Full of Light, Full of Love

by thatsanotherlovestory

A home for the gifts I've written for Klaroline Gift Exchanges hosted on Archive of Our Own.

2. your skin makes me cry

Hello lovely readers!

For this year's Klaroline Vacation Gift Exchange, I wrote a Klaroline Sense 8 AU. It was quite a daunting challenge, since I'd never written an AU before, or watched Sense 8, but I ended up being happy with how it turned out!

A few things I think you should know before you read:
-I've never actually seen Sense 8, so I sincerely apologize for any mistakes and inaccuracies. I did a lot of research, and I really tried to respectfully adapt the show to this format, but of course, due to time and length constraints, I had to reorder, condense, adapt, and omit some things.
-For the purposes of this story, all of the characters are human (well, that is to say, they aren't vampires, witches, etc.), and the Mikaelsons are not related.
-Some characters are closer than others, but the TVD/TO characters don't precisely match up with the Sense 8 characters, especially since Sense 8 has been praised for the diversity of its cast of characters, while the other shows-not so much. I decided to err on the side of keeping the TVD and TO characters in character rather than changing them dramatically to make them exactly like the Sense 8 characters. I hope that's okay!

The title of this story comes from Radiohead's "Creep," which I thought was fitting with the content of the story and as a reference to recent Klaroline scenes.

Happy reading!

---

The first time it happened to Caroline, she was talking and giggling with her best friend Elena while they watched one of their favorite movies and painted their nails, when all of a sudden, she was almost deafened by the sound of rapid gunfire that was completely out of place in the scene of the Prime Minister dancing.

"Did you hear that?" Caroline asked Elena.

"Hear what?" Elena asked innocently.

Caroline shook her head, trying to clear her head of her confused thoughts like she had erased her Etch-a-Sketch as a child.

"Nothing, I just thought I heard a car alarm outside," Caroline lied, forcing a smile in the hopes that it would keep Elena from getting suspicious.

Elena smiled back.

"No, I didn't hear it," she repeated, then turned her attention back to the movie.

Caroline mentally berated herself. Of course she hadn't really heard gunshots. This was Mystic Falls! There was no crime in this sleepy little town! The only person who might possibly have any reason to fire a gun was Caroline's mother, and even then, it was at the shooting range to keep her shooting skills sharp, just in case Liz ever actually needed to use her weapon on the job.

Caroline looked down at her hands, first at the bubblegum pink nail polish she was painting on her nails, then at her engagement ring, a simple heart-shaped solitaire on a white gold band. When her fiancé had given it to her, he'd praised himself repeatedly for finding a ring that so perfectly matched her sweet, girly personality.

If anyone knew the ins and outs of Mystic Falls, it would be Caroline: the daughter of the sheriff and the future wife of the mayor's son.

She didn't know why she had, but she knew that she must have imagined the sound of gunshots. It must have been the stress of the upcoming wedding, or too much sugar, or perhaps she was coming down with a migraine.

But even as she told herself that, she couldn't shake the feeling that something very unusual was happening to her.

{ }

The first time it happened to Klaus, he was in the middle of a job that was all going according to plan until he was suddenly inundated by a strange chemical smell that he couldn't identify.

And in his line of work, strange chemical smells were very bad news.

"Do you smell that?" Klaus asked his associate Marcel.

"What?" Marcel yelled over the gunfire surrounding them.

"There's this sort of chemical smell; do you smell that?" Klaus repeated.

"I don't smell anything, sorry, man," Marcel answered.

Klaus shrugged, and decided to deal with this the same way he dealt with all of his problems: ignore it and hope that it went away on its own.

Besides, if he got worked up over every weird thing that he saw, or heard, or smelled on the job, he would never know a moment's peace.

Klaus didn't work a cushy nine-to-five job, and he didn't even have an official job description. He had never sat for an interview or sent out a resume, yet the people who wanted to hire someone to do their dirty work, especially when it wasn't quite legal, always managed to find him.

This particular job had involved stealing a flash drive from a safe. He didn't know what was on the flash drive, or even who owned the safe, but he didn't ask questions.

Except now he was being shot at by the owner's security guard, and he could smell a chemical in the air that could be some sort of airborne poison for all he knew, so he was starting to reconsider his 'ask no questions' policy.

He and Marcel, the closest thing Klaus had to a friend—mostly due to their continued proximity, since Klaus wasn't exactly the friendly type—made it back to their car unscathed, but the smell persisted.

"You really don't smell that?" Klaus asked again.

"I don't smell anything," Marcel repeated.

"I'm sure it's nothing," Klaus shrugged, trying to convince himself more than Marcel.

Sure enough, the smell inexplicably disappeared a few minutes later.

It wasn't until the next day, on his way back home from delivering the flash drive to the client, that he identified the smell as the same one wafting out of the nail salon he was walking past.

{ }

The first time it happened to Elijah, he was at home, cooking dinner alone.

Elijah was resigned to his bachelor lifestyle after years of being married to his job. He was used to being alone whenever he wasn't at work, and it had even stopped bothering him. He was happier being alone than he would be if he tried to force himself to be social.

He dumped some pasta into a pot of boiling water and set the timer, then wandered over to the refrigerator to take out a head of broccoli.

He walked over to the stove to turn on another burner, before moving to the sink and mindlessly rinsing and chopping and filling a pot, but when he turned back to the stove, he was distracted by the sudden flashes of strobe lights.

Elijah blinked furiously, certain his eyes were playing tricks on him after a long, exhausting day at work. The lights made him feel dizzy and disoriented, and he tried to ground himself by putting his hand down.

But since he accidentally put his hand down on the stove, he ended up burning his hand in the process.

He swore loudly, immediately running his hand under cold water.

The lights were still reflected in the window above the sink, which didn't make any sense to Elijah.

He was a man of facts, and logic, and reason. He worked in law enforcement; he believed in following the rules, and bold lines between right and wrong that could never be crossed.

His world was black and white, with no room for mysterious flashing lights that appeared out of nowhere.

In the darkness, he couldn't see outside, but one of the neighbors must be throwing a party, though why they were throwing a party on a Tuesday night, he wasn't sure. Perhaps that was the latest trend in parties, not that he would know.

There was a logical explanation for what had happened.

There had to be.

And Elijah was going to find it.

{ }

The first time it happened to Katherine, she was in the club, letting the loud music drown out her thoughts, so that nothing existed but the thumping bass that synced up with her heartbeat.

Then she felt acute pain in her left hand, as if it has been burned.

At first, she ignored it, writing it off as a drunken illusion, but when the pain didn't fade, she was forced to admit that it was real.

So she ordered another drink, hoping that the more alcohol was in her system, the less pain she would feel.

It hadn't yet worked to numb her emotional pain, but she still thought she'd give it a try to numb the physical pain.

She looked down at her hand. It didn't look burned. So she couldn't figure out why it hurt, when there was no evidence of an injury.

"What's wrong with you, you look like someone died?" a loud, boisterous voice asked.

Hayley was an acquaintance, Katherine supposed. They weren't really friends because neither of them wanted to be friends, but they hung out at the same clubs and ran with the same crowd, so they saw each other more than either of them would probably choose to of their own volition.

"I'm fine," Katherine answered, knowing that Hayley wouldn't press any further. She wasn't exactly the caring, concerned friend type.

From what Katherine knew of the other girl's history, it wasn't much better than hers. Both of them had been kicked out by their parents, both because of poor decisions they'd made regarding the men in their lives during their teenage years. She'd had a tough life, and she covered up her pain and loneliness underneath a thick veneer of aggression and belligerence. She acted tough, but like Katherine, she was just hiding her demons and hoping that no one got close enough to see them.

"Okay," Hayley shrugged, tugging uncomfortably at the hem of her olive green crop top.

"I'm fine," Katherine repeated to herself after Hayley walked away. "I'm fine."

{ }

The first time it happened to Rebekah, she almost humiliated herself in front of the CEO of the company. She was the youngest chief marketing officer in the company's history, and she was at risk of losing that position after making a fool of herself at the monthly board meeting. One moment, Rebekah was casually taking a sip of her coffee while listening to the chief financial officer's presentation on revenue for the quarter, and the next moment, she was sputtering on what inexplicably tasted like a strawberry milkshake.

Everyone sitting around the table stopped to stare at her.

"I am so sorry, it just went down the wrong pipe; I'm sorry," Rebekah apologized through the fake smile she plastered on her face.

The other board members, primarily white men at least fifty years old, looked dismissively accepting of her excuse, and continued the meeting without giving her another thought.

Rebekah took another tentative sip of her coffee, finding to her dismay that it still did not taste like the coffee she was expecting.

Looking into her coffee mug, Rebekah saw that the liquid it contained still looked like coffee, and still smelled like coffee, and through the mug, she could even still feel the warmth of what must be coffee.

But when she took a sip, the coffee mysteriously, inexplicably, became a strawberry milkshake in the process.

It wasn't that Rebekah didn't like strawberry milkshakes—because she did, actually—it was that they were a completely different consistency and temperature than the coffee she wanted to be drinking during a board meeting taking place at nine in the morning on a Monday.

Rebekah had a demanding job that required her to be at the top of her game. She could not afford to waste valuable time and energy trying to figure out why her coffee did not taste like coffee.

