A/N: The majority of this was written before 4x13 aired, but I had seen the synopsis regarding Caroline caught in the middle of a violent confrontation between Tyler and Klaus and wanted to write my own take on it. This directly follows In Eternity We Trust. While this piece can technically stand on its own, I do recommend you read Eternity, simply because parts of this do tie back to it. Again, since I am still an utter newborn in regards to this fandom, and am kind of still feeling these characters out, if this is so hideous it makes you want to pour bleach into your eyes, do tell.

To tiptoe back through time, to walk on silent feline feet through its long echoing halls- what a thing. And he has a thousand of these halls stored away inside him, and he walks them all on this, the fourth day of his incarceration.

He misses the 1800s.

The lemon-silk waterfalls that pool in a taffeta rustling over slippered feet; the dancing; the flirting; the horses. This shrill century with its trumpeting of horns and thunderstorm hissing of tires on intersections and wailing vulture sirens- it hurts his ears. It burns his eyes.

Give him Paris on a rainy December, 1839, with the streetlamps and their light like butter melting in sidewalk cracks; with the Parisians and their art, their poems, their music; the pastries he stops to smell but does not eat; the lofty ladies with their flowers in their buttonholes.

Gettysburg, 1863. The drummer boys and their young apple cheeks and the final thundering charges through mud and blood; the bayonets, the cries of the gut-shot and the storming of the cannons- what a century!

He paces the lines of the ward, from corner to corner, testing, putting his shoulder to it, straining, straining-

He waits for the smell of Evodia coconut lime.

For her click click clacking machine gun heels.

And she does not come and he does not care, it means nothing, he has these walls to chip away at, he has these halls to pace with hands behind his back, meandering down decades and over centuries-

He has toppled kings, he has murdered queens sleeping in their beds- he will not be undone by this one small-town cheerleader who has seen nothing, who has been nowhere- he will not sit here with his winter heart dead in his chest wondering if she will ever come again-

He has incited revolutions in France.

He has watched his horse run itself to pieces underneath him.

He has stood before the great black mouth of one of those storming cannons and taken its charge point-blank to the chest, and he will not be brought to his knees-

But why doesn't she come; she understood -she told him she felt- she pressed her soft cheek to the space between his shoulder blades and she stood there breathing with him, and he burned as Kol still smolders with his faint meat-stinking death and why doesn't she come.

He prowls the kindling couch and the matchstick chairs and the shattered mirrors of the picture frames that crunch like gravel beneath his boots.

In 1753 he bedded a countess, and she smelled like roses and she cried when he tried to leave, and clung to him, and he reached his hand out to stroke her soft petal skin and with a flick of his wrist he left her broken-doll body behind on the sheets.

Her broken-doll body started a war between the count and a small neighboring piece of land, the proprietor of which was believed to be at fault, and not once did he even have to look deep into the eyes of these stupid humans and set his will upon them.

They do all the tearing themselves, you see, with hardly a nudge. They march screaming out to battle so easily.

You think him a monster?

The count whose wife he murdered raped the children of this neighbor and paraded their heads on stakes before their father, whose screams still stretch themselves across the centuries to still his hand where it glides across his sketchpad.

In the end he ate them both.

He watches the sky through the window. It is bruised by midnight and then touched with the fat red paintbrush of dawn, and she does not come.

He is not waiting.

She would like 1839 Paris. He would wing his elbow out to be lightly taken by her hand and stroll smiling down the sidewalks, smelling the pastries, the promise of snow in the sky, the sweating horses jingling past in their traps, and the gowns he would buy her, the jewelry- the nights between satin sheets and the days in his studio, she draped artfully over a chair, he at his easel-

He sees her there beside him so clearly; he feels her laugh work its way from ear to chest, and the squeezing he gets inside, when she smiles.

To her, he is a clockwork man, a thing of gears and levers and springs. He runs on a fuel of bloodlust and power; he does not feel; he does not love.

