A/N: This was written based on speculation for 6x10, so WARNING: CHARACTER DEATH. I've had over half of this written prior to 6x08 airing, so it's veered away from canon quite a bit, by now. Oh, the joys of procrastination. Yeah, the details of Liz's death are hella vague, and for that, I apologize, but those kinds of things are so not within my skill set. Also, I thought it was kind of a cop-out that the only picture Caroline has of her and Stefan is one where Elena's in the middle, so I tried to rectify that a bit here. Story title comes from the song Last Train Home by Ryan Star.
i'll be forever, wait for me
He sees her before she sees him.
Fingers interlaced with Elena's, she drags her feet along the forest floor, twigs and branches and leaves scratching at her skin with each step she takes.
Her cheeks are wet with tears, her pale blue dress wet with Liz's blood.
When she registers them, her gaze lands on Damon first before it travels to him, where it stays. For a split second, he's afraid that she'll make him go away, that she'll refuse to let herself share her pain with him. His hand clenches into a fist at his side as he fights to restrain himself from running to her, waiting to see if she'll allow it. He sees her take a shaky breath, managing to smile for a few seconds before her face contorts and a strangled cry escapes her.
That is all the incentive he needs, and he manages to successfully avoid slamming into her in his endeavor to have her in his arms.
She releases Elena's hand and winds her arms around him immediately, standing up on her tiptoes to bury her face into his neck, fingers reaching up his back to grab the collar of his shirt and pull. Her grip on him is strong and unyielding, and because she's pressed flush against him, he feels the tremors that wrack her body with each sob. He closes his eyes as he feels his own tears begin to build, running a hand through her hair while the other stays still, wrapped around her waist to hold her to him.
He meets Elena's eyes over Caroline's shoulder, and she's staring at him searchingly, with a knowing glint in her eyes that manages to shine through the sorrow. Her gaze flits to Caroline and back to him in question, and Stefan nods with conviction, aware of what she's asking.
Will you take care of her?
Of course he will. He always will.
Elena nods once, somber eyes moving to a point behind where Stefan and Caroline are standing, and then she's out of his line of sight.
"Stefan...my mom, she's ─ she's ─ my mom!"
He presses a hard kiss to her hair, leaves his lips there as he whispers, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
Try as he might, he discovers that even a century's worth of grief isn't enough to grant him the magical words that will console her and ease her troubles away. Aware of its redundancy, he keeps scouring through his brain, searching and searching, because hadn't she said that to him once upon a time? You always know what to say?
After drawing a blank, Stefan realizes that it would just have to be one of the many things she overestimated about him.
"Elena and I will take care of the body." At that, she disentangles herself from Stefan's arms to stare at Damon. Tentatively, Damon approaches her, clearly unsure of how to offer comfort to someone who he has such a tumultuous history with, ultimately deciding to rest his hand on her shoulder, thumb brushing gently against her clavicle. "Your mother was a wonderful friend. I know it might not mean much, coming from me, but I am truly sorry that she's gone."
Caroline's hand comes up to rest over his, squeezing gently before moving it off her shoulder.
Damon nods, eyes falling as he steps back. "I'll call a mortuary, see to it that she gets a proper funeral."
"Thank you."
Elena hugs Caroline once more, pulling away and wiping her best friend's tears away with her thumbs, her own lower lip trembling. Stefan remembers Elena talking about childhood sleepovers at the Forbes house, fondly recalling Liz's infamous blueberry pie, how she'd kiss her forehead as well as Bonnie's and Caroline's before tucking them in, and he knows it counts as a loss for her, too.
"Do you need anything? Should I come back with you, or I can─"
"I'll be fine. I'm in good hands."
"You are," she confirms, exhaling sharply, "god, I really wish Bonnie was here."
Caroline shuts her eyes, crystalline tears falling down her cheeks once more as she nods in agreement. Her eyes meet Damon's where he's standing next to a sap that's seen better days, and he ducks his chin down once, concrete. A promise. "She will be."
"Let me know if you need anything, okay?"
"Yeah, I will."
"I'll see you first thing tomorrow."
With that, she leaves them to catch up with Damon, who's already disappeared into the woods. Once she's out of sight, Caroline curls herself back into Stefan's body, her grief catapulting itself out of her in cries that echo around them.
