La route chante

by theviolonist

[sequel 'it takes a while to settle down'] Revenge is a tricky business. (After Tyler is mysteriously murdered, Caroline goes back to Mystic Falls and attempts to work her way through grief, love, and revenge.)

3. Chapter 3

The room was still dark when she woke up. They hadn't bothered closing the blinds, or even the drapes, before going to sleep, and the night outside was a mess of blinking lights, one of them sometimes flashing closer than the others in urgent red, blue, white. Caroline drifted towards the window almost instinctively, swearing between her teeth when she stubbed her toe on the leg of Hayley's bed. Hayley wasn't in it. Caroline wondered absently if she'd left for good.

The strap of her top had slid during the night; the window was cold against her naked shoulder. Not for the first time since she'd left Vermont, Caroline wished she hadn't stopped smoking. She could have done with the taste of acrid smoke of her tongue right about now, she thought, but she didn't have the strength of getting dressed and tip-toeing downstairs to buy a pack. There was a tint of rosy gold at the edge of the sky, probably a hole in the ozone layer or something —it reminded Caroline of the summers in Mystic Falls, when she would wake up after a party in someone's garden, hair damp with dew, the whole world smelling of stale booze and freshly-open flowers. It seemed so long ago, but it wasn't, was it? Tyler had given her his jacket, nuzzled her neck, kissed her, just a graze of lips. He'd been afraid to say he loved her at the beginning, and she remembered thinking it was ridiculous, because who would be afraid of something so mundane in a world where vampires and werewolves were real? She'd said that after their wedding and he had frowned, as if he couldn't remember not being a hundred percent confident of his love in her. It had made her happy, so happy. She'd thought, this is the end of all that. She should've known better.

There was a weight on her chest, suffocating and almost-familiar, but for once Caroline didn't feel the need to cry. In fact, had she wanted to, she wasn't sure she could've. Not that anything was resolved, far from it: but for now she felt carefully numb, like something fragile protected by bubble wrap. Tomorrow she'd get Bonnie to call Jeremy; at least there were some advantages to this whole other side business, to knowing that dying was never really the end, not even the second time.

Her skin raised in goose-pimples when a hand touched the bare skin at her hip, but she didn't startle.

"Elena," she whispered, without turning around.

Elena set her chin on Caroline's shoulder. Her body, plastered against Caroline's back, was warm but not burning.

"Care," she said softly. "Are you okay?"

Caroline shrugged.

Elena gave a small, sleepy chuckle. "Sorry, stupid question."

Caroline thought she was going to say something else —Elena was like that, always trying to plug the holes, to fix the cracks with mortar— but she didn't. They stayed there for a while, as the city got progressively bluer and bluer, dragging their shadows into long, shapeless forms on the hotel carpet. It'd been a while since the last time she'd been to New York, Caroline realized, and she'd never really looked at the city, not like this; it felt strange and wide and unfamiliar, like a place in a movie.

"You remember when we said we'd go to New York together?" Elena asked after a while, threading her fingers at Caroline's belly.

Caroline didn't. They'd said they'd do a lot of things together. Some of them they had; most of them they hadn't. There's nothing like the revelation that vampires exist to set your life off-track. "When?"

Elena shook her head slowly. "I don't know. A long time ago. I think it was before…"

"Okay," Caroline said, not to say, I don't remember much of the before. Sometimes she had trouble remembering some of the after, too, because there was always some apocalypse getting in the way and she had to redefine her boundaries: after the Salvatores came to town, after I died, after Elena died, after Klaus, after Tyler. "What did we say?"

"We said we'd be rockstars. Play every night in a different city. You know, with, like, raccoon make-up and wild parties and I'd marry Johnny Depp and you'd marry Brad Pitt… things like that."

That got a reaction out of Caroline; a small, punched-out laugh. "That's stupid. Brad Pitt already has a wife. I don't really measure up against Angelina, El."

Elena shrugged. Caroline could feel the stretch of her smile against the skin of her shoulder, like she was happy. "Nothing happens if you don't dream," she said in a sententious Disney presenter voice, and Caroline burst out laughing.

She turned around, twisting in Elena's arms. With her back to the window, she pressed their foreheads together, looped her elbows around Elena's neck. "Well," she said, "here we are."

Elena's mouth twisted in a sad smile. It was a strange thing to see: when they were teenagers Caroline remembered being annoyed that Elena only had two settings, either that brilliant cheery grin or a disappointed frown. No nuances.

"You'll get through this," Elena whispered. Her eyes were shiny; the city lights crowned her with a toxic halo. "You're strong."

I have to, Caroline thought about retorting. It wasn't about strength, really, strength was another matter: this was survival, pure and simple. Of course she couldn't die just to accompany him: she was Caroline Forbes. It would have been out of character.

"I know," she said instead. Elena ducked her head and kissed her bare shoulder, and it was such a gentle, childlike thing to do, something that only Elena could've gotten away with, that Caroline couldn't remember how to breathe for a moment, didn't know what to do, press forward or thank her or pull away or scream—

"Am I interrupting?" a voice broke the silence.

Caroline turned around, already rolling her eyes. Hayley was standing at the door with a greasy bag of take-out in her hand, the contour of her silhouette delineated by the stale corridor light. She looked almost genuinely curious, or maybe just uncomfortable that she'd stumbled onto something so obviously intimate.

"Hayley," Caroline said in greeting, at the same time as Elena said, "You're still here," in a cold annoyed voice so shockingly different from the soft murmur she'd been talking to Caroline in just a few seconds before that Caroline had to turn back to her to check it was really her talking.

"Food," Hayley said instead of taking the bait. She handed Caroline the bag and sat cross-legged on Elena's bed, toeing off her shoes in the process. She still looked smaller than she had in New Orleans, Caroline noticed —like the city was dwarfing her, making her into a regular human being for once. But maybe that was what she wanted. Caroline wouldn't have said no to being human again, if it meant getting Tyler back.

"Thanks," she said. Elena grabbed the bag off her hands and started taking out the containers. They settled one of the hotel trays on Elena's bed and sat in a loose triangle, Caroline sometimes reaching out to right the containers out of habit. Elena smiled at her over Hayley's head, as though to say, nice to see you haven't changed, after all.

They ate in silence, Hayley with her shoulders slumped and in ravenous, hungry bites, Elena with prim fingers and Caroline almost mechanically. She wasn't hungry. She hadn't been hungry for days, except for those blood binges, whose sour taste still sat at the bottom of her stomach like a bad memory. She thought about starting up a conversation, but the only things to talk about were what they were planning to do, and she didn't really need to realize just how lost and unprepared they were. How was she even going to find Klaus? The city was so big, so messy and uncooperative. It would take days.

In the end it was Elena who jumped in, with her usual bullheaded bravery. "Do you even know where they are?" she asked Hayley.

Hayley shrugged. "I told you, they left. They didn't exactly leave a new address." She didn't add anything, wasn't one for pathos. Caroline tried to imagine the rest of the sentence: the city was burning.

"How helpful," Elena bitched.

"I didn't come here to be your tour guide," Hayley snapped back.

"No, you just used us as your taxi to freedom, right?"

Caroline titled her head, annoyed. "Children." It was a strange recrimination in her mouth: when she was younger she was never the most mature, always the one that had to be called to order, corralled.

"I just have to find…" Hayley swallowed, "then I'll be out of your hair and you'll never hear from me again. Satisfied?"

"Very. And how long is that going to take?" Elena asked, a little less arch.

Hayley shrugged again. "I'll figure something out."

"You can stay with us a bit," said Caroline, and when Elena glared at her she pretended not to notice. The truth was —the truth was, she didn't particularly look forward to being alone with Elena all the time, discovering how much they really had grown apart under that pretense of being the same seventeen-year-olds they had been, arrogant and full of false bravado and tight, so tight.

"Thanks," Hayley said, without indicating whether or not she was accepting, and she went back to eating.

The conversation veered to Bonnie. Elena had her address, and she fired off a text to warn her they would be coming by in the afternoon. Caroline had never been to her flat but Elena remembered —vaguely; she hadn't been there in at least a year— a small, cosy thing at the top of a building with a narrow elevator, decorated in earth tones, with a long window and a vertiginous view. Caroline waited for her to mention Jeremy, but she didn't.

When their lunch was cleared and the tray wiped down, Hayley dug into her duffel bag for a leather jacket that she swung on her shoulders and waved them a lazy goodbye before disappearing again to God knows where. She didn't need them, and Caroline found herself a little that she could just dive into the city without apparent fear, offer herself to the indifferent flow. But searching for something was a powerful incentive. She hadn't thought about Tyler almost all morning, and when it came back it filled her veins with fire, the urge to find out why it'd happened, who'd done it. Maybe she didn't need to be envious after all.

"We should go," she told Elena, already putting on her shoes.

"Now?"

"We don't have any time to lose. Once this is done, we can leave and really start looking for Tyler's—" the word stuck in her throat,murderer. Caroline swallowed. "You took the books, right?"

"Maybe Bonnie knows someone who can help us with them," Elena nodded. "Those symbols…"

"She has a coven, right? I mean," she paused a moment to think, "all witches have to have one?"

"If I remember correctly it's better to have your original one," Elena said, "but considering what happened… I don't know. When I came here she didn't want to talk about that." She didn't say, me neither but Caroline heard it in her tone, the weariness that came from every hour of every day being occupied by trying to figure out the supernatural handbook.

"Yeah, I get it," Caroline said. She did: for years there had been almost no mention of it in her and Tyler's house, just those days melting into nights when fangs and fur came out. But it felt organic, natural, in the forest behind their house, not like an infraction or something dangerous. Coming back to this constant doubt and insecurity was tiring.

Elena held out a hand. "Let's go, then," she said. When her eyes met Caroline's she realized that they were just as afraid, as tense and nervous and wound-up, so she took a breath and forced herself to smile.

The city was noisy, hot and loud. By the time they made it to the subway station they were sweaty and panting, and they remembered why they'd both chosen to live in the countryside. In the end Caroline always preferred her fantasies of big cities, skipping through crosswalks with her arms laden with shopping bags from expensive brands, shaking her perfectly expensive hairdo, to the real thing.

In the subway Caroline asked Elena about Stefan. "So what's going on with you two?"

Elena just shrugged. "He's been gone for a while, with Damon. Before that…" she screwed her face up, as though she couldn't remember, "he's good to me. He loves me." A beat. "And I love him. But it's… it's that endless repeating history, you know? Every time we do something it feels like we've done it before. When we fight. I'm not sure that's what eternity is supposed to feel like."

When they were teenagers Elena had never said the word, had never really acknowledged her own immortality, except when she had her humanity switched off; had continued to live her life as though she was just a teenager, a magnet for trouble with a vamp boyfriend and women who looked like her scattered through history.

"So what are you going to do?"

