it's hard to hate someone once you understand them [lucy christopher]
x
College life is nothing like what she imagined. She had pictured bundling into her scarf and sipping hot chocolates in the quad with Elena and Bonnie, while cute guys in every direction shot admiring glances and secretive smiles.
Instead, Elena is off frolicking with Damon somewhere pretending that she was meant for a vampiric life, and Bonnie's corpse is six feet under while her spirit hovers heavily with questioning over Caroline's shoulders.
Caroline sighs, hefts her messenger bag on her left side, feeling the effortless weight of her bio book and ignores the direct onsets from some creepy dude with jean shorts waving at her from the steps of the Humanities building. This was not what she had in mind.
x
If she was still human [warm flesh, expanding lungs, beating heart human], the chill in the air would ignite her bones and quicken a rising of blood to the high cheekbones on her heart face. But she is not, so the brisk stroll from the library to her dorm is temperate, a September wind curving its way through her wild mass of curls, caressing each and every buttery strand. Inhaling the musk of a burgeoning autumn, a luridly familiar intake of chocolate and leather, hints of maple and oak stings her senses.
The stained glass windows of the campus cathedral lit with the silvered moon splay out sloppily over the sidewalks, casting uneven shadows of trees. It's late, too late for a beautiful young girl to be out in the muck of the world, click clacking of her boots on the pavement. She exhales for no reason other than to get the scent out of her nose.
Leaves and branches whip at break neck speed around her as she gazes to the left: nothing. She instantly scolds herself for hoping otherwise.
x
At mid morning after a leisurely cup of coffee outside the on campus café, a boy with honey scruff and remarkably glass green eyes approaches her, toothy confident grin perched on his mouth. He introduces himself, and she shakes his hand, glancing anywhere but his face.
He asks her to a party. Caroline declines as soon as she hears the slight lilt in his voice. Cocking her head, she inquires about it, and before the second half of the word (I'm Engli-) is out of his beautifully cherry lips, her feet are carrying her to her art history course.
What? It's required for her major.
x
She would never tell him, not that she wants to, this but she loves it more than anything else she takes all of the fall semester. The art building in itself is a myriad of graffitied walls, sketches on the desks driven in so hard that they'd never disappear, ongoing projects and paintings scattered on the three floors with enough nooks and crannies to keep her interest peaked long after the lecture has ended. Turpentine and acrylic, clay and plaster, oils and pastels blanket in a rich scent, intoxicating in their delivery at the front doors.
Each class is different with the Aztecs to the pre-Raphaelites, and Caroline drinks it in, absorbs it all with careful deliberation and concentration, pouring over extra books and slides in the dark room and the open studio with barely a crackling fissure of light.
When it comes time for spring registration, she signs up for a painting course, fingers the charcoals that he had inconspicuously swept into her mailbox before leaving for New Orleans.
x
Tyler attends college about forty minutes away so seeing each other isn't really a dilemma. He joins the Kappa Sigma fraternity and chugs beer and hosts parties and wears ties again, and it is kinda like the last two years never happened. Caroline gets grossed out when she shows up out of the blue, surprise, and all he wants to do is watch sports and show her around the frat house, high fiving all of his meaty friends that have no damn idea that this guy turns into a wolf a few nights a months.
He still kisses her so hard she forgets her name, but that feeling is quickly replaced with regret when she realizes that he doesn't give a damn about their past because they got out, they are free. It isn't a part of him anymore, but Caroline, it is most of who she is, how she became this woman, she owes it to Bonnie, Elena, Christ, the Salvatores even, that she is beautiful, strong, full of –
She owes them everything. They are everything. And she will not leave it behind.
x
Elena and Damon pick her up on their way back to Mystic Falls at Christmas time. Damon lugs all of her suitcases with rolling eyeballs and plenty of snark out to the baby blue Mustang they have been parading about in since Caroline kissed Elena goodbye in town square four months ago. All of her dorm mates enviously stare at him out the window, even as he thumbs his ring finger down the side of his girlfriend's olive temple. Caroline smiles in spite of herself and what has occurred in the last few years; they are her family.
When they are making fresh tracks in the snow, rolling through campus with the open windows, flakes of eggshell white fluttering in, Elena reaches behind the seat and holds her hand, turns and smiles at her. Damon turns the station to the top 40 nonsense that she likes and hands her a blood bag that is somehow still warm, his fingers lingering on Caroline's crimson and evergreen manicure.
"We missed you, Blondie."
She beams at his reflection in the rearview.
x
Mystic Falls is the same as it has always been in the holiday season. Thistles and berries wound in tight wreaths gracing doors of southern plantation homes with wide, snow decked porches. The biggest evergreen in the south bedazzled with baubles and ornaments, lights glowing a fierce golden smolder on the newest carpet of snow. Caroline pretends to feel the nip in the air, how the blazing fire at the grille warms and engulfs the town whole, neighbors hello-ing neighbors over amber tumblers of bourbon and whispy mugs of eggnog.
