this is what happens when I spend my summer break on tumblr. Obviously I don't own Vampire Diaries.
Summary: She was Caroline. He was Kol. This was the time they didn't get. AU.
This is the way it was.
"Is that her?" Rebekah teased lightly, smiling at the way her brother's eyes light from within as a reaction. But Kol is of a larrikin heart and laughs off his sisters antics in a way that their elder siblings could never suffer to.
They carry on working, washing that which has been hunted or gathered in preparation for its use in the village celebrations, Rebekah watching Kol and Kol watching her.
She practically dances as she walks, she glides, she floats, she walks as if nature itself given human form, as if the breeze and the grass caress and bow before her.
These are the thoughts of a boy in love.
The family of Mikael are fearsome creatures. The village held in the iron grip of the patriarch means that though polite and welcoming of the strength and protection they afford, they are somehow held in a class their own and few approach them for anything but necessity. They are magick and danger.
She darts to and fro, speaking a word to this woman and smiling at that man, telling the children to run along and directing the flow of supplies for the merriment where she finds them most pleasing. If the people are a river then she is an island within it and every coursing drop must brush her edges and seek her permission to move forwards.
Rebekah and Kol interact only with each other.
Still, she tosses her head and the world is alight.
She calls to him and beneath the horror (hunger) his heart beats anew as he always knew it would.
Her thunderous approach is overshadowed by the haunting of blood within his ears and in seconds the world is alight once more before bleeding to embers and leaving his world dark.
He runs and never looks back.
"Have you seen Tatia? I last took note of her with your mother at dusk and she is most prone to wander."
This is the way it could have been.
"Would you, would you like to dance?" The firelight is grandiose, raging as though fed on hopelessly stolen hearts and he finds himself at her side and asking before he can even recognise the words are his own tongue.
She smiles like she's been waiting for this her whole life, gives him her hand and this feels like forever.
"I thought you'd never ask."
It is her household that keeps the disgraced Tatia, a woman of several summers' longer life than they have and her own childhood companion. The childish affection of youthful conspirators never fades from her fairy heart and drives her to trek into the thick forest when the wayward woman lingers after dark in her wanderings. Kol never strays from her side during these trips and when Tatia will appear, rumpled, sheepish and lagging in a way he knows is more than simply lost time he glibly smiles and sets a strolling pace to allow her partner the time to return to the village well before their own party.
There are no words in his tongue for her light, but he thinks that acceptance and love will do until he may coin his own.
She takes to Rebekah and he wonders what he's unleashed. Seeing them together, talking and laughing in a way his baby sister has never had makes him wonder if perhaps she would heal the rift, in their family and in their community. By will alone she could pull down their walls.
Finn finds her boisterous and Elijah, Innocent. Esther merely smiles as the dutiful hostess yet worries at the wilful spirit her company has invoked in Rebekah and Henrik believed she hung the stars themselves when she told him she knew an actual werewolf.
Mikael cannot touch her as the village darling and so exists in an uneasy truce to her sudden invasion of their lives and time. In his sight she is the path to greater influence. In hers he is a beast.
It after she reins him from an attack on Niklaus that he realises she has taken up another's sight to wander also.
"Humour, a well-honed wit is the sign of a warrior destined for greatness to my father's thinking." She smiles; sidling up to Niklaus' side and disrupting the warpath the beast was clear on. "It shows intelligence and quick thinking. I see the great wisdom in that, surely you agree Mikael?"
He comes across her acting the part of chaperone in the towns centre, smiling politely as Elijah greets her but paying only token attention to the conversation as it evolves between Tatia and his brothers.
He takes note of Nik's gaze as it wavers between the two women, both taken and each holding the heart of a brother in their hands. One cherishing, one playing. He approaches, calling with extra, forced joviality and she turns, oblivious of his revelation and smiles in welcome.
He can almost feel her careful hands cradling that which beats within his chest.
She fills with childish awe whenever he or Rebekah commits their small displays of magic and bounces around, asking and prodding and grinning so brightly he thinks a candle has been lit inside of her.
They lose their precarious balance.
One moment things are bathed in light and the next, Henrik breathes no more and Mikael rages with a force not ever her presence would temper so he works to keep them from his family and she accepts it as his way of grieving.
The unexplained rift between Ayana and Esther forces him back into the fold and far from her for several days. It is bordering past dusk and he is returning to the house earlier than intended with firewood when she approaches and startles him.
Her footsteps were quick and silent, so unlike her meandering declaration of a prance that he takes note.
"Have you seen Tatia?" Her words came rushed and thick with worry. "The last anyone saw of her she was conversing with Esther but the sun had not yet dropped then and she promised me she would avoid the woods today."
He tells her to return home and if she does not appear she should come by his own in an hour, that he will make inquiries with his mother and that she should not worry. Esther and Tatia have much to discuss after all and she acquiesces, eager to believe the illusion he painted with his words.
He struggles to bury the feeling of finality in his bones as he crossed his own threshold.
The tableau he sets upon freezes him in place and the goblet, fresh from being filled in a wicked means is moved from the cooling body to his mouth before he realises what is being forced upon him. He is the first but will not be the last.
With a sword in his chest she is his final word.
When he awakens she is his first also as she stares vacantly ahead, led in by the hand by Mikael who tells him he must drink.
It all becomes chillingly clear as that sword is drawn again and he sets upon her with blind relish.
He never could stop himself when it came to her.
He can hear her heart stuttering as he cries over her prone form and in a rebuke against his mother and all she stands for he remembers Ayana and her words of equal and opposite actions.
Frantically, he slits his own wrist and pours the stolen blood into her mouth in recompense, pleading to the magic he can feel abandon him.
She swallows once to choke out something that might be his name before her heart stills.
She is light and love and still carefully cradles his heart when she awakens and tells him she's Hungry.
This is the way it will be.
He is far from the boy who believed in light and love and then crushed it, yet he still feels something the second his eyes dance across that familiar vessel.
His larrikinism has developed into something far more sinister and this will never be what it once could have but she's not what she once was either. It seems as if all the worlds aflame, her hands have grasp of his still heart and it all feels so familiar.
He's already thinking up something to say, some caviller throw away remark to cover his slip but the words simply won't leave his lips. Say it with me now; she looks like a tasty little thing.
"Is that her?" Rebekah drawls loudly.