It starts when Katerina eludes him with her untimely demise and transition into a vampire.
But, he manages his rage well he thinks as the hot blood of Katerina's father slides in hot splashes over his hands and face, down his neck like a rudimentary paint by the numbers with deep crimson as the only colour choice. (he knows that paint by the numbers hadn't been invented yet but he likes these metaphors for his trips down memory lane.)
He spends five hundred years looking for her, almost catching her, making of her someone whom would later be an instrument and the conductor of the symphony of his undoing.
But he remembers it started with her.
In a way it ends with her too, but he doesn't draw that conclusion until much later as the walls of his bower seem to close about him.
A thousand years to break the aegis his mother cast upon him and finally, finally he is free. He is free to shift as he wants, to slip his skin and revel as he was meant as was foretold in the writings etched (by his siblings and he no less) on the cave walls below that town, the Original hybrid able to now shift at his whim and run and be free.
There was however a price to his "freedom".
A loophole. He killed the doppelganger and so was cursed to run alone. Always alone.
His mother's way of sealing his fate to be the only one of his kind.
How he hated it.
How he hated /her/.
This was how Elijah found him after they fled, pacing, pent, and halfway to drunk. Well, more than halfway because he's barely coherent when he blinks up at his brother from the penthouse floor. Morose, moaning, cursing their gods (as if he still believed) and cursing the whole miserable whole of his existence as a vampire and now a hybrid and all Elijah can do is "stare at me like I'm some bloody specimen at the zoo!" His aim is off when the crystal tumbler he hurls bounces off the wall to shatter like rainbow stars. Elijah tuts and seats himself on the sofa, a large leather bound book balanced on his meticulously pressed and be-trousered knee.
"Really Niklaus, I thought you more, shall we say, controlled, than this?"
Klaus scowls and silently laments his lack of numbing alcohol as he watches Elijah thumb open the brittle pages to the place he'd marked. Klaus's ears are assaulted by the sound of the vellum moving through the air, the rough pads of Elijah's fingers scraping over them as they turn and the sound of Elijah's accented voice reciting the spell they used to break the Sun and the Moon curse. He looks deep into Klaus's eyes once he completes the incantation, the silence stretching so long and so loud that Klaus grits his teeth.
"And, brother?"
It isn't elegant the way he asks for this elaboration and when Elijah lifts his eyebrow, Klaus wants to box his ears.
"And, dear brother, the spell says you must take the life of the doppelganger, which, if I am correct in my assumptions, means that quite the opposite happened in order for this particular spell to have worked."
Elijah lets this information seep into the spaces where Klaus's molecules vibrate together at a speed he almost hear with his hypersensitive ears. Almost. It's distracting really when the alcohol seems to want to sing to him also the sweet song of oblivion. He doesn't let it. He blinks. He blinks and he rises with a bunching of his muscles and stares holes into his brother, his immaculate brother who saved his life; on more than one occasion over the centuries.
"So you're saying that the little bitch still draws breath and that's why I was able to break the curse."
Elijah nods.
"She is also still the key to making more of you brother, according to mother's grimoire."
Klaus stands and then stumbles over to the bar to pour another drink, memories of Tennessee fogging up his already fogged brain and forgoing the glass and drinking straight from the crystalline decanter. He points at his brother.
"We need to go back home then, celebrate this monumentally astounding news."
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She got her neck snapped, which freaking /hurt/ for fucks sake and Tyler was nowhere to be found. Until she heard him yelling and then the crunch of /his/ neck snapping and then nothing else; except the sound of her phone tapping away and then a loud screech and she sits up to see some blonde /bitch/ with her white knuckled fingers clutching said device and hollering blue murder about "her" necklace.
"Hey! What the actual fu-!" Caroline follows the bitch as she takes off (she's fast too so she must be a vampire) and as she passes the chem lab she sees Tyler sprawled out on the floor and Bonnie standing over him with blood pouring in a river from her nose and dribbling down her chin and that coppery tang makes Caroline's eyes run with dark veins and her fangs drop (shoot her with vervain ok, she's hungry and she's a vampire for christ's sake it's a natural reaction she reasons inside) and it's this face that Klaus sees as she bursts into the gym.
She manages to catch the tail end of Klaus smacking Elena around (finally because martyr Elena was /whiny/ Elena all the damn time now) and then biting her after he hauls her to her feet by her hair. She shouts something at him (Elena is still her best friend and she /has/ to say something) and then she's ripping her broken (for fucks sake!) phone from the blonde's stupid fingers and cursing her soundly through bared fangs. She so doesn't notice when the guy eating Elena drops her best friend's limp body to the gym floor because Caroline is /way/ too busy screeching at the stupid cow who broke her phone and probably hurt Tyler.
Tyler! (She feels really shitty now because her rage got the better of her and she forgot /Tyler/!) She makes to leave and that's when she's spun around and she's staring at the (super hot) face of Elena's attacker.
Her lips tremble.
"Klaus."
He grins.
"You must be Tylah's girl, you are quite something else, taking on an Original like you were."
He says Original just like that, like a proper noun and Caroline is far from stupid, these must be the original vampires, the ones, if google can be believed, that basically created all the other vampires anywhere, ever; she did a /lot/ of research after she found out, before the ritual. When Jenna died. And Jules.