She spends Christmas eve with her mother, still attends the midnight vigil with the flickering candlelit church and soft purring hymns of the children's choir, kind glances from people up the street asking about college and Tyler and spring break plans. The normality of it all will seem far dimmer the following day when she brunches at the boarding house.
That night on the route home, the snow ceases for a fraction of a second and she stands completely rigid in the middle of the street, feeling the last few flakes dance on her collarbone.
x
Late the next day, she dresses elegantly with a chignon twist holding in her buttered curls, deep crimson dress with ankle breaker booties, midnight pea coat shielding her on the walk over, the diamonds from her stolen bracelet kissing her pale wrist beneath the layers. With a bottle of brandy, she opens the front door and is tackled by Stefan, who hugs her tight to his chest and murmurs praise, adulation, and love. Caroline grins at her best friend in his tuxedo, a shamrock colored tie around his neck.
Damon and Elena are already in the drawing room with a roaring fire, all smiles and bravado, Matt and Jeremy sit nearby with bow ties loose around their necks, ignoring the flowing blood by slamming down mimosas. She admires her little family and their odd customs. Dressed to the nines and yet sitting on the couch. Crystal champagne glasses filled to the rim with whiskey. None of it should work, should have worked, but it does.
They get day drunk, shedding clothing, dancing on table tops and chairs, lounging on the poufs of chaises, laughter boisterous and rude before the daylight fades and exhaustion slips in quietly leaving Caroline sneaking out the front door with her gifts and carrying her shoes, barefoot all the way on a frozen December evening.
x
She stops cold in her tracks at the dozen sunflowers, out of season of course, on her front porch with no note.
x
For spring break she goes to visit Damon and Elena at their "summer" house in Key West. They ride bikes and fake tans and drink too much rum and too many locals.
One night out in downtown with the music thumping and the heat rising she kisses some guy with blonde hair and green eyes and a honey colored beard. Two minutes later, she throws up all over the tip of the Florida coast while Elena rubs her back and Damon compels the guy into next week. Caroline goes back to Virginia the following day with a hangover and a burning pit in her gut.
They say nothing to her, but exchange a worried look as her car crunches over the gravel of the drive, kissing and shouting goodbye and love you as she leaves for the rest of the semester.
x
Painting is difficult. Caroline has never not been good at school. Even if she wasn't always as pretty as Elena or as interesting as Bonnie, she was always good at school. Which is why she is pretty pissed that she got a C+ on her last assignment. Okay, she wasn't supposed to use charcoals as a medium, but it didn't say that on the syllabus.
Even though she didn't do great on it, she likes it still. It's definitely not the kind of thing you'd have ever thought she, girly little Caroline, would do, but all the black streaks and smudges of grey. She likes it, the lack of boundaries and lines to cross, losing track of where one end meets the other, how they came to be not that integral, just that they are there and close and wonderfully together.
She so deserved better than a C+.
x
Tyler invites her as his date for the last party of the term, and she wears his favorite flowered dress with the indigo buds on it and the metallic heels that she knows make her a bit taller than him, but that she knows he won't care cause she looks totally hot. And then she gets there and Tyler isn't Tyler anymore.
He is malleable and forced and not Tyler. The look in his eyes is yet pure and what she wants but it's how he talks and moves and is, how not like the man he had become and how much like the boy he had left behind. She steals away into a quiet room, the only one in the whole house, sees the full moon in the pane of a spidery spattered window and goes into panic mode, abandoning all pretense. Forgets the party, the people, the fact that he is a hybrid and can turn at will, and dashes madly around the mansion in search.
Oh she finds him too, finally, lazing against a keg with some carbon copy of her, cheaper, tackier, more of the insecure mess she had been, twiddling the loosely knotted tie on his neck. Tyler snaps upright when he sees her, chases her out onto the front lawn. They fight nothing new really, with an audience of riveted little boys in collared shirts and pressed khakis and they are so much more than this now, she shouts and it rings in the most powerful scream.
I don't wanna be anymore, he whispers and she doesn't glance back on her way down the sidewalk, heels in hand.
x
The final day of April births spring and it sings forth and lands in a heap at her feet. Not that she sees it in any other way than going to and from the library to cram for finals and to and from the studio to spend time with her final assessment. Finals are simple. Cut and dry, she bangs her way through the notes and lines of books, watercolored eyes taking in all what she has to understand.
While getting a coffee from the stand in the library during an all nighter, the English guy from fall semester with the green eyes and honey beard treats her, a small smirk on his mouth as she thanks him, whisking back to her books. She makes certain that he doesn't find her and leaves the library at dawn with her golden waves in a matted mess on her head.
x
It's the final project that is getting her.
Even all alone in the studio at night with the rustling of other students and the coursing of blood through their veins, various conversations lulling her to ease, she cannot do anything but stare at a blank canvas, so she takes it home, sets it up in her dorm room against the window, careful not to wake her roommate.
Caroline opens her laptop, searches the web, and books a round trip ticket to New Orleans. She doesn't bother to pack, she'll figure it out when she gets there.
x
Her morning is spent wandering the French Quarter, lolling her way lazily through the exploding window boxes dangling precariously from iron wrought balconies, flowers dancing to their death over the sides. French doors and windows painted every color of the rainbow, marked with age and defecated over time. It smells of sugary beignets and spicy creoles, chicory coffee and salt water.
