A/N: Ok, so this thing came about because someone on tumblr mentioned that they would like to see a fic where Klaus was not woken from his dessication at the end of season 3, but a thousand years in the future, where Caroline rules the land as the queen that she is. This is a bit of a tweaked version of that, but it's what sparked the whole thing in the first place, which is why I'm mentioning it, since it didn't just pop into my head all on its own. This is AU after season 3, and a bit before as well-Alaric never stakes Klaus, no body-swapping, Elena was not turned, etc. etc. Basically most of the season 3 finale.
And do you see, dear tumblr followers, why you can't just post these little ideas that come into your head? BECAUSE I COME ALONG AND I READ IT AND I GO OH WOW NEATO THAT WOULD BE FUN AND I HAVE A LIFE YOU KNOW.
Also, you know, if anyone wanted to take this concept and run with it, turn it into something really great, with multiple chapters, a fully-realized world, that sort of thing, that would be just stunningly peachy. DO NOT FUCKING DARE MAKE A PEEP IN MY DIRECTION, MELISSA.
Death is never so easy a mantle to shed.
Though he sleeps only the impermanent slumber of the monster, his limbs bear the weight of human rust, his millennium bed frosted in sepulcher moss, his lids tacked down with time, that sticky adhesive of mortality.
For so long, he is suspended in this dry Egyptian death.
And then the first trickle.
The first oasis dribbling upon the baked lips.
A drip, a drop, a flow.
The tiny oscillation of the lashes, the faint twitch of the fingers.
The curtains drawn away, morning let in, light, that elusive phantom of all these dehydrated black years; white flashbulbs, red after spots, the scents inhaled at last through nostrils scorched to anosmia-
You must shake off the dust, oil the joints, exchange grave rust for beast litheness, exhale from the lungs their snowfall of bee pollen dust, move the arthritic toes, open the shriveled mouth, move, hear the popping of the joints, revel in the stretch of sinew, the lengthening of ligament, slide from your frozen shoulders a thousand years of crumbling desert inertia-
In a mere moment have you recovered these eras lost, the generations laid to rest in marble memoriam, all the technology you have not witnessed and the great artists you have not experienced- no, give it another moment, a few more seconds on this internal clock you have wound to your own perceptions, look, feel, taste-
Your eyes scrape roughly against the lids.
Your tongue scours lips, your fingers sandpaper cheeks.
You blink once, twice, again, and there we are, the lids flicker smoothly now, the lashes lift easily, the pupils look, focus, absorb.
And now the mouth: the working of jaw, the guppying lips, the baring of teeth sharpened to taste.
Warm throat, copper death- skim your fingers along this bent neck, feel the life just there, beating beneath pale white flesh: listen to it rabbit, slow, fade- knot these fingers which have begun at last to regain their dexterity in the hair, revel in this sensation which for ten centuries has evaded you as breath shirks your dormant lungs-
"Amara! Pull her away, goddammit! He's going to kill her."
For a moment, he shuts his eyes.
For centuries he has drifted along in his hallucinatory fog waiting for the cracking of lid, the exclamations of discovery, the touch of tentative fingers.
And do you know, like a bloody boy idiot he imagined always the first voice to touch these ears which for ten lifetimes have had nothing but pale memories to be hers.
Changed her mind at last, shirked friends for foe, come round to his promise: in a year or a century, we'll find each other, love-
But no.
She has left him to rot.
She has snuffed all the things he has bloody well seen in her eyes when she looks at him and she has sealed him away and she has gone on to adventure in Paris, to tour Tokyo, to settle down in Rome.
Give him back this serene slumber of the deceased, where man may live out this most implausible fantasy of all, love, storybook invention of the hopelessly stupid.
"Klaus Mikaelson?" he hears, and he snaps open his eyes and he sits up in this millennial bed to dust the years from his sleeves. "We have a…proposition. Regarding your family."
He swivels his head round in a slow predatory swivel, and look at the little sweethearts just cower.
Magnificent, the sweating, the twitching, the cringing he still inspires centuries after he has been set down and forgotten among the pages of legends.
He smiles.
He swings his legs over the side of the casket and he takes his first step in ten centuries, just a fumbling human thing, but how fantastic it feels, to set heel to rock, to feel all the separate little quivering of the hamstrings, the thigh muscles, the calf tendons.
It's possible he's amenable to an alliance against these people who have buried him deep and left him behind.
Another snack might put him in a touch more acquiescent mood.
The little one on the left- aren't you a pretty thing now, sweetheart?
All that blonde hair.
He emerges with red lips, yellow eyes, his first footfall upon true ground cracking the earth in a rifle shot beneath him.
Interesting, the shape time has molded from this pliable clay that is Mother Earth.
Had a touch of the next ice age, have we?
She wears her winter well, Mother Earth. Bit bland, for his taste, but all that bright white powder, the glancing of sun along stalagmite, the simmering of daylight in the polished mirror of this new arctic world- a thousand years in the tomb has not taken the stick to his artist's eye.
