bowels on her hands, and oh love.

He takes a shuddering breath.

"You came," she whispers, as though he could have done anything else.

"Of course," he says softly, and she clutches her mother to her breast and what a noise the poor thing lets out, not unlike a boy who held his mother's heart and said to her of course he didn't mean it, mother, he was only lonely, he was only frightened, he would have just liked to know-

Still he was your son.

"I didn't mean to do this," she sobs. "Not…not to the cops. They were…they're like…her. But they were going…they were going to take her. Not yet, ok? Not yet, I just- I need to sit with her. Ok?" She smears away the snot and the tears and the blood with her sleeve and he watches something seismic ripple through her shoulders, down spine to waist, so that she must bend in helpless submission to it, and bring her forehead to her mother's gaping own. "What do I do when I let go of her?"

He starts forward, and she seizes her mother, she cradles the woman's half a face against her neck and she screams, "No, don't take her," and down onto his heels he goes, into his most unthreatening crouch, to make himself small as a man, small as a twenty-seven-year-old boy with all his vast and pristine years before him, hands down, shoulders hunched.

He has his grave digger's croon, that he may sing song man into his bed of loam and maggots, and what does he know, siren of man, beast, child- what does he know, what has he to offer, herald of death, crier of plague, war, famine-

Caroline-

He wets his lips.

And she holds her mother, and if there is any loneliness- if there is any loneliness like that full and eternal circle of life, the womb for the child, the great and gaping absence of Mother, he has yet to plumb its depths.

He may not have deserved his grief.

But he stood holding her heart and seeing with his uncomprehending own her blank and lightless eyes, and he knows, sweetheart.

And oh, love, if he could fix it.

To turn back the clock, to spin the dial counter wise, and rewind the great and terrible film reel of Time, and for a while yet hold at bay this great and terrible truth all children must one day know-

"What can I do?" he whispers.

"I just don't want you to touch her. Just please don't take her from me," she says with a jerk of her shoulders, and a wipe of her nose.

"I won't. I won't, sweetheart. You can have as long as you need."

She strokes the red strands from her mother's eyes with her shaking fingers and she looks down with all the tenderness she must have stowed carefully away for so long, that it might not be seen, and turned round against her raw young heart.

She hiccups.

She lets her mother slither from breast to lap.

He takes a step forward, just a small thing, still in his crouch, his eyes on her face, waiting for her to bid him back, away, whatever she wants, whatever she requires, if he's just to stand here and be merely a set piece in this final tragic scene, anything, Caroline, if you- do you want him to-

Should it be anyone but him, playing at all these small human tendernesses with his thick and clumsy hands?

He stops.

Her shoulders twitch, another long and painful spasm makes its way from shoulders to spine, she hunches forward against all these indignities of grief, and begins to sob again.

And he just watching, love, and he's so sorry, that it's only him.


Mommy.

Are you watching?

And do you see all the ragged meat sacks that used to be people, and did you think with the last dying twitch of your last dying synapses, I raised a monster, she used to be a girl, she used to be my Caroline, and go to meet Daddy with tears in your eyes because we could have stopped her when she still had pigtails, and let her subside in long and permanent peace beneath the epitaph all daughters must earn one day, before they have outlived their mother's love?

Mommy.

All these years, and she's going to be so alone, she's going to be so lost, she knows you had to fight for it, but she had her mother, she had a home, she had someplace, and it was always going to be there.

So she just sits here.

And you have long since cooled on her lap, and leaked your final struggles, and in place of that scent all children recognize, mom, mommy, your warm and willing neck, with that perfect cradle between shoulder and cheek for all disappointments- you're just…blood and piss and the rank shit scent of all the victims who fell before, but she sits here anyway, mom.

Because what else does she do.

She has an out.

She has a switch all the children of all the world wish they could flip when into the ground go those stiff mummy leftovers of what brought them into this world and coaxed them through it and loved them not perhaps they way they needed, but still with all their clumsy human comprehension of what it is to break off a piece of yourself, and send it out into the world where it might be twisted beyond your feeble understanding.

So she has this out.

She can feel it in the back of her brain like an itch.

But she couldn't do that to you, Mom.

To just…wipe away everything you have meant and will always mean, and for her own personal comfort smooth the next weeks, months, years of her long and motherless life.

She couldn't do that.

So you see, you have one thing to be proud of.

So she sits here.

Because, God, once she lets go, Mom.

"Do you want me- should I get Stefan?" he asks quietly. "Or…Bekah?"

And she says no and she strokes her mother's hair and God it's so hard to get out, but please don't leave her, please don't leave her, that's all she can ask, everybody does it, she knows she's not pretty when she cries, her grief is an embarrassment, it's something to be tiptoed around, it takes up so much space you can't help but be made uncomfortable by it, shade your eyes against her glare, because look how her mascara has run, and her curls lost their bounce, is this your committee leader and your cheer captain with her eyes like holes and her heart all over her face-

And he's crept forward another inch, two, carefully so that he doesn't startle her, so that she's barely even noticed this advance, and he touches her arm, so gently, and he doesn't say it, but he'd put down roots here, waiting for her to be ready.

And she just-

She can't-

You don't know what it means.

He touches her cheek tentatively, he puts his fingers right through the blood and cosmetics and curls that stick to her skin like it's all just part of her, and he's never been very good at hugging, it's like his arms just aren't made for it, but he kneels in her mother's blood and he puts them around her like she's made of glass, or maybe he is, and all this snot she gets onto the collar of his probably bazillion dollar shirt, crying into his neck.

