"When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me."—Sean O'Casey
"What were you thinking?" Liz exclaimed.
Black Beauty's hooves halted inches away from a cluster of buttercups in the backyard as Caroline pulled hard on the reins, her feet dangling from black stirrups. Looking down, she perceived her mom with her brow furrowed, barreling down the cobblestone pathway and onto the lawn in front of Damon. Her expression firm and lips pursed, jaw set, Liz crossed her arms over her chest…and waited.
Perfect. Caroline groaned inwardly. Home for five seconds and the Interrogation Squad descends.
Navigating the horse to the leafy shade provided by a nearby apple tree, she beamed—bubbly and unaffected—down at them.
"Hi, mommy," Caroline simpered. "You're home early tonight. Did you finally settle that nasty nymph business in the woodlands?" she asked.
Liz stalked closely behind her daughter. "Don't you dare 'hi mommy' me, young lady!" she exclaimed. "Do you have any idea how upset I've been? How many hours I've spent pacing and panicking? Wondering—worrying if I'd ever get the chance to see you again, my only daughter? Do you?" she cried, half-hysterical.
Caroline rolled her eyes. "Would you relax? I'm fine."
"Besides..." She removed her leg from one of the stirrups, throwing it over the horse's back to sit squarely in the saddle. "If you ever bothered to check your voicemail," she said, "you'd know that I left you a lengthy message detailing my whereabouts."
Sure, she felt bad for upsetting her mother (things had been tense between them lately thanks to her father's impromptu interferences), but wasn't this all a bit dramatic? She was home. She was safe. What more did she want?
"Why are you so upset? Why are you acting like I've somehow been irresponsible and reckless today?" she'd asked, a caustic sound escaping her throat as she glared at the unwelcome sight of Damon Salvatore. "Because I haven't been."
Damon, watchful yet silent, marched closely behind Liz, his amusement ticking in each bouncy stride he took.
"Why?" Liz countered, appalled. "You're asking me why I'm upset?" Stepping forward, she kicked a stray apple out of her path and approached her daughter in all her coiled worry. "I'm upset—I'm outraged because you went to the Underworld, Caroline! Alone."
"So what if I did?" Caroline responded, jutting her hip out on the saddle. "What does it matter to you?
Positioning himself between mother and daughter, his index finger wagging in the air, the elder Salvatore could no longer resist the temptation to speak. "To be fair, Liz," Damon interceded, those crystal eyes of his glinting, "she wasn't entirely alone."
Caroline scoffed at his suggestiveness. Dick.
What in the hell was he doing here, anyway? Didn't he have anyone else to scandalize? The prick always managed to shove his nose—among other things—where it didn't belong.
"She did have some pretty interesting, dangerous company…"
Dick, dick, DICK.
Liz's you're-so-not-helping glare cut Damon's comment short. After clearing his throat, he compressed his lips and plucked an apple free from a low-hanging branch, crunching into it with a hearty bite. "Right," he clucked, repressing a grin as he chewed. "Shutting up now."
Refocusing her attention on her daughter, Liz's voice became stern.
"Oh, it matters young lady," she huffed. "First, under no circumstances do you go gallivanting to unfamiliar worlds without first informing you parents...in person. Second—" Caroline attempted to interrupt, but her mother silenced her with a single look. "—you sure as hell don't go anywhere—absolutely ANYWHERE—with Klaus Mikaelson."
"You do not leave with the god of the dead. You never do. Never," she stressed, attempting to freeze her daughter into submission with the command of her words. "Do you understand me?"
Caroline remained stoic.
"He—" Liz stammered amid her lecture, rubbing a hand across the crinkles in her forehead, stress and anxiety apparent. "—he collects souls, Caroline."
Licking her lips, she stepped closer and grabbed her daughter by the hands with a crushing squeeze, the words she seemed desperate to relate trembling with fire and ice on the edge of her lips.
