Written in response to a tumblr prompt from the purestheartslove. Since I had just written something super fluffy when I got this prompt, I decided to somehow turn stargazing into an adventure story and I'm pretty happy with how it came out!
Klaroline+under the stars, thank you 3
Are you safe? -KM
Caroline scrubbed at her face with one hand, rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she stared down at her phone. She didn't recognize the number, but it only took a few moments for her to puzzle out the identity of the sender. Why was he contacting her now?
What are you talking about?
Vampires are dying in droves in New York, some sort of targeted infection. Needed to make sure you were safe. -KM
I'm actually down in Mystic Falls visiting Bonnie. I'm ok.
After shooting off the text, she stared at her phone disbelievingly for a few minutes more. It had been five years since she had last spoken to Klaus, two years since she had driven down there with the twins in a fit of despair, full of confusion and seeking the advice (and let's be serious, the solace) of the man, who amongst everything else, never seemed to let her down since that first uttered "friends, then?"
Funny the things that stick with you. Especially when a certain Salvatore brother you expected to be with forever certainly didn't.
Caroline sent a quick text to said ex, asking if he had heard anything about what Klaus was referring to, then headed over to Bonnie's. Caroline wished she could get her friend out of Mystic Falls. This place clung to you, the history of both simpler and more horrific times sticking to your skin like the thick, humid air of summer. She was happy in New York and glad she had made the move, but Bonnie's ties ran deep here.
Damon Salvatore died on a Tuesday, Elena's name on his lips. Caroline didn't miss the way Bonnie's eyes cut to the floor, and she curled her hand around a thin shoulder, squeezing. The air was quiet now that Damon's rattling breath, hallmark of this strange vampire virus, no longer filled the air.
He had ignored Caroline's warnings, drinking and killing with his once-again customary disregard for human life, taking his death sentence sips on a side road just outside the Mystic Falls border.
Stefan reached over to close those ice-blue eyes, closing his own in an odd sort of symmetry. Caroline felt bad for not feeling the pain as they did; she had made her peace with Damon but he would never be someone she shed tears over, and frankly she still sometimes seethed with rage when she thought of him. So instead of mourning she sat, focusing on her fear. What was this illness that was terrorizing the vampire community? Who was next? Could you get it from any human? Was animal blood safe? Blood bags? She wondered if Klaus was looking into the science of it all, snuck a look at her phone as Bonnie swallowed hard and Stefan blew out a slow, shaky breath.
A new text, the words inert on the screen until they came alive in her head:
I hope that you can forgive me.
She glanced up, Bonnie and Stefan both motionless in their grief, hunched over Damon's corpse. She squeezed Bonnie's shoulder again, kissed Stefan's cheek, and left the room.
I hope that you can forgive me. Sent several hours ago, just before she had gotten the call from Bonnie.
She tapped out a reply. What are you talking about? A buzz sounded and she looked down at her phone in confusion, thinking she somehow miss-sent the text. She looked up just as that accent cut through the air.
"For breaking my promise."
He was staring at her like he always did, and if she were to admit it to herself, the world fell away like it always did. That strange mix of guardedness and adoration colored his gaze, letting her know that she had the power to hurt him, and oh how she had used it in the past.
He ducked his head, trying to catch her eye. "Caroline? I must admit that silence is not the greeting I expected."
Caroline gave a sheepish smile. "Sorry, I'm just - why are you here? Do you know about Damon?"
Klaus leveled a stare in response. Of course he knew.
"It's not safe. Elijah has caught - whatever this is. It seems to affect my family differently, but he grows weak. I cannot lose-" His jaw snapped shut and a muscle ticked in his neck. A gust of wind filled the silence as Caroline watched Klaus gather his thoughts; his eyes broke away from hers, needing space to say his next words: "I need to know you're safe, and the best way I know to do that is if you come with me."
"There's no way in hell that's happening, Klaus." Stefan pushed open the door of the boarding house, walking over to stand by Caroline and looping an arm across her shoulders. She looked up at him, annoyed.