They stand there for what can't have been less than two hours, Caroline hugging herself and Stefan hugging Caroline, before her sobs subside into occasional sniffles. He pulls back a bit, just enough so that he can cup her face in his hands. She leans into his touch, lips pressing against the heel of his palm, and he hates himself for the way his heart soars.
"Do you want to go back to your dorm?"
"Not really," she admits, "but what other option do I have?"
He hears the undertone of resignation in her voice, and Stefan shakes his head, running his thumbs over the curve of her cheeks as he looks at her imploringly.
Caroline shrugs, and that does it.
A single shrug of defeat is all it takes to completely wreck his resolve, because if there's one thing Caroline Forbes doesn't do, it's admit defeat. Right then, he commits himself to her cause; they will find a way to get Mystic Falls back, even if he has to comb through each hidden cavern on the planet. Admittedly, Stefan doesn't care much for the town after seeing how much danger it attracts, but he does care about Caroline, and if Mystic Falls is where she wants to be, then he'll see to it that it's where she is.
"We should go," she says abruptly, stepping away from him.
A breeze follows her words, leaving the scent of blood and jasmine lingering around him, and he knows she's gone.
He stands there for a couple seconds, hands hanging in the air, thumbs still raised where they'd been brushing against her skin. Letting out a heavy sigh, he lets the reality of the situation wash over him. He drops his hands to his hips, raising his head to look at the night sky as if it holds the answers to all his questions, which it doesn't, because it doesn't have blonde hair and blue eyes and an effervescent way about it.
Truth be told, Stefan's kind of out of his depth here.
His experience as a friend doesn't really extend past Lexi, and by the time she came crashing into his life, she was in a place where she had no living family left to lose, never forged relationships that stuck, and he didn't have to do much comforting other than taking her out on the town to help her forget about whatever dumb hookup had disappointed her.
Call him crazy, but he thinks it'll take more than endless rounds of tequila shots to alleviate Caroline's heartache.
He remembers clasping her hand in his, the words you have me, the way her lips turned up at the corners in a genuine smile. He still means what he said, but now that he's faced with following through on that particular promise, he's not so sure he'll be able to provide the same solace for her that she's ceaselessly provided for him.
Stefan's not an idiot; he knows that, between the two of them, Caroline's the stronger one, at least emotionally. Her entire sense of self doesn't collapse around her after she makes a mistake, and she won't hesitate to do morally questionable things if it means protecting those she loves, whereas he goes on Ripper binges and lets his girlfriend die because she asks him to save her friend instead.
He takes a deep breath, preparing himself for whatever it is she may need him to be, and speeds away to Whitmore. The door to her dorm is already cracked open a bit, but when he steps through, the room is still coated in darkness, save for the light that's filtering through her bathroom door. He turns on the light in her room and focuses his hearing, straining to catch any sign that she's actually here, relaxing for a brief second upon registering her shallow breathing.
He knocks. "Caroline?"
Silence.
He turns the doorknob and steps through, surprised to see her standing inside the tub, hunched over and hugging herself. There's blood caked on her hands, around her ankles, and Stefan's jaw ticks at the contrast it provides against the stark white of the tile. She looks up at him sheepishly, and the fluorescent light of the bathroom reflects off of her tear-streaked cheeks.
"The zipper got caught," she tells him, turning so he can see that she'd only managed to get it a third of the way down. She faces him and grimaces, waving dismissively. "I know it's stupid, and I could just break it to get out of it, but my mom got me this dress, and─"
"It's not stupid."
Instead of responding, Caroline rubs her hands over her elbows and turns so that her back is exposed to him again, and Stefan spurs himself into action, stepping forward until the toes of his shoes press against the outside of the tub. Gently, his fingers reach out to clasp the zipper of her dress, slowly pulling it up and down again, and he exhales a sigh of relief when it gives way and the metal teeth unbind without hassle. He keeps pulling until the zipper meets the bottom stop, knuckles brushing against the small of Caroline's back as he goes.
He swallows, reminding himself that now is not the time to get distracted by the expanse of smooth skin beneath his fingers.
"All done," he tells her. She glances over her shoulder to stare at him, something indiscernible mingling with the anguish in her eyes. He steps back, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. "Whatever you need, I'll be right outside."
"Thanks," she whispers.
