a/n: alright, so this is a Christmas present for Melissa (goldcaught on tumblr), because I'm a huge dork and she made her Peaky Blinders KC AU piscspam which is beautiful and which I was unable to offer timely inspiration/help for. May the road rise to meet you, angel.

Also, because I'm still weeding through Hannah(but_seriously)'s prompts, this incidentally fits her prompt, angel of mercy, how did you find me — how did you pick me up gain? angel of mercy, how did you move me? why am i on my feet again? and i see you.

since feeling is first

who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

we are for each other; then

laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

—e. e. cummings

People in the street walk with their heads bowed, elbows turned in, probably still thinking about rationing, by rote. When she walks by they look up, drawn out of their cautious individualism by the flash of white, and she can almost hear them thinking that white is a strangely precise brand of ill-judgement, the suggestion of purity almost scandalous now, almost insulting. They whisper as they disappear into the side streets, about the mud on her hem, the wide brim of her hat: who does she think she is?

Maybe that's the catch. Caroline can't say she hasn't got the handle on being a spy —she does—, only there is so little about her cover that is untrue: a girl in white dress that's a long way from home, looking for a job, looking for a man… well, who isn't? And Damon, so glibly smug, who said he wouldn't fall for it, not immediately, but there were weaker links in the chain, one of the brothers was bound to be receptive to her charms. Not the sister, he said. The sister is made of steel.

She comes into the bar, aptly named Mikaelson & Co —not that she doesn't know, after all the briefings, the files, even if she isn't from here; not like she doesn't know how menacing it is if you live around here, there to be made into the scrap of collateral damage once again— and from the crowd of customers only one stands out, the Mikaelson uniform sharp and uncreased from head to toe except from the rolled-up sleeves, and a smile right out of one of those raunchy novels Elena used to read when they were girls. Kol, if Caroline trusts her file and its grainy photographs.

'Hello there, darlin',' he drawls, an elbow sliding forward on the gleaming bar, 'anything we can help with? You look a little lost, if I may.'

Not the place for you, she hears, but isn't deterred: so maybe she isn't his particular kind of amusement, or he isn't in the mood to be amused; all the better. Caroline has always disliked being used as bait.

She makes a point of looking around the place: the patrons are laughing, it's four in the afternoon and everyone is merry and drunk, the air cloudy with smoke. Men mostly, a few of them black, even; behind the bar there is a door against which more noise rebounds, undetectable to the untrained ear.

'Business is booming,' she says, and the man smirks, almost proud, she thinks, but there is something rapacious in it, 'sure you don't need someone tending bar?' She nods at a man whose glass is empty, hand lolling over the counter, waiting. 'Wouldn't want your customers to go thirsty…' and there she smiles, 'or the till to go empty.'

The man laughs, but he hops over the bar all the same, agile legs swinging, and starts filling the man's glass back up, earning himself a grateful nod in the process. 'Don't you worry about our till, doll. And if you don't mind me saying, I don't think this is a place for a girl like you.'

Damn this white dress, Caroline thinks, but there is no heat in it, because she knows the half-open face of a man waiting to be convinced, and Caroline once made a man to drive a car off a cliff for her. She wanted to wear a white dress this morning to forget some of the things she has done, to remind herself that the war is over, that there are still good things, that even blood washes off after a while if you scrub hard enough.

'I think you might find this place lacks a female touch,' she says, and grabs the back of a chair to climb on. That's something Elena never got to see: back in Ireland, they taught her to sing.

A female touch: a bullet that grazes your cheek, the slide of silk over the steel of a gun, an ivory handle on a knife. Or a white dress in the mud, on a wintry morning in 1919.

As she was hurrying down the street earlier, the scar on her cheek made redder by the cold, akin to the faint trace of a kiss, a woman saw her. It was only the two of them, too early, too cold, who knows, and Caroline doesn't believe in ghosts anymore, but there was something in that woman's gaze, as though she recognized the girl, just barely, or the dress—

Caroline turns away; her mind is on fire. The hem of her dress drags in the mud again, tears on the sharp edge of a paving stone; she remembers her scrawl on paper, the words guiltily halting, meet me. train station at ten.

