Caroline finally decided to take Klaus up on his offer to join him in New Orleans, Stefan in tow. Unfortunately, she got kidnapped before she had the chance to actually get there. Even more unfortunately, the original hybrid doesn't take kindly to those harming the only person he has ever loved. Again, no baby-plot.

"We cannot act hastily, Niklaus. Please, be reasonable," Elijah helplessly tried to plead with his brother.

Klaus sighed, briefly closing his eyes to try and keep his temper at bay as he poured himself the umpteenth glass of expensive bourbon.

"You know that I don't like to sit and wait, Brother," he scoffed.

It was Elijah's turn to sigh, and he was just about to speak again when the door of the elegant and secluded study of their New Orleans' mansion—that they had closed themselves into to discuss the city's fragile situation in privacy—suddenly flew open to reveal a very distressed Rebekah.

Ever the insensitive brother, the interruption only fueled Klaus' anger and annoyance, but before he could say anything Elijah cut in, noticing their sister's genuinely panicked expression.

"Rebekah, what's wrong?" he inquired with furrowed eyebrows, worry lacing his usually placid tone.

The blonde Original's eyes shifted from one brother to the other, looking at Klaus almost with fear.

"We don't have time for your childish tantrums, Rebekah," Klaus reproached her with clear frustration, exhaling heavily through his nose. "I don't see a white oak stake protruding from your chest, so I suggest you make yourself scarce," he added, pointing to the door that she had just burst through.

Rebekah swallowed, but remained silent for a few more moments. Eventually, she took a deep breath and spoke.

"A pack of wolves got Stefan," she announced, uttering the words so quickly that neither of her brothers would have heard her had they been humans.

Klaus laughed humorlessly. "If I recall correctly, I did tell you that it was unwise to invite him over," he said, drowning the last remnants in his alcohol, "or to have any kind of interaction with him, for the time being."

Rebekah ignored her brother's slight jab and went on. "They're keeping him in an abandoned underground cellar just outside of the city's borders," she informed him, fidgeting anxiously.

Klaus scoffed. "I would ask how you know all that, but frankly I don't care. This problem is your own Rebekah, and you will have to solve it alone."

"Niklaus—" Elijah tried to interject, giving his sister a sympathetic look.

"No, Elijah. I had told her that we are in a very delicate situation here, but she just couldn't live without a boy toy for a couple of days," the hybrid roared, making Rebekah wince visibly.

"If you're angry now..." she muttered to herself, briefly closing her eyes and taking a huge breath of unnecessary air.

"What do you mean?" Klaus asked her, almost dismissively.

"Stefan, he—he wasn't coming alone," she trailed off, bracing herself for her brother's reaction.

Klaus completely turned towards her then, regarding her with a suspicious and wary look.

"Elaborate."

"He told me Caroline was coming with him."

A heavy, deafening silence immediately fell on the room as those words left Rebekah's lips.

As unnecessary as it was for two vampires and a hybrid to breath, it felt eerily scary to not be able to hear a single breath around them. Only the faint echo of the word Caroline still lingered and nothing else, almost as if time had suddenly stopped.

The first one to break the silence was Elijah, confused at the seemingly dramatic turn of events. The situation did seem grave—he had made a promise to Elena and he certainly did not wish for the younger Salvatore brother and one of her best friends to die at the hand of a few of werewolves—but both Rebekah's and especially Klaus' set, angered and—

—did he dare say?—

—frightened expression, seemed to reveal that there was something that the oldest Mikaelson was missing.

He was just about to voice his confusion, a single breath escaping through his throat, when Klaus suddenly sped towards Rebekah, immobilizing their younger sibling against the wall with a tight grip on her throat.

"You better hope—" he trailed off angrily through gritted teeth, fear dancing across his bright yellow eyes. He didn't need to finish his sentence for Rebekah to understand the meaning of his words: if anything had happened to Caroline, it was on her.

"Niklaus," Elijah said sternly, and Klaus looked icily into his sister's blue eyes one more time before letting go of her.

"Show us where they are keeping them."

:

:

Klaus stealthily entered the cellar, although it really looked more like some sort of cave. It was cold and dark, and, even for Klaus who was half werewolf himself, that place reeked way too much of wolves.

He gritted his teeth, his jaw clenched, his heart beating frantically as worry set in and his fear grew with every single step he took.

