A/N: This drabble is a response to the spoilers that were leaked on TO's finale. Spoiler alert: it's terrible and makes no sense, just like the rest of the show. I slightly fudged the timeline on when Caroline's parents die (namely her dad), but otherwise this fic incorporates canon through season 4 of TVD. The title of this is from a poem by Wilfred Owen called 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.
There was a girl, once. And oh, she wanted a story.
And you shall have one, said the witch, and broke her bones like candy, for that is a woman's job: to put curls on a narrative's suffering, and make it something palatable.
And for a while she endured. That's what she does: she gets broken; she puts herself back together.
But there was a blue-eyed boy who said he loved her, and she took him around on her arm so everyone could see, sometimes, some people, they're here for her. But he never was. She should have known: some lives, some stories, that's how they go.
He could beat her any way he likes (and he does) and tear the skin from her young bones. There is yet no frost in young bones; they break like fresh greenwood. They have not yet learned their own mortality.
But loneliness is not like that. That is not the word for it. No human tongue has ever stumbled on it. You can say you're so full with it you're empty; you can ask someone you thought was a friend, at three in the morning, if they understand what you mean when you say to them: alone is not a solitary happening. Alone is a thing you are when people are happy to have your help, but not your heart. But that is not the word for it.
And so the witch whispers from the shadows, as witches do: you do not have to feel any of this. You have heard the stories. Sometimes, some maidens, they lay down for a century, and let the ages frost their gowns, and she says, ok, ok–
And she wakes up a monster.
She always knew there was one inside her.
People are afraid to know that.
In some dusty library they slept over 10th grade history, and it told them, all men, they have something inside them. It is not refutable; it is inconstant. They carry it with them through every choice, and in some are better than others. The dragon sleeps on his nest, waiting to be malevolent, because people would like to think, if they tiptoe around it, this monster will slumber away all the brief decades of their life. So they put that into their stories; they want to know: a monster is a monster because one day he said to himself, I'm just tired of being good.
But she always knew about it. She's pretty; she tried to be kind, and when that didn't work, she tried the other way. And she could see it in every last face, from Elena on down to her mother: something is off.
They tried to love her, she believes.
People do not like her as a monster; people did not like her as a girl.
So she decides: ok. If you want something done right.
But this will not do, the witch says.
For every young heroine deserves a prince, isn't that right, Caroline?
Isn't that right.
And then a boy she thinks she might love, who might love her, gives her a poisoned apple, and then he runs, and she crawls alone into her bed so she can die in her own room, on her own terms.
And they don't send a prince.
They send a monster.
He sits down next to her. He is so small, for a villain; that's what she thinks. But you can feel him on your nape: in all those primordial bits of caveman who knew when to run. She doesn't shrink away; she feels like that would please him. She's done pleasing people. She is seventeen. She is dead. She is dying again.
Go away, she tells him. She knows what he is.
"Ah; but do you know what you are, love?" he asks softly, and touches a stray curl on her forehead. He does it lightly; she knows he didn't have to. She knows he doesn't remember how, and he dredged it up out of him just for this, just for her. She doesn't know why; she looks up at him in the lamplight, and she senses how he must use those dimples to his advantage, but he doesn't use them now. He looks down at her with his head cocked. He tells her: you like being a monster.
She never told anyone that.
She never told anyone: the girl was superfluous, and she hated herself. She bent under everything. She had only a finite life, with unforgiving clocks. She didn't have time to make the people love her, or get over it.
He touches her wrist.
"How long do you want?" he asks her, and she listens to the rattling in her chest, and feels the final foams upon her lips, and she says:
Everything. All of it.
There is always a ball.
And so too does this come to pass.
Her fairy godmother is a jerk, but he has great taste in dresses.
When she walks into his ballroom, he stops. He stares at her the way no one has ever stared at anyone; he has watched empires rust, and kings fold their weary bones on lighted pyres.
He has not seen her before.
That's what his face says. He doesn't have long enough to hide it.
When he holds out his hand, he is scared she won't take it; he doesn't have long enough to hide this either.
"I knew the blue would suit you," he tells her, and takes her hand softly, not because she needs him to, but because he does.
"Did you go through my closet, you creeper? The measurements for this are exact."
He doesn't leave.
She doesn't understand that.
He is not misunderstood; he wants you to know: all those stories, they're true, and then some. His father taught him about love all wrong, and he forgot how to do it, he forgot it's not something you kill before it kills you. He forgot it doesn't have to be like that.
But he doesn't leave.
