AN: Basically I'm sick of Julie's shit and felt like writing something sassy. K? Rated 'M' for violence, profanity, and sexy times. Trigger warnings for a mention of suicidal thoughts, gore, death, sexual situations, and gun violence. If any of these things bother you, you don't have to read this. I don't take offense.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much- Oscar Wilde

Caroline Forbes never ceased to be amazed by the lengths people were willing to go to stay young. Anti-aging creams and botox treatments were still in the realm of comprehension to her. Not that she really gave a shit about how many wrinkles she was going to get, but she could at least sympathize with plastic-surgery addicts and needle-jockeys.

But people willing to live off of blood just to stay twenty forever? That's just nuts. Of course, there had to be people willing to turn those vapid, materialistic morons into blood-sucking murderers. 'People' being applied loosely; 'vampire' was a better word for them. Not the sparkling, brooding, masochistic kind of vampire, either, but the kind that could rip a human apart without a second thought.

Vampires needed supply of course, they don't sell blood at any local Walmart for a buck-ninety-nine. Most lived off of street urchins or club goers: transients that the media didn't really give a shit about. Recently, the trend had been towards more reliable, compliant access to fresh blood that didn't end up in a body trail.

In the last decade, dozens of warehouses sprouted up over the country, housing captured humans that served as excellent walking blood bags for several months before said blood bags were disposed of. The sales pitch for the warehouses promoted humans being tapped into and then healed for the next customer. Unfortunately for the humans, they would be subjected to being drained and then healed for months on end and being conscious for every waking minute.

Fortunately for the humans in the warehouse that sat along the docks in New Orleans, Louisiana, Caroline was getting ready to break them out. Though the vampires inside were stronger and faster, she was stronger than most humans and much smarter.

She never really cared for the catsuits female action stars wore in the movies: they were always too tight and cumbersome for hand to hand combat. Her tastes favored black cargo pants tucked into standard issue hunting boots and even a sweatshirt for the cooler nights. Tonight, unfortunately, was not even remotely cool. The muggy air wasn't nearly the hellish temperature that it'd been when the sun was up, but she still found herself sweating through her cotton tank top.

Perched atop a roof exactly one hundred yards away from the target warehouse, she knelt to wire a video camera to her transmitter which allowed for her to send a live video feed to anyone within a two mile radius. Caroline touched a finger to her plastic earpiece, which was nestled innocuously beneath a head of golden curls. "Bonnie, you got a visual?"

"Positive, Carebear," a voice crackled in her ear. "I still don't have a visual from Stefan. Ten minutes 'till go time."

"Got it," Caroline said, deciding to take the time to check her weapons again. She had two Velcro thigh sheaths running around her legs, which contained five wooden stakes each. An ankle holster just above her right hunting boot held a Glock 27, filled with oak-infused bullets that wouldn't fragment upon ejection. At her waist, she had two Glock 23's, filled with 9mm oak bullets as well. About ten clips of ammo were nestled in her pockets, another plus of cargo pants.

Caroline put on her brass knuckles, which had been doused in vervain and engraved upon by her mother. She traced a finger over the brass knuckles, "I guess I'm doing the opposite of what you wanted me to do with my life, right mom?" she whispered to herself, as if her mother was now some sort of cosmic entity watching over her instead of just a rotting corpse in the ground. She tied her curls into a bun atop her head.

"Bonnie, do you have a visual?" Caroline heard Stefan ask over the line.

"Positive, Stefan. I need everyone to check in over comm again."

Caroline sighed and pressed her finger to the earpiece. "Caroline, checking in."

Over the comm, she could hear everyone else check in as well:

"Stefan, checking in."

"Elena, checking in."

"Ditto," Caroline heard a voice identical to Elena's say. Katherine, Elena's twin sister, always had something sassy to say in response to an order.

"Do we have everyone?" Alaric, the team leader, asked.

"Sounds like it, Alaric," Damon answered. Alaric, Damon, and Bonnie were all in the van, which had been parked several blocks away. The cameras that Caroline and Stefan had installed would provide them with a bird's-eye view of the action while the field agents were in the middle of it.

The area they had to cover was about a half-mile radius of warehouses, boathouses, and loading docks in the Port of New Orleans. Shipping containers were like skyscrapers, stacked hundreds of feet high and filled to the brim with anything from drugs to electronics. The warehouse they were planning to infiltrate was approximately three-thousand square feet, with two stories and multiple exits. Several weeks before, Bonnie had stolen the blueprints for the building from the city clerk's office.

Caroline had been assigned to the east entrance, a door leading off of one of the docks and was closest to the Mississippi. Stefan got the north entrance, and the twins got the western entrances. If everything went according to plan, they'd slay every vampire in their path and free the humans kept inside.

Of course, nothing ever went according to plan.