A female touch: the soft slide of sheepskin over the metal of the pen, the round 'o' of her signature like an open mouth, like a vaulting ten-cents coin, waiting to fall back into his upturned palm and decide her fate.

Damon is wrong, Caroline can't help but think. There are bayonets, swords, fast bullets, but no one is made of steel.

The first words anyone ever tells her about Klaus Mikaelson, working her shift at the bar and it's been days but Klaus isn't there, is out of town on business, or so goes the murmured gossip, but Caroline is nothing if not patient, watchful even, are, 'That man only loves his horses.'

Maybe that should have been a warning; maybe she should have taken the first train out, turned in her revolver and her high heels and gone back to her mother, the crippling misery and boredom of her native country. Instead Caroline remembers that she used to love horses too. She would ride them wild and young, lead them into the vibrant green until the mist wrapped its shawl around her shoulders, and when she came back there was always something tamed in the horses' eyes. O'Malley called her a filthy witch, but he took the horses all the same, didn't he?

Klaus Mikaelson comes back to town on a Sunday morning, as a thick damp fog settles over the red bricks, oozing from the cracks in every half-open door, every secret left ajar. People are afraid to come out, even for a drink, and so it's Caroline and her dirty rag and liquor simmering behind her on the shelves, sending its golden reflections to cover the room like mosaic. He enters and Caroline looks up, thinks, 'Whiskey,' looks back down, hands moving out of habit, like drawing a gun.

Then her hands still. Caroline understands life like she understands music, the spaces between silence and fury, a pause for breath. The man has slithered in like a cat, like something sharp with a felt tip, his drink is whiskey and he wears the uniform, the crisp collar, hands in his pockets where no doubt there is something that could explode, tear or burst in flames…

'Whiskey?' she asks, just as he says, 'And who are you?' For half a second it's a face-off, but men like him pretend to be gentlemen until they sneak up on you in a back-alley and slit your throat, so he smiles, just the corner of his mouth, bloodless, nods.

She pours; he sits. His jacket falls in a perfect fold over the back of his chair, the dusty beam of light right in the middle of his chest, tearing it open; this one has a flair for the dramatic. He sips his whiskey leisurely, even invites her to sit. A parcel of sun catches on the eery delicacy of his eyelashes and for a moment her breath is caught, arrested; she thinks, this is why I used to go to church, kneel down on the dark wet wood and pray to faces carved in stone. For a moment she remembers the saints' severe, smiling mouths, her mother's embrace—

'You didn't answer my question,' he says.

'Your brother hired me.'

'To do… what exactly?' He points to the empty bar, as though the frequency of this morning out of time is lost on him, but she knows it's not. Music. Subtle as it is, his body thrums to its rhythm.

'Slow morning,' she says, unaffected. 'Besides, I like horses.'

He sets his glass down, scrutinizes her, trying to guess what she knows; what she's heard and what she's been told, since those are two quite different things here, and she feels almost guilty for the warrants hidden in the fake drawer she installed in the miserable room she rents to Mrs Dooley. He is young and he looks exhausted; his head is bent now almost as if in prayer, dragged down by a too-heavy weight.

'What's your name?' he asks, and to the answer, instead of offering his own —which she knows, of course, who doesn't?—, 'Can you count?'

The question throws her off-kilter; he likes it, hooks a foot around the leg of her chair, preventing her fall. 'As well as anybody.' I can hit a man at twenty paces, she thinks, does that count?

Once he's learned that she was in school up to the age of sixteen, and has made her do additions and subtractions on a napkin, for long enough that she does not notice he has gotten her a glass of water and set it beside her elbow, his steps slow, dangerous, he tells she will do the books for the bar. He doesn't have time, and despite the looks of it business is always growing, expanding, oiling its cogs and sharpening its wires. He doesn't wait for her to say yes, either, so she says it to his back, to a closed door, suddenly more tired than she has been in years.

That night she goes to the payphone wrapped in Irish wool and calls Damon. He congratulates her, warm and effortlessly cruel. 'You're in,' he says, 'next stop is the betting room,' and she hears mirth curling in his tone before it's another voice on the phone, Elena, her softness unyielding in the face of Caroline's doubts. 'Care,' she says, as though she hadn't been there the day they brought back Stefan's body, pale and noble as only the dead can be, 'this is the right thing to do, you know it is. We can't let those people control the city.'

