Grill
Caroline surprised herself these days. Here she was sat in Mystic Grill, sipping on a cappuccino and ordering a chicken Caesar salad which she was going to eat alone. Alone by intention. Wow.
The waitress who had replaced Vicky Donovan when she died, came to see if she needed anything. She was a nice girl; smiley and attentive, good at her job. Caroline thought she had heard the other staff call her Emma. She guessed she was probably about 17 or 18, and exactly the kind of person that once upon-a-time the old her would have been checking out to see if she would 'fit' with her crowd. There would have been a whole bunch of criteria she would have judged her on – her looks, her attitude, her sense of humor; a certain indefinable something that teenage girls know right away whether you have it or not. She smiled ruefully at the thought.
When Emma brought the food, she had remembered to put the dressing on the side, which put her a league apart from most of the servers in this place. Well, except Matt of course. He would have put extra peppers in her dressing because he knew she liked them. She firmly put that thoughts in a box marked 'to deal with later' where all thoughts of Matt currently resided.
Caroline stirred some chocolate dust into the remaining froth of her skinny cap. She liked it when there was enough chocolate clinging to the sides of the cup to make it all the way to the end of the drink. Coffee was a taste she had developed recently. Up to a month ago all she would have drunk was soda-lite and the occasional highly calorific peanut butter and chocolate malt to show the guys that she wasn't one of the vomit-girls. This was, well maybe 'sophisticated' was too strong a word, but this was, adult.
The chicken on her salad was good today, not overcooked like that crazy chef Ramon used to do. Petra, the new grill chef, looked like a woman who considered cooking for 30 people in a bar no hardship – the toughest thing in her kitchen was her. Caroline surmised that she was one of those women who cooked barbeques for a family the size of a small army. From the way she was barking orders at the servers, she sure looked like she ran things the military way. A 'take no prisoners' kind of gal. When one of the Saturday girls dropped something on the ground and tried to put it back on the counter, chef took a swing at her with a ladle. Boy, was she going to liven things up back there. Caroline liked her straight away.
Suddenly she picked up the sounds of a conversation that two senior girls she didn't know that well were having. They were sat on the other side of the restaurant drinking virgin-Cosmos and gossiping like there was no tomorrow. She had clocked them when she came in; they had seen her and nodded and smiled in the way that was the unspoken-but-customary way to greet a head cheerleader. She wouldn't have bothered to listen at all to their babble of who was sleeping with who, but she tuned in automatically when she heard her name.
"Look at Caroline sat on her own. She's so tragic these days."
"I know. Lydia said she hardly ever hangs out with the cheerleaders any more. What's that about?"
Caroline smiled a little. She knew that if she was on the other side, she would been saying the same thing. Except she may have thrown in a "and what's with all the eyeliner?" for good measure.
She supposed she had become a bit of loner, but surely that was inevitable in her situation? It wasn't a matter of control; she didn't struggle so much with that these days. It was more a matter of confidence. She didn't know how she had found it, but she had. It had come as a shock to her to realize that she had spent her whole life to this point completely scared. All her decisions basically boiled down to one question; what would people think?
What should I wear today?
What course should I take?
What car should I drive?
What should I do in bed?
What should I think?
The list was endless, and went deeper into her psyche than she ever had realized. She remembered the time she had first watched Jodie Foster in The Accused on TNT. For a fortnight afterwards she thought every guy she met was going to rape her. She didn't go anywhere alone and bought herself, and most of her friends, a rape alarm which she put in her purse and walked with her hand on it. It was now abandoned somewhere in her closet, probably covered in dust.
The point was, fear had crippled her. And she didn't want it, or need it, any more.
But that worried her too. Without the fear, what was left was the real Caroline. She had to get to know this person. Had to find out what her needs were, what made her tick. She realized part of the reason she had been so attracted to Damon was because he was already way ahead of her on this stuff. She guessed that 150 years gave you just about enough to time to figure it out. If she was honest, both the Salvatore brothers gave off this sense of knowing themselves, and it was an attractive quality. She knew that Damon's actions could be chaotic, self-motivated, egotistical – but on those rare moments when he didn't put on a show, he was really quite something else. It was maturity, but it went beyond that, to a spiritual level. Something she couldn't quite put a name to.
She wanted that. No, she needed it. She needed to find out who this woman was. She felt she had to start with the physical changes before she could deal with the intellectual ones. She needed to know more about her power – of what she was now.
Some of things had come to her right away, the strength and (regrettably) the thirst. But the others she was still working through. She spent the first few weeks testing herself. Garlic? Check. Mirrors? Check. Being invited in? Check. Each one confirmed or denied for its truth or basis in legend.
She started to read voraciously every vampire novel she could get her hand on. She knew they were fictional, but myths often began as corrupted truths. Bram Stoker's Dracula had been on their reading list anyway, and she remembered how when she had read it before she had only been interested in the women, Mina and Lucy. This time, she appreciated the nuances of Dracula himself, his binding and destructive dual nature. She came to understand him, and became fascinated with the sway he had over the people in his life; the hunters, the sycophants, the victims, the insane…
She had borrowed, and pretty much watched back-to-back, the entire series of Buffy. The old Caroline never would have been caught dead watching something so geeky. The new one had had no problems with what anyone thought. She had not found much there to guide her in her new life, but had found it fun anyway watching Sarah Michelle-Gellar kick some ass. If she had any interest in acting, she would probably get offered that role; some kick-ass moves seemed par for the course these days. Maybe she was more Faith than Buffy though, Faith's proclivity for torture was one that came easily to her too. She didn't know how she felt about that, and so she popped that one in the back of her mind too to save for later. "Five by five", she mused.