He loved his mother, and his horse, and a girl in the village when he was ten, who played with him in the woods, who gave him his first kiss, who told him about the day they would be married.

His mother turned him away and his horse fell in a gushing of blood to his father's sword and the girl died a brittle straw corpse, rotten with plague, but he tried; he held onto them all; he wanted so badly to not be left behind.

Get to know him, he tells her, and she scoffs.

She does not see.

She is blinded by her small-town life and her small-town boy and her own monotone perceptions of morality, which have not yet been colored by time.

He smells Evodia coconut lime.

He hears her click click clacking machine gun heels.

He is crushed, compressed, held so hard about the chest by something he cannot even see-

She is not alone.

He can hear the boy from here.

He is all jackhammer heart, jackhammer boots.

Twitching muscle, creaking knuckles.

He blows through the door and stands with feet planted wide and nostrils flaring wider and behind him she slips across the porch and into the entry way and lays her pale hand lightly on his back, and why does this boy who refused to bow get to be touched so gently, so easily, like she does not even have to think twice-

"Klaus."

"Tyler, don't," she whispers.

He smiles.

It does not reach his eyes. It cracks his lips and bares his teeth and if only this wall weren't between them.

"Tyler. Nice to see you."

"Did you kill my mom, you son of a bitch?"

"Tyler, let's just-"

"No."

"I heard, mate. My condolences. Tragic accident; mayor Lockwood, the town drunk. How does that rhyme go? Mrs. Lockwood sat on a wall, Mrs. Lockwood had a great fall-"

"Don't," he snarls.

"Tyler, stop." She tugs on his arm. He shrugs her away.

"I've heard less than favorable things about your father, too. A drunkard, a cheater, and their son, little Tyler Lockwood, monster."

"Don't, Klaus." He swallows; he works his jaw back and forth. "All of them. Every single- why?"

"Tyler, please, let's just go, ok? Tyler?"

"No." He flings her hand away again, stands with his tight white fists at his sides.

So tense, merely a nudge, that's all it will take-

"Did you kill my mom?"

He clasps his hands behind his back. "Your mother wasn't wanting for male companionship, mate. Word gets around. So does jealousy, hmm? Like a fever; it catches, gets passed on, consumes a man until he burns. And then a little slut-"

"Shut up."

Kol lies just behind his boot, and Tyler swings it back, smashes his brother's black-flaking hand to dust beneath its heel.

"Get away from him!" he roars.

"Tyler, stop! Stop, Tyler!"

"What was that? I didn't hear you," he snaps. "You want to have something left to bury, like I did? You want to be able to say good-bye? I didn't get to. She was all I had left."

He turns, and Kol's left leg crumples, dumps its gunpowder remains out across the floor, and he throws himself against the ward, slams his boot against it until his toes snap like the kindling couch and the matchstick chairs and how dare this little pissant boy- that's his brother- his brother-

Kol is chipped away in fragments; he collapses in one great mushroom puff of gray-

The ward stretches beneath his fist.

It flexes.

He throws himself screaming against it -he will break through- he will bleed the Lockwood boy until he cries; he will snap him in all the places he is not supposed to bend; he will not stand helplessly behind this wall-

There is a soft-wax loosening, a sudden elasticity that shapes this invisible wall to his fist, his elbow, his foot-

"Tyler-"

She tries to warn him; she grabs for his arm, jabs her finger, pulls him away, but he is through -he is through- and he stumbles, he catches himself, he is on Tyler Lockwood in a blink.

Tyler's jaw splinters beneath his fist and he swings again, again, hooks his fingers into claws through the meat of the boy's shoulder and the way he screams-

Hot blood all around him and in his mouth and streaked in splashes of paint through his beard, and the boy keeps screaming, breaking, and he sinks his teeth in, in- the boy's flesh gives just as easily as anyone else's- he rips down, he latches on-

And something in the boy shudders free, shakes off its thin surface layer of humanity and they are monster and monster now, and he is shoved backward, catches a blow to the head that wipes pinwheels of stars across his eyes, but this does not matter- he shatters the boy's elbow, his hand, and how does this feel- like a boot coming down- like explosions of black gunpowder spreading themselves in confetti pieces beneath a brother's silent staring eyes-

"Tyler, don't!"