Caroline thinks about Stefan in London, with his cap and his cigarette and his arm around Elena's waist, Stefan dancing, so effortlessly happy, clapping a hand on Damon's shoulder and bringing their foreheads together, and she thinks, why can't we?

She could have told him. If he'd stayed in bed, her kiss still spreading on his naked shoulder like a healing balm; if only he'd stayed in bed and waited for her to come back, she could have told him that nights like those, when the sky turns purple and mottled pink, almost too beautiful to bear, are never propitious.

But he didn't wait. He heard her leave, his ear sharpened by years of caves and bombs, of capturing his horse's last loud, shuddering breath as it crosses the finish line, and he rose and left after her. Followed her out to the payphone, guessed the docks from the rest, the signal, the ambush…

And now there they are, his finger on the trigger, her hair caught in the act, trapped in a ray of moonlight. Sorry, the word burns like acid on her tongue, sorry you found out. Out of nowhere, she remembers him asking once if she would visit him in prison, when he got caught. Not if—when. He knew it was only a matter of time; why is he surprised?

(She knows why. It's there in his hands, coiled like they want to open, in their desperate grip on his gun; there in his eyes, in his posture, in the rage on his lips, in the something haunted that he used to keep hidden, but not to her…)

'You,' he says, pleading, daring her to deny it, his voice slipping on the edge of his knife—but his back straightens, bone sharp, teeth a hard relief behind his lip, and now he's all accusation, 'you, you, you.'

She thinks, I have made men suffer before; it shouldn't be this hard. She watches his body try to turn hard, watches him take a step forward until the gun nuzzles against her temple, the ebb and flow of dirty dock water just a few paces away; maybe he's thinking the same thing.

Elijah, looming tall as a shadow at her back, says she is an angel. He says it in his menacing truant's lilt, his lips always closed around the rim of a thick-bottomed glass, an angel, says she sings Irish songs better than any Irish broad he's ever seen, says that she brings in more customers than all their contraband liquor combined.

Rebekah only says, 'Some angel.'

They let her in every secret one by one, a trickling, as if by mistake. One day the door is open and there is a flurry of people placing bets, Kol with his arms spread like a concertmaster, grandiose and focused; Rebekah lounging in the corner with eyes sharp as a butterfly knife's point, calculating; Klaus and Elijah with their heads bowed in confidence. The memory flashes, unwanted: Stefan and Damon in their own private confabulations, similar even in their disparities, even fighting, even as they fell in love with a story as old as time—

'… not your place, sweetheart,' Klaus is saying. 'Why don't you go back to pourin'?'

Disoriented, she can't help a smile from rising, vaporous; of course she knows he wanted her here. He leads her back to the bar with a hand on the small of her back the whole time and she is dizzy, thinking this is it less like a mission and more like something urgent, like turning back into his arms and making sure the look on his face is the same as the pressure of his fingers. Not that she does it: there are too many people there, the ghost of anticipated winnings and his face will be like stone, he is too careful, too cautious. Her hands are trembling when she sets them on the bar, noise buzzing in her ears, too loud. You have loved two men before, she reminds herself, and they're both dead.

The next week he puts another set of accounts on the minuscule desk they keep for her at the back of the house, to do the books on Sunday, still in her purple dress since she comes right from church, and every last shred of faith in her feels like a sinner. It only takes one look to understand but she does it, her fingers brushing against his as he puts his trust in her hands. Is it wrong, what they're doing? She tries to remember the figures, the people they've killed, Stefan in his coffin. Wasn't he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? How different is it from what Damon and Elena are doing in London, after all?

Some doors open, others close, and the conversation continues, wandering down the low-lit corridors of the betting house, past books of fraudulent winnings, past the illegal cigars that Klaus smokes outside, feet set neatly apart in the soaked gravel, as though waiting… and it's Rebekah's voice in the shocking cold of winter, is it always winter here, distrusting, forceful, 'We can't trust her.'

Caroline presses her ears to locks, glasses to walls; smiles, when she hears, 'Who says I trust her?'

In the war, he tells her, his friends used to shoot themselves during crossfire, in the foot, in the arm: anything to be sent home rather than spend one more day in the mud, death dripping in their bloodstream. Not me, he says.

