Chapter 7: Tomorrow's Rose

CAROLINE

I do a lot of things to look beautiful: I wax, shave, pluck, exfoliate, moisturize, buff, smooth, polish, powder, outline, highlight and curl, all in the course of the average lazy Sunday. I know how to pick exactly the right cut of any outfit for any body type, and I can accessorize shoes that could make a burkha shine like a Caroline Herrera.

Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely a feminist. I organized the Maids of Mystic Falls Campaign to bring awareness to the continued gender inequality of household chores, and we got 35 guys to fill out our survey about what household chores were their responsibility and pledge to take on a larger share in the future. Which was about 35 more guys than wanted to fill out our survey, so I consider it a 350% success.

And it's not like I think that being a woman is all about looking good. Every self help book I've ever read—and I've read plenty, though you'd better believe I keep them where Damon will never find them—agrees that confidence is the key to success and I feel most confident when I know I look smokin' hot.

But some days, I'm not sure why I bother. Because Stefan can make me feel more beautiful with a single touch than I would after a dozen makeovers.

I'm draped across his chest, smudged with dirt and crushed leaves, and his fingers trace my spine like I'm the only thing he ever wants to touch. I wish I knew how he did that, so I could do it for him.

I relax under his hands and sigh, idly tracing the lines of the rose tattoo that sits on the high, firm muscle of his shoulder.

"You know every time you do that, I wish I would have tattooed a labyrinth across my whole body."

I snort. "Like I wanted to date a tatted up biker guy."

"Mmm." He smoothes my hair away from my face. "I would have covered up, then, until I convinced you to go out with me."

"What fun would that be?" I tease.

Stefan really does have the most breathtaking body. I'm a great appreciator of male beauty: anything from the Zac Efron cute boy look to the rugged masculinity of Hugh Jackman. Stefan's the perfect blend of all of them, with a gorgeous balance of bulky and sleek muscle that makes me wish I could draw just so I could really appreciate every line of him.

Or I guess I could just put him on a bearskin rug and get out my iPhone. I smile against his neck. My phone has a zoom function that would do a pretty good job of appreciating his male beauty, and it would really dress up his incoming calls, too.

Though if Damon got his hands on it, that could be bad. Last time I left my phone laying around the house, Stefan's ringtone got changed to "I Feel Like a Natural Woman," which wasn't nearly as alarming as going to answer it and finding a picture of a penis staring back at me. Not, I might add, Stefan's penis.

Way over the line.

Of course, it is Damon. He's not aware that there is a line.

"What are you thinking about?" Stefan asks idly.

Your brother's penis, and his personality disorder.

"Just wondering when you got your tattoo!"

"Really?" he asks skeptically and I fight back a wince.

I don't know what glitch in my genetic makeup makes my voice go up an octave every time I try to lie, but I could live without the auditory version of Pinocchio's nose, thank you very much.

"I've always wondered about it," I tell him truthfully. "You don't really seem like the tattoo type, and if you got anything, I'd think it would be some kind of life motto or something. Or a picture to remind you of someone."

Lexi, maybe. She's only been gone a year and to Stefan, that must feel like the blink of an eye.

"The rose is to remind me of something." His fingers gently untangle my hair, picking bits of leaves from the strands and putting them aside.

"Of what?" I ask, and then realize that's really rude. "Sorry. I guess it's not really my business, you know, unless you feel like telling me."

He's quiet for a long moment and I wonder if it's about a woman or something. I mean, we all know Damon was celibate for fifty years and then slept his way up and down every coast that abuts the ocean, but other than Rebekah, I don't know if Stefan was with anyone in the space between the Katherine and the Elena years.

He said once that he didn't have time for much of a life in between trying to control his cravings for blood but yeah, I'm sorry. Since I'm a vampire, I could squeeze being horny into the space between two seconds.

"I don't know if I can make it make sense to you," he says, his hands gone still on my back. "But it's a simple enough story. You know I was in the second World War, as an ambulance driver."

I nod against his chest. I know it was during one of his long struggles to stay on animal blood and I've always thought it was really dumb of Lexi to send him to be around so many wounded humans at a time like that.

"I was stationed in North Africa, but when I shipped back home, we were stuck for weeks in England before the weather allowed us to sail for home. I had…" He pauses. "War is…" He stops again, as if there are too many words caught behind his teeth to let them all out at once.

"Bad," he finally finishes, stroking my hair.

The birds have gotten used to our presence and there's one with a very distinctive three-note song. I listen to it over and over again in the silence.

