Of Diamonds & Disaster, Part One
He has just asked her to marry him.
Though, of course, not in as many words.
Caroline is having trouble breathing. Not that it's a required action and the restriction in her abdomen is really a problem, but the lack of air in her lungs feels unnatural. She is trying to remember how to breathe, searching deep into her body functions to remember the natural inhaling and exhaling motions.
She can't concentrate hard enough.
His hands are in her hair and his lips are ghosting along the trails of her neck. He is following a path, traveling the veins of her neck like highways, attaching himself to her pulse point and refusing to let go. He has immobilized her, rendered her breathless and speechless and useless. She is so sick of feeling incapable under him.
He is trying to make this moment matter. He is trying to brand something into her skin with his lips, attempting to convey some deep meaning into the pretty kisses he presses against her flesh. He is trying.
His lips are moving up along her neck, curving into her jaw and feathering over her cheek. He is trying to coax her, use his lips as persuasive points so she will accept the ring he has shoved into his pocket.
He just presented her with a ring, a gorgeous, too expensive, and probably stolen from some great royal family member diamond ring. Fished it out of his pocket while they were undressing for the night and tried to give it to her.
Said, "Sweetheart, I have a gift for you."
And then he ever so casually tried to put a fucking ring on her finger.
She had just stared at him, shocked, slightly outraged, confused to the point of inability to speak. Now he is assaulting her neck in some strange attempt at persuasion.
Perhaps he thought that her silence was saying no.
"Stop it," she finally murmured, pressing her hands against his chest and removing his mouth from her person. He made it too difficult to think that way.
Klaus merely raised an eyebrow but obliged, leaning his body away from her. "Yes, love?"
"What-?" Caroline struggled for the right words to say. Normally, she was overly loquacious, never quite knowing when to shut up or stop babbling. Klaus found her incessant chatter endearing. Now she wasn't even sure if she could form the words to convey whatever it was she was feeling.
Was there a word for what she was feeling?
"What the hell was that?" She finally stuttered out, and though she was aiming for force her words lacked the conviction she wanted. She was floating somewhere between muted outrage and sadness. Maybe there was happiness in there too, deep in the back, and deep rooted surprise because in the past thirty-six years that she had been in a relationship with Klaus, she never, ever suspected that he would attempt to put a ring on her finger.
"The ring?" Klaus asks. "Do you not like it? It's early twentieth century, though I replaced the band for something slightly more modern. If you don't like it, we can find something else. Perhaps a different stone or from a more modern era?"
For being over a thousand years old, sometimes he is so fucking oblivious. She has to stop herself from rolling her eyes, but the annoyance is already setting in.
"It looks like a wedding ring."
Klaus pauses for a second, before he smirks and takes a step closer to her again. Her body instantly shifts against him, her orbit adjusting to his. Thirty-six years. She has loved him for thirty-six years and it feels like such a huge amount of time. She has loved him for more than half of her life, but he has only loved her for a fraction of his, a tiny little decimal point. Why does he want to marry her?
"Actually, it's more like an engagement ring." He says casually, shrugging nonchalantly. As if words like "engagement ring" can be said by Klaus with a blasé attitude. "There's a complimentary ring, as well."
"Are you proposing to me?" She asked him incredulously. Matching ring sets? Diamonds? Engagements? Caroline had given up on thoughts of marriage and her dream wedding a long time ago, somewhere around the five year mark when Klaus had openly criticized Elijah for his marriage to Katherine.
"We're immortal." Klaus said. "Marriage is a trivial convention for humans to prove their fidelity to one another. Perhaps it was useful in earlier decades, but today people treat marriages as events to have just for fun, like birthday parties. It's useless."
Caroline had stopped reading bridal magazines after that. It wasn't that she was harboring some great opportunity lost by not getting married, but in complete honesty, she would feel something as each year passed and the people she would have had on her invite list started dwindling. After her mother had died, Caroline had given up all hope on a wedding completely. There wasn't a point anyone to it, was there, if her mother couldn't see her daughter walk down the aisle?
And it wasn't as if she wasn't pretty much already married to Klaus. She knew the pin number for his debit card and occasionally did his laundry. Her name was next to his on the deed to their apartment in Chicago and the townhouse in London. She'd been referred to as "Mrs. Mikaleson" more times than she could count by hotel staff and service people. They were a unit, two people that came in one package, even if there wasn't a ring on her finger or certificate claiming it legally so.
Klaus looked perplexed for a moment, his face reacting in confusion. "Is that not what an engagement ring means?"
It took Caroline two seconds to react, registering his words just milliseconds before her hand reached out to shove his shoulder.