Anything will tip the balance: the muzzle of his gun is looking her temple in the eye and he's a violent man, the most violent man in England, some say, a man who only loves his horses, but she isn't afraid. Why should she be? She knows she holds his heart in the palm of her hand, has for weeks, and if he kills her he will be digging his own grave. Maybe that's what he wants.

'Why not you?' And she is tender, tender as the tenderest knife in the tenderest flesh, when she whispers, 'Were you afraid?'

He meets her eyes head-on; it goes through her like lightning, the needle-sharp pain, he knows me.

'Yes,' he says. He isn't smoking but he's searching for the smoke, something to hide his brutal honesty behind, 'I thought, if I close my eyes, if I let—' and there he gives in and lights up and there are a thousand movie stars on the screen behind her eyelids, the reel noisily turning, smoke drifts up, up, up, 'the fury. The mud and the desperation and the hopelessness, if I let them catch up to me…' a smile, quicksilver, 'who knows where I might aim?'

In the war, he told her once, curled like a giant parenthesis around her, he used to tell the others stories, violent, unfriendly stories made of patched up lies told in his gravelly drawl. Just so we wouldn't go crazy, he said. Just so we would hear something else than bombs, at night.

Caroline tilts her head against the barrel of the gun. I'm listening.

He takes her dancing. Rebekah storms out in a huff, muttering something about destroying everything they've worked towards, and what for —they pretend not to hear it hang in the air, the sharp tang of it tantalizing, what is it—; his mocking 'you've done worse than that for love, sister' follows her out of the door and goes through Caroline like an arrow. He won't meet her eyes. Love, she thinks—is that what it is?

But she doesn't ask and he doesn't tell and on the night in question there is a dress and a feather on the table in her office, a big box that looks out of place in its surroundings of dark wood and lingering smoke, with a mauve ribbon on top. He holds his hand out, bites off a smile, looks dazzled, breathless; she could forget who he is if she could forget who she is too, but she can't, and she doesn't say that she may sing like an angel but Rebekah was right and her halo is tainted, dark with soot.

(Rebekah, who doesn't trust her, who has never trusted her, who is a pebble in Caroline's shoe but someone she admires, despite herself, because her hands are without blemish and it was four years of her holding the business afloat, her doing what needed to be done, her setting that gypsy bar on the docks on fire… Caroline can't say she even remembers without a spark of something in her blood that day waking up beside Tyler, anger radiating off him, to an impressionist picture on the front page of the paper he was holding, blazing flames offset by charred beams looking down at the ground.)

Dancing with him is like flying, worryingly close to the sun of course, and song after song of his arms around her, his eyes searching over her shoulder for a prostitute his brother is crazy over, can't have that now can we, darling? She could pretend not to be as ruthless as he is, she does white dove innocence so well but with the liquor and the trumpet she can't bring herself to, she looks too, spies, twirls in his arms and his body and her body it's a bit of a whirlwind. Finally she sees the woman, surprise electric in her hands—so that's what Katherine has been up to? No wonder.

'What is it, darling?' he asks, still cradling her like something precious he's considering breaking to get the gold inside.

'Nothing,' she says, 'I found your culprit.' She leads him for a second and he goes, more pliant than she would've expected, she barely has time to think, I could play him like a violin and I already am before he's laughing, saying, 'She does seem like Elijah's type.'

'What are you going to do?'

He looks at her with a little reproach, like she should know which questions not to ask by now, but she doesn't back down, she can handle it. He won't tell her, though: he is only as strong as his secrets, a Samson in disguise with his flesh raw underneath the starch cotton and the drawl.

'Don't kill her,' she says in the tender flesh at the junction of neck and shoulder, around a sinew, and he can't hide a shudder, 'you may be able to use her.'

He doesn't kill, he wants to protest; he is an honest conman. How does she go from racing horses to killing women his brother is sweet on? Caroline couldn't say when she talked to Damon last, when was the last time she walked to the payphone in the velvet blue Birmingham night. Of course he can kill, and he does, but she can kill too—still, they have a file in heaven: how does killing your best friend's sister look in His books?