"Damon was supposed to be there with me. He said he was coming and then he just never showed up. It would have been so much easier with him there, knowing that someone could hold me back if I needed them to. And because he knew about war, knew what I was getting into and he didn't–" His fingers twitch once against the back of my neck before he continues in a quieter voice. "The smell of blood saturated the whole world. Every uniform and car and gun had traces of it; I could smell it waking or sleeping. I worked as many hours a day as I could without raising suspicion because I was afraid if I let go of the steering wheel, I'd find a soldier under my hands instead and I'd never be able to go home."

I squeeze him tightly, hiding my glare against his chest. Stupid Lexi. There are easier ways of getting used to the smell of blood. She's lucky he didn't go on a binge that never ended. I'd never have met him and he'd still be in Egypt, picking off oil pipeline workers. He'd be the freaking Ripper of Exxon Mobile.

"That's ridiculous." I pull back so I can look at him. "It was war and all crazy and you shouldn't have even been there in the first place! I mean, when I transitioned you didn't take me to freaking Afghanistan."

"No, Lexi was right, Care. Penance is supposed to be difficult. Anyway, that's not the point. It got easier, or I got used to it being hard. And then one day it was just over. They put me on a train and then a ship and then we were in England waiting for our next ship.

"We were all stationed at a big estate, sleeping on the floor of the ballroom with blankets nailed over the windows. And it wasn't until I was there, sleeping in a big room full of human heartbeats, that I realized I was free. For the first time since 1864, I could resist the blood. I could have a life if I wanted to. Friends, a home."

I nuzzle my face back into his neck to combat the sharp pang that goes through my chest. My mom's never around, but I've never been on my own. Certainly not for nearly a century. I try to picture myself in some big English mansion like in Pride and Prejudice, on my way back from war to make a fresh start, but the image is fuzzy in my mind. I can't imagine being so alone.

"Before I left, Lexi insisted that I make peace with Damon. I know he has his unpleasant moments so it's hard to understand, but it was..." His muscles tighten against my belly and then relax as he shifts his legs. "It was important to me. But I never heard from him during the entire time I was overseas and I knew that whatever life I built, he wasn't going to be a part of it."

Stupid Damon. I can't believe he bailed on a whole war. He probably decided it wouldn't be that fun and went dancing instead, the jerk. I make a mental note to light into him when I get home.

I've been meaning to come up with a prank for his bathtub, anyway. I've been on these art department websites for movies sets and stuff and they have this kind of weird Styrofoam that looks like ceramic but comes apart in water. If I could figure out how to take his bathtub out, I could replace it with the Styrofoam stuff and wait for the next time he runs a bath and goes all mental because his freaking tub dissolved.

But somehow a disappearing tub doesn't seem like enough revenge for missing a war. And to be honest, I don't get it. Even when he was Damon, Super Dickhead, he still looked out for his brother. I don't believe that he just wouldn't show up when Stefan needed him.

"Do you want to hear something strange?"

"Hmm?" I encourage, glad to get him off a sad topic. He still hasn't explained the tattoo but if has to do with war and stuff, maybe I don't really want to know.

"I thought I saw him, sometimes. When I was driving the ambulance. I worked at night and the bombing made for weird light, so I could never be sure." Stefan clears his throat. "Anyway, that's not the story. Before I got the tattoo, I was stuck waiting to go home but I didn't truly have a home to go to. Nearly everything I'd ever wanted was within my grasp. But I didn't feel anything. Anything at all."

I bite my lip, feeling like a jerk for making him think about those years. The Salvatores have lived about three lifetimes each and you'd think I could take a hint from the fact that they never talk about them. But before I can figure out how to let Stefan off the hook, he continues.

"I didn't want to speak to anyone, so I spent most of my time walking the gardens over and over again in the rain and the wind and the sleet. Until one day I was sitting there in the rose garden, soaked to the skin, and I just started to laugh. Because of that old saying, you know? Stop and smell the roses," Stefan says with one breath of a chuckle that dies before it even starts. "I got up and I looked at them and before I even thought about what I was doing, I was ripping them out by the roots, destroying them. I tore out dozens of bushes, red and pink and yellow, and when I was sitting in the middle of the whole mess, I was still laughing. Because I could smell them. I could smell my blood from where the thorns had torn my skin and underneath that I could smell the flowers."

I tilt my head so I can see his face, my lips tightening with concern, but he's staring up at the trees above us.

"The woods near there had plenty of big game and I finally had the time to hunt properly so that I was well-fed and I could smell everything and I could see the roses, so much more even than whatever human wrote that line to begin with.

"I could see the grain of the petals, the way they're soft but not really smooth, the edges rounded but irregular. I could smell not just the petals and not just the pollen but the chlorophyll of the stems. The water inside the cells."

