A/N: This fic will be dealing with the after effects of a lot of trauma and loss, and everything that comes with it. Warnings include: dealing with loss, depression, PTSD, trauma, and survivor's guilt. Most of this will occur in the later parts, but please tread carefully if this isn't your thing! You can also message me for further details if you want more info before deciding if this is for you or not.

overture
an orchestral piece at the beginning of an opera, suite, play, oratorio, or other extended composition

It's been almost two weeks since Caroline has had a good, home cooked meal, she's pretty sure the sulfates in the various hotel and motel water are not only drying out her hair but also breaking her out; and she's like, eighty percent sure that the last motel, a glorified truck stop in the middle of nowhere, was the scene of a grisly crime at some point. The one before that had roaches. And possibly bedbugs—she hadn't been super keen on investigating the tiny brown spot that had run across the floor.

But Dean?

Dean is thriving, falling easily into the rhythm of road life more with every diner they stop in. He orders cheeseburgers with milkshakes and fully loaded fries while she stares in disbelief at the sheer amount of food he is able to consume in a single sitting.

"But how?" she finally asks when they're just under two days out from Bobby's. "How are you not, like, sick all the time?" She reaches out and pokes his arm. "How do you still look like that? This," she waves at his burger, currently sitting in the excess grease it has shed on his plate, "is literal garbage."

He points at her with a fry. "Blasphemy. This is fine dining. And besides," he shrugs and pops the fry into his mouth. "Iron stomach."

She shakes her head over her chili.

"Guess you have to get used to it," she mutters, tearing a piece of her roll and dipping it into the soup.

"Yeah, which you will not be doing," he says, tone shifting to just a tad stern. "Your only job is to stay at Bobby's and do your Independent Study thing. Georgetown awaits, right?"

A pang of guilt slices through her, but she doesn't correct him. "Georgetown awaits," she echoes half-heartedly.

It's another day and a half up to Bobby's place, and when they finally, finally pull into the junkyard, she thinks Dean might actually make a run for the Impala once they park.

"I missed you," he croons to the car, his palm resting on the roof.

"You are so weird," she informs him tartly, hoisting her bag over one shoulder.

"Shhh. We're reconnecting."

Caroline rolls her eyes heavenward and turns towards Bobby's house—

—and freezes, the blood draining from her face.

"Dean," she says hoarsely, hardly daring to move, to breathe.

Adam is standing on Bobby's porch, his hands in his pockets and fear on his face.

The tone of her voice must alert Dean to the fact that something is very wrong, because he's at her elbow in an instant before he looks up and sees for himself. She feels him go very, very still next to her.

"What," he begins lowly as Bobby comes out, his hands raised, "the fuck is going on, Bobby?" His voice rises towards the end of the question into a shout; Bobby winces and Adam backs away.

"Listen," Bobby begins, "it's not what you think."

"Yeah?" Dean snaps, "cause I'm thinking that's the ghoul that nearly killed Care."

Bobby steps down off the porch, both hands lifted, palms facing them. "That's what I thought too," he says, advancing slowly. "But I tried everything, Dean—and I mean everything." He hesitates before adding, "Even had Castiel check him out."

Caroline sneaks a glance over at Dean and winces at the look on his face. It's a mix of devastation and betrayal, but she blinks and it's gone, replaced by a scowl.

"That doesn't mean shit," he snaps. "We did that last time and he was still a fucking ghoul." He edges over towards Caroline, partly blocking her from view. She chews her lip anxiously, eyes fixed not on Bobby, but on Adam, who looks—devastated. He looks as though someone has carved his heart out with a spoon and a shock of sympathy streaks through her.

Bobby sighs. "Had Missouri check too," he says. "Human as the day is long."

She blinks and it's on the tip of her tongue to whisper to Dean who is Missouri? But Dean's entire demeanor changes at the confirmation. His shoulders tense, then fall; his fists unclench and he looks so tired that Caroline reaches out and puts her arm around him.

"Hey," she says softly, so that only he can hear. "Hey, listen. We made it. We're here, and we're safe." Her fingers tighten slightly on his shoulder. "We can rest for a while."

Rest.

The word lands on him. He looks over at her and she offers her best, sunniest smile.