She would give up coffee if she had to before she allowed this conundrum to distract her from her work.

But she would really rather not.

{ }

The first time it happened to Stefan, he nearly died. He was driving downtown, hoping that someone would signal for a ride, when he saw a man appear out of nowhere in front of his cab.

Stefan immediately slammed on his brakes, not that anyone would notice in the rush hour traffic that he had completely stopped moving. Still, the sudden movement sent him falling forward against his seatbelt as he breathed heavily, relieved at having narrowly avoided a head-on collision with a man that he could have sworn wasn't there a moment ago.

The man appeared to be about fifty years old, not old enough that Stefan would assume he had dementia, or any other problems related to memory loss. In fact, he seemed to be quite attentive to something, just not the busy street he had walked into.

All around him, horns were honking and people were yelling, but as Stefan continued to look at him, the man gave no reaction that showed that he heard any of it.

Stefan looked around at the traffic, quickly coming to the conclusion that no one would be moving for a while, so he decided to get out of the car and check on the man who was standing in the street.

But by the time Stefan walked around to the front of the cab, the man had disappeared.

Stefan turned around in a circle, but the man was nowhere to be found, even though he couldn't have possibly gotten far enough away that he couldn't be seen in the few seconds it had taken Stefan to get out of the car.

Another cab driver yelled at him for standing in the middle of the street. Stefan waved apologetically and got back into his car, still very curious and concerned over the mystery man.

As he was contemplating what might have happened, Stefan's brother Damon called him, asking where he was. Stefan quickly answered that he was working and ended the call as soon as he could, wanting to get back to his speculations.

Either he was seeing people who didn't really exist, or a person who was potentially a danger to himself and others was wandering around one of the largest cities in the world unattended.

Either way, Stefan was worried.

{ }

The first time it happened to Kol, he was home early from work and was just getting ready to take a shower when the sounds of car horns and sirens close by made him worried that there was an emergency in the vicinity.

He quickly redressed and ran outside to see what was happening.

But after several minutes exploring the parking lot of the apartment complex he lived in, he couldn't see any sort of commotion that would create the noise that he was hearing. There were only a few cars that were actually moving, and none were going fast enough to warrant honking at each other. There wasn't any sort of accident that would require emergency services.

Deciding that whatever he heard must be far enough away that he couldn't see anything, Kol decided to return home and just try to tune out the noise, since he could see that he wasn't in any danger.

As he walked back towards his apartment, Kol wondered what had caused so much noise, even though the parking lot was nearly empty and the street was calm.

He was so distracted by his own thoughts that he tripped over the curb. He landed on his hands when he fell, though fortunately, his hands didn't appear bloody, just dirty from landing on the pavement.

Kol looked around to make sure that no one saw his embarrassing lack of coordination, but he didn't see anyone, much to his relief.

He washed his hands once he returned to his apartment, looked at his own confused face in the mirror, and decided the sounds of heavy traffic that were out of place with his surroundings were simply not his concern.

He was going to continue with his plans for the evening, which had already been postponed thanks to his random impulse to play Sherlock Holmes.

It was as if deciding to leave well enough alone was the solution to his problem, because as soon as Kol started to ignore the noise, it stopped.

{ }

The first time it happened to Bonnie, she was almost too tired to even notice.

Wanting to unwind after a busy week with the help of comfort food, Bonnie walked to the diner that she'd found by chance on the day that she'd moved to the city, sitting at the counter and ordering a strawberry milkshake and French fries.

She took a long sip of her milkshake as soon as the waitress set it down in front of her, hoping that the cold rush of sugar would make her feel a little more alert.

Then once they arrived, she slowly ate her fries one by one, not in any hurry to go back home.

Bonnie loved her job, and she loved going to work every day. After studying computer science and sociology in college, developing language-learning software for children was a perfect fit for her, and she found the job rewarding and stimulating.

But it was also a lot of work and a lot of pressure.

The idea of knowing that thousands of children would use the program that she helped create to learn a new language and learn about the culture of another country was gratifying, but it was also a tremendous responsibility.

Just that week, she'd had to deal with a crisis involving a coworker accidentally using the wrong flag, meaning that she'd had to replace the image with the correct one on every page, which had taken her the better part of three days. The coworker in question had been taken off the project as a consequence for his mistake, which meant that Bonnie had had to fix it all by herself. She was fairly certain that after the many stressful hours she'd spent staring at her computer screen, her vision would never fully recuperate.

So when she experienced the peculiar sensation of falling forward onto the counter, she simply reasoned that she must have been more tired than she thought.

Her only response was to finish her fries and her shake, pay for her food, and walk home.

{ }

For the next month, they all pretended that everything was normal, and that nothing had changed.

When the wedding cake sample that Caroline was testing suddenly tasted like day-old Chinese food, she chalked it up to pre-wedding stress. When Klaus was caught off guard by the feeling of someone tightly fastening what felt like an extraordinarily heavy piece of clothing around his waist, he ignored it. When Elijah repeatedly heard the heavy bass beat of an unfamiliar techno song in the middle of the night, he wrote it off as exhaustion. When the strong smell of coffee appeared under Katherine's nose, she blamed her next door neighbors and the thin walls of her cheap apartment. When Rebekah smelled car exhaust while she was working, her only response was to ask her assistant if she smelled it too. When Stefan heard the tapping sound of typing on a computer keyboard, he convinced himself it was actually his passenger's cell phone. When Kol heard the irritating click of high heels striking a hard floor when he was alone in his carpeted apartment, he tuned it out. When Bonnie saw a warped reflection of a dark-haired man in her computer screen, she blinked rapidly and resolved to go to sleep early that night.

But pretending nothing out of the ordinary was happening, didn't change the fact that these eight people were suddenly sensing things that they hadn't before.

{ }

Then came the dream.

She was one of eight people in what looked like an ordinary apartment. They were looking for something, but she wasn't sure what it was.

She was rifling through a set drawers, while a gorgeous blonde woman about her age looked through a closet, and a handsome man a few years older searched under the bed. She could hear other people investigating kitchen cabinets, the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, the bookshelf in the living room.

She could feel eyes watching her, searching, though what they were hoping to see, she didn't know. She wasn't the one hiding whatever it was they were looking for, and surely she wasn't compelling enough to serve as a distraction from their mission.

"There has to be something here!" a voice she didn't recognize insisted.

It was urgent, whatever they were doing, whatever they were looking for. It was important that they find it quickly, perhaps even a matter of life and death…

Caroline woke up, gasping for breath.

Her dream had felt so real that she was almost surprised to find herself in her own bed at home alone instead of in the mysterious apartment she'd been imagining with the strangers that had seemed so familiar inside her own mind.

Unlike most of her dreams, the one she'd just had didn't fade away as soon as she was fully awake. The image of the apartment lingered, only serving to make Caroline more sure that whatever her dream self had been doing there, it was important. She just still wasn't sure what it was.

And she wasn't sure where the apartment was, or who the people in it were, but something, some voice inside her head, some instinct, told her that it was imperative that she find them, that she make the scene in her dream a reality.

{ }

Elijah was the first one to find the apartment.

He had responded to a noise complaint and was on his way back to the police station when he felt pulled in another direction. Almost subconsciously, he turned right instead of continuing towards his original destination.

He pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex he'd never been to before, parked his car, and allowed the strange sense that had led him there guide him. He didn't typically believe in things like that: destiny, fate, kismet. They were different words that all meant the same thing: that people were somehow not responsible for their own actions, that some external force was pulling the strings behind the scenes. Believing in that idea seemed very passive to Elijah, like they were just allowing things to happen to them instead of taking the initiative to make their own decisions and control their own lives.

Nevertheless, as much as he disliked the situation he had now found himself in, Elijah traipsed across the apartment complex to a second-story unit in the back, away from the street, facing a walking path that bordered a creek that was all but dried up.

He held his badge in one hand and drew his gun from its holster on his hip with the other, preparing to kick open the door if necessary.

"Hello? Is anyone home?" Elijah called out.

There was no response.

"This is the police, open the door!" Elijah ordered.

Still, there was no response.

On an impulse, (and gut instinct was completely different than fate or serendipity in Elijah's book) Elijah tried the door, finding it unlocked.

Gun still raised, Elijah opened the door and stepped inside.

A quick scan of the apartment's few rooms showed that no one was home, and no one had been for quite a while. The apartment seemed to have been abandoned in a rush, if the amount of belongings left behind was any indication. There was a television and a bookshelf crammed with books in the living room, a closet full of clothes in the bedroom, and a medicine cabinet fully stocked with toiletries in the bathroom.

Elijah checked the refrigerator, hoping to gauge when the apartment was last occupied by the expiration dates on whatever food might remain there. All he found was an almost empty carton of milk that had expired three weeks earlier and half of a loaf of bread whose best sell by date was almost a month ago.

Naturally, Elijah was suspicious. Whoever had been living in this apartment had vacated it about a month ago—around the same time that strange things had started happening to him. It was too much of a coincidence for them to not be related somehow.

He had just started to look around the apartment again when his radio summoned him to another call, forcing him to postpone his mission, but he resolved to return when the next time he had free time.

Less than forty-eight hours later, Elijah was back in the apartment, searching through file cabinet, when the front door opened.

