Disclaimer: So, if I owned VD I most definitely wouldn't be up at five o'clock in the morning posting this.
Also, question: Feel totally free to answer, loves. Should Jeremy be with Bonnie or Anna? Give me your honest opinion. I'm not saying it's about this story, it could be about any story. Also: Stelena or Stefan/Katherine? I'm relying on the opinions of you fantabulous peoples!
Enjoy the long-awaited Daroline interaction!
A/N: Oh, also: the POV kind of switches around a lot. It's pretty obvious, but I thought I should just give you guys a heads-up. Which reminds me: I've found I'm more inclined to write a guy's POV than a girl's. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. I mean, shouldn't I be better at girls? IDK, you know what, it doesn't even matter. Just answer my questions and enjoy! :)
of fumbling passions, of personal struggles
–Levi Kreis, "Left Over"
The next few seconds are spent in silence as they walk back to the car. There's no time for him to ask her anything, or for her to tell him anything.
They get back in the car and he crawls into the backseat. Elena somehow manages to drift over until she's sleeping on his shoulder once again, like an unconscious migration. Meanwhile, Caroline gets up in the front seat and by some means shoves Damon over into the passenger seat. Damon mumbles something and tosses onto his other side, like he usually does, but nobody wakes up. Caroline sits in the driver's seat and turns on the ignition. It's warm outside, it being summer and all, so they've left the car off for now, needing neither AC nor heat. "We wanna go right now, right? As soon as possible?" she asks Stefan quietly, careful not to wake anyone up.
He nods. "Yeah, but—"
She starts driving, and amazingly the engine wakes up no one, not even Damon, who is the lightest sleeper that Stefan has ever known. He watches her as well as he can in the fading light of his lantern—it's on the lowest setting possible—and beyond Bonnie's seat. She looks grim, from what he can tell, but who wouldn't? Her hair is drying already into soft curls in her ponytail, from what he can see in the dimly-lit rear view mirror, and her eyes are determined on the road as they navigate their way slowly out of town.
(Elena's breathing on his shoulder reminds him to look away.)
"You sure you want to be driving right now?" he asks quietly. "It's late."
He can hear her softly snickering. "I've been awake for the past three days straight," she says. "Trust me. I probably shouldn't be, and I may not be as soon as we stop someplace, but for the moment I am wide awake. Really. It'll be fine. Besides, who else is gonna drive? El's asleep on your shoulder there, Bon's out cold, Gilbert Junior's sleeping too, as is Aunt Jen, and looks like your brother's as asleep as he's gonne get. I'm wired for now. I'll be all right."
"You sure?"
That same snicker again. "I stole some coffee from a gas station I passed about ten miles away from here. Cold, crappy coffee, but still. It does the job. Tell you what. We'll stop at a hotel or something, whatever works, make sure it's empty, and I'll steal the first clean bed and collapse. We'll crash there for a while." She's silent for a moment. "So, uh…do we really have a destination?"
He bites his lip. "Sort of, kinda. Yeah. Jenna's boyfriend was down at a local college in Florida when this all happened. We wanna pick him up. So, yeah. We're heading way down south. Jenna's traveled down there before, says it should take about fifteen, sixteen hours if we take no breaks. Of course, that's not accounting for weather and all the cars or trees we might have to move that would be blocking the road."
"You forgot zombies," she snorts. "Gonna have to take out some of those, too."
"I didn't think it needed mentioning."
She pauses. "Yeah, you're probably right." She sighs. "So…how did you and your brother get dragged into this thing? Why didn't you two just strike out on your own?"
Stefan worries his bottom lip between his teeth again. "I guess we wouldn't be here if it weren't for me dating Elena."
Caroline doesn't say anything, but he detects a slight deceleration in the car, as if she's lightly let go of the gas, or perhaps pressed more firmly on the brake. But the speed soon returns back to normal and she clears her throat. "You're dating Elena? That's, that's nice. Elena. She's a great girl. She's dependable, you know, smart. Sweet. Always trying to protect everybody." She shakes her head. "She really shouldn't, though. That's gonna get her into trouble someday."
He smiles a little, but it's humorless now. Something's dampened the mood but he doesn't want to think about what. "Yeah, I think you're right. It probably will."
"Congrats."
"I think the time's long passed for congrats, it's been nearly two years now."
She snickers. "Wow, you guys really did move to town just after I left."
Content to watch a bit of scenery, he doesn't reply just yet, instead watching the wildlife and nature itself as it passes quickly by the window. The trees are a blur and the grass is little more than a dull green lit up by the headlights. He turns back to his girlfriend, watching her sleep on his arm, and thinks about the attraction between him and Caroline. She seems smart, witty, nice, capable, and definitely hardworking.