He wipes his mouth.
He leaves below their pathetic death whimpers and he walks forward into the sun.
"I said put it over there. How many times do I have to tell you? No- you know what, don't answer that. Let's just establish right now that if I have to tell you again, you're going to find out why, bratty as she can be, Rebekah is not even close to the more feared of the two of us. Got it?" she demands, and with a dismissive flicker of her hand she gestures away this sweaty little man with his fingers full of floral arrangement.
He scurries away down the hall.
"Caroline?"
"You, over there. You, that way. And oh my God, Marcia, if you walk out of that kitchen one more time to do anything other than inform me that the Chateaubriand is ready, and that it's perfect, I will pluck your head off, and I will display it in the Gallery next to that one really ugly Picasso Rebekah refuses to get rid of. Understand? Away," she snaps.
"Caroline."
"What?"
Jeeves inclines his head with a whirring of smoothly-oiled gears, flicking his metal lids, whispering his soft rubber-capped feet across the marble-patterned floor beneath them, his steel lips cranking wide in creepy Manson enthusiasm, because that little shit Kol has messed with the settings yet again, and she just swears if this thing grabs her boob one more single freaking time, he and Marcia are going to double team that ugly Picasso. "There is a gentleman here to see you."
"Well, he can wait. If he wants an audience, he can just take a number. I've already got two waiting, and Rebekah's still out, and I don't have time right now-"
The doors to the antechamber thunder open.
She drops the data pad she is holding.
"Well, I suppose this bumps me up to the front of the list, now doesn't it? I may have cut in line a bit."
He drops the heads he is holding.
He smiles. "Poor lads. Lost their heads a bit- all that waiting, I suppose."
"Klaus," she whispers.
"Hello, Caroline."
Just like the day he left her, of course: the cream cheeks, that fantastic hair in its artist's shade of Naples Yellow.
Have you any idea, love, of how often he has applied his mind in a fine paintbrush stroke to the careful preservation of this memory, how he has stored away this precise shade, the exact angle of sun, moonlight, sallow winter sky on the strands and all the myriad gradations of white, gold, auburn they bring out; have you any idea how large his heart swelled and how small it shriveled with hope, that bloody abominable weed with its roots to the very bottom- your face hovering over him, Caroline, that was all he bloody wanted-
She blinks.
She stoops carefully to pick up this little flashing device she has dropped on the floor, and she faces him with steel in her spine and fire in her eyes.
"I'm hosting a banquet tonight. It's going to be perfect. I know you're all for dramatic entrances, but if you ruin this? Well, I'm sure you probably heard my earlier threats. And I really don't want to put your head on a stick- Rebekah will be in a mood for, God, centuries probably," she says so casually, glibly, fearlessly, and he loves her.
What a bloody simple thing it is, this sentiment he has tried for so long to root out, stamp down, burn away.
Always will it find a breach, this feeling he took in hand and he beat to nothing long ago.
What a shame, sweetheart.
Capture his heart, forfeit your life.
Seems a rather unfair tradeoff, of course, your smile meant only to distract, not enthrall, snare, entrap, but what's a monster to do- slip one prison, step into another- no, love.
He thinks not.
Time enough for this later, though, of course.
"Where is my sister?" he asks, and must this question really come out so raw?
"Nik," she breathes, and she knocks him to the floor with the exuberance of her embrace, and she sits holding his face against her neck while she cries.
Hadn't she tired of him- didn't she abandon him, dear Bekah, to endless silence, to excruciating thirst, to life spent always in contemplation of everything he has missed because she has not the heart to see him set foot once more upon the mortal plane, to take up his place beside her for all of existence- didn't she like mother before her stop wanting him?
"We couldn't find you- we didn't have time before Alaric chased us out of town and once Elena kicked the bloody bucket- we looked, Nik, but we never knew-"
"Bonnie hid you with some kind of spell," Caroline explains when Bekah can no longer go on. "She…died not long after casting it. We tried to get other witches to trace it somehow, but they couldn't pick up the trail."
"We?" he asks, and he peels his face from Rebekah's neck and he sits blinking up into this face which time has not so much as grazed, and when has he last been so utterly wrecked by a mere word?
Did she come looking for him then, love?
Did she leave him not to die alone his ten thousand deaths in silent pantomime, in that mind which like his tomb locked him away in the past, to live for ten very long lifetimes Stefan's final betrayal, his family's last indifference?
She has forgotten how much boy there still is, lurking beneath this old man with his impossible geriatric years.
His mom froze him in his 20s, these uncertain transitory years of those who are no longer children, who are not quite adults, and though time has come, and it has eroded them all, it has not taken away this uncertain human kid, this terrible, terrible man who strode in here with death in his hands, who looked her over like something to be consumed, who just missed his family.
"Well, it's not like I had much of a choice," she downplays. "Rebekah spent like the first half of my life going on and on about you, threatening all my friends-basically just throwing the world's longest temper tantrum."