Elijah stood, drawing his gun as he moved closer to the door.

Standing in the doorway was a beautiful brunette, tall and thin, wearing tight black pants, tall black boots, and a black leather jacket. She was carrying an overstuffed duffel bag that looked like it had seen better days, her long curly hair was mussed, and her eyeliner was smudged, all things that suggested that she'd had a long day of travel prior to arriving there.

The young woman (Elijah estimated that she was in her early twenties) slowly raised her hands, dropping her bag to the floor in the process.

"Who are you, and what are you doing here?" Elijah asked.

"Well, my name's Katherine," she answered. "And I don't really know what I'm doing here? I saw this place in a dream, as weird as that sounds, and the next thing I knew, I was on a plane. I don't even really know how I ended up here, because I didn't have the address, but it was like something pulled me here."

"That's what happened to me, too," Elijah offered, lowering his gun. "I had the same dream, and I was pulled here to this apartment."

"That's not even the only weird thing that's happened to me lately," Katherine continued. "About a month ago, I was out, and all of a sudden, my hand felt like it had been burned, but it hadn't. I wasn't standing anywhere near a stove or anything, so I couldn't have actually burned myself, it just felt like I did."

Elijah was stunned. This was impossible, fantastical, far outside the realm of logical thought…

"You're the girl who throws the parties," he stated. "I've been seeing your lights and hearing your music for weeks. The first time it happened, it startled me so much that I accidentally put my hand down on the stove to steady myself, burning my hand in the process. You've been inside my head, and it seems that you've been in mine."

"Well, if we've already gotten that up close and personal, then you should at least tell me your name," Katherine smirked.

"I'm Elijah."

"Elijah," Katherine started tentatively. "What if there are more of us? What if there are more people who have been inside our heads?"

"I honestly don't know," Elijah confessed. "Yesterday I would have said the entire concept was impossible, but our experiences are evidence that it isn't."

"Well, then," Katherine said. "We should make it as easy for them to find us as we can."

And she grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and wrote the address of the apartment in large, clear handwriting, then taped the paper to the living room wall.

{ }

Within the next week, they all appeared, one by one.

They came from a small town in Virginia, New York City, New Orleans. Los Angeles, London, Sydney.

Upon arrival, as soon as they put their luggage down, they were all quizzed on the odd things that had happened to them over the past month. Once they'd regaled Elijah and Katherine with the strange sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and feelings they'd experienced, they were allowed in and accepted into the fold.

There was a lot that they still didn't know. But at least they knew that they weren't alone.

{ }

Caroline was the first to arrive.

She'd had another dream of the mysterious apartment, except this time, there were only two people in it: a girl about her age, and a man who looked like he was at least five years older. They were sitting on a couch, and on the wall above them was an address, handwritten on a piece of paper.

The address was in Chicago.

A quick internet search when Caroline woke up told her that Chicago was only an approximately two-hour flight away.

Since curiosity would kill Caroline just as surely as it killed the cat, she made up a story for her mother and Tyler, both of whose eyes glazed over when she started discussing wedding planning, which made convincing them of her lie much easier, and boarded a flight bound for Chicago that same day.

Once she landed at the airport, she took a taxi to the address she'd copied down from memory after seeing it in her dream.

The apartment complex the cab driver took her to was old and run-down, with peeling layers of beige paint and ill-maintained shrubs planted in a half-hearted attempt to give residents of the ground level some privacy from the street.

Caroline paid and thanked the driver, then trudged upstairs with her luggage to the apartment number she was looking for.

When she knocked on the door, the brunette from her dream opened it and led Caroline into the living room.

"So," the girl asked. "How did you end up here?"

Caroline was surprised by her forwardness, but decided to answer her question honestly. It wasn't like she had anything to lose. She had flown to a city she'd never been to before, because she'd seen the apartment she was now standing in in a dream. She doubted her story could get any stranger.

"I saw this apartment in a dream," Caroline replied. "The first time, there were eight people here, looking for something. The second time, it was just the two of you, sitting in this room. My curiosity got the better of me and I decided I had to come find out for myself why I was seeing this place in my dreams."

"And has anything else inexplicably strange happened to you, say, in the last month or so?" the girl asked.

"Yes, actually," Caroline answered, describing the time she'd heard gunshots when there weren't any, and when her wedding cake had tasted like Chinese food, and all of the other random occasions when her senses seemed to have gone haywire.

"Yay, you passed the test," the girl cheered with sarcastic enthusiasm. "I'm Katherine, and that's Elijah," she pointed to the man who had watching her suspiciously, silent and stony-faced, the entire time she'd been in the apartment.

"I'm Caroline," Caroline introduced herself.

"Welcome to the home of the crazies, Caroline," Katherine replied. "We're still trying to figure out how and why we end up in each other's heads. Any thoughts? Also, how old are you, and where are you from, and what sort of job do you have that allows you to fly to Chicago on a whim, on a Thursday?"

"I'm twenty-two, I'm from a very small town in Virginia called Mystic Falls, and I don't have a job at the moment," Caroline answered. "I'm planning my wedding, and my fiancé and I want to start a family soon after we get married, so our plan is for me to be a housewife and a mother, and since he proposed right after I graduated from college, there was really no point in getting a job just to quit it a few months later."

Katherine pressed her lips together in a thin line.

"And is he going to make you wear pearls while you vacuum, Donna Reed?" she asked sarcastically.

"It isn't like that," Caroline insisted. When Katherine raised her eyebrows skeptically, she elaborated. "He didn't manipulate me into anything; I knew what I was getting myself into. He's the son of the mayor, and he has political aspirations of his own, so he needs a supportive wife who will take care of the household and the children for him. We've been dating since high school, and our parents are close friends, so we've known each other our entire lives. I've always known what to expect, and I agreed to it. This is good for me. It's safe, and comfortable, and best of all, it's with someone who really cares about me. Small town life may not be enough for you, but it's enough for me."

Katherine's jaw fell open with surprise or excitement, Caroline couldn't really tell.

"You don't love him."

"What? Of course I love Tyler; I wouldn't have agreed to marry him if I didn't," Caroline retorted. "And, no offense, but you're kind of a complete stranger, so I'm not exactly comfortable defending my relationship to you."

"Come on," Katherine whined. "Mr. Grumpy Face over there isn't exactly one for girl talk. Please have pity on me."

Caroline chuckled.

"I love my fiancé, Katherine," Caroline repeated.

"That actually brings up a good point that we should ask everyone else when they arrive," Elijah spoke up.

"Whether or not they love their fiancés?" Katherine questioned. "I maintain that she doesn't, for the record. No one refers to the love of their live as someone 'safe, and comfortable,' who 'really cares about them.'"

"No, whether or not they've told anyone—a significant other, parents, siblings, friends, coworkers—about our new… abilities," Elijah explained.

"I haven't," Caroline was quick to chime in. "My mother and Tyler know that I'm in Chicago, but I told them it was because I found a dress online that's only sold in a boutique in the city."

Katherine and Elijah immediately confirmed that they hadn't told anyone either.

"And now we just wait for someone else to show up," Katherine announced. "So tell me all about your wedding."

{ }

Caroline was the only one awake when he arrived.

On Friday night, they'd welcomed two new arrivals: Stefan and Bonnie, who had caught red-eyes from New York City and New Orleans, respectively, after work that evening.

They'd shown up within an hour of each other, each of them waking Caroline from her sleep. Since none of them wanted to miss anything, they'd all refused to waste money on a hotel room they wouldn't use, so they'd taken to sleeping in the living room. Caroline made herself comfortable curled up in the armchair, Katherine had claimed the couch, and Elijah had acquired sleeping bags and air mattresses for himself and everyone else who would come.

After Bonnie and then Stefan had successfully completed Katherine's interrogation, they'd gone to sleep, apologizing but explaining that they'd had stressful weeks at work and tiring journeys that evening.

So when there was a knock at the door a little after 6:00 the next morning, they both slept through it, as did Katherine and Elijah, who Caroline had learned were the furthest thing from morning people she'd ever known.

Naturally an early riser, Caroline was awake already, and nervously approached the door to see who had arrived.

"Hello, love," a handsome man greeted her with a sly grin as she opened the door, his eyes rather obviously scanning the length of her body before returning to her face.

"Um, hi," Caroline replied. She wasn't sure why, but she'd been expecting a woman. A woman would have been far easier for her to question than this man, who was attractive and had so blatantly checked her out and seemed so dangerous, not just because there was something about him that seemed so compelling to her, but because his posture, the calluses on his hands, his leather jacket and beat-up duffle bag, all told Caroline that he was someone who could do some serious damage if he was provoked.

"I have to ask you a couple of questions," Caroline told him.

"Neither, actually, at the moment," he smirked.

Caroline couldn't help herself—she felt her eyes lower.

When she forced herself to look back up, his grin had widened.

"Those questions did not include anything about your underwear preferences, or why you would confess that you weren't wearing any underwear to a complete stranger, or what would possess a person to go through airport security while not wearing underwear!" Caroline exclaimed shrilly.

"Fine. What do you want to ask me?"

"How did you find this place?" Caroline asked.

"I saw it," he answered. "Inside my head. The night before last, I saw it and I decided that I needed to see it in person, so I got on a plane yesterday, and now here I am."