Elena gave her a tight smile. "As much as I hate to admit it, maybe Hayley's got the right idea. Maybe I'll just… not go back."

Caroline's first instinct was to scoff, say, that's stupid, why would you say that? In her head Elena and Mystic Falls were still intrinsically linked, still meant the same things.

"Really?"

Elena laughed. "No, probably not. Who knows how this," she gestured between the two of them, hand moving in the tight hot space between their bodies—the man behind her gave her a dirty look that she didn't see, "will end, anyway."

Caroline didn't say anything, and Elena gave her a look, a slight smile. "I know you think Stefan and I should be together," she said, and Caroline's head snapped up, surprised, before she remembered that she had been so adamant that they were made for each other a long time ago, "but it's never that simple."

"I don't… I mean, if the alternative is Damon, yeah, definitely," Caroline said. Elena laughed, and for a second Caroline felt incandescently angry, considered confronting her about it —but it wasn't the time or the place and she was tired, so tired. "You should do what makes you happy. Who cares about boys?"

The train swerved and Elena, who hadn't been expecting it, even with her superhuman instincts, fell forward into Caroline's arms, Caroline's back hitting the metallic doors. Being in the metro was an onslaught of sensations in itself —smells, tidbits of conversation, microscopic perceptions— but this was almost too much: Elena soft and pliable in her arms, her breath harsh, and that anticipated taste, soft and sweet and earthly and real, the best friend Caroline had lost at some unspecified time between one end of the world and the next. She breathed deep, tears choked in her throat.

"Sorry," Elena said when she righted herself, pushing her hair back behind her ear. Caroline wondered what she thought about all this. It was strange, for a girl like Elena, to be this opaque, this mysterious, but she always had been, since the beginning. Caroline couldn't help but think it was something that coursed through the doppelganger blood, that almost regal ability to face anything and come out without a scratch, hair unruffled. Her only breakdowns had to be spectacular, to the tune of fire and switches —there was no in-between.

And to be near her again was —strange. Because she had changed, who wouldn't have, after seven years: but Caroline couldn't help but see, superimposed over her silhouette, the glowing outline of all the Elenas she had been, the bitchy perfect Elena of the beginning of high school, whom Caroline used to hate out of a perverse sense of duty; the kind, gentle Elena who had helped her through heartbreak after her —many— break-ups with Tyler; the manipulative Elena who couldn't stop playing games, with Katherine and Damon and all of them; the Elena of Stefan-and-Elena, almost otherworldly before she was even truly supernatural, preoccupied and childlike and so happy; the cold Elena after she had turned off her humanity, startlingly similar to Katherine but with still, inside of her, something aching and honest when she looked back on herself as though she were someone entirely different and scorned her past naivety. All those Elenas, and the millions of others, seemed now like faulty tracing paper, the edges not quite coinciding to who Elena had become, what was, for all intents and purposes, the real her —and it was a heartache wrapped in another heartache to realize that Caroline hadn't seen the transition, how she had grown into present day-Elena, and that there was something infinitesimal and precious that she would never understand about her, even if they stayed together forever.

"I love you," she said suddenly, unprompted, because it was burning in her gut.

Elena looked up, surprised —then her face morphed into that expression that meant she thought it was a reaction to grief, Caroline trying to put her affairs in order just in case, and maybe she was right, Caroline didn't mind. As long as she said it.

"I love you too," Elena said simply. The man behind her looked like he didn't know whether he ought to be disgusted or mollified. Caroline smiled winningly in his direction just to screw with his head.

Bonnie lived at the very top of a building in Manhattan, not exactly fancy but not miserable either. The whole transition —the part Caroline was present for, anyway— had been a little weird: she had had to tell Abby she was back, and when she told the story she got that awful faraway look, because it wasn't and would never be a happy relationship, because Abby was the only parent she had left but for all her powers of forgiveness, Bonnie still couldn't forget that she'd abandoned her. So she had moved to the city, gotten a new name, completed university and now she had a job, like she was almost normal. When she phoned and Caroline asked she said that Abby visited sometimes, and Caroline couldn't help but think about being a mother and knowing you would outlive your child, imagine the two of them sitting at a table with nothing to say to each other.

Still —at her core, Bonnie was a happy, positive person, and in the grand scheme of things she was maybe dealing with it better than all of them. When they finally made it to her apartment building, its windows glittering in the brilliant afternoon sun, she answered the intercom in a cheery voice, opened the door for them and told them to come up. "I missed you," her tinny and distorted voice said just before the metallic click, and Caroline felt warmth surround her.

The floor of the elevator dipped a little when they stepped in, but Caroline swallowed back the ridiculous fear and only closed her eyes a little while it carried them to the fifteenth floor. When she opened her eyes Bonnie was in front of her, and Caroline hadn't expected the surge of affection she felt then, even though they'd seen each other not a week ago. Maybe she shouldn't have left at all.

Being newly-widowed gave her priority rights on all and any hugs, so Caroline let herself melt in Bonnie's slim, strong arms, clinging needily onto her shoulders. Bonnie hugged back just as energetically.

"Do I really look that bad?" Caroline asked when she pulled back. It was meant to be teasing, but she still pushed her hair back self-consciously.

"Yeah," Bonnie and Elena said at the same time, then flinched and laughed.

Caroline decided she didn't care. What she cared about was that they were together again, the Three Stooges, and even if it was for the worst possible reason, even if Tyler should've been with them somewhere in the background… it was okay. It would be okay, eventually. It was better than being alone —so much better.

"Well," she said, pushing her shoulders back, "you'll just have to deal."

Bonnie led them inside and Caroline made all the appropriate oohs and aahs about the place. It probably wasn't required given the circumstances but she wanted to, and it took her mind off the inevitable —besides, the place deserved it. It was small but Bonnie had somehow managed to make it seem wide and inviting, open with light nestling in every corner. For a second while she was standing in the middle of the living-room, basking in dusty light that would undoubtedly have been stuffingly hot had the A/C not been cranked up to eleven, it seemed to Caroline like she was physically incapable to be unhappy.

She looked at Bonnie with heavy-lidded eyes. "It's a nice place," she said. "Very House and Home."

Bonnie laughed. "Shut up."

Then Elena took Stefan's books out of her bag, and the moment was broken. "We brought these," she said, all business-like, setting them on Bonnie's low table. "We thought you might know someone…"

"Magical?"

"Well, someone who can read Quechua, if that even is Quechua."

"I think it is, though," Caroline chimed in. "If that means anything."

"I don't—" Bonnie said, then stopped. "I really want to help you," she said, looking Caroline in the eye. Caroline smiled, trying to look encouraging rather than desperate. What she wanted was to take Bonnie's hand and tell her, I want to kill whoever did this. I want to sink my fangs into them so deep that they won't be able to identify the remains. I want to take revenge until I have nothing left, until I am empty from all that guilt and sadness and despair. Please help me. But she couldn't say that, could she?

Bonnie seemed to deflate all of a sudden. She sat down on one of the low chairs, gestured at them to sit down too. They did, automatically more than out of any sort of conscious thought process, and they watched silently as Bonnie undid her ponytail and breathed, shielded by the wavy brown curtain of her hair, before she tied it up again.

"Do you want something to drink?" she asked. "I've got —tea, coffee, and wine, though I guess it's a little early in the afternoon for alcohol, right?" She gave a meager, aimless smile.

"I'll have coffee," Caroline said. "Do you want help making it?"

"Sure."

Elena elected to stay in the living-room, the books already open and spread on the table. Caroline wondered if she thought she could teach herself Quechua by will alone —this being Elena she probably had some plan none of them had thought of yet. Caroline followed Bonnie into the small, colorful kitchen, whistling when Bonnie handed her a bright red French press.

"Fancy," she teased. Bonnie stopped pouring Elena's grapefruit juice to roll her eyes at her.

They were silent while the coffee brewed. Bonnie poured herself a glass of water with too many ice cubes and proceeded to drink calmly, her back pressed against the wall. Above her head, at the left of the sink, was a minuscule window which let a tight stream of light enter the kitchen, almost like a spear.

It was probably what inspired Caroline to ask, thoughtlessly, "What's it like, being the anchor?" She froze as soon as she'd said it, willing herself to take it back.

Bonnie didn't seem to particularly mind, though. Her face did darken a little but she kept sipping her water, as though she was really thinking about it. "It's… strange," she decided on eventually. "You know, when I left Mystic Falls I wanted all that shit to be over, like you. I wanted to put it all behind me and start a new life. I thought New York meant that— there are so many people here, nobody knows me, I thought I could make myself into whoever I wanted and nobody would notice. And I was right, in a way." She took a gulp of water. "But you can't stop being a witch. It's…" she darted a look towards Caroline, "it's not like being a vamp, obviously, but you can't just leave it in a corner and forget it either. My grandmother, even my mom… I didn't know but they were preparing me for it, all my life. All those old books I found boring and crazy. It's—I was meant to be this from the start."

"But the anchor—" said Caroline.

"Yeah, it's something else." She didn't say anything else for a moment, like that was all the description it needed. But, "I never thought there were that many on earth," she said then. She laughed. "It's a stupid thing to say, of course I knew, the way everyone knows, in a kind of abstract way; but I never really understood what it meant, six billion people. With what, five percent supernatural, maybe ten? It's hard to ignore it, the fact that people die, when you can feel it passing through you every time." She took another sip of water. "I got used to it with time. It's been years. Sometimes I feel like it's weighing me down, like it's all I can ever be, a door for people who don't even know I'm there, who are too scared or tired or angry to even care. Sometimes I forget about it."

Caroline nodded. She didn't know what else to do. She'd asked, though, hadn't she? Now she had her answer, whether she wanted to hear it or not.

"What about him?" she asked, when she couldn't keep quiet anymore.

"Who?"

"Tyler."

Bonnie looked vaguely guilty for a second. "Oh. Of course. What do you want to know?"

"Did you… feel him? When he died?"

"I…" The coffee started bubbling in the press. Bonnie didn't move to turn off the gas, so Caroline did. For a second she considering closing her hand on the searing hot metal, to wake herself up. "No. It's not like that," Bonnie said. "It doesn't work like that. I can't always tell."

"But it's Tyler," Caroline insisted, her voice rising to a plea. "You knew him. You've known him since we were kids!"

Tyler was such an insufferable kid, Caroline recalled. She wasn't a prize either, but God, she remembered hating him so much, with his perfectly white sneakers and his superior little frown, the way he would always beat everyone at sports, the way he laughed, all big white teeth and curled lips… But maybe that was just the way it seemed now. When they'd left Tyler hadn't taken a lot from the Lockwood estate, because he said it held more bad memories than good in the end, but one of the things he had wanted to keep was an old scrapbook. They'd looked at the photos one night when it was raining outside, thunder making the windows shake, snuggled on the couch with ball glasses of red wine, laughing. It had seemed like such a mundane, normal thing.

