My response to 3x21 – I had to write something. I had SO MANY FEELINGS. OMG. If you haven't watched it, don't read this. If you have and you understand my trauma, then read ahead and hopefully it will make you feel a little better. =) This is meant to be a one-shot, but I might eventually turn it into a longer fic if enough people are interested in seeing me continue it.

A Hundred Years

"Perhaps one day. In a year, or even in a century. You'll turn up at my door and let me show you what the world has to offer."

2081 - He was right, he always was, it seemed. Small town boy, small town life—it hadn't been enough for her. Oh, it had been for a while, but eventually the guilt ate her alive. When Elena finally died (which brought Alaric's reign of terror to an end) at the ripe age of 87, who was there left to protect? Her children, and now grandchildren, sure, but they were of no real use to Klaus anyway. It would be half a millennia before another doppelganger came into being. She hadn't seen Stefan and Damon in nearly 70 years. As it turned out, their love for each other was stronger than either of their desire to be with a mortal girl. They came back once, and then they were gone for good. She'd talked to them occasionally in texts just to keep in touch, and most recently to inform them about Elena's passing, but she owed them no loyalty. In fact, she didn't owe loyalty to anyone in Mystic Falls any longer.

That was how she found her way here—to a cave in the middle of Bumfuck, Virginia, a cave with a damned lake in it. "Seriously?" she screeched as she kicked off her shoes towards the wall and stripped the jacket off her body. She shouldn't have expected his desiccated body to just be lying out in the open, but at the bottom of a lake? She tossed the jacket over by her shoes and took a deep breath (not that she needed it) and dove in. The lake was deeper than she expected and it took a while, but finally she found him, half-covered in silt and debris that had settled in the lake. It was a harder swim back to the surface with his dead weight under an arm, but she gained the surface and coughed up some of the water she'd inhaled on accident when she got frustrated at the swim and huffed irritably. Caroline pulled him to the rocky edge of the lake, not even bothering to pull him all the way out. She scooted herself up the side and pulled him into her lap so that she was cradling his upper body on her folded legs, his own were still half-submerged in the frigid water. She bit viciously into her wrist and propped him up enough that the blood would go down his throat when she held her wrist against his lips.

It took a few minutes, and she even had to open her veins more than once but the pallor started to recede from his face and then he gasped, his eyes going wide and wild. Caroline held him steady. "Shh, it's okay. It's me. You're safe."