And it's like it's fine.

It's like she can just be a million, gajillion pieces.

He even pats her back a little, so clumsily it makes her cry even harder, because she never before had anyone try so hard, for just little ol' her.


She is waiting with a pile of Nik's paintings in flames at her feet when he walks through the door with Caroline at his side.

"Hello, Nik," she says, and smiles, so pretty, isn't she, big brother, with her hair perfectly combed, and her nails buffed to mirror, and all of her designer from boots to neckline.

And then she lifts the pistol in her lap and fires two rounds into Nik's head, and before he has sagged temporarily vanquished to the floor, she grabs him by the shoulders, heaves him twice into the wall, all these little slivers of him flying off into the house, his nose smearing, his teeth fracturing, his bones in a clockwork grinding that you will never know what white-hot satisfaction it lights in her belly and swells in her throat, Nik, because how often are you her prey, to be left cringing on your knees like nothing, like it is you whom must grovel for whatever forgiveness there is left in this family, how do you like it, Nik, do you imagine it feels anything like what poor Kol must have experienced, hoping for something better from his own flesh and blood, talk to her, tell her, you git, what he suffered in his final moments and how he pleaded for the brother he lost so very long ago and if it hurt and if he wanted to know why wasn't she there-

He lands on his side, and she flips him with a kick to the ribs onto his back, and she fires again, into his face, so that she can watch all his features just disintegrate, and if only they could erase you so easily, Nik.

"What the hell, Rebekah?" Caroline spits out when she has at last unfrozen her voice, and she keeps her back to the girl as she pats Nik down and roughly jerks the white oak stake from his jacket.

"He killed Kol."

It snags, this accusation, but then when has her family not been a thing to hang up in her throat?

"What?" Caroline replies in such a small voice.

"Are you deaf?" she snaps. "I said he killed Kol. It was bound to happen sooner or later, with my brother running rampant through the city. It's what always happens when you don't fall in line with Nik,"

It's such a slap to the girl, she sees when she turns round.

Poor thing.

It's what you get when you believe in Nik, is all.

She tilts her head, and narrows her eyes at the girl's red chin, and her soaked throat, and the hands brown to the forearm with death just recently dried. "Where's all the blood from? Did he do something to you?"

"No," Caroline whispers, standing with her hands limply by either side, and her throat working over some obstruction must be nearly as large as the one in her own. "My mom's dead," she says, and begins to sob.

Nik stirs.

She lifts her pistol once more, and she blasts his pretty blonde curls all over the floor.


"And take these. Save them by any means," she snaps at the girl who steps away from Caroline's bath with that bovine complacency of the compelled, and thrusts first Caroline's blouse and then her trousers into the woman's arms. "Those jeans are Dolce and Gabbana. Do you understand what that means?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I don't think you do. I had to compel myself past a whole waiting list of people to get them. So get those blood stains out, or the next ones on them will be yours."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Miss," she snaps. "Do I look like I'm middle-aged and wearing control-top hose?"

"No, miss."

"Now get out," she says, and pushing the woman out, she slams the door.

Caroline is sitting on the edge of the tub with the curls lank and rusty down her back, still in her bra and panties, and the goosebumps like some kind of horrid breakout on her back.

"Come on; off with the rest," she tells the girl, and crosses her arms.

But a mother's death stuffs up the ears to all else, and so she just sits there, staring down into the fumes of lavender and rose, shoulders slumped.

"Caroline."

Somewhere in the house the girl has set to work at those stains, and that long-suffering grandfather clock with the crack down the middle where once Kol put Nik's head through it opens its throat to cry the hour, and outside where the world moves on as it always does, without a mother, without a brother, the cars hiss away at their commute and the revelers cheer whatever vulgar new justification for alcoholism has brewed itself anew in their tiny minds, and she touches the girl's back, with just the tips of her fingers, and oh, Mother.

If you only knew what cracks you put in a daughter's heart.

You'd never leave.

"I killed Tyler," she sniffles. "But at least she didn't see that. So she got to- she got to…keep some of it. Like…what I used to be. You know?" she asks, and takes a great pull at the air, like she's just broken the surface. "Back when I was just her little girl. And she didn't have to try to love me."

She gave into her urges so quickly, when Mother unbent their bones from man's mortal anchor, and sent them wild into the world with no more clocks in their hearts.

How could any mother look upon her daughter like such, she used to think, picking the bones from her teeth, didn't you guide her first steps, and salve her first love, Mother, wasn't it always going to be- couldn't she never do something bad enough, doesn't a mother's love stretch and stretch, and eclipse all sins, and gather them still unto its breast, and rock them like a child?

She loops her arm round Caroline's shoulders, and rests her chin on her head.

She was once a daughter, and she knows.

"I'm sorry," Caroline hiccups.

"For what?" she asks, and shuts her eyes. "Don't be a twit, Caroline." She takes a deep breath. "You're a girl. We don't scrape and bow and make our apologies for taking up space in this world, with all our bloody feelings."

Those thin pimpled shoulders heave, and the girl leans forward to rest her face in her hands, and she keeps hold of her lightly but bends forward with her, and it's all right, if she leaks a few of her own tears into Caroline's hair, and feels in her heart Kol's death like it's the first grief she's ever known.

Maybe she'll take the girl, and just leave.

Maybe she was always sniffing round for her love in the wrong places, trusting to lovers and brothers her frail and hopeful heart.

She hears Nik mount the first step.