Elijah and Rebekah were right behind him, but his only concern was getting Caroline out of there safe and sound, while of course killing all of her captors in the process. It had to be understood that, even if she wasn't his quite yet, nobody would ever be allowed to harm a single hair on her perfect, blond head and get away with it. She was the only ray of light in his life, his only chance at a better existence, and the world would be sorry if he ever were to lose her so permanently.

Finally, they started hearing voices coming from deeper inside.

"Dammit, Steve, why can't we just kill them already? I'm bored," a male voice whined.

Somebody else scoffed. "Torture is fun, man," the new voice replied, a grin on his face easy to imagine given the smug tone of his words. "Right, Steve?"

"Shut up, you two," a third voice, which probably belonged to that Steve person, reproached them both. "We'll kill them when the time is right. I want to watch them monsters suffer, then maybe vampires will start being sorry for trying to take away our city."

One of the other two werewolves snorted. "Please. It's not like they actually matter or something."

A sudden noise coming from the back of the cellar startled the three men then, and they looked around the place warily.

None of them even had the chance to breathe before the one who had last spoken suddenly fell to the floor lifelessly, a hole bleeding through his chest where his heart should have been instead.

"Wrong."

The other two wolves gasped at the sight of a murderous looking Klaus, the still barely pulsing heart of their friend grasped in his hand, bloody and unforgiving.

She matters.

It was mayhem then.

Klaus effortlessly tore Steve's heart out of his chest too—

—"And it was never your city in the first place, mate."—

—as the other werewolf tried to escape but was stopped by Rebekah, who wasted no time and unnaturally twisted his neck, killing him.

Disturbed by the noise and the unfamiliar voices, the other wolves of the pack appeared from deeper inside the cell, although they didn't get much time to understand what was going on before the Originals attacked them.

Klaus tore through everyone who stood in his way without a second thought, moving towards where he could here Caroline's whimpers coming from, his anger only fouled by the proof of how much they had hurt her. Elijah and Rebekah swiftly took care of the others as he did so. On a full moon, the tables might have been somewhat leveled, but on a normal day no amount of werewolves could ever be a match for any of them.

Finally, the hybrid could venture through the tight passage that led to where Caroline and Stefan were being kept.

Nothing, no amount of worrying and fearing for the worst, could have ever prepared him for the sight of her battered and bruised, her face and hair stained with blood, her arms chained to the wall with two big locks around her thin wrists. His salvation, caged like an animal.

He vamp-sped to her, his hands immediately breaking the locks trapping her and setting her free.

"Caroline," he half shouted, his voice trembling. "Caroline, love..."

The blonde winced, her eyes closed, as if even the smallest of breaths hurt too much. "Klaus?" she muttered, confused.

"Yes, love, it's me. It's okay, it's going to be okay, you're safe," he chanted in a whisper, nodding more to himself than to her.

She was deeply hurt, probably both physically and emotionally, but she was alive and that was what mattered the most in that moment.

"Stefan," she managed to drawl out, her eyes fluttering open.

Klaus' jaw clenched, but he nonetheless turned to the side for a moment, spotting the other vampire lying just few feet away from where they were, his conditions no better than Caroline's.

"It's his fault," he growled.

The baby vampire laughed tiredly, the sound nowhere close to her usual twinkling laughter.

"No, it's not," she replied as Klaus put one arm under her knees and the other around her waist, effortlessly lifting her up into his warm and secure embrace.

"That's for me to decide, love," he countered, his anger barely contained. He had almost lost her, and he refused to let his sister and Stefan's blames go unpunished.

Caroline tried to laugh again, but it only resulted in a fit of coughing. "Are you really going to fight me on that right now?" she teased, and Klaus couldn't help the small smile that curved his lips at that.

However, the newly-found lighter mood soon dissipated as he took in the horrific sight of her right shoulder.

"They bit you," he roared, all of his anger resurfacing in the blink of an eye. "Why weren't you telling me?"

Caroline moaned in pain, trying to look at her own shoulder but unable to move too much.

"I honestly didn't know," she answered slowly. "Everything hurts, excuse me if I can't really discern the causes of it."

Again, Klaus couldn't help but smile slightly. No matter the situation, Caroline still hadn't lost her spunk, and he took pride in knowing that his little firecracker had probably made those worthless wolves going mad with her witty quips and remarks.

Without thinking about it twice, he rolled one sleeve of his shirt up to free his wrist, and offered it to her as he supported her up with his other arm.

Caroline didn't need to be told what to do. Even if she hadn't been bitten, she hadn't consumed blood in days and she was starving; not to mention that his blood smelled delicious and that she really wanted another taste, for it had been too long since the last time that she had had some. So she gladly bit into his wrist, moaning slightly as his blood finally hit her tongue, sucking more greedily.

