"You're in a mood."

She isn't, not really. Caroline's been staring at the screen for hours, obsessing over pinks and greys, careful and discerning over the use of geometry, asking Bonnie to be her fresh pair of eyes. There's just nothing incredibly exciting about prepping a flyer for a party she isn't organizing, but if she's going to put her name on something, she might as well go all out.

The young blonde takes a long sip from her straw, blood slowly draining from her mug. "Something's missing," she says, turning her laptop to let Bonnie see.

"It looks great," comes the familiar sigh.

"Great isn't mindblowing," Caroline groans, planting her forehead on the table.

"You need a break." Bonnie grabs her friend's hand in solace and slowly rises from the chair. "I'll be back with Chunky Monkey."

Only the best of friends know exactly what you need when you're having a meltdown.

"Hey Caroline," she hears, someone male, distinctly not Bonnie. When she lifts her head, she watches Mike tread over toward her with a duffel over his shoulder.

"What are you even doing here?"

"I don't know." He looks around, heavily grimacing. "I really don't."

Oh boy. All the alarms go off in her head, but she can't jump to a conclusion just yet. "You forgot something?"

"You know that feeling you get when you walk into a room to do something and it completely slips your mind when you're three steps in?"

Caroline nods slowly.

"I kinda feel like I walked all the way from home."

Home isn't even in Virginia.

"I kinda feel like I've been walking forever, actually."

She closes her eyes and purses her lips.

"Hey Mike," greets Bonnie, who sets down two bowls and the ice cream tub. "You visiting?"

No time for scooping. Caroline picks up a spoon and stabs it into a banana chunk. Mike isn't visiting, but she knows who is.

Kol's number hasn't been in service since he bolted, which annoys her to no end because she doesn't know how else she can reach him to plant a round-toed shoe in his ass.

He has to come to her. Which meanshe's only found when he wants to be.

Somehow the prospect of him making a surprise appearance while she's in the middle of an organizational tragedy stirs more than just a little anxiety in her chest.

Caroline puts the silkscreened banner up over the entrance of the frat house. She nearly loses her footing on the ladder when she hears the staccato clip clop of shoes approach, but it's only one of the frat brothers late for his play rehearsal.

Has Kol ever worn dressy shoes to anywhere other than a ball?

She's sitting in a group meeting about logistics - band, DJ, ping pong table, dry ice. They're lacking two bottles of Chivas from the litter of assorted drinks they bought during their latest alcohol run. The person in-charge of the booze accuses the fraternity, cursing the venue decision. He then begrudgingly shoves the crumpled purchase order under resting fingers.

It's not really her problem, but Caroline looks at the long list.

What does Kol like to drink?

Day before the party. she gathers stacks of paper wrist tags, plastic chips, and reviews her clipboard of chicken-scratching itinerary notes. Across the bottom is an alien scrawl of red ink - DON'T FORGET TO HAVE FUN.

She frowns.

Does Kol's handwriting look anything like this?

People are pouring into the yard where actual table tennis is being played. Bonnie tells her that she's doing good; for an event that makes people pay for their drinks on top of a cover charge, the turnout is surprisingly high.

Caroline shrugs, scanning the premises. She would've done a number of things differently, but she's only in charge of the marketing and décor (which is, obviously, impeccable).

"Are you looking for someone?" asks Bonnie.

Caroline eyes every dark-haired male in the room with a strong brow ridge. No, that one has a nose that's too sharp. That one has too-round eyes – far too doe-like for her taste. The one by the regal Louis XIII display lacks the all-important cleft in the chin, where she once identified as her bullseye for cheekiness gone overboard. She can't possibly feel satisfied about hitting someone the face when they don't have a tiny chin dimple.

Maybe someone's looking for me, she thinks, but maybe I'm wrong.

She absently picks up a downturned glass, signaling her best friend to follow suit. "We should get in on the tasting." It's easier to keep a lookout when you're pretending to be busy.

Hours later, Caroline finds her head swimming beneath a thin film of intoxication nearly two hours later as she listens to clusters of young adults trying to make philosophical sense of scotch whiskies.

Whatever. Everything starts to feel the same on the tongue after a certain point, really, but at least it helps her stop worrying about being on the brink of an Original ambush. That, and people can finally stop mistaking her narrow-eyed once overs for flirting.

