When Caroline woke as a vampire, the promise of her human future was gone.
It was Damon who'd first told her about a vampire's curse. His lips curled into a bitter, twisted smile as he watched Elena. Soulmates, he'd told her, were only for humans.
Not for monster's like them.
His false smile and covetous eyes as he'd watched Elena had left her stomach in knots. Caroline didn't know what to make of the ruin of his skin, the scarred over marks of a destroyed soulmate mark he'd have work as a human. She'd died at seventeen, months before her own mark would have appeared. The knowledge that she'd lost that chance, that whatever fate had intended for her had been both a relief and a stone in her chest. Her childhood had been filled with quite curiosity and wonder at the idea, but her mother's frown lines and tired eyes had always tempered the secret questions in her heart.
It was a relief to be free from the weight of an expectation she didn't know she'd had. But it hurt too. What did it mean, the no one would want her now? Not a girl but a vampire.
Caroline didn't know.
Her eighteenth birthday came and went. It was unremarkable in nearly every way. A monster watching the passing of time as an outsider.
Bonnie had worn a pretty cuff to hide her mark, and Elena still waited for hers with barely contained impatience. Caroline bitten the tip of her tongue bloody to hold in her screams, the ache of the monster fierce in her veins as her friends sat with her near the gravestones of her father's family. It wasn't acceptance she found with grave dirt clinging to her fingers and shoes, but a strange sort of hollowness she couldn't describe.
Freedom, Caroline decided, had a price.
Instead of a soul mate and a picket fence and children who had her smile and eyes, she faced a world with monster's bones and monster's teeth. No, it wasn't acceptance that carved grooves between her brows but determination. She wasn't Caroline the girl with a soulmate but Caroline the monster.
Tucked beneath her blankets and in the familial walls of her childhood, she felt too large. Trapped but not caged. Her hands looked the same, looked the same to a casual observer. But there was no mark on her wrist, just unblemished skin and a bloody, brilliant future that she found she wanted with a breathless sort of fascination she couldn't have described even had she the words.
Soulmates weren't for monster's.
Good,Caroline decided as she curled around her pillow. She wanted to choose her eternity. To go out and find it and then hold on to it with both hands and fight for what she wanted. Better, she wanted to be chosen.
Then Klaus happened.
She met him with his poison in her veins and her monster's greed in her bones. Caroline accepted his blood on her tongue because she wouldn't let him bleed her dreams dry with carelessness and disinterest. She threw diamonds into his face and dismissed his pretty admiration with a scoff in his face.
Small town boy, small town life. They don't suit you.
As if Klaus thought he could peer into the heart of her, a monster who fate had cut loose into the world. Instead of giving him and inch, Caroline strove to take back the ground he'd stolen with his schemes. And every cutting remark, every covetous glance and sharp threat, burned away just a little more of that hollow inside her lungs.
You don't care about people because you don't try.
I'd rather die of thirst.
You didn't let me finish.
But it was so much later, her lips pressed hot and greedy against his that Caroline hazily wondered if Damon had been wrong. Maybe monster's found monster's and swallowed each other whole. Fingertips on her skin, the press of bone and muscle and curious hybrid heat, it felt like an unraveling. It was greedy, greedy, greedy and the hunger in her bones was a thirst that the press of his skin couldn't satisfy. She stripped him of his clothes the way he stripped her of her defenses, and when he pressed her into the trees, panting breaths scalding against her lips as he filled her with his cock, she vaguely wondered if human Caroline would have ever felt this good.
Once wasn't enough.
Twice barely scratched the surface of her need.
Klaus drank her in like water. He met each grasping demand with his own, greed and desire mingled hotly with triumph. She'd gripped his hair and kissed his mouth and squeezed his hips tightly between her thighs, brain fuzzy and tongue loose.
This is just for now.
He laughed harshly against her throat, gripped her ass and thrust roughly. Dirt cling to the sweat of her back, she felt the leaves in her hair but it didn't matter as long as he continued to move like that. She panted and moaned, fingers digging bruises into his spine.
There are an eternity of nows, love, and I want them all.
She wanted them too.
He'd promised to leave and never return, Mystic Falls safe from the mercurial moods of his temper and his devotion. But as he pressed his mouth to hers one last time, the affection clouding out the triumph for a single moment, she realized he'd pressed a different of promise between her breasts, against the softness of her thighs. Lingering marks from a monster's teeth and monster's greed sat beneath her skin now the way the potential of her human soul mate had once waited to rise to the surface.
In the end, it wasn't a goodbye. It wasn't even a see you later. It was a lull, a cease fire in a private little war and one day, not tomorrow or next, but perhaps in a decade or century, they'd take up where they left off. He'd lay siege with his greed and his endless, unquenchable thirst and she'd meet him with her bloody hands and monster's smile.
Naked in the forest, she smiled at the unblemished skin on her wrist and rose to find the remains of her clothes.