How embarrassing.
She had travelled the scenic route through a clearing on her way home, just to bask in the moonglow and smell the crispness of nighttime air. She wanted time to herself.
So she walked, taking lighthearted steps and feeling particularly grateful for having an uneventful, normal type life on the supernatural front. Left in peace, and to her own devices.
Her only mistake was allowing herself to think that it would last. Otherwise she might have missed the bear trap.
She had tried to separate the bloodied jaws, but her hands blistered from the familiar burn of vervain and she let go. Bad idea.
Now she sits in the grass, steady vapor rising from her shin in smoky tendrils. She's got a seasoned threshold for pain, but this makes the top five on her list of most ridiculous sustained injuries. Extra points for being a total accident.
Looking for anything that could help her, Caroline attempts to limp over to a tree with the iron teeth still clamped down on her. Another terrible idea. It's too unbearable to carry the weight of it, and eventually she stops moving altogether because it seems like she might just sever it completely. Do vampires regenerate their lost limbs like lizards? She doesn't know. Peg legs aren't exactly nautical chic.
"Stupid!" she yells, hoping someone and no one will find her.
As if on cue, a passerby halts in his tracks and turns his head, intrigued. When she sees who it is, the urge to free herself shifts into high gear.
It just gets worse, doesn't it? Might as well run her over with a pickup and end it all now.
"My, my, look at that. Caught, are we?"
Kol, looking ever the sly fox, strides towards her. Caroline grimaces in both pain and humiliation as he crouches, observing her the way a little boy does before he takes an ensnared hare home to his mother for dinner.
"Laugh it up," she says, gesturing at him to not come any closer. "Go away. I can do this myself."
"Clearly," he says to her, waiting. "Please, do continue."
Her brow wrinkles, unhappy that he'd test her on it. Not one to favour appearing weak, Caroline takes a deep breath.
Flesh starts to hiss and the floral scent of vervain wafts upward as she garners all her strength to pull apart the mouth of the trap. It turns from fire to ice on her skin, and her arms are unsteady in their effort to split the teeth far enough for her to lift her leg out of it.
One of her hands slip.
Her eyes squeeze shut, expecting the loud snap of metal and bone to be the preface for her screaming, but it never comes. She sneaks a peek, only to discover that Kol is prying the device apart like he's cracking open a book. His hands are smoking, yet he appears to be relatively unaffected by it.
"Show off," she mutters, sliding away quickly. There's little relief in it, but at least she isn't trapped anymore. Kol lets the contraption go with a resonant clap of metal and she winces - imagine what that would've been like.
He stands, dusting his dark jeans off and sticks his hand out.
Caroline frowns. Does she owe him something else now?
Unfortunately for her, she's in no condition to walk, so she grudgingly accepts his help on the logic that sucking it up and having him aid her is far better than crawling home and chewing on someone for their blood. That leg's got to be broken in crazy places. And once the adrenaline wears off...
"Alright now darling, I'm here," Kol says, in a manner that's oddly endearing, suited more for a child with scraped knees. He lifts her, throwing her arm over his shoulder, and rests a palm on her hip for balance. "Point the way."
With a steadfast grip on the thigh of her own jeans, Caroline and Kol both haul her ass home.
Kol doesn't have an invitation her house, so he sets her down on the old chair on her porch. On one knee he inspects the extent of her injuries before he tells her to wait for him.
As if she has any other choice.
He returns with a small number of things - most importantly, a warm mug of blood in tow, which Caroline accepts gratefully. The taste of it instantly gives away that it's fresh, but she isn't going to ask him about its source - he can keep it anonymous. Sometimes it's just better not to know things.
Kol plops down in front of her and carefully straightens her leg.
"Hurts, doesn't it?" She knows it's rhetorical, so she bites her tongue to stop the sarcasm from finding its way out of her mouth.
The gleam of a pair of scissors causes a tiny alarm. "Don't you dare."
Kol disregards her, defiantly tugging the denim taut at her ankle and snipping up to her knee. Caroline purses her lips. "You're never going to salvage these anyway," he comments, peeling it apart to reveal the full extent of her injury. Yeah, it's not pretty.
"Hold my hand." Caroline stares, apprehensive. But he seems to know what he's doing, so she sets her mug down and accedes. "Okay, don't be mad-"
Before she realises what's happening, he sticks one of his fingers in her shin and she screams. Hoarsely, until her voice nearly gives out because what in god's name is he even thinking-
Oh Jesus Christ. It's so disabling that she can barely register anything else. The strain of her gritting teeth rides to her fingernails, a sharp nerve-chewing tension so strong that it may have jump-started her heart. Kol's lucky that he's got the strength to withstand her hand-crushing death grip, which, by the way, is doing nothing to tame the agony.
He wiggles his index to push something back into place; the tears are in free flow and the pain is so blinding that her loud protests of hurt sound more like choked, hysterical laughter. What she really means to say through the sobs is, You fucking asshole. She's probably gone through worse, but it's suffering all the same.
"Okay, you're okay," he says again, and Caroline gasps for air, more a coping mechanism than necessity as he removes his intrusive index from her. She feels his palm slip from her own, then his thumb meeting her wet cheek in an attempt to comfort. Ugh. No. That adoring gaze isn't helping. Okay, maybe it makes her feel a little better. Only a little.