She never looks for him, never asks around. Just gets on her late afternoon flight and lands in Richmond that evening, crosses the threshold to her dormitory and instantly realizes an energy in the air that only comes from one man. Caroline gasps for breath she doesn't need, runs sideways up the stairs, bursts into her room. No one and nothing.
Except a dozen sunflowers and a weathered set of paintbrushes past their prime. She grins, feels her eyes water, begins to work.
x
Caroline turns in her piece, leaves the professor's office with acrylic under her fingernails and splatters in her hair. She doesn't second guess herself or wonder if she had done well, rather she goes back to her bed and sleeps until her mother arrives to pick her up from ending her first year of college.
x
Decades pass and Matt dies, Jeremy dies, her mother dies. Damon and Elena marry. Stefan moves from place to place, keeping her apprised of his plans and intentions. She doesn't hear from him, except a bundle of sunflowers every now and again. She doesn't go looking for him, stays out of the Gulf Coast for a century.
She takes more painting courses at various colleges across the country and overseas. Drinks red wine in Florence while surveying the David, wears Chanel in the Van Gogh Museum of Amsterdam, critiques the coffee and the Rothko in the Tate, burdens the stilettos in the MOMA, nibbles on éclairs before Monet in Paris, inspects the Pollack and punk rock in Chicago.
He always finds her, but is one step behind. Until one day, he is ten thousand ahead. Caroline braves the Gulf Coast, takes Stefan up on his Mardi Gras mission, but declares that on one of their hangover days they have beignets and shop for local art. He agrees and after two days of tourism and one night of shenanigans and shots shots shots, they link elbows and flit from gallery to gallery. And in one, is something she thought she'd not see the likes of since her first go around at college.
Crookedly situated on the white washed wall with sketches of skulls and shrimps around it is her original work from the painting class so long ago. Stefan lets a low whistle, slides his wayfarers down the bridge of his nose, and chokes back a chuckle. It is one slash of bottle green eye with a perfect Roman nose, tawny honeyed beard and bee stung lips staring right back at her with the wind knocked out of her chest.
"Fuck," she bites out, ripping it off the wall, flipping it lopsided and backwards to see if the name is still there. And swiped in black charcoal is one word: Him.
The shop assistant calls out to them. Caroline cursing like a mad woman, blonde tumbleweeds in a mess over her naked collarbone and Stefan with his threadbare t-shirt and sunglasses down his face. "That one isn't for sale. The gallery owner had to go to great lengths to acquire it."
Caroline tries to remember how to breathe, sees the sunflowers in a mason jar on the checkout counter, notices the sun tinted walls and the back area courtyard with the cerulean mailbox and terracotta planters of lavender and daisies. Stefan fades into the background as an unmistakable scent of chocolate and leather, oak and maple fills her senses like that first week of her first year of college so many decades ago.
"Klaus", she states flatly.
x
He spins circles around her, winding in careful loops around her form, memorizing each swish and curvature that he already knows, can feel in a blind sleep. "Exquisite, isn't it?" He smirks, the pull of his bee stung lips wrinkled on the hard lock of his jaw, bottle green eyes pushing her into focus, running a long finger over the sigh of his cheekbone. With a quick hand, he snatches the canvas from her and places it carefully and with trepidation back on its hook.
Caroline sighs heavily, stamps her pink peony manicured foot against the strap of her gladiator sandals and doesn't dare to look to Stefan for help. The bastard has snuck out the door, bell clanging signaling his exit. She throws her hands up in the air, directs her best glare, screwed up on her gorgeous features and aims it in Klaus' direction, but it falls quickly when she sees the picture hanging on the wall directly behind the monster's head.
It's a blurry watercolor that one would never recognize unless present as to what it actually is: an aerial view of figures in neat little lines all out of focus and in the middle pin pointed and clear as the hot hot hot New Orleans day is the top knot of curls that she knows belong to her and the rough waves of honey that she knows are his and his alone.
"Is it?" she barely whispers, fingers clutching her lips so tightly that she fears she may draw blood, and examines closely the curve of her body, how he has scripted their dance in oil and acrylic, delicate and harsh in the severity of how the paint has dried to the surface. It is scarily intimate and wonderfully broad. Just a beautiful couple in the throws of the start of a romance that could either bring the world to its knees or start a fire that wipes out an entire civilization.
Klaus grins when she whirls on her heel to steal a glance at him. And despite all her faculties screaming in protest, she returns the smile. "Do you like New Orleans?" he inquires, ducking his head, the words lightly traveling across the space between them.
"It's my first time," she tells him.
"That's not what I remember," he replies, clever as all get out. Caroline flushes, if she could, and laughs. The sound breaks barriers and shatters glass, cracking all of the fine walls put up on either side of this fight. Holding her hands up above her head, she sighs and lets him win.
x
Surrender is sweet, resistance futile.