"Caroline!" Klaus shouted in concern as he sprung to his feet and ran towards her as fast as he physically could.
Caroline let out a pained whimper as smoke rose from her bubbling and blistering flesh. She held through the pain as she clenched her eyes shut and waited for it to be over.
Suddenly a different type of pain hit Caroline like a ton of bricks. The new pain first slammed into the whole front of her body and then her whole back.
Caroline sheepishly opened her eyes as the pain began to numb itself out.
She was lying on the hard floor of the cell, a few feet away from the patch of light, as Klaus pinned her there by covering her body with his own.
"Why did you stop me?" Caroline demanded as she flailed violently against his grip. "Just let me go!"
This time Klaus didn't care about being gentle, he was holding her down as roughly and tightly as he could. They were beyond the point of being able to try not to hurt Caroline while trying to keep her safe. They had reached the point where it was necessary to be rough and cold-hearted in order to keep her alive and okay.
"Stop it! That hurts!" Caroline shrieked as she thrashed around. "Klaus, you're hurting me! Let go!"
It wasn't just an attempt to make him let her go; Caroline honestly did feel shooting pains in her shoulders from where his hands were holding her down against the concrete.
"Can't do, Love," Klaus told her sternly. "If I let go of you, or even just loosen my grip a little, then you're going to try that again… Sorry, but hurt is better than dead, Sweetheart."
"No, it isn't!" Caroline argued. "You don't get it! I can't do this for years! Or even days, for that matter! Trying to keep me alive is just torture for us all!"
"I do get it," Klaus told her through gritted teeth. "I've been through it before; I know how awful and hopeless it all feels… But it isn't hopeless and you can make it out of this alive."
"I don't want to!" Caroline shouted through sobs. "It isn't worth it."
"It isn't worth it to live for Elena?" Klaus asked her. "Or Bonnie? ...Or Stefan? …Or Matt? …Or your mother? …Or me?"
"No, it isn't!" Caroline spat out at him. "You guys can't just all spend years dealing with crazy me and trying to keep me alive! I'm not worth that! Even if I could somehow come out of this alright after everything, I'm not worth that! I'm doing this for you!"
"Don't you dare tell me that!" Klaus growled as his grip on her tightened even further. "You are worth it! I'll stay down here for centuries with you if that's what it takes. No one is better off just having you dead instead of being able to help you fight to live. And don't you dare ever try again to claim that killing yourself would be for me! How am I supposed to live without you, especially while knowing that you died because I couldn't save you? Because I couldn't convince you that there was anything worth living for? I have all of the time in the world and I want to spend all of it with you. Even if that means being locked in a cage with you for an eternity."
Caroline could hear the raw aggression in his tone as he stared down at her with tears threatening to fall from his eyes.
"Look at that," The hunter's voice filled Caroline's eardrums. "It's day one still and he's already broken by your curse. It's day one and you've already tried to kill your best friend and yourself. You'll never make it through this, so why torture everyone else and yourself for any longer?"
Klaus noticed Caroline's head turning to the side to look at something or someone else that wasn't there and felt a rage flow through him.
"Caroline, look at me," He growled.
She continued to stare past him, over at the area where there was a little heap of dead bodies sitting. There was the hunter's body, Carter's body, the bodies of the two cops that she had killed, and most horrifyingly of all, her own disfigured and barely recognizable carcass.
"Look at me!" Klaus snarled as loudly as he could, causing the sound to go echoing off of the walls.
Caroline faintly could hear that Klaus was saying something, but couldn't tear her gaze away from that of her own cold, dead eyes to look back over at him.
Klaus slid one of his arms so that the whole forearm was pushing her down at the collar bone and then took the other hand and then forcefully grabbed her chin and roughly pulled her face over, forcing her to look at him.
As she continued to stare on in horror, it was clear that she was still seeing whatever she had been before and not him.
Klaus didn't know what to do or how to bring Caroline back to reality, but all that he could think of was that he needed something to shock her back to reality and distract her from whatever image her mind was currently showing her instead.