Kol then produces a small square packet from his back pocket. Caroline doesn't even care what the slime in it is – the only thing that matters is that it's cool to the touch and the relief is instantaneous when he slathers it onto her calf.
Fishing rolls of gauze from the pocket of his coat, Kol bundles her up and rips the excess off. "You'd make a pretty good medic in the second world war," she says of his skill.
"I was in a box that era. Apparently I missed some fun times." Caroline watches him casually clean blood and mud off his fingers with the remainder of the dressing. "When you live this long, you pick up a few things. Underneath that," he nods at his handiwork, "is a little concoction of Aztec clay, nightshade, the beaks and wings of things."
"That's quite the recipe," she says, feeling a numbness fanning out from the main point of injury. The discomfort dissipates almost immediately - it's got to be magic. There's no other way this is working so fast.
"I didn't make any of it. It was given to me by a very… disciplined witch, some centuries ago. Strong, compassionate woman. Didn't let anyone stop her for anything."
Kol looks at her like he means to draw a similarity, but he says nothing. She does, however, sense a deeper, more sentimental history behind the words, which piques her interest because it points to a very real possibility that Kol had been, once upon a time, a one-woman, completely committed, love-struck monster. "Sounds like you were into kinda into her," Caroline prods.
"Maybe I was," he responds solemnly, tossing away soiled gauze. "We wandered together for a long time."
"And?"
"And that's it." The reply is curt, and slams the conversation into a brick wall. "We're not going to get into it." He gets up from his spot and dusts his hands off, ready to leave.
Caroline glares. She doesn't like the way he cuts her off.
"We're going go into it," she starts. "We're going to go into it because you show up out of nowhere after weeks of radio silence. And then you make me a tourniquet for my mincemeat self. And then you expect me to be okay with your Mr Mystery routine." It's stupid, really. The more she thinks about it, the tougher it is for her to stave her rising temper.
"And when you bit me-" Yes, Care, you bring that up too, "-you just what? Shake my hand? I let you drink the blood straight from my neck and I don't even get asked for a frickin' coffee. So yeah, I deserve to know a little of the man I'm talking to, with minimal bullshit."
"I have no obligation to sit around and discuss who I loved or didn't love a million years ago," Kol replies, just as annoyed. "Did you want a date out of all of this? Is that why you're mad?
"Or did you just want to have sex?"
Her anger fizzles instantly. In her head, Caroline is covering her hands with her face. No, she's crawling under her thickest duvet, the deepest grave, and living there for all eternity.
Oh god. He's picked up on it, hasn't he? Her weakness for good bone structure; the accent. And how she can't help but be drawn to his allure, that deceivingly winsome grin under the deep pools of darkness in his eyes. Doomed. She's doomed.
Kol shakes his head. "I'm not daft, Caroline. I've seen the way you look at me."
The blonde vampire frowns hard, trying to physically suppress a hot flush from colouring her head to toe, bashful all of a sudden. She wants to look away, but the truth in his words will be deathly obvious. "You think I don't know what you want?" Kol bends, moving his face closer to hers so that there's nowhere else for her to turn. "I could smell it on your skin. Taste it in my mouth. I could've slid my fingers under your dress and I know that I would've found you absolutely soaked for me. And I'd have gone for it.
"But going down that road is lunacy. Love is lunacy."
Taken aback, Caroline folds her arms. "Who says I'm going to love you?"
"Do you honestly think that we would be a one-time thing? Just jump into bed and be done with it?" A sardonic smile spreads across his face. "You know I'd never let that happen. I'd keep you, and destroy you; I'd end up breaking you in half. And it'd be such a pity to wreck a beautiful thing." Because he's just that type of guy, who fucks you and kisses you and offends you and loves you all at the same time, unwilling and unable to respect the boundaries and labels that she'd typically assign to a casual relationship.
This is his warning to her. "The sex would've been great, though," he adds, like he's thought about it that many times to be sure. Caroline is tongue-tied for the moment, absorbing his meaning and assessing the gravity of the hole she's managed to dig herself into.
Kol steps off the porch. "Another twenty minutes and you can take that off." She stares at him. "The wrap." He gestures at her leg.
She ignores it. "...You don't know me." The words come slowly, because she's thinking aloud, attempting to understand what he's trying to do and say by pushing her away and reeling her in all at once. "You act like you do. You think you can do anything you want."
"I could say the same to you," he counters.
"I'm not that reckless."
Finding it ludicrous, Kol snorts. "You're the one who let me bite you." He ends with a playful nip of his teeth in her general direction. "I suppose we'll have to start getting familiar with each other, then."
There's no doubt that the encounter leaves her perturbed, but as the older vampire steps away and disappears into the dawn, Caroline can't help but feel that she'd just sat through a very long-winded invitation to... sleep with him? Date him? She isn't even sure. She was too busy fighting mental images of his feral touch, gliding and tracing and curious.
It's not the proposition itself that boggles her mind, paradoxical as it had been. The fact that it doesn't drive her away, even if it opens pandora's box of Mikaelson-branded insanity - it scares her, because it means he could be right.
She might be reckless, but it could be worth it.