"Klaus robs souls of sunshine long before it's their time to say goodnight, forever damning them to the hollowness of death's cold, dark nights. Do you understand what that means, daughter? Do you understand the severity of his actions?"
Caroline swallowed hard, but remained silent. Eyes dilated.
"He never lets them go. He never lets them go," she repeated a second time.
Liz's eyes brimmed with tears and threatened to spill over, down her cheeks, as she pressed hard into Caroline's hands. Turning her fingertips white.
"What if he had stolen your soul?" she'd asked, eyelashes still blinking back emotion. "What if he had never set you free? I—I would never forgive myself if something had happened to you. You are all I have, all that I love most in this world."
Emotion, hot and thick, caught in Caroline's throat as Liz spoke. She loved her mom—she loved her mom more than anything but...she wasn't sorry. She didn't feel guilty for going to the Underworld, for traveling into the darkness with Klaus.
Caroline had journeyed to a boiling, wondrous world with a menacing and monstrous god; but contrary to expectation, he had turned out to be playful, patient, and personal as well as fierce. He was possessively rugged on the surface, perhaps, but raw and tender on the inside. Almost...warm.
A god Klaus may be, but Caroline concluded that without a heart he was not. No—a fractured one thumped violently with rage and revenge in his chest, but it thumped nevertheless. Humming with the potential to flower into more human sensibilities, it lived.
But how could Caroline explain this? How could she begin to describe how the Underworld, and Klaus, tugged at her with unexplainable hope and gravity? Who would listen? Who would believe her?
"Why didn't you tell anyone where you went? How come no one knew?" Liz asked.
Biting the inside of her cheek, Caroline fidgeted on the saddle. She never lied when her mom prodded for honesty; but right now, in this moment...she wished she could prevent the impending pain her response would bring. Unable to hesitate any longer, however, she exhaled slowly and began, "I did. Dad knew all about it. In fact—"
Liz reacted instantaneously: despair seeming to crumple her from the inside-out like a shriveled brown paper bag. The allusion to Bill, her ex-husband who was now in love with a man (a forever tenuous subject) drained the color from her face.
"In fact, the Underworld thing was kind of his idea..." Caroline explained, rubbing her hands together as a nervous laugh escaped her throat. "He thought—he thought I could use a new adventure and well," she shrugged, shivering at her mom's emotionless expression, "I agreed."
God, listen to her!
Helpless, regretful babbling—that's what this was. Only here was the thing: Caroline wasn't sorry…at least not entirely. Did she feel bad for upsetting her mom? Yes, of course. Did she feel guilty for causing her to think that only Bill's permission mattered? Always. Did she regret her trip to the Underworld with the King of Darkness himself? Surprisingly…no. Not in the slightest.
It's not that Caroline didn't value her mother's advice and insight, because she did; but Liz's work as the town's resident Humanity Guardian kept her both busy with the misdeeds of the gods and prejudiced against them. Her hometown's affinity for god-induced magic problems had made her mom more accepting of the gods' existence, but no less wary. Suspicion limited Liz's circle of trust by quantity, meaning that it only included Caroline and her band of Mystic Olympus friends.
That, coupled with her overprotectiveness, prevented her mom from understanding that her only daughter yearned for more than an ordinary life. Somewhere, deep within her bones and splashing within her golden mortal blood, Caroline hummed with the knowledge that something grander awaited her, something profound and profuse in its unimaginable wonder loomed in the periphery—she just didn't know what it was. Or when it would occur. Or how.
"I don't understand." Words mangled wit strain, Liz retreated backwards into the fading light of a spring sunset, her hand clutched against the base of her throat. Horror etched into the lines around her mouth in rosy shadows. "I just. I don't understand what you were thinking."
This was the second time Liz had repeated those ghastly four words: what were you thinking. Disappointment rolled from her tongue, and something else, too...accusation.
Detecting Liz's burgeoning hysteria, Damon stepped in with practiced restraint, "Easy there, Guardian," he said.