The lower level, according to the purloined blueprints currently in Bonnie's possession, had been split into dozens of rooms for vampire customers to do their business in. The warehouse was operated much like a brothel was, only the humans that serviced that vampires had absolutely no way of resisting. The humans were treated no better than prisoners and probably hadn't seen sunlight in months. Caroline would be damned if she didn't save them or die trying.

She climbed down the fire escape of the building she'd been surveying from, preparing to get into position. The east entrance was the farthest from the docks, shielded from both security cameras and fog lights. Caroline would have to kick in the heavy wooden door, but she'd have no other obstacles to get through once she infiltrated the premises.

"Everyone is in position," Alaric said, obviously utilizing the cameras the team had installed. "It's go time."

It went just as unexpectedly as Caroline had expected it to. The second Katherine had kicked in her door on the other side of the building and threw in her vervain grenades, the entire warehouse erupted into chaos. The humans who had been compelled not to resist their captors immediately started flooding into the halls as their captors fled in Caroline and Stefan's direction. The vamps caught in the blast radius of Katherine's grenades howled in pain, only to be staked in the back while they were down. Elena followed her twin's line of fire and kept her stakes at the ready as the humans fled from their rooms where they'd been held prisoner.

Caroline's door frame had shattered into hundreds of wooden splinters when she'd kicked the door. She rushed in, her Glock 23 in her right hand, firing at any rush of vampire movement. Once a vamp was struck by a wooden bullet anywhere on their body, they slowed down to a speed that Caroline could aim at and deliver a kill shot. Shouts and cries of surprise echoed through the dim halls as the walking blood bags fled their rooms like whores liberated from a brothel. Harsh fluorescent lights flickered overhead to illuminate the barren cement hallway. Doors, dozens of them, were on either side of her. She had to clear each and every one of them to check for remaining targets or wounded humans.

A flash of movement ahead of her made her swing her vervain wrought brass knuckles out to catch whatever vamp thought could outrun her. As soon as her fist connected, a redheaded she-vamp crumpled to the floor. Caroline promptly staked her. Another round of gunfire erupted from the north entrance, where Stefan was facing off with custom TEC-9's, a rapid-fire handgun fitted with wooden bullets. Bullets flew like fragments of paper firecrackers, catching fleeing vamps with the same kind of speed.

"Care, we've got movement on the second floor. There should be a flight of stairs 200 feet ahead of you on your right," Bonnie chimed in over the comm.

Caroline touched her earpiece with her free hand, "Copy that. Moving to intercept." Glock at the ready, she advanced forward and made sure to check every room she came across for stray vamps. Most of the vampires, perhaps twenty of them, had fled towards Stefan on the north side and Elena on the southwest side. Katherine continued to throw vervain grenades to keep the vampires cornered.

Just as Bonnie had said, there was a flight of stairs on Caroline's right. She ascended them as stealthily as she could, fingers tensing on the grip of her Glock as well as squeezing her brass knuckles testily. Unlike the first floor of the warehouse, the second floor was just one big room, with painted-over windows and exposed beams hanging around to give it character. Fluorescent track lights helped her human eyes find her target. On her far left, a man was hastily unloading a six-foot high steel safe against the wall, frantically stuffing wads of money into a duffel bag. She only took a second to aim and shot a warning shot that fluttered just past his ear.

"Put your hands up where I can see them and turn around," she commanded, her voice harsh as she kept him in her sights on her gun.

"Whatever you say, love," the man replied icily, his gravelly voice almost a low growl as he turned to face her. Their eyes seemed to widen as they regarded each other's appearance. He was the only vamp tonight she'd seen with a tailored suit on, leading her to believe that he was the proprietor of the establishment she'd broken into. His face, whilst covered with sandy-blond stubble, was simultaneously soft and angular. Startlingly blue eyes matched Caroline's own, pupils dilating with excitement. His pouty lips turned up into a sly smile as he assessed the woman who had her gun trained on him.

"You're awfully chipper for a man who's just had his business broken into," Caroline snipped, her expression stony and impassive.

"What makes you think this is my business, love?" His accent flowed naturally, so it obviously wasn't the fake cockney she'd had men put on for her before.

"Power of deduction," she replied, tensing for him to make a move and wondering why she hadn't pulled the trigger yet.

Her hesitation was a mistake as he had crossed the room and knocked her off of her feet faster than she could have shot him. Her back hit the cement floor with a hollow thud, the blow knocking the breath from her lungs. The gun went flying out of her grasp. The lights above her cut into her vision like knives, piercing her mind as she tried to get her bearings. He'd pinned her to the floor beneath him before she could even think to stand, his hand at her throat as he took a deep breath to inhale her scent.

"Agh, did you just smell me?" Caroline croaked, struggling under his weight.

