A/N: So this is just a collection of drabbles I've put up on tumblr, which have, until now, not been published anywhere else. I thought I would group them all together into one document on this site for anyone who missed them the first time around, or would like to read them again. These are just little things, not terribly serious, mostly just some smut and/or prompts people shoved in my face until I couldn't not write them. Most are Klaroline, however, not all are- there is also some Rebekah/Caroline, as well as a Klefaroline fic I wrote a while back. I'll label the pairings either in each chapter title itself, or the author's note, so that you guys don't stumble across something you don't want to read. I've got to poke around my computer to try and round them all up, so I'll post these as I find them/remember to do so. I think there are about six fics I've never published on here before.
This one was just a little something that popped in my head, because who doesn't need to see Original!Caroline as a mafia boss, carrying on a torrid affair with a certain blue-eyed, dimpled underling? Featuring: newborn Klaus, rippah Stefan, and Kol as himself, because what else does he need to be?
He listens to the thundering of rain, the hissing of tires, the faraway murmuring of the people, that unvarying heartbeat of the metropolitan society.
Stefan holds up a finger.
Beyond the door, just round the corner, up the stairs, there is the movement of half a dozen bodies, the soft whispering of their exhales, the rolling fog of their cigars, the clinking of poker chips, the shuffling of cards, of feet, of nervous hands.
Kol slicks back his hair and winks.
He wonders:
Does a heart, in its final moments, sense with its thousand years of evolution the coming end; does it beat more rapidly to compel the body to move, to bear itself along on this wave of bitter metal adrenaline; does it understand that though this morning you rolled from a bed tonight you lay down in a box?
Stefan flicks up his index finger.
He smells:
The smog of this great industrial cluster squatting round him on all sides, the underarm stench of the unwashed, the cloying chemicals of the overly-primped, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand sensations to close round his head with a surging like the tide, burying him beneath its foam.
Waiting is no longer an itch in his fingers, a frisson down his back, a tightening of throat, of stomach, of bowels.
His nerves no longer irritate but cramp, distort, buckle him.
To feel everything a thousand thousand thousand times- how is he to go on for another century, three, four, with this load upon his shoulders?
The rain does not merely sting but stabs him.
The sirens split his head.
The blood thunders in his veins.
His heart leaps against his ribs and the saliva floods his mouth and just the grating of Kol's sneaker along the pavement- what a bloody noise it makes-
Enjoy it, she tells him.
There are some things worth being heightened.
Stefan pops forth his final finger.
Kol kicks open the door.
He surges round the corner and up the stairs and he takes his first shot with a smile on his face, and wouldn't you know it-
Right as always, love.
There is always a brief moment of respite.
For just a moment, infinitesimal to the human eye but elongated to his own, the mind must process this sudden interruption of routine.
Your hand has just set down your drink.
Your mate has just picked up his own.
You eye your prospects, you put forth your cards, you let for just a moment the laughter from the next room over shift your attention from this round you have already lost.
Drink.
Inhale, exhale, shuffle- what a robotic existence all man settles for.
Round and round we go.
Your lungs inflate, your heart beats, your body runs itself always along this track from which it will never veer though you are no longer steering the cars.
Until one day it does.
Your mate with glass in hand reels backward with his shirt shredded to pieces, his drink shivering apart to splinters, his lips thick with the foam of his lungs, and how you must fight to process this sudden reversal of his eternal fate.
He pumps his shotgun.
Kol leaps onto the table, upsetting the chips, and swings until one of the players' faces crumples.
And now comes the bloody fight, the skirting of death, that intoxicating little threat.
This brief respite ends with the sudden chattering of machine gun fire, and he flips the table with Kol still on top of it.
His brother rolls himself out of the way and behind him Stefan opens fires with his .45, pressing himself flat against the wall of the open-ended kitchen.
There is no time to fear, in a moment like this.
The guns vomit their acrid smoke, but forward you push, onward you move, firing as you go.
There is the clattering of his shells, the hollow click of the plastic, the resonating tink of the primer, his brother's voice coarsened by smoke and shout, the low rattling of Stefan's pistol, the higher voice of the automatic, squeezing off continuous bursts through flame and fog and blood-
Kol's bat, shattered across his knee with a snap-
The siren wailing of some innocent three flats above-
You have never truly experienced death, behind your computer, at your controller, in leaden awe before your television.
