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Klaus grinned at Caroline then stuck a forkful of steak into his mouth. He did it quickly, hoping she'd mimic his action and he would have a few seconds just to be able to stare at her for a few seconds before her head would pop up again and she'd do her inevitable rebuking.

He still found it impossibly odd that she was even in his presence at the moment. The last time he had seen her had been at her graduation ceremony a week ago. He remembered the very last second they had spent together, after he had walked her home, their lingering walk mostly enveloped in the comfortable silence he'd always envisioned them having – a sign of friendship. And their friendly interlinking of their arms that she had never broken. The nagging guilt of what he knew he would leave without saying. The almost unconquerable desire to furnish her cheek with another kiss.

Leaving her – or forcing her to leave, as he had once done – continued to be one of the most difficult things to manage throughout his existence. He hoped to master it someday but he had a feeling he never would.

Caroline took a sip from her champagne now and her head popped back up as predicted but he had only been half right: no rebuke came. Instead her eyes held his. They stared at each other for many moments before he looked away. Her here, at his dinner table in his apartment in New Orleans – there was something wrong with it.

He tried to shake off the part of his mind that was telling him it was because of the rock at the bottom of his stomach comprised purely of the dread that Hayley could walk in at any moment. The thought alone sickened him. Caroline was pure. She didn't deserve to be tainted with this. His stupidity and lack of judgment could not end up being her problem. And, moreover, though he would not admit it to himself because he could not think that it could be true, he did not want the notion of his mistake with the werewolf to hurt her.

He set his jaw and looked back at her. "What are you doing here, Caroline?"

Her brows furrowed slightly in a way that not even he could deny was adorable. "You invited me, remember?"

He reclined in his high-backed dining room chair, trying to retain the air of being unfazed. "Well, love, you arrived on my doorstep ten minutes ago completely unexpectedly and without any explanation. And while I've been quite hospitable," he said, gesturing to the dinner table which held their plates and champagne flutes, "I'm sure you can understand why I'm a little surprised." He sat forward and clasped his hands, cocking his head. "Have you even seen Tyler yet?"

Caroline dropped her silver fork onto her plate with an audible clang and sat forward as well. "I get it. You're trying to push me away."

He was intentionally doing so. It was better for everyone. He watched her face fill with worry.

"Klaus, what's wrong?"

He felt his eyes almost glaze over as his notorious icy manner took over. "Well, there is the little issue of what you're doing here. I mean don't get me wrong, love, but usually when you or your friends show up announced it has a little something to do with killing me."

She frowned again, "Klaus, you know we can't –".

He watched her as she seemed to undergo a realisation and then her face crumpled. He knew that expression. It was one he had often seen on his sister but one he had never thought he would see on the face of the woman before him while she was looking at him. Rejection. Worse, it was the last thing in the world that he would ever want to make her feel.

She looked down in what he guessed was embarrassment as he spotted a light blush on her cheeks. He too looked down. He was infamous for his rapid and revolutionary mood shifts and he knew that that was the only thing that could salvage this moment.

He knew he could not tell her he was happy that she was here, though. That risked her staying.

But he could not make her feel rejected. Not by him. She had to know this was not about her.

He smiled. "You know, Caroline, you're the only person I've fed my hybrid blood to straight from the vein." He laughed at himself and looked up. "Not that that's such a privilege, but it's important to me that you know. You're special to me."

He waited for her to look up so they could share another glance and she would hopefully feel the gravity of the moment. That his eyes would hint at the real feelings that he couldn't share.

But when she looked up it was her glance that had suddenly become icy. "You know, Klaus, you really shouldn't lie to me. I hate it when people lie to me."

Her voice had gone dangerously low and for a split second, absurdly, Klaus actually felt scared. Then he frowned. "I don't understand, love."

"What about all those werewolves? Ray and his pack. Remember them?"

Klaus stared at her in confusion for a few moments, then glanced down at the wood of the table, trying to recall who she meant.

Ah, his first hybrids. He had forgotten about them. Quite simply because they had all turned out to be useless. Failed experiments. And furthermore they had meant nothing. He had been doing it to turn them into his army, not to save their lives.

He was about to relate this to Caroline when he frowned. How would she know about that? The only person who had been with him had been Stefan and somehow he could not imagine Stefan relaying that experience to anybody. His head shot up as he joined the dots. He jumped up from his chair, pushing it away as his eyes wildly searched the room.

"Silas! Show yourself!"

His eyes darted back to where 'Caroline' had been moments ago. He wasn't sure how to feel about the fact that it had not really been her. On the one hand it was a relief to know that she was not in the middle of the chaos his life had turned into. However, at the same time the light he'd seen and the warmth he'd felt inside had disappeared with her.

And, of course, he was now stuck with the only creature in the world more powerful than himself. Silas would not be able to kill him but he could definitely put him in enough pain to make him wish for death.

Then his heartbeat sped as he realised that with Silas' mind-reading, he could easily locate the White Oak stake. Silas could kill him.

He had two seconds to contemplate that thought before he was flung against the wall at the far end of the room. He sped back up to his feet as he watched Silas in the form of Stefan approach him slowly.

"I thought Bonnie had put you down, mate," Klaus said, trying to remain as in control of the situation as he possibly could, as he straightened his shirt.