"Don't you think that's for me to decide?" Caroline bit out, turning back to Klaus. "Do you have labs set up, as well as witches looking at potential magic causes?" At Klaus' nod she continued, "I think it's going to take every resource we can lay our hands on to figure this out, and I want to be a part of that." She turned back to Stefan and grabbed his hand, locking his fingers in her own and pushing their linked hands up on his chest. "I know you're trying to protect me, but Klaus isn't the threat, this thing that's killing vampires is. I have to go."
"Yes he is behaving, Bonnie." Caroline rolled her eyes with a grin, pushing on the portholed swinging door that separated the labs from the rest of the compound. The Originals certainly knew how to fund a research lab - she had gone through a decontamination room and an airlock before finally calling Bonnie back.
Deep inside Elijah lay, grey-veined skin cracking as the days wore on and desiccation warred with the infection that tore through his system. He was dying.
Last week the scientists had discovered a synthetic compound in one of the infected's blood samples that resembled the molecular structure of white oak. Klaus would have destroyed the lab at the news had Caroline's hand not stayed his own.
"Kol is still asking about you, wants to know when you'll come down and join the 'fun'." Caroline changed the subject from Klaus's attentions - and her own feelings - she thought ruefully, cradling the phone between ear and shoulder and pulling the door open that led outside. The sun was bright, the Louisiana air swampy. "Don't get snippy with me! It's not my fault you chose to stay behind. Ancestral magic my ass, I think you're just avoiding Kol."
The conversation continued much in the same way for over an hour, Caroline happy to have a chance to relax into the comfort of old friendship. To be fair, Bonnie had actually learned a lot from the Bennetts on the Other Side, including information about the origins of the 'vampire virus'. Claire, her name was, a thirty-something scientist and witch who had apparently spent most of her life seeking a way to destroy vampirism. No one seemed to know the reason why, but it wasn't like that held much importance when the immediate need was figuring out a way to keep vampires from dying left and right.
Klaus had quarantined a group of humans when Elijah first fell ill, realizing too late that they needed to secure a viable blood supply. From what they could tell, the virus was spread via crop duster, magic used to make the virus inert from farm to table to human until a vampire's fangs pierced the skin and drew blood; something in the act of that deep pull triggered the magic to flare.
Caroline walked towards one of the greenhouses where they grew food for their living blood supply, waving at Sharon, a sweet, older vampire who held a PhD in chemistry and a hell of a green thumb.
Klaus looked up from his sketchpad as she entered. She often found him here, drawing the botanicals, detailed sketches of the underside of leaves; the methodical vein-work a balm to his increasing worry over Elijah.
"We have a name, Claire LaMountain." Klaus's eyes flashed at the news and he set his charcoal down, dusting his hands off on black denim as Caroline continued. "That, combined with the pattern of cities hit by the virus, may let us figure out where she's hiding. There's only so much we can figure out unraveling the spell and the science. We need to talk to her, see her notes."
Klaus sent off several texts at vamp speed before looking back up. "How is he?"
Caroline pulled up a cheap, plastic chair next to Klaus, hunched forward and stared at the ground as she swung her feet. "Worse. The white oak is closer to his heart every day."
Klaus had once said he appreciated her honesty, and it was something she would always maintain with him. "We have everything and everyone possible working on this thing, Klaus. If anyone is capable of saving him, it's you."
Klaus glanced up in surprise at those words, so similar to ones spoken long ago in such drastically different circumstances. His eyes darkened and her breath caught with their intensity. Working in close proximity to Klaus was distracting, to say the least. It was funny what fighting a life-or-death crisis and being on the same side for once was starting to do to her previous reservations.
Like get rid of them completely.
"You idiot! You just signed my brother's death warrant!" Klaus roared and clawed into a vampire's chest, his hand brutally tearing through bone and sinew. The heart smacked wetly against the laboratory's wall, coming to rest on the floor with another damp thunk. A pale woman sat propped against the same wall, eyes staring unblinkingly, neck a ravaged mess. Why the vampire had thought the scientist's blood would be safe was anyone's guess, but his decision may have cost not only his life, but all of theirs too.