Patting her on the back reassuringly, he edged them both closer to the horse, that trademark smirk dancing on his lips as he peered at Caroline. "Let's at least give her the chance to offer an excuse." He paused, eyes twinkling. "Or to invent a good lie."
Almost as if she perceived the insult, Black Beauty lurched forward and nayed, huffing in protest. She scratched the grass to mud with her hooves in a move to charge. Caroline narrowed her eyes at Damon in warning. Try me.
"Unlike some people," she snapped, "I don't lie."
"Is that so?" Damon clucked.
Calming the horse with a reassuring pat, Caroline threw her leg back over the saddle and spurred Black Beauty into a trot in an attempt to dawdle away from her questioners. But Damon, always quick when necessary, restricted her lengthy escape by retrieving the dangling reins from the ground and slowing her down, leaving Liz to lag behind.
"In that case, are you and the heartless devil sitting in a tree?" Damon taunted in a low voice, handing her one rein while clutching the other firmly in his grip. "K-I-S-S-I-N-G?"
Looking down at his cackling face, a man entertained by his own immature humor, Caroline resisted the urge to whip him raw with the sole leather rein in her possession. She loathed him. She loathed him with a hatred as fierce as the scorching flames in the Underworld. And she desired nothing better than to punish him with bleeding blow after bleeding blow, leaving the lashes of hell—fresh, sore, and peeling—across his back and against his chest. Around his heart. But not for this. Not for today.
Caroline despised her shallow sixteen-year-old self.
Mystic Olympus brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore, blessed and brandished with the thunderous powers of the gods, had arrived in the Falls at the start of Caroline's junior year of high school. They were tasked with the mission to find, protect, and teach their future Goddess of the Clouds the basic Olympus ways. Was Caroline wrong for hoping that one of the brothers would choose her? That she could be valued and esteemed and respected as the chosen mortal of the skies? Perhaps not. But if there was any truth in the notion that all teenagers made huge mistakes, hers was this: Damon Salvatore.
With Stefan snapped up by epic love straight away, she worked hard to snag the attention of his older, darker, more mysterious brother before anyone else could. Before any one of her friends. Elena Gilbert, especially, one of Caroline's good friends since childhood, always seemed to enchant men—all men—with some uncanny goddess-of-love spell that sent them kneeling at her feet like drooling, obedient puppies at the moment of introduction.
And it wasn't fair!
Not that it was a competition or anything (it was), but Caroline wanted to be Damon's choice. All she'd ever wanted was to be somebody's first choice. Just one man's number one. Just for once, you know? Was that too much to ask?
And Caroline got her wish all right…Damon chose her. But it wasn't because he wanted her or because he loved her, but because he was lonely, rejected, and depressed. And because she was there.
They didn't date for long.
Damon fell for Elena (surprise, surprise) and Caroline soon realized that she'd mistaken arrogance for attractiveness. He'd cheated, of course; which hurt, but not as much as his lies and blatant manipulation. First, he'd actually tried denying the infidelity when Caroline had tripped—literally tripped—over their nearly-screwing bodies behind the rhododendrons in her backyard, chalking it up to her rampant insecurities and jealous imagination. He'd sworn again and again that he and Elena were just friends.
"Come on, babe," Damon had crooned, approaching Caroline with cautious steps and his hands raised in surrender. "I promise this isn't what it seems."
Meanwhile, Elena, tears tumbling down her cheeks, had blushed and apologized prolifically as she'd tugged at the panties dangling down around her knees.
"It's nothing," he'd maintained, that smarmy smirk plastered on his face.
Elena, still trembling and teary, had seemed a little too distraught for a mere nothing, however.
"Let's not blow this out of proportion, shall we?" Damon had rubbed Caroline's shoulders and tucked a curl behind her ear, tapping her lightly on the nose. "You know how you do that."