Caroline reaches down for the hem of her dress to pull it over her head, and he turns immediately, closing the door behind him before her fingers get a chance to hit the fabric.
Once he hears the water start running, Stefan sighs, reaching up to scrub a hand over his face.
This is shit.
No matter how much he's relishing the fact that Caroline's letting him be there for her, he wishes their reconciliation ─ if that's what tonight can even count as ─ wasn't prompted by the death of her last living family member. Her quiet sobs permeate the air around him, unconcealed by the spray of the shower, and he finds himself looking through the array of pictures meticulously lined on top of her dresser in an effort to distract from the sound. It's hard to connect the vibrant girl in the pictures with the one that fell apart before his eyes tonight, but he can't help himself from trying.
Bonnie and Caroline in their cheerleading uniforms, arms wrapped around each other in a tight hug, bright smiles untouched by the havoc he and Damon brought with them. Elena and Caroline, where Elena's kissing Caroline's cheek and Caroline's eyes are crossed, tongue sticking out so that it almost reaches the tip of her nose. Caroline, propped up on her elbows between Matt and Tyler on a checkered picnic blanket, their heads pressed against hers. Caroline, radiant and joyful in her graduation robe, cheek pressed against her mom's, who's looking for all the world like she just saw her daughter get a Nobel Prize rather than a high school diploma.
There's a picture at the end of the line that's positioned face-down, and Stefan frowns, half-curious and half-aware of what he'll find. He turns it over, unsurprised to find his own smile staring back at him, right next to hers.
It was taken during the period where he'd been without his memories after attempting to locate Silas using their doppelgänger link. He can't help the surge of warmth that makes its way through his chest upon closer inspection. He's James Dean, and she's Bonnie Parker, and despite the fact that at that moment, he didn't remember anything or anyone about his life, the smile on his face was a trusting one, the arm strewn around her waist comfortable in its embrace.
He remembers what it felt like not to remember.
"Caroline Forbes," Damon says as he hands him a new picture from the stack, pointing to the pretty blonde in it, who has her arms draped around picture-Stefan's shoulders as he carries her piggyback style. He notices a lot of things; the ease with which he grins, the way her curls topple over his head and brush against his cheek, the luminosity of her smile. "Your bestie."
Stefan raises his eyebrows, gaze flickering back to the picture before it settles back on his brother. "She's my best friend?"
Damon smirks knowingly, taking a swig from the tumbler in his hand. "Yeah, well, in terms of the company you keep, you've always been big on the ones that are easy on the eyes." He shrugs. "You grew closer when you helped her during her vamp transition. She's controlling, and judgmental, and ridiculously adept at getting herself into dangerous situations, but for some reason unbeknownst to the rest of us, she's kind of your favorite person."
He nods, trying to bury the sliver of disappointment he feels. Admittedly, looking at how obviously comfortable he is around her, he'd been expecting Damon to tell him that she was his girlfriend, that they were in love. Hell, he wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out that they had a cabin somewhere with a picket fence and a dog.
He looks down at the picture again. "Caroline Forbes," he tries, thumb tracing over her smile.
He decides he likes how her name feels on his tongue.
He remembers brushing off her attempts to tell him about everyone else in his life, instead asking her about her favorite songs, what she likes to do on the days where supernatural threats don't plague her, the adventures he was lucky enough to share with her. He remembers his jaw ticking when he saw her kiss Tyler, swallowing the last of his drink before striding over with purpose, remembers how much he'd liked the warmth of her hand in his as they danced.
He incorrigibly reveled in her; her smile, the solidarity with which she spoke to him, the way she strived to make him remember who he was rather than who she was to him.
Suddenly, it's really hard to focus on anything other than the fact that this gorgeous, lively whirlwind of a woman had ─ has, he corrects himself; she may have tried to brush it off as a past lapse in judgment, but Stefan's really good at reading the signs when he's actually looking for them ─ feelings for him.
He's startled out of the beginnings of a reverie when he hears Caroline call his name, and he zooms to the bathroom door.
"Yeah?"
"Can you please get me some clothes to sleep in? I didn't bring any in with me."
"Sure thing."
He walks back to her dresser and hesitates before placing the frame in its original position, where their faces are hidden from view.