But she softens it with the smallest of smiles, when he can only go on blinking up at her.
"He looks best in the Italian style; he'd swim in a British or an American cut. Which means you measure here and here," Bekah snaps at the little robotic tailor flitting about on humming jets, one thin weather vane arm angled out to fire with bright strobe light pulse the vaguely gun-shaped object in its hand; he watches numbers pass in a neon flurry over its surface, recede into black nothing, appear in a jumble once more as this strange device moves down arm, across shoulders, round hips. "It'll need to be taken in at the shoulders and the hips; it won't be your grandest debut considering the short notice, but it'll do."
He smiles a little into the mirror as Bekah holds first one tie and then another to his neck, white ribbon, black bow, each of them exchanged in a blur, her lips pursed, head cocked, hand batting in absentminded irritation at this little droning thing darting about his throat.
"The blue one," it advises.
"Thank you, but your input is not wanted. Who programmed this bloody thing? Caroline!"
"What?" she demands, in the doorway in an instant. "What do you want? I'm busy handling all the eight million things we still have to get done for this dinner while you play dress-up Ken."
"Did you re-set this thing again? To your specific standards? And by that I mean atrocious, of course. It just recommended a bloody blue tie with this."
"What's wrong with a blue tie? It would set off his eyes. It looks better than that nasty little red thing you're holding up right now."
Bekah makes a strangled little protest in the back of her throat. "Are you bloody kidding me? You'd think a thousand years would have washed the plebian out of you, but clearly it's still lingering after all these years if you think for a moment that-"
"That what? He shouldn't look like he ate and then vomited back up the traditional tailor we should have gone with? I told you that thing breaks down all the time. It's too sensitive to the cold."
"So you admit it's malfunctioning right now, agreeing with your taste." Bekah smiles.
Caroline crosses her arms.
"No, I'm saying why the hell did you call me up here to help dress your brother when the caterers just brought in the dessert course and we have four trays of caramel ganache tarts, some brandied plums, for God's sake -where the hell did they even find those- in someone's freaking attic?- and not a single strawberry savarin? I don't care if he comes to the table naked if everything will just sort itself out and look and taste and just be flawless, and perfect, and everything that tie is not."
"You'd mind it even less if I did come to the table naked, love," he replies with a dimpled smirk to the mirror which reflects back her exasperated glare.
"Shut up," Bekah snaps, and slaps him sharply across the arm. "Don't flirt with her. She's being impossible."
"I'm being impossible? I have a very important alliance to form with the Badeaus, and instead of strategizing, I have been all day in and out of the kitchen because the staff has chosen today of all days to be completely incompetent-"
"You shouldn't even be in the bloody kitchen! That's for the help, Caroline!"
"Which is incompetent! I just told you that! What am I supposed to do, let them screw everything up? Tonight?"
"You think everyone's incompetent."
"Well, I wouldn't have to think that if they would just do things the way I told them to in the first place," she shouts with a little toss of her hands, and she stomps away down the stairs, barking orders as she goes.
Bekah strikes him once more. "Stop smiling like an idiot."
He is alone in this magnificent state room Rebekah has assigned him when he hears upon the stairs the first thundering steps of their arrival.
Elijah has changed his cologne, Kol wears only his last meal, but still he recognizes these brothers who have altered so little though time has put between them a great snowdrift of years, century piled upon century.
"Niklaus," Elijah says with understated smile, straightened tie.
"How'd you like a taste of your own medicine, brother?" Kol wants to know with quirked eyebrows, insufferable smirking ass face, and three broken vases and a litany of threats from Bekah later, they are drinking together in the banquet room.
He watches her descend like a queen.
A thousand years ago she strode so similarly into his mother's home and she suspended within him everything he for ten centuries kept moving out of habit, heart, lungs, blood, all of him sealed away inside this one moment which swept from the world everything that was not her.
Eliminate from this world this one tiny ant girl who with fingers not half so old as his own has reached somehow inside him and pulled into the light everything Mikael forced away into hiding, he thinks with knotted throat and churning stomach, and then he steps to the staircase and he crooks out his arm for the hand she sets lightly down on the banister.
Caroline-
Once a very long time ago he poured himself into a girl who with batting lashes and playful smiles took his affection as though she meant to give it back, and instead brought it round to always the more deserving of the two, Elijah the noble, purebred luminary of his father's life.
You never knew this boy, this timid creature who for three days fought his shriveled coward's tongue just to croak an inaudible "hello" to this girl who had at her disposal any one of the far more daring village lads.
He fell so hard, love.
He courted cautiously, he shared recklessly, he gave to this girl everything he dreamt, feared, wanted.
You expose the chest, bare the throat, and how naïve, to assume no stake will pierce your heart, no knife will score the neck, but to let go is to believe in precisely this, to give in to this most base of man's emotions, to trust that though this hand holds within its soft white fingers the sharpened death blow, it will never drive home the kill.
But always will its wandering eye turn round to another, never will those fingers not twitch upon the hilt.