Caroline slid to her knees, grasping at the woman's lab coat, the name LaMountain stitched across the breast, and drew in a shuddering breath at the faint heartbeat. Biting at her wrist she coaxed the blood into the woman's mouth and waited, Klaus crouching down next to her. They stared a moment and watched as the woman's eyes turned from sightless death to such hatred Caroline felt branded by it. The woman lunged suddenly, and Klaus cried out Caroline's name, pulling her back, arm banded across her shoulders.
The woman eyed this exchange with such intensity Caroline could almost see the wheels turning in her mind.
"I've been surprised by the level of emotion I've seen in vampires. I suppose it's easy to feel when you know at any moment you can simply turn it off." She pushed off the ground, her full height barely reaching to Caroline's chin. Wiping her thick tortoiseshell glasses off with the edge of her lab coat, she introduced herself. "I'm Claire, and you'll all be dead soon."
Klaus was never one to take threats, preferring instead to make them. With a snarl he pinned Claire to the wall, her feet dangling.
"Save us the theatrics and tell us how to make the vaccine."
Claire gurgled a choking laugh and Klaus let her down enough to speak. "There's literally no reason for me to tell you. The only thing I want is to see the vampire race dead, and I will succeed in that wish, even if I don't live long enough to see it realized."
Caroline spoke up. "Why do you hate us all so much? Was someone you love killed by a vampire? I'm so sorry if that happened, it's happened to me too, but it doesn't warrant murdering an entire population of a supernatural species that can be just as human as you are."
"Bullshit!" Claire snapped out in a rage, spittle flying from her lips. "Bull-SHIT. When it gets hard, you can turn those feelings off, just shut them off, not a care in the world." She was pacing now, and Caroline held a hand up, sensing Klaus' tension at the movement but realizing they were on the edges of something important.
Claire was staring at her now, sharp eyes seeing into the heart of the matter. "You're just as bad as the rest of them. What was it? What made you turn yours off? Why was life so hard that you had to ditch everyone that ever loved you?"
Klaus made a small noise and Caroline turned her head, spotting what he was subtly pointing to immediately. A small framed picture, two children - siblings by the look of it - the girl in ponytails and thick glasses; a much younger Claire, then. Caroline glanced back at Claire who had grown silent, her face twisted in a mask of grief that she quickly composed.
"The switch makes your life easy, a get out of jail free card. An excuse to kill freely and deal with the consequences later, if at all. It's bullshit, it makes you monsters, and now you're going to die. You have days. Even if you make me transition, the virus is in me and I'll die. Torture me for information while you can. Ransack the labs, do whatever. You'll fail, for it's all written in the stars."
Even Klaus wasn't fast enough to stop the scalpel from tearing a bloody smile across Claire's throat, and they both watched in horror as she dropped to the floor.
Claire had kept meticulous journals in both the lab and her apartment close to the local medical college, and while they helped the vampires gain insight into the enigmatic scientist's background, the science and magic sections were encoded. Klaus had cryptographers working on the code by hand - it wasn't something a computer could crack quickly as it used symbols instead of letters and numbers. So far they had come up with nothing.
And so Elijah's heartbeat continued to slow and Klaus grew more and more agitated in his frustration. The compound's inhabitants gave him an even wider berth than normal, and Caroline seemed to be the only one that could calm him down. She found herself being asked by his siblings to play the little blonde distraction once again, except this time was different. She understood Klaus just as she always had, and she could see how badly he was hurting underneath the snarling exterior. This wasn't motivated by an inability to understand friendship, or a twisted power play, or a petulant grab for attention. This was fear for his brother's life, pure and simple. So she found herself seeking him out more and more, and she even let herself admit that she looked forward to it much the same.
"Where's Kol today?" Caroline asked, entering the greenhouse and flopping down on the cushioned lounge she had moved from the game room in the mansion. If she was going to spend all her time out here watching Klaus draw, she was going to damn well be comfortable.
Klaus glanced up, smile curving at his lips. "He's in New Zealand, directing the operation to remove all the virus-laden pesticides." With them no closer to the cure, the Mikaelsons had directed their attentions on dismantling the infrastructure Claire had put in place. "Although to be honest that probably means he's at Lord of the Rings set and letting someone else do the dirty work."