'Prostitutes can't be trusted,' he says. 'I won't kill her,' messy, she hears in his voice, unnecessary, as though she didn't know how much violence is strapped to the inside of his chest at all times, waiting to explode, 'I just want to warn her away. Men like us don't make good lovers.'

Does he think she can't hear the tremor in his voice? If so, he really does underestimate her, and though she can't be sad of it —that is what her whole con depends on, after all— it raises something bitter inside her, that he thinks she can't divine such a simple equation as the two of them.

The song starts in the background; hurt, she misses a step. Trumpet, piano, and then the voice, silk and felt. Her dress sways more gently than she'd like. Katherine is smiling to a man who isn't Elijah.

'Do you know this song?'

He looks at her, almost coy, as if none of their conversation had happened, 'Should I?'

She shrugs, 'It's a good song.'

For a moment he is pensive, his arm frozen in an unnatural pose, waiting to slide around her middle and bring her close, hold her, 'Happy or sad?'

She looks away. The sun is setting in the horizon, beyond the wide windows of this place, this palace really, a room where none of them really belongs but they're such good actors, the sky is dripping black, blue, some nameless bruise color, 'Sad. I warn you, it'll break your heart.'

And there, you see, is the cinch: his arm cannot stay where it is, cannot avoid bringing the lighter to the wick, cannot resist curling around her and as he takes the first step of the dance and she follows without thinking, without any hesitation, and Katherine is forgotten and everything is forgotten but the golden trail of a melody about love, of course, are those melodies ever about anything else?

She sees his lips moving, words that don't come out; he leans in, the air shifts, transforms, his face so close she can see every one of his secrets ready to pour out of his mouth, sizzling on his tongue, he says, 'Already broken.'

Caroline was told that people usually see their lives flashing before their eyes when someone points a gun at them, like at the cinema, the reel unfurling at record speed, technicolor probably, birthdays and weddings and the odd love affair; it's never been that way for her. Instead she thinks about the future.

'You,' he says, and she thinks, me, and she says, 'I'm sorry.' If he kills her the future is like jumping into that murky water down on the docks, like going through the tunnel at night tucked against him like he never trusted her enough to do, and she can't blame him; like holding that lantern, slowly progressing through the icy night, waiting to emerge into the unknown. That's another thing he told her, about tunnels: after a while, he stopped being able to predict what was on the other side.

'Are you?' The metal bites at her skin. 'Are you really, Caroline?'

If he lets her go, it will either be with a promise that she will never come back, never tell —oh, that would be weak of him; as if he didn't realize that lying is a second language for her, always hidden underneath her tongue like one of those Christmas sweets—, or with her teeth kicked in, curled around herself like a dog in the mud, her face stained with blood. If he lets her go she will go back to London and tell them what she saw, what she heard, and mend. But how could she tell him that he is safer here, in the palm of her hand?

'I am,' she says. She reaches a hand and he lets her, she feels his wrist, his pulse irregular, crazy and he said that when the horses went insane, got that light in their eyes you had to put them out of their misery, 'I'm sorry, Klaus.'

The worst thing about this, she thinks distantly, and their silhouettes in the blue darkness could probably be mistaken for lovers from afar, the worst thing is, if she says it enough times he'll probably believe her.

He takes her to a race, watches her, smoking in the balcony, silent as the others scream but he smiles at her and she feels the rage inside him, hooves beating the dust, sweat tangling in his champion's mane, nostrils flaring. His horse wins —his horses always win— and he and his brothers buy a round to celebrate, fake surprise shining on their winners' faces. Sometimes they turn to each other and their expressions flicker as if they had forgotten how much of their happiness is just fake joy.

He calls her Caroline at the end of the day, she still bartends sometimes to help, his voice soft with exhaustion, worn thin; he calls her Caroline and lets her call him Klaus, seems unable to help it in fact —Mr Mikaelson and he'll wince. She thinks he must have a father but doesn't ask, because she knows she wouldn't answer if he asked her about her family. Her mother told her that when you've lived at either edge of a war it is better not to ask people where their loved ones are because someone has always died and left behind the ugly, gaping wound of grief.