He talks about his artwork all breathlessly, like he's afraid if he doesn't talk quickly enough, he'll leave something out; he will forget something vital, something he needs her to know, something that will make her go, oh, oh, and love it the way he loves it, with a young boy's tender innocence in something wonderful.
Mostly, he does not talk about himself.
Mostly, he shows up somewhere inconvenient, with blood on his shirt, and this helpless smile in his eyes, and he wants to know how she came to be, and where she wants to go.
This is not how she intended it to go, the witch says to her coldly one night, but she needn't have worried.
He tries to kill her because he is afraid of her.
He isn't used to that.
After his father it was just him, bigger than anything.
She is so small. He could crush her between his thumb and pointer, and smear her contemplatively on his lips, to taste this brine of fear in which all creatures, saving him, are doomed to flounder.
But she isn't the maiden; she's the monster. She does not have to lie on her bed of dust and mold, and expire in pretty exhalations. There are girls like Elena, who are to be saved, and there are girls like her, who have to do it themselves.
So she stares at him until he looks at her, and sees what he's done, and watches it go through him like a shudder; he wasn't going to watch: he was going to absolve himself of that.
But she's doing the hard part, you jerk.
So she stares at him, and he can never look away, he stands there in the lamplight of the Gilbert's living room, wetting his lips, clasping his hands, unclasping them, and saying to her things like, "It will all be over soon, sweetheart, shh."
It will be; but he doesn't know the ending yet.
She has decided already: it's not going to be hers.
She stares at him unblinking. She says to him, steadily, in her parched voice, with the death rattle in it, calmly, like it isn't her in mortal danger, as if she lured him here, and has been leading him all along, and has decided only now to show him: he is only some dense puppet, breathing because she told him to: "I know that you're in love with me."
She doesn't know that; she doesn't know that. Is there left in him any mortal comprehension of this love, which defeats anything so puny to kneel before it?
But that's what he thinks; she can sense his terror. He killed it long ago, and still it has crept up softly to his heart, and breathed the hot red blood back into it.
He makes a sound in the back of his throat.
She doesn't wait to see how the debate in his eyes ends: she holds out both her hands for his arm. She does not look up at him with trust. She tried that; you can't blame her. She was only a soft child with her young heart, carrying around all her infantile early years, when being loved is easy.
She looks at him like it's a command. Elena would have blinked her soft big eyes, and summoned half a dozen saviors, but there is just her, and him.
Some part of her worries: that's how it's going to be.
You can't ride off with the villain; but then, she is not the heroine.
He comes to her like he can't help it, the way he always does.
She does not forgive him.
It's not that kind of story.
He does not know that; he saved her. He does not think it is in any way relevant that he is the thing from which she needed saving.
"Go away," she tells him when he shows up at her committees, and on her daily latte runs.
There are princes, and there are the things they are there to slay. He likes to be the latter; he likes it that Tyler's mother died gurgling in his arms, with her son's name on her lips.
He says to her: we're the same, Caroline. You and me.
She thinks he must need that.
But she can be a monster: she can't be him.
Later, she loses her father and then her mother, and this will try, but it won't break her. And he will come to her, and he will say, with a soft earnestness, and this touch he leaves on her cheek, for, oh, God, eons, she can feel it: "I'm sorry, love."
He has killed both his own parents, and left them nonchalantly to rot.
But he means it in a way Elena doesn't, when she takes ten minutes from her own problems to condescend to Caroline's.
He tells her he's leaving.
He hasn't given up; he has unto infinity; he is the kind of thing that lies low in the shadows, waiting for its victims. She cannot outwait him that long; she will not want to outwait him that long.
But he stands in front of her yearning for her to invite herself along; he wants to know she will miss him like something she can't replace.
She says to him, "I love Tyler."
She can tell it hurts him; he doesn't know what that is, at first. It happened too many times, and he learned how to deny it.
But he tried to kill her.
He tried to kill her, and it only made her stronger. He knows what that means; he knows he won't do it now, even though no one refuses him, and survives.
When she graduates, he comes to her in a suit, with his curls all in order. He is solicitous; he offers her his arm.
He is not burning with something that has had to eat its way free; he is quiet, certain. She hasn't seen him like this. He does not know how to love something softly, with enough distance for it to breathe.
But he tells her, surely, steadily, "Tyler is your first love. I intend to be your last, however long it takes."
He shakes when he kisses her.
I did not intend for you to find your way to a better story, the witch tells her one morning, and then she takes her away to a tower in the woods, and she says to her, there: if you want to be the heroine so badly, when I have on my hands already a perfectly good protagonist.
Oh my God, there was this girl, and she looked so happy.
But this is how it's always been, inside.
She has one window; she can see out, people can see in. They do not care. They pass her in unconcerned murmurings, glancing over her, once.