"Get out of the way, Caroline!" he screams, and one broad sweep of his football-player arm and she flies, she soars, she comes down screaming.

He locks his forearm against Tyler's throat, pins him wriggling there.

She lies on top of the shattered coat rack with her guppy mouth opening, shutting, opening, and something inside of him yawns so wide he falls down inside of it and is trapped there utterly paralyzed, for just a moment.

And then the boy rasps her name and he jerks.

Tyler's head flops loosely back against his shoulder.

He throws him down and steps over him like garbage and he is across the room in half a second, and oh, Caroline, love-

She touches the polished wooden splinter that juts like a rib from her chest, and she looks up at him, and these fingers that squeeze his chest when she smiles and close themselves tightly around his heart when she laughs now have him by the throat, and how can he breathe-

"Don't move. It's nicked your heart. Ok, love- hold very still."

She stares up at him.

The tears that smear her mascara squeeze themselves from beneath her eyes and run themselves down her cheeks and his hands freeze into solid winter blocks where they come to rest against her shoulders, and, God, how careful he's going to have to be- surgeon precise, not a shaky finger out of place-

"Can you be still for me, sweetheart?" he asks, touching her chin. Her slick pink lips shake, and wrinkle, and he smells their saltwater layer and their chemical coating just underneath, and if there were a God, he'd have done away with a creature like him a long time ago, but just in case, give him a bloody chance, here.

He wants to take her to Paris, to Rome, to Venice when the sun has just risen, and turned the canals to stained glass.

He wants her to take his dare, to sit with him beneath metal winter skies and hot summer noons and cherry-blossom springs- a thousand of them, love, that's the thing abut their sort- so many experiences waiting- don't check out yet, do you hear him-

He eases her up, and his heart beats in his ears and his throat and his careful, careful fingertips: he is only a pulse now, one single throbbing-

The polished wooden splinter through her heart cracks, and breaks off from the main rack, and now he slips one arm around her back and supports her like this as he works it slowly, so slowly, from her pretty blue shirt, ruined now- and to think how well it brought out her eyes-

Her chest lets it go with a soft suction-cup slurp.

She starts to cry noisily, and he cradles her face against his throat, lets his hand shake, and go on shaking against the top of her head. "Shh; there's a good girl, Caroline. You're all right."

"What did you do to Tyler?"

"He'll be up in a minute. Nothing permanent, love, unfortunately."

She pushes him away. "Take Kol and get out of here before he wakes up. I'm not going to sit here and watch you fight. I'm not going to let you hurt him, Klaus."

"I think he has bigger concerns at the moment. He almost just killed you."

"It was an accident."

"And what sort of thanks do I get, for saving your life?"

She scowls and turns away from him, folding her arms carefully over her chest. "Just because you do one crummy kinda' good thing once in a while doesn't change anything. Just get out of here."

"Would a little gratitude really sting so much?" he snaps.

"If it's for you, then yes." She turns away, and what an idiot he is, for wanting this girl with her snarled curls and her dripping makeup and her black-hole eyes; how many times will he play the fool; how long does she expect him to go on not killing her, letting her tug his strings, rebuff his panting puppy-dog antics-

He stands.

He towers over her.

And this tiny little Barbie of a girl, barely a woman, flicks her eyes up to meet his and lifts her eyebrows and this is his dismissal, and he had an English queen, a Russian princess, and they dipped their knees and bent their necks to him and how their pretty little heads would have rolled, if they hadn't-

"Klaus," she hisses.

"Fine," he snarls. "I'll be seeing you, love."

He stands with clasped hands at the threshold of her room.