It's nearly 3AM. Caroline tips back her last glass for the night and breathes a sigh, short and sharp. No Mikaelson in sight.

Funny that she thought that he might have come back for her when he's more likely to just revisit Mike and send him crossing state lines by foot for a chuckle.

She wants to roll her eyes, because that's exactly the kind of thing that she imagines would tickle Kol. Small, childish, stupid everyday amusements that keep him busy between the mysterious business transactions he won't tell her about. That she'll never get to uncover.

Out of habit she glances at her phone, hoping for an unread message, but there's nothing, and no one, and she's getting a little bit bored. She texts Bonnie, who's tearing it up at table tennis, that she's going to head back to their dorm to crash.

Caroline does a final visual sweep of the house - still nothing. And she was so sure about it.

It doesn't sit well with her, knowing that it's just in her head.

One; take a hot shower. She's been told countless times that this is the least wise thing a person can do after drinking, but vampires don't have to play by the rules.

Two; check the Whitmore Wire to see if anyone's dropped an informal feature about the party. It'll help her decide if departing from the traditional rager is a worthy endeavour for the future.

Three; sleep. Long, tranquil shut eye. She can always get to the bottom of Mike's weird problems when she heads home for the weekend. Her bed beckons from beyond the walls, and she'll gladly fall into it.

Caroline sticks her key in the lock and twists once. She pauses. It should be two to open the door.

With her palm to varnished mahogany, she gives a tiny push.

Oh no.

"Miss me?"

No.

"Or maybe you need a little refresher?"

A breath. Her lungs expand. Exhale... Steady now.

Caroline stares at him, his head lolled back off the edge of her bed, blanketed in a deluge of her scarves. His face is lit with an old fondness as he casually twirls the soft fringes of one of her summer shawls.

He's been waiting, exactly the way he had on the day he left her hanging. Same stupid grin, annoying in every way whether upside down or right side up. All the mischief in his body gathers in his eyes and they practically twinkle at the sight of her wide-eyed silence.

She isn't thrilled that her gut had been right all along.

She puts her hand on the handle.

Takes one step backward.

And closes the door.

Caroline tucks her bottom lip under her teeth. There aren't any words she can string together to form a coherent sentence that could accurately convey the bizarre release she experiences, but there are thoughts. A flurry of them, non-sequential memories, flitting by her and feeling every bit as fresh as the days they happened.

He made her feel things.

Idiot, her forehead wrinkles.

She opens the door open again and sees Kol, still on his back, with her pastel pink scarf draped over his nose and mouth. He bats his lashes at her in comic seduction, then rolls off the bed to get to his feet.

Arms wide open, he cocks his head to the side. "Let's pick up where we left off, shall we?"

No, they will not.

"Get out of my room," comes her needle-thin whisper. "Get out," she says, lower and louder now.

Kol pulls a long face, but it's unserious. "No need to be cross-"

She is not cross, she internalizes, just before she strides across the room and grabs him by the neck. For some reason, he lets her back him up against her dresser drawers, albeit with a disapproving scowl. "Nails," he protests, but her claw-like grip digs harder into his throat.

Not a great idea on her part. Kol wheezes his discomfort, and then pries her fingers off with little difficulty.

"You're so full of shit," she snaps, wrist trembling with resistance. She's mentally prepped to be thrown somewhere, but he forces both her hands behind her back instead to hold her full against him. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Kol looks down at her mouth. It's been awhile, hasn't it? "Well I missed you too."

Caroline's fingers cramp at being folded awkwardly in her palm - dear God it drives her crazy to not be able to slap him in the face. She tries once again to pull free, but ugh, he smells good, and having him all around her, enveloping, invading… it doesn't help.

"You think you can just walk in here and get me to roll out the welcome mat?"

"No," he replies. Tell me that you missed me, the slow, dark dip of his lashes suggest, the way that I have missed you. The unmistakable hard press of him against her dress is all the emphasis that she needs. "I thought you'd ask me why it took me a year to get back to you."

"I didn't even notice."

Kol chuckles. "That's hard to believe. There isn't a trace of anyone else in your space."

She frowns at the notion of him snooping around. "This isn't the only place where I can hook up with someone."

"Mmm, if only you knew how much I cared about who you kissed goodnight and pretended to like more than-" he sniffs at her, "-the shit booze you presented tonight."