He'd then placed a chaste kiss on her cheek; and speaking with his lips still pressed against her skin, he'd added, "It's your biggest problem."
Her problem? Was he freaking serious? Grass stains, husky moaning, and her best friend's enthusiastic thrusting weren't things Caroline willingly allowed in her imagination, okay? Ever.
"I may be blonde," she'd retorted back at him, pushing him away from her, eyes narrowed, "but I'm not blind!"
Raising her arm, she'd cocked it back and whapped him good—solid—with her closed fist. Straight in the left eye. She'd punched him so hard that his eye remained black-and-blue for three weeks, the sunshine emblem from her favorite ring leaving a raised impression in his cheek—a permanent one. (Which he damn well deserved.)
Damon had collapsed onto the buttercups as Caroline had wrung her hand and had wiped his blood from her knuckles with disgust. Glaring down at his pathetic, cowering, crawling-away form, she only had one thing left to say:
"You suck."
With that, plus one haughty hair flip, they broke up.
Caroline had left him there battered and bleeding, and she'd never looked back. Perhaps Damon may have been bruised by her fists, but he wasn't half as broken as she was on the inside. And for that, for breaking her, she'd never truly forgive him. She'd never forget.
If all that wasn't bad enough, it got worse. Duped not only by his big brother, but by the love of his life, Stefan had been the one who felt the brunt of the affair. The absolute despair he'd betrayed at hearing the news—which Damon had attempted to dissuade Elena from relating (a consequence which her goody conscience wouldn't allow)—had punctured Caroline's heart more than anything she'd witnessed with her own eyes.
Disbelief. Sorrow. Rage. Retaliation. Despondency. Stefan vacillated along the entire spectrum of god-to-human emotion…and it wasn't pretty.
Always there, always supportive, Caroline had championed as his best friend and personal cheerleader of optimism. Before long, Stefan and Caroline had grown close. Together, they slowly had nursed each other back to health with the healing powers of unconditional friendship. They had moved on and ahead…as best as they could.
Still, despite Caroline's best efforts, she knew Stefan would never truly recover from the heartache. He couldn't. His heart—committed and unwavering—clung to purity of love he felt for both brother and girlfriend. Like a boomerang, it always circled back around to them and to Mystic Olympus. It always would.
While Caroline hated witnessing Stefan's brooding torment, she hated one thing more: herself. How hadn't she realized sooner that asshole was Damon's most prominent characteristic? Seriously.
"Caroline, our conversation wasn't finished," Liz said. Her boots, squishing in patient yet determined strides, tramped through the grass as she followed behind.
Caroline moaned.
Sliding off Black Beauty's back, she tore the leather reins from Damon's grip, gave the horse a good girl kiss, and led her toward the stable at the far end of the yard. It sat secluded beneath three large maple trees near the duck pond. Rustic and quaint, it cut a picturesque image with its white picket fence and bushels of wildflowers.
"Can we talk about this later, Mom?" she pleaded. "Preferably without Gory the Godless Gladiator around?" She flicked her fingers at Damon with revulsion. "Please?"
It'd been a long, bizarre day. Caroline's foray into the Underworld had left her dirty, disheveled, and delirious. What she needed now was privacy and a hot bubble bath not endless hours of investigation from her mother.
"What's the matter, Blondie? Afraid I'll divulge all of your sordid secrets?" Damon goaded as he made mock kissy noises.
"Perhaps we'd better continue this in private," Liz suggested, fixing him with a pointed look as the gate swung closed behind her.
"I'll take that as my cue," Damon shrugged. "Though I'll be sorry to miss all the dirty, dirty details."
While Caroline rolled her eyes at his childishness, Liz rubbed a hand over her face, "Damon," she scolded.
"Right," he smirked. "It's been delightfully boring, ladies, but it seems I have pressing business in the nymph woodlands," he said.
With one obnoxious bow, he strode away with his hand waving casually in goodbye and his teeth puncturing the skin of his apple to take another bite.