Emma came and cleared her plate, and asked if she wanted anything else.
"Chef has made the most amazing banoffie pie. Its worth the extra 20 minutes in the gym."
Oh she so would have been one of her girls, Caroline thought.
She didn't hesitate in her response. Another 'up side' to the vampirism was that she'd never gain any weight. Emma gave her a wink when she accepted.
"You won't regret it," she promised, and popped her hand on her heart, "you have my personal money back guarantee."
The pie was every bit as good as Emma had promised, and she relished eating it. Food was an unexpected pleasure in her new life. She thought that as her body was dead that it would not be able to process food in the normal way. She had so many questions relating to that. What happened to the food she ate? What was with her body anyway; why did she heal so fast? Why did she never get sick? Why didn't she need the bathroom anymore? (The latter was an unpleasant part of her current life, remembering to fake that particular requirement took up a surprisingly large amount of time.)
It made her head hurt when she thought about all the different implications. If her body was dead, then were her internal organs dead inside of her? Or were they kept alive by the vampire virus? (She liked to think of it in those terms: if she put her vampirism in the same bracket as colds and flu it seemed less threatening.)
Stefan had been good to her at the beginning, he had taught her some fundamental principles, but she wore him out with her questions and it got to the stage where she knew he would see her coming and take off. She couldn't blame him. In any case, he was so wrapped up in Elena, and they had their own problems. She had to take care of this herself.
Even understanding that was new thinking; the idea of not depending on anyone to come up with solutions to her problems. She winced when she thought of how many times she had whined at her mother, and blamed her for all the times she had not been there to help her out. She had truly hated her for it. She had felt her family was not an absent gay dad and a single mom, but more like an absent gay dad, a single mom, and 20 young-offenders; all of whom took attention away from her needs.
She was getting it now of course, responsibility. She faced it every day she lived with the knowledge that she, Caroline, could kill. She was wearing the mask of Clark Kent to hide Superman – only her version was less noble. Sometimes she had to play the selfish brat card just to stop her mom getting suspicious. Nothing but a 'normal', healthy senior, with attitude to match.
There were other things that bothered her too. Her friendship with Bonnie for one. Bonnie had been attacked by Damon, and had ever since developed a wariness of the vampires in her life. She was smart like that, valuing self-preservation. Caroline knew she had to keep working on their friendship, or she would lose it forever.
What was she to do with herself, now she was looking down the barrel of eternity? She had to have new goals. Getting into Columbia just didn't cut-it for ambition. What were her new priorities? To see the world, obviously, but then what?
How would she handle people dying? Her mom, her dad – geez even her dad's boyfriend. Eventually she'd have to watch them slowly shut down, lose themselves to age when she never would. Before they even got to that point, she knew she would have to move away so they would never she her again. She would have to simply drop out of their lives forever. She thought of how sad her mom would be that the girl who always valued a simple life (school, marriage, children), would have to behave in a way that was anything but. To disappear without a trace, she just wasn't that person. And for them, she left a legacy of a life without grandchildren, without anniversaries to celebrate, without her... Protecting them from the truth was only a short time away. She knew that she didn't yet have the skills to live on her own, yet alone cut herself off. Could she cope without family, without friends? Wherever she went and whomever she met she would always have to move on, leave them before they knew.
Her eyes began to well-up at the thought. Despite this, she was impressed by exactly how long it had taken her to bring emotion into her thinking. It was true that vampires had an uncanny ability to stamp it out. But if anything was going to tip her into an emotional response, it was thought of the life she would never have.
She knew she could do it though – this vampire living. People had written her off her whole life. Blonde and bubbly? Well, she must be an idiot. Her straight A average was easily overlooked if you cared to. She knew she was no fool. She had big reserves of inner strength and an ambition that went well beyond what she shared with people. She was a leader, and people always looked to her, always. In her vampire body, it took so little to bring that to that quality to the fore. She supposed it was something to do with the predatory nature of what she was. Something which helped her handle the aftermath of the successful hunt.
The knowledge of that lead her to think again of the people she had killed. At first, she had been analytical about it, forcing herself to think of the lives she had ended; the son without a father, the husband without a wife, the business without a boss. She realized she could compartmentalize the issues easily; horror at her behavior was one small part. She knew it wasn't her fault. It was always going to be a part of who she was, both in her ability to kill and her need to do so. It was instinctive and a response to the way blood called to her like a siren song.
Her cell began to ring, she flipped it open and saw 'caller unknown' on the screen. She answered it.
"Hello, is that Miss Caroline Forbes?"
"It is."
"Boy are you lucky Miss Forbes, I can save you twenty percent on your annual heating costs right away."
"Can you?" she said smoothly, "because I am also good at dealing with hot air." And with that she cut the caller off.
She smiled. Perhaps the old and new Carolines weren't so very different. Maybe there was space for both.
She got up, looked at the bill that Emma had drawn a smiley face on and left a good tip.
It was time to go, she had a life to lead.