But she's not Elena. She's not generous and she can never hope to be as forgiving. She doesn't have Elena's heart-shaped face or her chocolate-colored hair or her caramel eyes. She doesn't have her thin lips or her small nose or her delicate jaw. She probably wouldn't fall asleep on his arm, and she wouldn't be his unofficial therapist, and she already knows how to use a gun. Unlike Elena.
So, yes. She's great, Caroline. If she'd still been here when Damon and I have moved here…
But she wasn't, and Elena was.
He watches a raccoon streak past them, startled by the lights on the car, and looks up at the front seat, where Caroline is determinedly driving the car as far down south as possible before she needs to crash. "What?" he asks distractedly, aware that she'd said something a few moments ago.
"I said you guys must have moved to town just after I left. Strange, huh?" she says, with a laugh that almost sounds forced.
And he looks down at his girlfriend, whose hair is free and loose and her face slack but still somehow even more beautiful in sleep. "Strange but perfect," he murmurs, and he moves a stray strand of hair behind Elena's ear. She shifts but doesn't wake.
But somehow he still can't ignore the tension in the air.
Though he hadn't planned to do so, he somehow falls asleep with his hand still touching Bonnie's. He doesn't know exactly what's going on with them. Until recently, they've always just been friends, with her like another big annoying sister to him and him like an irritating little brother to her.
But the fact is that everything seems to be changing with this zombie apocalypse.
And…maybe not all of it's so bad.
But not the point. He falls asleep, which was not his intention, and he wakes up to a fist lightly poking/punching him in the shoulder. He stirs, opens his eyes, and greets a brand new face.
Um…wow.
His first impression? The face of an angel. She has blonde hair swirling around her face in soft little curvy tendrils. Her eyes are a light blue, like frozen crystal that's slowly being warmed over. Her hands are delicate and her fingers painted a bright purple nail polish. Her skin is pale, like extra whitened porcelain for a fragile china doll. But she looks anything but fragile. In fact, her expression is rather determined, and she's standing in front of him, the car door open. She's standing outside, and the car's off. She must have turned it off sometime and flung open the door so she could wake somebody.
He scans around, and nobody else is awake.
"You were the closest one," she says, and he nods. "Hi, I'm Caroline. You've probably been expecting me. You're really Jeremy, right? God, you look older."
"Um…yeah." He remembers a patronizing girl with blonde hair and blue eyes that was a friend of Elena's from when he was a kid—he must've been around eight when she'd moved away. But she didn't have the look of an angel then. And now he's speechless.
"Okay, good. Stefan said we should stop when I felt tired. And I'm just now kind of realizing that I'm exhausted. So I pulled up to the nearest hotel. So it's almost eight in the morning and if I've done my math right we're about a third of the way there. But I figured that was good enough for one night, and I'm really about to fall asleep on my feet." She's probably rambling. He doesn't really notice.
He struggles for a second to remember the words. "Um, yeah. Okay. Have you cleared the hotel out yet?"
"Not yet. I figure, safety in numbers. So maybe you and I could go together?"
Oh my god. Send me into a close confined space with a Swedish model, why don't you? Add in zombies and it's practically the same thing.
He swallows. "Uh, sure." He suddenly feels Bonnie's fingers intertwining in his own, almost painfully so, and he disentangles her grip quickly. She turns onto her side in her sleep but doesn't open her eyes, so he guesses they're all still asleep and safe. "Can we lock the car? I don't want any zombies crashing in on a bunch of sleeping people. Aunt Jenna's already PTSD'd enough."
She grins. "Got it covered."
With a matching brave smile, he covers his shyness as he scrambles out of the car. She locks it and sticks the keys into her jeans pocket. "They shouldn't wake up in the next five minutes," she says, "but if they do, I'd rather they were freaked out to be missing two than waking up to get eaten by zombies." She cocks her gun and he clings to his baseball bat, which is still kind of bloody, and they enter the hotel.
It's small, only two stories, and it looks kind of abandoned—but then, what doesn't nowadays? The walls are made of brick, which is good, and there are no fire escape ladders, which is both good and bad, she knows. It's good because some of the zombies might be smart enough to figure out how to climb a ladder—though the odds are pretty against that, anyway—but bad because there's no emergency escape route if necessary. They'll just have to hope that they don't need it.
After scouring both of the floors, including the small check-in room, the elevator, the stairs, and then every single room (there's only twenty, ten per floor—how much business could they have gotten, he thinks), they exit the hotel. "No zombies," she says with a sigh of relief. "I mean, I stopped at this town because it had a small population count, but I figured there'd be at least one. This is good, right?"