"Ha, I wouldn't be surprised." Caroline rolled her eyes and tucked her feet under her, leaning over the table in front of Klaus and sliding a piece of paper aside. "What're you working on tod-" she trailed off, stunned.
He was working on her face, apparently. Well, a ridiculously gorgeous version of her face, that is. She was reading in the drawing, the rough-hewn timbers of the mansion's vaulted living room in the background. Was this how he truly saw her? This girl - no, this woman with such a calm strength in her face? How could this be her?
She looked up to meet his expectant gaze, shot through with that guardedness that signified he was waiting for rejection. "Klaus, it's beautiful."
"You are beautiful, Caroline," he responded simply, and something unspoken passed between them, as if they had taken another step away from proms, dopplegangers, distractions, and the rest of their Mystic Falls past.
The witches had made progress in unraveling the spell that allowed the virus to lie dormant until a vampire ingested it, but they still couldn't figure it out completely. Claire had truly been a genius, melding science with witchcraft so inexorably that it was impossible to separate. The secret truly had to be in the encoded journals, so when Caroline was not with Klaus, and even sometimes when she was, she pored over the journals trying to spot the patterns, trying to find something in the journal that might reveal a clue to the nature of the symbols.
She was rereading one of the journals in the living room of the mansion, the late afternoon sunlight streaking through the room in thick shafts of light and warming the leather couch where she sat, feet propped on an ottoman. 'To my darling daughter on her sixteenth birthday', the black marker scrawled across the inside cover proclaimed. Flipping to the second-to-last entry, Caroline began to read.
Dear Diary,
I miss them so much.
The rest of the page was blank and Caroline flipped to the next.
Dear Diary,
Marcus did something at the funeral today. I felt…him leave me. Like he was there and then just gone. I went to talk to him and he looked at me so coldly I thought I might freeze to death. I don't…I don't understand. Is this how people without a twin feel? Like their heart is empty all the time and something is missing? Lost?
Dear Diary,
Marcus left an hour ago, wouldn't listen to anything I said, just told me he's in a better place now and safe from the pain. I don't think he's ever coming back.
I'm not safe from the pain. I hate him so much for leaving me.
There was a large section that was crossed out with thick black marker after that and Caroline pondered at what it had contained. She didn't think Claire had known then what Marcus had become, assumed she had put the pieces together when her aunt began teaching her witchcraft. She thought about what it had to feel like, much like she had for Elena what seemed like eons ago. To lose both parents, and then, to lose a sibling, a part of you, at an age where your hormones are all over the place and you don't really know which way is up? Yeah, Caroline could at least see what set Claire on her path of revenge.
Not that it did any good now. The virus was out there, clawing its way to countless vampire hearts, frothing their mouths as their vampire healing failed over and over again to heal the damage.
But she continued to read, looking back at Marcus and Claire's life, reading about their interest in science at a young age, their various experiments and studies described with utmost gravity in a carefully-crayoned scrawl. She knew the answer lay somewhere within these writings and she was running out of time to find it.
"Come with me," Klaus' grin was part glee, part temptation as he pulled Caroline up from the greenhouse lounge. "We've been stuck here for too long."
Caroline shrugged with a small smile. "OK, but I don't like surprises, where are we going?"
Klaus adopted a faux-shocked expression. "You don't like surprises?! Colour me astonished!" Caroline glared at him, jabbing him with an affronted elbow, and his grin split even wider, dimples in full prominence. Moments like these she felt like she could see the young man as he was ~980 years ago. It was completely and utterly charming and beyond dangerous.
The Land Rover was rumbling over the country road when Klaus took a sharp left into a field, Caroline letting out an involuntary gasp at the suddenness of the movement. The car jostled through the tall grass, lurching to and fro as it hit divots in the ground and Caroline held on for dear life until they rumbled to a stop in a cleared area next to a dark house.
"Warn me next time you attempt offroad adventures, would you?" Caroline rubbed at her elbow where it had rammed into the door and scowled at Klaus, who was pulling a small cooler out of the back of the Land Rover.