Her heart leaps, the sweat prickles along her lip, there's the thundering of the blood in her ears, wrists, throat, metal adrenaline, liquid knees, but she keeps hold of the girl, she pops open her eyes, she tilts her head so it's her chin and not her cheek once more on Caroline's head, and listens to the creaking of the second step, the moan of the third, silent fourth, whispering fifth, and Nik, when did you become something she had to shore her courage against, and stiffen her spine like so, that she might take any blow, and pop up swinging?

She never asked for you to be perfect, Nik.

Only a brother and not an executioner.

She can hear him breathing outside the door.

She wipes her eyes and presses her lips together.

Do it, you bastard.

Kick the door down, drag her screaming by her hair into the corridor, up the next flight, dash her against a wall here and there, threaten her pretty hair, her prettier face, put your nose to hers, and roar out your where is it, jostle her till her bones rattle like dice, remind her she has one living brother who is not yourself, who cares if she spends her next century not rotting underneath but breathing up above-

What else has she to expect from you, Nik?

She wipes her eyes again.

She wants to taste the innocence of this girl once more, and look up into Nik's eyes, and think to herself, he wouldn't, not his own brother, his love hasn't rotted in his dark and shriveled heart, he's only hidden it away, because people poked it where it was softest, and laughed when he cried.

But she's slept for so long, with the dust drying on her lids, waiting for her fantasies of errant brother knight on his white and shining horse to sprout legs, and walk themselves into her tomb.

She tightens the arm round Caroline and she sets her jaw, and do not be afraid, daughter, her mother might have told her.

He is only a boy.

Mother said once, with the virginity still sticky on her thighs, don't cry, Bekah darling, it's what he wants of you.

And she stepped out into the world and understood, so it is with most man, who rides his beasts not so unkindly as his wives, and so mother, mother, why do you cry, when she no longer takes her revenge with bruised thighs and broken lips, when at first sign of his intentions, she spits him on her teeth, and wipes away his death as casually as he'd have surely smudged away her maiden's blood?

There's a rattle in Nik's throat.

She could rip it right out of his throat.

She did that with her first and only victimizer, and flicked it from the tip of Kol's dagger into the bushes while he spurted like no wound she'd ever before seen, and scrabbled about in the leaves, and gurgled into the grass at her feet what surely must have been the only plea of this man's short and brutal life.

And poor Kol, fourteen and all angles, vomiting into the undergrowth.

Men just don't endure, she remembers Mother telling her.

And so, Bekah, forgive them for taking what they will never deserve; it is their only talent, dear daughter.

But she's tired of being you, Mother.

With her fine white neck bent beneath the boot of the strongest of all the Mikaelsons, and muffling her tears because oh, he doesn't know any better, he'll come round if only she loves him well enough, long enough, with all her servile woman's heart meant for nothing greater.

"Come in, Nik, I dare you," she says, still holding Caroline.

He never could resist a challenge, her big brother.

But he merely stands in the corridor, listening to them breathe, and perhaps smelling all this salt, but when have tears been a thing to stir and not delight her brother, when has he stood not making a sound, just living from one ragged breath to the next, not blustering out his next threat, but respecting how heavy are some silences, and sounding almost nervous, when he breaks it at last-

"Caroline's mother is safely at the morgue. For whenever she decides what's to be done with her. The rest of it's been cleaned up as well. So." She hears him shift his weight, take a breath, run one hand over his lightly stubbled jaw. "I didn't kill him, Rebekah. He left. And I didn't go after him."

Her lips give a warning twitch, and she squeezes her eyes tightly shut for a moment.

"He ran away, just like all of us have tried or longed to do at some point," she tells him coldly. "Because you showed him once again that if he can't love you and only you, Nik, he shouldn't bother."

There is a long pause.

"He didn't leave alone," Nik replies quietly. "I let them both go."

Caroline takes a deep breath in her arms.

She blinks and smudges away half her tears, half her mascara, lets the rest fall where they may, brings her other arm up round Caroline.

"Caroline," he says, and then he just stops.

He whisks on away up the stairs.


She leaves Caroline sleeping in her bed, curls wet and tangled underneath her, and steps into the kitchen for a snack from the maid's neck.

The girl's only scrubbed half the blood stains from Caroline's jeans, and so she drinks till the girl's gone colorless with it and leaves her for another of the staff to clean up, patting her mouth daintily with one of the paper towels from the dispenser, carefully so she doesn't muss her lip gloss, and then back up to her room where Caroline sleeps away her grief, and she's not been gone fifteen minutes, but here Nik lies, not touching the girl but curled up at her back with his hands respectfully underneath his armpits, like he understands precisely what he's good for, a bit of warmth as from a hearth glow, but no real comfort to any burdened heart.

She stands just back from the doorway, slowing her heartbeat, slowing her breath, so that next to the girl as he is, breathing the scent of her fresh hair and her damp skin and listening to the thumping of all her fragile young life throughout her veins she is nearly invisible.

He falls asleep like that.

He's very young when he sleeps, Nik.

With the curls just lying on his forehead, and the dark eyelashes soft on his cheek.

He doesn't deserve it, but she pulls the sheet lightly over them both anyway, settling it carefully on his shoulders so he doesn't stir, doesn't wake, doesn't look up and see that his sister has tried and struggles still, but she's soft, she's not filled herself to the brim with hate, Nik, and let it fuel her every whim, she just loves, and she can't help it.

You could have stopped punishing her for it.

You could have made it so she's not sick with her own love, lying here with her face pressed to your hair.


She wakes up, and she has no mom.

That's the first thing she remembers.