Blood in your teeth, bone beneath your fist, the screaming, the pleading-
In a thousand years, will this too become merely another thing to be endured?
He sincerely hopes not.
He empties the final shell from his chamber and spins the shotgun in his hand with a smile, swinging it like that bloody bat Kol is so fond of.
Stefan materializes beside him.
Kol pops up at his other shoulder.
"Did you miss me?" Kol asks as the machine gunner spends his final round and with a hiss drops his fangs instead.
Stefan flashes round behind him.
Kol skewers him with the tip of his splintered bat.
And his mate-
What a shame.
How fascinating, though, the shape a shotgun butt can press a face into, when you put your back into it just a bit.
They sweep on.
Stefan shoots two through the heart, Kol has his back while he reloads, he closes the action with a snap.
Another throws himself through the doorway with pistol in hand, firing blindly as he goes.
Fantastic.
He shoots the boy twice in the head.
"Nope," she says.
"I said, 'Be. More. Funny.'"
She leans back.
She puts her feet up on her desk.
At the other end of the leash she holds casually in one hand, Damon Salvatore grimaces, his wooden collar digging its spikes into his neck, and now he opens his mouth to pop off with something she is just sure is never going to meet her expectations.
She seems to have bled him dry.
No pun intended.
She hears Klaus' laugh down the corridor, and she gives another sharp tweak of the leash.
"Never mind. Amy?"
The girl pops her head instantly through the door adjoining her office to the room next door, eyebrows lifted, hands in a sweaty little twist before her. "Put Mr. Salvatore back in his cage. I'm done with him for today."
The boys' footsteps come thundering down the hall, Klaus' leading, Stefan's just a moment behind, Kol's bringing up the rear.
Amy takes the leash from her hand and leads Damon away by the throat, the door clicking shut behind her.
She sits forward with her palms together, fingertips touching her nose.
"Having a good day, brother?" she hears Stefan ask with that little shit-eating tone of his, and now comes the soft little slap of his playful cheek pat, Kol's mocking tweak of the nose, that little freaking laugh of his brother's which does not set her heart to flight or her veins to surging, it does not turn her mouth to sawdust, she feels none of its echoes in her clenching stomach, she hasn't lived a goddamned thousand years to be brought to her knees by this curly-haired newb.
The door opens.
"And how was the act tonight? Yes?" Stefan holds up one hand and taps the other softly against it. "Or?" He separates them and flattens his mouth regretfully as he draws a finger across his throat.
"It was boring, actually. Your brother needs to step up his game, before I decide to eat him and be done with it. There will always be some idiot who can't look past the cute little curls and the adorable smile." She fluffs her hair and scrunches up her nose. "I'd say that maybe the next time he tries to violate a girl in a dark alleyway, he'll maybe think about who he might be trying to victimize, but there won't be a next time."
Klaus is already smiling when he steps through the door.
She falters just slightly, and leans back once more in her chair, putting her feet back up on the desk. "Shut the door," she tells Kol.
"Uh, oh," he says, nudging it closed with his heel. "I think we're about to get spanked."
"So." She twists from side to side in her chair, letting her eyes skitter just briefly over Klaus, settling them instead on his brother, on Stefan, flitting back and forth between these two men who though they face her with such casual smiles are still just a bit scared, underneath it all.
She just adores the smell of fear.
Go on, boys, let your little hearts just rabbit.
"I heard the three of you had a good time over at the Donnollys'."
"Very good, actually," Kol agrees.
"I'm glad. I hope your little adrenaline high can bolster you, in these next few minutes." She leans forward, pressing her hands down into the polished cherry wood of her desk. "Because I don't remember ordering that hit. So I'd like to hear an explanation as to why I'm now going to have to deal with some sort of retaliation." She sits back once more, folding her arms across her chest, both boots crossing at the ankle. "You have two minutes. Impress me."
Kol begins to unbuckle his pants.
Stefan smirks.
"It stays in, or it gets cut off."
He stops his fumbling.
Klaus flashes his dimples and ducks his head, peeking back up from underneath his eyebrows.
Shelve your freaking googly eyes, Mikaelson.
"They called you fat," Stefan whispers. "We didn't want to say anything."
She rolls her eyes.
"We were looking for the white oak stake, actually," Klaus tells her, linking his hands behind his back.
"Really."
"Yes."
"So you were looking for the white oak stake that the Angevines are rumored to have…at the Donnollys'."
"A few of them may have gotten a little uppity with us the other day."