She startles in the doorway of the bathroom so badly she drops the bottle of lotion she is holding, and it shatters to mirror pieces on the tile. "Oh my God! Don't do that."

"I'd like to be invited in."

"You already have; that's why you're here, which you shouldn't be. I mean, don't you have something evil to be doing or something shiny you have to buy for the next girl?"

He smiles. "There is no next girl, Caroline. Just you."

She huffs and kneels down to begin collecting the shards of her bottle, sweeping them carefully into her palm.

"Caroline. Invite me in."

"Argh! Just go away, ok? I'm going to bed. Alone. I'd show you out, except that would mean spending one more minute with your freaky sweet-talking and your stupid pictures or whatever you came here to give me this time, and I'm not in the mood. Long day, you know."

He feels the smile harden and turn down at the corners.

"I'd like to be invited into your room."

"And I'd like you to go away and leave me and Tyler and everyone else I care about alone, but I think we both know how futile that wish has been so far. Just-" She flaps her hand in his direction. "Ok?"

"'Futile'. I've always like that word. It was a favorite of Dickens' as well, you know. He saw it everywhere he looked- futility, I mean. In the seasons, coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, as they say, how they always tried to stay but were nevertheless forced aside to make way for the next, year after year. How a baby cried for its mother as she slept not breathing in her bed beside it. In the beating of his own heart- a dark man, I told you."

"What's your point, Klaus?" she asks tiredly, dumping the shards she has gathered into the wastebasket beside her bed. "What do you want?"

"I'm here to discuss your appeal for the lives of Elena and the hunter. I've decided to consider it."

She sits herself warily down on the edge of her bed, watching him through narrowed eyes.

"But I want something in return."

"Like I couldn't see that one coming," she snaps.

He inclines his head and shifts himself just slightly forward as though to take a step, to walk beyond the hall. "May I?"

"Like I could stop you."

"I'm a gentleman, Caroline. I don't force my way into a lady's bedroom." He lifts his eyebrows with a smile, and stands looking at her in the dark. "She always opens the door willingly anyway."

"Well I'm not going to."

The light, coming in through the window there- it flatters her. He would like to capture it, pin it down to paper, immortalize her in charcoal dust. Vine for her hair, compressed for her eyes- or graphite, perhaps, for the eyes; charcoal hasn't got the shine to do them justice.

"Come, Caroline- must we be uncivilized about this? I'd prefer to not discuss such serious matters in the hallway."

"Oooh- fine. Come in, Klaus," she invites with exaggerated formality.

He smiles and steps beyond her doorway, hands still behind his back, one eyebrow lifted. "I'm all ears, if you'd like to propose some kind of arrangement that would be to the great advantage of Elena and the little hunter. You might want to throw in a little something for Tyler, as well."

"Just make your demands," she says with arms crossed, eyebrows pulled together, and how captivating she is there on her bed- the fire in her eyes, the bright white moon in her hair. Its light turns her skin from porcelain to pearl, and he could burn through a thousand sketchbooks trying to touch this moment, to hold it in his hands, to keep it forever sealed away.

But you cannot keep time like a fly in amber. The way humans cling so tightly to it, try to pin it down, to make it obey, to keep it in line with their calendars, their clocks, their countdowns- it's incomprehensible to him, a creature with a thousand yesterdays, a thousand more tomorrows, an eternity of birthdays that do not wilt his skin or shrink his bones.

And she takes this incomprehension, and she crams it down his throat, she chokes him on its ash, she makes him see.

This moment will not stretch; it cannot be pulled tight, it will not pause.

He wants it to. Oh, he wants it. If you could freeze a second, and carry it around in a pocket, a bag, a suitcase- if you could take this second out and turn it about in your hands, feel its weight, its smooth-sanded corners-

For a very long time, he has not bowed before Time.

He has had nothing to fear from it.