And she doesn't like that, she doesn't know how to process it, how do you open your eyes on a day and understand it's that day, it came too soon, you never had the time, you were supposed to get so much more, you were going to adjust, it was always going to be this gradual tiptoe to the end.

You're nineteen.

You're supposed to have a mother.

So she stares at the ceiling for a while, with the tears standing on her bottom lids.

And then she just…slides back underneath.


For two days, she does this.

And don't tell her, chin up, Caroline Forbes, it's only death, it's only human, and like all things this too shall pass.

She knows that.

But she has forever.

She has forever.

And this one thing- this one thing-

She couldn't have longer? She couldn't have just another decade, two, three, to get some time beneath her belt, to get some perspective beneath her belt, to establish her two feet on the solid ground beyond her teens, beyond her untidy and seismic adolescence, where she understands nothing, where she is only a child, where she has just barely begun to grasp, death, it comes for everyone, even for mothers, but not for the girl with her shiny blonde curls and her pretty cream cheeks.

Mom.

Oh God, mommy.

It hurts so much.

You would have made it better.

You would have told her, here's how you go on, without me, without Daddy, here's how you square your shoulders and face the world without an anchor, without a back-up, here's how you just do it, and you live.

But, oh, you're not here- you're not here, and so she doesn't know-

Where does she start?


He brings her blood bags he leaves at the foot of the bed.

Sometimes she hears him, moving around the house, but mostly he's silent, mostly he's hovering at the edges of his own home, mostly he's just gone, but she comes out of the bathroom one day, and she catches him laying out her favorite candies and teas next to the bags.

He freezes.

"Hi," she says.

He laces his hands behind his back and rocks awkwardly on his heels. "Hello." He darts his tongue out to nervously wet his lips. "Are you- have you-"

"I'll do both parts for you. Are you ok? No, stupid, my mother just died. I know, I'm sorry, I just- it's what you say. I know. Thanks for caring enough to do the awkward oh-God-this-person-has-been-crying-so-much-what-do-I-do dance."

God, she wishes you would smile like that more.

Without the malevolence, without the swagger, just the dimples, just the little crinkles at the corner of your eyes, and the little duck of your head, like you're just a boy, you don't know any better than she where to go from here, with which foot do you make your first stride, how do you carry on, when will the world embrace you?

"I brought you a few things."

"I know. I'm just sad, Klaus, not blind."

"Right." He clears his throat awkwardly and looks down at his feet. "Where's my lovely sister? Out sharpening the stake she still hasn't given back to me?"

"Out getting me more clothes, probably. Apparently, you designer shop your way back to a glad heart."

"Ah, yes, retail therapy. Bekah's quite adept at it."

They try to smile at one another, but hers is broken right now, and he sees it, and he falters.

She listens to the clock downstairs ticking away, and the thump of his heart in his chest, too fast for a man who has ridden down Russian generals, and French lieutenants, and yawned his way through their deaths like all other deaths.

"Caroline. Can I- bring you something?" he asks so earnestly, and then downstairs the front door slams, and Rebekah appears half a second later, shopping bags in hand.

She tosses them onto the bed, and lifts her chin to Klaus. "Get out."

"It's ok," she says quietly. "He's trying."

"Well, isn't that lovely," Rebekah snaps, and slams the door in his face.


One night she just walks out of the house, with Klaus gone and Rebekah sleeping.

It's a kind of sleepwalker's daze.

You'd probably cry to see her, Mom, shuffling along with her hair down like a woman's, and her lipstick red as blood.

But she's been thinking.

She likes the spurt of the fresh vein in her mouth, she likes all the little struggles of her prey, the thrashing arms, the kicking feet, the last mercy cry of the throat, incomprehensible with blood and bile.

She can't tell you she doesn't.

She dressed it up in ribbons, because she wanted you to like her.

She's had to do that a lot, you know.

A girl is only human, but not her, not Caroline Marie Forbes, who had to be better, who had to be seamless, who was supposed to overshoot the mark, and always fell just a bit shy.

But anyway, you know how it is, with the bed not quite right around you, the pillows too cool, the sheets too hot, sleep always just beyond the fingers, and all the day whirling around your heart, and coming back up your throat.

Like she said: she's been thinking.

And she wants to know, why hold herself back, why pretend, why keep looking down, and pretending to herself Klaus is a monster, Rebekah is a monster, the whole nutso family is just fundamentally different.

So she thought why not wear her skirt a bit too short, and her lipstick a little too bright, and shut her eyes for a moment and let Caroline the Girl mourn the days when there was a mother, there was a daughter, and if neither of them were perfect, they were not monsters, they were not the slayers of monsters, they performed that dance of all those taut teenaged years, autonomy vs. umbilical cord, and Mom was always going to lose, and divide her time between her weeping and her pride, but they would have parted smiling.

We like to tell ourselves because we don't accept something it is not a truth, though it hides behind our heart, and we feel it worrying away at our ribs.

And that's what she's been trying to do, Mom.

But you're not here, you're not here, and she can't face a trillion gajillion more years, creeping around what she is.

So you have to forgive her.

You have to forgive her, for all those times she tried, and this one time she didn't.

You think it's going to be something cinematic.

The slow loom from the shadows, and the moon just perfect behind you, the slight breeze in your curls, the streetlights caught on your lips, the condescension of this six-foot behemoth with the shoulders like mountains (well hello there girly), and the smile, and the head tip.

The one heel just slightly ahead of the other.

