Chapter 11: If I Stuck My Tongue Out, Would You Bite It?
"Please tell me Stefan is wrong and that you didn't go to D.C. to visit Major Cripkey!" Caroline begged her boyfriend.
Her blond curls had gone wild on her head after the run here to meet him and her green eyes looked at him with the most pleading look he had ever seen over his thousand years. Not one of his victims had looked this vulnerable.
Okay, maybe one person had been giving him that look, his ex-girlfriend, but he never wanted to think of her again or even hear her name so she didn't really count.
Caroline looked so cute and sad and vulnerable that all he wanted to do was to take her in his arms and comfort her, but he knew that he could do that. That gesture would tell her something that wasn't true. That gesture would make her think that he killed Phil, an action he wasn't guilty of, this time.
So instead of giving in to the so strong urge he felt, he just looked at her in a try to make her understand that her friend's death wasn't his fault.
"I can't do that love, but I can promise you that I did not kill him!" Klaus answered, trying to clear this mess up.
He should never have gone there. Why did he always have to punish people when he thought they hadn't obeyed him?
Okay, that question might have a very reasonable answer; just like any other parent, he wanted his children to respect him and obey him and just because they weren't his biological children he still wanted them to do that. Respect and obey him that is.
The hybrids were like his children, they were his creation and therefor basically also his children. They were turned by his blood, so it's pretty much the same thing, right?
No, that question was easy to answer, Phil had been one of his children, a child who had disobeyed him and therefor needed to be punished. The hard question was 'would Caroline understand?'
Would she? Would the woman he was so extremely, completely, heart breakingly in love with understand why he had done what he did? She hadn't before. But that was before. Before all of this happened, before she caved in and let her emotions get the best of her.
"But you were there." Caroline whispered, whishing she could believe him. But she just couldn't. He had hurt her and her friend one time to many for her to trust him this time.
"Please Caroline," He begged. "You got to believe me when I say that I did not kill him! "
"I'm sorry Klaus, I just can't." She sobbed.
He lost it; all self-control he'd ever had not to get angry at her just ran away.
"DAMIT CAROLINE! WHY CAN'T YOU JUST TRUST ME ON THIS?!" He yelled and regretted it the second after.
The pleading look in her eyes disappeared and was quickly replaced by anger and fear when he picked her up and threw her across the room after ripping her throat open with his teeth and feeding of her.
He didn't know what he had done before he saw her face.
"Oh, God" He breathed when he realized how badly he had messed up. "Caroline…" He rushed over to her and tried to help her up.
"Don't. Touch. Me." She said with a stone hard face, got up on her own and took a step back.
"Caroline… Please… Just let me explain it all." He pleaded.
Klaus tried to get closer to her but got saw a glimpse of the fear she felt for him in her eyes when he took a step towards her.
All colors went from his face in a split second and he just stood there. She was afraid of him. What he had done just seconds ago had scarred her so deeply that she might never recover from it.
He could see that in her eyes already. This might just be the thing that would tear her apart from him forever.
"Please Caroline…" He kept begging.
"Fine." She gave in. "I'll listen to your so called explanation." She ran to the other side of the room again and put a hand up when he tried to follow.
"But only if we stay on opposite sides of the room."
Klaus felt his non-beating heart fall down to his stomach when he realized just how big those scars he had created were. And they weren't even scars yet, more like 4 inch wide open wounds.
"Okay." He said and sat down on the armchair next to what was left of the couch.
He looked up at her standing on the other side of the room, again with the stone hard face, leaning with her back to the red wall and arms crossed over her chest.
She looked very serious and if he didn't know better, he would just think she was having a bad day or being that kind of mad at him that she soon would get over. But he could see the pain behind her cold façade.
"So two days ago, I got a call from one of my hybrids, Major Phil Cripkey…" He started.
"Wait." Caroline interrupted. "Phil was a hybrid?"
"Yeah, haven't I told you that?"
"No." She said abrupt, telling him with the tone of her voice that she wanted this conversation to be over and that he should hurry up with his story if he wanted to tell it.
"Well sorry for that, Love." He sighed and tried to find a better way to explain it all.
He knew that she wouldn't believe him whatever he told her, she was too angry and too afraid of him right now. But he also knows that if he wanted a slightest chance of her forgiving him, he had to tell the truth, so he did.