He nods, tongue stuck in his throat. He forces it out. "Yeah. It's great. Should we wake the rest of them up?"
Caroline nods. "Yeah, let's do that. Tell you what, you take the three of them in the backseat and I'll take your girlfriend and Mr. Sunshine in the passenger seat. God, he talks in his sleep, annoyed me all night long," she complains, and Jeremy suppresses a smile.
Sounds like Damon, most definitely, the teenager thinks. He doesn't know his big sister's boyfriend's older brother—whoa, that was complicated—that well, but he knows that Damon loves to be difficult. Sounds just like him to bother everyone even when he's sleeping.
Elena and Jenna are awakened easily, having slept a lot that night, as is Stefan, who he guesses is a light sleeper. Bonnie's also woken up by Caroline without difficulty. They all clamber out of the car, with Elena sleepily holding onto Stefan lightly by one arm. Stefan looks alert but weary, and Jenna seems wide awake and rather jumpy. It's only Damon who's still left asleep.
"Just smack him on the shoulder," Stefan finally says when they all get tired of standing around in an abandoned parking lot. "That should wake him up."
Caroline gives him a well-deserved slap to the shoulder—his mumblings did not help her concentrate on her driving last night, thank you very much—and he stirs, finally opening his eyes. They're a dark blue. Almost mesmerizing.
But she draws back and breaks eye contact as he sits up and unbuckles his seat belt, climbing out of the car and wincing at the sunlight. "Guess you're Caroline, huh?" he asks, his tone…well, not exactly nice. He stretches his arms out, and she cringes at the sound of his shoulder muscles popping.
"Guess you're Damon, huh?" she snaps back. (She hasn't slept in three and a half days. Forgive her for being a little sharp.)
His eyes travel her up and down. "You do look kind of like Liz," he admits begrudgingly. It's true. Same hair color, similar facial patterns, even a comparable body figure to what he's seen in pictures of a teenage Liz—something which she definitely did not have a lot of in quantity because she was "embarrassed" by the pictures or something. (Was hair the size of a beach ball really that popular back then? he wonders, having seen the pictures himself only once.)
With a tired sigh, she sticks her hands on her hips, leaving her gun dangling by two of her fingers. "Can we go inside now, please? I'd love to play the it's-nice-to-meet-you game," she retorts, "but I'm about to be dead on my feet and you're kind of making me wish that it would happen faster."
He snickers. "Yup, you act just like Liz." He stands up fully, and his knees make a cracking sound which makes even Stefan flinch. (Jenna most of all, but nobody mentions it.)
"Can we go now?" she demands.
Reaching back into his seat, he pulls out his bags and the cooler. "Yeah, sure, let's go in. Zombie-free, I assume?"
"For now," she says darkly, and they go inside.
They're all seated in the biggest room there is, sharing in the heat of the fire (it's starting to get colder outside, and not everybody wears leather black jackets and black boots, meaning everyone except Damon is starting to freeze) that Stefan made and talking about small things.
"So," Damon interrupts as snidely as possible, "tell us about your deep, dark, secret, scary past, Blondie."
"Really original, badass. Well," she says, as mildly as possible considering the fact that she feels like she's about to die from lack of sleep—she snarls it, by the way—now that the adrenaline rush has worn off, "is everyone listening? I'm only telling it once."
Stefan leans back from his conversation with Elena, interested. He recalls that she wouldn't share her past with just him—she needed everyone to know so she'd only have to tell it once.
Jenna draws back from Jeremy, who, as per usual now, is staring in fascination at Caroline. (Damon is so gonna tease him about it later, when Caroline's not commanding for their attention.)
Elena is suddenly pulling away from Stefan, and he doesn't know why, but there's a slightly guilty look on her face, and he imagines that Caroline's story will clear that up presently. Meanwhile, Caroline is sitting up on the couch, her arms wrapped around her legs, chin resting on her knees. She looks like the epitome of a girl trying to collapse in on herself—someone trying to forget, someone trying to fade away and not exist anymore. And he feels sorry for her.
But she straightens up her spine and looks at them all with her piercing icy blue glare, which is probably only rivaled by Damon's cold stare, and she clears her throat. "Okay, fine. Who here knows the full story?" she asks monotonously. She sounds bored, like she doesn't really care.
(Even Damon knows better, and he sucks at reading girls.)
Elena and Bonnie tentatively raise their hands. Well. Looks like everyone else is in the dark.
"Well, then," she sighs. "I'd better get started."