That was how Klaus got the idea that caused him to lean down while still holding her there and give her a brief, but passion filled, kiss.
At some point during the kiss Caroline's eyes must have closed because they snapped back open to stare up at him when he pulled away.
She could see the look of sheer concern on Klaus's face and she knew that he had been telling the truth, that if she died it would destroy him.
"I need you to stay and keep me in line, remember?" Klaus asked quietly as all signs of aggression seemed to leave his voice.
Caroline nodded her head a little, which just caused more pain in the areas where Klaus was pressing down on her body to keep her in place.
"Okay," She responded weakly.
She still doubted that she would be able to make it through the curse; she still knew that the torture could only get worse. But she also knew that she at least had to try, for his sake, to survive it.
"Okay?" Klaus repeated in a surprised confusion.
"Yeah," Caroline assured him.
"So does that mean that if I give you this ring back that you won't throw it out the window again?" Damon asked from where he was now standing, leaning against the bars of the cage. "That you'll put it on?"
He had bolted outside, the instant that Caroline had thrown the ring, and gone searching for it. He had returned just moments later and had been silently watching the scene between Caroline and Klaus, knowing that there was nothing that he could add at that point that would help.
"I'll keep it on this time," Caroline promised, although really she knew that she was only promising to trying her hardest to make herself keep it on.
"Good," Damon said as he tossed the ring through the bars and towards Klaus.
Klaus caught it with one hand and then slid it onto Caroline's hand himself before he very cautiously loosened his grip on her slightly.
"I did that to you," Caroline commented quietly when she noticed the blood that still remained on Klaus's face from when she had scratched him thinking that he was Tyler. "I made you bleed?"
"I'm fine," Klaus told her with a reassuring smile. He had forgotten about the injury until Caroline had brought it back up. "It already healed a long time ago."
He wiped his face on the already blood-covered arm of his shirt to get rid of the blood and show that there were no scratches left on his face.
Caroline continued to frown as she tried to piece together what had and hadn't been real since she had woken up in the cell.
"He bit me," Caroline whispered to herself.
"Who did?" Klaus asked her.
"Tyler," Caroline replied. "He bit my neck."
Panic filled Caroline eyes as she reached up to grab at her neck without thinking.
"Tyler was never here," Klaus assured her. "There's no bite."
"I can feel it," Caroline argued as she continued to hold onto her neck.
"I promise you that there's nothing on your neck other than your hand," Klaus told her. "But if it will make you feel better-"
Klaus cut himself off as he brought one of his wrists to his mouth and bit through the flesh. Once he had drawn blood, he held his wrist out to Caroline to let her drink from him.
As Caroline drank, Klaus positioned them so that he was sitting cross-legged against the wall with Caroline sitting in his lap. He had one arm wrapped around her waist to hold her there and the other pressed to her lips as she drank.
Damon's phone had received a text message while he had been running to get Caroline her ring, but he had been too preoccupied to look at it up until that point.
From Elena:
What's going on? Is Caroline okay? Where are you guys?
Of course Damon didn't have any signal in the cellar, so he turned towards Klaus and asked, "I need to go call Elena, are you two okay for a minute?"
"Yeah, we should be," Klaus responded.
Damon nodded and then headed for the stairs.
A/N: Please read and review! I hope that you guys enjoyed the update and thanks for reading! :D
Another great big extra giant thanks goes out to all of the incredible reviewers of the last chapter: 1998baby, arielmermaid, XXXXKlarolineLoveXXXX, Carroline, layaboo, cRaZyGuRl093, oneindigorose, souzap, WeasleysGroupie, jessnicole, justine, DrawingMyHeartOut, If We Burn You Burn With Us123, Heidiionaanita, LitLover 101, and Athena
REVIEW ANSWERS:
WeasleysGroupie: I think that the main one is Mabekah, but there certainly some people who will say Matbekah instead.
justine: With Elena everyone knew about the curse though, here it's just Klaus, Damon, and Elena who know so far.