"And have you seen anything else strange in the past month? Anything that seemed odd to you, that you couldn't explain?" Caroline asked.

"A few times," he nodded. "Once, I was at work, and I smell this weird chemical sort of smell, but my partner couldn't smell it. I thought it might be dangerous at first, but it went away on its own, and I figured out the next day that it was nail polish that I'd smelled. Another time, I was at home, eating dinner, minding my own business, when all of a sudden I feel like I'm being squeezed into one of those things that rich ladies had on their dresses during the Middle Ages."

"A corset?" Caroline supplied.

"Sure," he agreed.

"Have you told anyone about these instances?" Caroline asked.

"No, of course not. No one would believe me, and anyone who did would think I was crazy."

"Then what is your name, where are you from, and were you being shot at, or were you the one doing the shooting?"

"You've got fire in you, I like it." He grinned. "You can call me Klaus, I live in London, and the shots you heard were coming at me, not from me."

Klaus. It was a rather uncommon name, but somehow it suited him. There was something unique about him that Caroline couldn't put her finger on, something sharper and more intense than anyone else she knew.

"Why were you being shot at?" Caroline asked.

"I was just doing my job, and they didn't really like that," Klaus said.

"What kind of job do you have where people shoot at you for doing it?" Caroline questioned.

"Oh, princess, you don't want to know," Klaus smirked.

"Don't call me princess," Caroline snapped.

"Okay, sweetheart."

"Don't call me that either."

"Then what should I call you? I don't know your name," Klaus pointed out.

Caroline flushed. She didn't like being outsmarted, especially not by people who didn't know her and didn't know that she wasn't just a pretty blonde airhead.

"I'm Caroline."

"Well, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, sweet Caroline," Klaus replied.

"Wow, so original!" Caroline mocked. "No one's ever called me that before!"

Klaus laughed, a short, self-conscious sound, as if Klaus himself wasn't used to hearing it.

"So who are the rest of our roommates?" Klaus asked.

"That's Katherine, Elijah, Stefan, and Bonnie," Caroline pointed to each person as she said their name.

Klaus's eyes followed Caroline's hand as she pointed.

"It seems 'princess' might be accurate for you, doesn't it?" Klaus nodded towards Caroline's ring. "Since you're clearly the hopeless romantic, always-dreamed-of-being-Cinderella-or-Barbie, happily-ever-after type."

Caroline fixed Klaus with a critical stare.

"You don't know me," she stated.

Klaus didn't look offended or discouraged by Caroline's assessment of their relationship.

If anything, he seemed to take it as a challenge.

{ }

By the time Rebekah arrived, jet-lagged, on Sunday night, everyone who had arrived before her was more than ready to find everything they could about what was happening to them and return to their normal lives.

Stefan worried about the income he was losing by not working overtime despite having the weekend off of work. Katherine and Kol watched the tense interactions between Klaus and Caroline with an almost maniacal interest (which made Caroline think that Katherine had shared her theory about her not loving Tyler), while Elijah and Bonnie stoically ignored them, though they had their moments when they were visibly annoyed with them.

They started their search the next morning. Katherine and Elijah stayed in the living room, Kol and Bonnie went in to the kitchen, Caroline, Klaus, and Rebekah searched the bedroom, and Stefan handled the bathroom on his own.

Caroline searched through the dresser, while Rebekah went through the closet and Klaus looked under the bed.

Looking through the clothes, Caroline didn't find anything she thought would give them any significant information about the person they were looking for.

"There has to be something here!" Katherine exclaimed impatiently from the living room.

Caroline was relieved that someone else was having as much trouble as she was, though that didn't help them find anything out about the apartment's former occupant.

"The contents of this dresser tells me that its owner was a woman who wore a lot of black clothing," Caroline reported, holding up a small sample of the contents to show Klaus and Rebekah.

Rebekah walked over to more carefully inspect the clothes. When she took them from Caroline's hands, she tapped the ring on her finger.

"What a charming little trinket," Rebekah smiled.

"I would say thank you, but I don't think that was a compliment," Caroline replied with a forced smile of her own.

"No, it's sweet," Rebekah said. "Perhaps more appropriate for a little girl who dreams of being a Disney princess than a grown woman, but maybe you're a grown woman who dreams of being a Disney princess, in which case it's perfectly suitable."

"I think it's romantic," Caroline insisted, looking down at the heart-shaped diamond on her finger. "My fiancé was so pleased with himself for finding this ring. He says that it suits my personality perfectly."

Klaus laughed, reminding Caroline of his presence in the room. She'd almost forgotten that there was someone else listening in on her conversation with Rebekah.

"That explains a lot," Klaus scoffed. "He thinks of you as some kind of 1950s housewife Barbie doll, and you've let him see you that way. You've made yourself look like he wanted you to look, and talk like he wanted you to talk, and act how he wanted you to act. But if that isn't who you really are, you can't keep that a secret anymore, Caroline, because there are seven people who can access your mind at random, and you can't hide from that, even if you've managed to fool everyone else in your life."

"That's a good point," Rebekah interjected. "We need to talk about that."

{ }

Rebekah, with a surprisingly commanding presence for someone of her stature, ordered everyone to take a break from the so far frustratingly futile search and meet in the living room.

"What is this about?" Kol asked.

"Klaus just brought up an interesting point that I think we need to discuss," Rebekah answered. "He was lecturing Caroline about her keeping her actual personality a secret from her fiancé, or something—"

"She doesn't love him, so I wouldn't worry too much about it," Katherine interrupted.

"Will you quit it?" Caroline exclaimed.

"Not until you admit it," Katherine retorted.

"Anyway," Rebekah demanded their attention. "The point is, we can't hide anything from each other when we can just appear in each other's heads with no warning. That means we don't have any privacy from each other."

"Okay?" Stefan said.

"I can only speak for myself, but I personally have not had the misfortune of interrupting something I didn't want to see," Rebekah continued.

"What would you define as something you didn't want to see?" Elijah inquired.

"I mean, I haven't seen anyone in the shower, or in bed," Rebekah answered.

"You aren't very creative when it comes to locations and positions then, are you?" Kol smirked.

Katherine and Klaus laughed.

Rebekah and Caroline rolled their eyes.

Elijah sighed.

"All I'm saying is that we have to learn how to control this," Rebekah said. "If there's a way, we have to find it."

"Well, I don't think we can do that while we're all here," Bonnie chimed in. "I mean, how are we supposed to know if we're seeing what another one of us is seeing, or if we're just seeing it for ourselves?"

"So what should we do?" Caroline asked.

"We finish our search of this place," Elijah decided. "If there's anything here that can help us, we need to find it. When we've finished with that, I suppose we all make our way home, try to continue our lives as normally as possible, and practice controlling these abilities if we can."

"Has anyone found anything? Because we've only found some clothes," Rebekah said.

"Unfortunately, most of the stuff in the living room belongs to one of us," Elijah answered. "The books don't really reveal anything about the person who lived here except they seemed to prefer British authors over Americans."

"So do I," Caroline, Klaus, Rebekah, and Bonnie spoke in unison.

"So that doesn't even really narrow down our search," Rebekah lamented. "Because she still really could be anyone."

"She?" Elijah repeated.

"Yeah, the clothes in the dresser and closet are a woman's," Caroline responded.

"So are the products in the bathroom," Stefan corroborated. "Makeup, hair products, things like that. I tried to look for a prescription so that we would have a name to look for, but there wasn't anything in there."

"All that we found in the kitchen were some pots and pans, some dishes and silverware, a toaster, and a blender," Kol chimed in. "All of the groceries, we bought, so there's nothing there."

"Well, let's keep looking. We can't give up until we've scoured every inch of this place," Elijah declared.

They split up again, and Caroline, Rebekah, and Klaus went back into the bedroom.

Rebekah gathered up all of the clothes hanging in the closet and threw them on the floor.

"What are you doing?" Caroline asked.

"There has to be something in here," Rebekah answered. "Don't people hide things in their closets?"

"There aren't many other hiding places in an apartment this small," Caroline noted.

Deciding that Rebekah's plan might have some merit, she scooped the clothes out of each dresser drawer to look underneath. There was nothing in the first three drawers, but in the bottom drawer, Caroline was shocked by what she found.

Taped to the bottom drawer was a piece of paper. Caroline cut through the tape with her thumb nail and picked up the paper.

Which was blank.

Caroline let out a disgruntled sigh.

"What's the matter, princess?" Klaus asked.

He had barely spoken to her that day, for which Caroline was grateful. She had enough on her mind without this virtual stranger who had been inside her mind, smelling her nail polish and trying on her wedding dress, trying to convince her she wasn't the person she thought she was. She wanted to be stunned and offended by his nerve, to remind him that he didn't know her and that he should stop acting like he knew the first thing about her, but when Klaus's blue eyes were trained on her, she felt like glass: transparent and breakable.

"Don't call me that," Caroline reprimanded. "And I thought I found something, but it turned out to be a dead end. There was a piece of paper taped to the bottom of this drawer, but it's blank."

"Then what is the point of it being there?" Rebekah asked.

"How should I know?" Caroline replied, looking back into the drawer. "Oh, it's because the grain of the wood doesn't match the rest of the drawer."

