…

His hand never stills, the black pencil never missing a stroke, as he draws on the sketchpad open across his lap. She appears behind him, sitting down and spreading her legs out on either side of his. Her cheek rests on his back and her arms loop around his waist. He smiles a little to himself but still, the quiet scratching of the pencil never falters.

"Can't you draw in bed?" She asks him softly, her voice laden with sleep.

"I know you can't sleep with the pencil against the paper," he says and leans back against her chest. She smiles and rests her chin on his shoulder. "You should get your rest," he smiles as she nuzzles her nose against the side of his neck. "We're leaving tomorrow and not stopping again until we reach our destination."

Caroline chooses not to listen to him or to respond to his comment. She likes when they're here at their cabin in the middle of the woods. It's just them. Just the two of them. They don't have any of those other annoying vampires or witches or those she refers to a Klaus groupies. It's just the two of them and she's greedy because she wants it to stay that way.

She knows when they get to Virginia, it will be different. He will be consumed with his obsession and she has seen him get like this before. He will be right next to her but he won't be there at all.

She closes her eyes and breathes him in deep, inhaling his familiar scent of pine and earth and a splash of cologne and something that is entirely Klaus. He is right. She is feeling a bit tired and she could get some rest before they begin their travels but she knows that this might be the last time she has him like this. She doesn't want to sleep through it.

She begins humming a song, something they used to hear in the many clubs while they were in New Orleans in the twenties, and her knuckles graze up and down along his bicep. With her chin on his shoulder, she looks at his profile and the pencil is still moving across the paper and his lips are twitching in a smile. She smiles, too, and keeps humming.

Of all of the places they have traveled to in the world, New Orleans still remains one of her favorites and she knows that Klaus misses the twenties. The man has been alive for centuries but he fell in love with that decade – short in terms of eternity. The music and the clubs and the alcohol and even though they didn't need to drink it, they still enjoyed it and with it being illegal, it had somehow tasted even sweeter.

"What made you think of that song?" He breaks through her thoughts.

"I'm not sure. I know how much you love it," she says and turning her head, she rests her cheek on his shoulder. "Maybe we can go back to New Orleans. It has been such a long time since we've been. I can't even imagine how different it looks now."

The scratch of the pencil finally stops. "Even after everything that happened there last time we were there?"

Caroline closes her eyes. She does her best to not think of that.

If she had ever doubted that Klaus would do anything for her, she found out in New Orleans. And she has never forgotten it. She had never doubted him before New Orleans and what happened there, what he did for her, the lengths he would go to keep her safe, and she will go to the end of the world trusting him, and only him.

She begins to hum again and he closes his eyes, leaning more so back against her chest. She slips her arms around him and holds him close.

"Come to bed," she whispers.

He immediately sets his pencil and he sketchbook aside and he stands up, turning and holding out his hand. She slips hers in and he pulls her to her feet. They stand, facing one another, staring into one another's eyes and his hands sweep across her cheeks and his hands bury in her hair. She lifts her own hands, sliding them over his narrow hips.

"I love you," she whispers, moving closer, the space between them diminishing.

"I love you," he whispers back and she smiles every time as if he has never said that to her before. "And I'll take you anywhere in the world you want to go. Paris. New Orleans. Back here. I know you love it here."

"I love anywhere with you," she raises on her toes and kisses him lightly on the lips.

She doesn't tell him that she won't love Mystic Falls. He already knows that. She won't love being there, so close to the doppelganger – the one woman who Klaus has probably thought of more than anything these centuries.

Caroline knows he loves her. He loves her as much as a man can love a woman and he has never been short of showing her that but she isn't a Petrova. And because of that, she wonders if she will ever have all of him or if there will always be the tiniest part of himself that she will never be able to have for her own. A part that will always belong to Tatia or Katherine or the doppelganger in Virginia but never her.

Klaus stares into her eyes and with his fingers still in her hair, he brings her face closer to his, his lips parted, almost about to kiss her again but he doesn't. "Why are you so unsure of my feelings towards you? Even after all of this time?" He asks her quietly.

She shakes her head. "I'm not. I just… you know me. Pathetic and insecure Caroline. Just like I was when I was a human girl," she tries to shrug it off, to try and play it off as it meaning absolutely nothing but you can't spend three hundred years with a person and not have them know you. No one knows her better than Klaus.

"Nothing is more important to me than you. Nothing-"

"Except a hybrid," she corrects him and he doesn't argue. He can't because it's the truth.

Creating a race of hybrids – half-vampire, half-werewolf – just like him, along with finding the doppelganger's blood to do it, has been his obsession. Caroline knows he loves her but she will forever be second in his life when it comes to his precious hybrids.

He stares at her and she sees yellow flash in his eyes. He's angry. She knows he is. She suddenly feels too tired to fight with him. Three hundred years, an argument starts to get boring after a while. And he has no right to be angry. Not when she was simply speaking her mind and the truth. They have always been completely open and honest with one another and he can't fault her for that tonight.

Whenever they get into an argument, it usually ends with him storming off and killing someone. Tonight is no different – except, they don't exchange a single word.

He steps back, his hands dropping from her hair, and without a word, he turns and within an instant, he is gone from the room, from the house, the door slamming shut behind him.

She doesn't expect him before dawn. With a sigh, she returns to their bed and lays down.

She doesn't sleep though. She can't.

Sometimes, with the knowledge that she is second, she wonders why she stays with him.

When he returns hours later, after the sun has risen just as she suspected, he smells of human and blood and his clothes are stained in it. He crawls onto the bed and she rolls onto her back, looking up at him. Without a word, he lowers his head and kisses her fully on the lips – a hard, hungry kiss, one that demands she kiss back. And she does. Her hands clutch the lapels of his jacket, tugging him down and the blood from his lips smears onto her own, staining her chin and making her moan.