"Yeah," he says finally. "Yeah, okay."

—

Bobby's house is bigger than she expected, though she can't really articulate what she expected. Logically, if he had offered to house two entire people for an undetermined length of time, his house had to be large enough to accommodate them, but somehow, she had always pictured him in a small cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

Instead, his house is bigger than theirs in Mystic Falls, and, she notes in quiet delight, is painted a robin's egg blue that makes her wonder for the first time if Bobby has ever been married. She makes a note to ask Dean later.

The house is a fortress, nestled on a sprawling landscape and surrounded on all sides by nothing but wild. Bobby has no neighbors as far she can see, just hills and trees and mountains in the distance.

It would be beautiful, and perfect enough to put on a postcard; but the house sits right smack in the middle of his junkyard. Beaten up cars in varying states of decay sit piled high on the outskirts of his front and back yards; she squints at one in particular that she thinks she recognizes as belonging to John Winchester.

"This is your room," Bobby says, his baseball cap in his hands. Caroline glances down and sees that he's twisting it nervously, as though he's afraid she'll turn her nose up at the tiny space.

"This is perfect," she decrees firmly, hiding her wince at just how small the room actually is. "Seriously, Bobby, it's great."

She thinks she sees an honest to god blush on Bobby's face before he nods once and heads back down the stairs. Behind him, Dean rolls his eyes.

"Laying it on a little thick, don't ya think?"

Caroline ignores him. "Why is your room bigger than mine?"

He leans into her tiny room and takes a look around before drawing back and smirking down at her. "Wouldn't take much to achieve that," he snarks.

"Seriously. I've got more stuff, I should get the bigger room."

"I'm older, and I'm bigger," Dean retorts. "Besides, you chose to bring half your closet with us. We're on the run, not the runway. Suck it up, buttercup."

"I hate you," she whisper-calls after him as he walks down the hall towards his own, larger room.

She turns back towards her room—her tiny, thimble sized room. A twin bed is shoved into one corner, next to a tall window that overlooks a few skeletal cars; further in the distance, she sees the beginnings of rolling hills peaking over the tops of the trees.

A desk—clearly a newer purchase, based on its lack of dust—sits opposite the bed, with just enough room for a chair. There is no dresser, and she's pretty sure the closet is the size of a postage stamp.

"It's pretty small," Adam comments from the hall; Caroline nearly jumps at the unexpected sound. "Sorry, sorry," he says, hands up. "Sorry. My bad. I—I thought you heard me, on the stairs."

Her heart is thundering in her chest, but she manages a small smile. "No, you're fine. Just—a little on edge, I guess."

He gives her a half-smile that's just this side of self-deprecating. "I guess we haven't, uh, technically met." He sticks out his hand. "Adam Milligan."

She stares at his outstretched hand a beat too long, and he wavers, dropping it back to his side before she can say anything. "I guess you already met me, then," he says softly, his tone holding just the slightest edge of bitterness.

"I know that it wasn't you," Caroline tells him quietly, "but it—I need time." She offers him a weak smile. "I, um—it wasn't great. For me."

Adam gives her a tiny nod, just the slightest tilt of his chin downwards. "Could I ask you?" he begins, "what exactly a ghoul is?"

The word ghoul, in his voice, is enough to bring her back; and all at once, she is on the floor of the Fell tomb, her side ablaze with pain, vervain burning through the skin and muscle of her wrists until the bone is exposed. She is immobilized, waiting for death to come, certain that her number has been called and her time is up.

She gives voice to none of these things, but Adam must read some of it on her face because he drops his gaze to the floor. Caroline shakes her head, pulling herself out of it, but the damage is done.

"Another time, maybe," she offers, her voice cracking. "When everything's not so—fresh."

The smile he gives her is one she recognizes well: he doesn't believe her, but he'll humor her into thinking he does. "Sure," he agrees easily, taking a step back. "That sounds okay."

Caroline watches as he retreats down the hall, towards what she assumes is his room. She watches as his door, across from Dean's, shuts, before slowly shutting her own.

—

As it turns out, Mystic Falls High Independent Study is a joke. Caroline thinks grimly that she really should have seen that one coming.