"Sometimes they just… pass, Caroline. I can't always tell. If I could I'd have…" she let her sentence trail off, and Caroline wanted to shake her, demand that she explain. What? What could she have done? Bonnie said, "You remember when you arrived in Mystic Falls last week? I didn't know."

Caroline felt like she was crumpling, her whole body a scrap of paper in the hand of a giant. "But you could —you could call him, right? We did that before."

Bonnie hesitated. "Maybe. I'd need people to help me. And a medium."

"Jeremy," she ignored Bonnie's small tremor at the name—this just wasn't the time, "he still lives here, right?"

Caroline saw how would I know? hover on Bonnie's lips, but she took one look at Caroline and said, "Yeah."

"Can you call him?"

"Caroline, this is —Tyler will still be dead, you know. When you talk to him."

Caroline shook her head violently. Her hair flew in her face and stuck to her eyelashes. It was only when a tear fell on her hands that she realized she was crying. Shit. "I know that," she said. Her voice was trembling. Shit, fuck. Why couldn't she ever control herself? This wasn't—

A hand at the small of her back. "Care," Elena said, her voice so soft and gentle Caroline wanted to turn around and scratch her face off. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," Caroline said through the tears. "We're just talking."

"About what?"

Caroline opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Eventually Bonnie said, "Caroline wanted to… see if Tyler was still around. In ghost form."

"I know he is," Caroline said, in as steady a voice as she could. "I can feel him. I just want to talk to him."

"Why?" Elena asked, and for a moment Caroline wanted to slap her, ask her, wouldn't you want to talk to your parents if you could, to all the people who died for you? "It's just going to—" hurt, was the word Elena didn't say. It's just going to hurt more.

"Maybe he knows…" Caroline swallowed, "maybe he knows who killed him. He can help us avenge him. He'll tell us where to find the tribe."

I want to talk to him. I want to say I'm sorry. She kept it between her teeth.

"Can you do that?" Elena asked Bonnie. "Call him, I mean? Or summon him, I don't know?"

Bonnie bit her lip. "Not on my own. I'd need a coven, the help of the ancestors."

"Didn't you say you had people here?"

Bonnie didn't answer. She poured the coffee in two mugs and handed Caroline one. Elena took a sip of her juice and sighed. Caroline noticed the light from the little window was hitting her right in the chest, like a beam speared through her body. The Passion of Saint Elena.

"We don't always get along," Bonnie said after drinking. "I'd have to ask."

Caroline drank too, just to feel it burn down her throat. "How long is that going to take? We…"

"I don't know. If they don't want to be found I won't find them. They're not like the Mystic Falls witches. They help if they think they can get something out of it. When I came here at first they wouldn't even talk to me. I had to tell them about the Other Side."

"Look," Caroline said, agitated now, "I know you don't want to talk to Jeremy—" Elena opened her mouth to deny it, then realized it wasn't about her, or not just about her, "but wouldn't it be easier? I know Tyler's there, somewhere around me. Jeremy can just tell me what he's saying."

Something seized on Elena's face. "You didn't tell me," she said.

"What?"

"That you felt him."

"There are ghosts everywhere," Caroline said, but when she looked into Elena's face she realized she didn't understand. What she meant was: there are ghosts everywhere, and vampires and werewolves and witches, but we don't talk about it, do we? We just know.

"Well," she said, to close the discussion, "I do. And I think we should call Jeremy. If you just give me his number," she told Bonnie, "I'll go talk to him alone. If you really don't want to see him." She didn't look at Elena when she said that. Elena had never said —not to her, at least— that she wasn't talking to Jeremy anymore. They'd all understood, but it was implied, a secret lying under the skin. If Elena didn't talk about it it meant either that she was embarrassed, unsure or she didn't know how to explain —in any case, it was better to leave it alone. There were some questions Caroline wouldn't have wanted to answer either.

There was a silence.

"I don't have his number," Bonnie said after a while, like a concession. "He just comes around sometimes… if I'm here I buzz him up I do, we spend some time together." She didn't specify what 'spending time together' meant, and they didn't ask. "That's all."

"Don't you have any way to contact him?" At any other time Caroline would have been ashamed to sound so desperate, but loss was ringing in her head like a big gong, high and low at the same time, and she couldn't think. "Do you know some of his friends, or where he lives?"

Bonnie gave her a worried look. "Caroline…"

Elena joined in, "You should sit down," she said. She moved a little to the left and the beam of light transferred from her chest to the open air, where it dissolved. Caroline felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders.

"Just tell me," she said, but she let them guide her to the living-room and sit her on the couch, her mug in front of her on the table, in a nest of papers. It looked like Elena had maybe found something while she and Bonnie were talking.

"I can do a locating spell," Bonnie said. "I have some of his stuff. He leaves things everywhere." She glanced at Elena when she said the last part, to have it confirmed or maybe to apologize for knowing that kind of detail about Jeremy. Which was stupid, Caroline thought; they'd all known him since they were kids. Caroline remembered his room in Elena's parents' house, the way it always looked like there had been a storm, books with broken spines and messy clothes and homework in stacks of flying paper. He used to be rebellious in a quiet, repressed way, always brewing with anger. After the initial shock it had made sense that he would be a hunter, someone whose blood was genetically —magically— designed to boil.

"Do it," Caroline said.

"Now?"

Elena bit her lip. "We should wait," she said, and Caroline couldn't determine if it was because she was afraid of seeing Jeremy and because she thought Caroline would crumble under the weight of grief again.

"I'm not made of glass, Elena." It came out a little snappy, but saying it felt good, like releasing pressure from a cooker. "I won't break. I can take it. I just want to talk to him."

"You can't even know he's here for sure," Elena said.

"I know."

"She's right," Bonnie said, but it was difficult to determine who it was intended for. Elena took it for herself, of course.

There was more silence, and the sun was at window level and was a great big ball of fire filling every corner of the visible horizon, overwhelming. Bonnie blinked a few times. She looked thinner, Caroline noticed; not thinner than she was usually these days but thinner than she had been when they were in high school. She used to have good cheeks and nice, slim but substantial hips; now she was razor-sharp, her eyes a little sunken. Caroline felt bad for being so insistent, tried to imagine what it felt like to have one foot in an undetermined dimension filled with the ghosts of vampires and werewolves and who the fuck knew what kind of other creatures, and couldn't.

"I think I've got a bracelet of his," Bonnie said. "I'll go get it."

"Thanks," Caroline said, nodded and slumped on the couch, feeling drained all of a sudden. Elena followed Bonnie out of the room. Caroline heard them whispering in the narrow corridor, heard Elena saying, what if he isn't there? Bonnie didn't answer.

"I love you," Caroline said to the empty room, because she wasn't sure she would be able to say it to Tyler's face, even though he wouldn't be flesh and blood. She didn't expect the ghost to answer, but it still hurt when he didn't.

Bonnie came back and arranged the ingredients for the spell. She seemed less sure than she had when she did this all the time, and Caroline wondered how much this would draw on her own energy without a coven or ancestors to lend her power. She took Bonnie's hand over the table, interrupting her mid-movement.

"Thank you for doing this," she said. "I…" missed you, but they had never really been apart, had they? Except they had.

Bonnie nodded, her smile wide and generous. At least that hadn't changed. Caroline felt richer just for seeing it, like she had every time Bonnie had smiled at her since they were kids. She would be nothing without these girls.

When she started doing the spell Bonnie closed her eyes and color drained from her face. It didn't take very long; sand moved on the map until it stopped not far from Bonnie's apartment, at the blunt, dead end of a street, and stayed there, unmoving. Some form of recognition dawned on Bonnie's face, but she didn't say anything. She stopped the spell, clapped her hands to get the sand off her fingers.

"Okay," she said, standing up. "It won't take long. You can wait here. It's better that—" She didn't finish.

Elena looked like she was thinking of arguing, but didn't. So it was just the two of them again, once Bonnie had donned sunglasses and slipped out the door, the two of them in Bonnie's red and brown apartment with the giant sun blotting the view and tear tracks on Caroline's cheeks and that old bracelet of Jeremy's on the table, tarnished gold shaped like a wolf's mouth. Caroline's eyes fell on her coffee mug and she realized she hadn't drunk more than that first sip of it. It was probably cold now anyway.

Elena touched her hand. "Are you going to be okay?"

"Yeah," Caroline said. She resisted the urge to tear her hand away. Elena was only trying to help. Sometimes she knew how, and sometimes she didn't. Now that feeling of being sisters was mixed in with the feeling of not knowing each other very well, and it was strange, off-putting, like the ground was uneven and you couldn't be sure when you were going to step into a porthole. Elena used to never miss the mark when she really cared, but she was still talking to the old Caroline, the one with fruity lipgloss and long teeth she wasn't sure what to do with.

"How can you be—" Elena hesitated, but continued, "how can you be sure he's here?"

I'm not, Caroline thought, but saying it would make the fear real and she knew it would rear up in front of her and hurt her. So she said, "I just know, Elena. When you love someone… it's like there's a part of them that's hooked into your flesh, and it acts like a compass."

Elena nodded. "I get tired of it, though," she said. "Death never being definite. How are you supposed to mourn people if you're never really sure they're gone? How are you supposed to get any peace —or them?"

Caroline frowned. She'd never really thought of it like that, she realized.

"Your parents have peace," she said, taking a wild guess at what she thought Elena was thinking about. The subject came up at the most random times, but for Elena it always came back to that. Caroline knew she counted the years from that day, like it was her own personal birth of Jesus.

(Besides, came to her the afterthought, 'parents' encompassed a lot of people: Alaric and Jenna and even Isobel and John, all the people Elena had found and immediately lost, as though touching her—)

"Maybe," Elena said. "Maybe not. I mean, who's to say it's not the same thing with humans? Maybe we just don't know, we can't know. But if there's another side for us, why wouldn't there be one for them? And even a heaven and a hell, all that. There being a God doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore when you know everything that's running amok in the world."

"I guess," Caroline said, a little hesitant now. "Don't you think your parents would be in heaven, though?"

Elena shook her head. She looked angry, and Caroline regretted having started the conversation. She felt sick to her stomach, too, because that idea was so grim and pessimistic and unlike Elena, and because it was too easy to imagine Elena torturing herself with it, shut in the thick darkness of the Salvatore house. "Why?" she bit. "It's so arbitrary. It's not like the Other Side was created for any real reason, right, except to trap someone, and the rest of them, of us, they just end up trapped one way or another, when they die. You heard Bonnie when she found out. Some of them make it to the beyond, but they don't know how, maybe it's just an escape… not even that they're better. Don't you think that if there were a way out for the good ones Bonnie wouldn't have lingered? She deserved all the peace. But she didn't see the light, or whatever they call it."

There was a silence, then Caroline asked, "Did you ever ask her how it felt? To be a ghost, I mean?"

"I think she still is, in a way."