Because the universe decidedly hates him, of course the first drawer he opens is her underwear drawer. Making quick work of his task, he picks basic black underwear, shutting the drawer before he can give into temptation and investigate the royal blue lace he'd caught a glimpse of. Fortunately, ransacking through all the other drawers isn't as painful on his sensibilities, and he comes away with a maroon t-shirt that has MFHS Cheer 2010 emblazoned on the front in white script along with a pair of pajamas that he selected solely for the fact that they have baby polar bears all over them.
Caroline opens the door before he gets the chance to knock, and everything about her visibly softens when she sees what he chose.
Stefan takes a seat on the edge of her bed, clasping his hands together and resting them in his lap as he waits for her to emerge.
When she does, she walks to her dresser, glancing at him conspicuously over her shoulder before turning back to her drawers. Before he can ask what she's doing, he finds himself being attacked by sleepwear. Unfolding the dark gray sweatpants, he looks up at Caroline questioningly.
"They were Tyler's; they'll fit, I hope." She stalks past him to Elena's side of the room, digging through what he knows to be her Damon memory box until she finds a black v-neck, chucking that at him as well. "I don't think it matters that you wear that, since Damon's back from the dead and everything, and your shirt's full of blood, so..."
He stills, readying himself to act according to whatever reaction her words will produce. She's silent for a couple of minutes, breathing in and out raggedly, looking up at the ceiling in an effort to keep her tears from spilling.
In that moment, Stefan realizes that this is the most vulnerable situation they've ever been in. Caroline just lost her mother, there's a flush in her cheeks from the effort it's taking to reign in her emotions, and he's standing there, at a complete loss for what to do to comfort her. He wants to go to her, to wrap her up in his arms and just hold her, but he knows she won't appreciate it, at least not right now, when she's so obviously trying to keep herself in check. There's a distance between them that he doesn't know how to close, and given the circumstances, he's unsure whether he'll get another chance to try and figure out how after tonight.
Will she dismiss him again tomorrow morning, claiming that seeking his comfort was a one-time regression in a moment of weakness that won't happen again?
Will she accept his offer to stick with her through the grieving process, and every day after?
Will there ever come a day where she looks at him like she used to, affection and unbridled trust in her eyes?
Oblivious to his internal musings, Caroline manages to get herself under control, expelling a long breath. Her lips turn up in a smile that doesn't reach her eyes before walking back to her bed, sitting down with her back to him, most likely to give him some privacy while he changes.
"So I'm staying the night?"
"If that's what you want."
He nods. "It is."
"Then by all means," she says, twisting around to pull back the covers next to her in invitation, and oh no.
They've slept together before, of course, but that was when the prolonged gazes and the shoulder brushes that occurred between them weren't laced with the knowledge that there's more lying under the surface. That was when she was Caroline; bright, supportive, stole-his-heart-in-a-totally-platonic-way Caroline.
Now, though...
Now, she's Caroline.
She's still bright, and she's still supportive, but he's not sure the way she has him wrapped around her finger is based solely on appreciation for what an amazing friend she is anymore.
He stands there, watching Caroline cross her polar-bear-pajama-clad legs on the bed as she reaches for the hairbrush on her bedside table, and he clutches Tyler's siphoned sweatpants a little tighter. It's so domestic, watching her run a brush through her damp hair, fingers expertly weaving it into a side-braid once she's successfully gotten all the knots out, and an unbidden rush of want shoots through him.
This is exactly what he'd always dreamed of having as a human, what he'd convinced himself was inconceivable as a vampire; a beautiful woman to fall asleep next to, one who understood him and didn't fault him for his imperfections. One he could laugh with, one he could inspire and be inspired by, one whose smile soothed the deepest aches of his soul. He used to think that was Elena, but now, he knows that that idea has been added to the long list of things he was wrong about. Because if there's one person that can fulfill all that criteria, it's the one sitting in front of him, applying moisturizer that she no longer needs to her makeup-free face.
Dear god, Damon was right to call him the earth's biggest idiot for the past 148 years.
Clearing his throat in an effort to redirect his straying thoughts, Stefan makes quick work of changing, kicking his soiled clothes under her bed to worry about later.
"They fit okay?"
He looks down at sweatpants that are closer to his calves than his ankles, at the shirt which will only cover the entirety of his upper half so long as he stands perfectly still. "Well..."