"So you pulled out your ding dongs and your rulers."
"There's no need for rulers, darling. It would be completely superfluous."
"It will be, if you don't stop talking without permission." She smiles pleasantly. "There's no point to measuring a stump."
Klaus smiles again.
"You wouldn't, Caroline- not when our love has yet to be consummated."
She rolls her eyes again. "You wouldn't live through that consummation."
"Nik, Stefan- does that sound like a challenge?"
"Sounds like a challenge to me," Stefan agrees.
"Sounds like you want your liver ripped out, little brother."
Caroline tilts her head. "At least somebody knows how to treat a lady."
"I'm sure he does ok. But does he have a tongue like-"
Klaus reaches out and casually breaks Kol's arm.
Stefan laughs.
She stands up. "Everybody out. We'll see how much shit hits the fan over this, and then I'll expect to see you back in here. Bring your best ass-kissing. I'm going to want to hear about how pretty and brilliant I am. Be creative. Ok?"
Kol gives a little hiss as his bones knit themselves back together. "I'll await your call, darling."
"Tell my brother it was good seeing him again, and that I'd like a post card now and again, you know?"
She waves them off. "Not you, Klaus. I need to talk to you for a second."
Kol gives Stefan a little pop on the ass and turns back with a nod and a thumbs up to Klaus as Stefan precedes him into the hall.
He blows her a kiss.
She shuts the door in his face.
Klaus has moved back toward her desk, that little smile still on his face, his T-shirt soaked against his chest, his jeans damp, his hair still with a fine mist of blood in it, his stubble slick with this same hot red dust.
She listens to their footsteps fading away down the hall, to their voices vanishing, to the shrill hinges of the door which admits them onto the street.
She leans her shoulders back against the door.
He takes a step forward.
"No," she snaps.
"Sit."
He smiles.
"In your seat? I thought that was a bit taboo, sweetheart."
"On the desk."
He backs away with his hands up, still smiling, his curls ruffled, his boots each their own little separate heartbeat against the wax-polished floor.
He sits down slowly, and he leans forward with both eyebrows raised, folding his hands between the open v of his knees.
She locks the door behind her.
"If I may," he says, never dropping that little dimply goddamned smile of his, "it was Kol's idea."
"Really," she replies, and in a blink she crosses the room to seize his hair in her hand, wrenching back his head, baring his throat, bringing one knee up to rest it on the desk beside his thigh.
She brings her other knee up.
He grabs a handful of her ass and surges forward against her fingers to kiss the tops of her breasts, just visible over her shirt, making his way up her collarbone to her shoulder, her throat, her chin.
She yanks his head back again, and she leans down to kiss him until he lets out a jagged little breath against her lips and shudders underneath her.
She kisses his bottom lip, drops her fangs for a brief taste, slides them back up to just hold his cheeks in her hands for a moment and sit there breathing against him, their lips barely brushing.
He opens his eyes to look at her, bringing his shaking hands up to brush them down either side of her head, his fingers sifting her curls as they go, and God, how carefully he watches her, like she is the only thing in this entire freaking world.
She throws him down on the desk.
He rips her shirt as she straddles him, snaps her flimsy bra between his fingers, presses an open-mouthed kiss to her nipple.
She grabs his head in both her hands, grinding her hips down frantically against him as her mouth drops involuntarily and she lets out this rough, rough breath, her throat seizing, her heart thumping, his mouth still working away at her breast, his teeth lightly scraping, his tongue skillfully flicking-
"One of the Angevines is dropping by today," she pants as he kisses toward her other breast, slipping his hand up her bare stomach to cup the one he has just left, his teeth closing gently around the other. "You have five minutes."
He undoes her jeans one-handed, his lips still moving reverently against her nipple, the hand at her zipper sliding around to push her pants down one hip and then the other, and now for a moment she breaks away to help him, lifting herself off him to slip her jeans all the way down to her ankles and kick them away over the side of the desk.
She tears one of the legs of his jeans getting them down, rips his shirt down the middle, kisses from navel to boxer waistband.
"And how am I supposed to walk out of here with no shirt and ripped trousers?" he asks breathlessly, kissing the top of her head once, twice as she slides her lips up his abs, his arm looping around her back, his hand steadying itself on her hip.
"You're not going to be able to walk at all, by the time I'm done with you."
He lays back against the desk and smiles up at her as she pins his hands down by the wrists. "I love it when you talk dirty to me."
