A/n: I did a mean thing, I'm so sorry. Don't read if you like happy endings. It's just an alternate ending, you can pretend like it doesn't exist. I'm a monster.
"I love you, Klaus," Stefan heard Caroline breath from her room. He sighed as he thought about the last 24 hours.
Caroline had gotten bitten.
She was sick, she was dying.
He'd called Klaus a million times.
I'll do anything, Stefan had pleaded in the voicemails. I'll leave with you again, like before. Just save her, Klaus! You have to come back for her!
He'd nearly lost it when she'd hallucinated the hybrid instead of him in her bedroom.
Stefan had heard her heart speed up in the last half hour, pulsing sporadically, racing towards the finish line.
And then suddenly, there was silence, and the weight of it pulled him from his thoughts.
It was deafening.
"No," Stefan whispered, and he raced swiftly to her room. Bonnie was already on her knees next to the bed, holding Caroline's lifeless hand in her own, sobbing.
The whole world came crashing down around him. She's gone.
Stefan fell to his knees next to Bonnie, a choked sob escaping him that he barely recognized as his own.
She finally looked peaceful. Her pale skin still gleamed with a sickly sheen of sweat but a small smile whispered around her lips and her fingers were curled gently, as if holding someone's hand.
Stefan remembered the way her heart had sped up momentarily, and that murmured line that must have been her final hallucination: "I love you, Klaus,"
Anger and sadness bubbled under his grief as he cried over Caroline's lifeless body. He barely heard Bonnie's whisper beside him. "I can't believe he didn't come for her,"