"Are you serious?" She asked him, her voice now raised and firm, like she had needed it to be seconds ago. "That was the shittiest proposal ever! That wasn't even a proposal! You didn't ask me anything! You just tried to give a ring! A proposal is supposed to be romantic and memorable and you're supposed to get down on one knee and say something stupid and cheesy and then ask me to marry you and I'm supposed to cry and act flustered and take a moment as if I'm actually going to say anything besides yes and then we're supposed to have a bottle of celebratory champagne and go upstairs and have great, newly engaged sex. You're not supposed to just spring something like that on me while I'm taking off my makeup! Honestly, you've been alive for more than a freaking millennium and you can't even grasp the concept of a proper proposal!?"
Klaus stepped away from her, his face shifting from confusion to amusement. He smirked at her as she ranted, her chest heaving in shallow, exasperated breaths.
"Are you done, sweetheart?" He asked when she seemed to take a pause to catch her breath.
"I don't know," she answered honestly, leaning against the bathroom sink behind her.
"Do you want a proper proposal?" Klaus questioned. "Romance and roses and one knee? Is that what you want?"
"Do you want to propose to me?" She countered, avoiding his question stealthily because, well, she wasn't really sure. Yes, a part of her was saying, yes I want romance and roses and grand gestures. But then another part of her, the part of her that had buried her gestures of grand romance from Klaus years ago, when she watched him mercilessly tear through a group of werewolves once for threatening her, thought that maybe the only romance Klaus knew wasn't grand or traditional and she had accepted that.
"Would I have attempted to give you a ring if I didn't?"
"Was it meant to be an engagement ring? You didn't act like it was meant to be an engagement ring."
Klaus sighed exasperatedly. "Caroline, anything with that many diamonds and worth that much money is meant to be an engagement ring."
"I thought you didn't want to marry me." Caroline blurted out.
Klaus's eyebrows furrowed. "Where did you ever get that impression?"
Caroline scoffed. "Where did I get that-? Um, okay, let's start with the fact that we've been together for over thirty years and you've never brought the idea up once, despite the ample opportunities. Also, I distinctly remember you saying that you didn't approve of marriage and it was pointless, especially for people like us."
"It is pointless." Klaus accepted with a nod. "It's a pointless human convention to mark ownership and attempt to claim fidelity, but that doesn't mean I don't want to marry you, Caroline."
"As what? A sign of ownership? Are you seriously saying that you want to marry me as a sign of ownership, because Klaus, I swear to God, I will-," Caroline seethed, her guard up instantly.
"Yes, a sign of ownership," Klaus said, cutting her off. "But not for me, for you."
Caroline was mid-rant when she instantly stopped talking, taken aback by his confession. "What?"
Klaus stepped towards her, his hands finding the familiar grove of her waist. He pulled her towards him, pressing her body against his.
"Sweetheart, everyone knows who you are to me and my ownership over you. Start on your feminist rant as soon as we're done discussing this, but face it, love. I've had my claim marked on you since before this even started, but the hold you have over me is less obvious."
"Are you saying that you want me to claim ownership over you?"
"Well, in less demeaning words, perhaps yes. There are other reasons, as well, as I think the title 'wife' fits you marginally better than 'girlfriend', as you are so much more than that, and the name Caroline Mikaleson is heaven to my ears. Perhaps it's a formality, but I want you to be my wife, Caroline, and I want to be your husband."
"Why now?" She murmured, her face now pressed against his shoulder. She nuzzled into his neck, her entire body sighing in relief as the fight dropped out of her. "Why have you waited for so long?"
"Because I keep waiting for you to finally come to your senses and leave me." Klaus murmured in her ear. "But I figure it's been decades and you haven't gone screaming yet, so might as well try."
"I'm not going to leave you." She muttered into his neck, pressing a soft kiss there before pulling away and looking up at him. "Are you sure about this?"
Klaus rolled his eyes. "I'm positive, love. Now do you want the ring or not?"
Caroline released him. "No."
"No?" He asked, his brow instantly furrowed. He stepped back from her then, and his gaze hardened instantly. "I see. You've finally decided that now is the time to run. Convenient, that-,"
"Klaus, shut up." She sighed at him, exasperated. "No, I don't want the ring right now. If you want to propose to me, you're going to do it right, dammnit."
"Caroline, you can't be serious-," Klaus protested.
"Damn right I am." She smirked. "If you're so convinced that marriage is what you want, you're going to do this the right way. I have not put up with your insufferable ass for the past thirty years to be cheated out of my dream proposal."
"Insufferable ass? I am not insufferable. How dare you insinuate that I-,"
"Oh, shush." Caroline giggled, before pressing a chaste kiss to his lips. "Now hop to the planning, loverboy."
She sped out of the room before he could protest.
A/N: Part two is coming hopefully some time soon(ish), so keep an eye out for that, yeah?