"Make sure that business takes you straight over the nearest cliff," she muttered to his retreating figure. "Asshole."
Caroline shooed him away in good riddens as she secured Black Beauty to the fence near the feeding station. She then retreated to the well across the way to fetch a bucket of water and some unpicked apples from the orchard on the other side of the fence, taking longer than necessary to procure the items she needed. Caroline wasn't particularly desirous of returning to face her mom's tiresome questions and disapproving glances.
With Damon gone—thank the gods—no buffer existed now. And while she wasn't sure what else Liz wanted to say, she no longer had a reason to divert her attention elsewhere, or to shirk her questions. But honesty, like always, became Caroline's sword of choice.
"She's striking, I'll give you that," Liz said, scratching under the horse's chin with her fingertips as her daughter approached. "Just beautiful."
She leaned in and kissed the animal on the nose.
"There's something stunning about her black, shiny form galloping forth from another world against the backdrop of a spring sunset," Liz remarked, casting a probing glance at Caroline "with you on her back."
Exhaling slowly, she shook her head in disbelief and laughed without humor, "The devil's beast brought you home. I can honestly say that's something I hoped I'd never see."
Caroline's brow furrowed at this.
After dumping fresh water into the trough, she tossed the apples she'd plucked into a bucket and began dismantling the riding equipment from Black Beauty's back. Concentration seared into her forehead as saddle straps unbuckled, reins untangled, and stirrups loosened, her perfectionist neuroses causing her to arrange everything into neat piles on the ground.
"She's not the devil's horse anymore, mom. She's mine."
She had a feeling this admission of fact wouldn't go over well, so after stooping to retrieve the riding equipment in one swoop, she rushed away to the storage closet. Liz followed promptly. Seizing her by the elbow she reached to unlock the stable doors, her mom spun her around, fingers digging into the bare skin of Caroline's shoulders.
"What did you promise him."
A demand, not a question.
Caroline tilted her head back, eyes wide with astonishment and confusion, "Nothing," she breathed.
"Nothing? Nothing?" her mother scoffed, her hands shaking. Liz's hold felt almost as clutching and as desperate as the horrified look that currently flooded her brown eyes. "The King of the Underworld doesn't give presents like that—" she gestured wildly at Black Beauty who, unbothered, drank water from the trough "without expecting some kind of payment in return. He wants something from you, Caroline, and he wants something bad."
Irrevocable conviction somersaulted from her tone.
"What—" Fingernails ploughed further into flesh, colliding into bone. "—does—" Anguish marred her gentle lips and contorted them into harsh, shadowed lines of terror. "—he want?"
Caroline gaped into her mother's raging, despairing eyes, her throat drier than sand. She fumbled for words, raking teeth over her tongue in search of the proper word to begin, to explain but...nothing came out but air. Hot and silent.
"Just tell me," Liz cooed, mistaking her daughter's silence for fear and pulling her into a rough embrace. Rocking side-to-side, she kissed her forehead with quivering lips. "Tell me how you escaped, how you made it home safe. I'll try—I'll try not to get angry," she promised.
"Please—please let me in this time," she implored, pulling back. She cupped Caroline's face in her hands. "Let me be there for you. Let me find a way to help you. Just—" tears pooled her in her eyes "—just tell me what you've promised him?"
Pulling away, tears in her eyes, she cupped Caroline's face in her hands.
"Nothing," Caroline exclaimed defiantly, tripping backwards as she struggled out of Liz's grasp, "I promised him nothing, okay?"
Her back collided into the closed stable doors with a resounding thud, her hands burrowing into the wood for standing support as her thumb twiddled the bronze lock between her fingers. Alarm and agitation reddened her pale face, brightened her blue eyes. She lifted her chin, "Klaus let me go, Mom. He set me free," she explained.