"What's a pretty little thing like you doing hunting vampires?" The man whispered to her, his lips ghosting by her ear.

"I dunno," she snarled, catching him on the jaw with her vervain wrought brass knuckles. The blow sent him reeling, staggering off of her and clutching his handsome face in pain. "I think I'm just good at it." Caroline lunged for her fallen gun, reaching it just as the man tried tackling her again.

He smiled once more, though his eyes remained terrifyingly cold and calculating as she leveled her sights on him. "You're fast for a human."

Caroline smirked, her finger itching for the trigger. "You're slow for a vampire." For some reason, her finger wouldn't move, as if it were frozen in place by the hand of that proverbial conscience everyone yabbers on about. The trigger was like some obstinate obstacle that she couldn't sneak around. Shoot him, her inner voice screamed, for the love of God, shoot him. But she couldn't.

"I'm just going easy on you, love," he growled, before flashing to one of the windows on the other side of the warehouse floor, some one hundred feet from Caroline. "By the way, I'm Klaus," he called. A blink of an eye later, one of the windows had been shattered and her target was gone. One of the lights from the docks shone through the hole in the glass, occupying the space where this man, Klaus, had stood merely seconds before.

"Dammit," Caroline spat, touching a finger to her earpiece, "Bonnie, I lost him. Bastard's faster than I expected."

"No time to go after him now, Care. I called in an anonymous tip to the police that there are dozens of wounded civilians stuck here. We need to get out before the ambulances arrive," Bonnie answered.

"Copy that. Moving to extraction point," Caroline trotted back downstairs, her mind still reeling from her encounter with Klaus. Katherine, Elena, and Stefan were all waiting for her in the hall. Gray bodies of slain vampires were strewn haphazardly all over the place, victims of the team's seamless attack. Some died with their eyes clamped shut with pain, but most of them died with their eyes glazed over like stone, staring glassily up at the ceiling like those proverbial haunted statues.

The lights above them flickered as they jogged out of the warehouse through the east entrance, distant sirens from police cars and ambulances wailing discordantly. Alaric's van sat idling, the ancient motor purring and stuttering occasionally. Its black exterior blended in nicely with the pitch-dark night, broken only by the harsh glow of streetlamps. They slid in through the rear doors, making sure that no straggling vamps were following them.

Damon, who sat in the driver's seat, stepped on the gas the second the rear doors had closed, wanting to get out of there way before the police arrived. Alaric's van had been outfitted with three computers on a bolted-down desktop, modeled after one of those spy vans in those James Bond movies. Bonnie sat in her own wheelie chair, which was secured to the van's wall whilst in transit so she wouldn't slide around. Much like the seating on military aircraft, there were fold-down seats welded to the side of the van, just enough for the field team to strap into so they could get a speedy exit.

They all breathed a sigh of relief once they were a mile away from the docks, the distant sirens fading away into nothingness. Stefan began to laugh, panting and exhausted, his knuckles beginning to swell up from having punched someone. The rest of them chimed in, giddy after a good night's work.

Caroline was the only one who didn't join in, her mind elsewhere, her thoughts still revolving around that terrifyingly enigmatic Klaus. He had the chance, certainly the ability to kill her and yet he hadn't. He was much faster and way stronger than any other vampire she'd fought, cunning and (dare she think it) stunningly handsome. She looked down at her hands and glared at the way they shook. She should've pulled the trigger and at least pumped a few wooden rounds into him before he eventually got away. Every fiber of her being had screamed at her to pull the trigger and yet she didn't.

Katherine, who sat next to her, elbowed Caroline. "Hey, chin up. We did good tonight. Kicked some undead ass and saved the sheep from the slaughter."

Bonnie glanced over from her place across from the computers. "Are you still beating yourself up over that vamp that got away?"

"I guess, yeah," Caroline replied, offering a tight smile to reassure them.

"Can't catch 'em all, blondie," Damon said, his eyes still on the road as he drove.

"Yeah, Care, these sons of bitches will always be faster than us," Katherine shrugged, "Some of them will always get away."

"I know," Caroline clenched her trembling hands into fists so the others wouldn't see, "I just hate knowing that the vamp that got away could be killing someone." The others seemed to accept her answer and settled back in their seats. Stefan stared knowingly at Caroline, his brooding gaze boring into her forehead. She met his eyes and mouthed 'later' at him, a promise that they could talk in private once they got back to HQ.

HQ was an old apartment building that had been abandoned during Hurricane Katrina, but had since been restored by Alaric and Damon. It sat just inside the Lower Ninth Ward, the water lines still woven into the brick on the second story. Alaric, Caroline, and Damon all paid for the place five years ago, which they'd gotten for a fraction of what it was worth now. It had six windows on every side, three for each floor, with three apartments up top.