Rebekah still grouses and Elijah still seeks out his prostitute, who dies cradled in his arms —Caroline knows because he empties his gun into the shelf of spirits afterwards, his cheek streaked with blood, shoulders moving in his impeccably clean shirt and if she had doubted he was human, this is proving her wrong. Klaus looks at her while she's bandaging Elijah's hand, a blank, mean look which she thinks is meant to say, what else could I do, what choice did I have, only they both know all he ever did was to get that choice, to be able to walk away and say no even if he'll get beaten to a pulp for his trouble. It unsettles her, his cruelty calling out her own, waking it from behind its veneer of flesh and lace.

That night she calls Damon and Elena is the one to answer. 'Damon's busy,' is what she answers with, and when she hears Caroline her voice softens, she says, 'we haven't heard of you for a while, how's everything going?' and Caroline can't help but tell her that there is a shipment coming in on the 23rd, not alcohol this time, American rifles.

'What for?' asks Elena, suddenly interested, hard. (When you've lived at either edge of a war… —but Stefan didn't die in a war, did he?)

'They're planning,' Caroline says, and feels something wet on her cheek. Her first thought is blood, but it isn't, of course it isn't, it's only tears. She didn't think she was sad enough to cry; that, too, unsettles her. 'I think they're planning to move into the city. They're looking to expand.'

'Why didn't you call sooner?'

I didn't think about it, Caroline thinks. She can't say that, though, so she settles for, 'I don't know. Everything's moving fast; it's hard to slip away.' There's something moving at the back of her mind, something she'd like to say to Elena, but it's slipped her mind now. Maybe it wasn't that important after all.

She can hear Elena hesitate, her breathing makes a unsteady loop. Caroline remembers how bad Elena used to be at lying, her religious crowding at the doors of the church every time she had to confess, all her sins neatly organized, ready to be absolved with a necklace and a stream of poems learnt by heart.

'They say he took a liking to you,' Elena says eventually, Caroline's mind already wandering from the words, from what she knows comes after. Are she and Damon… ? She used to wonder, even back then, because there was something animal and electric to their trio when Damon was there, but she and Stefan were so in love, they used to joke, the rest of them, how long before he gets that ring on her finger? Guess we'll never know. Guess they'll never know. Or maybe the three of them… ? All sorts of things happen in this country. Is this what life is like, retroactively realizing that your mother was right about everything? 'Be careful.'

'I'm being careful,' Caroline says, rote, even though she isn't, she really isn't, her careful is setting the bomb instead of lighting the fire, but—

'Good,' says Elena, 'we'll handle the details of the raid, only be there to give the signal. I'll send you a time and place. You know the procedure.' She does. Elena hangs up.

She's wedged half her body out of the payphone, one fold of her skirt caught on a scrap of metal that's sticking out, and fighting as gently as she can, when she remembers what she'd meant to say to Elena. She stills, looks out; yes, the world is changed already, something is lighter, sharper, a hint of green in some hazy perspective the horizon hesitates to offer, smiles surfacing on people's faces in tiny little shocks like waves ebbing, and Elena would almost certainly have liked to hear it, would have been grateful for that half-second of peace; it's almost spring.

He can't shoot her. She feels the shame with him, hot, stinging, a bloom on his skin like a blush. There are tears in his eyes and she can hear the thoughts in his head that he has never been so weak, can hear his voice bitterly listing times he faced death. The problem with men like him, she thinks, is that they're only taught what can hurt them in the flesh, and so they're startlingly easy to disarm, a perfumed breeze does the trick, you have to feel a little guilty for taking them down with so little, and—

and no, wait, she's lying, is the thing—pretending this doesn't hurt her too, that there isn't another heart in the palm of her hand making a grotesque attempt at stopping the bleeding, flopping around like a fish out of water. He shoots at the wall next to her head and she doesn't jump, caught by something on the side of his face, not a smile not a tear something, something painful like those times she hears he wakes up in the middle of the night screaming because he remembers the war. The bullet makes a broken noise of torn-apart wood, gets lost somewhere, past the glinting of dark water and gravel, she takes his hands, the gun searing as it touches her after all, 'I'm sorry'—

and she kisses his mouth, still, because she loves him, which seems like a stupid trap to fall into but he was in her bed only a few hours ago and when she held herself above him with her hands on his shoulders he looked up at her as though she was the moon, the sun and a barrage of stars, and I love him was the only thing ringing in her, she was so afraid to have to do this when she left, she remembered then arriving at the station, spine made out of steel, thinking no, no—

'Caroline,' he says, more of a sob really, but his voice firms and straightens, he is one of those men in whom the pretense of dignity triumphs over any other emotion, 'you can't leave now.'