"He let me go with no strings attached, with no contracts signed or future obligations to fulfill—I am free." Raising her arms, Caroline thrust her hands forward to expose her bare wrists. There were no chains. No shackles. No handcuffs. She was not bound to anything...or to anyone. "Hope," she said, peering hard into her mother's eyes, words combusting with feeling, "hope is the only thing I promised him."
"Hope for what, Caroline?"
The weariness in Liz's voice caused Caroline to drop her head backwards with frustration. Turning away, she fished keys out of her back pocket and unlocked the squeaky doors of the stable and pushed inside.
"I don't know? Hope that maybe someday, if I felt like it, I'd visit the Underworld again. Hope that I'll take a chance and approach his well-documented flaws with a grain of salt—an open mind," she said. Grabbing a broom from the first stall, hay crunched beneath her feet as she swept away dirt, leaves, and cobwebs from the floor. "Hope that I'll learn to hear the history he relates before I attack him over it."
Whipping around suddenly, Caroline halted in her cleaning to prop the broom handle under chin and meet Liz's eyes, "Out of all the dark and dreary contracts that supposedly take place in the Underworld," she said, "how was hope a bad thing to promise Klaus? It's not like it cost me my precious soul or anything. In fact, it cost me nothing."
Liz sighed. Fatigue colored her face in the morose tones of dark circles and bloodshot eyes as she rubbed her temples and said, "I never thought you'd be so gullible."
"And I never thought you'd be so judgmental," Caroline countered with a huff. Throwing the broom against the wall behind her, it snapped in half and snowed splintered wood around her feet in shards of red. "How can you say that when you don't know him?"
"Because neither do you!" Liz bit back harshly.
"And that is exactly my point!" she smiled, feeling encouraged for the first time, "I don't know Klaus. Nobody does. Don't you see, mom?"
Rushing over, she enveloped an arm around Liz's waist and squeezed her tight, resting her head against her mother's shoulder. As she steered them back outside to the feeding area, composure slumped her shoulders and eased her into a jounce as they walked.
"All any of us knows, all any of us sees is the King of Darkness, the taker of the dead, the god without a heart... All we perceive is the notion that the devil wears many faces and all that jazz. But what Klaus Mikaelson, the person?" she wondered aloud. "Who knows him?"
Deep in thought, Liz's eyebrows pinched together, silence stretching out longer between mother and daughter.
"It's like everyone in this entire universe forgot that he's a person just like the rest of us, you know?"
A faraway look gleamed over Caroline's eyes as she looked up and into the night, lost in her own introspection. Twinkling constellations and the bright spotlight of a full moon now populated the evening sky and cloaked them both in peaceful darkness. Black Beauty, who was still tied to the fence post, swished her tail around and around upon hearing their voices drawing nearer.
"It's no wonder he's rumored to be so vile and vicious," Caroline half-laughed as she fed the horse an apple, "that kind of ignorance would drive anyone mad, don't you think?"
No response.
"Look, Mom—" After wiping her hands against the fabric of her white dress, she turned to meet her mother's gaze. "I don't want to fight. I love you," she said frankly.
Liz's lips trembled as she reached for her daughter's hands and squeezed.
"I love you for always being there and for wanting to protect me," she continued, "but I need you to believe in me now. I need your support in this." She looked to the ground, biting her bottom lip. "Can you—can you try to let me make up my own mind about Klaus?"
Liz shifted uncomfortably and compressed her lips together.
"Can you try to see that there's a man who rules the Underworld, and not just a god?"
At the sight of hope and pleading glistening from Caroline's eyes, warmth slowly begin to melt the severity in Liz's features and she drew her daughter into her. She placed a sweet kiss on her forehead. "You've always had a big, daring heart, I'm afraid," she sighed with fondness more than censure, "and the gods know I've never been able to temper your vast worldy interests."
Burrowing her head further into her mother's neck, Caroline's chest rumbled with laughter at this.
"Just promise me that you'll be cautious," she requested, "that won't let your curiosity for the King of the Underworld take you away from me? Promise me you won't let it get you killed."