Niklaus run along to the village I've your new brother to attend to; Niklaus you were a pleasant dabble; Nik I've no need of your company; Boy come home a man or do not return at all.
And so you see, sweetheart, why he feels within his chest the strange constriction of the heart and he hears in his voice the slight catch of this boy with his coward's tongue and he knows that to nip this in the bud is his only recourse, to sink his fangs in to the lip, to watch your life move on in damp gray ravings.
But the smile you give him, Caroline.
She's forgotten the way this guy looks at her.
Like he sees nothing else in the room, she is that fascinating.
There is a tiny flutter way down deep in her stomach, and she remembers that ten centuries ago she endured these same butterfly nerves, that she had to beat them down, store them away, deny always their persistent annoying stupid presence.
"Shall we?" he asks, lifting his arm a little higher.
A thousand years ago, he terrorized her town, hurt her friends, upended her entire. Freaking. Life.
But time's a funny thing.
This town he terrorized no longer exists and these friends he hurt preceded it years into the grave, and with her eternal teenaged body she has lived ten lifetimes unhampered by his deeds too horrible and his promises too tempting.
A thousand years later, it is finally ok that she sets her fingers lightly down on his arm without an eye roll, a scoff, a thought.
"House Danerys isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and the witches are growing bolder. In the interest of protecting both our families, Caroline and I have had you over this evening to propose an alliance between Houses Mikaelson and Badeau."
"House Forbes-Mikaelson."
"Our army has repelled three attempts on the city in the last two months alone, and while we are more than capable of continuing to fend off such attacks, the southern border requires our attention as well. It's come to our attention recently that you have a bit of a situation on your hands with a rogue coven. We're willing to lend our support, if you would in turn commit a portion of your fighters to our defense of the border," Rebekah continues smoothly, ignoring entirely Caroline's interjection. She smiles prettily. "You have, of course, twelve courses to think it over. I suggest you choose wisely."
"What she means is that there is no implied threat whatsoever, and that we welcome your thoughts on the matter, whatever they may be." Caroline smiles diplomatically.
"You have to present a strong front, Caroline."
"You have to not make vague murdery implications at your dinner guests, Rebekah."
There is a polite clearing of throats, a dozen blinding flashes of wine glass grabs, sideways looks, pressed lips, nervously tapping fingers.
Rebekah snaps her fingers.
The maid whizzes away on soft rubber tread, returns in a moment at the front of a steaming procession, the kitchen staff in their immaculate white uniforms rolling forth carts dialed to standard room temperature from which they dispense with human fingers, robotic palms the tiny hors d'oeuvres plates.
"Enjoy," Rebekah commands, and the cathedral ceilings fire back a volley of clicking forks, rustling napkins, clinking glasses.
Caroline kicks Kol under the table as he tilts his head and licks his lips and leers openly at her cleavage.
Klaus gives him a look like Kol is something he has just stepped in and pins his brother's pinky to the table with a blinding dart of his dessert fork.
"Niklaus," Elijah scolds.
"Not the tablecloth!" she hisses.
Kol stabs his own through Klaus' ribs.
They jostle elbows, Klaus' jaw tight, Kol's smile mischievous, their hands skittering toward the carving knife that lies halfway between them both, Kol spinning it just out of Klaus' reach, Klaus sweeping it back, the younger Mikaelson with his cheeks taut in his giant asshole smirk-
"Niklaus. Kol," Elijah warns, and he smooths a ripple in the tablecloth before him and he folds his hands very neatly beside his plate. "Our guests have the common courtesy to pretend that they do not notice their hosts conducting themselves like well-dressed children. I suggest we extend the same common courtesy, by ignoring our proclivity for acting like well-dressed children."
"I was only teaching him manners, Elijah. We have a lady among us."
"Don't worry, darling; he's just jealous of our love."
"You mean he's concerned about your delusions?"
Kol smiles. "I love that edged little tongue of yours, Caroline. The things she can do with it, Nik-"
She collects her own knife in a blink and with one javelin flick of her wrist she fires it across the table, straight into his neck-
He catches it half an inch from his throat, and puckers his lips with a smile.
Elijah turns his paternal disappointment on her, his face too composed, his hands absently aligning the edge of his plate with the stem of his glass. "Sorry!" she huffs, throwing her hands into the air.
"Isn't she lovely, Nik? I understand how she pricked that armor of yours all those years ago. Unfortunately, tragic circumstances being what they were, it left the rest of the 'pricking' to be completed by-"
"Kol Mikaelson, if you make one more bloody innuendo at my table, I'll snip off your testicles and display them in a jar on my armoire."
"I wouldn't embarrass your collection like that, Bekah darling. Imagine the discrepancy-"
"Elijah!"
"Kol."
"There's a hole in my tablecloth!" she hisses suddenly through her teeth, and she watches it short out briefly, flicker uncertainly, shimmer from white to mauve.
"Uh oh, Nik. You'll want to pop back in that box about now."