She turns around, takes in his stupefied expression and his awkward stance, and promptly bursts into laughter. It takes him by such surprise that he straightens his posture immediately, and judging by the way her hand closes over her mouth, she hadn't expected that either. They stare at one another for a second, gauging each other's reaction to gain an idea of what the appropriate next move is.
Caroline clears her throat slightly, a corner of her mouth still ticked upwards. "Breaking news: Stefan Salvatore can look ridiculous."
It's a jab. A well-intended one. There's no malice in her tone, no anger in her eyes, just good humor, and Stefan feels like he may as well have just ended world hunger. Maybe global warming, too.
A vigorous longing settles in his chest, and he's stunned to realize how much he's missed the sound of her laugh, missed being the brunt of her teasing.
"I'm sorry to interrupt your commendable impression of a fish, but would you mind turning the lights off?"
He snaps his mouth shut, trekking to her light switch in a quasi-daze. A quasi-daze which is immediately shattered as soon as he turns around to see Caroline lying on her back, an empty space next to her that has his name written all over it. He tamps down on his rising panic somewhat frustratingly; he shouldn't be letting himself entertain these thoughts right now. Caroline needs him to be her friend, something steady in the chaos of a storm, and fretting about the evolution of his feelings for her is a luxury he can't afford.
Not right now, and maybe not for a while.
With that in mind, the trip to her bed is an easy one, and he crawls under the sheets next to her, tucking an arm behind his head. They lie in a heavy silence for a couple of minutes, Caroline focused on a spot on the ceiling, Stefan entertaining himself by trying to find what bump or ridge has captivated her attention.
Eventually, she reaches for his free hand, resting her fingers in the spaces between his, and Stefan tries to ignore the way his stomach twists.
He fails, quite splendidly.
His eyes rove over their hands, and she misinterprets his gaze.
"Don't worry, I'm not coming on to you."
"Oh, no, I wasn't─"
"Stefan, about the whole…thing thing…"
He shakes his head, lifting himself up onto one elbow, careful not to tug at their joined hands. "We don't have to talk about that right now."
Caroline's eyebrows kink together. "Well, I want to talk about it, I think. Right now, it seems like the lesser of two evil trains of thought."
He nods, then, both looking forward to her words and dreading that they'll crush his hopes before he gets the chance to see them realized.
"I'm sorry for that. Not for having feelings for you, but for it obviously putting you in a weird position. And for saying that I hate you. You have to know that that is the biggest load of crap that's ever spewed from my mouth, and I'd like to remind you how much crap-spewing I used to do."
Against his better judgment, he laughs, squeezing her hand in his as he leans his head back down onto her pillow. "Yeah, Caroline, I know. Don't feel guilty about saying that you hated me; you're not the only one who did some crap-spewing, you know."
She groans, throwing her free arm over her eyes. "It hasn't even been a minute and I already know you're going to take every opportunity to remind me what a poor choice of words that was."
"It wasn't easy to ignore you whenever you called, or to walk away when you asked me to stay. I didn't do those things because I stopped caring about you, or about everyone else. I thought I needed to move on, and at the time, cutting off all the ties that bound me to Mystic Falls seemed like the way to go." He braves a glance at her, glad to see her expression is one of understanding and unsurprised that it's also more guarded than he'd like for it to be. "And I know I talked to Alaric every week, and I know that I answered when Elena called, and I know you think it's because you were the easiest to cast aside."
Her brows arch. "Do you want to wait here while I go fetch the crystal ball I'm now convinced you own, or…?"
He pauses, tongue darting out to lick his lips as he struggles to propel the words from his mouth. The image of her eyes, hurt and angry and everywhere in between, flashes across his mind, and he freezes. There wouldn't be months of friendship lost between them if he'd only apologized when she first found him in Savannah, if he'd only told the truth and admitted that yes, I do still care, if he hadn't driven her to see him as another name on the list of people willing to hurt her.
Because he's not.
Never again.
"Caroline, you're the one I wanted to distance myself from the most because you're the only one that could convince me to come back. To...face my problems head-on instead of running away from them."
A beat of silence, then another.
"Okay."
He reels back in surprise. "Okay?"