She could immediately feel her energy coming back to her, her bones retaking their rightful places and her skin healing where she had been cut and bruised. She sighed, letting go of his arm—which she had been holding onto as she drank—and licked the last drops of blood on his wrist as the two little holes in his skin vanished. She couldn't say that she was feeling perfectly fine yet, but she did feel a lot better and that definitely was a start.

"Thank you," she whispered.

Klaus smiled down at her, tenderly caressing her bottom lip with his thumb.

"You're welcome, love."

Just then, Elijah and Rebekah arrived, and their little bubble bursted.

"Where's Stefan?" Rebekah asked in a rush.

Klaus rolled his eyes, protectively tightening his grip on Caroline and bringing her a bit closer to his chest.

"Your lover-boy is over there," he answered, nodding to the side, displeasure clear in his tone.

"He's lucky that I have more important matters to attend to right now, because I could kill him for having been so reckless. He decides to persist on his silly bunny diet and can't even take on a couple of werewolves when they're in their human forms as a consequence," he scoffed. "If he has a suicide wish, then he better think twice about bringing Caroline with him next time."

"Hey," Caroline weakly protested, already on the brink of sleep. "Don't insult the bunny diet."

Klaus' hard gaze softened as he looked down at the blonde in his arms, and then he sighed.

"There's so much that I have to teach you, love."

In the meantime, Rebekah had gone tending to Stefan but Elijah was closely watching Klaus and Caroline's exchange with peaked interest.

He had never seen his brother act like that around anybody before, not even in his long gone human days. He was caring with her, a quality that he didn't think his brother even possessed anymore. What surprised him even more was that that behavior didn't seem forced, it instead seemed to come naturally to the hybrid around the young vampire. Klaus was looking at Caroline and holding her as if she was the most important thing in the world, and Elijah's eyes widened slightly as he realized that, to his brother, she indeed was.

"Nik!" Rebekah's panicked voice suddenly broke through Elijah's reveries. "Nik, he's been bitten, he needs your blood!"

Klaus simply laughed dryly in response. "He got himself into this mess, Rebekah."

The blonde original gasped indignantly. "Are you serious?"

He shrugged, almost looking smug.

"So what, you're just going to let him die because he put your precious bimbo in danger? God, you're so full of yourself! Elijah, help me, please," she imploringly looked at her other brother, caressing Stefan's arm in a soothing manner.

Klaus scoffed. "I'm not going to let him die. But I'm sure that he can cope for a couple more hours with the venom in his system."

"Ugh, Klaus," Caroline whined, rolling a bit in his arms. "I told you that it's not his fault. Please, do it so we can go home."

Klaus' heart jumped slightly in his chest at hearing her call his New Orleans mansion home, and Elijah observed the struggle going on in his brother's eyes with curiosity.

With Caroline still securely in his arms, the hybrid eventually sighed and walked towards where Stefan was crouched on the ground.

He bit harshly into his own palm, positioning his hand over Stefan's mouth.

"Open," he commanded. Stefan wearily parted his lips, and Klaus pressed into the rapidly healing wound to let some of his blood drip down the vampire's throat.

"This will suffice for now and heal the bite, he can have more blood at the mansion," he snapped, retreating his arm and cleaning the wound against his jeans. "Let's go now," he added with finality before speeding away with Caroline.

Elijah and Rebekah helped Stefan to his feet, then quickly followed after their brother.

:

:

"What's gotten into you?" Rebekah asked her brother, eying Elijah warily as she entered the kitchen for the umpteenth time to get Stefan some more blood bags. "You've been really weird since we got back. You can't tell me that you've been traumatized by what happened," she scoffed with a sarcastic chuckle.

"Mmh?" was Elijah's only reply as he mindlessly looked towards his sister, still caught up in his own thoughts.

Rebekah's eyebrows furrowed in worry. "Are you okay?"

Elijah exhaled loudly through his lips, briefly closing his eyes.

"I'm perfect, Rebekah. Just... surprised," he commented with a hint of confusion evident on his features.

"The almighty Elijah, surprised? Wow," Rebekah mocked him, although affectionately, earning herself a slightly scolding look. "And, pray tell, what is that has you surprised?"

The Original ignored his sister's question to inquire something himself, nonetheless answering the blonde in the process.

"What exactly is the state of our brother's relationship with Miss Forbes?"