Caroline dragged her finger along the demarcation where the wood changed. Her eyes widened. What had looked like a line was actually a crack in the wood.

Caroline slid her nail along the gap, trying to lift up the section that had been covered by the piece of paper.

She wasn't sure what she had been expecting to find underneath, but it wasn't the gun she saw hidden in the false bottom of the drawer.

"Hey guys, I found something," Caroline announced.

"What is it?" Rebekah called out, her head still in the closet.

"There was a false bottom in the drawer," Caroline explained. "And this was in it."

Caroline held up the gun.

"How do you suppose she got her hands on that?" Klaus wondered.

"Hopefully, legally," Caroline answered.

"Oh my goodness, put that away!" Rebekah cried.

"Not a fan of guns then, Rebekah?" Klaus chuckled.

"Not at all!" Rebekah insisted, pulling the gun from Caroline's hands, clearly intending to put it back where it came from.

"Be careful with that!" Caroline scolded. "If you don't know what you're doing, you could seriously hurt someone, or yourself."

"The safety's on, don't worry," Rebekah replied calmly, showing Caroline that the safety of the gun was, in fact, on.

Rebekah shook her head.

"How did I know that?" she asked. She looked down at the gun in her hands. "Take this, I don't even want to touch it."

Caroline took the gun from Rebekah.

"Come on, let's go tell everyone what we found."

{ }

"Everyone, we found something," Caroline announced as she walked into the living room, Klaus and Rebekah on her heels.

Everyone came running.

Caroline held up the gun so that they could all see it.

"I found this in a false bottom in a dresser drawer," she told them. "Hopefully whoever owns this bought it legally, which means that it's registered. Would you or someone you trust at the police department be able to check that for us, Elijah?"

"I'll go into work early and look into it first thing tomorrow morning," Elijah agreed, taking the gun from Caroline.

"That's another thing," Caroline started. "Just a few minutes ago, Rebekah took the gun out of my hands, and was able to determine within seconds that the safety was on, even though she hates guns and has never touched one before in her life."

"So?" Kol challenged. "That doesn't mean she's never seen an action movie."

"Maybe," Caroline acknowledged. "But do any of you think it's possible that we're sharing more than just our senses among us? That maybe we can share information among ourselves? Because that would be amazing, if all eight of us had access to all of the information that any of the eight of us know."

Caroline's obvious excitement at the idea made Klaus laugh.

"What?" she asked, innocent blue eyes blinking rapidly as she tried to figure out what she had done to make Klaus laugh at her.

"And nothing is more exciting than knowledge!" Klaus said in a high-pitched, mocking tone. "You're just so wholesome, princess, it's surprisingly cute."

Caroline frowned and drew herself up to her full height.

"I'm not 'cute,'" she insisted. "And don't call me princess."

"Okay," Bonnie interjected, steering the conversation back to Caroline's theory. "We can test this. Show of hands: of the eight of us, how many of us have learned gun safety, or have ever shot a gun?"

Klaus raised his own hand, as did Elijah, which didn't surprise anyone since he was a police officer.

But the last hand that went up stunned him.

And he wasn't the only one who was shocked, since Klaus saw everyone else's eyes widen as they stared at Caroline's raised hand.

Klaus found the idea of Caroline, with her doll-like blue eyes and blonde curls, and the girly little dresses and jackets that she wore, holding a gun, aimed at someone, or even just a target, out of place with everything he knew about her, but also wildly attractive.

"Those two I can believe, but you, Caroline?" Katherine questioned skeptically.

"My mom is the sheriff of my hometown," Caroline explained. "She's carried a gun as part of her job my whole life, and she didn't want me to be scared of it or accidentally hurt myself with it, so she trained me on how to safely use a gun. I don't own one myself, and I only go to the shooting range with my mom once a year to refresh my memory, but yeah, I know what I'm doing."

"Wow," Kol said. "I wouldn't have guessed that about you."

"I think we're all going to get to know each other very well from now on," Caroline replied.

"Well, there's nothing else we can do until I can try to find out who owns that gun," Elijah added. "I suppose we can all stay here until that happens, but we also all have our own lives to get back to."

Stefan and Bonnie both announced that they were only able to stay for the weekend, and had already purchased plane tickets to their respective home cities for that night.

"Should we exchange phone numbers then?" Kol joked. "Maybe try a method of communication a little more normal than appearing in each other's dreams?"

They all exchanged contact information, then everyone except Elijah packed their belongings and got ready to return to their ordinary lives—if they could even call their lives ordinary anymore.

{ }

The next day, Caroline found herself tossing and turning as she tried to fall asleep.

She'd flown back to Virginia that morning, and had spent the day avoiding both her mother and Tyler. It wasn't that she wanted to keep secrets from them, and she was equally reluctant to tell them, but she just wanted more time to figure out her new abilities before telling anyone about them, if she even decided to tell anyone about them. If her mother or Tyler came to her telling her that they were inexplicably mentally connected to seven other people, she would think that they were insane, or making it all up.

But as a self-confessed chatterbox, the easiest way to avoid telling someone something was to avoid spending any time with them at all.

Now, after hours of dodging their calls, her brain was still too wired to sleep.

There hadn't been an incident that day. In the apartment in Chicago, on the way to the airport, on the plane, and at home, she'd been the only occupant of her own mind all day.

She'd gone entire days without experiencing something that wasn't actually happening to her before, but she'd just assumed that once all of them met in person, their connection would intensify somehow.

Caroline sighed.

She missed them. She knew that it was strange to miss people that she'd only known for a week, but she did. As different as they all were, she liked these people that she shared this connection with.

At Katherine's insistence, they had started a group message, and had spent the day keeping each other apprised of their activities throughout the day. Katherine had continued to tease her about her relationship with Tyler. Kol shared jokes that, as funny as they were, Caroline wouldn't want anyone to see on her phone. Elijah had let them all know that he had searched for the gun's serial number in the police database and would let them know when he had the results. Rebekah had complained when jazz music had prevented her from sleeping on her flight back to Sydney, to which Bonnie had replied with an apology for leaving her window open, and then Stefan complained about the number of messages they were all sending, adding that he was working, so he couldn't reply.

The only one not to say anything was Klaus. He'd left early that morning, before even Caroline woke up. Katherine had been annoyed, since they were both flying to the same place, yet he seemed to refuse to travel in the same plane as her.

He hadn't said goodbye to anyone when he left, not that that bothered Caroline at all. She was looking forward to having a break from being called princess in that condescending voice that had made a home for itself on her last nerve.

He didn't know her.

And she was engaged, for goodness sakes.

So why were his eyes and his voice hovering at the edges of her subconscious, haunting her, when the only man she should be thinking about was her fiancé, who contrary to what Katherine believed, she loved?

Caroline blinked hard, trying to rid the images from her mind.

When she opened her eyes again, she wasn't in her room.

Caroline's bedroom was painted a soft yellow, with white furniture and white eyelet curtains.

This room had walls painted grey, with dark wood furniture and black curtains.

Instead of lying under the pink bedspread of her own bed, Caroline was now lying under a dark grey blanket.

"Hello?" Caroline called out quietly.

A set of heavy footsteps approached, then the door opened.

She could see his Cheshire cat smile backlit by the light from the hallway behind him.

"I must admit, I like the sight of you in my bed, princess," Klaus smirked.

{ }

Caroline sat up quickly.

"Well, don't get used to it," Caroline retorted. "I don't know how I got here, but I'd like to go home."

She threw back the blankets and hopped out of the bed, while Klaus stepped further into the room.

"Is this a thing we can do now?" Caroline wondered. "Spontaneously travel to someone else's location?"

"I have no idea," Klaus shrugged.

"I'm going to let everyone know that this happened," Caroline announced, reaching for her phone.

Which was currently across the Atlantic Ocean.

"Okay, change of plans. You are going to let everyone know that this happened," Caroline said, holding her hand out.

"What are you looking at me for?" Klaus asked.

"I need your phone, mine is in a different country," Caroline explained.

Klaus sighed, but reluctantly handed over her phone.

Caroline typed out a quick message informing the group of what had happened—namely, that she had been in her own bed one minute, and the next she was in Klaus's, seeming to travel from Mystic Falls to London in less time than it took her to blink.

Katherine and Kol immediately replied with innuendoes. Rebekah and Elijah both sent skeptical responses, wondering whether their abilities had expanded into a physical connection between them, or if this, like everything else they'd experienced so far, was entirely mental.

"Rebekah and Elijah think that this is all in our heads," Caroline told Klaus. "Like how I didn't actually hear gunshots, I just heard what you were hearing; or how you didn't actually try on a wedding dress, you were just feeling what I was feeling."

"Is there any way to test that theory?" Klaus asked.

"Are you alone?" Caroline asked.

"I'm not entertaining a guest this evening, if that's what you mean," Klaus answered with a smirk. "You would have known if I was, I assure you."

"That wasn't what I meant," Caroline responded. "I meant, do you have a roommate, or a family member who lives with you, and might think you're crazy for talking to yourself."

Caroline pushed passed him and into the hallway, surveying the sparsely decorated walls before finding herself in a living room whose most notable contents were a large black sectional and a flat screen TV mounted on the wall.

"No, I don't have a roommate and I don't have a family," Klaus answered.