And knowing in your heart this man will never pin me, this man will never bruise my hips, and drink my screams, this man will think to himself, no it's me who needs to flee, and turn to run, and spoiler alert-

He won't make it.

The streetlight shorts out at just the right moment, and it's like the clouds know, and close their arms around the moon, and God, she feels this all the way to the tips of her toes, the man's warm fear, his fluttery pulse, the first stuttering steps on the pavement, and she closes her eyes and she inhales that one slutty intake of breath, you know the one she's talking about, the one right on that verge, just at the edge, and she pops open her eyes, and maybe she means it and maybe she doesn't, she's not sure yet, but she smiles.

She doesn't walk quickly.

It's scarier that way, she remembers, tearing along with the breath sour in your lungs, and the rubber in your knees, and the footsteps never getting farther away, just freaking moseying along, like they've got all the time in the world.

Once there was a girl, and she was just like you.

And she rattled the doors of shops long-asleep, and she opened her lungs to the world, and she begged it, please, somebody help.

And she thought it was just a story.

Just for a moment.

Because girls don't really die when they're seventeen, they don't really leave their mothers alone in houses their daddies abandoned long ago, their hearts don't just give up, and stop going, not when they're seventeen.

But sometimes they do.

And sometimes you stumble across one of these girls who stopped breathing at seventeen, and you think, just look at her, she's nothing, and though you caved to your first prey's instinct to run when the moon filled her hair, and the streetlight failed just right, and the clouds converged just so, that a mind full of midnight and alcohol might think, her eyes are black, she's got death in her smile, you stutter out of that sprint you tore off in, and you smooth the sob in your throat, because seriously, come. On.

You think it's going to be something cinematic.

And it is.

He turns to you like any stupid victim in any B horror, because humans never change, they always think to themselves not here, not now, not me.

And your smile is just like you always dreamed.

And the scream he is too scared to sound goes straight to your belly, straight to all the places you are not supposed to feel death, and you think, you could fuck him, right here, right now, with your hand over his mouth.

But you're not that kind of girl.

You just eat him, is all.

And he's so warm, it's just fantastic, sliding down your tongue, down your throat, it's what you always imagined, sitting there with that bag between your lips, you feel it sizzling in your veins, burning up your cheeks, and the way he fights it, and how easily you twist his arm behind his back, and you hold him right where he is, with the head yanked back, and the throat pumping into the night, and you are not a monster, you told Daddy, you are not a monster, you're a daughter.

But you know just precisely how to bury your face.

And if you collapse when he does, and kneel there with your face in your hands, sobbing into your palms, and any nearby heart surely bleeding because the poor thing, she must have lost so much, to wail like that, still your veins are hot, your face is smeared, you look him in the pale and lifeless face and you don't think Mommy, you don't think, I'm sorry, you don't think who does he leave behind, what have I taken, you wish there was more, you wish he hadn't gone so fast.


It's not that he doesn't care, she understands.

It's just-

It's not what he knows.

He's never healed someone of death, he's never thought, some puny mortal has died, and I the Great Klaus ought to fix it, somewhere within me are the words and the experience and the capacity to Make It Better, so for once what I touch will not turn to blood, will not turn to screams, for once I will open my arms, and there will be someone to walk into them, not to their death, not to their salvation, that's in someone's own breast, and not another's embrace, but just into me, where for a little while I will be enough.

But he steals in to leave his gifts silently.

What would he know about mourning a mother anyway, Rebekah asks in disgust, but she doesn't take them away.

Sometimes they just lie there on that bed with their heads touching, and Rebekah pretends she's asleep, like it's only an accident, like it's only unconsciousness that leans them against one another like that, because of course she needs no one, of course she stands alone in her designer boots and her trillion-dollar jeans.

Sometimes when she really is asleep, Caroline slips a hand into her twitching palm, and holds it until she stops crying, too quietly to wake her, because that's how girls are trained, that's what she was always told, grieve however you need, just as long as it doesn't step on any toes not your own.

And that's when he comes, to stand outside the door, and listen to them breathing, and to hesitate there like he just needs a moment, he'll just take a breath, and then he'll slip himself right inside, and to his sister he'll say I was wrong, and to her he'll say, love, I'm so sorry, and it won't make it all ok, but at least it'll be something, at least they won't be in here and he won't be out there, where nobody ever solved anything.

But he never comes in.

And Rebekah just goes on breathing, and she just goes on crying.


"What was it like, after your mom died?" she asks one night when Rebekah pretends to sleep but does not.

She's a while answering, just lying in the moonlight and breathing her slow and false slumber.

Sometimes in moments like this, she puts out her hand and she touches the hair next to Rebekah's cheek because they both need it, and that's ok, and she wishes that's what time immemorial would impart.

"It was like everything ended," Rebekah says without opening her eyes. "Except me."

"And what about now?" she asks, her voice cracking.

But she knows.

You don't bury your mom with a thousand, thousand years.

So there are no pretty words.

But Rebekah opens her eyes and tucks one of her curls very gently behind her ear, almost like she's getting the hang of this whole friend thing, and if a friend is only something to leave you, and break your heart on the way out the door, still she thinks it's worth it, to enjoy them while they stay.


She hears him in his office, bossing minions and tacking away on the keys of his laptop and shutting the doors of her filing cabinets and here and there butting heads with Elijah.

Well, a story doesn't end because your favorite part is over.

So people commence their business of loving, and dying, and living, they do not stop moving outside her window, because her own small universe stopped spinning, and crashed into wherever it is children go when their mothers stop breathing.

But she doesn't have to watch the glare of them.

