He wanted to kick himself. Hey? That was the best he could come up with?
"You look nice." He added
She looked down and flushed with embarrassment. All there was to wear were his t-shirts and sweatpants, and she had taken to just wearing the shirt part since he left. She tugged at the hem, it barely covered her ass.
"Oh, um." She stumbled, finding herself growing redder. Almost as red as that patch on his shoulder. Wait, what? Was that blood?
"You're bleeding!" She squeaked out.
He looked over and saw the stain seeping though his shirt. A stitch must have popped.
"It's nothing." He shrugged.
"It's not nothing." She said, repeating the words Nik had said to her when she fell at the hotel. She grabbed his hand and pulled him to the bed to sit down. She started to pull his shirt off so she could get to the injury.
He sighed as her hands grazed his skin. She noticed it and tried not to touch him so much as she pulled it the rest of the way off, being extra careful around the injury.
She rested an hand on his chest as she leaned closer to look at the blood soaked bandage.
"Your turn" He suggested, pulling at the hem of the long shirt she was wearing.
She swatted his hand away. "Stop."
"Fair's fair."
"I'm just trying to get a closer look at your injury. Besides, I'm not wearing anything under this."
His mouth hung open and his eyes wandered over the loose t shirt she was wearing, imagining himself pulling it off. Nothing under it. She was wearing his shirt with nothing under it.
Caroline avoided his gaze and took a step back. "I didn't know you were coming back right now, I would have put more on." She muttered, looking away from him.
She adjusted her focus to the bandage, carefully pulling it off. The gash on his shoulder looked terrible. There were stitches running across it, but it looked as if two had ripped out. It was still bleeding.
Thick droplets of blood were leaking out of the opening. It wouldn't stop unless it was sewed up again. He looked over at it and started to get up from the bed. She pushed him back.
"Where are you going?"
"I have to sew it shut."
"No. Stay there, I'll do it."
"Caroline, you don't have to."
"Yes I do." She snipped, rummaging through the cabinets for the first aid kit. She pulled out the supplies. Antiseptic, bandages, tape. There was a little clear plastic box that held a few very sharp looking needles and some thread. She sat on the bed next to him and lined everything up. "Ok, antiseptic first."
He nodded and grabbed a handful of the blanket next to him, anticipating the sting. She dabbed it on with a cotton ball and jerked away when he let out a pained grunt.
He wrapped an arm around her back, trying to make her less afraid. She was acting like he was going to hit her or something.
"It's ok, you can keep doing it." He said.
She dabbed again, cleaning the rest of the wound, and he tried to keep a straight face, but she felt his arm tighten around her.
She looked down at the needle and thread. "Ok, I guess the next part is.."
"You haven't done this before."
"No"
"I can do it myself"
"I'll do it. Just tell me what to do"
She threaded the needle and knotted the thread. He pointed to the spots where she should push the needle in and out on either side of the gash. She positioned the needle, took a deep breath and pushed.
It wasn't going in.
"You have to push harder." He said.
"It's going to hurt."
"Yes. Have some fun with it. Revel in my pain."
"I'm not having fun with it. Thats not why I wanted to help."
"Why are you helping?"
"You helped me when I was hurt, even if the reason why you did it was fake, you still did it."
He nodded. There was a chance. She didn't hate him completely.
"Ok, this time press harder, The needle has to actually go through in order for this to work."
She bit her lip and pushed it though. He winced a little but tried not to let it show. Her stomach did a little flip when she looked over at his face and saw that he was in pain. It made her feel awful to have to be the one to push the needle in, but it needed to be done. She paused and waited for him to nod that it was ok to continue before re doing the second stitch. She got through the second stitch quickly and knotted it. Looking over her work, she dabbed away the excess blood and cut some gauze to cover the area. She felt his arm around her loosen a little bit while she taped a square of gauze on him and his face relaxed a bit.
He traced the bandage she had just applied and looked back at her. "Thank you."
She smiled and nodded.
He decided to press his luck by asking a question. "Why are you being so nice to me? I thought you hated me."
She shrugged.
"Do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Hate me."
"I'm not answering that question."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't know. If I do or not."
"Oh."
They sat quietly for a while. She thought about how to figure out her answer and he thought about ways to convince her not to hate him.
"Tell me the truth." She said.
"The truth about what?"
"Everything. Tell me the true story about you. How you ended up here."
"Why do you want to know?"
"So I can decide. If I really hate you or not."
"How will you know if I'm telling you the truth?"
"You just have to." She pleaded. "Please. No more lies. Just tell me who you really are."
"You know who I am."
"Not really. I still don't understand how much of what I know about you is true. I still feel like you're two different people."