"Oh," Caroline was stunned. Klaus said it so matter-of-factly that it made Caroline's heart break for him. "I'm so sorry."

Klaus looked at her, surprised.

"For what? You didn't do anything."

"You said you didn't have a family," Caroline emphasized. "I was expressing sympathy. It's an important part of being a human being who successfully interacts with others, you should try it sometime."

"I don't need your pity, princess," Klaus remarked lazily. "I don't need a family either."

"I don't believe that," Caroline said. "Everyone needs a family."

"That's because you don't know my family," Klaus replied. "But we aren't talking about that, we were trying to figure out how we can be sure that you're really here. Or that you're not, I suppose either way will work."

"Well, I was just thinking that if this is only happening because of our mental connection and it isn't actually, you know, real, if you had a roommate they wouldn't be able to see me," Caroline suggested. "But if you live alone, we can't really use that theory."

"What about the other way?" Klaus proposed. "Is there someone at your house who would notice if you were gone? Or else talking to yourself and convinced you were in London?"

Caroline shook her head.

"My mom's at work. I was home alone," she answered.

"You don't live with your fiancé?" Klaus inquired.

"No, not until we're married," Caroline said. "It's the South, his mom is really conservative. Plus, she doesn't really like me, so I think she just wants to keep us apart in the hopes that Tyler will change his mind about marrying me."

"How could anyone not like you?" Klaus wondered. "Especially since you're signing yourself up for a lifetime of playing Jackie O to his JFK. You know, wearing pretty dresses and turning a blind eye as he cheats on you. Being the perfect politician's wife."

Caroline decided to ignore his jabs at Tyler and their relationship.

"I'm not sure it's personal, I think Carol is just very protective and thinks that no one on Earth could possibly be good enough for her precious little boy."

"You know what I think?" Klaus asked. "I think you're being taken advantage of, and I have no idea why you're putting up with it. I think that Tyler is too self-centered and immature to love and want to marry you. I think that he wants to marry the image of the beautiful, blonde, college-educated, daughter of the sheriff of the small town they both were born and raised in, because that image will help him get elected to whatever it is he wants to run for. But I don't think he wants to marry Caroline, and I don't think he even knows Caroline."

Caroline tried to ignore the way her heart raced when Klaus called her beautiful. She couldn't remember the last time that Tyler had called her beautiful. She couldn't remember the last conversation that they had had that wasn't about him and his plans and how Caroline fit into them—the chalk outline of a tall, thin body, painstakingly styled in a suit that was somehow simultaneously conservative without being matronly, feminine without being girlish, stylish without being eye-catching enough to steal attention away from Tyler: the one who really mattered.

"Regardless of what you think, I'm an adult and I can make my own decisions," Caroline said. "And for the record, Tyler does know me. We've known each other since we were little, and we've been together for years."

"Does he know how much you've grown since then?"

"I don't want to talk about this anymore," Caroline insisted. "I appreciate your kind words towards me, but I don't want to just stand here and listen to you criticize my fiancé, who you've never met."

"Fine."

"Would it be totally out of character for you to knock on the door of one of your neighbors?" Caroline asked.

"I tend to keep to myself, plus I'm working a lot of the time," Klaus admitted. "I'm not sure I know any of my neighbors."

Just then, someone knocked on Klaus's door.

"Just stand there, so that they can see you," Klaus instructed. "If they can see you."

Klaus pulled open the door.

"Marcel," Klaus greeted.

Marcel was a handsome man with a movie star smile and the swagger of someone who had the means to live by his own rules.

"Good, you're alone," Marcel pushed past Klaus into the apartment.

Marcel couldn't see her. This was all in her head.

"Wake up, Caroline," she told herself.

"There's been a new development," Marcel started, but Caroline didn't hear the rest of what he said.

She blinked, and she was back in her own room.

Caroline took a deep breath.

"This is getting crazier by the minute."

{ }

Elijah returned to the apartment the next day to return the gun to its hiding place.

Now that he had recorded the serial number, he didn't need the gun itself in his possession anymore. He wanted to put it back where Caroline had found it as soon as possible—hiding a stolen firearm at a police stadium was a very risky operation.

Elijah pushed open the door, which they'd never locked, having been unable to find a spare key.

He strode purposefully to the bedroom, opened the bottom drawer of the dresser, moved aside the contents, and hid the gun back in the drawer's false bottom.

With his objective completed, Elijah left the room, intending to leave the apartment and go home.

That was when he saw the man standing in the living room.

"Hello?" Elijah called out. "Can I help you?"

It felt very odd to speaking that way to someone who had also essentially broken in to an abandoned apartment, but the place felt like it belonged to them, and now some stranger was standing there, invading their private space.

The man turned to face him.

This man was the embodiment of potential energy. He held himself like a snake poised to strike, the frantic frenzy just waiting to be unleashed intensified by the glow of his wild eyes against his dark skin.

"I thought that you had left," the man said. "I was watching; I thought that you had all left. I was waiting for you to leave so that I could come back."

"Who are you, and what are you doing here?" Elijah asked, trying to remain calm.

"My name is Vincent, and this apartment belonged to a very dear friend of mine," Vincent answered. "She's the one who made the eight of you what you are now."

Elijah pulled out his phone and sent a very brief, direct message: 'You need to get back here. Now.'

{ }

Within twenty-four hours, all eight of them were back in the living room of the apartment.

"If anyone asks, my grandmother is in the hospital," Bonnie announced as she walked through the door.

Everyone immediately agreed to cover for her if necessary, Caroline even going so far as to research potential diagnoses so that she could convincingly pretend to be a nurse.

Katherine arrived holding a knitted scarf in her hand.

"I think Caroline might have been on to something," she said. "Do any of you know how to knit?"

"I do," Caroline and Rebekah answered.

"Okay, so I was sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight, and this grandmother sits down next to me and starts knitting," Katherine started. "When she sees me, she asks if I know how to knit, and I tell her that I don't. Then she offers to teach me, and I agree just to be nice and because I don't really want to keep talking to her. But then she hands me knitting needles and some yarn, and I just start knitting. And I have no idea how I know what I'm doing, but I do. I made this in the hour-and-a-half I was waiting," Katherine held up the scarf. "So I think Caroline's right. Anything that any of us knows, now we can all know it. Which is very cool and also very creepy, as is this entire situation."

"It's great that there's a positive component to this, rather than just randomly seeing things in dreams or tasting someone else's food," Caroline pointed out.

"Or randomly appearing in someone's bed!" Katherine challenged. "We are talking about that."

Someone cleared their throat from behind them.

Standing next to Elijah was an unfamiliar man.

"Everyone, this is Vincent," Elijah told them. "He was close friends with the person who lived in this apartment. He claims to have answers regarding our new abilities, and I don't see the harm in hearing his explanations. I thought you would be interested as well, which is why I instructed you to come back."

Elijah took a small step backward, letting Vincent have the floor.

"Her name was Freya," Vincent said. "She died just over a month ago. And her death is what created you."

"Created us?" Rebekah asked.

"Let's just let him explain, with no interruptions," Elijah scolded.

"Freya was a sensate," Vincent continued. "So am I, and so are all of you. The eight of you form a cluster, which means that you are mentally linked, which you have likely already experienced, whether it was sharing experiences, communicating with each other, sharing your knowledge and experiences. The death of a sensate creates a new cluster, and your cluster was created by Freya's death."

"I'm so sorry for your loss," Caroline offered. The rest of the cluster, as they now knew they were called, murmured words of agreement.

"Thank you," Vincent replied. "Now there's something you should know about Freya's death."

He paused to gather his thoughts.

"Freya was on the run from a man known as 'Whispers,'" Vincent informed them. "He is a sensate who rejected his cluster and his entire species, and is now a part of the organization whose mission is to eliminate all sensates."

"Of course there's someone trying to kill us," Klaus muttered darkly.

"Wait, when you say species, are you saying that we aren't human?" Stefan asked.

"Yes," Vincent answered. "The scientific name for humans is Homo sapiens, and the scientific name for sensates is Homo sensorium. Same genus, but different species."

Katherine laughed.

"Caroline, I think you should break up with your fiancé who you don't love anyway, because everyone knows that interspecies relationships never work out."

Katherine, Rebekah, Kol, and Klaus laughed.

Vincent looked concerned.

"Have any of you told anyone outside of the cluster about your abilities?"

Everyone shook their heads.

"Good, keep it that way," Vincent approved.

"So, what is it exactly that we can do?" Bonnie asked timidly.

"After a month, you've probably already experienced a lot of it," Vincent answered. "You can share each other's senses, knowledge, language. You can communicate from a distance, on a mental plane."

"What does that mean?" Kol asked.

"That's what happened to Klaus and Caroline," Rebekah answered. "She mentally traveled to England, but she didn't really leave her house. They were able to talk to each other because of our connection, even though they were in different countries with an ocean between them."

"Correct," Vincent confirmed. "It can be very unnerving at first when that happens, so you just have to remember that you're safe at home, or wherever you were, and while what is happening is real, it's only happening in your head."

"Is there a way for us to control our abilities?" Caroline asked.

"It just takes time and practice," Vincent answered. "It requires concentration and focus. But you can control them in the sense that you can essentially close yourself off to your cluster for a time, or conversely, reach out to a member of your cluster, which can be very useful in times of crisis."

