Relentless.
She was relentless in her complete invasion of him.
Why couldn't he let her go? Why had he held her so close and warm and riddled with half formed words and half formed pleas against his half formed heart while the fever gripped her and why did he find himself so unprepared to do anything but spew whispered truths as her needle teeth settled like roots into his very veins when he gifted her with the life's blood from his own body when he'd never /ever/ done such a thing before.
How had the "collateral damage" become the desired?
How had he never before seen the light of all that she was?
How had he once more let the doppelgänger cloud his mind so much that he nearly extinguished that light?
He was the bastard betrayer.
He was the monster under your bed and the devil in your ear, sibilant accented tones bidding you to do the terrible things you only dreamed of doing in the darkest parts of yourself that you let care for that monster 'neath your mattress.
And oh little one you should never care for that monster.
Monster.
Nomad prince.
Lost wolf now.
And he watches her.
He follows her and watches her and tries to find ways to get into her life; to get himself into her life. It's easier with the other gone, his failed experiment, it's easier because Tyler leaving her made her crack and when one had chinks in their armour, they let the devil inside with his sibilant accented whispers and dark promises of Rome, Paris, Tokyo.
He laughed at his own bitter comparison because there was no devil, no god, no higher anything at which to rail when fate fucked you properly.
He would know, he was the oldest creature on the planet and had been fucked properly by fate more times than even that cruel mistress could notch into the bedpost of his eternity.
But if there were a god, or gods, then Caroline Forbes would be an angel certainly because she was everything light and good and that was what one associated with deities always wasn't it? And the good and the light and the shining bright sun of all her parts were laid bare for him to gaze upon in the fractal light of the golden corona that shimmered about her and he craved.
He liked her laid open for him, laid raw, laid bare, laid so bright she hurt his eyes.
He saw what no one else did when he watched her, saw her mind, saw her soul, and he couldn't stop the forward motion of his body as he joined her in her room and she made such a delightful sound of terror in her throat and clutched her tiny sweater in front of her like a shield and he chuckled at her attempts, as if the thin cashmere shield would stop him should he desire to touch her that way.
He did want that but he was a gentleman first and foremost and gentlemen wooed their ladies.
Was she his lady?
She would be he vowed.
"Ever hear of the front door Klaus? Announce yourself instead of being a creepy stalker and coming through my window?"
Such disdain from one so young and he smiled wider at her lack of actual fear when she addressed him.
Even if she still covered herself with that sweater.
So much more than a pretty face.
He clasped his hands behind his back and stood tall while his nose was assaulted by everything she smelled of, every scent, everything that he held inside the fractured parts of him that spoke so sweetly of her that he purred and shifted closer.
She scowled and kept that pale blue garment against her and straightened her shoulders to glare at him.
"Perhaps I like the smell of your fear love, when I creep into your room unannounced, so delectable a scent."
She scoffs and advances a step.
Two.
Three.
Until she's toe to toe with him and fully within arm's reach which she should be mindful of but she just doesn't care when she throws her caution to the wind and oh so doesn't care how close she is to the wolf in her room.
He likes that rub.
He likes that shattered barb of her broken breaths fan over the lower half of his face and he thinks if he wanted to, he could taste her very insides if he opened his mouth and breathed in her exhales.
He likes her raw and red mouthed cursing him for running her "boyfriend" out of town again thank you very much and she tells him so with all her white teeth snapping her rage and her blue sky eyes burning holes into his with her scorching lividity and he smiles and she hauls off and smacks the smirk off his face with a handprint that fades and his black and gold eyes flash and he has her in his hands his hands that brand red hot into her skin and he says so calm.
"Careful sweetheart, I could take that as foreplay under these circumstances and with you so ill covered."
Her cheeks stain the perfect shade of red and he longs to taste that colour with his tongue to see what she does then, to see if her petal pink lips will part or her slashing words will come instead to put him into his place like always.
Nothing happens for what seems aeons and he doesn't loosen his hold on her and she doesn't try to get away and though he keeps his eyes on hers he can feel and smell what this is doing and has already done to her body and he knows she isn't as unaffected as she has always played and now that they are alone she lets him see and smell and almost taste the heated...
...want rolling off her to him and then wreathing between them like mist until he feels he'll go mad with it.
He's already mad with it but he tamps that down and growls when her eyes flick down to his lips and linger there like he's compelled her to look at them with such, longing.
He'd thought of that once or twice when he'd wanked off to the memory of her in his arms at the ball; how he could simply make her do what he wanted. Compel her affections and her desires from her.
Make her writhe for him and make her come.
He never did it though because he wanted her fully coherent when he had her for the first time so she would know that it was he pleasuring her and he who made her scream for him.
And she would, scream for him.