When the first got the place, the wooden floors were warped and moldy, the roof was in tatters, and most of the windows had been boarded up. Over the course of a year, Damon and Alaric had managed to restore it back to its former glory. The neighborhood around it had been rebuilt by volunteers from all sorts of churches and organizations, but their HQ had been left to rot until the three of them slapped down the down payment. The bricks on the outside, faded to brown, were the only reminder of its traumatic brush with Hurricane Katrina.

The second floor had been kept as apartments, enough for Damon, Alaric, and Caroline to live in. The first floor, however, was where the magic happened. Everyone limped inside, stripping off their weapons and special gear to place in the allotted space on the wall. The east wall, the wall directly to the right of the door, was covered from floor to ceiling with hooks and even metal cabinets. On said hooks were all of the sharp instruments: stakes, machetes, knives, and even a couple swords. The cabinets housed all of the guns, wood-infused bullets, and vervain grenades.

On the western wall hung long ropes of woven vervain, some fresh some not. Near the furthest wall hung two punching bags, with mats for sparring and wrestling propped up against the wall. Piles of boxing gloves, mitts, forearm and shin guards, and even a torso guard were strewn haphazardly around.

Exhausted as they were, the field team couldn't just take their weapons home with them and collapse into bed: they still had to file everything away and take stock of how much ammo they used. Caroline had gone through two clips on her Glocks, not a big loss. Stefan had gone through a whopping ten clips, having used the rapid fire TEC-9's after drawing out the vamps. Katherine had blown up four vervain grenades, and Elena had snapped three stakes in the hand-to-hand combat.

Every round, every stake, every grenade, and every hospital visit had to be accounted for: money was tight, like it always was. The team made it work because they knew that what they were doing was worth every penny.

Elena and Katherine were the first ones to leave, only after Katherine had kissed Stefan goodnight. They lived in their tiny little house on the other side of town, so they could be near the Xavier University campus, where Katherine was studying to be an explosives expert and Elena was getting ready to become a marine biologist. Bonnie followed soon after, going back to her dorm room at Tulane University.

When Caroline was filing away her left over clips of ammo, Stefan sidled over next to her, mindful of Damon and Alaric's proximity. "So what happened in the warehouse? What's got you so riled up?" he asked, voice laced with concern. He'd always looked out for Caroline, ever since they'd met in first grade.

Caroline sighed, counting her unused bullets before admitting: "I choked, Stefan. I had him in my sights, but I couldn't move my finger. And anytime I sit still, my hands start shaking and my fingers won't stop twitching. I'm losing it."

Stefan lowered his voice some more. "Caroline, your mom's Parkinson's didn't set in until her thirties. I think that you're so convinced that she passed it on to you that you're seeing symptoms that aren't there." His voice was gentle, but she could still hear his condescending tone.

She bit her lip. "Stefan, I told you about the new genetic testing going on down at Tulane, remember? They claim to have identified the specific genetic mutation that causes Parkinson's disease. I sent in a sample of my blood a month ago. I got the results back this morning."

"And you haven't told anyone? You didn't tell me? What did the tests say?" Stefan demanded, his heart pounding in fear for the answer he knew was coming.

"If the gene they claim to have identified is the Parkinson's gene, then I have it. My blood had what they were looking for," she snorted humorlessly, shaking her head as she filed away her Glock 23's and 27's. Even if the tests were wrong, I'd find out well enough when I hit thirty.

Stefan's eyes searched her down-trodden expression. "You don't seem surprised," he noted.

"I'm disappointed, yeah, but not surprised. I was sure enough of it before now that I decided not to go to college, didn't I?" She waved her hand to gesture at their HQ. "That's why I can afford to live so dangerously."

"But that's not why you choked up on the trigger, Care. I know you. Even when you're living from paycheck to paycheck or been dumped, you never let it get to you where you're on mission. Tell me exactly what happened," Stefan had always, annoyingly, known when she was holding something back.

"He was fast, faster than any vamp that I've ever come across. He had power, but he didn't flaunt it. I can tell, you know, when a guy is compensating for something. I could've killed him, but I didn't. He could have killed me, but he didn't," Caroline sighed, shutting the cabinet drawer and sitting down on one of the chairs to unlace her combat boots. Stefan drew up a chair and sat next to her.

"And?" he prompted.

"Nothing. We just had a mutual willingness to let the other live. Klaus is an oddity, I'll give you that."

"Oh, so it's Klaus, now?" Stefan's expression remained impassive. "You can't allow yourself to believe that he'll show you the same mercy again. You have to remember that he's a killer."

"I haven't forgotten," Caroline said, her voice hard but laden with exhaustion. "Believe me, I haven't forgotten," she repeated underneath her breath.

Short first chapter. Also, the build-up is going to be heinously long. But your patience will be rewarded with so much smut you'll get sick of it.

ONWARD!