"You mean, because she's always half on the other side, or…"

"I just think a part of her never came back. What she believed in. She didn't tell me how it was like, but afterwards she told me it hurt. To always have people passing through her. She told me you can't ever stay yourself when you're the anchor, because there are moments you become everything, everyone at once…"

Caroline shuddered. "It sounds horrible."

"It's what it is," said Elena. "Didn't you find being a vampire horrible at the beginning too?"

Not really, Caroline thought. Thankfully Elena didn't seem to be waiting for an answer.

"Anyway," Elena said, but then she didn't continue and she was staring into nothing. She looked exhausted, very unlike herself in the hot sun, with her clean hair and clean young face on which hundreds of centuries worth of pain and tiredness had dropped which weren't there the second before. "God," she said, not seeming to realize how ironic it was of her to invoke that divinity whose existence she found so arbitrary and random, "I wish I smoked."

"Maybe I have—" Caroline started, even though she knew she didn't. She only ever stole cigarettes from people; that way it was easy to convince herself she really had quit.

"It's fine," Elena said. "I don't really want it. Just something to occupy my hands." She looked down at them and saw something she didn't like. Maybe they were trembling. Seeing her in pain like that, a pain Caroline couldn't assuage, suddenly reminded her she had been a good friend of Tyler's, too. For a while in high school, before the whole vampire thing, Caroline had even thought he had a crush on her and had told Elena to go for it. Maybe if she had none of this would've happened.

There was a silence and Caroline thought, this is my slot: this is where I should talk, say that her parents are in heaven, say that God exists and is benevolent and loves us and we'll be happy eventually, forever. But Elena was the optimist, and Caroline had just lost Tyler. There wasn't a drop of optimism left in her, only rage and what hung back, the crazy desperation of what would be left when that rage was spent, lacerated on someone's chest the same way they had lacerated Tyler's. This was what terrified her. So there was no room left for optimism: only rage, desperation, and fear.

"I'm sorry," she told Elena. She meant, I'm sorry this is the best I can do.

Elena looked her in the eye. "It's okay." She took in a breath. "I miss him too, you know."

Caroline tried to find a way to say, sorry we left you behind. It hadn't felt like it at the time, had felt like they were barely making it out alive; but maybe that was what it had been. "I thought he had a crush on you in high school," Caroline said idly, to say something.

"Tyler?" Caroline nodded, smiling slightly from the corner of her mouth. "Really? Why?"

"I don't know. He was always staring at you. Everyone was always staring at you. You were…" beautiful, she meant to say, but Elena was still beautiful, more beautiful even, if you looked at her right. "Everyone loved you."

Elena laughed. "Yeah, that's why I spent most of my high school career trying to avoid getting killed."

"That's how vampires show their affection. Don't you know that by now?"

She was joking, except she wasn't; when she thought about it these days she couldn't even be mad at Katherine for killing her anymore. It had been strangely merciful: a pillow and that sweet last exhale while she had still been sleeping, then waking up —scared, yes; terrified —but in a hospital where it was easy to find blood, not in a grave forced to dig her way out, not cut open on a cold morgue slab. And her life since had been… not easier, really, but she couldn't imagine it differently, without the rush, without the way everything always felt alive around her, her perceptions increased and sharp sometimes to the point of hurting. Sometimes she tried to imagine loving someone whose beating heart she couldn't hear quieten before they went to sleep and felt hollow.

"You know," Elena said, "we almost kissed once."

"Who?"

"Tyler and me." To Caroline's arched eyebrow, she reassured, "Almost. It was before you were together, we were drunk, it was at that party… I don't know. Maybe you're right, maybe he did have a crush on me."

"He did."

"He married you, though."

"And look where that got him."

There was no laughter in Elena's eyes when her head snapped up. Caroline thought, I wish she could let this go. "Caroline—"

"I know, it wasn't my fault. But—" she stood up and started pacing, only realizing it when she was in the middle of the room, standing in the pool of sunlight, "he's dead, Elena. And I can't do anything about it, and I can't help but think that every tragedy in his life was because of me. Klaus being after him. The hybrid debacle. His mother's—"

"None of that had to do with you," Elena said. "It had to do with Klaus being an asshole and… look, you can't think like this. He loved you." She swallowed. "He loves you, still, wherever he is now. It was always you and him."

It was never me and him, Caroline thought, even as she let herself be hugged by Elena, swallowed in her embrace with the sun dripping on her back. We fell together by chance. And now he's dead.

"He wouldn't have wanted you to blame yourself," said Elena. Caroline wanted to scream, how do you know? How do you know what he was like? You weren't the one who lived with him for years, and loved him, and didn't love him, and had to watch as they loaded his body into a truck, and had to look at his torn-out heart. You don't know how selfish he was, and cruel and violent, like you, like me.

She burrowed her head in Elena's neck. "Maybe he'll tell us," she said, very softly. If Elena heard she didn't show any sign of it.

—

There was a knock at the door. Caroline couldn't understand why they Bonnie was knocking on the door of her own apartment. She got it when she looked back at Elena, bent over the books and studying them with more focus than they probably required: Bonnie was pacing herself, trying to make this as painless as possible for everyone. It would hurt anyway. This was the way things were now: it was more about cushioning the fall than trying to avoid falling altogether, since that was already inevitable.

"I'll get it," she said. Elena nodded without looking up.

Truth was, Caroline didn't know what to think of Jeremy: nice enough —always a boy, because he was Elena's little brother— but more trouble than he was worth in the end, for Elena, for Bonnie, for all of them. And there had always been something vaguely off about him since the death of their parents and then, after that, since he'd found out about his hunter status: the knowledge that there was violence coiled right under his skin, only waiting for a moment of inattention to leap at them and attack. Hunters rarely missed, Caroline knew that, but it was hard to make coincide with that dark-haired boy with traces of baby fat on his cheeks, the rebellious frown he used to serve Elena when she forced him to go to school.

She opened the door, and Jeremy was standing there, Bonnie at his side. Caroline noticed her fingers were ringing his wrist, as though to hold him back. For a second, irrationally, Caroline thought about shutting the door in his face. It wasn't too late: she could still pretend she hadn't seen him and hope Elena hadn't seen the too-familiar outline of his body, the puppy eyes, the adolescent slump of his shoulders even though he was, what, twenty-three now? But they weren't running away from things, not anymore. Besides, she needed him; she was the one who'd asked for him, after all.

"Hi," she said, dipping in quickly to hug Bonnie. "Thanks for doing this."

Jeremy nodded and smiled, not to her but to someone behind her, maybe Elena and maybe somebody else, floating in the air between their bodies. Is it crowded with ghosts? Caroline wanted to ask.

Elena came closer: Caroline could feel the tension radiating off her body, a skittering in her pulse. She opened her arms. Jeremy didn't even hesitate before he stepped into her embrace; they sighed, worryingly in-sync after all this time. Elena's hand fit at the nape of his neck, fingers tangling in too-long, slightly greasy hair.

"Hey," she said, so softly Caroline wasn't sure she was supposed to hear. She couldn't really help it, though. "Missed you."

There was a beat; Jeremy's hands pressed too hard against Elena's shoulder-blades, in a bruising way that would have hurt had Elena been human. Caroline remembered him saying, eyes dark, trying not to look at Elena, I want to kill her every time she's near me. It was hard to not feel pity for them when they loved each other so much. We're everything to each other, Elena had said to Bonnie and her more than once, like it was just the way it was, a fatality; we don't have a choice.

Everyone back in Mystic Falls had known that Jeremy and Elena were a little too close for siblings, a little too codependent. They had turned a blind eye because there were reasons, attenuating circumstances, their parents were dead and it had to be an orphan thing, didn't it, clinging to each other like the air between the two of them was being suckered away by an invisible force?

Caroline had thought it would abate when Elena started dating but it hadn't, not really. For one thing Elena had dated like she'd been doing for her whole life, with the same elegant, smiling carelessness. It had seemed unfair to Caroline, who always cared so much about everything, the way Elena waded through the waters of relationships like she didn't even notice the turnovers, Matt fading into Stefan fading into Damon with only occasional tremors, a few pauses to take care of herself, shut off her humanity while she dealt with the wreckage of her burnt-down house. When Jeremy had moved to New York after the whole hunter debacle Caroline hadn't been able to help being relieved: it was almost as easy to picture him getting lost in the noisy bustle of the city and forgetting to call Elena every day until it didn't matter anymore as it was remembering the two of them hanging over each other at every town fair for sixteen unbroken years.

When they let go of each other Elena stumbled back a little. Jeremy put a hand on her arm to steady her and she smiled up at him, lightning-quick. Caroline felt like she was intruding, but—

"Can you see him?" she asked when she couldn't keep it in anymore.

Jeremy's eyes moved from his sister's face to her. "Bonnie told me you felt his presence. Is that true?"

"I think —yeah, I do. I know he's here."

"Not right now," said Jeremy matter-of-factly. Caroline tried not to let her face fall. "But they wander off sometimes. We can wait a little if you want."

His hands twitched at his sides. Caroline wondered if the urge to kill her was as strong as it was towards Elena or if blood ties just made things worse.

"Are you sure you can still… I mean—"

"Yeah," Jeremy said. After a moment, he elaborated, "Sometimes ghosts linger for a long time. When I go back to Mystic Falls I talk to Bonnie's gram."

Elena's head snapped up. "When did you—" she started, voice cold and betrayed.

"Just one day," Jeremy said, guilt flashing on his face. "It was a long time ago. I didn't… it wasn't a big thing."

"You couldn't even tell me?" Elena turned to Bonnie. "Did you know?"

Bonnie looked down, like this was everything she had hoped to avoid. "Look, he's right, it was nothing. He just didn't want to stir up trouble. You were busy anyway."

"Do you think he's going to come back?" Caroline asked.

"He can't have gone far," Jeremy said, sounding grateful for the interruption. Then: "What happened? I thought you moved to Vermont."

"We did. He—Tyler—apparently someone still had a bone against him. He was killed in the forest behind our house."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah," Caroline said. Maybe in time she'd learn to say thank you when people said that, but right now it just made bile rise in her throat. When Tyler came back he'd tell her it was okay.

"Can I help with anything?" Jeremy asked, and Caroline almost laughed, because she remembered him at thirteen, sullen and uncooperative, his head gelled in adorable spikes on his head. Hard to think he'd slept with Bonnie, too, and years ago at that. They were all so young still —it was easy to forget sometimes.

For some reason this brought her thoughts back to Klaus. There was no telling where he was at any given time, and being in such a gigantic city just made it harder to guess. Caroline had been intent on not following his tracks after the wedding, letting the outside world fade away: she had made her choice. Now it was coming back to bite her in the ass —figured.

They sat and waited. Bonnie stuck close to Jeremy's side, more out of habit, it seemed, than by any conscious decision; and Jeremy and Elena were staring at each other across the table like they were re-enacting Romeo and Juliet. Caroline's hands were itching in her lap; she wanted to put them around her mouth and shout-whisper to Tyler to come back, that it was rude to make people wait. Once she saw him she would— what would she say? Her heart thundered loudly. The others pretended not to notice.

