Time, forever frozen and still.
"I want your confession."
He says this as if it's a church they're in and she a penitent looking to repent some heinous sin, beg forgiveness, feel better about what she's thinking, plotting, planning to do to him if and when he shuts up, the hungry /considering/ look she's raking over his body making him crave the explosion he knows could follow such words from him.
"My, confession, I didn't do anything." Okay, she's trying for disdain here and instead looks as though she's stopped breathing and he hears the audible click and slide of her saliva when she swallows past the stoppage in her throat, in her heart, in her lungs, in the very processes of her thinking and he knows that if he can just get the words out, just make her /stop thinking/ for one second she'll meet him halfway. He didn't come here to gloat over Katerina's corpse to be after all; he came here for /Caroline/ and she cannot have put herself so far into denial that she isn't contemplating the same things he is.
It's in her eyes, you see, it's her eyes that belie her words saying she feels nothing but loathing for the darker parts of herself that care for him, that crave the way he speaks to her, the way he always looks at her, as if she is the sun and the moon and the starlit sky and she's been handed to him to care for and hold and protect and his words now, "I will walk away, and never come back, I promise." are a sort of emotive confession only to her in this moment, his face so open in this that she knows it for the truth it is.
He keeps his word always.
But it's his truth. He has never hidden how he feels about her, has never hidden the lengths to which he would go to keep her safe; be her secret now to save face because he /is/ the hated enemy and has been the progenitor of so many awful events.
"Good."
What does she see there now as she fastens her blue eyes on his mouth for a long beat then his eyes for a longer beat. A step.
Two.
Her breath is on his lips and they share air here in this space and share heat and want and so many unspoken things between them and it's only millimetres really now and still all the spaces fill and fill and then snap. Her lips, her lips finally on his and he's stood there watching her as if transfixed, like some green slivered dream he had on repeat in his head every night since he'd gone and the scared open /shock/ of her giving in to what she wanted, of watching her give herself a moment to take what she /needed/ now held him in stasis, in a rictus of disbelief and sweet saccharine awe when those two rosy petals finally landed on his stunned mouth and he stayed frozen there, stayed so scared still there that it took her hand on his face to bring him back to himself because Klaus never thought that she would ever be kissing him like this, plea and prayer and sin all rolled into one.
He's in motion now, confessor and cleric, lips breaking away to take in air and murmur wordless sounds while he takes action to press her between his too tight and hot skin and the bark of a tree, long fingers supple and strong when he begins peeling her clothes off, getting rid of her layers in a controlled frenzy of voraciousness and hunger that has nothing at all to do with blood, though that red substance still fuels the desire he has here now but it's a very different type of feeding he's embarked upon, feeding his eyes and his beating heart and his soul with every touch he's denied himself and now applies to her with every alacrity.
He is hungry for the sounds she makes as he tears her shirt, hungry for the way his skin touches her, hungry for the way she keeps touching his face and tugging his hair and holding his mouth captive while his hands worship her without the benefit of his eyes. No man, at least no man giving himself wholly to his hungers in this way was ever so reverent of the touches now being gifted him as Klaus Mikaelson was. He had never before dared more than a soft hand at her back, splayed fingers in chastity on her waist when dancing, a crooked elbow to walk with her, a bolder kiss on her soft cheek, the pointed dig of her small fangs in his right wrist on two occasions to save her life and all along he had been hungry for the feel of her trapped under his fingers of her own free choosing.
He never dared more until he knew her body was free of Tyler, her heart battered but free, for as monstrous as he was, he never took what belonged to an enemy without first alerting said enemy to the removal of his cherished belonging, but in this instance, Caroline belonged to no one but herself and she had to make the choice to come to him willingly with no cajoling from him at all or she would forever have this memory tainted with regrets and bitterness.
