Bride
Caroline makes a deal with Klaus to make her immune to the hybrid bite with unforeseen consequences.
Dreaming.
"Caroline!" a voice echoed, shooting through radical waves of subconsciousness like a star— shaking like the sound of whitecaps shuddering against the aching hull of a ship. It was an unfamiliar voice. Like the sound of a person you have never met before, lips curving over the consonants of your name with the nuances of a loved one. Wrong.
She has never run so fast in her life, not with all of her vampiric speed, not with all of her strange supernatural aberrations. Her monstrosity masquerading as a smile, her newfound terrible beauty (because she will never be beautiful again, will she, she will never be okay again). And in the sky above her was a moon, she wasn't sure if it was our moon- for did our moon not suspend like a balloon above a child? Did it not bring wonderment and innocence into the night? It was at all times, the object of affection for one billion blinking eyes. Longing, loving, and brightened by the coin-cool glint of Earth's eternal friend. Stable.
Our moon hung with the purity of a pearl, the argentine promise of honeyed beginnings beyond the sweet reprieve of sleep. Our moon sat snug in the black velvet pocket of the sky, always calm, never wanting.
But this moon was volcanic. Its tawny orange blooming into a greater, deeper red. Oh, and the unrest so palpable from her singular piece of earth… the heat, cornering living things with the slow stalling simplicity of magma. The slow stagnation of an old, old man, but with all the virulence of a newborn anger.
This moon gorged itself on the glass of space, sweeping the stars into its vortex of spice and spite and time-sprawling starvation. It was a charybdis of hunger, akin to the wailing of famine-plagued continents and the blankness of eternal universe… all of the longing with no hope of the absolution. And she was horrified at its face, the crimson clouds of this wormhole, its colossal destruction seen so vividly above… sweeping the constellations into its ancient, angry mouth, a conflagration of bitterness.
Her eyes, a bracing blue, fixed upon it like a fly over a corpse. They were glassy and bold, black pupils strung to the destruction as if the finest needle had pierced them and held them there with silken string.
The ground shook below her feet, cracked like the world would fall under her. But she was immortal, and everywhere she stepped the ground shivered into a spider's web of shattered ice.
Did she do this? her sleeping mind questioned, blank of horror but brilliant with surprise, as the stone seems to crumble under the heel of her boot.
But there is more to this nightmare, this dreamscape, there are sounds. And molded hands reach from the fissured Earth, decaying with the crusts of death, grey and sloughed but overripe and red beneath the surface, through the cracks in the skin, like they were still meant to be eaten. Like they were meant to be torn apart.
She jerks back from them, but their strength is impossible, loses her balance, and crashes to the steaming ground. Shouldn't it burn? Geysers flare around her, bursting through the ground like long-held exhalations. Her hands fly to the arthritic knuckles of the dead-hands with their dead-grip on her ankles. She cracks them one by one, lets them ooze their sickness, rips her limb from their grasp and scatters back in a heart-pulsing retreat.
The pavement is leaving coal-marks wherever her body presses. And Caroline is wondering why she can still breathe, with all of this smoke? And since when did our Earth catch this fire? Did the vortex inhale us too? Her eyes shoot to the sky, but it's curtained, ironed closed by plumes of black, choking toxin. Her confirmation lost forever.
Though her lungs don't burn. Her eyes don't pour water like the statues in the news that bleed holy miracles from their eyes- mourning humanity.
She can see.
But there is more terror in this miasma, more than chaos and revenge from the celestial plane, there is a sound, a chorus, a cacophony, a choir of screams that starts as the dull whine of a tea kettle boiling over blood… red, indelible, meant for drinking.
The whine increases, the crescendo overpowering, worse than a siren, more dichotomizing than the peeling shriek of a red-white ambulance, a thousand voices all in one, a vibration that could shake apart the air that carries it.
She covers her ears and cries out, her own torment muffled below the terrible…
Howl.
Morning.
The blare of waxen, wan light from the window onto her open, motionless eyes is like the mind-numbing hypnotism in the bulb of a television.
Her breathing stills. Mastery comes back to her as she remembers where she is, why she is. She moves her fingers. The blankets are warm. They have that den-like coziness only engendered on the rainiest days. And Caroline exhales, the tendrils of her dream – nightmare?—fading away like the last scraps of sinew swallowed by a wolf before it paws silently away into the dark. Her pale skin glows white under the clouded, rain-water refracted light.