"What I'm really concerned about is this organization that's trying to kill us," Klaus said.

"It's called the Biologic Preservation Organization," Vincent explained. "They study human genetics, and they try to find and destroy all sensates. They're international, with connections within governments all over the world, they're incredibly well-funded… There's no escaping them," Vincent sighed. "Freya was trying to escape Whispers, but she was trapped, and he was closing in, so… she did the only thing that she could to make sure he didn't get his hands on her."

Caroline gasped, covering her mouth with her hand.

"I am going to help you, to make sure that you all stay safe from him," Vincent promised. "But you have to be careful, because each and every one of you has a target on their back."

{ }

The next several weeks passed as normally as they could for the cluster as they continued to adjust to their new abilities.

There were days when nothing happened, and there were days when everyone had something new to share.

Katherine had been able to mentally transport to Chicago to 'visit' Elijah.

Kol had discovered the ability to speak Italian, thanks to Bonnie and Stefan, who both answered in the affirmative when Kol had asked the group which of them spoke the language.

And Caroline had 'visited' Klaus at least once each week.

She wasn't sure why she kept getting sent to see him and not anyone else, but no matter how hard she tried to control it, she couldn't make herself go anywhere else.

The first few times it happened, Klaus had seemed amused, taking it as some sort of sign that he was constantly on Caroline's mind.

Eventually, they had both accepted these encounters, and in Caroline's case, at least, even look forward to them.

It was after the second such meeting that Katherine had taken it upon herself to create a second group message for herself, Caroline, Rebekah, and Bonnie, where their primary topic of conversation was the guys in the cluster. Despite the challenge of time zones, the four girls were constantly texting, mostly about Klaus and Caroline's obvious chemistry and interest in each other, though they occasionally took a break to discuss Katherine and Elijah's growing feelings for each other.

Caroline maintained that she was engaged and she loved her fiancé, even as she got to know Klaus more and grew to like him more than she had when they first met. She refused to tell anyone what Klaus had told her about himself, not wanting to betray his confidence, no matter how much Katherine pestered her.

As pushy as Katherine could be, Caroline knew that her intentions were good.

Caroline thought, and even shared with the rest of the cluster, how glad she was that she genuinely liked the seven of them.

Then Kol ruined the sentimental moment by wondering aloud if that was a side effect of their connection, and they'd been forced to like each other.

As they established this new normal that included randomly seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing things that weren't really there, and randomly knowing things that they'd never learned themselves, and speaking languages they weren't fluent in, the cluster also established a solid friendship.

They each felt themselves drifting apart from friends, family, and acquaintances who weren't in the cluster. The eight of them were now an entirely different species from everyone else they knew, and it was easier to spend time with people who understood.

The more isolated they grew from the people in their lives, the more they came to depend on each other.

And if they all had the strange feeling that they were being watched, they simply blamed it on the link that meant seven other people could be watching them at any time.

{ }

Caroline was getting ready for a fundraiser that she had to attend with Tyler when it happened.

She was putting the finishing touches on her makeup when she felt a blow to the back of her head, making her smear lipstick across the bottom half of her face as she cried out in pain.

Her phone rang a second later.

"Care, was that you?" Rebekah asked frantically.

"No, it wasn't me," Caroline answered. "Was it you?"

"Nope."

"But that's weird, that you felt it, too," Caroline said. "Right?"

"To be quite honest, Caroline, I'm starting to have trouble keeping track of what's weird anymore," Rebekah responded.

"That's true," Caroline sighed. "Do you want me to help you figure out who it was?"

"I appreciate the offer, but I think I can handle six more minute-long phone calls by myself."

"Okay, call me when you know something," Caroline said. "Bye, Bekah."

"I'll talk to you soon."

Tyler walked in the door a few minutes after Rebekah hung up.

"You look nice," he complimented.

"Thanks."

Tyler took Caroline's hand and led her towards her front door. Her mother was working, as usual, so they were alone in the house.

"What is this fundraiser for, again?" Caroline asked.

"Repairing Wickery Bridge," Tyler answered.

"After all of the fundraisers we've had, they still haven't finished repairing that stupid bridge?" Caroline exclaimed.

"I know, but if I want to be elected mayor after my dad retires, I have to show my support for the town," Tyler explained, as if they hadn't had this conversation before. "And I have to have the prettiest girl on my arm."

He'd meant it as a compliment, Caroline was sure. But it felt like Tyler had just proven all of the accusations Klaus had thrown at him right. It sounded like Tyler did just see her as an accessory, or as a campaign strategy. Handing out buttons, kissing babies, marrying the sheriff's daughter. Could it all be the same to him?

Just then, Caroline's phone rang.

"Hey, Kat, what's up? Have you heard from Rebekah yet?" Caroline asked, ducking back into her bedroom to take the call.

"Yeah. Care, it's Klaus," Katherine told her.

"What?"

"I'm assuming that you, like all of the rest of us, felt like you were hit in the back of the head with a heavy object a few minutes ago?" Katherine confirmed.

"Yes?"

"Elijah called me right after it happened to make sure that I was okay."

"Aww, that's so sweet!" Caroline squealed.

"Not the time, Care!" Katherine scolded.

"Sorry."

"He called Kol and Stefan while Rebekah called you," Katherine explained. "He couldn't reach you, so he called me back to ask if I had heard from you. When we hung up, Rebekah called me, and I asked if she'd talked to you, and she said she'd called you and Bonnie so far."

"Which means Klaus is the only one unaccounted for," Caroline concluded.

"Sorry, Caroline."

"Well, we have to find him! He could be seriously hurt!" Caroline exclaimed.

"I know, but how?" Katherine asked.

"If we all concentrate all of our energy into finding him, at least one of us should be able to sense something," Caroline reasoned. "And since you're in London, you can go to his house. Best case scenario, Marcel was able to drag him home and now he's lying on the couch watching Inception and waiting for the pain meds to kick in."

"I don't know his address," Katherine lamented. "And who's Marcel?"

"Klaus's friend slash coworker," Caroline replied absently. "And I can text you his address as soon as I hang up."

"Okay, I'll keep you posted."

Katherine hung up and Caroline texted her Klaus's address, which she only had because she'd happened to see some mail he'd left out on the coffee table one of the times she'd visited him. Now she was glad that she'd thought to write the information down.

Caroline walked back out to Tyler, who had an expectant, impatient look on his face.

"Is everything okay?" he asked.

"No, my friend is in trouble and I need to help him," Caroline replied. "I'm sorry, but I can't go to the fundraiser tonight."

"This is important to me, Caroline," Tyler insisted.

"And my friend is important to me," Caroline shot back. "He needs my help."

"Well, I need you here, not running off to help male friends," Tyler snapped. "Do you know how bad it would look for me if people thought you were cheating on me?"

"Is that all you care about?" Caroline asked. "Your image? Do you even love me, or do you love the image of the mayor's son and the sheriff's daughter being high school sweethearts? Because you want the perfect politician's wife, but I can't be the Jackie to your JFK, sitting there smiling while Marilyn Monroe sings happy birthday to you!"

"Where is this even coming from? Of course I love you. We're going to get married, and we're going to make all of our dreams come true together," Tyler insisted.

"Do you even know what my dreams are?" Caroline asked. "Because they aren't matching my headbands to your ties, and smiling next to you while you campaign for something. You don't want me, you want a Barbie doll with a backstory that voters will love. And I thought I loved you enough to put up with that, but I don't love you enough to give up on myself. I'm sorry, but being first lady of Small Town, U.S.A. isn't enough for me."

And with that, she pulled off her engagement ring and pressed it into Tyler's palm.

"Why don't you calm down, okay? You don't want to make any big decisions that you'll regret later," Tyler said.

"I need to go, and you have a fundraiser to attend," Caroline told him. "Please leave."

As soon as the door closed behind Tyler, Caroline was dialing her phone.

"Hey, it's Caroline. I'm on my way. Can you pick me up at the airport?"

{ }

The next morning, Caroline pulled her hastily packed suitcase through Heathrow International Airport, trying to find her friend in the crowd.

After a few minutes, she finally found Katherine waving at her.

"Hi," Caroline greeted her.

"Hey," Katherine replied. "So, Elijah, Kol and Rebekah are on their way, Stefan and Bonnie are looking for flights after they get off of work, and Elijah called Vincent, and he's on his way, too."

"I didn't even think of that," Caroline said.

"That's why there are eight of us," Katherine shrugged.

Katherine led Caroline to where her car was parked.

"Plus, you've done plenty. I wouldn't have been able to check his house if you hadn't known the address," Katherine pointed out. "So, I'll drop you off there, and then I have to go back to get Elijah."

"Okay."

They spent the rest of the car ride in silence.

Caroline had been trying for hours to send some sort of mental signal to Klaus, eager for any response that might give her some clue as to where he was.

She was jolted out of her concentration by the car coming to a stop. Caroline gathered her luggage and followed Katherine to the front door of Klaus's home.

"Luckily, I found where he keeps the spare key," Katherine smirked.

She reached up to the top of the door frame, picked up the key, and unlocked the door.

Caroline and Katherine collapsed on the couch as soon as they made it inside.

