The Buried Dead
Request: Caroline finds wolf!Klaus in the woods where he buried Kol
Semi Angst and wolf!Klaus.
Caroline was... confused to say the least. It had been a roller coaster of emotions for her the past few weeks, what with Tyler leaving, Elena turning her emotions off, killing the witches, oh and there was the teensy tiny detail of admitting to Klaus that she might have had feelings for him.
In her defense, it had come out after a flurry of accusations that they sent at each other after Silas attacked him and she had gone to help him, only to find herself with a hand locked around her throat because he thought she was a hallucination. And what followed was trying to convince him that she was indeed real. Which meant that she had to, at one point in their encounter, admit to things that she had long kept buried. But she hadn't seen him since.
She had thought that he would seek her out, woo her more now than he had before. But it seemed her fears had come true; she had admitted to having feelings for him, and he had probably decided to find someone else to chase. Okay, maybe she was getting a little ahead of herself. It had only been two days, but this was the part of her that she sometimes couldn't stand. The insecure teenage girl who couldn't help but think that the boy she liked had changed his mind.
So she went hunting to relive her frayed nerves. The thrill of the hunt, the pleasure that she got from the kill helped a little, but still... she wasn't entirely sure about how she felt about everything and all that it was serving to do was make her a mess of emotions.
Now that she could admit to feeling something for him, she had to know, could he actually love someone else? Was he capable of it? Oh, she knew he felt things, she knew that he could hate, but she didn't quite know if he knew how to love someone else. And it wasn't necessarily anything against him, she just couldn't help but wonder if he had gone too long without letting himself love, so long that he had forgotten what that meant. Would he ever really be able to give her the love that she so deeply desired?
She had been so caught up in her inner musings and her battle with herself (was it alright to have feelings for him? would he just leave her eventually? could he even feel true love for anyone, not just her?) that she hadn't noticed the hulking shape in front of her until she heard a low growling. Her eyes shot up finding a white wolf in front of her.
He was in a word, huge, muscle evident, but at the same time there was a graceful beauty to him. Powerful, that was the word. When she looked at him, she saw... she saw the same thing she saw when she was looking at Klaus. And when the wolf finally got a good look of her, sniffing the air, he stopped growling, lowering himself to the ground with a slight grunt.
It was then that she saw what he had been standing in front of. A fresh gravestone that clearly read KOL MIKAELSON. She added the dates quickly in her head, realizing that the wolf was indeed Klaus, and then she knew. This was why he hadn't called. This was why she hadn't seen him in two days. It had been a month to the day since his brother had died in front of him.
A slight gasp escaped her throat, and she lowered herself down to the ground beside him, carefully, trying not to startle the werewolf, knowing his bite was poisonous if she survived an attack by him. But she wasn't truly afraid of him, and any fear she did have quickly fled when she rested a hand on his head, and instead of growling, snapping at her, he let out a small whimper.
Her heart clenched painfully in her chest, and she moved her body closer to his on the ground, wrapping an arm around his body, laying her head on his back in his soft fur, as he continued to let out soft, mournful whimpers. Caroline didn't know how long they stayed like that, and she didn't care. He had proved to her that he could indeed feel love and sadness at the loss of a loved one. And for the first time, she found that she was completely okay with the way that she felt for him, the way he felt for her.
She was startled when he pushed up off the ground suddenly, and she sat back when he approached her, but felt relief when he started to lick the tears she hadn't known had escaped from her eyes off of her face. She laughed slightly, in relative awe at this version of him she had never seen before, rubbing his ear, trying to comfort him as he comforted her. Caroline leaned forward slightly, wrapping her arms around his neck, before she got to her feet, flashed him a smile, and ran to his house.
There were some things that were better done when they both possessed a human form. And comfort was one of those things.