At first she pounds at the walls and she tries to climb over the balcony and she screams into the stones, which hear her just as well as any nonchalant passerby, and the witch appears, with folded hands, beside her bed, and tells her: "Your friends are not coming. There's something with Elena."
She knows.
She knows.
There is a mirror on her bedside table.
The first time she sees him, she has just woken; she thinks she conjured him up from somewhere; she feels ashamed. It should be Tyler.
But he doesn't come either.
He is talking to a blonde woman in front of a painting, and he looks at this woman the way she thought he could not look at anyone, not except her, and she thinks: not this.
"He can't hear you, poor Carebear," the witch says when she slams her hand against the mirror and she screams into it and some silly part of her that is still a girl expects him to look up, to turn his head, to say to the woman, "Excuse me, love, but Caroline's in trouble."
He touches the woman's arm, reverently.
"He thinks she's you."
"What did you do to him?" she asks hoarsely, and the witch smiles, she says:
Nothing that wasn't always going to happen.
She watches the mirror.
He loves the woman.
She should have known.
She watches the mirror.
She starts to notice: the dimples are gone, the puns are gone, the menace is gone. He is not even a shadow of his former self, still faintly reminiscent; she doesn't know him. He looks pale; he cuts all the curls from his hair. He gets particularly butt hurt over some teensy corner of New Orleans' French Quarter.
"Where is he?" she asks the witch when she comes with her daily meal. "That is not New Orleans. The signs are backwards. What is that?"
"Something of my own invention. I call it Wonderland, where all my dreams come true." The witch laughs.
Eat your pretty young virgin like a good girl, Caroline, she tells her.
She tries to jump from the balcony; she is rebounded by a sharp jolt of magic.
She smashes the mirror.
There is a new one when she awakens.
He has a child, or he thinks he has a child; she doesn't understand.
"He is dead, hello? It's loaded with blanks."
"Ah, but it's my creation, and I can do what I like with it. Isn't this what you wanted, Caroline? For him to reach down inside himself and find something better? I'm giving him that chance."
No.
It's not him.
He never wanted to be something he isn't; she never wanted him to be something he isn't. She wasn't asking him to be a prince; she thought maybe he could just stab the people he cares about a little less.
"I will get out. And I will eat your heart," she tells the witch, matter-of-factly.
She thinks sometimes, when the wind lies unmoaning in distant hollows, she hears voices, beneath the stones.
But when she turns her ear to the floor, and she concentrates all her senses through these layers upon layer of rock, she hears her heart, she hears how painful is the breath in her throat.
She watches the mirror.
She says to him, "Klaus. Klaus, you idiot" when he runs into the arms of a woman who isn't her, but could be, if you squint, and forget that she is a woman of impeccable brand name taste.
He does not hear her.
He looks wan, tired, he smiles down into this woman's eyes, but she thinks, maybe it's just her bruised heart, which has not yet learned how to be hopeless– but she thinks, she thinks–
Something in his eyes is not sure.
She closes her own eyes.
She tries to, project herself or something, ok, she doesn't know, she's just thinking on her feet here, she pushes toward the mirror with all her senses, she thinks, come on, come on–
But when she opens her eyes, he is cupping the woman's face.
She breaks the window.
It shivers back together.
She kicks down the doors to her chambers and she makes it halfway down the stairs and she is thrown backward with a loud sizzling that lives in her bones for hours afterward.
Ok.
Ok.
She sits in front of the mirror.
She stares: not with any pleading in her eyes. She is commanding him, ok, and if you have ever strung a snowflake wrong for one of her school dances, you know there is no resistance, and no refuge–
He stops.
He looks up from a corner of his study; the book in his hands falls. His brows beneath the shorter hair come together, there is a brief flicker in his eyes, he looks up, up–
And they both stop.
"Klaus," she says, and he cocks his head; he is looking right at her, maybe, oh God– let him see–
"Niklaus," a voice says from some distant nook, and he turns away.
In another tower, in a time long ago, there was another girl with hair like the sun.
She wants to know why the hell she let her mother talk her into cutting her hair; but she couldn't climb down anyway.
And not for him the mundane physicality of scaling a wall, with all its grunting indignities, and sweaty underarms.
She wakes one morning to screaming below.
She sits up in her bed.
There are boots on the stairs: not the witch's lighter tread, in slippers of fine silk; these are the footsteps of marauders –of one marauder– who cannot bear to let their entrance be something unseen.
He flings open the doors to her chamber so hard they rebound back against the walls.
"Caroline," he breathes.
