A/N- This was one of my Halloween offerings.
When waking up on a weekday morning; there was a very short list of things Klaus Mikaelson liked to see.
The time of his phone telling him he had at least another hour or two of sleep.
A blue sky that promised, if not a warm day, at least a bright one.
His beautiful girlfriend curled up beside him.
What he didn't like to see was anything unpleasant.
That was a pretty long list already but when he woke up that Thursday morning, the list had to become one item longer.
And the new number one?
A severed head floating an inch above his face.
Admittedly, he might have screamed a filthy curse word as he threw himself backwards, scrambling as far away from the unwelcome intruder on his sleep.
He's half hanging off the bed when the head flickers out of existence and he's left wondering where it went before his brain catches on to the fact that it must have been a hologram.
Which means…
"Sweetheart," he gasped, "Why?"
Caroline came into the room with a wide smile of excitement, practically bouncing on her toes, "Did I scare you?"
She'd probably shaved a good decade or two off his life, certainly she'd bloody woken him up.
He puts a hand to his severely overstrained heart and feels it racing like he'd just run a bloody marathon, which he likely would have done if the disembodied head had decided to give chase.
"Yes, you did," he admits, and she smiles in satisfaction, tapping her finger to her holodeck before padding across the room, kissing him on the lips as she goes past.
"Is there a reason you wanted to scare the living daylights out of me?" he grouches as he follows her downstairs to the kitchen where she already had a pot of tea sitting on the counter,
"I am preparing for Halloween," she answers, pouring him a cup of vervein tea that he would drink only out of love for her.
"It is a tradition to dedicate this day to terrifying people, is it not?"
Ah.
He checks the time on the oven and tries to figure out how to accurately explain Halloween in five minutes or less to his girlfriend.
"Some people like to be absolutely terrified," he begins, "Some just like to eat lots of candy, put on stupid costumes and get drunk."
Caroline sips on her tea and frowns, "I thought only children wore the costumes? And four months ago, you said children aren't allowed alcohol."
Right.
He sucks on his lips and tries again, "Some adults wear costumes as well, they're the ones that get drunk, the kids go from door to door and we give them candy."
She opens her mouth- probably to remind him about the time he told her not to give candy to children on the street and he can feel his brain already beginning to throb in protest.
"I'll explain it all when I get home from work," he promises, "In the meantime…don't actively try to terrify people alright?"
She frowns and huffs, her shoulders dropping but wraps an arm about his shoulders anyway, bringing him forward so she can press his cheek to hers, rubbing them together and he feels the tiny papillae on her skin tickling his own.
"May you come home safely." She chirps as she picks up her tea and heads to her home office, probably to send a message back home.
Klaus waited until he was stuck in traffic and bored out of his brain before making the call.
Sheriff Forbes knew his number so when she actually answered instead of sending him to voicemail, he found himself suspicious.
His suspicions were confirmed when he could hear the amusement in her voice,
"Morning Mikaelson," she chuckled, "How's your day going so far?"
He glowered at the car in front of him, "You were bloody in on it, weren't you?"
She laughs and he hears the creak as she leans back in her chair,
"Who do you think gave her the idea of the severed head? She wanted it to be a ghost but I managed to convince her otherwise."
"Right," he grumbles, "No point in asking why you're getting such pleasure out of this…"
"Consider this a small part of the payback for almost your every waking moment from the time you hit thirteen until you realized you would be tried as an adult." She warns and he has a brief flashback to the time he'd found the location to old police department septic tank, dug down to the hatch and thrown cherry bombs in.
To this day he's still surprised that she let him live.
"I do need your help, however," he continues, "Caroline's holodeck gave her a version of Halloween that we're going to need to flesh out a little bit."
The Sheriff hums and he can practically see her shrug, "Nah, I like the thought of her dedicating the weekend to scaring you senseless."
"Oh yes, what a brilliant idea," he deadpans, "Let's have the alien running around terrifying folk, that won't harm Earth-Martian relations at all."
He sees the light turn green up ahead and presses the pedal gently,
"Mystic Falls nearly rioted when her hatch-brother started working in the hospital and he spends his days literally curing cancer patients and rebuilding spinal cords, what d'you think they'll do if Caroline mistakes the spirit of the holiday?"
He knows he's point when she grunts, "Okay, I'll try and talk to her, maybe get her to spread the word through the alien grapevine."
It had been two years prior when the question, 'Is humankind alone in the universe?' had been rather rudely answered by spaceships landing in Iceland.
Martian spaceships.
As it turned out, Mars could sustain life, only the life wasn't on the surface, hadn't been for centuries but had rather gone underground, building entire cities with technology that ensured that they wouldn't need to venture to the dusty surface.
The Martians had been somewhat aware of Earth for a while but had waited until they were ready to make contact and doing so in the manner they thought best suited to preventing widespread panic.
They had bioengineered humanoid creatures to resemble homo sapiens and- mining information from the International Space Station- had sent them to Earth to make contact.