Caroline pulled back, eyes bold and brave, "I—"
—Unfortunately, her promise to her mother was truncated prematurely when a bunch of strange things suddenly occurred at once, disrupting everything:
First, the ground quaked and quivered beneath their feet. It sent a dagger of tremors flying across the soil of the earth, radiating the land in glowing shades of volcanic orange, tossing Liz on her ass, Caroline on her back, and sending a prickly shower of hay over their heads. Second, Black Beauty reared from the ground, snarling, onto her hind legs and kicked into the vacant air. Aiming to gallop away into the night sky. She relented only when Caroline managed to crawl to the reins and pull, placing calm, reassuring pats on her back hoof. Third, and probably most bizarre of all, a gangly shape staggered into the shadows of the apple orchard, tripping over grass divots and fallen branches.
As the form drew nearer to the stable gate, darkness fading away, Caroline, through squinted eyes, perceived a young woman tottering toward them with labored steps. Her jeans were tattered, sliced and ripped across the thigh and shins. Her lips, though pouty and pretty, were stained with dirt, blood, and smeared lipstick. And her hair...
...That was the lightbulb.
Recognizing the girl immediately, Caroline gained her feet with swiftness and sprung at her, leaving her mother in her dusty wake. The girl barely made it two steps inside the stable gate before she collapsed. Eyes slamming closed.
Skidding next to her, plopped on her knees, Caroline jostled the girls' shoulders violently. Desperately. "Elena!" she yelled. "Elena, wake up!"
Her friend's heavy-lidded eyes fluttered open at the sound of her name, then fluttered back shut.
"Who is it? What's happened?" Liz asked breathlessly as she came up running from behind. A hand flew over her mouth as she recognized the girl sprawled across the ground. "What's happened to her?"
Caroline crumpled back onto her heels and compressed her hands against her knees, shock draining her face of its usual animation. "Something malevolent," she replied as she shuffled Elena's weight onto her lap in disbelief. "I'd bet my life on it."
Despite the fact that she and Elena had their differences—self-centered-cheating-boyfriend-indecision and all—Caroline wasn't the type to throw away ten years of friendship over a guy. Especially not one as scummy as Damon Salvatore. She loved her friends and protected her friends and made sacrifices for her friends…sometimes to a fault. That being said, seeing Elena in this catatonic state made her want to scream. To sob. To scour the world and freaking find the people responsible for this. To make them pay.
Fury zipped through her veins like fluids from an IV, energizing her with purpose and resolve. Yes, they would pay. They would be sorry.
"There's definitely something wrong here. I mean, look at her hair," Caroline remarked, pointing to her friend's brunette locks.
"What's wrong with it?"
Elena's hair—long, flowing, and shiny—ordinarily extended down to her waist. It was famed and revered throughout the universe for its thickness and exquisite beauty, maintained by expert grooming fairies who combed it for hours upon hours. Tourists travelled far and wide to witness its loveliness in person. Only now, gnarled and tangled into giant, twisted knots, it didn't look so lovely. And neither did Elena...
Face-palming, Caroline gaped at her mother's oblivion and said wryly, "Are you kidding? It's a freaking mess! I mean look at it!" Snatching a few brunette tendrils, she twiddled them between her fingers and tilted her hand for Liz to see. "It's like—it's like a nest of angry snakes."
"There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."—Leonard Cohen
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Sending a personal shout-out to fanfantasticworld on Tumblr for my fantastic fic cover. It's beauuutiful! Thank you so much! *hugs*
A few of you have asked if this will be longer than a three-shot and the answer is (obviously) YES YES YES. I'd originally intended for this to be no longer than a five-shot, but I'm having such a blast writing this that it'll likely be double that. If not more. ;) I have some cool plot ideas planned, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading! :)
Shoot me a review and let me know what you think, por favor.
xx Ashlee Bree