"I'd find him," Caroline says coldly.
"Should we be expecting a new addition to Bekah's collection in the next few minutes then, Caroline?"
She shuts her eyes, and she reaches deep, takes a breath, finds her center, brings forth with a decisive little clench of her hands all the smooth Southern charm with which she won that crown once a very long life ago.
She raises her lips, narrows her eyes, stares down Klaus' unrelenting dimples and his unabashed admiration.
The next course wheels in on silent rubber whisperings of robotic tread, mechanical wheel.
She reaches for the wine glass she has not touched since Klaus pulled out her chair with gentlemanly flair and she turns her gaze from his eyes that go too deep, and two sips, a third, and her throat bubbles blood not served from the vein and her lungs expel from her lips one moist deathbed rattle, and she pitches sideways in her chair.
Kol lunges across the table.
Rebekah screams.
Elijah has her already by the arms, cradling her as she slumps, and in a blink he vaults the table and he lands beside the lime puddling of her gown as Kol brushes the hair from her face and thumbs the blood from her lips.
Well now.
Isn't this quite the opportunity, he thinks as she twitches her last throes and she inhales her final breaths, and he rips open his wrist and he holds it dripping to her mouth before she has fluttered her next blink.
Kol holds her up by the shoulders as she drinks, her little hands tight round his wrist, her lips with their smear of wet chemical gloss sticky upon his skin.
Elijah brushes off his suit as he stands.
Rebekah sets aside her napkin as she sits.
"Get her out of here, Nik."
Kol passes her over.
"I've got you, love," he whispers, and with one brief pass of his hand over her ruined hair, he vanishes away through the open doors into the hall.
She smiles and she tilts her head without letting slip this pleasant little expression. "Kol, would you go and fetch the kitchen staff?" she asks, and in only a moment he is back, herding them all like cattle to the slaughter.
Her guests shift.
Her employees press themselves with wide eyes and twitching hands back into the walls.
"Who put that in my sister's glass?" she wants to know.
She listens to this thundering silence that like so many silences before puts to shame the storming of the battlefield, and she tilts her head just another fraction more as her guests' nervous clockwork legs spring them from their chairs in marionette lunges.
"No confessions then?"
Elijah gestures graciously. "Please. Be seated."
She waves forward the guards who have with professional invisibility made themselves a part of the walls.
"That's a shame."
She motions.
"I do abhor the hiring process."
The doors shut.
He has nodded off in the chair beside her bed as she sleeps soundly beneath its covers.
Bekah wakes him as she flits in through the doors, tossing her shoes with a great clatter into the corner.
He jolts.
Caroline jerks.
"I do believe I may have sparked an incident," his sister announces carelessly, and she flounces herself across the room and she throws herself down on the bed to rake her fingers gently through Caroline's tangled yellow curls. "Look what that fall did to your poor hair."
On a soft gray morning not quite so bitter as the previous, Kol flings himself with a great whoop up the main stairs to throw aside in a noisy gunshot blast the doors to the room inside which Bekah has arranged his new digital canvas.
Caroline looks up briefly, and touches one of the dials. "You can choose the style, the subject, the type of brush stroke, and all of the colors are completely adjustable, if you want to mix something you can't find in the palette, which is at the top right of the screen. Or you can set it to manual, and do it all yourself. If you do that, make sure you go into the menu and turn off this little paintbrush thing in the corner. See it? If you don't, it'll keep making suggestions."
"It only did that to you because you selected 'horse' for subject, and it had to keep asking, 'Did you mean 'fish'? Please change your selection in the menu located to your left.' She completely scrambled its circuits, trying to keep up with her lousy technique. Elijah had to buy her a new one, and then she broke that one too, and what did you blame it on, darling- 'sucky 90s technology that wouldn't know a-"
"Ok, first of all, it did not look like a fish, and secondly, what do you want?" She crosses her arms.
"Sorry, did I interrupt something? How did that old saying go- Nik and Caroline sitting in a tree…something about a pram and the shrine Nik has built out of the hairs he sneaks from your comb every morning-"
Caroline snatches the metal brush with its fine spray of synthetic hairs from his hand. "I've got a special place for this," she says sweetly.
"Nik's heart, where you have struck all your other blows to the hilt; not a month out of the box, and look at how our boy glows, Caroline! Isn't he lovely?" Kol slings one arm round his neck, flourishes his other hand to indicate him like a bloody mannequin upon its stand, revolving for the masses. "Caroline Forbes, a flush no cosmetic can match, and what she adds to Nik's extra-long showers and his afternoon 'naps'-"
"Do you like your spleen where it is?" he snaps.
"Focus!" she clicks her fingers in front of Kol's face. "What do you want?"
"The Badeaus are attacking our border patrols!" he crows, giving a playful bump of his shoulder, a nudge of his hip.
"Ok, one of these days you're going to get your head blown off, and then none of this is going to seem like something to wet your man panties over."
"I have our love to sustain me, Caroline. You know I'd never not return to you."