It was in the dark slithering thing that moved behind her eyes as she dragged those blue sky orbs up from his mouth, daring him.
Begging him.
But not tonight.
Tonight was for the promise of what he could and wanted to do with her, tonight was the first volley.
Tonight she would know what it was to be wooed by Niklaus Mikaelson.
He loosens his hold and closes the distance enough so that a hard thought would press them together in a kiss, but Klaus is all about seduction and want and aching desire and so he whispers with evil intent in his low growly voice.
"You look like you'd like me to ruffle those perfect feathers love, and perhaps I will, but not tonight, tonight I want you imagining just what sorts of things I could do with my lips on your, lips..." he draws the last word out like pulled taffy and lets it linger like sweet sin on her lips and he's gone.
But not far enough that he couldn't hear her exhaled "shit."
Indeed.
He starts simply, small gifts, bright jewels that he later finds littering the ground outside her window and he grins proud because if she only knew that the glittering trinkets she so carelessly tossed away could buy a country, she might not be so hasty to dispose of them.
He knew better why she did this.
She was well aware of the value of those baubles and jewels and pretty things but her message was one that sang to his broken insides far better than had she accepted them and proudly worn them; she needed the unconventional. She was not one to be bought the way his other conquests had been with pretty trinkets and fine garments and whirlwind jet setting no, she was one who needed honesty and raw visceral feelings to prove that she came first to her pursuer, that she /mattered/ more than revenge or plotting or world domination.
Klaus chafed at this. He didn't bow, he didn't scrape, he didn't chase women. They came to him always, the accent, the dimples, the barely tamed beast they both feared and craved brought them in droves over the centuries.
Until he broke them screaming with his true insides and intents and desires and he was left infinitely and utterly alone again with nothing but the drip, drip, drip, of their life's blood coating his features and his hands when it was all over.
Empty.
But Caroline, this new vampire, blonde angel of light, she was so different and she told him without ever uttering a word that she would need more.
He still gathered the baubles and took them away, for the thought of draping her in the ropes of diamonds and pearls and nothing else came to his mind once he had won her.
In fact, he returned home to sketch her garbed thusly and left that finished image on her pillow.
That he never found outside her window and he knew, then, that he had found a way to win her over.
Caroline wanted his insides on display too it seemed and though he had vowed to never let another see what a mess his monstrous heart was, he knew that he needed to at least let her have a peek into his deep wounded soul in order to be able to taste her the way he so desired to.
He didn't have to give all of himself to make her his.
Did he?
Did he?
Did he?
It became his new obsession, leaving her things that let her into his twisted heart a little more.
A bloodstained parchment drawing after she distracted him.
Her carved in charcoal and light on a park bench.
"C'mon, get to know me I dare you."
He captioned his gift to her with that line, showing her how he saw her that night, the dried blood carrying the scent of the human Matt whom she had dated before Tyler. He knew she'd recognize it and when he heard her sob, and her fingers dialling her friend and the voices on the other end of the phone telling her he was in transition, he grinned.
She began to understand him then, because he heard her wander those same shaking fingers over the bloody marks of his fingerprints.
She kept that drawing too.
Klaus was an artist and wooing Caroline had become his new medium, a new way to create and control and if nothing else, Klaus was always in control.
He made her a thick linked silver necklace, the pendant on the end rustic and perfect all at once, the symbol rendered in Sanskrit writing and obscure, a brand of sorts, the meaning clear to him; marking her his. The little pendant literally said "mine". Her little friends wouldn't know it and he had a feeling she would keep this as well, she would stare at it, she would mull it over in her bright mind and she would hold it and then she would look it up.
He knew her.
But would she wear it?
Perhaps.
He left it hanging over her vanity mirror with no note.
She found it straight away and he heard her sharp inhale, watched her run the chain through her fingers and feel the warmth of it, her face so open and her cheeks so pink. He fantasizes that those same fingers would dance over his skin in much the same way in exploration and he becomes so painfully hard he has to grit his teeth.
Not yet.
He fades into the shadows and exits the town to find entertainment elsewhere, one doesn't piss in the pond they drink from and Klaus knows he needs to rid himself of this pent need with bloody violence and screaming of a different kind right now.
He wonders if she'll wear his gift.
He hopes she does.
Soon.
Between shared moments at dances and Christmas parties, Klaus makes sure he leaves her gifts, the blood splattered leather thong that wrapped a long sharp canine that she keeps as well even though it's stained with Carol Lockwood's blood and the blood of his twelve butchered hybrids.
He listens to her as she brings herself to completion that night, sobbing aloud in both relief and revulsion, for what is death without life really and what is passion without pain?
He catches her wearing that necklace when he enters her room the next twilight.