The entire course load consists of worksheets with due dates that she discovers are less like due dates and more like gentle suggestions. None of her teachers press her for them, but she still faithfully turns each set in on time like the valedictorian she hopes to be would.

But the tiny printer that Bobby had set up on the floor next to her just as tiny desk can barely print off all the worksheets she has, and it runs out of ink halfway through her second week.

"This is bullshit," she complains, dropping the stack of papers next to Dean belligerently. The ink is already gray on the first page, and by the end of the stack, it is so faded that her printed worksheets look entirely blank. "Bullshit."

Dean shrugs. "Take it up with Saltzman," he suggests, stirring his coffee and staring hard at the newspaper in front of him.

"I can't. No one's allowed to know where we are, remember? Ric will definitely ask—"

"So just don't tell him."

She scowls at him. "Because things are always that simple," she says sarcastically. "They're my friends, Dean. They're probably worried AF, and—"

"Found another one," Bobby cuts in as he walks in from the library, a book with yellowing pages in his hands. He hands Dean a newspaper article and like that, she has lost his attention. "Nineteen fifteen," Bobby says, and Caroline blinks, battling twin urges to stomp her foot like a child or burst into tears.

In the end, she does neither— she simply picks up her stack of barely legible worksheets and backs out of the kitchen, fighting back the suddenly overwhelming urge to cry.

Adam is standing at the bottom of the stairs, an empty cereal bowl in one hand and a guilty expression on his face. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop," he begins, "but if you need ink, I can—I'll go with you to get some."

Caroline isn't entirely comfortable with him, but—well, she needs her printer ink if this Independent Study thing is going to work. And she wants it to work, wants to insist upon normalcy where she can still find it; but more than that, she needs it to work if graduation and college are still going to be a viable goal in seven months.

It has to work, so she shelves her discomfort and says, "Yes, please."

—

"Can I ask you something?" Caroline asks as he navigates the beater truck Bobby had loaned them through the streets.

Instead of answering, Adam half-shrugs, and it's a gesture so reminiscent of John Winchester that she has to briefly look away, old grief aching anew.

There's no delicate way to ask what needs to be asked, so she dives in before she can overthink it. "How—how are you here?" It treads dangerously close to Klaus's you were dead and she has to push aside the guilt that pangs through her at the thought of him.

Adam tilts his head at the road ahead. "I'm not sure," he says thoughtfully, signaling a lane change. "One minute I was dancing with my—don't laugh, but I was dancing with my prom date." Her head swivels towards him, and she can't help but smile at the bashfulness on his face. "Next thing I knew, my whole body hurt and Bobby had a shotgun in my face." He seems to consider his next words carefully. "I think I died, and someone brought me back."

"And you don't know why?"

"Wish I did." He waits a moment, his fingers drumming something without a beat against the steering wheel before he blurts out, "Bobby said something like that happened to you?"

Something—

She swallows. "Oh. Uh, yeah." Something inside of her wavers, balancing on the precarious edge of a seesaw. She would trust Bobby with her life, and has before, yet she can't help but feel the stinging echo of the cold, hard floor of the Fell tomb on her back as though she was just there. He isn't the Adam that had nearly killed her, but the memory of the thing that took his face is sharp, a bell that is still chiming.

Adam may not know what she went through at his own hands, but he feels the temperature shift in the truck. "It's cool," he says quickly, signaling a turn and looking past her to check his blind spot. "You don't have to tell me."

They fall silent—a heavy, thick silence that Caroline thinks she might suffocate under, until the weight of it is too much to bear and she blurts out, "It's not you, I promise—"

He cuts her off, the words bursting from him. "But it is me," he corrects her bitterly.

And to her dismay, she can't think of a compelling argument.

—

Sioux Falls, to Caroline's immeasurable delight, is a real city.

There's a downtown with shops and restaurants and tourists enjoying the cooling air before the crispness of fall truly sets in; and her heart takes off, speeding up giddily. The smile on her face feels foreign and unfamiliar, and she realizes with a jolt that it's been weeks since she's had a real, genuine reason for one.

The office supply store is cramped, but she finds what she needs quickly and grabs a handful of cartridges. Nearby, the store has displayed their stock of notebooks and she can't help but gravitate towards them, a sucker for a crisp, blank set of pages.