She stops at the foot of her bed, having scrambled no farther. She cannot voice what's inside her; she feels it in her throat and she understands how vast it is: she knows, she lied to him. What she meant was she wanted it to be Tyler. She won't apologize for that; every story she ever read told her, you are supposed to dispatch men like this, and watch their deaths with glee. He is the thing at the end of the fairytale that dies horribly, in shoes of red iron.
"What happened to the guard?" she asks; what she means is thank God. Thank God.
"He's in a better place now," Klaus replies, with a hint of his old smile, the one impressed with its own malice.
"Like your stomach? Cute."
And then he crosses the floor between door and bed, and he never touches her, not really, he skates his fingers along her though they both know she cannot break: she can bend, she cannot shatter, not like a girl, not like an Elena, who was meant to bruise in the hands of the boys who love her–
But he pulls her up by her arms, and he breathes out when he crushes her against him, as if he's been holding it, just for this, he couldn't waste it on anything less. His chin touches her hair and he holds her until her bones creak and she clutches at the back of his jacket and she presses her face into his chest and they are both shaking. He switches his cheek to the top of her head, and she feels his breath warm against her hair. She has not felt warm in so long; there is the same consistent chill in the stones, in the bedcovers, where she lies alone, staring at the ceiling where the tree branches outside haunt with spectral gloom the molding, so she knows there is nothing tangible, not here.
"Come on, love; lets get you home," he says, not pulling away from her.
She has to snort. He always thinks he is the central piece, and a narrative cannot move without him. "Do you think I have just been waiting here for you to come rescue me? I can't leave; there's magic binding me to this place. You have to get out of here, before she traps you here too. I don't want to be stuck in this tiny little room with you for all eternity." It sounds good; it's something he needs to hear, so he doesn't get ideas about his superiority, which are already too many and varied.
"You want me to leave you?" He does pull back now; she can tell it's time for their wills to cross swords.
"You have to find some way to get me out of here. Bring another witch; a better one. Get Bonnie. Get any one of your gazillion minions." She hesitates. She brings her hand up to his cheek. "Be careful. Don't let her catch you again."
His jaw works. He wants to run headlong at a problem, decapitating all its obstacles along the way. He doesn't comprehend how he can leave, without having conquered anything.
"Klaus."
He shuts his eyes.
"Just go. I know you can escape her. I know you will come back." She misses the curls; she buries her hand in the tuft at the nape of his neck that's starting to grow out at last, and for a moment something in her still quails: she knows what she is supposed to want. It's not him. She knows she was supposed to go to Tyler until all the naivety dried up in their love, and they knew it was time for what they both really sought.
But she puts her forehead against his, and they lean into one another for a moment, she holding him up or he holding her up, she doesn't know. He turns his nose into her cheek. They don't say good-bye.
It's just for right now.
She pulls him in by the lapels of his jacket; she doesn't want it to be something that is all fevered tongues. He's good at that; she knows he could put any man or woman on their knees. This is not that. Sometimes a kiss is not supposed to wake anything; sometimes it's just two people, saying things language cannot invent.
He looks at her the way he never looked at that other woman in any of their weepy reunions.
"I know you'll come back," she says, for herself.
But he doesn't.
She watches the mirror.
She doesn't see the point at which he is intercepted; perhaps the second he leaves the tower.
But he is once again left to wander this backwards New Orleans, wailing about an heir with his simulacrum siblings, who slowly, one by one, shrink into themselves, and are forgotten. Kol takes up blood bags; Rebekah plays with the child. Elijah stops wearing suits.
She hears the voices again one night, and calls out, "Hello? Hello?"
There is some muffled pounding from beneath her, but that is nothing, says the witch; just the snacks she brings regularly, like the kind and benevolent warden she is.
One day, she looks at the mirror, and she sees him standing before a monotonous replica of the Mississippi, with his brother beside him, and a white oak stake in his hand.
She says, wait: wait. "What is happening?"
"I'm sorry, Caroline. He attempted another escape. He just isn't very cooperative. It ruins the whole effect. But maybe, when he's dead, I can let you out. That will be nice, won't it? You can travel; you can do anything you want."
"No," she snaps, and blurs for the witch's neck, but there is a nearly soundless pop, the air shifts, displaces itself–
And she is gone.
This Klaus at least is just as prone to dramatic posturing as the other, and monologues forever about his sacrifice, and the future of his daughter, his Hope, who will carry on the legacy he was meant to have, before mother destroyed them all–
"Put that down, Klaus Mikaelson, I swear to God–" she says with her fist at her throat, and then, suddenly, the floor behind her gives a mighty crack, loud as a gunshot.
She whirls.