It's a surprise really because he's perusing her bookshelf and amongst the fluffy young adult fare, he finds books that one wouldn't associate with the blonde; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, books on Egyptian hieroglyphs, Shakespeare.
Her sharp gasp makes him smile and he faces her with a slow smile and burning eyes.
Those eyes find and rest on the leather and then meet hers.
"You're wearing my latest gift I see, love."
She reaches up and clutches her hand protectively around it as if he'll snatch it back any second.
She's speechless still and breathing hard.
"That canine is mine."
The silence descends at the raw quality of the words he'd just uttered as if a blanket was thrown over this room specifically and he wonders why he blurted that out where it would tear up his throat like broken splinters of glass and he watches her with mutiny in his eyes, daring her to snipe a comment about it in that cutting way of hers, tearing him down the way everyone in his life did.
But she remains mute and watchful and her fingers trace it.
"Mikael tore it from my skull before my mother locked away my wolf. He gave her the other to use in the spell."
He steps closer to her and his voice lowers.
"I found this where they bound me, after it was over, I kept it to remind me what I still had even when I couldn't feel that part of myself anymore."
She's searching his eyes as he speaks and she still remains silent and he wonders why he's telling her these things.
Like the hummingbird in the Andes.
"I know."
His eyes meld to hers and he sees the truth there, her face open and soft with her care.
He leans forward and drops one chaste kiss to her pulse, her small little sigh following him as he leaves her, killing away his raw cut up insides two towns over and finding some random redhead to fuck and drain against the wall of the bar he had just decimated.
He's definitely spiralling.
And it's emptier than it's ever been, even the blood is less satisfying.
He zips himself back into his trousers and leaves the area, memories of Caroline in his mind and his heart and he can't breathe goddammit and the stink of the woman he fucked still lingers in his nose and he knows that nothing could ever compare to Caroline anyway and he aches for the want of her bent and trembling for him.
/For him/.
And she knew it.
Tyler tried to sneak back into town to be with Caroline but she could smell another wolf on him, on his clothes, smell the stink of her and when she told him to leave.
"LEAVE."
She threw his meagre belongings after him like missiles. The last being the little charm bracelet he'd given her for her birthday.
No more Tyler.
Klaus killed the entire pack and left the wolf bitch alive, small mercy though he had for such things, he felt it was poetic in the end, a message to his first hybrid.
He watched Caroline sleep that night.
He saw too whilst he watched her that she had added the silver chain to what she wore already around her slim neck and when he glanced at her open laptop screen he noted that she had found what the symbol meant.
Was this a sign?
Klaus didn't believe in fate or the gods or god, but he did believe in one angelic infant vampire and he knew that she did nothing by halves.
It was a message.
So he left her one in his sweeping script he left her a note and he left her room and he went home.
And he waited for her.
She would come he knew because she was just a drawn to his darkness as he was to her light and perhaps she now knew that it was meant to be.
"Mine."
He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until her voice floated into the semi darkness of his room.
How she'd gotten in when he couldn't have missed her entry was a feat he would have to examine later.
"I know."
She'd said that before, when he'd said other less possessive things to her but now that she wore the trinket he'd made for her, branding her, he knew she knew more than she'd ever let him see.
Let anyone see.
One broken thing to another, she called to him, and he moved as if under a spell and perched beside her on the bed where she'd planted herself.
They looked at each other for a long time.
Moments paused and waxed and waned like the moon across the sky and still they looked both memorising they way this looking seemed to tell them all and then nothing about the other and laid bare and open every subtle nuance and every indrawn breath of all they they were and were not together and separate as time seemed to still and then stop in the dark.
Later she will think he moved first but later he will note that they they both moved as one and both reached out and both touched the other and it was more electric and raw and hopeful than any other touch that either of them had experienced before with anyone else and it ruined them forever for any touch that could possibly come after. Every want and every desire and every hungered need scraped them to bleeding eternity here and at the first touch of their lips Klaus thought he was dying a true death.
Nothing could have prepared him for this, nothing could have warned him that he would fall and fall so far as to forget where he ended and she started and he made some sort of hungry sound in his chest and he cupped her chin and he kissed her and her lips, gods her lips were everything good and right and perfect and tasted of her and he wanted to open his eyes just to see what Caroline Forbes looked like when she gave herself to something like this, gave herself to /someone like this/, and he did and what he saw broke him and then built him back into something so much more.
She was radiant when she let go and Klaus, Klaus wanted her to let completely go.
She would, he vowed and soon.
They kiss for a long time before Caroline does something bold and reaches for his shirt and he has to part away in order to stop her.
She makes some sort of disappointed sound and her mouth frowns and he smiles.
"Caroline, I've waited a long time for this, do you think I'm going to rush it with a quick fuck in my bed and send you on your way back home like little red riding hood, hmm?"
"No...?"