"Stop talking, and put your cock in me. You're down to three minutes."
"I don't know what you're concerned about," he says silkily, smirking up at her. "I can have you screaming in one. But you already know that."
He flips them both over.
She yanks his boxers down.
He pushes her panties aside.
He leaves his cheek pressed to hers as he screws her, his hips hammering relentlessly away, his cock right freaking there, exactly where she needs it, his breath rattling in her ear, his hand fisting in her hair, both of them arching into one another, her leg hooking over his hip, her hands shredding his back-
Another surge and he comes with a sharp breath, pressing his lips to her hair, cradling her face with his other hand, his eyes shut, his hips still thrusting, that slick warm spurt inside her still going, and oh God, just once more, right where he is-
"Oh my God oh my God Klaus-" she cries out, and with another sharp cry she pulses around him, her toes curling, her nails burrowing deeper into his shoulder muscles, everything riding this intensely brief high.
He kisses her softly as she comes back down from it, and it has never, ever been an uncomplicated thing, for people like her.
But somehow she loves him, and somehow it is just that freaking simple.
He could stay up all night, just putting the contours of her face down to paper.
Sometimes he does.
Tatia always protested this odd little quirk of his, this insomnia that drives him to the pencil among the early gray hours of the morning, but on days she catches him bent over his pad sketching her where she lays, sheet pulled up to her hips, her pretty white cheeks sunk beneath layers of curls, she stretches her arms, she arches her back, she smiles up at him.
There are some things which cannot be put into words, and from this...void sprung art, which articulates all.
What he cannot say because his father choked it down inside of him, because Tatia transferred it to another, because his mother snatched it back when he needed it most-
It's all here, sweetheart.
She just loves the rain.
Maybe you're not the outdoors type. Maybe you prefer your ground carpeted, your sunlight filtered, your breezes kept always just at bay beyond screen, window, door.
But all the little nuances, brought out in a woodland fresh from the storm.
The branches shake down their own personal showers in little wet diamonds that catch the sunrise as they fall; the grass has borrowed from the sky the galaxy that simmered out when the first rays touched their long yellow fingers to the mountains, and the smells-
It's like…
Maybe there is a man way up high in that sky after all, and between first drop and final sprinkle, he has taken this great wet paintbrush, and he's smudged everything out.
If ever there comes at last that one moment in which everything is just…sloughed away, it will be on a morning like this, with the sludge poured into the gutter, with the buildings sluiced clean of their smog, with the streets swept empty of trash.
And how fabulously easy is it, to get all the bloodstains out of your brand new Burberry Brit blouse?
She wipes her hands on Donald Angevine's face, and she walks away smiling.
"The Angevines shot Brooklyn Donnolly this morning," he tells her in between kisses, his lips moving across each sliver of skin he bares as he inches her shirt up her stomach.
"What about her husband?" she asks breathily, curling her fingers into his hair.
"Got himself out a window." She feels him smile against her abs. "He may not have made it to the street."
She yanks him up from her stomach to kiss him roughly, wrapping her legs around his waist.
He brings both his hands to her cheeks, flicks his tongue out to meet hers, presses her back down into the bed as he kisses her, holding her face gently with his rough, rough palms.
"Well, I guess that's what he gets, for just leaving her behind like that. I mean, they were married for like 300 years."
"I wouldn't," he says breathlessly, sucking on her ear. "Leave you behind."
She goes very still underneath him.
You would not do what everyone else for a thousand years has done just like it is freaking breathing, it is that easy; you would not do what ten centuries ago her own freaking father did without batting an eye-
He pulls back to look at her, running his thumb down her cheek bone.
He leans in to kiss her, so lightly she barely even feels his lips against her own.
She holds him for a very long time that night, trailing one hand along his bare shoulder, down his arm, onto his knuckles.
There is a raid on one of the main warehouses.
An entire arsenal of weapons pinched, some of Caroline's best men cut down in a wooden rain, quite the little bill racked up in damage-
She takes care of it personally this time.
Two dozen of the Angevine clan, snuffed out in a blink, he hears.
Quite the sight.
Caroline scurrying here, there, now you see her, now you don't, all of them sweeping about their weapons in blind beast panic, firing wildly, disappearing with a scream and a sudden silencing of their weapon into the smoke, splashing up against walls, over chairs, across carpet-
"You should have brought me," he whispers, kissing her bare thigh.
