Title| Ink Through Water
Genre| hurt/comfort/angst
Rating| t
Fandom| the Vampire Diaries
Couple| jeremy/kol, caroline/klaus, damon/elena
N/A| okay, haters will hate and forget you all because I actually like this pairing so read it, don't read it. If you flame it, it only brings up my review count so think about that. No skin off my teeth.
N/A| Otherwise enjoy. :3
"I'm just a normal boy who sank when I fell overboard—
My ship would leave the country, but I'd rather swim ashore,"
—"Into the Ocean" by Blue October
"Kol?" Caroline's voice is soft over the phone, barely above a whisper and it still manages to shake him to his bones. He smiles at the thought of the blonde vampire his brother had taken a fancy to sounding scared of anything. She was a baby vampire, delicate looking but iron-laced. She was beautiful, strong, the very stuff of light—Klaus's words, not his—and a lot more tolerable than her 'better half' on any day that ends with a y.
"Caroline, darling, what do I owe the pleasure—it's nearly noon, Niklaus has been looking for you." He teases lightly and expects for her to scoff and say she doesn't need to be with him every second of the day.
"I called him already . . ." she says edgily and he hears shuffling over the line and—he presses the phone closer to his ear—crying? "Elena and Stefan are back from the island," she says and Kol's mind instantly wonders back to Jeremy—wonderful, Hunter, buddy-buddy Jeremy—he really needs to stop by later and break his sternum for not calling him. Seriously, he may have been daggered for the last hundred years, but he's pretty sure he remembers how courtship works. You don't just leave without telling someone.
"Well, when's the funeral?" he jokes.
Caroline's quiet for a few long moments and dread begins to twist in his gut.
"Caroline—?"
"Kol—it's Jeremy . . ."
The cellphone crushes in his hand.
Kol stares down at the body on Jeremy's bed wrapped in a pale blue, baby blanket—Jeremy's baby blanket. He remembers teasing him for it on numerous occasions, but he had liked it. It had been a gift from Jeremy's deceased aunt to celebrate his birth. He liked running his fingers over the frayed edges and helter-skelter stitching and smelling the entwined scents of detergent, Jeremy, and him.
That stupid ratty blanket smelling like him was enough to let him know he had fallen for the human like window washer's falls off a one-hundred foot skyscraper. The first ninety-nine floors are fun, but the last one brings him down. You crumble, fall, and can't walk away. It was his one weakness.
And now it reeks of death.
He barely remembers the drive here, but Caroline had opened the door for him when Stefan was making a call and he followed his nose to the bedroom.
"What are you doing here?" His eyes slide from the bed over to the bathroom adjoining Elena and Jeremy's rooms, finding aforementioned doppelgänger and the doctor woman who cheated the death of others with vampire blood.
It takes him a moment realize the Elena is angry. True, she had never approved of their relationship—like he cared—but the simple fact that the doppelgänger had the nerve to pick a fight with him now should say something about her sanity.
"Who let you in?" she hisses.
"Caroline," he says with the same frosty tone, and turns to face her. "I hope you don't mind, but I was a tad thrown when I smelled a dead body in the house." He says harshly and watches the doctor wince. "Even more so, it seems that you're unfailing holier-than-thou, golden vagina complex has kept you from meeting a tragic end once again—for the sake of humanity you don't even want—and look! You're idiocy has claimed yet another victim—dear Jeremy, love of my twenty-first century."
His voice if dripping with venom at the end and the doctor is backing away. Elena's expression, however, morphs from anger to confusion slowly.
"Kol," she says like he's wringing the air from her lungs. "He got hurt on the island, but he was wearing his ring—h-he's gonna be okay."
Alright, bitch is delusional.
"He was part of the Five!" Kol exclaims. "That Hunter ring would not have worked!"
It's a fact he knows and has accepted.
"No, no—you're lying. Jeremy isn't—Jeremy couldn't be—"
But he is.
He knocks away Elena and Meredith like flies and they collide against the hard plaster of the walls, crying out in pain. Kol barely hears them and sizes up against Elena's fingers curling into a choke around her neck and slamming her back into the wall, chipping off plaster.
"No. He's dead. You killed him. I just want to know how so I can make it a thousand times more painful." His nails curl into her neck and she screams for help.
"He's not—he's not—how can you say that?" Elena hiccups and Kol applies more pressure to her neck, cutting off the ramble of nonsense spilling out of her mouth. He can hear her lungs beginning to spasm, trying to catch air, but Kol wouldn't allow her that.