She rolls her eyes and turns back to the canvas.
"Come on, Nik!" Kol jostles him roughly. "The family that mercilessly murders its enemies together stays together."
"He is not going with you. He's been in a casket for the last thousand years; he doesn't even know how to use any of the weapons, and you just might want to mention that little thing where four hundred years ago the witches figured out how to duplicate and break up into ammunition the white oak stake, so when they're shooting at him, there's a good chance he could actually be killed."
"Of course he knows how to use them- I took him out while you and Bekah had your hair done the other night. Besides, you know we still use a lot of the old stuff; all the automatics are mostly useless out in that weather, always shutting off when you've got a whole army in your face. Nik knows how to handle a rifle."
"And the armor? Has he ever worn that? Does he know that it's going to slow him down? That it will stop a rifle round from two hundred yards but not one hundred, and only then if he takes a direct hit to the chest, where it's reinforced?"
"You know, I'm starting to detect a little trickle of concern in your voice, Caroline. Tread wisely. You know how jealous I am."
She huffs.
He smiles.
"Fine. Go. But if you bring him back with any holes in him, you get to tell Rebekah that you just broke her favorite brother."
"I resent that. Everyone knows I'm the apple of this family's eye."
"Maybe a stick in its eye."
"Listen to that wit, Nik- still stunning, isn't she? I can just picture this evening's journal entry: Dear Diary, today my lovely Caroline, light of my life, star of my existence, flame of my loin, made a funny. It was without flaw, Diary, just like every inch of her unblemished camellia-petal morning dew silk knicker legs. Love Until You Inevitably Disappoint Me, Mr. Caroline Forbes."
"Get out of here!" she demands, and a tiny little trickle of a laugh makes its way up her throat, through her lips, and now she seals her mouth carefully and she gestures with stern finger to the doorway, tapping her foot, cocking an eyebrow.
"She denies and she denies and she denies, Nik, but in the end she's completely enchanted by my cleverness."
She flips her hand at them both. "Go. Find someone smaller than you to pick on, and be back in time for dinner."
She looks away from Klaus' too-bright smile and Kol's terrifying teenaged outlook, that immortal conceit of those who cannot die until they lie with crushed limbs and leaking mouth beneath smoldering steel, watching with blurry disbelief the hands that have not shriveled to elderly dust and prune.
Be careful, she wants to urge.
Come back, she cannot say, and she watches with tight throat and helpless smile as Kol jumps with another whoop onto Klaus' back, driving his arm like an arrow straight ahead, his other hand sweeping down to deliver a sharp little pop of a slap to Klaus' ass. "We ride!" he declares.
Klaus peels him one-handed from his back and throws him casually into the wall.
She hears the crack of this landing, watches all the little spirals of damaged paint and chipped ice drift to lie in confetti shavings on the floor, and with one look to her face, Kol sings out, "Good-bye, Caroline!" and sweeps Klaus away down the stairs in a blur.
"17th century," he says one evening when he happens upon her in the gallery, standing before a plastic-sheeted canvas with hands in a little triangle just beneath her nose.
"I know. Ter Borch."
"'A Violinist'. Formerly a resident of The Hermitage."
He steps up beside her.
He flickers a little sideways glance to her profile, looks away, laces his hands.
"Until about 2019, anyway."
He tries so bloody hard not to smile.
She gives him this same little sideways glance and drops her hands, folding them carefully in front of her. "This guy said he'd take me and then totally flaked, so I went on my own."
He gives into the urge as hard as he has ever thrown himself into anything in all his centuries upon this earth and he stands dimpling down at the floor, this boy with his dry coward's tongue who has drowned beneath so many layers and still flounders so close to the surface.
"I liked it. Your landscape. It's in one of the guest suites, actually. Rebekah stole that one. She wanted something to…remember you by. It was a little like you died, for her. They pretty much turned this planet upside down, looking for you, you know."
"And you helped."
Why, he wants to know.
Why, when he has only ever sought out and never been sought in return, when he latches always onto what will always linger just beyond his reach; why when like Tatia long before her she looked, she saw, she understood here is something not worth the bother, a tryst, an affair, a night- always must men like him be reduced to a notch.
"I don't know," she whispers.
She felt guilty, she confesses.
"You saved me from Alaric. And I knew what they were planning, what they were going to do…and I just let you help me, and then I went on my way, and I didn't say one word. So I helped Rebekah, and we just sort of…fell in together. And then I just never left."
She looks up at him, and he sees a little smile just there at the corner of her lips, ticking up the edge of her mouth. "I mostly regret it less than I thought I would. Anyway, I'm out. Late night tonight. Political assassinations just do not plan themselves."
"Caroline," he says as she reaches the doors, and he hears the soft tapping of her footsteps hesitate, pause just at the threshold of this hall she is about to put between them.
Could you ever-
Have you not once in a thousand years-
Has he any chance, love- must his recourse always be elimination and not reciprocation; can he really not slip this noose with nothing short of her crumpled to ash between his fingers- couldn't she turn this lonely penitentiary thing into something warm, open, worthwhile?
