Disclaimer: Don't own; don't sue. Story title comes from the Marianas Trench song "Haven't Had Enough". Photo credit is currently unknown. Please message me if you are the creator/know who it is.
Summary: Immediately following the events of Season 3. Caroline's got a grand plan to fix everyone's problems, but since when did plans ever work right in Mystic Falls? Ensemble, Caroline-centric. Features Damon/Caroline, Stefan/Elena, and mild Bonnie/Jeremy.
Spoilers: All aired episodes. Everything else is just speculation/AU.
Author's Notes: This chapter is a fair bit shorter than previous ones; it was a scene that didn't really fit being added to the previous one, and that I wanted to separate from the next scenes. Apologies! It has a tiny bit more action than previous chapters, so hopefully that kind of makes up for it. :)
As usual, THANK YOU to all the lovely reviews, favorites, and follows!
Thank you VERY much to Fenmir for the phenomenal beta work! (Re-uploaded 22 November 2012.)
CHAPTER 4: FOOL ME ONCE
After 'The Princess and the Frog', 'Tangled', and halfway through 'Brave', Liz was snoring gently into the couch, Caroline looking on fondly. She was debating finishing the movie or bringing her mom up to her bed. Just as she was thinking that if she didn't move Liz, she'd had an awful crick in her neck, her phone buzzed. 'Need to speak with you. Come to the Lockwood house. Please.' Caroline's eyebrows furrowed. Fully written out words? Grammatically correct English? Just another way Tyler's been weird, I guess. Sighing, she put her phone down and picked up her mother. She sped up to her mom's room, tucked her in, and grabbed a jacket. Hopefully this would be a fairly quick conversation; tomorrow was a school day and she still had an essay to finish.
It was a fairly nice night; clear with a thousand and one stars. Caroline smiled as she looked up, deciding to run to Tyler's. The cool air and beautiful scenery might help her to think.
The Lockwood mansion was suspiciously dark when Caroline arrived. Carol was a lot like herself, and would stay up late planning the latest shindig, or more recently, plot against the Council. She had a hard time believing Carol would already be in bed by 9PM. With everything that had been going on, she didn't think she could even guess what Tyler was up to in the evenings. She walked up to the front door slowly, debating whether to call Tyler and have him let her in rather than knocking on the imposing door. She placed her ear up to the wood to see if she could hear anything. A bit of gentle pressure was all that was needed, and the door swung slowly open. A shiver ran down her spine. Talk about heebie jeebies, she thought grumpily. She was a vampire, for heaven's sake! Why was this freaking her out so badly? Taking a deep breath and squaring her shoulders, she began to stomp (very quietly) up the stairs towards Tyler's room. Thankfully, the door was cracked and the light was on. Probably just forgot to lock the door. Stop being a baby, Forbes. She raised her hand to knock on Tyler's door before remembering that he was the one who had called her over to his creepy house in the middle of the night. She huffed angrily and pushed the door open.
"You've got to be kidding me," she couldn't help but mutter when she was able to see into the room. Tyler had never been particularly clean, but his room was a disaster. Clothes were thrown every which way, and she was fairly sure some had been torn in half. At the foot of his bed was a duffle that was still open. All she could see inside of it were clothes and a framed picture of her. Tyler himself was nowhere to be seen. She made her way through the mess, picking up clothes here and there and tossing them on his desk chair. It was painfully obvious that Tyler was preparing to leave, and soon. Caroline sighed. She really didn't want to fight about this yet again. Not only had there been no headway on the Bonnie situation, but Elena hadn't even interacted with her first human yet. Jeremy hadn't seen his sister in weeks, and she was getting a little worried about that living situation as well. Who knew what the boys were subsisting on? Were they even doing homework? Not to mention her mom's skyrocketing stress level. She had way too many people to take care of before she could leave. She began folding Tyler's clothes, avoiding the easy solution of calling him. Her back was to the door, so she didn't see Tyler approach, eyes dark with a predatory gleam.
"You shouldn't bother with that," he murmured.
Caroline yelped and dropped the shirt in her hand. "Jesus, Tyler! Warn a girl, would you?"
"Sorry," he said with a smirk.
Caroline ignored the weird way he was acting. This was so not the time to be flirting. "Where were you?" she interrogated.
