It wasn't a Merry Little Christmas at all...
She is dressed to the absolute /nines/ in a dress that /flares/ and sparkles and is so far from the colour blue it isn't even funny.
It's red, a red so damn dark it looks like blood spilled in the silvered dark of midnight and it's /perfect/.
To say that she had one of the worst christmases on freaking record if she were honest and Caroline Forbes was always honest, even when it hurt like hell to be. And she was hurt. Tyler was gone, on the run, probably with that betraying fucking wolf slut Hayley following right behind him like the bitch in heat...
...Jesus she had to focus or ruin her make-up with all the scowling and squinting and it was probably good she couldn't get wrinkles from those activities either because, hello, eternally seventeen (a damn filler year and a half which sucked) because that's when she'd been killed by Katherine "I'm a world class bitch" Pierce.
(No bitterness here though because Caroline was a fighter, she was /strong/, she was...
Oh hold the fuck /up/ she was quoting /him/ now?
Seriously?!
She breathes deep and then squares her shoulders and flicks the rhinestone chain of her neat little purse over her shoulder and heads out to crash the biggest party of the year.
(And she's resolutely /not/ thinking about a shirtless hybrid after he'd killed his own pack of hybrids and Tyler's mom. Nope. She's not.)
Even if she really is and she's kind of hoping that the feeling in her belly is just nerves because Miss Mystic didn't /crash/ parties held by what was essentially the most powerful family in town. Nope.
She was just going to show up and hope that there wasn't someone all bouncer-y at their door asking for invitations or anything, because she didn't have one of those thanks to Klaus fucking "friends then" Mikaelson /not/ inviting her /at all/.
That /asshole/.
But as she strolled out to the waiting cab (one of two in this dinky town), she can't really blame him for not extending her said invitation because, let's get right to brass tacks, she hadn't been all that /receptive/ to his friendship, even though she'd spent an entire day digging around in his shoulder for a Silas induced hallucination where he thought he was dying and she thought he was more crazy than ever.
Yet she stayed, and helped him and admitted some /pretty scandalous/ things whilst they were shouting at one another, well, screaming profanities at one point and her saying "I should have turned my back on you /ages/ ago!" Which was really her saying that she kept coming back because she knew he was capable of terrible things and yet he only cared about her and oh god how did he always seem to be in her head?!
She realises with a start that they are at Mikaelson manor already and she pays the cabbie and gets out, wrapping herself deeper into her black wrap and strolling nonchalantly up to the grand and open front door.
No door man bouncer-type person, good, just milling party guests and as she's smugly congratulating herself on her smarts she suddenly finds herself pulled into a pair of strong arms and she squeaks embarrassingly as she collides against her assailant's chest.
Kol smirks down at her and she blushes at the crazy younger brother of Klaus.
"Hello darling, fancy dress there, have you come to seduce Nik again in an attempt to end my life a lot sooner?"
She is shaking her head and he laughs, and laughs, and laughs.
God why couldn't it be Elijah manning the door, at least he wouldn't be trying to dance her around like a loon and drawing attention to her /crashing/ this party.
"Kol, look, ahhh, I'm just here to drink, I can't...breathe...baby...vampire..." She gasps and he seems to realise she's gone a little purple and he loosens his hold.
"Sorry pet, don't know my own strength, but Nik told me you helped him, so I suppose I can let you get on with your gate crashing, I love to watch Nik stumble all over himself when he catches sight, or smell because weird hybrid senses, of you. And you sweets, look good enough to eat." He laughs at her scandalised expression and her spluttering denials of how Klaus sees her (except he does tend to act like she's always leaving him breathless) and pats her /ass/ as he sends her toward the front door.
She manages to get inside without being "originally" detained again and she plucks a flute of champagne off a passing gilded tray and wanders through the crowd with her white shoulders exposed under the thin jewelled straps of her dress, long legs moving confidently under the layers of tulle and satin and lace. She feels invisible for a good twenty minutes before that familiar weight falls on the back of her neck.
He's been following her, though she hasn't seen him just yet and she wonders what his tux looks like.