They waited for hours. No one said anything, even when it started to become obvious that Tyler wouldn't come —wasn't there— wasn't— even when it became obvious that it wouldn't happen today. Jeremy didn't say he had somewhere else to go; he picked up one of the books and leafed through it, sometimes leaning over to Elena to whisper something to her, pointing to some symbol he recognized, though Caroline couldn't bring herself to care whether it was useful information or not. When he wanted Bonnie's attention he would touch her forearm with light fingertips, casually, like they were used to being around each other all the time. Or maybe they had picked up that dynamic back when they were dating and never really let go of it.

After a while of standing by the window and pretending not to panic Caroline slumped into the couch, toed off her heels, her body curled into a comma. She didn't let herself cry. Tyler will come, she told herself for the first five hours; then, as the others kept whispering out of respect for the dead, as if to trick them into coming closer, her hope started fraying at the seams and she focused on keeping awake, on not crumbling, not yelling.

To distract herself she started planning in her head the funeral they would have for Tyler once she and Elena came back from Peru. First Caroline would wipe the blood from her hands, lick the entrails from her fingers; then they would get to work. She doubted the coroner would surrender Tyler's body to her, if they even still had it, but in the end it didn't really matter. She would round up all their old friends, the people they had loved, and they would do it in the Mystic Falls woods —a concession, she thought, to how wrong they had been to believe you could ever get away, forget the place you were born. She would consecrate Tyler's soul under the thick-smelling pines, in the white mist, and then there would be a reception where they would tell stories of how wonderful he had been, how unjust his death— It was like a dream. In it Caroline wasn't sad, or angry, but pleasantly numb; she accepted everyone's condolences in her black dress and veil, like all the widows she had ever seen on TV, and there was no anger gnawing at her gut. Maybe she'd feel like this, once she—

"Maybe you could try," said Jeremy, spurring her from her reverie.

"What?"

They ignored her. Bonnie grimaced. "Maybe," she said. It was easy —too easy, Caroline thought; she could have concealed it better, for my sake— to see where she thought Tyler was: faded, disappeared, entirely gone, something to be given up on. But Caroline wasn't going to do that. He had to be somewhere. What was the point —what was the point of the Other Side if Tyler wasn't there?

"You know," Bonnie said hesitantly, to her this time, "they say that peace—"

"You'll try, right? You'll ask the other witches?"

Bonnie sighed. Elena bit her lip, probably to keep herself from making a comment. Caroline was grateful. "If you're sure," Bonnie relented.

"I am."

"Look, nothing guarantees they'll say yes. It doesn't—they don't do things just for friendship's sake, and if they did, the wouldn't do it for me. They don't know me very well, and they don't trust me, not to mention that you're not even from here—"

"They'll do it," Caroline said, meaning: they'll do it, or I'll hunt them down myself, break their necks and suck the marrow from their spines. "We'll make sure of it."

"Caroline, I'm not sure this is a good idea." Elena's eyebrows were furrowed: poor girl. It reminded Caroline of the Vermont policemen, sparing her tragedy a half-glance before moving along, walking away.

"Do you have anything else in mind?" Elena didn't say, you should just give up. She'd never been able to say things like that, hard things, things that hurt. "Thought so. We're doing it."

"Not tonight," Bonnie said, softly, a little chastising.

"No," Caroline agreed. "Not tonight. I need a bubble bath and a glass of wine." She let herself slump back into the couch. "Or like, a barrel of B positive."

There was a silence: not uncomfortable, but like a break in the atmosphere, an almost tangible moment where they stopped waiting. The tension in the room relaxed. If they had been a heartbeat, Caroline thought —and it was a funny thought, given that only two of them were technically alive, and that was being generous—, they would be comatose.

"I'm sorry," Jeremy said again. "Maybe he just stayed behind."

"Behind? Where?"

"Where he was killed."

"Why would he do that?" Why wouldn't he follow me?

Jeremy shrugged, and Caroline thought it must be hard to live surrounded by ghosts—he must understand more than he should, and not understand even more. "I think it's linked, or something. Some of them have—beefs. With the past. Things to care of, you know."

"I'm trying to find out what happened," Caroline said, then amended, "We're trying."

"I know, but maybe Tyler doesn't. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's not that. Maybe he just doesn't want me to see him. I don't think he liked me all that much."

"He liked you," Caroline said automatically, though Jeremy wasn't wrong: Tyler had considered him like a little brother for a while, but after they'd found out Jeremy was a hunter there had been a distance, Tyler's instinctive wariness kicking in. Tyler liked to see the world in black and white. Sometimes it had infuriated Caroline, and they'd fought about it, but it always came back to—

"Do you wanna go back?" Elena asked, setting a hand at the small of Caroline's back. It was a strangely intimate touch for people who hadn't seen each other in —well, years, but Caroline understood: this week had been like an accelerated crash course in life, every tragedy of existence crammed into those small 24-hour days. Maybe that was why she felt so exhausted all the time.

"Don't you want to—" catch up, she meant. "I can go back on my own. Maybe Hayley's at the hotel."

Elena curled her lip, her instinctual reaction whenever Hayley was mentioned; at the same time there was something like a glimmer of guilt in her eye. "About that," she said.

"What?"

"Wait," Bonnie said, "Hayley's still with you?"

Caroline remembered calling Bonnie from the road and mentioning the wolf in the backseat of Elena's car, Bonnie's bewilderment and polite disapproval. In fact, every time someone disapproved of their traveling together Caroline found herself liking Hayley more and more. Maybe it was just to spite the world, she reflected —but maybe it was for another reason, because Hayley was going from place to place and always unwelcome, always fighting, always making her way despite everyone. Caroline couldn't help but admire her a little.

She shrugged. "I told her she could stay with us until she found what she was looking for," she said. "She didn't have anywhere else to go."

"Some organizational skills," Elena mumbled, as though she hadn't up and quit her entire life to follow Caroline into what would most likely end up being a wild goose chase.

"What is she looking for?" Bonnie asked.

"Elijah. I think."

Jeremy's eyebrows shot up. He looked so much like Elena in that instant that it physically hurt, and Caroline had to turn away so she could breathe without his eyes on her for a second.

"What does she want with Elijah? I thought you said Klaus was in the city. Aren't the other Originals with him?"

Caroline considered telling her that they knew about as little as she did, but before she could Elena said, "She didn't tell us exactly what happened, but apparently they left her in New Orleans for some reason. Elijah seems to be here though, somewhere, or at least that's what Hayley thinks. She almost made us run over two members of her pack leaving, that's how eager she was."

"You must have heard about Klaus," Caroline told Bonnie, regretting that she was only thinking about this so late, "from the witches. There's no way he's been in town and not brokered some sort of deal with them."

"Or more likely some intimidation tactic," Elena couldn't help but contribute.

"I don't listen to gossip," Bonnie said. Caroline arched an eyebrow and she flushed a little, said, "I mean, they don't trust me enough with their business, and even if they did, I'm not interested. I've dealt with this enough when I was in Mystic Falls."

"We're living our own lives now," Jeremy said. Hearing him say 'we' felt out of place, unwelcome, but no one called him on it.

"Besides, even if I wanted their information, I think they know what happened with Klaus back in the day, with the hybrids and all that. It doesn't look great from the outside. They won't purposefully antagonize me because they're afraid of me, but I don't think they're going to offer me friendship bracelets any time soon."

"Makes sense," said Elena. Jeremy nodded and caught his own bracelet between two fingers. Helpless, Caroline watched as he communicated silently with Bonnie, raising an eyebrow to which she responded with a light smile, a peculiar sort of choreography Caroline didn't want any part of yet couldn't help but watch. Elena didn't seem to notice, though she probably did.

"I thought we could track her," she said.

"Who?"

"Hayley."

Caroline stared. "Why would we track Hayley? And how?"

To Caroline's amazement, Elena produced one of the charms Caroline had seen dangling from the handle of Hayley's bag in the hotel. It was small enough not to be missed in the tangle, a little silver thing with a half-moon dangling from it. Caroline stared some more.

Elena didn't even pretend to be sheepish. "I thought we could ask Bonnie to… you know. Look," she said when it became obvious Caroline needed some convincing, "she must have some leads if she's searching for Elijah, and it's not like she's going to share. Once she finds him he'll lead us straight to Klaus. You're the one who said the faster we took care of this the faster we could avenge Tyler."

Caroline bit her lip not to say she was the one who would take care of the revenge part. Elena was helping her, after all; had followed her, without asking for anything in return, not even an explanation.

"Not today," was all she said in the end; she couldn't take another disappointment. Elena looked ready to argue, but eventually she just stuffed the charm back in her pocket, content with her victory for once.

Caroline thought they would leave after that, but Bonnie persuaded them to stay for dinner —or rather, pizza, since they were all too lazy and wrung-out to cook. There was an uncomfortable moment when Jeremy realized he didn't have anything to do here anymore and extracted himself from their circle, all long limbs and toned, tense forearms he used to push himself up. He seemed choked-up in front of Elena —after their first embrace they hadn't talked much, just a few stray whispers here and there when they forgot themselves and glances when they thought the other wasn't looking. Eventually he dipped down, fast as quicksilver, and bracketed her head with one arm, her hair bunching up at the nape of her neck. From where Caroline was sitting it looked like desperation and the sort of love that can only exist between siblings, people who know each other too well and not at all at the same time, who spend their lives missing essential facets of each other.

"Our hotel—" Elena said when he released her and her hands slid from the small of his back, rattling off the address. He listened intently but didn't write it down.

"I'll see you," he told Caroline, after he had hugged Bonnie and pressed a kiss to her hair. He was reverent with her; that Caroline could accept. He gave her an awkward half-hug. "Sorry again. Tyler was a good person."

"Yeah," Caroline said.

He picked up the messenger bag that he'd left against the foot of the table and left the apartment without fanfare, polite and unobtrusive in a way it hadn't occurred to Caroline that he could be. She tried to picture him outside in the golden-lit New York streets and realized that she hadn't even asked what he was doing here, if he was working, studying, something. Maybe he'd found other hunters.

"Let's drink," said Bonnie, and Caroline forgot all about Jeremy Gilbert.

They made margaritas to go with the pizza; by the time it got there they were already thoroughly tipsy, salt like little broken diamonds everywhere, between their fingers and on the damp skin of their wrists because they'd decided halfway through that it was a good idea to try to do them like shots while they were at it. In Caroline's mouth was the flavor of crushed ice and mint, sparkling water with the sour aftertaste of tequila, the remembrance of Elena's thick, creamy blood when she'd dared take a sip, thinking it was oh so funny and looking at Bonnie all the while to see if she'd notice. Elena had liked it, too. Afterwards she had held her wrist like touching Caroline's lips had turned it to porcelain.