Adam finds her there, gazing longingly at a set of notebooks with seafoam green covers.

"Do you, like, want one of those?" he asks curiously, and it snaps Caroline out of her reverie.

"Oh, um— no, it's fine." She tears her eyes from the notebooks and heads reluctantly over to the cashier, handing over her cartridges and a few of the bills from the stash of cash she had taken out of her bank account four cities ago.

"I'll meet you outside," Adam says when she rejoins him at the front. At her quizzical look, he waves her off. "I need some pens," he says vaguely; she shrugs and heads out to the sidewalk.

While she's waiting, she takes her phone out and stares at the blank screen where her text messages should be.

Caroline had texted her friends a brief, vague don't worry, I'm safe, I'll see you soon message, blocked all of their numbers, then reset her phone to factory settings somewhere in Alabama. She had written their numbers hastily on a scrap of paper she had then handed over to Dean, for emergencies only; and the only exception, the only one she had kept from Dean, is Klaus's.

There it sits, one of only eight remaining contacts: Bobby. Dad. Dean. Ellen. Jo.

Klaus.

Her fingertip hovers over his name, and she wonders what he would do if she called him—which ring he'd pick up on, what his greeting would be, what his voice would sound like from thousands of miles away. If he would come find her and bring her back.

She wonders if he misses her.

Her hand halts millimeters from the screen, hovering, unwilling to close the tiny gap between screen and skin.

Right beneath Klaus's name—

Mom.

Before she can overthink it, before she can remember why this is a very bad, terrible idea, she taps the screen and listens as the sound of the ring trills in her ear. It rings, and it rings, and she lets her eyes close, lets her brain deceive itself into thinking that someone will answer—

You've reached Sheriff Liz Forbes—

Caroline hangs up, her breath catching in her chest and her hand tightening around her phone as she fights back the overwhelming urge to cry.

"You okay?"

The sound of Adam's voice snaps her out of it and she locks her phone quickly, shoving it back into the back pocket of her jeans. "Yeah," she assures him, brushing her hair out of her face and wiping at her eyes as discreetly as she can. "Yeah, I'm fine." Her eyes drop to the bag in his hand. "Buy something?"

He hesitates before shrugging and pulling out—

—a set of the notebooks she had been coveting—

"It looked like you wanted one," he says, and he sounds almost…apologetic. "And I figured, you know, whatever I, uh, did to you when—er, I mean, what the ghoul did to you—" he's fumbling, and she's pretty sure he's lost his nerve.

Caroline reaches over and takes the notebooks from him. "Thank you," she says. "But you didn't have to."

Adam doesn't look at her. "I did," he corrects quietly, and as he walks away from her, she's left on the sidewalk, stunned into silence.

On the drive home, he says casually, "I think I'm gonna—I'm gonna head out."

Her head swivels towards him so fast that she almost gets dizzy. "What? You're going to leave?"

He shrugs, eyes fixed on the road. In profile, with his stare hard, he reminds her of Dean, back when Dean was softer and before the world had crumbled beneath their feet. "Yeah," he mumbles. "Been thinking about it."

And he isn't Sam, will never be Sam, but his steady, quiet demeanor has been a balm since they arrived in South Dakota, and even though she barely knows him, she knows that she wants him to stay.

"Where would you go? If you left?"

Adam seems to deflate slightly, his shoulders rounding. "Don't know yet." He pauses, his gaze flitting over to her briefly before returning to the road. "My mom was all I had."

That decides it. "You have us now," she says firmly, pushing away her lingering fear. "You should stay. You're—you're Dean's brother, which makes you my brother, and you should stay." He doesn't say anything so she repeats it. "You have us."

—

For a while, Caroline is sure the change of scenery has chased away the nightmares. She goes weeks without one—nothing but sweet, dreamless sleep that leaves behind no shadows in the morning. The dark circles under her eyes slowly fade, and even Bobby gives her a gruff compliment about how South Dakota "seems to be agreeing with you, kid."

And it is.

Her Independent Study is usually finished by mid-afternoon and it's then that she finds herself out on a hike, her tennis shoes scuffed and muddy, the soles threatening to peel off of the shoe. Sometimes Adam comes with her, sometimes Jo, who is fighting her own battles, Caroline thinks; and even Dean ventures out a few times, but mostly she is by herself.