"Kol!" Caroline and Stefan come barging into the room, taking in the damage with round eyes.
"Start talking—now!"
Caroline and Stefan spell it out for him in black and white. They were on the island, Jeremy was with Bonnie, they found the cure, something went wrong, Katherine showed up (that bitch is now at the top of his shit list . . . right behind Elena) and now Jeremy is dead.
Plain. Simple. Neither.
He's staring at the bed in astonishment, eyes tracing over Jeremy's pale waxen features and slowly decaying human body.
It's enough to make you want to cry isn't it?
They left him alone in Jeremy's room.
"When you're ready," Caroline whispers to his ear and gently lays a hand on his shoulder. He shrugs her off and waits for the door to click shut and the music from downstairs cranks up a notch. It's soft rock music, like the kind they play at the Grille.
Kol closes his eyes and reaches out, presses his fingertips to Jeremy's forehead and trying to find a way into his mind. There's nothing inside, just organs and stilled blood and that horrid smell. He gets a nostril full and wants to recoil, but when he sees Jeremy's face again, he stops.
I wonder if we were getting back together, he wonders to himself, remembering their last conversation—debating emo bands and the differences between the Beatles and One Direction. They hadn't really talked about anything too important, it was just another was of their inane chats about whatever came up, like they always did.
"I think my brother ships Stefan and Elena together," Kol mutters into his whiskey glass and Jeremy makes a face. "Personally, I think that's way too much self-sacrifice and hair in one relationship."
"But Stefan's better than Damon any day." Jeremy points out and Kol shrugs.
"You know what? I think your sister should become a nun, save us all the trouble. She could wear the dress, though we all know she's not a virgin—" Jeremy claps his hands over his ears.
"We are not discussing my sister's sex life!"
"—I think they'd still take her. Think about it, then everyone can stop worrying about who she's sleeping with and we can focus on something different for a change."
"Like what?" Jeremy asks, realization dawning over his face.
"Like who you're sleeping with," Kol says casually and watches the brunette across from him go scarlet. He enjoys watching him struggle to answer, but Kol stands and kisses him sloppily on the ear before making his grand exit.
"Hey! I need to talk to you!" Jeremy shouts and Kol hears his chair scrap back, about to give chance.
"Wait before you tell me the answer!" he shouts back and darts into the streets because he's faster.
What did you want to say? He wonders.
Jeremy, he wants to mourn, but remains stronger than that. See ya in the next life, mate.
Kol is beginning to question the doppelgänger's sanity, but in the upmost respect he agreed. This house was an ugly reminder of much too many things.
Burn down the house—make the flames surge high and burn down everything, every last lingering detail and the memories collecting in the corner, ready for the slaughter. He'd even get the matches and throw them if the Gilbert girl was too damaged to do it herself.
(—Lighter fluid slashes over his Italian shoes and he hisses a warning—)
Burn the house down. Burn the porch where him and Jeremy had many conversations (and many pizza men compelled), burn the couch where they played video games together, burn the bedroom where they'd slept together, burn every wall until the paint peeled back and couldn't remember the place Kol pushed him against.
(—Lighter fluid spills unceremoniously onto Jeremy's body—)
Burn his body from oblivion and leave no grave to guilt him into visiting.
Burn every last—
The lighter fluid splashes over the sketches Jeremy had left laying out on the wooden coffee table, smudged, half-shaded, surrounded by charcoal and pencils. It had been a masterpiece he was taking extra care to finish, just by the assort of utensils Kol could tell he'd been really trying to get the lines right.
Kol—who never sat still for too long—had secretly liked watching Jeremy sketch. The way his eyebrows creased and his eyes would squint as he worked, how he would turn the paper or his head for a better angle—leaving his neck exposed and getting so lost in his own world Kol wouldn't have been able to follow him if he tried.
Those were happy memories.
Denver days and Grille afternoons.
Kol felt a pang when he realizes that he wanted those sketches, the work Jeremy had poured his soul into—nightmares, coffee mugs, him and anything that cross though his mind. Things Jeremy made. Things Jeremy thought of. The very last living pieces of him.
Suddenly, he thinks the doppelgänger is using a little too much lighter fluid on the table.
"Bitch!" he barks, launching himself at her he hears no resistance behind him for his efforts and his fingers lock in a vice around the baby vampire's neck, gripping and forcing her to drop the match to the ground in mid-hysteria.
It's unlit, safe, alright.