It's a question and Klaus leans close to brush his mouth in a hot press over her pulse while he whispers seductively.
"I plan to /enjoy/ you, Caroline, every breath, every sigh, every bleat of my name from your perfect mouth, I plan to enjoy them all, I plan to worship you, sweetheart, plan to mark you mine, before I bed you properly. This time I want to /take/ my time..."
He does remove her sleep top though when he's through speaking and again he is left in awe that her breasts are perfect, perfect for his hands to tease and mould and cup and kiss and taste and perfect to make her arch into his body like a sleek cat and he learns her now, learns her body, learns her tells so that the next time, the next time he can light her up fast for the rough taking he plans for the second round because Klaus is not one to be sated after just one taste.
He'll never have enough of her.
He'd shed his coat by now, and his shirt, and his shoes are off and his trousers are half undone and by the time he's biting a path down her left side she's already panting and trying to grind herself into his thigh but he holds her and he enjoys her and she is vibrating and soaked through her tiny little shorts.
He won't touch her yet, he wants her practically insane from the need he creates in her, a need he himself had been harbouring all this time and he thinks that she should have a taste as to the level of insane that she had driven him to the brink of with all this exploration because damn it all, if he was going to bed this magnificent creature for the first time then he was by the gods going to make sure it was seared into his brain for the rest of eternity because he would never get another first time with her.
He wanted the sweet musky scent of her to bleed into his pores and as he looks up from the blade of her hip and the mark he'd put there with his teeth he can see and hear the supple chain of his gift shift and sing softly.
"Mine..."
He whispers this while his eyes burn her alive and the flush that creeps up and over her skin like a heated shadow makes him smile and it's the devil in that smile, its all the wicked things she thought about him all this time in that smile, its the love he has for her in that smile and though he is the bastard betrayer and monster incarnate, here he is her Romeo and her prince and her dark desirous need all rolled into one man.
Her shorts go and then his mouth is on her sex and her right leg is up and hooked over his left shoulder and he's feasting on her like she is the filet mignon at his last meal before he is taken to the gallows or the guillotine and while he laps and sucks and bites at the perfect pink gates of her, outer lips and lower lips fair to dripping with her fluids and she's making that high keening howl of his name and the word yes all garbled and strangled and tangled in her throat and her body is wet and her thighs tremble and she tastes like heaven itself in melting wonder angels singing pearly gates open and joyful bliss be had, he knows that no one has put her first like this, has ever tasted her like this, has ever satisfied her like this.
He is that last supper dead man walking as he bites down on her clit in a series of perfectly timed sucking bites and she's gone, flying higher than an eagle screaming the walls down and tearing his sheets in her throes and he takes it all in and growls his approval against her wet skin and her strangled tangled words are a song-like litany and her hips are that staccato beating drum as she chases his mouth as he licks her clean.
He whispers things against her thighs with his whiskers scraping little shudders over skin still sizzling sensitive and he crawls up her body with touching sweeps of his hands that paint invisible sigils over all the places he'd already been and all the places he'll be again. He knows her know, has her deep in his body, knows her split hungry wailing hold of him has him gripped in every fibrous thud of his thick beating heart and he knows too that he is as encapsulated within her, running her body and setting his own roots to bury deep in her and all their broken parts are fitting together and rooted together.
He poises above her and she fists his chains and leather where they hang around his neck and he half smiles down at this woman and she half smiles up at him until their lips touch and she toes his trousers down over his hips and past his backside and he settles himself between her legs and she makes a sound when she feels the throbbing heat of him pressed like velvet iron against her thigh and though she circles her hips in invitation, Klaus takes the time to fist the two gifts he'd given her and presses them to her pounding heart.
Mine the gesture says.
Yours she seems to agree when she places her hand over his heart too.
There is no "I love you" here, there is nothing like that because that isn't who they are to one another and when he fills her, and he does, fill her, it's her heart he's filling as well as her body and in every tempered thrust and every quivering clench and grinding roll as they move together like they'd been together this whole time.
Perhaps they had been perfecting this since he fed her his blood on her birthday and with each passing liquid touch of their skin set to the tympanic pounding beat of their hearts as they succumb to the hot pleasured scrape of everything they were and everything they weren't before and during this act of fervent worship, Klaus feels just how far he's fallen so that when she begs him in needful sighing whispers to "come Klaus come with me..." he can't deny her and they fall together he and she and though the whole world seems to implode when he spills himself and she holds him so close while she shudders it's like they are one writhing entity, he would do it all again just to have her whisper his name with that so soft lilt she has.
Tangled and mangled they lay as the world keeps spinning and when he presses his most reverent kiss to her sternum, she whispers out into the dark.
"You're mine too, you know."
He whispers back his affirmation into her skin over her heart.
"I was from the very beginning."