And now here he stands, steamrolled by time, crushed beneath its treads; each ticking of the clock on her wall is another second stolen, another minute lost, and they just keep slipping, right through his fingers- how hard must he grasp-

He turns away, faces her dresser, flicks his finger out across the top of her perfume bottle. "I love this."

"Great; it was my favorite. Now I'm going to have to switch."

"Why so angry, love?"

"Uh, I don't know. Maybe because you probably killed Tyler's mom? Maybe because you tried to kill Tyler?"

"Self-defense, Caroline."

"You went at him first."

He pauses, tilts his head to take in her bookcase, crammed mostly with bent copies of Cosmo and Marie Claire, but among them a spine stands out with its little white smile lines down the binding, and he works it loose, lets it drop down into his hand. "'Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, I turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst.'" He looks up with another smile. "You've good taste, love."

"It was assigned."

"Remarque was a friend; we met just after the war."

"Really? You've had those?"

"A few, throughout the centuries. Stefan used to be one of them, you know."

"Yeah, back when he was all Ted Bundy."

He smiles. "Ripper Stefan- the spark in him, back then. You should have seen him in the 20s. I enjoyed him immensely." He holds up the book. "This translation's a bit rough; some of his poetry is lost to the technical necessities of English grammar. You must read it in German one day; I've a copy. A first edition, actually, with a little note in the front from Remarque himself."

"Would you get to the point? What do you want?"

"A dance," he says quietly, holding the book balanced on the tips of his fingers, looking down at her in the moonlight.

She frowns. "A dance. That's it? No first-born child, no kiss, no-"

"'Hot hybrid vampire sex?'"

She gives him her 'not amused' look, the one that furrows her brow just there, right up to the bridge of her nose, and he imagines the blank white paper before him, and how he will create these folds with carefully placed shadows and sketchings.

"I want a dance," he repeats. A dance with no spaces between them, with her soft white-silk hand in his own and her powdered cheek on his shoulder, a moment in which she feels it is safe to touch, to rest herself lightly against him and pretend she is merely holding a position, completing a turn.

"Wait, by 'dance', you don't mean-"

He smiles and opens the book, rifles its thick dog-eared pages. The smell of a new book, of its tiny black stars of words swimming in their flat white sea- if he could only bottle this with the scent of horse flesh, and leather, and Evodia coconut lime-

He flips it shut. "I'm not trying to trick you into bed, Caroline."

"Ok, so, if I dance with you, you'll leave Elena and Jeremy alone? You won't hurt them?"

"I'll take it under consideration."

"That's not good enough."

"Then maybe you've another offer to lay on the table?"

"Seriously?" She huffs. "Can't you just-"

"Can't I just what, love?" He brings his teeth together so hard his jaw creaks warningly beneath the scruff of his beard and now the book bends, and whispers its thin cardboard protests between his fingers, and how he wishes this binding were the hunter's thick jock neck, feathering apart into sinew and spine-

"Can't I just let them go, after they murdered my brother? After they left me sitting there alone with him- four days I sat there, Caroline. Smelling him. Watching him slowly flake away into dust."

She sinks a little into herself, cups a hand around either elbow. "You killed their aunt. And now they've killed your brother," she says quietly. "We've all done horrible things to each other. What they did- they didn't have a choice. But you do." She lifts her eyes to him, and he laughs, he turns away; the book goes sailing through the air to knock her perfume loudly to the floor.

In a thousand years, he has learned many things. To paint, to sing, to sit with pen in hand until in a sweeping white fire of fever madness his muse leads him through another poem, a different story. To lie quietly concealed in brush and bramble, bow in hand, listening for the creep of the deer, the soft pawing of the panther.

The little blonde bombshell from the 50s touched him with her wit in 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes', irritated him with her hideous over-acting in 'There's No Business Like Show Business', and put him off completely when she took up with that annoying Kennedy man and his repulsive equine teeth.

He lost himself in her pretty white throat and left her behind to die feebly gasping inside the snarled nest of her bedcovers.