He told her the whole story from his heart, with the hope that she would forgive him when the wounds had healed and the scars were repaired.
He didn't care how long it would take, they had forever, she just had to forgive him for his poor lapse of judgment.
"My hybrids are like my children," he began in a second try, and she looked surprised up at him. She hadn't expected this version of him telling her his story. She had never in a million years expected this man to explain it all to her, this man who was so unfamiliar to himself.
"And I need you to know that before I'm gonna begin my story, I need you to keep that in mind while I tell you all of this, because it's going to be long and you should probably sit down."
He watched her patiently as she slowly slid down against the wall and sat down on the floor, still in the same cold, stiff position as she had been keeping up when she was standing.
"Just tell it Klaus so I can get out of here."
She penetrated his skull with her eyes.
"Like I said, this story is going to be long, so just keep remembering what I said about my hybrids. This story will explain why and a lot more."
She kept staring at his forehead.
After trying to stall the moment for as long as possible, Klaus finally told her. Everything.
"…And that's why I would never kill Phil Cripkey."
"So your eight hour long explanation for why you were in D.C. is something I easily can summon up in a couple of few steps?" Caroline said eight actual hours after he started his story. He said it was going to be long but boy, did she not expect to miss a whole school day for this shit.
"N-no." He mumbled.
"1." She said to prove her point and put up a finger to count the steps.
"You had a crappy human life with a crappy family that went even crappier after getting turned into vampires.
Newsflash! I already knew that, it's kind of public knowledge, you know."
Caroline grinned meanly towards him.
"2."
She put up a second long, gorgeous finger.
"You tried to fill up that empty hole in your life you got from that traumatizing childhood, with 'kids' (aka hybrids) who would adore, obey and worship you forever.
Another newsflash! Everybody kinda knew that too."
"I get it, I get it. My life's story isn't as secret as I thought." Klaus interrupted but got stopped by Caroline's hand which was put up in the air, in a simple gesture, to silence him.
"3. You fell in love. You were happy. She betrayed you." She continued.
"Oh how sad for you." She said sarcastically.
"Now let's see… Where was I..? Number four, right?" She coked her head and twisted her face into an almost evil looking grin.
"4. You walked around miserable on planet Earth without anybody since almost your whole family was daggered, let me just add 'by you' to make you sound even more like a douchebag.
5. You finally found what you had been looking for, your hybrids, and then they started to disobey you, starting with my ex-boyfriend. You got so tired of it that you decided to give them a really horrible punishment every time they didn't do as you pleased."
"You're right, I do sound like, what did you call me? right, a douchebag."
"A, a, a…" Caroline waved her finger sideways in front of him. "I'm not finished yet."
She put down her finger again when she was sure that he wasn't going to interrupt her again.
"6. Innocent Major Phil Cripkey married someone who turned out to be a werewolf who manipulated him into getting free from your sire band. So when you found out why he had been out of town for so long, you traveled to D.C, drained his body as a punishment and a warning, and then you left him lying there with a slow IV of blood so that he would recover after a month.
"7. You left him there. You left him there for someone to change the IV with blood to gasoline instead.
You left him there to die."
"No, Caroline, I didn't kill… "He stopped his sentence. "Wait, did you say 'someone else to change his IV'?" He gave her a relieved look.
"Yeah, cause let's be honest here, it's not really your style to fill someone up with gasoline and also; I've been sitting here for over eight hours, listening to this crap, so I'm pretty sure that if you wouldn't lied, you wouldn't have started telling me everything."
"It's nice to know that you believe me, Caroline" He said and went to her side of the room.
"Wow, what are you doing?" She said and the coldness and hatred that had slowly eased up a bit under the eight hours of storytelling was suddenly back.
"Just because I said that I believe that you didn't kill Phil, doesn't mean that I've forgiven you."
"But please Caroline…" He begged as he reached up to gently stroke her cheek.
"DO NOT TOUCH ME!" She yelled.
She calmed herself down, trying so hard to keep her façade up, but reality was; she was terrified of him.
"You're always going to be monster, no matter what you did or did not do this time.
"I'll see you around, Beast." She muttered and then she was gone.