And as both cleric and confessor now, he feels another part of himself bloom and race to heated want under his skin; the wolf. The wolf that hungers for the base canticle beating out a tattoo in his blood, furred hedonist crawling his body as he scrapes his hands to bare her supple frame to the caress of the dappled sun and warm air. Utter predation when his lips cleave a path down her shattering pulse of strangled breaths and reddening skin in the wake of his mauling kisses and unrepentant hands. She is the split carcass in his maw rent in twain in her urgings and her gasping pleas, voiced now with words breathless and hot, her own hands hard where they tug at him, sinking into his hair, angling her long neck for his mouth and silent begging for his teeth, wanting the promise of his teeth always in her marrow(she remembers what he felt like when he was inside her thus before) in her sinews, in the very meat of her he has his hooks, those teeth, his roots, and his grasping fingers buried deep into the beat of her heart the beat of her life as it pounds thickly and luxuriously against his lips and his tongue and those teeth he scrapes and drags over her bones turning her to dust and ashes to ashes that coat him like sooted silk, sinking into him in the ebbs and throes of her aching need firmly entrenched and inelegantly encapsulated within the sacred walls of his body, her temple.
It's raw, rough and when he rolls her panties down her trembling legs he is reverent, whispering prayers against her skin, her mouth bruised and her hair a golden corona against the bark, her breath a stutter as he marks her, draws her with his eyes and creates her over and over and he's still so still and so careful to not waste or rush and his lips press just there on her inner thigh with trembling certainty and her confessions come fast and low as he looks up the white virginal length of her from his vantage on his knees, true supplicant, true penitent here and when he sets his lips to the apex of her, sucks gently on the flesh of her sex, his name is her prayer, abject and raw as it's torn from her throat in a ragged ululation. Again he applies his mouth to her and she is weightless and boneless as he worships at her alter here in this canopied cathedral of fecund green and yellow that whispers in susurrant murmurs like background parishioners amening as he suckles and laves the wet pinked gates of heaven herself to coax entry to that inner sanctum of her quivering insides.
He alternates his pace, alternates his licks and sucks and then adds his fingers as he applies his teeth, gentle bites and soft suction and she's writhing and bucking with one pale leg thrown over his broad shoulder and she's open and unashamed in her melting pleasure, her orgasm total when his drives her over that edge with all his considerable skill with his mouth set over her weeping mound with wild hungry abandon, feeding off her sobbing pleas for him to not stop to never stop and "please faster-o-oooohhhhhh gooooddddddd!"
He couldn't stop if he tried now, not with the echo of her orgasm caught in his tympanic nerves for all eternity.
He's just begun. He wants her burned into his memories, wants her to keep filling the spaces of his insides with all of her; her hooks in him, her bones and sinews melded and pushed right against his where he's always kept her even when she said she couldn't stand him and that he was a terrible person. She didn't think him terrible now, if her screams are anything to go by, if her hard fingers in his hair were anything to go by, if the outward jut of her hips were anything to go by. He follows the blade of her hip with his wet red lips and he follows that with his hands, long fingers creeping to lift her with a bunching of his fine muscles as if she were truly weightless and he brings her forward and down, arching up to cover her where he lays her out on the leaf strewn ground and covers her instantly with his long frame.
Later he'll taste her again later after he's had her this way, filled her this way, poised above her so he can watch her face for this first time when she comes apart because of him /this way/. He reaches between where she's fastened those long movie star legs about his hips to get his belt open and her birdlike hands are there, her animated mouth working words out past the shutter and stop of her still battered heart and lungs.
"Let me, Klaus, I want to see you...touch you...because I always wanted to touch you..." This is a confession and it makes him stop, go so still again while her hands touch him, burning his lines into /her/ memory now as she traces the chains about his neck, tugging them aside to trace the hollows of him, the bones, the places her friends put stakes and knives and where his siblings put daggers, where old scars mar his otherwise indestructible flesh and her blue blue eyes see all those places, touch them, commit them to memory, the lines of his tattoos and he catches sight of her hummingbird and he smiles and takes a knee to bring that errant wrist to his lips so he can flick his tongue over it, then bite. She sighs and drags her nails over his pecs and his straining abdomen and her eyes glint and she watches her fingers work his belt open, then his jeans, splitting the zipper and finding him bare beneath and hard and long and thick and she sobs out something nearly unintelligible in her desire and when she uses both hands to stroke up and down that velvet coated hardness he manages a harsh expletive and barely manages to keep himself from falling on her like a ravenous and starving man.
"Caroline, if you want more than two minutes before I pop off, you need to stop, please, take pity, help me get my trousers down yeah?"
He's about to beg, needing to be inside her now, knowing his control is on a frayed tether.