"Caroline," it's the sound of Stefan behind the door. "You're going to be late for school."
He's right. She glances to the clock perched on the nightstand. It's round and portly and a precious, precious pink she thought would mutate the ring into something pleasant, beacon brightness into her mood before every school day.
Caroline rubs her arm. There are goosebumps. And throws off the warm womb-like haven of the covers, the reflection of rain on her back as she reaches down to disable the alarm.
"Caroline," Caroline hears her name is if it's been said many times before. She finally looks over.
"Are you alright?" she is met with the concerned eyes of Bonnie. The other students in the classroom are something like figments behind haze. The windows lining the wall let in the same pallid light as her room. The rain is a spray of seawater against the glass.
"Yeah," she responds. Her voice is bright, chirping like a bird on a branch. It sounds strange, like everyone else in the world was trying to be quiet and she didn't know. Her eyes are caught by a tree outside of the window. The nubs of the branches are scraping into the glass.
The entire class jumps as the startling pelt is heard.
A bird has crashed into the window, leaves a slimy streak down the glass as it slides to its death.
But Caroline doesn't move. Her eyes already there like she expected it.
"Apparently someone else feels passionately about Fidel Castro," her teacher's voice rings out to break the stale tingling strangeness. The class laughs nervously. "Now back to the Cuban Missile Crisis…"
Bonnie is frowning, disapproving of some of the boys' morbid fascination as they laugh from the back of the room, reenacting the collision with sound effects.
Caroline is still looking at the window. Bonnie turns the page of her history book as Caroline hears the slowing heartbeat of the bird on the ground. The sound of breath failing.
Water taps against the glass like ice tinkling when it's dunked into cold water.
About to crack.
Lunch is like it is every day. But they have to sit inside because of the rain.
Stefan came to school today. She isn't exactly sure how he manages it so that he can come and go as he pleases, but she doesn't ask. Her curiosity is muted when it comes to commonplace routine of the everyday.
He is sitting next to Elena; they are sitting across from her. There is an energy between them, despite all that has happened to dislocate it. Something permanent she can't quite understand. Stefan doesn't move to put his arm around her, but he wants to. Elena glances at him, but she shouldn't. Damon is somewhere else, cringing under the weight of all he isn't.
Stefan looks tired. He must have been up all night. She can picture him, pouring over a dozen pre-med books. His newfound fascination regarding supernatural medicine, inspired by his reigning control of his bloodlust, and the goading of Dr. Fell, seems both inspiration and insomniac to him.
Caroline, as his sober coach, approves, and it's true she has been interested as to what his research and journaling into this cryptic field will actually produce. Bonnie rolls her eyes at the idea, and calls him Dr. Salvatore with all the casual disregard of a New Age hippy towards the stern medicinal coldness of modern day medicine. Witches. He laughs along with her taunt, but afterwards Caroline always sees this simple brightness in his eyes that lingers.
Caroline watches them, and Stefan looks at her, his expression peculiar as if he is looking through to her from the other side of a tunnel. "Caroline?" his voice almost echoes, and the sensation is unbearable against her eardrums. It's like a car window open too much while you're going too fast. Like a voice lost in a well. "What are you looking at?" he seems suspicious.
"Nothing," she answers too quickly. Her brows string together, annoyed. "I wasn't looking at anything."
He seems momentarily wounded in that painstaking way of his, and she thinks maybe he was just worried, not suspicious. She smiles to reassure him. He stares back.
Her eyes fall on Elena, who has stopped eating. Large brown eyes meet crystalline blue. And there it is again… Caroline thinks. Those little pulses of energy. Orange like a navel, small and spiky like the soundbeams coming out from the trumpets of tiny soldiers. They buzz around Elena like bees, and Stefan has them too. They meet in the middle of her friends, joining forces like a small army. Stefan has a yellow aura around his hair, curving down warmly above his shoulders.
"Caroline!"
She hears Elena's voice ringing out behind her after she gets up and leaves the table.
