He could feel every brick of the wall behind him, as though it were moving and trying to prolong the contact with his rigid back. At times he titled his head back, but made sure that even from his sitting position he could see her slumped form. The pattern of her breathing had changed in the last 10 minutes. He tried to focus on the rhythm of it, the perfection of physiological synchrony, rather than what it meant.
She turned her head towards him as he thought she might have after a stint of reading in the sun: slow and relaxed. But in truth her movements were slowed by pain. Pain that he had inflicted. She said his name. 'Klaus'. He registered only moments later that this was her way of getting his attention. He fixated for too long on the way her tongue rolled forward in her mouth as she pronounced the sticky German vowels his name contained. She had not spoken to him for an hour or more now. Even when she had in hours prior to this she had not once deigned to beg him. He could so easily have helped her, but that would not prove his point to that belligerent hybrid Tyler. Somewhere in the part of him that was blackened and charted was a notch. A notch that existed and was carved out of his enjoyment of punishing those who had defied him. Smothered beneath that was a tendril; his feelings of misguided affection for Caroline. Even now with death dogging her she still seemed to possess more light, more purity then he had seen in all his centuries on this rotting planet.
Maybe he was exaggerating. Maybe the years and the resultant blurring of time had desensitized him to beauty and warmth and now he was overcompensating. He was certainly had seen woman more beautiful than her. That one Spanish Queen, whose name he could not quite remember. Then there had been that enchanting maid he had encountered on Elijah's estate in France. They had had a wild romp in a neighboring field. But while she plucked grass from her auburn hair afterwards he felt the inevitable disenchantment descend.
So what was it about this woman that had him crossing boundaries he had set centuries before?
'Klaus'. She said again her voice was closer. He hadn't realized that he had been moving towards her. He sat now cross-legged almost next to the couch she was lying on. He leaned towards the couch and inhaled. He had forgotten she was there altogether. He was privately reveling in the smell of her, the idea of her, without actually taking any notice of her. Only having said his name she still left him intoxicated. He had her golden hair between his fingers, inspecting the different shades of gold as they emerged with shifting of the light. He looked up in time to register the dilatation of her pupils that had nothing to do with compulsion. He had surprised her.
'Why do you like me?' she asked. There was a shame colouring her words that made him aware of just how much his answer would mean to her. 'I don't know, Caroline. I don't know.' He thought about the sheer inconvenience of his feelings for her. The way it was splintering her bond with Tyler and altering his usually decisive and strategic nature. 'You are a light to someone who has sat comfortably in darkness for a very long time.' He was stroking her cheekbone now.
'So why are you trying to extinguish me?'
'Im not. I mean obviously i am. I don't know how to make any of this right, or if I even desire it's correctness at this point. I don't know how to make you look at me the way you look at Tyler.'
'That's what this is about? You're jealous of Tyler?'
He slid his finger now across her bottoms lip. He already knew he would cure her. He had known even when he was all the way across the room. He knew that when it came to her he would always choose apparent weakness her displeasure.