There was something quite different about her after.
Perhaps it was his blood that made it so, that made /her/ so.
Perhaps it was that thick ichor that cleaved through her veins and changed her so.
This she thought as she stood there, hands stretched up toward the fullness of the hung moon, shadowed digits bathed in gilted silver with the stars behind sending swirling shadows her vampiric sight picked out, feeling the call of that full round orb hung low in the sky.
("I would hang the moon for you and for one last kiss from your lips")
The elegant lines of her arms lower and she closes her eyes then, still able to see the cold white light that silvered her in its gilt, goddess bathed and limned to perfection in shifting cold light.
She shouldn't feel the pull of the moon like this. That was all him. He was inside her making her feel this. She didn't mind. It was nice to sit out here in the cool, in the silver light and feel this connection, to be alone with it finally to turn it over in her agile mind and examine it.
He was in her. Gods she didn't want him in her running her veins and making her (feel) think about him /that way/. She couldn't. She was spoken for for the love of god!
But was she really if her partner was so able to easily leave her after putting her in danger? Tyler couldn't even look at her after and he didn't come to make sure she actually survived the visit from Klaus;
to make sure she was still her. He never came back.
She wasn't herself after all that.
Caroline wasn't stupid and she knew, she knew the changes were deep inside her where all the blood travelled in her sinews in her very bones that ached with a thousand years of longing and want to be free to run the moonlight on four feet not two feet and to feel the wind ripple supple fur and pin delicate ears back to a skull that was not human. To feel and see and breathe the night that way as she ran ran ran until she could stop and split that silver gilt moonlight night with her head-thrown-back-howl of joy and lust, breath misted silver ululations that called the moon down so she could hold it for the briefest sliver of eternity...
...Her eyes open as the last howl sings to her from far away, yet not so far she couldn't follow that siren call to the originator of that music. Bare feet, wet grass, silver dew sliding over her skin as she makes dark tracks to the edge of that silver lake of lush grass and bare feet connect with the loam and littered leaves when she breaks the treeline to carry her forward to that song.
She is slow in her tread with her face tilted up to watch the moon, silver lined hands tracing rough bark like a breeze, noiseless, an apparition in the night barefoot and clad in a flowing summer dress the colour of the noontime sky and her eyes, shadowed legs that carry her into the smattering shadows of black and silver in the deep night under a hung moon.
She walks slowly and time seems to freeze as she does, fingers light and mouth smiling and the songs of the night continue, crickets and rustling leaves and soft sleepy wind that curls about her and her feet still noiseless.
She sees the wolf sat there, black and silver like the night with eyes feral gold and glowing and on her and she should fear, those eyes say, but the moon says something else and her blood says it too and she isn't afraid, not of him even when she knows he's this and sows fear thus.
He's in her blood you see, in her so deep it feels like his roots are embedded in her like he's home in her and she remembers in her marrow the sound he made as she bit his wrist and drank him down and the sound he made was a guttural one against her back, shattered and raw with want when she bit in and he let her feed for far longer than he probably should have; let her feed on memories of him when he was new and free and human guttural when he let her feed on his first memories of cities being built, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and art and music and genuine beauty, he was giving it all to her on her birthday.
He also gave her his pain that night so long ago when they locked the wolf part of himself away, the wolf part before her now, on a night like this silvered night, when they locked the wolf part of himself away a thousand years ago, the pain of his own family cutting out of him that part that he was truly and the agony of never knowing himself whole until now.
She had it all now in the thick ichor of him flowing in her bones.
Her gilt silvered hands reach to touch him when she shouldn't, reach to pet and feel and sigh at him so soft and real and silver gilded in the light of the hung moon too. It was like touching magic as her fingers sifted through his pelt and the guttural sound he made now sang through her in a thrill. She sighed and combed him with her white fingers and allowed him to brush against her bare legs and to press against her while she revelled in her freedom here in the night with him, revelled in the fact that she was able to be herself with him and not be afraid, not that she was ever was afraid of him but she was less so now.
It was because he was in her now, this part of him in her like a treasured kernel of knowledge about him that she initially didn't want but that she now had despite it all and she found that she liked having this part of him in her, liked knowing he was physically and emotionally able to be this soft with her; this silver and black and magic soft of him against the skin of her hands and legs at the same time and she shivered in delight.
"You're beautiful you know."
His lupine head lifts and he looks at her with those ancient eyes of his and reads her like an open book, every word tasted and tested and felt as she stroked him and whispered.
He is not surprised she'd chosen now to confess such a thing to him for it's easier to imagine him less a monster like this in her mind, when he's true to himself like this.
It had been months since his breaking of the curse and each month he'd shifted and prowled near her home, prowled near to her whom contained so many pieces of him that he could scarce recall ever knowing what it was to be without it; without /her/.
For he knew, even if she didn't that she was his other half his mate as it were, if such ancient legends were to be believed, and he did, believe, because he didn't create this one, this one was older than he and his siblings. It was as old as his pack, the original wolves and carried on through the generations to him.
It was always going to be her for him and once she had his blood he knew for certain that she was it. There would never be another for him no matter the distance betwixt them; no matter what horrible things he did to her friends.
And horrible things he did do.
But it always came back to this, to he and she in the silver gilt of the full moon bathing woman and beast, the black of his midnight fur that she petted and stroked and the heated whispers plumed out from her lips as if invocation to some higher god. She belonged to him here when she belonged to no one else, she belonged to him here in the dark, and on this last night before he left her, he was not clad in his fur, he was man here in the midnight dark, he was himself here and gilded in silver light from the hung moon.
("And she had hung the moon for him, and for this last kiss from his lips.")
She paused and watched him, liquid silver light that patterned his outline where the moon shone on him and his breath misted magic smoke to creep upward in tendrils of glittering light that stole her breath and her words and left her shaken and yet she still reached for him, still touched him as she had when he was furred and black, still whispered to him though he too possessed the ability to whisper back to her except he didn't, he let her whisper and touch and pet and she felt the same, like she was touching magic still as her pale fingers sifted through his silvered blonde curls and ghosted in pale coolness over his stubbled cheeks and chin; traced his lips as if writing her name there for him to call out later when he dreamed of her.
Eye to eye they watch here, each watch the other as the cold moonlight midnight magic night steals the blue from both their eyes and turns them silver too, turns them magic too, turns them into jewels too and the kiss when it comes is like the soft dew on the grass, like the silk of her hair between his fingers, like the scent of the roses in his garden like the wind as it stirs the leaves beneath their feet. It beats their shared blood through both their hearts, both their hearts that the other cups a palm over to feel that pulsing beat and shared tattoo more ancient than the earth spinning out here in the midnight magic dark of the night made gilt and silver and magic.
"You're so beautiful." He whispers this and then he is gone, and she doesn't see him again, not for a long time, and she finds herself still in this moonlit place, feeling him as a magic beast in her blood still in the silver outline of her in the light of the hung moon and she smiles, silvered words she knew he could hear somehow in the dark.
"I love you..."
Fin