It's nice, being alone and free from the noise. She'll never tell another soul, but the feeling of expectations has been almost crushing: Dean's. Her own. Klaus's. Sometimes she thinks she can't breathe under their weight.

But out here, with just the trees and the grass and the breeze? She's well and truly nothing—one measly human, an ant, a microscopic bit of fluff, and it's freeing.

It lasts just long enough for her to think that maybe she has escaped the worst of it, that this is what healing looks like.

But it isn't.

They've been in South Dakota six weeks when the nightmares come back. Six weeks of peace before she falls asleep and sees Bonnie screaming for Elena; Elena, her humanity turned off; Stefan, desiccated; Matt, drowned; Tyler, gone where she can't follow.

Caroline gives up on fighting it, resigned to seeing her friends in pain.

Sometimes she dreams of Klaus too, dreams where she wakes up still feeling his lips on her neck, his hands on her waist, his hips pressing down on her own. It sparks a memory of Stefan mentioning offhandedly that Katherine had often invaded his dreams to torment him, but she doesn't think this is Klaus reaching across thousands of miles just to make her hot and bothered.

Those dreams always end in flames too.

—

Caroline gathers up all of her courage and asks Castiel the question that's been lingering in the back of her mind for weeks now.

"Do you think I came back wrong?"

She's baking cupcakes—Bobby jokes that if she keeps baking so much, he's going to have to pull old Jane Fonda workout tapes from the attic just to keep up with the demands of hunting. But the methodical measuring and stirring and pouring gives her brain a break and her hands something to do. Castiel is her taste tester, and a bad one at that: he tells her very gravely that each one is outstanding.

Her question is quiet but it fires off in the space between them like a gunshot.

Castiel slowly lowers the cupcake in his hand, his gaze serious as he studies her. The silence lingers long enough that she has to resist the impulse to fill it, to wave the question away with a lightness she hasn't felt in weeks.

But it's been eating at her for days, this idea that maybe her nightmares and the feeling that she is slowly sinking into a quicksand that exists only in her mind are not, in fact, fixable. That maybe, just maybe, when she had died and chosen to come back, she came back wrong.

That maybe her body had been healed but her mind scarred.

"No," Castiel says finally. "No, I do not think that."

Her shoulders slip forward. "But Cas, I—I feel wrong, like there's something wrong inside of me."

"Perhaps," he suggests, "you have that—that PSDT you mentioned."

"PTSD," she corrects automatically before tilting her head thoughtfully at him. That hadn't even been on her radar, but now that Castiel has offered the theory— "Maybe," she concedes, chewing on her bottom lip.

He nods slowly. "You said it was quite common in soldiers after a war."

"Yeah, it is, but Cas, I wasn't—"

"A soldier," he repeats stubbornly, "in a war." He fixes her with that stoic stare and says, "You fought, and killed, and sacrificed, and lost. You were."

"Cas—"

"I promised I would not tell Dean," he says, and she freezes. He has never brought up the deal, has never once mentioned her clandestine trip to the Mikaelson manor, and she had thought maybe they just had an unspoken agreement to never talk about it again. But apparently not. "And I will not renege on my word. But Caroline," bright blue eyes find hers and pin her in place, "You did not come back wrong. You sacrificed, and you have survived. Allow yourself grace."

Grace—what a concept. Caroline stares out into space for a moment, her brain whirling. She's pretty sure she has never given herself grace; no matter how hard anyone has ever been on her, she has always been harder on herself.

"I like this one the best," Castiel adds after a beat, pulling her out of her thoughts; and he points to the lemon buttercream on the edge of the counter. "Though they are all very tasty."

She gives him a half-smile. "Baking is my love language," she says with a flourish of her batter-covered spatula in his direction. "Consider yourself initiated into the Caroline Forbes inner sanctum."

He blinks at her. "I was previously in the outer sanctum?"

That makes her laugh, and she feels the slightest bit lighter. "No," she allows as she slides another batch into the oven. "But now it's official."

Caroline catches a glimpse of her reflection in the window over the sink.

Grace.

—

tbc

A/N: One tiny note: this is not the true sequel to 'birth' - that will come later this year. It's an interlude (thus the title)!

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