"See that's the thing about witches, Klaus, they're so unreliable."

Klaus frowned. Bonnie had betrayed her friends? Worry pierced his mind for a second at the thought of how Caroline would feel when she found out.

'Stefan' arched his eyebrow, obviously enjoying himself, as he still made his way across the room towards Klaus, "Of course, more frequently they're also just plain incompetent."

It probably had something to do with his mother, but he had always bore a certain amount of disdain for witches, and Klaus would have sniggered now had the slight come from someone he had an inch more tolerance for. Instead he just felt relief that Caroline would not have to suffer betrayal from the moronic witch whom Caroline had already killed a dozen other witches to save. He winced, remembering that moment.

The moment when Caroline had sealed the progression of the descending of the veil, but also the moment that she had performed her most horrifying act ever in her own estimation. The moment he had felt the anger of the former consequence and shared her pain with the latter.

He gritted his teeth. "What is it you want, Silas?"

Stefan disappeared as Silas' figure flashed over in front of Klaus, re-appearing as Klaus' own doppelgänger. Klaus had a second to process this before he saw his own hand reach out and pin him to the wall by his throat.

"You know it's funny you should ask that, Klaus," he heard his own accented voice ring out. He watched the twisted expression appear on his own face and for the first time he completely understood the fear he incited in others. "In light of our recent conversation. Because you see, what I want to know, is what you're doing here."

Klaus' eyes widened, and he tried to speak but he found his speech rendered impossible because of the pressure Silas was applying to his throat. He had never before in his existence been so glad that a lack of oxygen was not fatal to a vampire.

"Please, spare me the technicalities, Klaus. We both know I'm inside your head so I know exactly why you're in this blip where, what was it, 'The living are easily lost and the dead stick around to play'? What I want to know is why you're not in Mystic Falls."

Klaus was now utterly confused. This witch-vampire hybrid could get inside of his head but yet was still questioning him. Moreover he seemed to be upset with him for leaving Mystic Falls. His mind sped, trying to figure out what Silas' problem was. Perhaps he had unknowingly ruined a plan of his? He could not think of any plan that would involve himself though.

Klaus watched the man who was currently a mirror of himself sigh. "You're not going to make me ask you twice, are you? Mate?"

Klaus seriously began to consider whether Silas was sane or not. His whole plan to bring back all the supernatural creatures that had ever died just so he could die and be re-united with his 'one true love' was enough of an indicator, but now he actually expected Klaus to answer him while he was simultaneously actually rendering him physically incapable of doing so.

Silas seemed to take a second to realise this, then released him. Klaus rubbed his throat, then made a slight production of straightening his shirt again before he turned back to Silas.

"I'm sorry, but did I manage somehow to personally offend you by leaving Mystic Falls?" Klaus asked, attempting to regain his casual approach.

He watched the eyebrow of his doppelgänger's face shoot up. "Do you think this is funny?"

"Well how would you feel if some evidently only half-sane two thousand year old witch-vampire hybrid accosted you pretending to be someone else, only to start an interrogation about why you left what is, frankly, possibly the oddest town ever?"

"Well how would you feel if something you had worked so hard on for so long had been destroyed by a moronic one thousand year old werewolf-vampire hybrid leaving town for no logical reason whatsoever?"

This time Klaus sighed, thoroughly fed up with both Silas' cryptic way of speaking and the fact that he was messing around in his mind.

"Silas, do you realise how difficult it is to have a conversation with you?"

He'd been heading over to the decanter to pour himself a scotch when suddenly he was being pinned to the wall once again by Silas.

"Yeah well do you realise how difficult it is to be a die-hard Klaroline shipper when the two people involved aren't even living in the same freaking town?"

Klaus' eyes widened. He had the intense urge to laugh but he could see Silas was dead serious. Mostly because he was wearing his own face. Klaus pushed Silas away and he allowed him to, before Klaus once again made his way to the drinks table.

"Listen mate, I understand your predicament. But if you haven't noticed, Caroline is not interested."

He heard Silas approach from behind him. "I think you forget which one of us has dug around inside her head."

Klaus spun around. "What?"

He watched his own sly smile spread across Silas' stolen face. "So you can stand there and pour yourself a drink, or you can get your ass back to Mystic Falls and make my OTP a reality!"

Klaus hesitated, mostly wondering what on earth an OTP was, but then shook his head. "I can't leave here now. I'm sure you know why."

"What you don't yet seem to grasp is that I do not ask or suggest things, Klaus. That is what you will be doing."

Klaus paled slightly but he thought of his brother's speech. He could not just leave him here to deal with what Klaus had essentially brought him into. "Elijah. Marcel. Hayley," he growled the last name.

Silas sped up to Klaus until there was hardly any space separating the two Klaus Mikaelsons. "You also seem to have very little faith in my abilities. Your brother will never even know you're gone."

Klaus frowned. "You'd do that for me?"

Silas turned away and Klaus retrieved his phone from his pocket, already convinced enough to make the call to take him back where his heart had in truthfulness been all along.

"Anything for Klaroline, mate. That's a true fanboy's job. Oh, and about the werewolf, don't worry. I'll have her sorted out in no time."

Klaus looked up, about to ask what that meant, when he saw that he was all alone again. Instead he began dialling. He couldn't wait to see the real Caroline again.