Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all men seemed pale beside him [f. scott. fitzgerald]
x
She likes daffodils and sunflowers for no other reason than the fact that they are the brightest blinding yellow. How they come up out of the earth quickly without being told to do so, abide by no laws other than the ones that have been made out time and time before that crop existed. Sometimes they even sprout up so fast and out of fashion that they surprise with every last golden petal, the swish of each elegant evergreen stem, the furl of the singular emerald leaves.
Blinding and beautiful with the ability to shock and awe even the most skeptical of creatures.
x
Caroline used to wear wild lavender in her hair when she was a little girl. She'd weave in splintered off strands of the violet buds into her tangled buttercream plaits, and they'd stay in there for days at a time, the flowers decaying with age and experience of her hours in and out of the fields behind her mother's house.
There would be days when she would attend school feeling fiercely ordinary until partway during story hour or a few minutes into math equations, the dying buds would shower down on her lined paper, contrasting difficultly with her scratched pencil marks and overwritten initials of a boy she liked. And in those brief seconds where the egg shell white sat with indigo blooms, she knew that she was the least ordinary girl in the world.
x
When she was about eleven, she went to Elena's house for a tea party. Caroline wore a sunflower colored dress and lavender in her hair and she baked baby cupcakes with wobbly green vines and too red smudges of roses on creamy icing, each carefully planned and executed with flour under chipped purple fingernails. Bonnie made perfect symmetrical bite-sized peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, each with the crusts strewn to the side and the exact correct amount of insides that make the snacks taste so good, and she flushed rose into Elena's mother's flawless floral china when Caroline complimented her, smear of raspberry jam on her upper lip.
With streaks of jam sticky on the palms of her hands, she grasped the white of her linen dress, twirled it out wide so that the lace hem caught slits of sunlight in the tiniest gaps. She raced out of the Gilberts' backyard and into the woods, chips of earth and broken leaves clenching to her heels, golden curls flying out wildly in her wake. Bonnie and Elena ran after her, their laughter and cries seeming miles off.
Bid me run, and chase if you can, she had thought.
x
She stops plaiting her hair and decorating it with lavender when she is sixteen years old.
It is the same year that she meets Stefan Salvatore and the world goes to hell in a hand basket. It is the same year that she wears lipstick for the first time, gets her driver's license, actually dates the quarterback the football team because he likes her neurotic mess of self, and is human.
Fully, breakably, foolishly human.
(She doesn't realize how rare that part is until a year and a half later when she is drinking blood out of a bag and monitoring the lunar cycle so that she can have sex without fatality crossing her mind.)
x
He stares at her face and her body and her face again and then he smirks and she wishes that she could just slap those dimples off his cheeks without risking her life and everyone else's. The biggest bad in the history of time merely checks out her ass and saunters out of the room.
Damon chuckles and tries to cover it up unsuccessfully with a cough while Stefan has his brooding eyebrows so furrowed that they are encroaching into his nose. Elena stomps her foot at Damon, and Stefan sighs, rubbing the pads of his fingers over his face. Caroline crosses her arms over her chest.
"What?"
Klaus is so not as scary as everyone thinks he is.
x
On her eighteenth birthday, she plaits lavender behind a few curls, just a bare hint of purple that one can hardly see unless looking for it in the first place.
Later on in the evening when she is begging for release with her teeth in his wrist, almost sucking him dry, he weaves a hand through her yellow waves, comes out with a few dying blossoms of brilliant violet. So starkly dark against her sunshine ringlets. It crumbles in his fingertips, and the following morning she awakes with it by her lips.
x
She hardly wears yellow anymore. It reminds her of when she was a little girl playing in the garden where those vivid daffodils and sunflowers made their presence known. Where she would sit small down at the base of their ivy stems and stare up, up at the buttery petals. And she is not so young anymore.
Strong, beautiful, full of light, he tells her, twisting a finger in the golden curls framing her face. He has been known not to be trifled with, not to keep his promises, but the gaze of his bottle green eyes hovering on her peony lips makes her consider otherwise.
She wears a creamy yellow sweater around her bedroom when she gets home, wonders why she never thought that her light might not be out in this life, just magnified.
x
When she almost dies at Ric's hand, she runs swiftly straight to her mother's backyard and lies down amongst the uncut grass, the wildflowers dotted crimson and blush, robin's egg and indigo parting for her golden untamed whorls. The sky above her is huge and riddled with darkening clouds as if they even anticipate the future that is kissing their doorstep.
She runs and no one chases. Leaving emerald tufts of earth in her footsteps.
x
In all actuality, she should loathe him. He has murdered or at least attempted to murder every person that she cares about on this planet, and he still stands there, begging forgiveness from her. The little girl that plays tea parties and wears lavender in her hair because she didn't, doesn't want to be the one that lost her sunlight.
But holy hell, the way that he looks at her.
Once when she was in English class the rays of light were coming in the windows at an uneven slant casting gorgeous dancing shadows on the wall that moved when the wind picked up or died down, that changed when the trees showered leaves or grew further out to touch the drunken aqua sky, that altered when her teacher slowly coursed like a fluid river never ceasing up and around. It was the only time she can remember in this lifetime (with the blood stains on her hands and the flesh in her mouth) that she was worthy of those forgotten sunflowers and daffodils and streaking barefoot with lavender in her hair in the woods.
Until him.
x
I know you're in love with me, she had scolded him and he had burned a hole right through her head as she avoided his gaze, could feel the air thick with tension continuing to mount as long as she felt the need, the want to stand there and bait him.
She sits on the white rocker of the Gilberts' front porch and feels the Virginia breeze wind its way through the messy waves of her buttercream locks, listening to him seething silently inside. It's significantly easier than facing him head on when she can see the world written in his eyes.
x
It's a few weeks later when she shows up at his mansion, pissed off because he won't stop calling her, pissed off because she never wants him to stop calling her, and completely terrified because he is having a mental breakdown all while waltzing around shirtless.
She barters and begs for Tyler with her hands in his skin, tracing the faded tattoo on his shoulder when she hopes he won't notice, and hushing his frantic cried against their newest enemy of the moment. Taking his face in her fingers, feeling the three day scruff and memorizing the planes, where the bow of his mouth meets the cupid's arrow, the exact cavern that shadows his dimples, the bottle green mixture that hovers in his eyes that couldn't replicated in another thousand lifetimes. And he stares at her like she is the sun.
They fight and yell for good measure, a snark here, a sass there. Each of their faces within kissing distance of the other's when he grins a real smile that goes all the way up to the crinkles in his eyes. Bastard.
Klaus tucks a finger behind her ear, twirls it with nonchalance, and doesn't even flinch when a sprig of lavender tumbles to his hardwood floor. She spins on her heel, absolute fury in her Mediterranean eyes and marches out of the house without so much as a look behind her. With a huff, getting in her car and slamming it into reverse, she comes to realize that the potted plants framing the front of the house are daffodils and lavender.
x
Klaus presses the violet buds in his drawing pad and makes a cup of tea with the afternoon sun warm and comforting on his cheeks, sluicing up his forearms, hungry on his long legs.