A dark head protrudes through a hole in the floor, where the stones have suddenly crumbled away to reveal an opening large enough for someone, slightly less broad-shouldered than this man, to pass through; he squeezes himself into it nevertheless, brushing dust from his hair.
From beneath him she hears, "Kol, get your feet off my face." And behind that, "Rebekah, Kol; I think we've all had enough of your childish squabbling. Get off her face, Kol. Bekah, do not stab him; it's impolite."
"Hello, darling," Kol Mikaelson says to her, smiling with the same lackadaisical carelessness of his brother, who just expects every panty within a mile to combust on sight of him. "I know it's been a while since you've seen a man, especially one like this, so please try to contain yourself. But not too much."
"Oh, it's you," Rebekah says, emerging after him with her usual bitchy sneer pasted on her face. "This is just wonderful. I blame you," she snaps sourly at Kol.
"Where the hell did all of you come from?"
"Oh, that what's-her-face put us in the dungeon. I'm rather embarrassed, really, darling, I clawed my way back from the Other Side just to have some portly little human– is that Nik? What the hell is he doing?"
"Yes; it's a lot to explain right now. We have to get to him now; he's been going on for like an hour, but even he's eventually going to run out of the bizarre, Walmart knockoff version of Shakespearean dialogue about his redemption. Do you know how to get out of here?"
"His redemption?" Kol asks in genuine horror.
"Yes; we do," Elijah replies grimly, rolling up his sleeves.
"Klaus," she says.
She doesn't yell it.
She stands three feet from him, waiting. If she is too late, if she startles him, if he doesn't know her–
He turns.
Her knees give, just a little.
She realizes: in all the versions, in any poorly-constructed world, with the plot running about with its head off, he is going to know her.
He says her name the way he always does, like he can't believe it's something he can just say, like it's something that could just spill out of him, the same way other words do, from the same general anatomy.
She inches toward him, with her hands out. The stake is wedged against his chest; it was so, so close. She saw him draw what he thought was going to be his last breath, and put it to his breast, and that's when she knew: it will not end, not now, not when she doesn't want it to, not when she finally realizes: it is him, it is her. He knew all along.
But then, he's older, he's seen what he's seen, he's put his hand into the hearts of living generals, and yanked them from the cusp of their triumphs.
She holds out her hand for the stake. She isn't sure he knows exactly what she means, he hasn't taken it from his chest, he is still standing there, before the river, before the moon, he turns to Elijah and he asks, "Elijah, brother– isn't this something I'm supposed to do? For the good of– someone?"
But he isn't sure anymore. He turns back to her.
And Elijah says, "How did you get out of the tower?" and now he compresses, down, down, and in Elijah's voice, fading away disconcertingly into the witch's own, so that each word comes out in a different pitch, the witch barks: "You aren't supposed to be here. Klaus, don't listen to her. Listen to me, to your brother, your real brother. This woman is just a hallucination."
But she's in range now. She takes the stake from Klaus' numb fingers, and she breaks it over her knee.
Sometimes an enemy doesn't know when they are vanquished, because each of us all has our own story, and our own side, and we know the rightness of it, and the inevitability of our own preferred outcome.
But this is her story, now.
"Good to see you again, Nik. I'll be having a word with you about how you apparently just let me drink from blood bags, like a savage," Kol says from behind the witch, before she can turn, before she can understand–
And he brings his bat down across the back of her head with a wet thock and spills her moaning into the grass.
"I've broken three nails on this," Rebekah bitches, rolling a barrel over the hill toward them, and snapping at her brothers, "You could help."
The witch is stuffed inside; there is a lurid hissing, and the first of her stirrings as she comes to, halfway, in the writhing darkness. "Bekah and I built this, in the tower," Kol brags. "We got bored."
So you can see that every tale ends, eventually, the way it is supposed to.
The barrel is shoved off into the river, and lands with a plash that breaks the placid waters, and she begins to scream, and pound at the nails in its sides, and flop this way and that, twisting her body away from the snakes they have got who the hell knows where.
There was a witch once, and oh, she wanted a story.
And so she would have it.
But stories are treacherous things, and the creatures who populate them finicky.
"I believe," Kol says, picking up his bat to admire the blood spatter, "That I have a poncing, blood bag consuming git to eat."
"Well, apparently I cleaned peasant blood off the floor, like a maid, so I don't want to hear your complaints."
"He wore…tennis shoes," Elijah says, putting his hand to his mouth and letting a deep shudder run its course.
He looks at her, in a way he can't articulate, in any of his tongues, and holds out his hand.
And they lived long indeed, into a world your children's children's children can never grow old enough to see.