"Klaus?" she prompts.
"Good night, Caroline."
She taps away on down the hall and he stands for a very long time before this painting she perused so intently, studying without seeing.
What a rush is this beast war, so like the immortal monsters between whom it is waged.
The weight of rifle in hand, the whistling of bullets overhead, stained trenches, empty boots, trousers shot through, chest plates filled up- though time may sculpt with her inevitable avalanche an entire new world, she will never change this unalterable creature that will outlive the longest of them all.
He can see the boy will be a problem right away.
Niklaus would do away with him promptly, Kol torment him endlessly, but he has cultivated a certain civilization his brothers are unfortunately lacking, and so he gestures politely to the chair before him and he sinks back into his own, folding his hands on his knee.
"My sister and Caroline are otherwise occupied at the moment. I am to be considered their representative, and act with the full authority of this household."
"I came to talk to Rebekah, not some fuckin' poofter in a suit. I've got a few demands that need to be met before we pull back from your borders. And if they're not, we've got three fuckin' regiments ready to storm this city and rip your little palace right out from underneath your feet. Shouldn't have fucked with the Badeaus, Mikaelson. So why don't you run along and tell your bitch sister that? Now."
"I would ask that we maintain a certain level of…professionalism during this interview."
"I don't give a shit what you ask. I said I didn't come here to deal with you."
"That's unfortunate," he says calmly, and leans over the desk between them to rip from his chest this impertinent boy's still-beating heart.
He drops it with a sigh in the boy's lap.
They make such a mess when they refuse, he thinks with a distasteful brush of his pocket square across the spatter down his right cuff.
He lies with cheek pressed to the snow, rifle underneath him, smiling across to his brother.
This is life, after a millennium in the grave.
The kickback of the gun in his hands, the cries of the men ground to mire beneath his boots, the rattling of these great belt-fed weapons with their hot dragon mouths- movement, his legs gone not to dust but to rubber, and yet still they carry on, surge over, tumble him from the lip of one trench to the next- and the hot red deaths at his hands-
"To your left, Nik!" Kol calls out cheerfully, and then he spins, and he buries teeth, bayonet, fist in each wave of these enemies that will never stand against them.
Ah, brother, brother, brother.
If he could only keep forever this back-to-back camaraderie of the soldier.
She wakes one night to find Rebekah in her doorway, and she shifts aside to make room for her when she lifts one corner of the covers and crawls with a sniff into the bed beside Caroline, her soft sleep-tangled hair wriggling up onto her shoulder.
"What if they don't come back one day?" she whispers, and Caroline feels Rebekah's eyelashes twitch against her neck and her fingers slide down beneath the blankets to find her own.
"Please. Klaus and Kol? They're like the Freddy Krueger and Jason of the vampire world. Even when you kill them there are still like twenty million sequels to come."
"But they're idiots."
"They're boys."
"That's what I said."
Caroline smiles up at the ceiling, and lifts her free hand to lightly stroke the hair strewn out across her shoulder, tipping her cheek down to rest it lightly against Rebekah's forehead. "They'll be ok, Beks."
"Nik loves you, Caroline," Rebekah murmurs sleepily. "Don't break him, not when I just got him back."
She strokes this hair on her shoulder and she blinks up at this ceiling above her, and for a very long time she goes on doing this, seeing nothing.
"Caroline's not one of your possessions, Nik," Kol says one night when they are hunkered down amidst black snow, red pieces, drifting in and our of this fitful slumber of the combatant, rifles across their knees. "Don't put her away in one of your boxes when she displeases you."
He gives him the most grave look he has ever seen from this man who has never grown beyond his childhood pranks.
The sky spits onto their wrapped faces little ash-fine bits of snow.
The guns start up again with a rattling of prison yard chains.
Kol rolls over to find once more a few oft-interrupted moments of dream.
How easily said, brother.
How easily spoken by a man who is swatted away playfully, who is always welcomed back unhesitatingly.
Whatever happened to Stefan, he asks her one night after he and Kol have trudged in coated in blood, dusted in snow, and she looks up from the drawers she is organizing, one of the mechanical maids polishing along at her heels, and she sees by the look on his face that this is not just a passing question, idle curiosity, and God, how does she answer this without breaking him?
"Well…"
"Not much of a fairy tale, I presume?"
"Maybe the original version. Not the Disney one, unfortunately."
Let's hear it then, he insists, and she sets down the folder she is holding, and she leans her hip back against the desk the maid is still dusting with pre-programmed persistence.
They lived, they loved, and on the eve of her short mortal life, Stefan walked out of their bedroom with Elena's white wrinkled hands just barely cold on the covers, and in his grief he ate half a dozen of their neighbors, and then he took off his ring, and he walked out into the sun.
It was fast, she assures this man who was once her enemy, who has never before deserved her pity, who looks for just a moment like she has stabbed him through the chest and she has pulled out everything inside him as she slips the blade back out.