Rebekah shrugged; Klaus' weird obsession for the baby vampire was no piece of news for her, after all. "Nik fancies himself infatuated with her," she answered with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

"Infatuated seems like a bit of an understatement to me. And you too know that it is not that simple, or you wouldn't have been so terrified to tell him that she was in danger this morning."

Rebekah glared at her older brother. "I wasn't terrified, I was concerned," she corrected him haughtily, lifting a hand to point a perfectly manicured finger at him. "For Stefan, mind you. I couldn't care less about Caroline."

Elijah's tone softened as he spoke again. "You don't have to fear that he will not love you anymore, just because he is in love with her now," he reassured her. Even if they didn't realize it, his siblings were very much alike in that sense, always worried that the people that they cared about the most might one day leave them behind.

It was evident by the slight look of hurt flashing across Rebekah's eyes that he had indeed brought up a sensitive subject, but she quickly concealed it behind an air of indifference.

"I don't," she said harshly. "And he isn't in love with her," she added before grabbing two blood bags and leaving the kitchen with haste.

Elijah smiled softly, lost to his own musings once again.

His brother, in love.

:

:

"Are you feeling better, love?" Klaus asked Caroline as she emptied the last one of the four blood bags that he had brought her.

The blonde vampire nodded her head meekly, lifting her eyes into his intense stare.

"Yes. Thank you."

"You don't have to thank me, love," he smiled.

But Caroline shook her head with decision, suddenly feeling more driven.

"I do. You saved my life today, again, and I—"

"I thought we had agreed that the first couple of times had been my fault," he interrupted her with a low chuckle. "So I suppose they don't really count."

She allowed herself a small smile as well. "Well, this one definitely counts. And, you can't blame Stefan for what happened," she added with a commanding finger aimed at his chest.

Klaus scoffed in response, although his eyes and tone were still gentle.

"I am pretty certain that I can. It was his fault."

"No, it wasn't," she swallowed nervously, avoiding Klaus' gaze all of a sudden. "I was the one who wanted to come to New Orleans."

The revelation caught the hybrid by surprise, his heart jumping all the way up to his throat. He tried to keep the hope that was inevitably swelling in his chest at bay, but it was already too late for that.

"Were you?" he asked with a hoarse, low voice, barely above a whisper. "Why?"

Caroline took in a deep breath, gathering all of her courage. She had suffered through hell and back for the past two days, and she would be damned if it had all been for nothing. She knew what she wanted, what she needed.

"I missed you," she admitted with a trembling voice after what felt like a never-ending moment of silence, finally focusing her gaze back into Klaus'.

The Original's breath caught in his throat, his eyes widening slightly at the blonde's confession.

The whole situation seemed surreal. In both his head and heart, he had always been hers and she his, but he had genuinely believed that he would have had to wait years if not centuries for her to actually come to him, and he had been more than willing to do so. Granted, she had only said that she had been missing him and not declared anything more, but it was a step forward, one that rendered him speechless.

He could see the worry slowly clouding Caroline's eyes, a hint of fear hidden just beneath the surface, almost as she was scared that he might have laughed at her then or sent her back on her way. But Klaus was, if anything, a man of his word, and he knew with complete and utter certainty that he had never loved nor would he ever love anybody before or after her. He had promised to wait however long it would have taken for her, and he had meant it more than he had ever meant anything else in his whole life.

Smiling—and it wasn't a grin, no; it was a rare, genuine smile—he slowly brought one of his hands up to her face, tenderly trailing his fingers up and down the side of her cheek.

"I missed you too, love."

A radiant smile appeared on Caroline's face then, her cheeks reddening endearingly under his touch. She bit down on her bottom lip and looked down at her fidgeting hands, away from the intensity present in Klaus' gaze. The way in which he stared at her was in no way helping the already uncontrollable beating of her heart, which she knew that he could hear; the only thing keeping her from being terribly embarrassed was the fact that she could hear his as well, pumping nervously underneath his ribcage.

"You should rest now," he eventually broke the comfortable silence that had fallen between them. "It's late and you have been through a lot."

Caroline nodded, feeling a bit disappointed as he dropped his hand from her face, her cheek still burning where he had touched her.

"Stay with me?" she asked shyly, meeting his dark blue eyes with her own.

"Of course."

Klaus lay on the left side of the bed, keeping his arms open for Caroline to move into them. He cradled her against his chest softly but securely, kissing her forehead and hearing her sigh as she finally closed her eyes and let sleep consume her.

"Sleep, love. You're safe now."