"Don't forget to ask your parents for permission for the Richmond field trip," Ms Turner, the cheerleading supervisor, reminds the squad as practice closes out in the locker room. "We need all the slips signed by Monday at the latest so we can reserve hotel rooms." Her tone is one of a pressing mother, attempting the mien of a friend, always a shade too upbeat.
All the girls like her enough. "I think Caroline wanted to say a few words about the competition last week, right Caroline?"
Ms Turner goes back to her clipboard after a view overly encouraging nods.
The girls on the squad look over to her, one by one, reoccupied with dressing but interested in what she has to say. A lot of the girls on the squad aren't seniors. They look up to her.
Caroline looks at all of them and her expression bends for an instant, for some reason seeing a room of skeletons. Like for an instant she could see through their skins. She feels a chill, and she wonders if they aren't all ticking clocks, picked and presented to make her day more pleasant, but easily silenced.
"Uhm," she says, her pupils shrinking. "I feel like despite the fact that we came in dead last, that there are more important things than winning. We should remember that." The girls turn away from her lackluster advice, losing interest, looking back to their smartphones. The words had no refreshing minty quality, were stale as old snow, no life in them.
Caroline leaves the locker room after she says her goodbyes, the chill still lingering behind her as if she walked out from a graveyard.
Hoisting her backpack onto her shoulders, she exits around the back of the school, the part that faces the football field.
Stoners used to use this exit, and she rounds to the corner to the pit of graffiti where the likes of Vicki, Jeremy and their crew of black-clad, pariah-lifestyle pioneers used to toke up the kinds of chemicals that always made Caroline's head spin.
That was before they were dead, and her footfalls feel heavy over the memories of people that are lost forever.
When she looks up he's already there.
Her posture goes a little rigid, as if she were preparing for defense. She stares hatefully at the figure of death in this quarry of souls.
"Why the tormented welcome?" he asks while he approaches, arms fanning out as pestilence falls from his wings. That is why she picked this stone dead place. So nothing more could die under him.
His is voice startlingly clear, ringing through her brain like the brightness of yellow sunlight searing through a car window into your eyes as you're driving. He notices her cringing and his smugness, both feigned and frigid, recedes for ill-projected concern. "What is it?"
"Stop talking," she blurts. Anything to get his voice to stop, so she can open her eyes, unsure in those later seconds if it was a vision or a sound that caused the momentary duress. "We'll do it in the car."
As they're sitting in her car she's quiet, does nothing to signify she wishes him to break the unfriendly silence with some attempt at mending the cleavage of stone between them.
Caroline hears him inhale, to do just that, "Let's just get this over and done with," she says finally, impatiently. Her voice is piercing as shiny steel through a white-washed wall, lodged deeply into a structure already built, the catalyst of time-worn destruction.
It starts to rain, drops hitting against the windshield.
For a moment she can't hear his heartbeat, or his breath. It is as if he is erased entirely from creation, but for the heat coming from the molten core of his body below the ice-cold tectonics of his outward form. He is a mutation, some kind of freak design, dead but with all the sinewy ferocity of life. All of the fires of doom, burning, burning, burning.
He has never had the chance to tell her there is much more to be seen. Is it for his own redemption or hers that he wishes her to watch the wonders of the world, the wonderful degeneracy, the awe striking corruption, the genuine wickedness that walks everywhere in the shadow of all good.
In all the world, beauty and evil – beautiful dread, and dreadful beauty, a combination of the two where the finality of his moral depravity is encoded into a curse far more infuriating. The eternal balance of nature's encompassing tyranny….
Who will ever know the secrets of nature's spirits? What is murder but necessity to the killer? What is death but rebirth? He who is Hades is the beacon of the future to pass, the keeper of the dead, the driving force of new life, the plague that desecrates the armies who war for reasons leaking through with greed. You should be thanking me.
And what is alms but feeding the sloth of the beggar for the ego of the giver? What is this great ruse called morality? In ancient Egypt thy heart is measured against a feather, not a code of Truth, at death. Light is blinding, can ruin, can burn. Light shows all faults and leaves distress, light does not giveth, it taketh away. Tell me you'll never think of me again.
But in absence of True Death comes no silence, no peace.
