Chapter 1
"I don't really get what they saw in you…what made them so stupidly in love with you," Hayley confessed dryly. She wasn't trying to be rude to Caroline, but every other word out of her mouth tonight had been dripping with that tone and this far in she really couldn't see the point in trying to make amends for it. Both women seemingly knew where the other stood on Klaus, and hell, even Tyler, and yet neither appeared all that inclined to actually address the men they were actively trying to avoid. Instead, they traded observations about one another that rang more like barbs.
Hayley folded her legs at the ankle and let them rock up and down as she leaned in. She was carefully perched atop a pair of large shipping crates adjacent a shorter stack occupied by Caroline, who had opted to sit Indian-style. The two women were the only sources of sound in the old theatre, and from their vantage point upon the stage, they could see everything through a gap in the weathered stage curtains.
And despite the sadly decayed state of the setting, replete with the surprisingly tolerable odor of mold, the pair was content to set amidst it all for what felt like a long overdue chat.
Caroline narrowed her eyes enough to denote interest in Hayley's comment, but there was no trace of the characteristic grin—the kind of smirk she had at the ready for particularly witty and well-deserved jabs she so loved to level on unsuspecting HBIC. "Go on, you can say it." She already knew where the Louisiana native was going with this. She wasn't going to waste her good quips just yet.
Hayley seldom bit her tongue and didn't see occasion to start now.
"Okay—fine," she slapped both thighs in surrender. "I like you better as a vampire. I mean…is that a dick thing to say? 'I like you better dead and drinking blood?'" Their eyes met and for a moment, the tension turned noticeably grim. With Caroline's gaze directed anywhere but the 'bayou beauty,' Tyler had become so enamored with during his extended pack retreats, it was hard to say which would explode first: the beer bottle in Caroline's hand, or her mouth.
And suddenly the blonde was laughing, perhaps harder than she expected to. Hayley followed suit once she recovered from the temporary look of bewilderment which snowballed into a wolfish cackle.
"I get that a lot. People don't exactly come out and say it, but I get the sense that it might have taken a pair of fangs and habitual bloodlust to endear me to a few people." Caroline paused to take a swig of the piss-warm pilsner, "Of course a few years ago I would have settled for an atypical cross-country road trip with best friends and a surprisingly one-size-fits-all pair of jeans—or a whole lot of drunken spin-the-bottle with a dormie for that kind of 'character development,' but I'll take the compliment as-is." She clinked bottles with Hayley and smiled.
Caroline knew Damon and Stefan found her a great deal more bearable since she had been turned, not that they were the end-all-be-all of opinions on her character. But at least they were honest about things like that, unlike Elena and Bonnie. She loved those two girls but out of all the things they had, could, and should have shared, the truth was perhaps the least common and most inconvenient. She simply chalked it up as one of Humanity's flaws: You always lie to the people who love you.
No wonder so many vampires just said 'fuck it' and flipped theirs off.
That's why Caroline had bothered to entertain an evening alone with Hayley in the first place. More than someone to count on or to share secrets with, Caroline wanted someone she could be brutally honest with—and someone who could return the favor in kind. She didn't know that much about the brunette werewolf. Only enough to know she could count on that and maybe that alone. It also didn't hurt that she wasn't all that fond of her to begin with, but that came part-and-parcel with women who had shared the same lover twice.
The pow-wow wasn't about who they shared in common, though. Caroline had picked up Hayley's mildly familiar scent in Richmond, Virginia and had, at first, stalked her out of curiosity. Initially, she wondered who the wolf might have had following in her wake, but after seeing a noticeable absence of Klaus and Tyler, she took it as an opportunity to salvage the familiar in the strange. There was a reason Caroline found herself roaming the state's capital alone, although not one she had shared with Hayley just yet.