"So, I guess I'll keep trying to find out anything about where he might be," Caroline suggested. "At least we haven't seen or felt anything that would suggest he's been hurt again, that's a good sign."

"That's true," Katherine agreed.

"Wait a minute. Show me your hands!" Katherine demanded.

Caroline hesitantly held them up.

"You dumped your fiancé who you don't love!" Katherine exclaimed.

"I did," Caroline confirmed.

"What happened?" Katherine asked.

"I told him that a friend was in trouble and needed my help, and Tyler's first reaction was that my going to help Klaus would look bad for him if people thought I was cheating on him," Caroline explained. "I realized that you and Klaus were right. He didn't love me as much as he loved the idea of me, and I didn't love him enough to sacrifice my dreams, and my friends, and my independence to be the person he wanted me to be."

"Sing it, sister," Katherine responded. "In all seriousness though, I'm proud of you. I would have been even prouder of you three weeks ago, which was the week I picked that you would dump him in our bet, but even though Stefan won, I am proud."

"Thanks, Katherine. I think," Caroline replied.

"No problem."

{ }

Once Katherine left, Caroline once again concentrated on trying to find Klaus. When that failed, she turned her attention to trying to send him messages of support, letting him know that they were coming to rescue him.

She even considered telling him that she'd ended her engagement, but she figured that he would find out soon enough anyway, and he would probably ask questions about what happened, so it was easier to wait and let him know in person.

Plus, she wasn't sure if he'd care, apart from the satisfaction of being proven right.

He'd called her beautiful, and flirted with her, and told her things about himself that he claimed he'd never told anyone else—about his abusive father, about his job, about his hopes and dreams—but a few compliments and conversations did not a relationship make. But he hadn't spoken that way to Katherine, or Rebekah, or Bonnie, all of whom were prettier, smarter, more interesting, and all together more desirable than Caroline was.

Caroline shook her head. It didn't matter if he cared or not. He was a member of the cluster, and he was a friend, and right now, he was in trouble. Her focus had to be on helping to rescue him. Everything else could wait.

She still hadn't made any progress by the time Katherine returned with Elijah in tow.

"Well, you're the only one who has mentally teleported to him before, so if you can't find him, then I can't see why any of us would have a better chance," Katherine sighed.

"Vincent might be able to help us when he gets here," Elijah pointed out. "His flight should be landing soon."

"I'm going to spend the whole day in the airport today, aren't I?" Katherine complained.

"I can go retrieve him myself if you want," Elijah offered.

"That won't be necessary," Vincent himself announced from the doorway. "I managed to get a ticket on an earlier flight and took a cab here."

"How did you know where Klaus lives?" Caroline asked.

"The BPO knows everything about all of you," Vincent answered ominously.

"That's fantastic," Katherine deadpanned.

"Then do you know where he might be?" Caroline asked.

"There's only one place that he could be," Vincent answered. "The BPO's facility in London."

"Okay, let's go!" Caroline exclaimed, getting to her feet.

"You can't!" Vincent insisted. "It's too dangerous. Wait for the rest of your cluster to get here. Then we might have a chance."

{ }

By the time everyone arrived, the moon was high in the sky.

Vincent assured them that this was a good thing, since fewer people would be in the facility at night than during the day.

"So, do we have a plan? Or are we just going to storm the castle and hope for the best?" Stefan asked.

"The plan is to storm the castle, find Klaus, and get out before anyone, especially this Whispers person, sees us," Kol corrected.

"Well, we can't go unarmed," Caroline said, walking over to the safe that she knew contained Klaus's collection of guns.

She typed in the combination to the safe and yanked open the door, quickly surveying the contents.

"He told you the combination to his gun safe?" Katherine exclaimed.

"No," Caroline answered absently.

"No, he didn't," Caroline repeated more emphatically. "I didn't know it at all, I just typed it in without even thinking about it, like muscle memory, or something."

"Did you know that's where the guns were?" Elijah asked.

"Yeah," Caroline answered. "I asked why he had a safe in his living room, and he said that that's where he kept his guns. Something about wanting them easily accessible in case of an intruder."
Caroline started frantically grabbing everything in the safe and placing them on the coffee table behind her.

"We need to go, now," Caroline insisted. "He was able to communicate with me, that's a good sign."

"There's not enough room in my car for all of us," Katherine reminded them.

"Whoever doesn't fit will call a cab and follow you," Bonnie decided.

"Then, Caroline, Vincent, and Elijah: come with me," Katherine commanded.

Caroline took one of the guns off of the table and tucked it into her waistband, watching as Katherine, Vincent, and Elijah all did the same, with varying levels of confidence in the weapons they were now carrying.

"Let's go."

{ }

The parking lot was deserted when they arrive at the BPO facility.

In the few minutes before the rest of the cluster arrived, Caroline, Katherine, Elijah, and Vincent sized up the building in front of them.

It was almost intimidating in its accessibility. There was no fortress, or moat. No drawbridge or guard dogs.

It was modern-looking, like the headquarters of some technology company, which to many people, it was, in many respects. It wasn't the science fiction dystopian lair that sensates targeted by the organization thought that it should be.

After the cab dropped off Rebekah, Bonnie, Kol, and Stefan, they hesitantly approached the building.

"Whatever we do, no one goes anywhere on their own," Rebekah said. "We have to stick together."

Everyone nodded in agreement.

The automatic doors slid open, revealing an ordinary looking hallway with every other light turned off. On one side was a block of cubicles, reminding them that these people who wanted them dead came to work every day and sat at a desk.

They weren't monsters, killing innocent people out of hatred. They were just scared and threatened by something that they didn't and could never understand.

It took what felt like hours—but was actually less than one—to find Klaus. He was trapped in a cage that looked like a fish tank, with glass walls reinforced with steel.

He shook his head frantically as he saw them coming.

"Eight people, and not one of you has any sense of self-preservation. Your blind loyalty will be your downfall," a mysterious voice came from behind them.

They all turned to see the man that they instinctively knew was the enigmatic entity they knew only as Whispers.

"Use one as bait and they all come running," he continued. "You didn't consider for even a moment that this was a trap, and now you've all fallen into it. I must say, eliminating this cluster was even easier than I'd hoped it would be."

Elijah drew his gun and pointed it straight at Whispers' chest.

He scoffed.

"You would really resort to this?" he asked. "The mission of this organization is bigger than me, bigger than any of you. Fear of the unknown is a part of human nature; you can't fight it, and whatever you do to me won't erase it."

"But it's a start," Vincent countered.

Six guns were drawn.

Seven shots were fired.

Whispers lay dead on the floor, and they would never know who killed him.

They scrambled to free Klaus from his glass prison before someone came to investigate.

"Are you okay?" Caroline asked. "What happened?"

"I'm fine, they knocked me out and brought me here," Klaus answered. "I woke up in this cage with a headache."

"We all felt the hit you took to the back of your head, you should probably have someone stay with you tonight to make sure you don't have a concussion," Caroline suggested.

"Are you volunteering, princess?" Klaus asked with a smirk.

"You should choose whoever you feel most comfortable with," Caroline hedged.

Klaus looked around at the cluster.

"I can't believe you all came here for me," Klaus said.

"Some of us even dumped our stupid fiancés to come here for you," Katherine cut in.

"Katherine!" Caroline scolded.

"Is that true?" Klaus asked.

"It was more of the principle of the thing, but technically, yes, I suppose that is true," Caroline said. "And of course we came for you! We're a team! We are always there for each other, no matter what, so it's time for you to drop this 'I'm not worthy of unconditional love and support' attitude, because it isn't true!"

"Did you just say that you loved me?"

"No, I said that you deserved love. I made no promises that I would be the one to give it to you," Caroline corrected. "You really should listen when I talk."

"It's like having a nagging wife," Klaus complained good-naturedly.

"Did you just call me your wife?"

"No, I didn't. You really should listen when I talk."

"I will fight you for maid of honor, Bekah," Katherine interrupted.

"How about whoever comes closest to predicting the date he proposes?" Rebekah suggested.

"Deal."

"We aren't even together!" Caroline exclaimed.

"Yet," Klaus added. "Don't you worry, I'll win you over, princess."

Caroline blushed, hiding her face in her hands. Klaus pulled her hands away from her face, placing a kiss on the back of her hand in a sweetly chivalrous gesture.

"As truly adorable as this all is, we really should go before anyone sees the nine of us standing over the dead body on the floor," Kol spoke up.

"I just have one more question," Klaus started as they began walking out of the building. "Where did you get so many guns on such short notice?"

"Your safe," Katherine answered.

"You broke into my safe?" Klaus exclaimed.

"Caroline knew the combination," Elijah explained.

"I'd ask how you knew the combination, but I'm guessing it's one of those things that are just a part of being what we are."

They heard police sirens in the distance and walked quickly towards the parking lot, where Katherine's car was waiting for Katherine, Elijah, Klaus, and Caroline, and everyone else would call a cab.

Before they split up, the cluster stood together for a moment, reassuring themselves that everything was okay.

"You know, Whispers wasn't the whole organization, or even the leader," Vincent commented. "We still have deal with them, and they'll be watching you even more closely now that you've evaded them."

"And we will figure it all out," Klaus promised. "Together."

---

Thank you so much for reading!

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lots of love,
charlotte