The pizza came and the delivery guy looked like something out of an underwear ad, one of those quasi-alarming New York improbabilities; Bonnie chatted him up while Caroline paid and when he left they made unsubtle innuendos about him, Elena laughing in her margarita like they were still sixteen, Bonnie's face lit up from the inside the way you only got to see if you were privileged enough to be her real friend. It was reassuring to feel that life could still be like this, light-hearted and fun and something you'd forget the morning after, a summer errand. For a second Caroline almost forgot that Tyler hadn't shown up. Was it absurd to resent him? Maybe; but she did. She couldn't help but feel he ought to have been there, if only to make it up to her for leaving her behind. In the church he had said 'til death do us part' and Caroline had thought —but it was a ridiculous, romantic notion— that they would die together, or not at all.

One good thing about New York, Bonnie said, as though there were plenty of others on the tip of her tongue, was that the metro was open all night —so when they left the sky was a mess of mauve and too-ripe orange and narcotic pink, the way light only got in big cities, dripping on the edge of the sky and onto the buildings. Bonnie kissed them at the door more effusively than she usually did, and she hugged Caroline hard enough to break her bones, said in a drunken shout-whisper against her collarbone, "You'll be fine." Caroline wasn't so sure, but it was gratifying that Bonnie thought so —Bonnie who, after all, could have written the book on how to be fragile and breakable and still survive, how to make strength out of suffering.

The metro was deserted, save for a few roamers and a girl at the very end of their wagon, nose buried in the book, casual in a way disavowed by the tense set of her shoulders. She couldn't be a lot younger than them —than them when they'd died— and it was a strange thing, thrilling, to realize that they had no reason to be afraid. It took so much more to hurt them now than an inebriated stranger; you had to really think about it, plan ahead. Caroline flexed her hand. Her teeth felt like they were burning, trapped in their precious casing of flesh, and she pinched Elena's sleeve between her fingers, to tell her to look. Elena did. She understood; she nodded. They crossed the wagon and sat next to the girl. She shot them a surprised, fearful look, but after a few stations her shoulders relaxed a fraction.

They didn't get off at their stop, too preoccupied by the surreal experience of the train at night, every small signal flashing in the darkness and the names of the stations blurring on the wall opposite, barely visible through the dirty windows, or maybe mindful of the girl. When they finally got off and took a train in the other direction it was even quieter. In the street Elena's small heels printed a dull thud on the concrete when she walked. On the surface the city was like a prowling cat, quiet with a sense of oncoming brutality, still illuminated. Caroline amended the saying in her mind: it wasn't that the city never slept but that it always slept with one eye open, wary like a predator lying in wait.

In the hotel night staff greeted them tiredly as they tipped against each other in the corridor, pretending the alcohol had gotten to them. Caroline expected to see the room empty when she came in but it wasn't: Hayley was a bundle in her bed, this time under the sheets. The line of her back moved slightly when they opened the door, the only sign that she had heard them. Elena didn't comment. She took off her jacket and it fell in a heap on the floor. Caroline resisted the urge to pick it up and fold it.

Elena ducked into the bathroom for a few minutes to wash her teeth and clean her face; when she came out she looked like a younger version of herself. It was difficult to get used to the many facets of Elena Gilbert again, but Caroline found that she didn't mind the learning; the only thing she did mind was how hard it was sometimes, the occasional awkwardness. You never wanted to feel like you were a stranger around your friends.

She changed into the clothes she used as pajamas, a threadbare t-shirt and shorts. Elena smiled at her in the hazy darkness of the night. The drapes weren't closed over the window and outside New York was a multicolored chaos, an abyss spreading in all directions. But Caroline wasn't afraid, she found. She looked at Elena again and in a tacit agreement they placed themselves on each side of the beds and pushed them together, trying to do it as silently as possible not to wake Hayley up. They got rid of the bedside table in the middle, pushed it to the side, and when the beds were as close as they could possibly be, one big king-size in the middle of the room, when Elena was done arranging the covers and Caroline had fluffed her pillows, they climbed in.

They arranged themselves in the bed out of instinct, curled towards each other with their foreheads and their toes touching, so close their conversation wasn't above a whisper. It was a good position, Caroline thought. There had been a lot of sleepovers where they'd slept like that, or with Bonnie on the other side of Elena, what Elena's mother called "my little box of sardines," closing the door softly and making them promise to go to sleep soon every time, even though they never listened.

It slipped out of her mouth when she was on the cusp of sleep, a garbled murmur in a crease of her pillow. "It should've been me."

Suddenly Elena's eyes were wide open, big and brown and concerned. Caroline felt her opening her mouth to say no, it shouldn't have been, it wasn't your fault; Caroline touched her hand to remind her of all the times she'd said the same thing about people who had died in her name, all the times when she'd crumbled in Caroline's arms and cried, I don't deserve this, I don't deserve to live. Caroline had said the wrong things too many times before understanding that there was no right thing to say, that the only way was to hold her tight and try and make sure nothing inside was permanently broken, that she carried on nevertheless. After all there was no other choice; no alternative.

Elena understood. With her fingers she traced the swell of Caroline's cheek. "But it wasn't," she said eventually, unbearably tender, and Caroline had to close her eyes to keep the image from burning her retinas.

The next morning it was a faint rustling that woke her up. She'd always been a deep sleeper, even as a vampire, her supernatural abilities shutting off as she fell asleep, but since Tyler's death she had become uncomfortably hyper-aware. Her nights were filled with nightmares she couldn't remember but which left her already exhausted upon waking, her bones feeling as though they'd been ground to dust. She stretched. The vertebrae in her back cracked, and Elena made a face. She followed the trajectory of Caroline's eyes across the room, lingering over the horizon framed by the window, ears picking up the bustle of the street, and then on Hayley's bed. It was neatly made, tucked in at the sides, but the maid service couldn't have come yet, not so early, while Caroline was still asleep; on the pillow was a sheet of paper folded in four, with a black scrawl on the side facing up.

"She left a note," Elena said. "I didn't open it."

"Why not?"

Elena picked up the note and showed it to Caroline. The scrawl formed her name. Elena said, "Not my place."

And Caroline found it funny, because of how many times Elena had made the executive decision that she needed to know something that wasn't about her at all, but she didn't say anything. She took the note but didn't open it; it felt heavy, a lump of steel in her hands.

"I need to get dressed first," she said. "I probably won't survive today without a least four shots of espresso."

Elena smiled, genuine and real. She handed Caroline a Starbucks cup. "Got you covered," she said. "I picked it up downstairs."

Caroline took it, feeling immensely grateful for Elena. The coffee was warm, almost-hot, and full of all the sugary chemicals Caroline liked. There was even a hint of caramel in it. On the side of the cup it said Caroline, the thick loopy handwriting ten times more welcoming than Hayley's worried scrawl had been.

"Since when have you been up?"

"A while ago," Elena said with a shrug. "I went jogging. I didn't want to wake you up. You seemed like you needed the rest."

Jogging —it threw Caroline off, a little, because it seemed to her like it was the end of the world, and Elena was going jogging like she didn't feel any of that urgency and that rage. Maybe she didn't. (Besides, who went jogging in New York City? It was so Elena, to be heroic even in the mundanity of her routines.)

"I did," she said. She didn't tell Elena about the nightmares. She'd want to help, and she couldn't —she just couldn't. It wasn't hard to figure out that they weren't something that went away quickly, or easily, or at all, sometimes, though Caroline hoped they would eventually. Sometimes they were unusual even for nightmares, with colors like a fever dream and sounds like she was trapped in a fish bowl. "Thanks for the coffee."

"Sure," Elena said, her gaze straying towards the note. But she didn't ask Caroline to open it.

So Caroline didn't, not immediately; she drank her coffee and then got dressed, grimacing to herself when the smell of their laundry detergent hit her nostrils and everything came back swinging like a bat to the head, every conversation she'd had with Tyler about how to separate whites and colors, cotton and silk, all the fights about which brand of detergent to choose and whether or not to buy softener. She put on a purple top with a bow on the shoulder. Her arms felt numb.

When she was finished, trying to ignore the way her fingers had trembled on the button of her jeans, face scrubbed and make-up applied and feeling incrementally readier to face the madness and cruelty of the world, Caroline picked up the note from the bed. Elena looked up from where she had been pretending to read —at that rate she was probably going to know the Dictionary of Ancient and Lost Languagesby heart soon.

The note was written in the same tight scrawl as Caroline's name. There was an address, then a few words: Thank you. This is Klaus. Tell Elena there's money for the hotel in her bag. Good luck. Caroline laughed.

"What does it say?" Elena asked.

"There's money in your bag."

Elena's eyebrows drew together. "What?"

"Hayley. She put money in your bag," Caroline said. "For the hotel."

Elena frowned, annoyed that Hayley had gone through her stuff while she was sleeping and she hadn't noticed, and Caroline thought that it was probably exactly what Hayley wanted.

"I hope she didn't take anything," Elena said, grumbling a little. Maybe one day Caroline would understand what it was that just didn't work between the two of them.

"That wouldn't make any sense," she pointed out.

Elena looked up at her, opened her mouth to say, why wouldn't she be a thief, on top of everything else? then thought better of it. "Well," she said instead. She went to her suitcase, and sure enough, there was a handful of bills tucked in the middle of her underwear. She scoffed, then crouched to count them before she got back on her feet and asked Caroline, "Does it say anything else?"

"Good luck," said Caroline, because she wanted a little more time to think about the address before she told Elena and what she was thinking disappeared under the weight of her opinion. It was hard to hold your own in front of Elena, especially for her.

Elena's face softened. Caroline thought that she might have noticed the way Caroline cringed every someone said Condolences or Sorry for your loss.

"She says—" Caroline started, then couldn't find a way to say the rest. "There's—" In the end she just handed Elena the note. Elena looked at her inquisitively, then back at the note, then up again. This time she was frowning.

"This is—" she said.

"Yeah," Caroline said.

"Do you think it's real?"

Caroline shrugged. "I don't see the point otherwise." She didn't add, Hayley likes me, or that it was a favor; those things were wild guesses at best.

"Why would she give you Klaus's address? How did she even get it?"

"You're talking to me like I know something more than you do. I was sleeping until ten minutes ago, Elena, I didn't wake up in the middle of the night to conspire with Hayley," Caroline snapped. She squeezed her eyes shut. "Sorry."

Elena looked kind, but not in that excruciating way people got when they heard about Tyler. "I'm sorry too," she said. She turned the note over in her hand, like there might be a clue on the back or something written in invisible ink. But it seemed a bit convoluted for the situation.

Caroline went to turn her ring around her finger, nervous, only to realize she wasn't wearing it. She felt guilty for not having realized, for forgetting to put it on as part of her morning ritual. If it all went that way, and that fast… how long until she forgot about him entirely? It was years of shared memories, of near-perfect love. But, a little voice at the back of her head said, sounding eerily like Klaus, a few years are nothing in the greater picture of a life like ours, love.