She waits until the house is quiet at night and slips out then, when there's nothing but black in the sky, and her heart in her ears.

Somewhere down Bourbon St. a lone radio crackles, and there are the ever-present boots, and the bored tick tick click of some soldier flicking his safety back and forth, back and forth, and as she walks she inhales them, she can't help it really, not when they sweat like so, and snag their cuticles on all those little hazardous protrusions of life, and squeeze out into the world all the mouth-watering lure of an eleven A.M. Cinnabon.

The moon's not here tonight.

And there's a wind, it tears at her hair, and whips out her coat, and she doesn't know if it's a herald, if it's an announcement, look out world, something wicked this way struts in its Jimmy Choos and its Armani trench-

But you can just imagine how she looks, here alone in the wind and the black and the streetlights ahead of her giving a shudder, not, she likes to think, at the mercy of those fickle whims of electricity and all its little kinks, no, here is a girl, here is a woman, she lost her mother, she killed a lover, quail before her, world, and bend your knee at her arrival.

She didn't come here to kill anyone.

She wants to put that out there.

But she finds a guy working late in some little shop on the corner, she didn't even look at the name, she just saw the light, and she broke the lock on the door, wrenching it open, and it was like he knew, just looking at her, this tiny blonde thing in his doorway, she's here for his heart, he can see it in her eyes, or hear it in her 'Hi', and when he tries to run, it sends this thrill down her spine, and she understands, this is what his smirk is about, this is what he sees, when he looks out over the world.

She snaps the guy's neck, and then she bends him at the throat like she'd crack a lobster, and she sticks her face into what pops free.

She hears the door open.

It's a small noise, an inconsequential noise, what is it to the snap of bone, and the wet slurp of the meat from its tendons, and the blood, pounding in her teeth, pounding in her chest, but she pulls her face away, somehow, someway, and she looks up.

And it's him.

His jacket is open over his Henley, those necklaces shining in the lamplight.

He nudges the door shut behind him with his heel.

The click is louder than her heart.

She lets the man slide out of her hands, but she doesn't wipe her face, she stands here before him with the veins black under her eyes and throat still caught in her teeth, she listens to his pulse like a drum in his neck, and the breath heavy in his nose.

"Well, love," he says softly, and he takes a step forward, a predatory thing, full of slinking muscles, and pupils dilated to Sex.

And whatever he came for, she could seize this, she could have him the way she didn't have that other boy, the way she didn't close her hand around his throat, and kiss him dead.

He takes another step forward and stops in the middle of the room, his head tilted like she is something particularly fascinating, his hands behind his back.

She could kick his legs out from underneath him, and he'd fold.

He'd even like it.

All thousand years of him groveling at her feet and the dead man at her back, and outside those streetlamps giving another nervous flicker, and the boots tromping past, tromping past, but never stopping and turning just to check, because a prey knows, it scents its fate, and tears away home, where there are no wild and moonless nights, and little blonde girls in grown-up shoes.

He doesn't take another step.

Maybe he can't.

Maybe he's afraid.

Maybe he is everything she spent the first seventeen years of her life being.

So she steps forward instead.

She leaves her fangs down and her veins out and he looks at her like-

Like there's nothing else.

Like she never has to be just Caroline Forbes again.

Like maybe her mom wouldn't get it, maybe poor Tyler- poor Tyler got in her way, and she wasn't good enough to spare him, like she tried and she tried and she tried and still it just came surging up out of her, because that's what time does, that's what immortality does, you can stay pink-cheeked, you can stay lithe, you can't stay seventeen.

And that's ok.

She smells the dead guy at her back and the cologne on his collar and the blood in both their veins, and she thinks maybe he should run.

She thinks there was never a feeling like this, in all her years, not when she drenched her chin with her first kill, not when he broke the skin of her neck with his brother smoldering at his feet, and she thought I might die, I might die, and I like it.

It hurts her throat.

It warms her heart.

It stretches itself all the way to the tips of her fingers and tingles there like lightning, she feels the arc of it in her knees, in her toes, she thinks to herself what does his jugular taste like, will his knees buckle when I rip him, what kind of noise will he make, when I shred the skin from his back and tear the curls from his nape-

She flashes her hand out to grab him by the throat.

His hands part.

His lashes flutter.

She kisses him just a little, not with teeth, not with tongue, just a slow slurp of his bottom lip, her thumb caressing his carotid pulse.

He's already half-hard against her.

She hears him swallow noisily, and ducks her head to kiss just underneath his adam's apple.

And then she just slams him back against the door, so hard she rattles the 'closed' sign against the window, pinning him with her hips.

He takes a ragged breath, and she squeezes harder, she yanks his head roughly to the side and she sinks her teeth into the arch where his neck slopes down into his shoulder and now she lets go of his throat and she jerks both of his arms over his head to hold him by the wrists as she feeds, and he could snap her fingers so easily, and throw her like a doll, but he doesn't, he wouldn't, he barely keeps his feet, he tips his head back against the door and breathes like a victim, all harsh and rattly in the back of his throat, the blood bubbling in his open wound, and God, she likes that, God she likes the way he tilts his hips forward into hers, so unconsciously, he can't be anything but just swept up in her-

She kicks his legs out from under him.

And it's just like she imagined, him kneeling on the floor before her, with his curls in her hand, and his shoulders heaving, and those lips still open and damp with her kiss, and she wonders what sort of hole her heel would put in his throat, if he could breathe around it, if he'd look up at her like she was the universe, and lick the blood from her feet.