"Can't you just be ok with not knowing?"
"No. I can't do this without you being honest with me. Theres so much about you I don't know."
"I don't want you to know, I never wanted you to know these things about me. It doesn't mean I don't really care about you."
"That doesn't make any sense. How can you like me and want to hide things from me?"
"Because I liked how you looked at me. Before you knew, you looked at me like you weren't afraid of me. I wanted to keep that."
"Just tell me, please."
"You'll hate the answers."
"I need to know. I can't tell you how I feel about you unless I know who you really are."
"Ok." he nodded. "What do you want to know first?"
"Did you kill your mother?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
He took a deep breath and dove in to the story. He had never told anyone other than Emily and his siblings the whole story. He ended up telling her more than just what happened that night. He went thought the whole story of how he ended up on Emily's doorstep as a frightened teenager and she turned him into a hardened killer, how she became a surrogate mother to him after that night.
He told her about how he lost years of contact with Elijah and Kol because they both blamed him for their mother's death, but how Rebecca never wavered in her support for him, and eventually was the one to get her brothers to speak again.
He told her the story of how Becca gave him the scare of her life when she snuck off to Budapest with Kol when she was 17 and how she ended getting kidnapped. He had to go in and drag her out, and she saw him kill her captors. The incident had changed her, making her more suspicious and hardened, and it had driven a wedge between him and Kol.
She sat and nodded, not showing any expression. Occasionally she would ask him to elaborate, or talk about certain events, but mostly she just listened.
"Why did your father hate you so much?"
"He wasn't really my father. My mother was with someone else. He hired those four men I just hunted down to kill the man - my biological father I suppose - with the odd request that they just kidnap him and let Mikael do the actual killing. I guess he impressed them, because he became part of their pack after that."
"He hated you for something you had no control over? Because you weren't his child by blood?"
"He was prideful, and I was a stain on his ego. I brought shame on him by simply existing, and he made sure to remind me of that every day of my life."
"Thats the only reason he came after you?" She asked.
He gave a sheepish smile. "Well, a few other things account for that as well. See, my siblings all eventually chose me over him. Except for Finn, of course, who chose none of us. And then there's the part where I ended up in the same business as him, and I'm much better at it."
"Cocky much?"
"I'm still alive, aren't I? The better killer is the one who doesn't get themselves killed."
She shook her head in disbelief.
"Do you like killing people?"
"Yes."
She felt a shiver run down her spine. She had asked for the truth, but he was right, she hated the answer.
"How can you say that?"
"Because it's true. I like doing my job."
"But they're people."
"Not all people are the same. It's not like I would..." He reached out to her but she flinched away. "Caroline, I would never do anything to you. You're safe with me."
She looked back at him, afraid and not entirely convinced. He hated it, that look. It was like the one Becca had given him, when he pulled her away from the lifeless bodies of her kidnappers. She had looked at what he did to protect her and saw him differently. It was easy to convince his sister that family was different and that he would do whatever it took to protect her, but how could he make Caroline the same promise and expect her to believe him?
"Ok last one."
"Alright?"
"If I didn't find out about what you really did for work, would you have ever told me?"
"Probably not for a long time. I would have to be sure I could trust you to keep it a secret. And I would hate telling you, because I liked the way we were when you thought I was a normal person. I would have wanted to keep that for as long as possible. But eventually I would have told you. As much as I liked being someone else with you I didn't like lying to you."
She just nodded again, taking in all the information.
He tried to read her, but it was difficult to see how she felt about it all. She kept her voice even and her face expressionless, except for when she returned his soft smiles that would creep up whenever he talked about his siblings.
"So what now?" she asked.
"Well, there isn't any immediate danger anymore. Mikael and the four men he hunted with had all burned a lot of personal and professional bridges. They would kill and die for each other, but I doubt very much anyone else would kill on the behalf of one of them."
"Ok."
"So I just need a night to rest, then in the morning, I'll take you to the others, and get you all on a plane back to the resort. You'll continue your lives as it was. I expect Becca will want to go out there with Stefan as well."
"What about you?"
"I don't know where I'm going. I have a month off work. I guess I can go anywhere."
"Where do you want to go?"
"Are we still doing the thing where I have to give you the honest answer?"
"Yes. Honest answer."
"You'll hate it." He warned.
"Tell me anyway."
"I want to go wherever you are."
She shook her head and looked away from him. It was such a Nik thing to say.
"Let's just go to sleep. You probably need a lot of rest." She said.
He pulled off his shoes and lied down next to her, hesitantly wrapping an arm around her after she flipped off the light and settled against him. She didn't push it away.
"I don't hate you." She said softly.