It was over nine hundred years ago.
But it still kind of hurts, you know?
By day he dodges death, by night he teaches her these techniques which have yet eluded her, guiding her strokes on the canvas, Kol popping round to insert his little stinging insults, to charge away down the stairs with face painted and clothing stained, tattling to Bekah as he goes: "Sister, come and see what Caroline's done to that suit you had imported from Palis- you know the one you spent a small fortune on? I think you'll like the additions she's made-"
"Barricade the door," he warns, and he sends the chaise lounge across the floor with a casual nudge of his foot just as her wailing reaches their ears and her shoulder finds the door.
"Caroline! Caroline Marie Forbes, don't think Nik's bloody little crush is going to save you- Nik, open this door- open this door right bloody now-"
He smiles at her as he leans his shoulder against it to counteract Bekah's demanding palms, hammering the wood to splinters beneath him, and with a tip of his head and a finger to his lips he indicates the window just beyond the easel.
She springs the latch, swings one leg over the sill, gives him that little smile which reaches so far down inside him, drops soundlessly away into the afternoon.
"She hasn't been here," he says as Rebekah bursts in with mussed hair, wild eyes.
"And you just opened the window to get a nice 20 degree breath of fresh air?" she demands.
"It clears my head. I do my best work in the more extreme atmospheres."
"You're an ass!" she bellows, slamming the door as she goes.
Elijah joins them with an extra regiment on a gray Tuesday morning, and with a frown he warns them both to proceed cautiously, to keep eyes skinned for better weapons, more men, lurking covens.
Kol charges ahead recklessly.
He follows nearly as heedlessly.
He always stands too close when he talks to her, listens a little too attentively, smiles a little too brightly.
He is the worst of all these men she has met throughout her very long life, and yet he has no stories of his own to share, no virtues to extol, no ideas to put always ahead of her own- he still wants her thoughts, her dreams, her hopes, and she understands with this sharpest freaking pang that in a thousand years she has somehow never quite managed to shake the strange hold this horrible man slipped down over her when he stepped into her childhood bedroom and he saved her for no reason.
Death has always been much misrepresented in the cinema.
Dramatic speech, drawn-out struggles, farewells exchanged, love professed, entire minutes lived on, a dozen little moments which carry ever closer the reaper and his scythe in increments that may be fought, denied, accepted.
But his brother-
His brother lays down so suddenly in this trench where they crouch, rifles tipped over the rim.
They bring Kol home in Klaus' arms.
Rebekah collapses.
Elijah kneels down beside her with his lips in her hair.
And Klaus-
Klaus the terrible, the tormentor, the murderer- he lays his brother down so gently on the empty table in the banquet room.
"You're still here," she whispers when she finds him sitting beside this cold gray boy who followed him on copycat tiptoes after doe, boar, fowl, bow in hand, worship in his eyes.
She puts her arms round his shoulders and her chin on his head, and for a moment he shifts himself stiffly away from this embrace he does not understand how to accept.
And then he turns his head, and he buries it in the neck of this girl he thought he could kill, and he sobs until he has nothing left in him.
She clicks the buckles on his armor carefully into place, straightens his shoulder pads, adjusts his chest plate.
"Ok, well. Come home all in one piece, or Rebekah will pull out all your hair, and I'm not going to stop her. And I think you will make a really super unappealing bald man."
"Niklaus is far too vain to risk our sister's wrath," Elijah assures her, and with a brotherly kiss to her cheek, he whisks around her into the hall beyond, shutting the door as he goes.
"That was subtle of him," she says, and he looks down with the first laugh she has heard in over a week.
He looks up from beneath his eyebrows, smiling just a little.
She takes a breath, and she tips herself up onto her toes.
Her first contact is just a tentative brush of her mouth along his bottom lip, a faint graze, a careful testing.
And then somehow her hands find his collar and her lips open against him, and she puts each single ounce of everything she is too afraid to say into this thing of ragged breaths and tight arms and pressed foreheads.
He keeps his eyes shut for a very long time, savoring this.
They breech the walls of this pathetic stronghold of the Badeaus with minimal losses to their men, and he keeps every heart he takes, and he displays them all before this home they leave in shambles behind them.
Make another try for his family, mates.
Walk into his home like you are something, lay a single bloody finger on his brother, his sister, his Caroline.
He dares you.
A/N: I know, I know- I'm sorry for what I did to Kol, but Klaus just looked so heartbroken in the show when he died, and I just wanted it to be acknowledged, and for Caroline to hold him gently in her arms and stroke his hair until he was ok and JUST LEAVE ME ALONE OK?
Also, I may have seen an Originals gifset and snagged the line 'I've got you, love,' and used it more appropriately. Also to the second power, I could have turned this into a Klaus vs. the rest of the family, had him side with the witches or one of the other vampire families in his bitterness over being abandoned for a thousand years in that tomb, but after everything that's been happening in canon, I just needed a little unity, dammit.