(Focus Forbes)
She follows his scent and turns slowly to pin him to the spot he's made it to with her eyes on his. And dear god he's dressed in the same colour scheme as she. Deep red vest under the blackest jacket she's ever seen, a deep red pocket square, a black tie with a diamond the size of her thumb, diamond cufflinks and Italian leather shoes polished to a mirror gloss. He's perfect and he /fucking/ knows it if his swaggering march to her side is any indication.
She drains her glass (high school cautionary tale be /dammed/) and fixes him with a bright smile. He holds out his arm for her and she puts her hand there, in the crook, and doesn't, /does not/ marvel at the smooth flow of muscles under her overly sensitive fingertips. He leads her to the dance floor and swings her into a waltz, hand positioned appropriately on the small of her back and staring into her eyes as he leads her expertly around the room.
Sane.
Safe.
Yep, that's what she is even though his eyes are dark and his nostrils flare and she is one hundred percent sure that she's been staring at his mouth this whole time and wondering in her naughty bits what they'd feel like on hers, or on her throat right before he bites...
Jesus /fuck/ Caroline, get a hold on your hormones!
He killed tyler's /mom/! After slaughtering twelve of his hybrids, blood splattered Gucci suit and clutching a bottle of Dom...
She should remind herself that it was fucking creepy Klaus she saw outside her house that same night, drunk, smelling of blood and chlorine and death and her simply staring at the crushing loneliness of his eyes as she received Stefan's frantic phone call about Carol Lockwood. Yet she stared at him for the entirety of that conversation with Stefan and once she hung up, knowing he heard every word out of her mouth, they continued to share that look, and she waited, for a long time, for him to fade into the night in his utter devastation, that gilded moment where he was so completely alone he could do nothing but fill the frigid spaces of their shared look with his need.
In the seconds it took for her to look over at the stolen snowflake painting (yes, she compelled the "curator" to "sell" it to her) hanging on her wall, seconds spent comparing it to how she was beginning to see him, as fragile (yes he was an immortal hybrid) in his need to be understood and loved even, to his unique beauty (and when did she start thinking of him as beautiful she wonders), and the seconds she gazes back up to where he was stood, he's now gone.
Maybe that's why she's in his arms now at his party, a party she crashed because she too feels like that damn snowflake, fragile and brittle and all cold.
Except where he touches and looks and she comes back to herself as she hears a countdown beginning and Klaus dances her to the middle of the room and gazes up to the sparkling ball dropping down as the new year is about to begin by kicking out the old.
"Five."
Klaus pulls her close and fans his hand out on her hip and she sort of doesn't mind, much because evil hybrid and all, but she also doesn't mind because "friends, then?" and she's got a humming bird tattooed on her wrist, one she got after he told her his story about his trek in the andes.
"Four."
She's snaking her arm around his back and tracing her fingers over his triangle tattoo, remembering how his blood felt under her fingertips, how good he smelled to her.
"Three."
He's staring at her as the lights dim and she is gilded in all the sparkling hues of their glittering christmas lights and how that image sort of burns into his memories and how later, after she's gone, he paints her this way, full of light and bathed in light.
"Two."
She grasps his hand and sort of dances in place because she feels like there is some sort of breaking within her still seventeen year old body as if her perceptions have been shaken loose from their moorings and she's taken a leap into something entirely new, someplace she never thought to be when it came to him. It's that stolen snowflake painting, it's him, it's her, except now neither of them are lonely, even when they think they are, though fragile in their tenuous joining here now, divine providence or magic or fate. But not lonely.
"One."
Funny how the revelry holds that pregnant pause every New Year as "one" is spoken and he's brushed her hair off her neck and she thrills in terror and need as those perfect red lips move to press carefully over her pulse and she tilts her head when his words come the first words he's said to her all night.
"Happy New Year!"
"Happy New Year Caroline..." and he kisses her neck, smiling, knowing in that smile that she was hoping for a kiss on her lips, and knowing she knew he wouldn't dare more than that, not tonight, not when she's gilded in lit perfection and he needed to leave her as he found her; perfection under his lips and in his arms as the old years dies and the new year is born in the same second.
There is something in her voice as she whispers back so softly in the revelry that it is like she spoke not at all, but he hears regardless.
"Happy New Year, Nik."