She thought about going to get the ring, but there was no way to do that surreptitiously, without Elena noticing. For a second Caroline wished Elena would leave; then she could put the ring on and touch two fingers to the metal of the tumi blade where it was smothered between a pair of white pants and a yellow towel; for some reason she was itching for it. It felt almost like a substitute for smoking, the urge to have something to turn in your hands, and in that case it was the jagged stone of the blade, the reassuring carved symbols. Caroline tried not to feel weird about it.

"Do you want to go?" Elena asked. She didn't wait for an answer, didn't seem to want one, just started collecting her things on the little table stacked against the wall. Caroline watched her: her phone, her watch, her necklace.

"I'll go," she said before she could stop herself.

Elena's fingers stilled on her wrist, attaching her watch. She blinked twice in rapid succession. "What do you mean?"

"I'll go," Caroline repeated. "You don't need to come. You don't—" like Klaus, she was going to say, but swallowed it, "it'll go faster if I go alone. I'll be in and out. He likes me; if you go he might get ideas about doppelgangers again." She shrugged as loosely as she could, the muscles of her shoulders coiled and hard. "Think about it."

Elena frowned. "What if something happens?"

"Nothing will happen."

"It's Klaus. Who knows what he'll do."

You had to admire how little stock Elena put in the belief that people could change, Caroline thought petulantly. But —no, that was wrong. Elena was one of the most forgiving people Caroline had ever met, on the surface at least.

"I'll be fine," Caroline assured. Then she said, "He didn't kill Tyler."

"I never said he did."

Caroline gaped.

"I didn't," Elena insisted. "I just said he might've. It's what makes the most sense."

"Maybe ten years ago," Caroline said, that twinge of guilt she felt every time she remembered she was still lying to Elena about what had happened at the wedding pinching her gut. "He probably doesn't even remember me."

"He remembers you," said Elena. In her mouth it sounded like a warning.

"I'll dazzle him with my witty repartee and my police-style interrogation," Caroline said. "I promise. It'll be done in twenty minutes, and then we can leave this place."

"I thought you liked New York."

I liked New York when I'd never actually been, Caroline thought. "It's not about that," she said. "I just want to find who killed my husband, and tear their intestines out."

Something flashed on Elena's face, maybe fear. "I guess I can't do anything about it," she said.

Caroline gave her what she hoped was a bold, brave smile. "It's never stopped you before."

Elena bit down on her bottom lip. She never did things halfway, so it was a clean bite, a clear flash of teeth that closed down on the plump pink skin. She was hesitating, but not for long —Caroline was still looking at her lips when she took a step forward and framed Caroline's face in her hands, then kissed her mouth, very gently, softly, like a friend.

"For luck," she said when she pulled away, coloring a little.

Caroline tilted her head to show she understood the instinct. It wasn't the same thing, not exactly, but for Tyler and her the long, hot kisses they shared every time they had to part had been a sort of talisman.

Caroline took Elena's hand and squeezed. "I'll be fine," she said. "You should book us tickets for tomorrow."

"Not tomorrow."

Caroline wanted to ask why, but she remembered her gray face in the mirror, her bad dreams. Sleeping with her arms around Elena had been the first unbroken night of sleep since Tyler's death, but she still didn't feel like she had gotten any rest at all.

"The day after, then," she said.

"We'll need to buy equipment, tents and all that. If we're going in the forest."

Caroline frowned at 'tent' and 'forest'. "I guess," she said. She brightened a little, smirked. "Don't tell me; you've always wanted to go backpacking through the Andes." She knew it for certain, actually, because Elena had made a vision board in junior year and Caroline remembered the little brown-red mountains cut from an ad in one of Jenna's magazines.

"I hoped it would be in better circumstances," Elena said, with no irony whatsoever, and the lump in Caroline's throat was back.

"Okay," she said when she didn't feel so choked up anymore. She picked up the note and stuffed it in her jacket pocket. After a moment's hesitation she went to her bag and dug for her ring, too. She couldn't help a sigh of relief when she slid it on her finger. "For protection," she told Elena who was looking, then felt stupid for it. But Elena just nodded.

"Call me if he does anything fishy," Elena said.

That description was large enough, Caroline thought. "Everything's going to be okay," she said. "I'll just ask him, he'll laugh in my face, and then we can go do what we actually have to do."

She was already halfway out of the door when she heard Elena say, "It would make sense for it to be him, you know. He used to love you." After a pause she added, "And he liked tearing people's hearts out, too."

Caroline didn't have anything to say in answer to that, so she didn't.

The address Hayley had given her was for a gigantic, immodest building in the center of Manhattan. When Caroline got off the metro and saw it looming over her she snorted: Klaus literally couldn't have been more blatant if he'd tried. Then again, he'd never been all that subtle, had he? His assets —what he liked to think were his assets— had always been brute force and charm.

She looked up. The top of the building, so high Caroline had to crane her neck (that was probably the point) was glittering in the sun and underneath it was a combination of jagged metal, rough grey steel, beams sticking out like bones from a wound, and row after row of huge windows, circling the entire place like a belt. There were two vampires in front of the entrance, a sliding metal panel that wouldn't have been out of place in a warehouse. They were skittish and young. Caroline thought Klaus ought to be more careful with his security. She checked no one was looking, then held one of them out of reach with a strangling hand, fingers pressed down on his carotid, while she was drinking from the other. When she released him he fell in a crumpled, boneless heap on the ground. Caroline smiled at the remaining guard, trying not to get blood on her top. He looked mutinous but he was almost laughingly easy to knock out, even more so than his acolyte. Caroline sank her fangs into his neck then thought better of it. She pulled back and spit out a mouthful of blood on the ground. She didn't want to be delirious with it while talking to Klaus; it was always better to have a clear head with him.

The big metal door slid open easily. The inside also looked like a warehouse, albeit a very stylish one —there were paintings on the walls, masters everywhere Caroline looked, expensive trinkets, plush velvet chairs and at the very far end of the room a wide glass desk like Klaus was pretending to be a businessman, only the desk was completely empty. Caroline was pretty sure if she looked up there would be a chandelier hanging from one of the exposed iron beams.

Klaus wasn't in the room, but Caroline wasn't bothered by it. She knew he was somewhere near; she could feel it. She twisted her ring on her finger, relieved to find that it was there this time. She crossed the room. There was a door behind the desk, hard to notice if you weren't looking for it. It was locked. Caroline gripped the handle and pulled. The door jumped neatly off its hinges with a horrible creak of metal. Caroline rubbed her knuckles against her thigh: this was her version of throwing plates, she thought. She felt better already. What little blood she had swallowed had invigorated her.

Klaus was sitting in the middle of the second room, slouched in a pretentious chaise thing which Caroline assumed had cost more than her house. Surprise flashed on his face when he saw her, like he had electrodes stuck to his wrists, but he got hold of it quickly. He smirked, bowing his head a fraction.

"It's a little late to call me back now, isn't it, love?"

Caroline ignored him. "You've turned hipster," she said, looking pointedly around the room. There were heavy purplish drapes in front of the windows, blocking the light, though streams of it flowed through every interstice, smooth as butter; the rest was a mish-mash of excruciatingly modern furniture and objects that looked like they belonged in a museum.

Klaus sat up. His legs splayed open; he rested his elbows on his thighs and leaned forward, voracious. Immediately Caroline felt as though there was a giant magnet at the center of her chest and it was pulling her towards him, into his orbit, not caring which bones it broke in the process. She felt guilty and nauseous, but unable to stop it —and unable too to stop from remembering the velvet brush of his mouth on her back, between her thighs, his blood dripping from her fangs and her choking on it, blindingly certain that he would save her without having to think about it, because he loved her; the terrifying rush she got out of knowing that she had done nothing and yet held such great power over him, the power to make him kneel and fuck his tongue inside her, fingers pressing worshipful bruises in the skin of her thighs, before she had even touched him.

As usual, his eyes seemed to read straight through her. "Caroline Forbes," he said, his voice twisting ribbon-like around her throat. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Caroline took a breath. "I was looking for you," she said.

Klaus bit into a smile. "Isn't it usually the other way around?"

She shrugged. It would be easy enough to fall into the ping-pong of banter with him, to pretend she still loathed him with as much energy and dedication as she used to —but now there were other things to think about, and she wasn't going to beat around the bush this time. Not only was there no time but she, selfishly, needed to hear the words to calm the rate of her heart, this infuriating state of disarray Klaus's presence always seemed to put her in. "Tyler is dead."

Klaus arched an eyebrow. "Good riddance," he said. Then, purposefully belated, he added, "Sorry. I know you were fond of him."

"He was my husband," Caroline said, even though it was useless, because it was what they did, what Klaus did: needle her until she responded, and then—

"Yes," Klaus said, and his eyes got dark, "I seem to remember a wedding."

They looked at each other from opposite sides of the room. He hadn't changed, Caroline thought, except maybe he looked a little more adult, and even more dangerous. He was wearing a suit like that time at the Lockwood estate, charcoal grey with a steel blue tie. He fit in the warehouse like he had been dressed by a stylist. Caroline wondered if he had, or maybe if Rebekah had chosen his clothes for him. It seemed like the kind of thing they would do, in-between plotting everyone's demise and snacking on innocent bystanders.

Klaus was looking at her too, Caroline realized. It had been a while, but it still felt kind of familiar, his gaze sliding over her. He was appraising her.

"Take a picture, it'll last longer," she said, because she didn't want to get too comfortable in it.

Klaus smiled, and it bared his teeth. He stood up and tugged his sleeves down. He wasn't wearing the necklace Caroline remembered; maybe under his clothes. "Who killed him?"

Caroline opened her mouth to say, who?, because she was distracted. She closed it before she could say anything, but Klaus saw. His smile turned sharper, more cruel.

"I thought you might know something about that," she said instead, refusing to let him unsettle her.

"Tyler hasn't been my responsibility for a long time, love. I surrendered him to you, remember?" He was talking about it like they were divorced parents discussing custody.

"His heart was torn out," Caroline said.

Klaus flexed his hand at his side, remembering what it felt like to plunge your hand into someone's chest and close your fingers over a live, beating heart. Caroline wondered if he had different techniques now. Maybe they were less bloody —maybe he missed it. Then again, it wasn't like Klaus to deny himself anything.

"You think I did it?" Klaus laughed. Caroline frowned. It did seem ridiculous, when he put it like that. Come to think of it, it had seemed ridiculous when Elena had said it. "I'm being an awful host," Klaus said. "Do you want something to drink? I've got a bottle of '54 Chateau Margaux somewhere."

Caroline's mouth was dry. She thought, why not. If the blood hadn't gotten her drunk, good wine certainly wouldn't. "I guess I'll need it," she said. "And Elena does."