She holds her wrist to his mouth, and he closes his lips around it without looking away from her eyes.

She sees the veins spread underneath his eyes first, and the lightening of the irises, and then the dimples.

When his fangs break the skin of her wrist, she comes.


But it's all just play, the grown-up shoes, the lipstick like blood, because when the mortician flourishes the sheet from her mother, she starts to cry.

"Go outside and wait until one of us tells you to come back in," she sniffles through her tears, and he nods and he flashes his blank smile and he shuffles away into the hall.

For a while, she just lets herself pour out everything that she dammed with blood, dammed with sweet human throats, dammed with the singing of a girl's new and aching heart when a boy kneels before her in the dark and stares up at her like she is the sun.

Her mother doesn't look like her mother.

Death is like that.

But, Mom, a mother is always supposed to be a mother.

So she pulls the sheet over this thing that is not your face, and she tucks it in around your stiff head, and she chooses instead to remember this lady who sometimes didn't get home when she said she would, who once baked a great towering pile of a chocolate cake, all black and shiny, and tasting of burned ass, who wasn't perfect, who was only a person, who loved her, whether either of them believed it or not.

And she dries her eyes.

Because one day you have to go on.

Because sometimes it doesn't look like it from your bed, through your tears, but there's still a story.

"Can you tell him to come back in?" she asks Klaus, very steadily, with her chin lifted.

"She wanted to be cremated," she says when he slips back inside. "That's all I know. She didn't- she didn't make up a will. So I don't know what she'd want done...afterward. What was important to her, you know? Where would she want to be put? She had me, and she had Mystic Falls. And I don't want to go back there. And I don't want her to go back there. We were both stuck. You just don't know it, when you get comfortable, when you get afraid."

She takes a deep breath. "So that leaves me. And sometimes there were times when I thought that disappointed her, that in the end it was just me and her, that she didn't have anything else. But I can't still be using that like a crutch when I'm a bazillion. I can't do something, because she'd approve. I can't not do something, because she'd disapprove. You can't live one lifetime like that, let alone eighty." The mortuary swims, she feels the thickness of her grief in her throat, in her chest, but it's supposed to take up room, it's supposed to feel like dying, or maybe being born, it's always going to be a beginning and an end.

"And I think she'll be sad, but she'll still love me. That's what moms are good at."

She turns away from her mom to face Klaus, and he swallows when she looks at him, the tendons shifting in his throat, and the heart rich and full in him, and the scent of it tingling in her veins.

"So have her taken over to the crematorium at St. John's Cemetery," she tells the mortician. "And then from there, she can go with me. And eventually I'll find a place, and I'll think, oh my God, mom would have just loved this, and that's where she'll get to stay. And by then I think I'll have made peace with that, that it's just going to be me, going on."

She doesn't look away from Klaus as the guy carefully loads her mom onto a gurney, and wheels her out into the hall.

"I'm not going to live according to some…regulations I think my dead mom probably would have set out for me. I could do that, for a few years. But I can't do it forever. And I can't feel like a failure, every time I slip."

She watches the tendons in his throat shift again, and when she thinks how pretty they'd look in her hand or how warm they'd feel in her gut, she doesn't suppress it, she doesn't tell herself you are a girl and not a monster, Caroline Forbes, she doesn't tell herself, put that down where it belongs, and conduct yourself like a freaking lady.

"I want you to teach me how to not be ashamed of it. How to get over what I am, and just…live."

She's not used to hearing his voice this soft. "That takes time, love. Not instruction."

She puts her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and takes a step closer, because he's always doing this, puncturing all these personal bubbles, and making of himself a thing that can't be ignored, and now it's her turn.

"Then just be there. So I know that no matter what I do, it's never gonna' be bad enough."


The first thing to remember with murder is to have fun and be yourself.

She doesn't know where she read that.

But it seems like a good jumping off point.

Klaus tells her it's not a person, it's just food, it's just the still warm corpse of a man who was going to lie down in his inevitable bed of mold and worm anyway.

He's always so freaking poetic-y about these things.

But it does help.

To think to herself, maybe life was going to knock him around so hard, and for all his troubles he was only to get a cold plot, a marble goodbye, and maybe there's not even a mother, to stand for years watering his only green and living remains with her tears, just the grass feasting on his old and rotten bones.

She likes to chase them.

It makes her think of that girl crying on her bed, and the afterward ache of wrenched hips and bruised thighs, and not even mourning her lonely victim's hours of sticky thighs, sticky throat, and moving on, but skipping around with her curls flying and her scarf waving, because isn't her shiny new boyfriend with the hot car and the hotter abs just fabulous?

She couldn't hold down a gnat.

But this girl- this girl.

She likes to see what the darkness shakes free, and sends slobbering after her swaying hips, and her cute little smile.

One time, she spends like an hour watching one of the patrols, and picking out the tastiest among them.

You start learning how to smell them, the really ripe ones, with the blood that will go down so smooth, so sweet.

Here's where girl Caroline might have felt sick to her stomach.

She picks out the one that smells best, short, baby-faced, newer than the rest, cute and curly-haired and dimpled, a boy with a smile that makes a mother of everyone, and she waits for him to switch out with another soldier.

She follows him all the way back to his hotel, and into his room.

He sings in the shower.

He reads himself to sleep.

He lays all sprawled out over the covers, only the thin sheet over him, and the moonlight coming in through the open window, to stripe his young unbearded cheek.

She stands at the end of the bed, just studying him.

Sometimes she goes alone.