It had been a shock for humanity, but many countries had allowed the aliens to stay, which was in no small part to the fact that they were amazingly attractive and had first mistaken diamonds for the main form of currency and used handfuls of the gem to buy anything from packs of gum to houses.
They had also brought technology that had changed the world for the better, advancing medicine by decades, reducing carbon footprints to nearly zero and methods of food production that drastically reduced waste and ensured that every country was able to feed every single citizen if they wished.
Many still didn't but that was a work in progress.
Which most of the Martians were taking part in.
A year after contact, another spaceship had appeared in the sky and sent down hundreds of egg shaped pods, to every country in the world where a Martian would represent the intergalactic partnership, except there had been a lightning storm over America that day, so the pod that was supposed to have landed in Washington D.C had crashed down in Mystic Falls, Virginia.
Klaus had been at work in Richmond that day but had received updates every five minutes from his brother Kol, who had skipped school and signed Henrik out of hospital to see the pod.
That was when they'd seen Caroline, who had been pulled from the wreckage by the Sheriff.
Of course, her name hadn't been Caroline then, but it was the closest humans could get to pronouncing her name so she'd chosen it and rather than get the hell out of Mystic Falls and gun it straight to D.C- like any politician would have done- she'd declared that it must have been fate that had landed her there and stuck around.
She had moved in with Sheriff Forbes and taken her last name, trying to pay rent in diamonds before the woman had insisted on greenbacks.
The Mikaelson family home was next door to the Sheriff and it had only been a matter of time before Klaus had met Caroline.
Unfortunately, he'd first met her when she had been fixing Henrik's broken spine- on the front lawn because on Mars it was apparently a procedure so easy it could be done anywhere in under an hour and with little more than a few scary looking instruments that had made Klaus think that she was cutting her brother open to eat him.
Even more unfortunately, Caroline's grasp of the American and British vernacular had been advanced enough at this point that she'd understood exactly the words he had used and some of the less flattering things he'd called her.
But when Henrik had walked for the first time in three years, when he had run and kicked a ball and climbed a tree, Klaus had dedicated all his spare time to moving them past that first encounter.
He hadn't meant to fall for her, but she had such a light, such a strength and kindness to her that he couldn't resist.
It hadn't been easy, for one thing, kissing wasn't something Martians did, preferring to rub cheeks as a form of endearment but that was an easy barrier to overcome, especially because Caroline had a rough tongue that made kissing and other mouth related activities amazing. But human-alien relations weren't something many people were willing to accept.
His brother Finn declared him as good as dead to him.
His siblings congratulated him on having achieved such a feat.
He and Caroline had moved in together around the six-month mark.
Marcel was one of the friends that Klaus had managed to keep after word had got around that he was dating Caroline, but because the bastard had laughed so loudly when he'd found out about Klaus' morning, he had forcibly invited him home for dinner, deciding that he personally would cook.
Except when he pulls up to his house in Mystic Falls, it was to find it almost unrecognizable.
The front lawn had been transformed into a haunted graveyard, fake tombs dotted across the grass with arms and legs protruding from the dirt, cobwebs floating in the breeze and at least two zombies climbing up towards the chimney.
"Wow!" Marcel murmured from the passenger seat, "She did all this in one day?"
Klaus climbs out of the car just as a costumed Henrik comes bounding out the front door towards him, "Hey Nik!" he shouts, "Look!"
He turns in a circle, "Caroline dressed me up as an alien for Halloween! She said that I can't look like a real Martian and she and her hatch-mates weren't ever kids but she and I made the fake tentacle things for my face and she said she might even let me borrow her holodeck for the night!"
Klaus wraps an arm around Henrik's shoulders, "You look great mate," he tells him, "Go show Finn, would you?"
See if his brother's head exploded.
He leads Marcel inside to the kitchen where he can smell fresh baked cookies and sees a chocolate cake cooling on the counter decorated with marzipan bats and Caroline is running her finger in the air, scrolling through her holodeck to study a recipe for pumpkin pie.
She's wearing a witch's hat and little black dress that exposes miles of long leg and Klaus can't resist wrapping his arms around her and drawing her in for a kiss.
"Hi," she giggles, "So, Liz called me and told me how much fun Halloween was supposed to be, so I planned everything accordingly, what do you think?"
He thinks that he's never really cared about Halloween.
He went trick or treating when he was younger and then babysat Kol and Rebekah until they were old enough to go on their own but after that, he'd maybe watch a scary movie if it was the weekend or otherwise go out drinking with his friends.
But this year? For Caroline?
He wonders if it's too late to by a costume, hell, he can probably find some fake blood and go as a vampire, that's easy. They can watch scary movies and eat enough candy to make them crave vegetables and swear off sugar for life.
For her, he'd celebrate this holiday as if it were Christmas.
He grins, "I think this'll be the best Halloween ever!"