Tyler shrugged, ignoring her attitude. "With my mom. Taking care of some last minute things."
"So that's it then?" she asked tightly. "You're really leaving. Running away with your tail tucked between your legs?" she scoffed. "I thought you were done with that."
Faster than she could process, Tyler sped over to her and slammed his arm across her throat, pinning her to the wall. His eyes flashed yellow (gold with amber highlights, her own voice haunted her) and he growled low in his throat. "This is not running away, Caroline. This is self-preservation at its finest, and it's high time you learned that, love."
"Ty – tyler?" she choked out.
A devious smile curled his lips. "Not quite, love."
"Klaus?" she gasped.
Positively beaming, he dropped his arm and let her down. As she panted for breath, crouched on the floor, she looked Tyler, no Klaus, up and down. How could she have missed it? Yes, it was Tyler's body, but the mannerisms, the hair trigger anger, the condescension towards humans… that was Klaus, through and through. Revulsion spread through her. She had kissed him!
"What have you done with Tyler? Where is he?" she growled at him.
"Oh he's in here, sweetheart. Crying out for you incessantly, I might add. As soon as I am returned to my own body, he'll have this one back. More or less," he shrugged.
"More or less?! What are you talking about? How did you even get in his body?!" she shrieked.
"Quiet down now, love. We don't want to wake Carol. I'm not sure how much compulsion her poor mind can take. Been seeing phantoms all over the place lately," he grinned. "And you have your dearest little witch friend to thank for my current home. Really, did you not think it strange that your precious Tyler survived the death of his bloodline? Tch, tch, I'm ashamed of you, Caroline. I expected more of you. Although, you are the only person who has figured it out, so I suppose you deserve credit for that. Now come along. I hadn't planned on you discovering this out quite so soon, but we shall just have to make do." He gestured to the duffel bag and pulled her roughly up from the floor.
"'Come along'? You've got to be kidding me. If you've been in Tyler's body all this time, then you know I'm not leaving. I should have known better. Tyler never would have left his friends like this," she spat.
"On the contrary, dear," Klaus replied lightly. "He and I are in complete agreement on the subject. And before you protest, recall that he has done this before. Tyler clearly understands what it means to survive. If he wasn't so disappointing in other aspects, I would be almost proud to have him as my progeny."
Caroline felt as if her world was falling apart. She was torn between throwing up or pulling her hair out and screaming. How could this have happened? How could Bonnie have put Klaus in Tyler's body? And then run away from them without filling them in? What the hell, Bonnie?
Klaus had moved on to close up his duffel, tucking the picture in more securely. She didn't even want to think about the fact that he was taking that with him. "I'm not going with you, Klaus," she finally said dully.
"I could compel you," he said softly.
"You could," she acknowledged. "And no one would come after me, because they'd assume we ran away together. My mom would worry, but she would think it was just too hard for me to say goodbye. They would be sad, but they'd move on." A small smile appeared on Klaus's face, as if she was finally seeing reason. "But I'd hate you." With that, his face shuttered and clouded over. "I'd hate you forever. I never said this, because I thought everyone would see it as a betrayal. But when I thought you were dead, I was sad. I thought you had so much more to give the world, and that you'd never been given a chance to be loved. I thought that in another life, we could have been great friends. Maybe even best friends." Caroline locked her eyes with his, hard and cold. "But if you compel me, or force me to leave with you and abandon everyone who has ever cared for me, I will never forgive you. I will hate for the rest of our very long existence, and I will not stop until you fully understand what that means. That is the choice I am giving you." With that, Caroline turned around and began making her way out of the house. She knew she should help Carol and attempt to undo Klaus's compulsion, or at least go immediately to the boarding house and warn Stefan and Damon about the hybrid. Instead, she began to run.
She ran and ran, unseeing of the world. The stars that seemed so beautiful before were now cold and unfeeling. They mocked her pain, her confusion, her sorrow. Finally she collapsed in exhaustion at the base of a large tree. The sobs that she had had no breath for burst through, and she became a heaving mess on the forest floor. She felt like a raw nerve, exposed to the whole wide world and vulnerable to everything. She cried and cried, refusing to move from her curled up position in the dirt. Logically, she knew she should get up and move. She should go home. She should do a million and one things, but all she wanted to do was disappear.