Sometimes she likes it best that way, just her and the moon and some guy thinking to himself, aw, look how little she is.

But she brought him with her this time, and he stands at the end of the bed too, and she wonders what this guy would think if he jolted out of his dreams, and he blinked the gauze from his eyes to see this little blonde thing with her curls shiny as polished furniture, and the eyes so wide, so blue, and beside her this man who is something, but he isn't human, you can feel that just in his presence, you can see it in his smile, it's like if Death peeled back his hood, and he was an Abercrombie and Fitch model.

She picks up one of the pillows.

And Klaus watches her and she doesn't know why she wanted him to see this, maybe it's another birthday of sorts, and you should always have someone to clap for the blown-out candles, and the hat tilted just so.

She died and was reborn, but she's been thinking about that, and not really, actually.

See, like, she woke up on that hospital bed and she wasn't Caroline anymore, she wasn't a girl anymore, but you wouldn't know it, to look at her, because when you pretend hard enough, you create a new truth that is perhaps not quite a truth, but is close enough.

So she was still a girl.

For her mother, for Bonnie, for Stefan, for every expectation society makes of girls who are supposed to spill only their own blood, and walk gently in their ruins.

If bitch is the worst thing a woman can be, she wonders what this is?

She holds the pillow down over his face.

The body jerks itself awake when it reaches for its next breath, and it realizes suddenly that it isn't there.

She remembers that.

She remembers that panic tastes of bile.

She remembers how hard the limbs flail when they realize here it is, I'm only seventeen, but here it is, because they know how badly you want it, they know you were supposed to have a husband and a pool and head chair at the PTA, they know it shouldn't end here between sheets that smell of medicine, awaiting a mother who didn't come when she said she would.

The boy circles both his hands around her wrists and he must be thinking under that pillow what small bones, and smooth hands, I've got this, it's just a girl, just a girl.

But not anymore, see.

His feet drum beneath the sheet.

He twists the bedcovers into a sweaty figure eight and he squeezes and he claws and he makes the same noises she remembers making, the failed gulps like sobs, and doom doom doom in his chest, a heart is always loudest before it quits, hearts are stubborn like that, they will always be your greatest supporter, and thwack thwack thwack of the heels and one last gulp like a sob and the spine arching with a crack and the nails sinking in to the bone-

And it'll be going black for him now, maybe he sees a light, she didn't, but death is an individual thing, everyone goes to it differently, but the last buck, that's the same, and the final breath, all slurry and slow, like it knows, like it's given up, but the heart- that makes a final push, the blood fizzing in your veins and pounding in your temples and the worst headache you have ever had like a freaking supernova between your ears and so you think to yourself maybe I'd like to, it hurts so badly, maybe this is just better, and your hands fall away and your legs give a couple more kicks, out of habit more than anything, really, you're just keeping up appearances now for your obstinate heart, the poor thing, it tried so hard, and then your eyelids just drop, and they're so heavy, and the pounding's trickling out of your veins, out of your head, out of your chest, what a nice and fuzzy cocoon death is, so quiet, you know maybe the world could learn a few things from it, just stop up its mouth, just every once in a while-

And then it's over.

She lifts the pillow.

He is like a perfect wax doll of himself.

Klaus sits down on the bed beside him, very gently, just the way he eased himself onto the sheets next to her as she lay sweating out her life through Tyler's bite, and he told her there's the world, go grab it.

He can be very reverent.

She remembers that.

He closes the guy's eyes so tenderly, and brushes the curls off his forehead.

She's still standing there holding that pillow when he looks up at her.

Welcome, love, she thinks is what his smile is probably trying to tell her.


A/N: So obviously we've still got loads to deal with, Klebekah tension, the continual chaos that is New Orleans as the violence just escalates and escalates, etc. etc., but I wanted to make this first part all about Caroline, and actually give her some space to grow as she wasn't allowed to do on the show when Liz died. I think Liz's death should be a pivotal moment for Caroline as a character, and TVD just used it to push Steroline. I don't want this plotline to be about a ship, any ship, I want it to be about Caroline.

And: 'The first thing to remember with murder is to have fun and be yourself'- I think this is an actual quote from something, but I'm not sure of the origin; it was a line I say on a Kol gifset on tumblr, actually.

Also, I want to make a quick note on the whole Stefan thing. I don't know if anyone's been wondering where he is, but obviously he's been pretty non-existent throughout the last couple of one-shots. I'm going to just write him out of the series. And I hate to do this, because I had a lot more planned for him, and I really just hate to unceremoniously boot him out the door, but TVD has finally managed to do something that both it and TO have so far utterly failed in, and that's to so annihilate my enthusiasm for something that I just don't want to deal with it. I don't know why Stefan is the sole victim here; I hate what they've done with all the characters, Klaus most of all, and obviously the craptacular writing has only fueled my muse. I think maybe it's just that he's been so shoehorned into Caroline's story on TVD that now I don't want him anywhere near it.

I was really hoping to work past this feeling, but I just can't, and the thing is, this series is supposed to be my escape from the shittiness that is TO and TVD. So if something leaves a bad taste in my mouth, the way Stefan and the Steroline friendship in particular now does, I'm not going to force myself through it. I started this series so I could explore these characters in a way that I actually enjoyed, and in a way that hopefully readers disillusioned with the spinoff could enjoy, and that's just what it comes down to, at the end of the day. So Stefan will get a very quiet, blink-and-you-miss-it send-off, and I'm sorry if that disappoints anyone, but I just can't deal with his fuckface in Caroline's life after what the writers have done with their relationship.