But some great general somewhere said "know thy enemy" or something and she really just wanted to be more useful but every time she brought anything up, Damon always scoffed and she always ended up being thrust back into that "pathetic waste of space" category in her mind and she just clammed up. No one ever noticed; no one probably cared at all and as she stares into Klaus's eyes with these thoughts roiling around in her head, she thinks maybe he can see into her soul, see her thoughts and /exactly/ where they have taken her. He leans close and whispers:
"So much smarter than they know love." before he releases her back toward the door she'd burst through a minute or two ago. (It wasn't long ago at all).
"Best go see how my guinea pig is doing yeah?"
"What /the fuck/ have you done to Tyler?!" She screeches at Klaus as the bimbo grabs her by the hair and drags her along back to the chem lab and Tyler. They get through the door and Tyler is bleeding out of his nose and eyes and he's screaming because he's in transition and that's when Klaus offers him a vial of Elena's blood and she yells out "No!" before Rebekah kicks her left leg hard (she learned that this was Klaus's sister as she was manhandled from the gym and she whines in pain. (Klaus smirks at her and Tyler drinks the damn blood.
Her skin crawls when Klaus winks at her like she's in on his private joke.
Fuck they are so fucked.
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He didn't expect her to be so, pretty.
This word lacks the elegance he would normally use to describe such a creature as her but his mind was a little occupied with the notion that the doppelganger was in fact the cure for his inability to make more hybrids.
He knew better now.
Tyler was his first in a new success story and after he got that sorted, he grabbed Elena and left, the back of his mind buzzing with Tyler's pretty girlfriend and the way she felt between his hands, the way her scent was breathed into his blood and bones and muscles and seemed to stay there, filling up his spaces and he realised, after a thousand years that a baby vampire shouldn't intrigue him so, though if you were to ask any of his family they would tell you that Caroline Forbes was perhaps the perfect one to pique his interest thus. The flash of intelligence in her eyes, the way she came into the gym all fanged and veined and madder than a stung bear.
She knew things. In the minutes that she was under his scrutiny he knew that she knew things that even her friends were unaware of and he really wanted to know what those things were. But he was testing his theory at present and needed to make sure he wasn't wrong. (he wasn't but it always helped to be cautious) and when Tyler perked up after the doppelganger blood infusion, he knew he was correct.
And there was Caroline to consider now. And a sire bond as the next thing to test.
How he was going to play now that /nothing/ stood in his way.
Except, his own small tiny shred of conscience for the look he put on Rebekah's face when he said he was always alone. She who was his constant companion until he daggered her while they ran from Mikael. He wanted to protect them all and making hybrids was the only way he could do that.
He would have more like him now, and army so big he would finally feel safe.
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Stefan steals his family and Klaus retaliates by getting Tyler to bite Caroline.
Tyler looked upset and even said no a bunch but really, sire bond (it was a nifty thing to enact) trumps "true love" in this case and Tyler did end up doing the deed. It was on her birthday too and the poor lad, the poor lad felt quite upset about the whole thing, blubbering like an infant. (baby vampires always had such emotional traumas in the beginning) so of course Klaus /had/ to save her.
Never mind what a personal act blood sharing was amongst his kind, it was very nearly a calculated step in his plan to ingratiate himself to these people in order to get his way, start a network of informants so that he could get his family back.
He needed them.
And so, there he's sat, speaking in hushed and reverent tones to Caroline about how she was merely collateral damage(a lie) and how all she had to do was ask him, tell him she didn't want to die (he knew she didn't) and drink from him. Perhaps it was the fever of the bite, but when he told her about having it all he thought she had a bright glint in her eyes, imagining what it would be like to see it all a hundred times or more, to live forever in the eternity he offered with his words and his visions of a world that would be her if she but dared to take it.
She took it.
She took it as she bit into his wrist and swallowed him whole, dragging him into her as she was drug into him, pictures and words and scenes passed behind his open eyes and the orgiastic rush of such a sharing made him hard(that was new) and made him drunk in ways alcohol couldn't and he /knows/ her now. He knows the inner workings of her like a favoured clock and the sounds they make are both sensual.
She isn't conscious long and as her eyes close and her drinking stops, Klaus lays her down, smoothing a hand over her now cooling brow and dares a small kiss to her temple, breathing in her scent to the deep places of his own remembering and glorying in their budding connection. He is gone soon after with instructions to the sheriff that if she notices anything not right she is to call him and he will return in an instant.
He is after all wanting to have her support, nothing more.
He hears Caroline wake the next morning, hears her unroll the thick paper of the gift he left for her, hears her sharp breathless inhale and then nothing, except the soft tracery of her fingers over the lines he's committed to the paper to form her likeness thereon.
One word reaches him, like gossamer strands of hope they weave about him and make his stone of a thousand year old heart thud in painful reminder that it indeed exists and that she is one whom can make it continue to do so if he decides to let her.
He considers his careful plans, considers all the angles, considers everything but the way she makes his heart feel; the way she makes /him/ feel and he knows that he cannot plan for this, plan for the raw way his nerves sing and he realises as he watches her window that this could be love, if he wants it.
He wants it. He wants /her/.
He wants the thick bloody thud of his heart beating in the throes because it feels like he's dying when he's never really lived at all in a thousand years he's never been alive until now, until he let her feed from him, saw her heart, saw /her/. Saw the world he would have with her at his side.
He would court her, and he would show her the world, his world.
He would show her what it was to really live.