And in 1935 Germany a frightened little boy whom he coaxed from beneath the oil-weeping chassis of a battered old Cadillac bit his finger just above the knuckle when he tried to point the brat away from the rain-starved road whose dust had just been stirred by passing Nazi feet, and he fed until this little screaming monster hung in limp cloth-doll tatters from his hands.

He does not forgive.

He offers a chance, perhaps, if one's manner is not too offensive and one doesn't smile too widely or laugh too loudly when he's trying to think, but a chance is just that, one single moment of clemency which is so frail one must cradle it carefully, guard it wisely.

He watches her sitting there in the moonlight, trying with her blue drowning eyes to suck him down, hold him fast, to bring him 'round, and why should he yield-

How she warms a man right down to his toes. No effort at all on her part, just a little lifting of her feathery brows, a shifting of her hands in her lap and he is all pathetic liquid limbs, trying to hold themselves upright-

He is before her in an instant.

His numb wood-block hand, so clumsy this close to her, picks free a single curl, and he stands looking down at it; he lets his shaking fingers iron it straight between pointer and middle.

Like a ribbon, it slides over his knuckles and down across his nails. The lemon balm is gone; he smells strawberry tonight.

He is not sure which he prefers.

Has she caught her breath just slightly? Does she sit with fluttering lashes because she is afraid, because she wants this- because he has lit her up inside so brightly the way she has struck the fuse that burns in his fingertips, his aching throat-

He lowers himself to his knees.

Her rabbit pulse jumps in her neck and he brings this numb wood-block hand that barely belongs to him anymore, that acts with its own will, its separate mind, to her cheek and puts thumb to skin and this moment- this moment is the one he wants to freeze away in its amber coffin.

He wants to say…so many things.

He fought in the first of the World Wars and there was no one waiting far away for him to walk with rifle in hand and tired smile on face through bullets and bombs and barbed-wire trenches back to them. He brought a crowd to its feet with just his words and sent them surging like a tide to pull their government to pieces, and when he stepped with a wink into the hangman's noose, who cried out in the crowd- who fell shrieking to their knees and begged the hangman mercy, not this one-

When the soldiers in their worn blue coats stepped aside to make way for the wide black mouth of the cannon and he held the line- who had his back- who stumbled with blind stinging eyes over each body pleading not him; anyone but him-

And the girl, the tiny doll girl who perished her scarecrow death, did she look up at him when he laid beside her with his cheek to hers, did she care that he risked his own life to send her off-

You walk through history, you touch its paths, ripple its currents, you melt into it or stand apart from it, but you are always and forever on the other side of the glass, looking in.

This is how it's always been for him.

This is what he has tried to change, towing his family along behind him in their polished beds.

This is the fine print of a thousand birthdays, but it doesn't have to be, love- Tyler Lockwood is a stupid silly boy and one day she will outgrow him, but for a thousand years he has lived, traveled, soaked up culture and he'll split it, love- he's never been good with sharing, but the art, the history, the words swimming in their delicious newsprint perfume- they're hers-

"Sometimes, I almost think maybe I can forget all the horrible things you've done," she whispers.

What a thing, to be given wings.

He's heard it said that this is what hope does: it lifts you up, holds you aloft.

What use has a man like him ever had for hope; he didn't need it in the trenches and he didn't hold it tight when the Nazis stomped their thug boots down sidewalks and through homes to pull children screaming into the light.

He cast it off; he threw it aside.

And now it has found its way back to him, poked its intrusive fingers into his chest that is too tight and his throat that is too hard, and give him a sign here, love-

"Did you kill Tyler's mom?"

He swallows.

His thumb stops it careful caress.

She takes his hand away.

You take a bullet, a bayonet, a cannon blast, and it doesn't kill you, no, nothing much that can do that, but they hurt; they bring you howling to your knees and snarling back to your feet, these things that cut the flesh and break the bone.

And she takes his hand away and he is hammered flat beneath all of these, simultaneously.