"Elena Gilbert thinks I killed your husband?"

Caroline shrugged, as though to say, I know, it seemed strange to me too. "Apparently she thinks you still carry that torch."

When she looked at Klaus again he had two large ball glasses in his hands. He handed her one. "Well," he said, "you did look quite fetching in that wedding dress." He smirked against the rim of the glass. "And even moreso out of it."

Caroline took a sip. It was really good wine. She felt an urge to stalk to the windows and open the drapes; the darkness felt precarious. She set her glass down and did just that. Dirty, dusty New York light flooded the room. Caroline's gaze snapped to Klaus's hand, expecting for half a second to see him burst into flames. She wasn't sure how to feel about it. But he was only taken off guard; his face contorted in a grimace, slipping into the animal. His mouth opened in a fang-adorned snarl.

"Well," Caroline asked, taking advantage of his disorientation, "did you?"

"Did I what?" Some wine had sloshed out of his glass onto the ground. Thankfully there was none on his suit.

"Kill Tyler."

Klaus looked bored, and amused, and petulant. It was a strange combination of expressions. "If I'd wanted to kill him, darling," he drawled, "I would have done it a long time ago."

"Why didn't you?"

"You asked me not to," Klaus said simply, and Caroline hated him for it.

Elena would want proof; she couldn't just go back to the hotel and tell her that Klaus had said it wasn't him. She took another sip of wine. Something inside her was trembling.

"What do you even do here, anyway?" she asked to stall for time, gesturing with her hand at the room. It wasn't as big as the first one, the one with the chandelier, but it was still sprawling. It made sense: the Mikaelsons never did anything small.

"This and that," Klaus shrugged. "I dabble." When Caroline rolled her eyes he smiled, unrepentant. "What would be the point of telling you of my nefarious plans in advance, now love? Since you and your little friend have such a vested interest in heroism."

Caroline couldn't help but snort. "I think we're over that now," she said, even though it occurred to her that she didn't really know, for Elena. She certainly wasn't interested in saving the world anymore —though thinking about it, it had never been really about that, had it? In the end it was always about saving their own skins. "Go ahead and be nefarious all you want."

"And there I was thinking marriage wouldn't tame you," said Klaus, mock-sad. The word 'marriage' hit Caroline like a truck. "If I didn't know better," Klaus continued, oblivious, "I would think you missed me. Coming all the way from Vermont to visit. I'm flattered." Caroline was surprised he remembered where Tyler and she lived. That he knew at all, actually. It didn't really work in his favor, though he didn't seem all that interested in being exonerated.

She took in a breath. In front of her nose was a column of golden dust, illuminated by sunlight. Caroline felt like crying, or breaking something.

"Did you really mean it, about showing me the world?"

Klaus grinned with the side of his mouth. It looked almost genuine. "I do," he said. "Is there anything in particular you'd want to see?"

Caroline had wanted to see everything, the first time he'd asked her; and she'd hated him and said no and felt sick to her stomach with want and rage. It had haunted her for some time after. Now she didn't seem to want anything, except to get revenge for Tyler.

"How can I know for sure that you haven't killed Tyler?"

"Do you want an alibi?" Klaus didn't wait for an answer, like he thought it was too preposterous to even consider. "I guess you can't, love. Your doppelganger will just have to take my word for it."

He said 'your doppelganger' like he really thought that Elena was hers, that Caroline owned her —that in their divorce Elena had been parceled to Caroline. Caroline wondered if he thought of Katherine as his.

Unexpectedly, Caroline remembered the knife in her bag. Maybe she would kill the murderer with it, for poetic irony. Not that that was something she was interested in: in fact it was more of a Klaus thing, to think in advance about how he was going to kill someone —but still.

"Where are the others?"

"The others?" Klaus raised an eyebrow.

"Your entourage," Caroline said.

"I believe you met two of them at the door," Klaus said.

"Yeah, I did." Caroline snorted in her glass. "I hope no one's out for your skin, because those guys are a joke."

Klaus appraised her again; this time his eyes were fiery and wondering. "Did you kill them?"

Caroline rolled her eyes. "No."

"You could've," Klaus said. "They were disposable." He didn't add: I would've liked to see you kill them, but it was clear enough from his tone. Which was a strange thing to get a hard-on from, but then again, they were vampires, so maybe it wasn't that strange. Caroline had had some time to get used to the idea.

"You're the big bad wolf, remember? And I'm the damsel in distress."

"Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"In distress."

"No. Don't worry, I don't need you to save me again," Caroline snarked. She didn't point out that most of the times he'd saved her it was because he was the one who'd put her in danger in the first place. They both knew it. "I just wanted to know, about Tyler."

"I didn't kill him," Klaus said again, waving his empty glass in the air. "And incidentally, I don't know who did." He frowned, and Caroline thought he might be realizing that he was the only hybrid left once more. It must feel lonely, being the only one in your species. Maybe that was why he was always trying to build an army, because of how fragile family seemed to be for him.

"Okay," Caroline said. She set down her glass on a low table near the wall. She did feel a little drunk, but it wasn't the alcohol, or the blood. He always made her feel this way, like he was literally clouding her judgment. In his presence she stopped being able to tell right from wrong.

Her heart was pounding in her ears. He can hear, she thought, but his heartbeat had been a quick staccato since he'd seen her. Suddenly she thought about Elena's words: he remembers you.

"Doesn't it get boring, after a while? I mean, knowing that you'll be here forever. Doesn't it end up just being about things… dying?" This was an unusually honest question to ask Klaus Mikaelson of all people, but Caroline didn't take it back.

"No," Klaus said. "The world is infinite. Death is only ever the beginning for us. Isn't your witch friend the anchor? There is always a next step." He moved closer. "When you have seen the world change as much as I have…" now his voice was a whisper, "you'll understand. Things never only have two sides. It's not about right and wrong. There are other things. Better things."

"Better things than justice and goodness?" Caroline asked. She meant to make it sound sarcastic, but it didn't.

"Yes. Those things change. Joy doesn't. Pleasure, beauty. Revenge."

"You can't live on revenge," Caroline said.

It wasn't the right thing to say to Klaus. It would have been the right thing to say to Elena, because she would've said, of course you can't. But Klaus had spent a hundred and fifty years chasing after Katherine. When he'd started she'd had a different name.

Klaus's eyes were riveted in Caroline's. Caroline had to physically keep herself from shivering. "I don't think you believe that," Klaus said, almost gently. "You understand revenge. You used to want revenge against me."

"What for?" Caroline asked. But she remembered his words: there is an allure to darkness. No, she had thought then. This is enough darkness for me.

"For making you want to come with me. Don't deny it," he added, even though Caroline wasn't sure she would've. "But you've always been strong."

"I didn't. Come with you."

Klaus shook his head. He was so close Caroline could see his eyelashes feathering on his cheek. "No," he said. "You stayed in the church."

It had been the right decision. Caroline was almost sure it had been the right decision.

"So," Klaus said. He rested his forehead against hers for a second, tender, then pulled back, smirking now. "How was that marriage? Was it as mundane and human as you had hoped for?" Before Caroline could respond he traced a finger over her knuckles. The touch was like an electric shock. "Good thing they added that bit at the end," he said with a shark smile, "'til death do us part."

Caroline jerked backwards. "Fuck you," she said. "You have no heart."

Klaus pinched his lips, irritated. "So you've said. Many times. And yet—"

Caroline didn't want to hear it. "Okay, I get it," she said hurriedly. She felt a bit light-headed. "You can go back to your scheming; I have a murderer to catch."

Klaus perked up interestedly. "What will you do to him?"

There wasn't enough kindness left in Caroline to lie. "Kill him," she said. She didn't add any of the gory details, but from the way Klaus was looking at her he knew. He liked it, even.

They were close again, even though Caroline didn't feel like she had moved. The ring was strangling her finger, cutting her circulation. When had it started being too small? Her fingers weren't pudgy, never had been. It seemed absurd that they would stand so close in such a big room. They must look ridiculous.

Klaus's fingers rested on her cheek briefly, not long enough for her to swat them away. "I haven't pursued you in a long time, Caroline," he said. "I've left you alone to live your little sham of a human life —and yet you seem to have found trouble anyway. What does that say about you?"

"Even the Vermont customs can't stop Murphy's law," Caroline said, but her voice felt raw.

There was no reason for her to stay here now, she thought. It was dangerous: his voice knew what spots to hit in her stomach, on her body, how to fit in the bruises his hands had left on her a long time ago. She'd been careful not to remember that time before the wedding too much during those last few years, but now it seemed to play constantly at the back of her mind in excruciating detail.

She turned on her heels to leave the room, and Klaus followed her. In the big, near-empty warehouse space the sun was dimmer, hitting the metal like it thought it was diamonds. Caroline wondered what it really was Klaus did there, if he would tell her if she asked the right way. Probably. The general consensus seemed to be that he would do a lot of things for her. But for a long time she'd had someone else who would do those same things, and who wasn't a psychopathic murderer on the side.

She thought Klaus might try and convince her to say, or maybe to go away with him like the last time, but he didn't. Maybe his empire in the city wasn't powerful enough and there was no kingdom to govern with him; maybe he really had forgotten her, a little, no matter what reasons he'd had in the first place for being so interested in who she was and what she did. It didn't feel that way, but it wasn't like Caroline was a Mikaelson expert; a lot of what he did had confused her at the best of times, not to mention his siblings. He let her walk away, resting his hip against the edge of the glass desk.

When she was finished hauling the sliding door open and she had one foot out the door, he asked, his voice reverberating against the walls, "Why didn't you?"

Caroline turned around. "What?"

"Why didn't you think it was me who'd killed Tyler? I suppose it makes sense, if you follow your doppelgangers preposterous logic."

"I never said I didn't."

Klaus smirked. "You said Elena thought so. I know an omission when I hear one."

Caroline shrugged. "It didn't make sense. That you'd go all the way to the other side of the country to kill Tyler after all this time. Besides, there was—" she was going to talk about the knife, but thought better of it, "there were signs. That it wasn't you."

Klaus's eyes were sharp. "Don't you think you deserve to have people kill for you?" he asked.

The thought made her stomach clench. "It's a twisted way of looking at things. Of course not."

"Occupational hazard," Klaus said, shrugging one unrepentant shoulder. "For the record, I would gladly kill for you."

Caroline rolled her eyes. Only in Klaus's mouth would that sound like an endearment. "You don't need a reason to kill people."

"Well, it's very relaxing. You should try it." Then his smile fell, and he looked like he might take a step forward, join her at the door. He didn't. "You deserve your every whim catered to, Caroline. Maybe now you will let someone do that for you." He meant: me.

Caroline wasn't as disgusted as she'd imagined she would be at the thought. She had always lacked the necessary protection against Klaus.

"Unlikely," she said, and strode out before she could implicate herself any further.