Impasse
by Sandrine Shaw
He rolls into Mystic Falls in a sleek black sports car, parking it in Caroline's driveway like owns the place.
"Hello, love. Did you miss me?" he says, and his lips curve into a smirk that's achingly familiar, as if it hasn't been half a century since she's last seen it.
She puts on her most disapproving expression and makes her voice sound lofty. "Not at all," she lies. "I barely thought about you."
The tragedy of Klaus is that he never changes, Elijah once told Elena when they shared one of their moments of raw honesty, but it only takes Caroline a few hours to realize that he was wrong. This Klaus, the one lounging on the couch in her living room and drinking her wine, is not the same Klaus who came back just to gloat over a dying enemy and made love to her in the woods with victory written all over his face. There's something different about him now: a hollowness behind his derisive little smile, a fakeness in his nonchalance, a lack of conviction when he playfully chides her for not having managed to leave this boring place behind.
"It's my home."
Caroline doesn't miss the way his jaw clenches minutely before he pastes on another smile and waves her objection off. "Come on now, sweetheart, you know better than that. There's nothing here for you anymore. Everyone who kept you here is either dead or they ran off as soon as they could. You'd do well to follow their example."
She purses her lips, annoyed. "I don't have to justify my life choices to you, Klaus. No one asked you to come here. You could have stayed in New Orleans playing king."
For a moment, he looks like he wants to rip her apart, and she's almost frightened of him. It's like she can feel his hand pushing into her chest, fingers tightening around her heart. But she never let Klaus intimidate her – not when he was terrorizing her friends and certainly not now when they've long since struck what feels like the most uncomfortable, hard won truce – so she pushes on. "What happened in New Orleans?"
The fight drains out of him and he turns away. He shrugs. "I just fancied a change of scenery, that's all."
He insists on taking her to dinner, and she knows it's better to give in than argue. Besides, she enjoys his attention. Always has, if she's honest with herself, even back when she shouldn't have. Now there's no one around to disapprove anymore.
So she puts on a pretty dress and pulls her hair up and lets him drive them to the quiet little French place two towns over that opened last June. They share a bottle of expensive wine and Klaus compels the waitress to kindly donate a little of her blood, tipping her generously when Caroline objects. He makes Caroline talk about what she's been up to the last few decades, goading her into sharing little anecdotes about her trip to Europe a few years ago and dutifully asking after every one of her friends, as if he genuinely cares what Matt is up to (tending a bar in Alaska and not speaking to her since she turned him) or Bonnie (still caught in the ghostly state between dead and alive and haunting-slash-playing-house-with Damon), as if he didn't already know everything about Elena's travels from her run-ins with Elijah.
Klaus lets her talk and talk and whenever she stops, he's ready with another question, like all he needs to do is keep her busy so she won't realize he's not offering any information himself.
She doesn't know why she lets him get away with it. She likes to think it's kindness, not forcing him to talk about something he's obviously running away from. The truth is, she's not sure she'd be ready for his answers, even if he was prepared to give them.
He tosses and turns in his sleep, like a man plagued by night terrors.
She puts her hand on his cheek carefully, as if she's trying to placate a frightened, wounded animal, and when his eyes snap open it doesn't surprise her that they're a predatory yellow.
She doesn't shrink back, lets him pull her in and kiss her and doesn't pay any mind to the sharp, deadly teeth that could poison her with no more than a scrape. The danger of it doesn't thrill her, doesn't make her lust spike, but it doesn't scare her either. Trusting Klaus with her life is an old game that she's played for a long time now. If he wanted her dead, she'd be dead a dozen times over.
"Why didn't you turn your mother when she was dying?" he asks one morning, taking a framed picture of her and her mom at graduation from the shelf above the bed.
"She didn't want me to." Caroline's smile is sad. It hasn't stopped hurting, but it's a different kind of pain now, after so many years, like an old injury that never quite healed.
Klaus' grip on the plastic frame is so tight that she's afraid he might break it, so she gently pries it out of his hands and replaces it. She brushes her hand over her mom's face, noticing for the first time how pale and faded the photograph has become with time. "I tell myself it's the normal course of things. It's what being human is about – life and death, love and grief. What you said about the hummingbird once. Making every moment count."
He looks haunted, tired. "What if it's not enough? The time we have together."
Somehow, she doesn't think she's the one Klaus is referring to in that 'we'. She thinks of her parents, of Vicky, Stefan, Jeremy. All the friends and lovers she cared for and lost. "It never is."
He leaves on a Wednesday morning in fall. It's raining, and the world looks grey and washed out.
On the driveway next to his car, he kisses her, his hand cupping her cheek with a gentleness that makes her ache. "Thank you," he whispers against her lips, and the intensity of his gaze is almost too much.
She doesn't ask 'for what', just like she doesn't ask where he's going, or whether he's going to be okay. "Anytime."
The seriousness slips from his face, replaced by the old smile, a little more genuine now than it was when he arrived. "Don't be a stranger now, love."
She watches him drive off until his car disappears at the horizon. Perhaps, she thinks, it's time to leave Mystic Falls, for a little while at least. There's a whole world out there and just because it's immortal doesn't mean it'll be waiting for her.
End