…

Katherine laughs, pouring herself a drink from Damon's supply. "What do you want to know?" She asks, turning back towards them. "Or rather, why do you want to know?"

"Oh, I don't know, Katherine," Damon glowers at her from across the room. "Maybe you've forgotten but Klaus is coming."

That shuts her mouth and turning her head, she takes a gulp of the scotch from her glass. She knows how much Damon loves his scotch. She's tempted to take the bottle and smash it onto the floor.

"Do you know anything about Klaus? Or Caroline?" Elena asks, leaning forward on the couch, her hands folded in front of her, eying her doppelganger. "You have to know something."

"Yes, Katherine," Damon is still glaring, his arms crossed over chest. "I don't know if you understand the concept but we're rather desperate and are asking you for help-"

"Like you're helping because of the goodness of your heart," Katherine snorts. "And it has absolutely nothing to do with that constant hard-on you have for-"

"Can we stop?" Stefan frowns at her and if anyone can get her to shut up, it's him. "Now please. Just tell us what you know. If you do know anything."

Katherine is quiet for a moment, taking another sip of scotch and then she turns away. They wait, not sure if she will talk or if she is just wasting their time like she is prone to do, but then she sits down in one of the leather chairs.

"Who do you want to hear about first?" She asks them, crossing her long legs, looking at them with a perfectly arched eyebrow.

"Caroline," all three of them answer at the same time.

A small, rueful smile passes over Katherine's lips. "Long story or short story? Short story, Caroline is absolutely insane." She looks to Stefan and Damon. "You think you've met some crazy vampires? You think you were bad in your day?" She pauses to take another sip of scotch and then gets up to pour herself some more. "I met her in the 1920s in New Orleans. I never saw Klaus. I was still hiding from him and I didn't know he was in the same city but I never saw him. I didn't know he was there until after… I saw Caroline though. She didn't know who I was at the time. I'm sure afterwards, Klaus informed her but I knew exactly who she was."

"How?" Elena can't help but ask.

"Pretty, perky blonde teenager? Just because most vampires haven't met her doesn't mean they don't know who she is. I'm sure these two have told you. Everyone knows who Klaus and Caroline are. They're inseparable… or apparently, they are most of the time. Klaus hardly trusts anyone and rarely leaves wherever they're living at the time. I don't know what he's so worried about. He's practically immortal." She takes a long sip of newly poured scotch from her glass. "It surprised me that Caroline went out without him but she did."

"What did she do?" Elena asks, almost whispering, almost holding her breath.

Katherine turns and stares right at her. "We met at one of those nightclubs, jazz and booze and we just seemed to click instantly. We danced for hours together. The men certainly enjoyed the show."

She ignores Damon's eye roll.

"There was a man there, a human in his twenties, and all night, he desperately tried to get close to Caroline. Most men become so enamored with her."

"Being compelled?" Stefan asks.

Katherine smiles. "Just because you two obviously have a type doesn't mean that other men don't find Caroline's blonde curls and blue eyes beautiful. She may be dead but she has this aura around her. She commands attention and she gets it."

"What about the man?" Elena tries to get her back on track.

"There was a man who wanted her. Caroline flirted and smiled and she made this man believe that she was completely enamored with him. She acted as if he had hung the stars for her. She took him out back and I went with her. What she did to him…" she pauses and has to take another sip of scotch. "Vampires tend to attack a person's throat. That's all we want. Caroline, however, she tore this man apart. Limb from limb. Tore at him and fed from him until he was completely unrecognizable. I have never seen anything like it."

Katherine sits again and shifts in the chair.

"The man had brothers and it took them three days to track Caroline and somehow, they were able to kidnap her."

Elena gasps. She may not know much of anything about Klaus but the idea of Caroline being taken from him, if he loves her as much as Damon and Stefan say he does, this story does not have a happy ending.

"They tortured her. Stabbed her with wooden stakes, burned her in sunlight, rubbed vervain all over her body. Klaus tore New Orleans apart looking for her. Set houses on fire. Performed his own tortures. Thirty-one people were killed. It was a complete massacre. He was the boogeyman. People still talk about him down there."

Another pause, another sip of scotch. They are hanging on her every word.

"When he found her, he showed her captors what a monster he truly is. Those brothers, they never found all of their bodies. Just pieces. And after the brothers, he went to their wives and children and killed them, too. And then he and Caroline left and no one heard from them in nearly five years."

Elena realizes her hands are shaking only when Stefan reaches over and covers hers with one of his, giving it a comforting squeeze – or as comforting as it can be in that situation.

She turns on the couch and looks back at Damon. "Kidnapping Caroline is a really stupid idea. We need to think of something else."

"Or…" Stefan begins to say, surprising her. "It might just be so stupid, it could actually work. We won't torture her. We kidnap her and we kill her. Just like that."

"Just like that?" Katherine almost wants to laugh but it's just too idiotic – even for her. She sets her glass down and stands up. "If you are even thinking of doing anything to Caroline to get to Klaus, I am getting as far away from Mystic Falls as possible before that happens. None of you will survive that."

…

A/N: This is the first long "Klaroline" story I have written, normally just writing short drabbles, so I can't thank you enough for reading and embracing this story and commenting and leaving feedback. I had no idea how you would accept a dark Caroline and her relationship with Klaus.

THANK YOU so, so much for reading and please, comment! It really means a lot to me and I hate that so many read and only a few can take the time to comment - unless it's truly awful and no one is telling me that.