She reads his mind: ropes, blood and the brand of her name cast away by a pain more intense still. She could tell him that it won't work, but he wouldn't listen.

'I'm not going to.'

He fumbles in his pockets for a cigarette which she lights for him. He gives it to her after a few pulls, a feint of a peace offering; rakes his hand in his hair and says, 'So what now?'

She knows what she's supposed to say. Let me go, she's supposed to say, swearing she'll never tell anyone and getting away with it once again, because of course she's the more talented player in that game, she didn't take hours designing the new Caroline's wardrobe for nothing, long off-white dresses and green poplin offsetting the brilliant gold of her hair, the picture of innocence, of grace, of a woman you would trust, could trust, in any circumstance. Let me go is what the script says; but then what did the script say about all the suffering that came before, about Ireland, about Stefan's death? What— but no, the script is right, let me go won't hurt her, is the safe answer, the answer where she gets on a train with the wind whipping her hair, gets away scot free.

So she says, 'Come away with me.'

'What does happiness look like on that man's face?' said Rebekah once, annoyed by Klaus's endless requests for more, faster, more efficient, complaining he was never content with what he got. It isn't the first thought Caroline had about Klaus Mikaelson, but it might as well be, and now she has her answer. She sees it in a flash, a half-second before he leans in, blooming quicksilver on his face and reaching every corner of it, the essence of a transformation, then—he's kissing her.

She can't say she hadn't been wondering when, wondering who she was in that kiss, Caroline the spy or Caroline the girl he bought a dress for, who does his books, whom he looks at when she thinks she can't see him, who, she knows, he sometimes calls family without noticing, as though it's not a big deal. She doesn't know better now, but she also doesn't care.

He came here, she thinks. No, he did: he came here, to her little room, he touched the kettle and the lamp and the window with careful fingers, said, 'I just wanted to check our employees weren't living in squalor,' and then turned around with a humorless grin, said, 'I have to say I'm disappointed, Caroline,' and for a second she hadn't known what to say before she realized it was a joke, him making a joke. And so she had had to offer tea, biscuits too, what would you like? Your darkest. He likes teas which have taste, he tells her, which is when she realizes she's never seen him drink anything but alcohol—she could use some brandy right now but it's too late for the bottle she keeps in her commode, she already offered tea and he thinks she is—who does he think she is? Not someone who drinks brandy right out the bottle, she'd bet.

He came to her room, sat on the only chair, by the window, looked at her with his murky-water eyes, said, 'Caroline,' like something invaluable but also as if he was shocked, as if this really wasn't what he'd come here for.

And she was turning her back at him, not on purpose, not exactly, pouring the tea to hide the way her hands trembled when he said that name, her name, and for a burning second she was shiningly, fervently relieved not to have seen the movement of her lips as he did. It might have killed me, was what she thought then, which of course was stupid and melodramatic but—

'How many sugars?'

'Caroline,' he repeated. Was he sure now? She heard him moving. She can taste it on his lips now, the courage it took, the abject fear, the resignation, the adrenalin, all mixed in.

'Caroline,' the same way he'll say, you, you, you, desperate, lost to it before it even happens, before it dawns, so she has to turn around and there he is, perfect in his uniform as usual, not reaching out, just saying her name—

'What is it?'

The breaking point, she thinks, was that he's not a delicate man, never has been, and yet he had spent weeks tip-toeing around her, not that she'd asked for it but out of some sense of gallantry or fear, she'll never know. So he takes her face in his hands and he kisses her.

Those people who had to part the sea in two, she thinks as they fall backwards on the bed, hands a vice, entangled, so in love they could only part to say it and they can't, won't, remembering a meeting in a church where he told her she was with them now, no return, was that how they felt before, when they opened their arms?

Spring 1920, and the platform is almost empty. Caroline sits on the bench, hands set primly together on her knee, white gloves, keep up the appearances to the end and the minutes tick by. She closes her eyes.

A female touch, she thinks; no one is made of steel.