Damon's eyes widen and he moves to lunge. "Don't!" He shouts, turning Elena in his hold, wringing her neck in his grip, his fingers pressing sharply into her back, digging in through the cotton long sleeves she seemed to own in abundance. He drew a careful amount of blood for warning. "Come any closer—I'll rip her spine out."
He watches Damn and Stefan—the idiots—come to a jarring halt in mid-step. Caroline hasn't even moved.
"Caroline could you be a dear and collect Jeremy's sketches, please?" he says prettily. "No lighter fluid if you could and try not to smudge the coal—I had it imported."
Okay, so maybe he had tried to buy Jeremy at one point, but he could give a fuck less if Damon and Stefan knew that.
Caroline takes a careful breath, eyes darting to Stefan's hesitant look and Damon's outright glare—her neutral party status was none too appreciated during any conflict—and she nods. Kol watches her collect the books and pictures and take them into the kitchen before his eyes flicker back to the Salvatore's. Elena whimpers mournfully and Damon's eyes darken.
"Kol—" Stefan says slowly, palms facing toward him in surrender—lies for slander!—and Kol sneers at him. "You don't have to—"
"Oh, I do—I so want to—but I won't. I just want the sketches, and this little bitch," His nails dig in sharply and Elena yips in pain like a kicked dog. "Isn't going to take that away from me."
"Please, don't, please!" His captive cries and Kol nearly wanted to rip her spine out then and there for simply breathing. No, he coaches himself silently. Not yet, not yet. Get the books. Then rip. One, two. One, two. One, two, two, two.
Damon's eyes narrow on him.
"What?" he spat.
His mouth opens to speak, but whatever he is going to say—for poor Elena's sake—he thought better of it and stays silent.
Caroline reenters the room a few minutes later, the books bundled up but smelling faintly of chemicals and water—it couldn't be helped. The moleskin holds onto anything. "It stinks, I know, but this is as much as I could get without ruining anything."
Nervous rambling, he could forgive only Caroline for—to an extent.
Caroline slides the books into a backpack she must have grabbed from somewhere in the house and tosses it to him, seeming to understand that behind the couch, beside Jeremy's body, is the safest place to be right now.
In the same instant that the backpack is in the air, Damon lunges forward, grabbing Elena from his arms and hauling her halfway across the room.
The backpack lands in the corner by a plant.
Snarling in outrage, Kol's muscles tense, ready to lunge when Stefan knocks into him, clipping his head off the fireplace mantle, he howls in pain. In retaliation, he takes the fire poker and plunges it into the Salvatore's spleen.
Caroline then jumps in—for the heels she wears, she moves fast—and he suddenly feels the urge to roll his eyes. And yanks the fire poker from Stefan, and raising it like a spear.
"Caroline, darling, I like you. My brother loves you—but if you don't move, now I will kill you."
Caroline's eyes are narrow and he can tell she doesn't believe him. She been on the Good Side too long and not with his family enough. Mikaelson's always keep their word.
"Kol, Jeremy wouldn't—"
"Jeremy's dead." He says indifferently but the words are tearing at his ears and driving needles into his skin. "A corpse can't want for anything."
"Well, if he means so little to you," a voice calls from behind him and a sound echoes in his ears, a faint scratch and smell of new flame. "Then you wouldn't mind if I—?"
"Stefan!" Caroline cries.
The youngest Salvatore is holding a match over the open mouth of the backpack, dripping and newly bathed in lighter fluid. He's still on the ground, but is even more of a threat than anyone else in the room right now.
"Put the backpack down."
"Leave," Stefan says.
"Just keep them then."
"Stefan—don't you dare." Caroline growls nearly feral.
"No. What means more to you, Kol? Jeremy's pictures or revenge against the person who didn't even kill him?" Stefan says hollowly, reminding him of why his brother thought Stefan was full of untapped potential. He could turn off his emotions without turning them off. He could torture and do what was needed to get the job done. "She's hurting, too."
So is he, Kol notes that Stefan is still bleeding a river from his torso and is now snapping comments back at Caroline—along with Damon—and Elena is wailing in the corner. He's a clear shot.
By default—when he lunges—Stefan drops the match and everything remaining of Jeremy goes up in flames.
I can't write for Kol—or at least not fully in character, very, very well because we haven't seen Kol in love, but we know he'll take revenege when he needs to. And I'll write something to explain how I feel Klaus and Caroline should be together without sacrificing too much of their personalities.
Like to stay away from OOC *puts on sunglasses* and let the games begin.
Two reviews and next update,
—QueenVamp