Damon doesn't really particularly care about Barbie, per se. Sure, he made a promise to Liz, and yes, she's hot, but she's also kind of a bitch and her story means very little to him.
But then he starts to listen, and it starts to mean more.
"I was ten when I moved away from Mystic Falls," she says. "I had a bad argument with my mom and I really just didn't care what happened with her after that, so I left and went to live with my dad. I didn't come back for five years.
"When I came back, nothing much really happened to me. I was getting along better with my mom, which was good, but we were really distant, both living in the same house but also being a million miles away from each other emotionally. I was rebuilding my friendship with Elena and Bonnie, which was weakened after I moved away—" she gestures to the two other girls with a toss of her hair and a fragile smile "—and then I started going out with this guy. Tyler Lockwood.
"He was different. Kind of an asshole but in a really endearing way. He was funny, and cute, and I really liked him, and he liked me too. His family was moving to where my dad lives—lived. So we could keep up the relationship if I went back to my dad's, which I didn't really want because I was getting along better with my mom, but like any girl, I chose love over family." She sighs. "Anyway. It was all getting along great. I didn't want to leave Mystic Falls, but I didn't see any other way."
She narrows her eyes a tiny bit. "Then it all kind of came crashing down."
Elena interrupts. "Can I say this part? If it's gonna be told…well, I'd rather it came from me."
Caroline shrugs. "Makes no difference to me."
"Okay," Elena says, kind of shakily, looking to Stefan for something—encouragement? Support? Something. So he nods and she finally spits it out. "Tyler kissed me."
"You kissed back," Caroline says harshly, and they've obviously had this argument a dozen times. But she calms herself down and looks at Elena. "It doesn't matter anyway. You said he kissed you, he said you kissed him, I didn't know what to believe. My friendship with Elena was ruined no matter what. I just didn't trust her enough anymore. And Bonnie took Elena's side in it all—"
There's an unspoken Of course in the air, but she ignores it and continues. Bonnie looks down.
"—so I left Mystic Falls as soon as I could. I was still with Tyler when this all started. We'd been dating for two years." She winces. "Our anniversary was last week. So. We were out celebrating when the news really started piling up. Zombie outbreaks, people eating at each other, that sort of thing. People started thinking, you know, we should all get somewhere safe. And Mystic Falls is—was—whatever—a small town, so I figured I could go there and be safer. I didn't want to leave my family and my friends, but my dad made me go.
"Just as I was about to leave—the morning of, actually—my dad had called a taxi and we were standing outside when he got bitten. We went inside to take care of it and he…turned. Of course," she says with a sneer Damon suspects is directed at herself, "we had no idea what was going on, the news hadn't gotten that far along yet. So I started disinfecting it and I left him alone for maybe ten, twenty minutes to go find gauze. I came back and he was practically foaming at the mouth. He rushed at me and I shot him with his own shotgun. I barely even got him, and he was somehow so close.
"His boyfriend came in with his daughter, and they'd both been bitten too. And I knew what was going to happen. They both wanted to die human, so I shot them as well. In between the eyes. So." She shrugs. "I guess I was in shock or something, I went around packing like there weren't three dead bodies in my living room and everything was just fine. My taxi pulled up an hour later and I got in with my duffel bag and my gun. He started driving, I made him leave me so he could get back to his family." She shrugs again. "And now I'm here with you people, and Jeremy, you need to shut your gaping mouth before your jaw freezes like that and you look like a fucking dumbass for the rest of your short, short life."
Jeremy closes his mouth with a look of shock on his face still, though Damon imagines it's both from the story and the harsh words.
Caroline looks mostly untouched by the story, but even Damon can see that underneath that layer of coldness lingers a little girl who killed her own father in self-defense when he tried to eat her. He looks at her with something that's probably akin to pity, and she must see it because she looks vaguely, faintly horrified and she snaps at him, "I'm going to bed, I haven't slept in four fucking days," and stalks off, leaving everyone reeling in the aftermath of her own little horror story.
Damon sighs right after he sits on the bed. He and Stefan are paired up for the night. Bonnie and Elena are sharing a room as well, as are Jenna and Caroline. Jeremy's on his own for the night, but he'll be fine. Besides, from the sound of the room next door, it seems like Jeremy's having a talk with his aunt anyway—and it sounds like she's telling him to leave Caroline alone. (Nice, he thinks.) Leaving Caroline in her bed. Asleep. And alone.
Suddenly, the thought of visiting Caroline doesn't seem so bad. Now he has two reasons to do so: to make sure some zombie didn't escape her sight and is now chomping on her brains; and to make sure they get a proper introduction. She's Liz's daughter. It would be better if they could get off on the right foot this time.