He who is damned is blessed. (She has never realized how ancient he is, how decrepit, how the heaviness she feels when he is near is the gravity of thousands of souls, his constant prison in their wailing court, how is smile is crawling with pill bugs and maggots, the stench of his body full of the corpses of the hundreds of lives he's lived and died, like a wicked king upon an empire of dirt, everlasting in his arbitrary judgment, Armageddon among us)
She who is blessed is damned. (He has realized how newborn she is, how virginally fruitless, how the lightness he feels when she is near is the burning magnet of her merciless, pitiless newness, the reminder of how far there is to the coals from the clouds, how far she is yet to fall, and in her eyes there is a clearness, a brightness that she will turn on any, incinerate their feeble homes like the rabid wildness of brush fire, like a terrible goddess, a demon of light who may never go out)
"Let's get this over and done with," he repeats.
When she is at home (at the Salvatores' home, this is home now) Damon is fiddling through a cabinet in the kitchen for a wine tumbler. "So, anything useful and-or not annoying–slash-subpar happen at school today?"
Caroline looks up from her schoolwork, spread out onto the table. "No," she answers, hair up, a blanket pulled around her shoulders.
There is a loud thundering sound above them both, and Damon glances up, unperturbed. "Seems like Dr. Frankenstein is at it again," he comments. He is in his own way relieved Stefan has a reason to go on, hopefully not decapitating thousands at the drop of a bandaid. "Why can't he ever do anything like a normal person? This nighttime creepery is a little too Mary Shelley for me."
He waves his fingers for effect.
Caroline nods a little.
"Do you want something to eat?" he asks off-handedly, attempting hospitality but the sinking edge to his words suggesting the whole endeavor is intentionally half-hearted.
"No."
"Huh," Damon's face bends in some weird amalgamation of various expressions. "Stefan said you were acting weird. I mean, if you need some clever ways to automatically kill a boring conversation with my sleep-inducing brother, I thought you knew you could always come to me. Blow horn is a second option."
She looks up after a moment. "Oh, I didn't know you wanted an answer."
Damon's ice-cold gaze doesn't move. He stares for a moment and then shrugs, leaving the room as if he were as impermanent as a breeze.
Caroline's eyes go out of focus.
The words in her history book blur.
As she lays down to bed she looks for the moon in her window, reminded of her dream. But there is nothing but black canvas, empty of any interpretation, a vacuum.
There is a heaviness in her bones, but that is to be expected. It's not because of prom committee or yearbook committee, not because of varsity cheerleading or the oncoming pressure of college acceptance letters. With her face against the cool pillow she blinks slowly and out of time, pulling up the sleeve of her worn-out Mystic Falls Cheer Squad shirt.
On the inside of her wrist is a black mark, as sure as death, snaking spirals of poison curling off the festering wound like cilia. She can smell it, the rotting of her body already taking place, but this has been going on for weeks now, and she is used to all the permutations and the side effects of the deadly hybrid bite.
How to trust the devil? That's easy, find a way so that fire doesn't burn.
She gave no inclination that it would provide any more than a stalemate between them, but eventually he accepted. Caroline had better things to do than imagine his motivations.
He doubted the legitimacy of the idea. In all his endless, terrible years had never before been inspired to spare anyone of his absolute power. He suggested the fallibility of it, of nature's sinister balance, even between its supernatural bastards.
Her strange urgency dispelled this, unconcerned. A determination intermingled in all of her response. Klaus has better things to do than imagine her motivations.
As her eyes slowly closed, her body slinks into the depth of the toxin. The first night it always helps her sleep. But it will loiter there, unwanted in her blood, until she drinks the antidote. Letting the day pass with chills and nausea.
She hears the shuddering of furniture at the other wing of the house, where Stefan has set up his makeshift lab using the broad old bookmen's tables from their father's 19th century lumber business. She can hear the smallest tinkling of the second-hand equipment, courtesy of Dr. Fell, microscopes and beakers in boxes. The pages of her erstwhile schoolbooks turned as he reads through chapter after chapter. The ways of the living will mirror the ways of the dead.
Caroline turns in the bed, stares at the ceiling as her eyes blink lubricated lids to close once more in finality. In half-sleep she pictures Stefan in his hand-me-down labcoat, working into the isolated hours of the night. She dreams he is creating a monster.
Dr. Salvatore is at it again. It's a little too Mary Shelley for me. Tell me you'll never think of me again. You should be thanking me.
She dreams the monster is her.