"Okay." She turns her gaze back to the ceiling, blowing out a long breath. "I told you I hated you because it felt like I was in too deep, and I really, really, didn't want to be. Your friendship means the world to me, and realizing that I had these...feelings, only to have you do everything in your power to keep me from being able to reach out to you…it felt too familiar. Matt walked out when he found out I wasn't who he wished I was, and Tyler walked out because he put revenge before me. It hurt so much, realizing I wasn't enough to make someone stay, realizing that I was the only one fighting, that by the time you put me in a position I'd already been in, I was done. I am done," she says resolutely, shoulders squared against a protest he won't ever give. "I won't fight for anyone that's not willing to do the same for me. Not even for you, Stefan."
"Good. You deserve nothing less."
Her gaze snaps to his, eyes wide and searching. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She hasn't moved or even breathed, as far as he can tell, but Stefan feels a definite shift in the air around them. Suddenly, he's very aware of the proximity between their faces, how it feels like he's too close to her and not close enough. Weirdly enough, another thing he zeroes in on is that her toes are touching the bridge of his foot. It seems unusually intimate to him in a way that hand-holding and intense-gazing doesn't, their feet touching.
Deliberately, he shifts so that his feet tangle with hers. It feels like a defining moment, somehow.
"The footsie's not helping matters, you know."
"Nonsense, everyone could do with a little more foot play in their lives," he teases, running his toes along the arch of her foot to prove his point. She's looking at him, eyes bright with a mirth he hasn't seen since while you were out flirting with yet another British man, and he hopes that she uses this moment to anchor her for however long it will take her to heal.
"Not if you expect this monologue of corny thoughts to stop running through my head."
He feels the corners of his mouth tick up in a smile, but he doesn't respond. He wants to tell her to let those corny thoughts run wild, to never reign them in, but her mother died no more than five hours ago, and despite all of Caroline's deflections on the matter, he won't drop something like that on her tonight.
She sighs after a moment. "I just wanted to tell you. There's so many things I wish I'd told my mom, and now I can't. She'll never know that Bonnie took the fall for breaking grandma's vase when I crashed into it after convincing her that it was a great idea to ride our bikes inside the house, she won't get to go on the trip to Boston I was saving up to take her on, she won't see me get the first of the twenty degrees I promised her I'd receive throughout the span of my vampire lifetime. There's just─" her voice hitches, and her hands come up to hide her face. "Well, that lasted a good fifteen minutes."
"C'mere," he says, pulling his hand out of hers and stretching his arm out in invitation. She goes willingly, burying her face into his neck and wrapping an arm around his waist, and Stefan can't really describe the relief he feels at her lack of hesitation. With her in his arms, the hollowness he felt in her absence becomes even more pronounced, and he can't help but press his palm flat against her back in an effort to pull her closer, just to assure himself that she's really there with him.
He feels her wet eyelashes graze the underside of his jaw as she blinks, mumbling something incoherently.
"Hmm?"
"I don't want to flip the switch."
Stefan immediately tenses, each line of his body going rigid with worry.
He...shit, he hadn't even thought about that.
Thinking back on Elena's actions when she turned off her emotions, he imagines Caroline in her place: Caroline ruthlessly tearing into strangers' necks with the intent to kill, Caroline trying to shove a stake through her friend's heart, Caroline ruining everything and everyone in her path in order to destroy any inkling of feeling that may still linger.
The thought hurts more than he'd care to admit.
"Then you won't," he answers, and the assurance must sound as brittle to Caroline's ears as it does to his, because she raises herself from her position to stare at him dubiously. He knows how all-consuming and destructive grief can be, knows that she can say this one minute and decide the opposite the next, and Stefan can't bear to think about that right now, not when he may have just gotten her back.
It's a pretty convoluted thought, because isn't his being selfish how he lost her in the first place?
"I had a front-row seat to how Elena behaved when she was sans emotions, and she became someone I didn't recognize. I mean, it took Matt dying to get her to come back to normal. I couldn't handle it if I took the easy way out and ended up hurting somebody. I just...I know it hasn't really sunk in yet. I know it's going to be harder tomorrow, and the next day, and the next week, and I'm going to want to turn it off."
She sounds so afraid, so resigned to the idea of not being able to overcome this special dose of anguish, and he decides to take a page straight from the Caroline Forbes handbook.
"Whenever you hear that voice telling you to turn it off, trying to convince you to just give in, let me know. I won't let it happen."
