Okay.

What.

Seriously, though, what is going on? She's definitely sure now; Klaus has nothing to do with this, because he is deadly serious; and by deadly serious, she means serious enough that he looks like he's going to kill her if she makes one misstep, because at the moment he thinks she's threatening herself; or some other version of herself, or whatever. Like she somehow kidnapped herself and is now here to—what? What would she even come here for? And even if she was trying to kidnap this Caroline (that's weird) that he's talking about, why would she try to impersonate her? Which, you know, isn't what she's doing in the first place, but how is she going to explain that to him?

Oh God, this is Klaus. She is in very much danger now, and not just danger of emotional trauma, but physical danger. He's convinced that she's done something to his Caroline (God that's even weirder) who is a completely different person than she is, and, well, if they've been together a century, then he must care about her, and at the moment he thinks she's a threat, which puts her in more danger from him than she's ever been; and he's the Original Hybrid, and he's like a million years old. He's picked up a couple of tricks over the centuries, of course. So what will he do to her?

No, no panicking. Just, think with a calm head. She needs to convince him that she's not done anything to his Caroline, and also that she's really not dumb enough to be trying to pull the wool over his eyes. He probably invented that trick, anyways.

"Wait, just, wait a second. I've lived in this town my whole life, and all of a sudden the people who I've known forever are telling me that they think I'm another person. So if anything's happened to this, this other Caroline, then it's not me doing it. Do you really think that if I was impersonating her, or whatever, that I'd have come in asking you about Tyler, or Elena? I don't know what's going on here, but I'm not the one responsible for this, I swear. I just want to get back home."

He looks like he sees the logic in that (thank God) and frowns, picking up a glass of bourbon from the side table.

"So what's your theory, then? Where is she?"

Well, that's a tough one, considering; she's no idea where this other Caroline is, but it's possible she's still in New Orleans, right? Maybe she never left. Except, apparently, when Klaus calls her, it's her phone that rings. How did that even happen? Do they have the same number, too? It doesn't make sense. And all this stuff, like the hybrids being alive, and Tyler being in town, her never being born—it's almost like she's in a completely different world, somehow.

She swallows.

Different world? Can that happen? Like, a lot of impossible stuff has happened since she's become a vampire, actually becoming a vampire being one of them. Her best friends are a witch and a vampire, who's also a doppelganger of two others before her, and she's dating a hybrid who used to be a werewolf, and she's standing in the room with a thousand year-old. She's seen ghosts and there's this whole Other Side deal going on where supernaturals go where they die; so why not different worlds?

How does she—oh God, how does she even start trying to get back?

Right, Klaus is still waiting for his answer. She clears her throat, tries not to flail. "Okay," she says, "so, I know I grew up in the same town, and if another Caroline had come here once, I'm pretty sure I would have remembered, which makes me think; what if I'm not in the same Mystic Falls? Like, different universes or something? Because there is no way that all these people, including you, remembered who I was yesterday and forgot today. I mean, yesterday all the other hybrids were dead, but you're saying you never killed them. And yesterday Tyler wasn't in town, but today he is. There's no way this is the same Mystic Falls, right?"

"You're telling me you're from a different universe where you are just eighteen, and things are as you believe they should be here? One where Caroline doesn't exist, like you don't here?" She nods, and he frowns, setting his glass down and turning away from her. She bites her lip, hoping he believes her, mostly because she knows that if he doesn't he might start torturing her for information about the other Caroline, which would suck, and not only because she hasn't actually got any information about her, and doesn't really know her at all, and didn't know she existed until now, really.

Klaus looks amused. Well, not amused, more incredulous, really. Great. She needs him to believe her; after all, right now he'd be the only person who she can trust, considering everyone else in town kind of wants to kill her. Besides, he's a thousand, which makes him the best protection she can get, especially if the Salvatores try to attack her or something, which she doesn't doubt. If anyone hurts Elena, then they're definitely going to try to take them out. And Caroline's not exactly going to be hard to kill if they all try to come at her. The only thing she can do is stick by Klaus and hope no one attacks her for fear of pissing him off, or something — or if they do attack her, that Klaus keeps her safe.

Oh, God. What has she gotten herself into if she needs to depend on him to keep her safe? She needs to wise up to everything that's happened here fast, and figure out a way to keep herself safe. Klaus is not her protector.

"Let's say I believe you, love. That still doesn't explain where Caroline is." He says, turning around, and she sighs. She doesn't know that. Obviously; if her theory is right, she just got here. How is she to know anything?

"I don't know. Maybe she's still wherever she's supposed to be. You've been together for a hundred years, right? So how come she's not upstairs sleeping or whatever? Didn't you say it'd been just you for a while?"

"Caroline was in New Orleans the last I'd heard from her, which was two days ago." At her questioning look (duh, why? Doesn't together sort of imply they'd actually be together? Like, in the same place?) he continues, "She was in the Caribbean islands, helping out a witch she owed a favor to, after which she decided that taking a bit of a break would in New Orleans would be a better idea than doing so here. I may have mentioned that it would be dangerous for her to come here while the town's little band of misfits is still trying to hunt down a cure."

She raises an eyebrow, confused. "What do you mean? They found the cure ages ago. Okay, so Katherine stole it, but they did find it. They got back from that island days back." She says, and he raises his eyebrows in response, sitting down opposite her on another armchair, then shakes his head.

"What island? My brother and I are quite hard at work convincing them against looking for the cure at all." My brother and I? What brother? Elijah? Really, that's weird, because no one's seen or heard anything from or of Elijah in months, since he left town the night they desiccated Klaus—no, wait. Shit.