"Ooh what's in there? Oh my god, are we having a night picnic? We are, aren't we?" Caroline clapped her hands in delight, looking in the backseat and pulling out a thick blanket Klaus must have packed earlier.
"Indeed we are. B positive, some Pinot Noir, and I had Alyssa make some of those devilled eggs you-"
"No way! Gimmeeeee!" Caroline tucked the blanket under an arm, making grabby hands at Klaus who burst out laughing.
"Patience, Caroline. Waiting makes it all the sweeter, I've found." His voice deepened on the last line and Caroline swallowed audibly. She wasn't sure how to react, so chose to ignore it for now, unfurling the blanket where Klaus set the cooler down and reaching inside to pull out the devilled eggs. Blood could wait, Alyssa made the BEST devilled eggs.
—–
"Why did you let me eat so many?" Caroline groaned and laid back on the blanket, hands holding her stomach.
"Excuse me? You're the one who batted my hand away when I tried to get one for myself."
"Yeah, well, they're really good," Caroline responded lamely, feeling the blanket shift as Klaus lay down beside her. Caroline could feel the heat coming off of him from where he lay inches away and scrambled for a distraction. She pointed up at the sky, where the stars blazed across their velvet backdrop, so bright in this rural sky.
"There's my favorite set of stars."
"Which constellation?"
Caroline quirked her lips. "None of 'em. I could never see constellations, because the sky doesn't have those lines drawn like they are in the books. So I just picked my favorite grouping of stars, right under that super bright one."
"That's Venus. Ah, yes, I see. Caroline's favorite stars." She could hear the smile in his voice and she fought the sudden urge to grab his hand, entwine her fingers in his.
"OK Mr. Know-it-all. Do you have a favorite set of stars?" Caroline glanced over at him before turning her face back to the sky.
"You'll laugh." Caroline turned her head to look at him expectantly until he continued. "It's Lupus."
"The wolf for the hybrid, I should have known." Caroline gave a small laugh. "Can you show it to me?"
Klaus grabbed her hand in his and her heart lurched fitfully in her chest. He pointed and she watched their clasped hands trace from point to point, forming a shape that vaguely resembled a wolf…if it was sitting like a human. The legs tapering from the star to the body, the lines connecting the points, the -
"Ohmygodohmygod OH MY GOD Klaus!" Caroline shot up and off the blanket, racing back to the car and grabbing her purse, pulling out one of Claire's journals.
"What is it? He looked oddly hurt, and Caroline had to think a moment before realizing he might have seen her jumping away as a rejection. She pulled him back down to the blanket and opened the book in front of them, giving into the earlier urge to twine the fingers of her right hand with his while she pointed with her left. His shoulders relaxed visibly and something in her throat ached with it even in her excitement.
"The constellations are the code! Claire and her brother went through an astronomy phase when they were little, she talked about how they were saving their allowances to buy a telescope. Look, isn't that your wolf?"
Klaus nodded and grabbed the journal, flipping pages to where he reached some more of the symbols. "How did I not make the connection earlier? Here's Casseopia, and Virgo. And there must be something with the different colors used - see here, how the third dot of the constellation is red instead of black like the others."
"And this one here is blue? I wonder if the colors signify whether they are letters or numbers. Oh my god we cracked it, Klaus. We have this. We can save Elijah!"
Caroline headed the worldwide distribution of the vaccine developed in Klaus' labs based on their code breaking, her ruthless efficiency ensuring that the virus was contained and eradicated within weeks of the vaccine's creation.
The vampire virus was now very much a thing of the past. Elijah made a full recovery, the vaccine breaking down the synthetic white oak to the point where his vampire healing could destroy it.
Klaus had managed to maneouver for sworn fealty in exchange for the vaccine despite Caroline's protests. They had compromised on many things, but Klaus now had more to protect than ever before and couldn't yet see the benefits of ruling with kindness instead of fear and intimidation.
But they had nothing but time, and right now they were too busy making up for the time they had lost before.
Rome, Paris, Tokyo - they had a lot of cities to visit, after all.
Please let me know what you think! Did I telegraph too hard with the line? Did the story get bogged down anywhere? What was your favorite part? I'd love to hear from you!