It's faintly reminiscent of come to me, whenever you want, and I won't let you lose control, and he knows she must sense that too, because her entire face relaxes and she lowers herself onto his chest without further discussion.
"Why is there an inverse relationship between missing someone and the time that they've been gone?" she asks a couple of beats later, voice small in the darkness of her dorm room. The thumb that had been absently rubbing circles over her elbow comes to a stop at her inquiry. "The first hours, days, weeks...they're the hardest, right? Why? I mean, how is it that their absence is that much more pronounced when their corpse hasn't even decayed yet?"
"I don't know," he answers honestly.
"Grief is weird."
He thinks about drinking himself to oblivion when Damon died, about the bitterness he felt at waking up each morning with the knowledge that his brother would never see another sunrise, about the weight that pressed down on his heart each time Caroline's name appeared on his phone's screen and how it only became heavier upon pushing decline.
"Yeah, it is," he agrees, craning his neck to look down at her, "but good thing you're familiar with weird, huh?"
She lets out a sob that's trying to disguise itself as a laugh, nodding against his chest. "Yeah."
"Go to sleep. I'll still be here when you wake up."
"Will you?"
He swallows down the pang of hurt he feels at the doubt that laces her question. He knows he deserves it. "As long as you want me here, I'm here. Promise."
She seems to accept this answer, because the hand that's fisted in his shirt gradually relaxes, and after a few minutes, the only sound saturating the air is of her breathing, soft and steady. Caroline falls asleep pressed against him, her leg tucked between his, and Stefan tries not to read too much into the fact that their position doesn't make him want to run far, far away.
Again, this isn't the first time they've cuddled; he distinctly remembers Caroline's head pressed in the juncture between his neck and shoulder and waking up wrapped around her, his hand having reached over to cover hers in sleep. Really, that should've been the moment that the proverbial alarms in his head went off, and, for what seems like the millionth time, he's in awe of how oblivious to his own feelings he was.
Thing is, Stefan's never really been one for soft intimacy with those who don't have a straight path to his heart. Sex with women he has no emotional attachment to, he can do, but the snuggling? The holding hands?
For crying out loud, before Caroline, there had only been two people whom he'd felt comfortable hugging, and one of them was his big brother.
Everything just comes so naturally with her in a way that it never has with anyone else. Throughout the course of their friendship, he'd often surprised himself with how he behaved around her; how he was the one pulling her out onto the dance floor, or how he would smile and laugh and joke with ease, or that every time he found himself in her presence, he let his merciless self-loathing take the backseat for a while. When he's upset, the person he wants to talk to is Caroline. When something funny happens as he's walking down the street, the person he wants to laugh with as he recounts the story is Caroline. When he thinks of how he could become a better man, he thinks of being more optimistic, of not giving up so easily, of taking more chances with himself; all of which are qualities he observes in Caroline.
It shocks him to realize that he doesn't want that to change. He doesn't want someone else to inspire him or to challenge him or to tease him.
All he wants is what only Caroline can give, and he feels that in his fucking marrow.
Of course, he's going to have to wait a while, until the devastation of her mom's death is less pronounced, but he can do that. He wants to do that.
He wants to fall asleep like this with her, wants her face to be the one he wakes up to, he wants to walk through town hand-in-hand, listening to her rant and rave about an upcoming event she's dragging him to or what classes are giving her trouble. He wants to make her smile, and travel with her, and tell her all about the horrible things he's done, the names and faces that will haunt him 'til his dying day. He wants her to have some of his clothes in her drawers, wants her to know that he'll fight day in and day out for her, that he'll do whatever it takes to prove that he's unwilling to go through life without Caroline Forbes in it.
He's really going to do this.
Pursuing this could be tricky, he realizes. They might not work as something beyond the comfortable realm of friendship they've built for themselves, or she might change her mind and realize he's not as deserving of her love as she believes him to be, but damn it all to hell, Stefan wants it to work.
He really, really wants it to work.
Checking to see that her breathing is even, he presses a light kiss to her damp hair. She stirs, curling herself closer into his side, and Stefan sighs, looking up at her ceiling as he drapes an arm gently around her back.
He's going to have to call Damon tomorrow and tell him he and Miss Cuddles weren't so far off.