Kol.

"Klaus," she says slowly, "Kol — " She pauses, unsure. What would she even say? They killed Kol for warning them against the cure? Klaus will not take well to being told his brother is dead, like he hadn't taken well to them actually killing him. Besides, if she does tell him, who's to say he won't get mad enough and just kill her? Whether or not she looks like his Caroline, she is, to him, essentially, a stranger. Right?

Klaus is looking at her expectantly, though, so she licks her lips and says what is pretty much the truth. Or close enough, anyways. "Trying to stop us getting the cure, it didn't work. Um, we trapped you in Elena's house so we could get to the cure."

"You trapped me in the doppelganger's home? How? I'm an Original, love, it's not easy to trap me anywhere. And to trap two Originals..." Well, yeah. If it was easy to trap an Original, they'd have gotten rid of all of them long ago, kept them magically trapped in their mansion or something, and they could do what they liked. Maybe then all of Caroline's problems would magically disappear, like this one.

"Okay, so it's not happened here. They, uh, tricked you by, uh, attacking Kol, and then when you were inside Bonnie did a spell to keep you there so you wouldn't interfere." That has to be safe enough, probably.

"What did I do? In your universe, how painfully did Kol torture whoever it was that made the mistake of trying to attack him?" He asks, sounding amused, which, of course, this is Klaus. He's amused at the idea of torture. God. She doesn't know what she'd expected.

"Nothing, really. Kol was kind of just, uh, lying there for most of it. You were pretty mad, though, you bit me at one point. And then you ran Tyler out of town. Jeremy died on the island, Silas killed him, so there wasn't exactly anything you could do to them. For trapping you, I mean." He clenches his jaw, then unclenches it and looks at her with a grin—which, what? Bit out of nowhere, isn't it? The topic of conversation changes like he's suddenly completely forgotten that in another universe he did not take revenge for them attacking his brother (and, as he thinks, failing. She has to make absolutely sure he doesn't find out what really happened); of course, it's not happened here, so maybe he's got nothing to worry about?

"And yet, here you sit. Alive despite a hybrid bite. Clearly there's more between us than you've revealed, if you were brave enough to come making demands of me in my own home. And why did I heal you if I bit you myself?"

She tries to avoid the question, feeling uncomfortable. He keeps staring at her, though, intent on getting an answer, and she can feel him looking at her even when she looks away, down, anywhere but at him. Damn. She really didn't want this to come up, considering how vehemently she's been against the remote possibility of her being his girlfriend or lover or whatever. While, yeah, that's not a thing that's going to happen, it remains that he does have a crush on her or something, which isn't exactly something she wants to talk about with this Klaus, who is, well, with her. Another version of her, but still.

"Okay, so you have some kind of thing for me. You fancy me, or whatever. You're very persistent, and it's very annoying." He smiles at her, like a real smile—why?

"And yet you trust that I won't harm you, or you wouldn't have come here as you did." He says, and she sighs, then nods. She kind of does; even though she was very pissed when she came here, and still kind of is, she was pretty sure he wouldn't hurt her (again). Physically, at least. She also cannot stress enough how much the knowledge makes her uncomfortable.

"It doesn't matter, okay? I'm with Tyler. Just, not this Tyler. My Tyler." She looks away for a second, trying not to think about the absolute hatred in Tyler's face when he looked at her earlier, so much anger, like he hated her; which he should, considering she tried to kill him. It's just strange. She tried to kill him. She was the one who was using him for the werewolf sacrifice, which obviously means she wasn't the vampire sacrifice herself.

It is also weird in that impossible never ever going to happen way, that she's been with Klaus for a hundred years, because, really, how? She knows that even her Klaus (no, no, not her Klaus, just the Klaus that she knows, that's not what she means, seriously) is always talking about forever and stuff, but being with someone a hundred years, that's not something she can even start to comprehend. She's a vampire, sure, and she gets in theory that she has forever (unless some new Bad Guy of the Day in Mystic Falls kills her, which is a big possibility), but she doesn't really get it, really. She's just spent a year as a vampire, and all that time has gone into stuff like plotting and trying to stay alive, so she hasn't exactly had a chance to think about that forever.

Besides, even if she does get back to her universe, it feels like for the next hundred years her and Tyler will be separated because he will probably still be on the run—if Klaus hasn't found him, which would be infinitely worse.

Which is why it doesn't matter that in a different universe she's with Klaus, because in her own world she never will be. She knows that if Klaus finds Tyler, he won't let him go, and she doesn't think she could be with him after that. Ever. She couldn't forgive that even if a hundred years passed. She can see herself forgiving the other things, things she'd even started to forget, but that was before Winter Wonderland and before he killed Mrs. Lockwood. Before he ran Tyler out of town. Before he proved that he was as terrible as she'd thought.

In this universe, he's not that bad, or so it seems. Obviously he isn't, or she wouldn't still be with him, right?

Except, she might not be the same. She might be really different. She's a hundred years old, and she comes from a time when blood bags weren't even a thing, so would she be on a blood bag diet? Probably not. And she wouldn't exactly have had Stefan to teach her to control her urges, and who knew what she was really like? What if she'd completely let her humanity go, or was just as twisted as Klaus could be?

"Where do you think she is?" She asks. "Your—the other Caroline?"

His face hardens just the slightest before he responds. "Well, seeing as you're here, I'm inclined to believe that Caroline might be in your... universe."

Caroline's face falls.

So, I guess I'm going ahead with this after all? Thank you so much everyone who reviewed/favourited or followed, it means a lot.