He could make her love him, the little smug bitch. He could make her beg to be bent across this pink child's bed with its ridiculous flowered quilt and brought screaming to her climax. What will Tyler think of her then, sweet, loyal Caroline, impaled on him until she can't take it anymore- he could do that-

"How could you do that to him? How could you take away his only family?"

"Maybe I can't help myself," he says flatly. "Maybe I'm just evil."

"You want to not be alone so badly you cart your family around like some kinda' freaky circus…sideshow. You sire your little hybrid armies because at least if you can't have your family, they'll be there for you, always; they'll never leave, no matter what you do. You save Damon in return for Stefan, because he was your friend once, and there's no one else who's going to step into that role. And I know -I know- that after a thousand years, you can't still feel this alone, you can't still care, and not be a little human, underneath it all."

Something inside his chest is unstoppered, emptied out onto the floor beneath his boots.

He stands and turns with fists clenched at his sides and she keeps talking, she throws her voice out into the dark like a life ring, for him to clench tight or push away.

"You can't manipulate people into being your friends, Klaus. You can't make them love you."

"Oh, but I can, sweetheart. I could do it right now."

"But you won't. Because you want it to be real."

He has spent the better part of his thousand years evading his father.

He has lain with straining arms just barely holding at bay the bright white tip of the stake his mother's hunter monstrosity tries to plunge into his heart.

He has lost each of his siblings, to death, to anger, to other lives they would rather lead; he has gained them back, and lost them all over again.

It has never been real.

"I've changed my mind. I'm rescinding my offer. I think I'll start with Tyler."

"Fine. Kill Tyler. Kill Elena. Kill Jeremy. Do you think you're going to stop hurting? You're never going to stop feeling, Klaus. You've had a thousand years to stop feeling."

Her bloody voice. Her bloody voice and how hard it hits and how deep it goes and is it really so much to ask, love, to not poke at a man this way, to leave him whole-

"You could have let me die, to teach Tyler a lesson. You didn't need me. It would have been so easy, to just leave me there in my room- it would have hurt Tyler so much. It would have shown him what happened, when he tried to disobey you. And you didn't. You came, and you saved me. And you let me choose."

He works his jaw, shuts his eyes.

"How little you require, to have a little faith," he says roughly.

The boy screams and he squeezes, he squeezes, and listen to that- his brother must have screamed just like this as he burned, his brother must have begged for it to stop in just precisely this way, he must have pleaded so helplessly-

He turns his hand, and the boy thrashes, he gurgles, he flails blindly out to touch Klaus' red-painted wrists and this blind flailing touch spasms, hooks deep, falls away-

He forces his hand deeper, he holds Tyler's warm beating heart in his hand, and a twitch, a tug, and out it pops, just the smallest movement of these red-painted wrists he cannot look away from and good-bye Tyler, good-bye traitor, and why can't he do it-

A thousand years he has lived, and a thousand more he will live.

And he will never stop feeling, she tells him.

He will never not care.

He lets go.

He stands looking down at Tyler Lockwood and the pathetic mewling heap he makes on his mother's Italian-import carpet.

For the longest time, he stands, and he looks.

"Another time, mate."

A/N: The quote Klaus says as he's holding the book he pulls from Caroline's bookshelf is an actual quote from All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque. And at last, the real story of Marilyn Monroe's death comes out- not an accidental overdose, a murder, or a suicide at all, but Klaus, unimpressed with her choice in both movie roles and men. (For anyone who is a fan of Monroe, I have never actually seen anything with her in it, so I haven't any idea if her acting is witty in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or if it is too over-the-top in There's No Business Like Show Business. I simply plucked the names of those movies off her IMDB.) I am actually kicking around the idea of writing yet another follow-up to this one, to turn it into a trilogy, but I'll be returning to my reguarly-scheduled program of Final Fantasy VIII fanfiction next week, so I can't say for absolutely sure that it'll happen, or when.