"I swear to god-" she grits, because she didn't even fricking have anything to do with the bottle selection and she has no idea why he'd even go round in circles about her love or sex life or whatever when he's just going to wedge himself back into it anyway, "-I am going to hurt you if you don't let me go."

He turns his head and lets out a controlled burst of a laugh. She hadn't even been that angry to begin with, but this is something that makes Caroline go from zero to sixty in rage. It's so typical. So typical, that he should make it seem like it isn't him crawling back to her to have his fill before he hits the road again.

She isn't a pit stop. And she sure as hell isn't just going to stand there and swallow it down like bad medicine.

In his split second of distraction, Caroline's canines extend into pearl white points.

She bites down into the exposed curve of his neck. Hard.

She can't decide which is more satisfying – his loud bark of pain, or the fact that she manages to take two quick drags of him before he shoves her away and onto the floor.

Kol stumbles back and slaps a hand on the wound, already drenching his tee dark.

"I told you," she runs her tongue over the top row of her teeth, back of hand wiping under her chin.

He stares, dull branches of his vampire visage appearing for a second before they fade away. "Shit." He checks his fingers, completely glossed in the deep hue of his own blood.

The entire room smells of it. Kind of makes her hungry, actually. It's been so long since she's sunk her fangs into a neck.

"Was that good for you?" he seethes, half-mad, half-amused that she'd even try it.

Caroline gets up and straightens her dress out. "I'm not that into cowards."

"You think I ran away?" Kol rolls his shoulder back. "I was tying up loose ends."

"A year. Of loose ends."

"It's not easy to placate drug lords."

"Drug lords-" She rubs her temples with her fingers. "You know what? I don't want to know. I don't need this. Just get out. And stop messing with Mike."

"I had to do better than a text," he says, to which Caroline walks over to the door and opens it for him. Get out, she repeats through a gesture. "Look. It's all done now. Won't be getting into trouble for awhile. You can be mine. I can be yours." Kol sets his hand gently over hers, printing blood on the back of it.

"Nobody belongs to anyone," she says, soft and quiet with all the weight of her words bearing down on her. Prickling, questioning.

Nostalgia strikes her hard when he slides his clean hand into her hair. "Is that what you say to make yourself feel better about liking me?"

"Nothing makes me feel better about liking you." She says this much too impulsively, not realising what she's admitted to until she sees the smugness written all over his face.

"Let's see what we can do about that."

She doesn't turn away when he kisses her. No, she scolds herself, but she leans into it, weak in her resolve.

Hand on the nape of her neck, Kol presses his kisses beside her mouth, on her chin, under her ear - he's tasting every stretch of bloodstained skin. Remember what his glib tongue is capable of doing? He can be so convincing, she thinks, as she attempts to suppress the wild ache forming inside of her.

No good. Caroline releases the handle and Kol pushes the door shut.

She reaches back to mind the zipper of her own dress. Too forces the fabric down to her waist, and she helps him pull the shirt over his head, his wince somehow adding to her bloodlust, god, why is it so hot in here?

And then there's her pounding heart, beating bold in her chest because the wet glisten of his wound is distracting. Blood is blood, and she's got an appetite for it.

He's about to dive in for another kiss when he notices her ravenous little animal stare, fixed on his shoulder. Fine little capillaries are mapped in the whites of her eyes, with more of them stretching down into the apples of her cheeks. It's Kol's favourite thing to witness, it seems, as he raises his fingers to them and traces down to her now-elongated fangs.

Though Caroline draws back, never having liked anyone touching her teeth, she can't look away from the slow tip of his head to the side – is he…? Yes, he is – until she can see the muscle under the mark of her bite pull taut.

Gazing from the corner of his eye, he dares her. "Go on."

There are many reasons not to do this, she knows there are. It's just hard to be rational about it. Not when Kol, for the first time, is throwing her off completely by acting submissive. It's so unexpected that she hesitates in fear that he'll somehow turn the tables on her again, pin her down, rough her up.

But he doesn't even move. Kol embraces her instead, red rivulets running down the length of his back and lets her drink, until she's panting and paranoid about a sudden appearance by Bonnie, who would totally be horrified to find two vampires in the middle of some kinky bloodplay.

With a hand covering her forehead, Caroline makes a decision. "You're coming home with me," she says to him, before putting her dress back on and dragging him out of the door.