(Even if she is a cranky little bitch.)
So he wanders out of the room he's sharing with Stefan and down the hall to hers. He approaches her door and he can hear some sounds coming out her door—high-pitched, almost keening sounds. For a second he thinks there's a puppy crying in there or something—or maybe baby Gilbert, one can never tell—but then…
"I'm so sorry, Daddy," he hears a small voice whisper, and for a second his chest tightens and his feelings for her soften. Just for a second...no, wait...
Make that more than a second.
Make that for about twenty damn straight minutes, because that's how long he listens to her cry. And he doesn't know what to do. Is he supposed to go in there? Is he supposed to comfort this girl who acts like she hates him?
Is he supposed to just leave her to cry all by herself?
Before he can lose the courage, he raises up his hand to knock on the door. But he doesn't yet. He waits for five seconds, inahling.
"Tyler," she bites out in a harsh sob that probably hurts her throat, and breaks out into a new outbreak of gasping breaths. God, she's certainly not a quiet crier, is she.
(He tries to convince himself to be just a little bit nicer to her. She's lost nearly everything.)
He knocks.
There's a fierce scrambling inside, and when she opens the door two and a half minutes later, her eyes are a little bloodshot. But her face isn't splotchy and her voice sounds normal when she demands to know why he's there. "What the fuck do you want, Salvatore?"
If he hadn't heard her, he'd think she's just sleep-deprived with her red eyes. If he hadn't listened to her crying her eyes out, he wouldn't know she'd been crying at all.
"Just…" he says, his words trailing off and leaving him defenseless.
She raises up her walls and he can practically see her hiding behind them, hoping he won't knock them down.
She makes herself look, act, maybe even (to a certain extent) feel stronger, and he knows she won't do anything if he tries to console her except push him away. And never let it be said that Damon doesn't know when to go (and leave the person to be weak on their own, like they want) and when to stay (and let that person cry on his shoulder). And at the moment, she wants—no, needs—the former. She needs to convince herself that she looks strong to everyone, even him.
And she really really needs some sleep, which she probably won't get if he's there watching her.
So he just smiles weakly at her. "Wondered if you had some hair gel. Stefan's being a little girl because his bottle's empty, and his hair doesn't get that roll-out-of-bed look naturally, you know? He's super conscious about his looks."
Caroline rolls her eyes (she knows he's joking but she doesn't care enough to correct him) and turns away and walks off and leaves the door wide open, but he doesn't look, doesn't invade what she's claimed as her half of the room. He hears a bit of shuffling and some rummaging through her duffel, and she comes back with some hair gel. "It's nearly empty," she warns, "but I don't really use it—it was Tyler's, so." Her eyes are tinged with hurt and have a glazed-like look to them.
"I'll make sure there's still some left when I bring it back to you," he says softly, not really meaning to be so gentle with his words around her.
She stiffens her spine and narrows her suddenly icy cold blue eyes at him, frozen over like a lake or maybe a heart, and she shuts the door in his face. "Don't bother," she calls out, but he knows that he will anyway.
Maybe not quite the best way to start a friendship, but then, there are worse.
(And he hears the quiet, "Thanks," she whispers from behind the door as he leaves. Pretends he doesn't hear it. That's what she needs.)
A/N: So, my promised Daroline action! I hope you guys liked it! Sorry it ended on such a sad note, but hey, love is all about pain before the joy, right? Otherwise, why else are romances in existence?
Anyways, so, I have discovered that I now have this burning all-consuming fiery passion for Klaroline. Which I did not know that I had it in me. I thought I liked him okay, but this passionate love had not yet been discovered. But then I found Joseph Morgan on YouTube and his accent and it does things to my insides and I am so NEVER going back, all right. OMG WTF so now I love him, okay. And I probably shouldn't, because I already love Damon and one bad boy's probably enough in my life, but hey, the heart wants what the heart wants right. But OOOHHHHH MY GOD HE'S SO PRETTY. (Both of them are.)
So, you guys, Elena and Tyler made out when they were fifteen and that caused the Elena/Caroline friendship breakup! Not quite as dramatic as some of you probably planned, right? But I've been there. (I was the one being cheated on, loves, I would never kiss a friend's bf. Mostly because my friends have bad taste, jk.) And to a fifteen year old, that's super dramatic and it really hurts and that probably would cause a rift between you that lasted for two years...or until the apocalypse, whichever came first. :D
You guys give me feedback, okay? And answer my two questions up above in the beginning of this chapter! I can't decide. :)
Review! And I totally love you guys, so, thanks for reading this!