He shrugs, his shoulders pushing against my weight.

"And I didn't care. They were beautiful. I could see that, even then, and I marveled that a world that could tear itself apart with bombs and guns and blades could ever host such a delicate little thing. That it could ever live here. But it didn't make me want to live."

"So why did you get the tattoo?" I ask him, curious again despite myself. "If it didn't help?"

Stefan tips his face down to me and I can see the shadows in his eyes and the faint quirk of his lips as he says, "Because I still wanted it to. And I thought with everything I'd seen and been and felt, that if I could still want it to make a difference to me, then maybe…" he pauses for long enough that I can hear that same bird trill its little three-note song. "Then maybe that would be enough. So I walked straight from there to the tattoo parlor, and I made them draw a rose on me, because I thought if I took nothing else with me all the days of my life, I should take hope."

I know I should say something, but I have to swallow to loosen my throat. Because that would be a great story, except that I know it took place in 1945.

Which means he didn't find a life and a family. He came back and he stayed away from people until all the practice from the war was lost and he was sensitive to the smell of blood all over again. He didn't go after what he wanted. Instead, he lived alone for over sixty years before he finally found the courage to go home again. Somehow, that's the saddest part of the whole story, worse than the war or Damon's betrayal.

I can't imagine waiting sixty years for anything. I couldn't even wait for the Twilight books to come out in paperback before I bought them. And I can't help but think it's funny that when Stefan came back to Mystic Falls, it was the exact moment Damon chose to come back, too.

Stefan kisses the top of my head as if he can sense my melancholy thoughts. "It did help," he reassures me. "Some days more than others. But all the days were worth it, I think, in the end." I can hear the smile creep back into his voice. "Anyway, it's better than a flaming skull, right?"

"It is pretty. But I used to think maybe you got it because of your mother's roses."

"My mother's roses?"

"Her garden."

"We didn't have a rose garden," he corrects me. "We had the maze, and a formal garden, but it didn't have roses."

I roll off his chest, propping myself up on an elbow and frowning at him. "Damon said you did. Why would he lie about roses, of all things?"

"Since when do you and Damon talk about flowers together?"

"Since I was saying the driveway would look beautiful lined with rose hedges and he was saying that it was too much work and he wasn't going to hire a gardener to take care of glorified parking bumpers because he knew I wouldn't keep up with it and I was saying like he even knew how much work it was because he'd never gardened a day in his life and he said that his mother did."

I pause at the look on Stefan's face, but he nods for me to continue.

"He said it was her hobby, that she spent hours every day pruning and fertilizing and testing different imported soils and hybridizing her own varietals. He said she loved it." I smile. "He said nobody would be stupid enough to do all that crap unless they loved it."

"I didn't know that," Stefan whispers, glancing away. "I was so young, and my father…he must have torn out the roses after she died. He never would have wasted the money on a new slave to keep it all going unless he thought it would gain him some social standing. He only kept the maze up because he was so proud that it was the only one in the county."

I lay my head back on his shoulder, my hand over the ink-darkened skin.

"I wish…" he says, and then hesitates. "I wish I would have known that."

"Maybe you did." I press a kiss to his shoulder, to his symbol of what is worth living for. And mine, beneath it.

I roll to my feet and the torn up ground of the clearing catches my eye. I can't hold back a smile at the mess we made.

"What?" Stefan asks.

"I think I like 'hunting,'" I tell him with a giggle.

"Trust me," Stefan says, propping his head up and watching me without bothering to get up. "It's a lot more fun with you around. You have strange taste in ah, post-hunting conversation, though."

"I didn't know it was a war tattoo. I thought those were all naked ladies or Don't Stomp On Me or whatever."

His lips twitch. "Something like that."

"Are you laughing at me?"

"I wouldn't dare." His eyes gleam.

"You better not. I've got my eye on you, Stefan Salvatore." I plop hands on my hips, a gesture that probably loses some of its threatening punch since I'm wearing nothing but a single stray sock. Still, Stefan knows better than to risk my wrath, single-socked status aside. "And what did you do with our clothes? You always throw them way too far. I swear, if I had a nickel for every time I've asked where my panties were, I could fund the whole Ronald McDonald House for a year."

Stefan chuckles. "Did you look in the trees?"

"Very funny." I expand my search area.

After five minutes, all I've found is three of our four shoes and I'm starting to get suspicious. I glance over at Stefan, who is frowning at the ground on the other side of the clearing.

"You don't think…" I ask him, trailing off, and then my eyes snap to his as we both realize exactly what happened to our clothes.

"Damon!"