Of course, they argue on the way, about the drugs and Kol's apparent preoccupation with mind-controlling her cousin. He doesn't have answers that satisfy her, not everything comes with a sensible explanation, he shouts into the night air, a response that she doesn't like but seems to ring truer than any other nonsense he's been spouting since they first bumped into each other.

Because she can't come up with the reasons herself. Like, why didn't she look for a white oak stake every time she went home? Or why did she need to kiss him the first time instead of just letting the moment pass? Why does she let this unpredictable ass take her down her own road of crazy?

She doesn't have the good answers, the logical ones, the ones born from common sense. She's only left with short, staccato outbursts of frustrated Shut Ups and Oh My God's, until they finally arrive at her bed and she mutters a different kind of Shut Up and Oh My God to the skill of his eager, familiar fingers that know when and where and how to make her ache.

The fact is that even when he's being an idiot, Caroline still likes him enough to not punch him when he bites into her thigh in the middle of a powerful climax. She likes him enough to let him bite her a second time as he guides himself into her and grips, grabs, digs blunt fingertips into her until she bruises. Likes him enough to want to kiss him with her blood in his mouth while he holds her thighs apart and drives himself deep.

That counts for something. Liking him.

Oh Caroline, she hears Kol moan, it's good to come home.

She turns her head and grasps the sheets.

Speaking of coming-

"Maybe a year was a little too long," Kol says, but it doesn't sound like regret, no, he's not the type to be huddled over in something as wasteful and unproductive as remorse. He's hoping for Caroline's reaction. Who knows for what reason - to be annoying on purpose, maybe, but nobody actually knows what goes on in that manic brain of his.

Lying on his stomach next to her, he traces gentle, careful circles around the marks he'd left on her thighs, round, irregular spots that fit the shape of his fingers, like the teeth of a key to its lock. He's admiring his handiwork. Critiquing in his head. Next time, she imagines him thinking, as he mentally dots a path across her ribs, a little clamp of the mouth here wouldn't hurt. Much.

He, on the other hand, is completely unmarred. She'd torn her nails down the length of his back and four hours later, he's brand new again. No red welts, or jagged lines, no proof of her feeding. Unfair, she wants evidence, where bright raw patterns of ownership should be worn on his neck like a brand.

Ah well. Even if she doesn't actually see any of it, she knows that her name's already written somewhere in his bones. He wouldn't be back otherwise.

"You don't need to explain yourself," Caroline says.

It earns her some skepticism. "Really? You're giving up?"

"I'm not giving up." It'd be much easier for her to stop trying to understand everything and just enjoy the time spent with him. He doesn't need to know that, though.

"No, that's what I thought. You're not the type. Besides," he reaches for the source of persistent buzzing – her phone – in the pool of shed clothes on the floor, "you'll be far too busy explaining to your friends where you've been to start planning on how you're going to quit me."

She snatches the cell from his hand and sees eighteen missed calls, good god, and two thumb scrolls worth of unread messages begging to know her whereabouts in short capitalized abbreviations; why is there blood in the room/did u kill a wild animal/ur drawers are open and ur scarves are all on ur bed/PLS REPLY ASAP, to which Kol chuckles upon glancing the excess of punctuation.

"What will you tell them?"

"That I'm not dead. That I'm fine. That I'm not actually holed up in my room wrapped in bloody sheets being friendly with a psycho."

Kol reaches for the phone and flings it to the far corner of the bed. "What a terrible idea."

Caroline's deep frown appears. "Of all the terrible ideas I've ever had, of all the stupid choices I've ever made, you're the worst one."

She can't get rid of him – doesn't exactly want to. Which is why it feels particularly good when he leans in close to her and whispers, soft as a cat's purr, "I'm your best bad decision, darling."

Caroline may scoff and push him away, but it's the complete opposite with her heart, a troubled, reckless thing, allowing herself to be pulled into his unpredictable web of complications. It's so blindingly foolish. So captivating and thrilling, to quite possibly spend days on end gnashing teeth, kissing and fighting and lying and hiding and breaking, making love – love? A distant possibility, Caroline considers, she doesn't know – and in every manner a best worst decision to be with him, this dear Kol.

And you know what? She's perfectly okay with that.

FIN.

End Note: I'm so sorry that there was such a long break between Ch 5 and 6; I forgot that I hadn't finished uploading this, so I decided to post the last three bits of the story altogether. Now that it's done, I hope you liked it. Thanks for reading my indulgent Koroline writing!