"Too many of them. Their bullets annoyed me. They would have killed you."
She arches up as his tongue finds her clit.
He coaxes two orgasms out of her with lips and tongue and fingers, and then he fucks her with blood still in her hair and on her hands.
On a misty Tuesday, Kol is cut down in one of the lonely side streets, and brought home barely alive.
Klaus and Stefan drive a delivery van through the front window of the deli run by the Donnollys and open fire on everyone in the shop.
He leaves just one alive.
"Go back and tell your boss that if he lays a single finger on my brother again, I'll make him think Caroline Forbes is positively merciful."
He pats the boy's cheek and breaks four of his ribs with one steel-toed boot.
Stefan takes the boy's sunglasses from the collar of his shirt and flicks his nose with the tip of one of the earpieces.
"You look like a douche, mate," he says as Stefan slips them on over his nose.
"I'm making an exit," he says, and he flings the pipe bomb in his hand over one shoulder with an easy flick of his wrist.
The shop ignites with a great roar.
"You see how much less cool that would have been, without the glasses?"
She sends him out on a routine raid, just a little flexing of the muscle, that showmanship necessary to keep the peasants in their place, and with her heart in her throat, she switches on her TV to see the last survivors of this routine raid shot down in the street to die their dusty gray deaths.
He is not among them.
It's not a conscious choice, sitting down after something like that.
It's funny, how easily the legs still fail after a thousand years of famine, of plague, of war.
He spends half the bloody night making his roundabout way to her flat, shaking Angevines off his tail as he goes.
"Oh my God," she breathes when she opens the door to his knock, and for a moment she shuts her eyes, and she leans her forehead against her hand.
"Do not, do not, do not do that again," she snaps, and then she pulls him inside and she fists his jacket in her hands and buries her face against his chest.
"Have you ever stayed with anyone…permanently? Well, obviously not permanently, seeing as how they're not still around, but did you ever…want to?"
He has put down his charcoal and is looking at her so earnestly.
What are you trying to ask, she wants to know, keeping her face nonchalant and her hands steady as she buries her feet in the sheets they have knotted up at the end of the bed.
He looks down with a little breath and a smile, but she can see his knee bouncing beneath his sketchpad, his pulse pounding in his neck, his fingers twisting the garish silver settings of his daylight ring.
"The Donnollys…got married, didn't they? So it's done sometimes…with people like us."
"Yeah, it's not exactly the same as it is for humans. It's a little bit different when you're pledging an eternity, not a lifetime."
He picks up his charcoal again, fidgets it between his fingers, drops it back onto his pad with a hollow little tink that scatters a layer of loose black dust across the page.
"What if I wanted to?"
She tries not to feel her heart beating in her throat, her wrists, her thighs, all of her one single pulse, pounding, pounding, pounding.
She scoffs and looks away. "You're a kid. You have a very long ways to go before you know what you want."
"I'm thirty-three."
"And I'm a thousand and seventeen. You've barely even started."
"So you don't want to."
"Klaus." She presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose, rubs one foot along the other in this knot of sweat-scented bedcovers, looks up at him through her lashes.
"That's not what I said," she tells him, and what a smile his face breaks out into.
"Three on your left. One with a gun." She cocks her head. "The far right one."
And then she kicks in the door of Maria Angevine's cozy little flat, and she strides right into their midst, ripping out hearts as she goes.
He breaks that far right one across his knee, tosses him aside, shoots him as he flies, jams the barrel of his pistol into the gut of his friend and pulls the trigger three times in rapid succession as he fends off the last with an elbow to the man's jaw.
"Jackpot," she tells him, clicking back toward him with a smile, white oak stake held aloft.
He tucks his pistol back into the waistband of his trousers.
She loops her arm through his own.
Behind them, Maria Angevine's head slips with a moist splash from the counter where Caroline has jauntily set it to splatter itself noisily across the tile.
"All right," she says one night, examining her lipstick in the mirror of her vanity.
He looks over to her from the bed where he has stretched himself out, hands behind his bed, feet crossed at the ankle.
"You can marry me. Or, whatever, the vampire equivalent of that. Which is basically just a ring and the understanding that if anyone tries to back out, the other one gets to eat them."
She twists her head round to look at him over one shoulder.
He has sat up without even noticing this shift from horizontal to vertical, his hands nerveless on his knees.
She smiles.
"But you're going to have to prove to me that it's worth my time."
She crooks her finger.