She smiles her madonna smile and obliges, rolling her torso up and shoving his trousers down and guiding him to her with a sureness in her movements that Klaus is in awe of. It's inelegant, the rough growl he lets out as he fills her and it mingles with the near scream issuing from Caroline's throat as she yanks him all the way inside her body with a deft roll of her hips and her arched spine.
He goes so still again to revel in that sensation of her velvet channel rippling around his girth the tight heat of her quivering to accommodate his size and he wonders, dimly, if he exceeded her expectations, if he passed her muster, his lips dipping to take her left breast into his mouth and finally tunes into the words tumbling ceaselessly from her wide lips.
"Huge, god, should have...unnnggghhh...fuck Klaus, huge..."
She shifts those hips and purrs
"You gonna move...?"
He lets her breast go and smiles darkly down at her and finds she's got a glazed look in her eye.
He moves, she screams like she's dying and he finds that that suits him, her so wet and so tight and so fucking receptive to this he cannot do anything but move, fast and hard, making her body writhe and jerk and moving as she begs him to move so that she can go off again.
It doesn't take long and as she comes down from her high, she rolls him over and sits back and he thinks "what a thing, to be so manhandled." and he clamps his hands in bruising brackets around her tiny waist and sits up, shifting up as she bears down, his lips on her throat.
"Do it."
Strangled, needy reedy words as she drags his head to her jumping pulse and he breathes an invocation to his gods before biting her and in the first swallowing rush of her blood he comes apart like an exploding sun, all hot orange matter that batters him upward to fill her, feeling her fingers dig into his back and shoulders, marking him hers even though he was always anyway and when he pulls away she kisses his dripping mouth in all hungry need with her true face peeking spidery veins and red eyes and he lets her drag his head back while her hips move and she bites him now and he shouts, still hard, still riding the waves of his pleasure and hers and she comes again, and again as she swallows him into her and she whispers his name as she pulls away and he kisses her now, tasting them both on her lips, on his.
The afternoon wanes into dusk and after the fourth round, they are both sated, perhaps not, because her fingers and his can't stop committing each to the memory of the other as if filling themselves with only those memories to tide them to bind them to one another and this place, this church where both have offered their blood and bones and souls as sacrifice to this god of the green, this ancient deity of desire, torn apart and remade as something else each entirely.
This is the first time he's ever lied to her.
She knows this, she knows she will never be /free/. Not from him, not after this.
And he knows that he never was, free that is.
He won't be back, but he knows, he knows that she will come to him.
Maybe not now, maybe not even in a week. But it will be soon because she smiles and turns to him when he skims just his knuckles down her sweet warm spine, when his lips press soft and damp to her nape and he whispers, so faint its a wind of another promise along the fine hairs of her neck and she curls her body to his, open to the words he places like invisible brands.
"I could love you for an eternity Caroline, and a hundred thousand lifetimes wouldn't ever be enough of an eternity for me."
It's more than he's ever said and with her palming his heart where it beats so slow in his chest now, he knows that she could feel the same, though she doesn't right now. It's too soon after Tyler to make any sort of declaration despite what she's allowed herself to feel for him today.
The light begins to die and he zips her into her coat, apologizing for ripping her top in two and she blushes and kisses him softly small price to pay she says. He stuffs the remnants into his jacket which he shrugs on swiftly so he can cup her chin and then carding leaves from her curls. She is radiant to his wolf's eyes and he gives her a chaste kiss.
"Don't tarry too long in coming to New Orleans love, because though I said I would never come back /here/, I said nothing about not seeing you again."
Her breath catches and he continues as her hand tightens over his heart and he notes she hasn't moved away from him at all.
"You are not obligated to me, Caroline, but I meant what I said, I will be your last love, just as you /are/ mine."
With that he turns and walks human slow from the trees, hearing her whoosh to the Salvatore boarding house and he smiles fingering the remaining chain strung round his neck, knowing she's wearing the other tucked over her heart, the small hand carved hummingbird he made after his trek in the Andes remembering the inked lines of her tattoo and how it matched his little carving perfectly.
He may have belonged to her from the moment he fed her his blood that night of her birthday, but he thinks she started to become his when he told her that story of the hummingbird.
And what a thing that was, after all.