"Sometimes you gotta fall before you fly
And sometimes you really live, you've gotta try
We can change it all together, in the end you're gonna find
That what we felt in our hearts was real the whole time
When you open up your eyes, I hope that you find
Who you are, who you are" –KookierThanFiction
"Can you possibly make a story where Tyler cheats on Caroline and Caroline gets drunk and Kol is a total softie and takes her home? And possibly the aftermath of it all?" –seesee50
"how about Caroline is pregnant :)" –Guest
"Caroline and Kol and their first pregnancy scare and finding out that she's not really pregnant and being sad that she's not. or realizing that they cant care for the child and having an abortion or giving it up, if abortion is not your cup of tea. years later when they are more prepared they welcome their first born and tell him about the sibling that never was but that could have been." –meaningtospeak
Sensitive topic of miscarriage so be forewarned. This is a sequel to 'you and me up against the world, it's you and me'. Set four years into the future.
"You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast."
-Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente
Kol shivered underneath his expensive but too-thin coat. It was fast approaching December already and he cursed inwardly at being in a Muggle-infested area where he could not so easily take out his wand and cast a warming charm lest he break the almighty magical secret. Having to venture into Muggle London was bad enough without having his extremities become frostbitten. But James fucking Potter being his boss signed him up for the job and as he wanted to keep his job he went despite the nearly insufferable temperatures.
"I told you you'd freeze." His partner told him and Kol threw a glare at the other man.
"Quiet, Gilbert." He grumbled, making Jeremy roll his eyes.
"Kol, we've been working together for months and you still won't listen to a word, I say? However is this partnership going to work?"
It worked quite well surprisingly enough. Kol and Jeremy complimented each other well strategy and fighting wise so they've solved quite a few cases and gotten out of some pretty dangerous skirmishes in the past few months, While Kol did try to drown out his girly whining like the need for more layers of clothing and the sort, Kol took his partner's opinions and ideas on missions very seriously and trusted the bloke –much to his bemusement and he'll deny it if you spill –with his life.
"Quit nagging me and keep focused on the job at hand," Kol retorted. "We're here to do our job not chat about the weather."
Jeremy rolled his eyes again but opened the door to the pub they watched their target go into. Both he and Kol weren't in their Auror robes as to better blend in with the crowd and get to their target without him knowing. Their target for the night was a child sex-offender who had been elusive for the Auror department for a solid few weeks now and Auror Potter was needling him into catching this bastard so they could move on with their lives.
"He ordering a drink at the bar," Jeremy informs him discreetly. "I'll linger by the back exit if he decides to bolt. You keep near him."
Kol nods his agreement and beelines for the bar, eyeing the middle-aged man ordering whiskey. You wouldn't have known from looking at this plain-looking man that he was a convicted pedophile with a list of victims that would have had nuns spitting on him.
Kol took a seat a few feet away and orders a light drink to keep his cover. He keeps his glances indecipherable but often, observing what their target was going to do next when he saw the familiar blonde at the other end of the bar. There was Caroline Forbes that broke his heart the night before Graduation, crushing it underneath her kitten heels like it was nothing. She had tossed him away like something rotten and he would be a fool to tell you he'd gotten over it.
He couldn't help himself if he got up with his drink and took the empty seat beside her. She blinked at him in surprise, a light gasp escaping her lips and her entire body stiffening in defence. He resisted the urge to grin mockingly and simply greeted her. "Hello, Caroline."
She bit her pouty red lips, a nervous habit she never seemed to get rid off and almost spilled her drink when she tried to recover from her shock. "Whoops! Um, hi, Kol."
"'Um, hi, Kol?' That's all I get?" He couldn't hide the bitterness in his voice. "Really? After everything?"
Caroline's eyes glistened with what could've been pain – but no, he had to be hallucinating – and it's quickly replaced by the frostiness she started to act towards him days before she broke his heart. The end came with the cold and he hated it still so much. "Everything is over, isn't it?"
"Well, you made sure of that." Kol practically growled and he took pleasure in seeing her small jaw tighten, her eyelashes fluttering as she tried to stop herself from hurting him. He was always best at making her angry, no one could drive her mad like he did and he took pride in this. "After all, what was that cliché line you fed me? 'It wouldn't have worked out anyway'".
"And obviously I was right," She countered. "Shouldn't you be glad I broke things off as I did instead of having you torture yourself at finding at just how wrong we are for each other?"
"That's bullshit and you know it." He spat out. "I loved you, Caroline, and you threw it back in my face."
Caroline started to stay something but thought better of it, getting up and tried to gather her things to leave. "You know what, I didn't come here to fight with you or see you at all so I'm just going to go now and-"
"Wait," She's a step away when he speaks and his voice breaks as the words come out, "I'm sorry."
She turns slowly to look at him. "Did you just apologize?"
He glared at her but there was no real heat anymore. "Yes, Some of us changed after Hogwarts."
A reluctant smile bloomed on her face before she's laughing and falling back into her chair. He watched her giggle into her hands as that ache in his chest he buried for years jumped back out. There was time her laugh was his most favorite sound in the world and a part of him still loves it.
"O-Oh Merlin, I just never thought I'd see the day Kol Mikaelson says sorry." She snorts out. "When did you start to learn?"
"About the moment you told me 'you never really loved me and it was all just a waste of time'. I believe I tried to get you to stay by apologizing for whatever wrong I may have done." He points out and she stops giggling, sobering up quickly. "But no matter, that was a long time ago and we're mature adults now, we shouldn't be acting like the teenagers we once were."
She sighed. "I agree. I apologize for blowing up on you too. You were always great at making me mad."
"It's a talent." He shrugged, changing the topic. "So, Caroline Forbes, how has it been since we last saw each other?"
"You mean since four years ago?" Caroline began to explain. "Well, I became Head Girl the year after you did and then I graduated too. I took a job as an event planner, doing parties for rich, pureblood debutantes and Quidditch after parties and the like.
"Not long after, I started dating someone. Tyler Lockwood, you know him I believe?"
'Know him' as in having walked in on him and Rebekah in the green houses Fifth Year than yeah, Kol nearly went blind with horror and rage. Horror because –eww, Bekah naked with a boy. And rage because his sister naked with a boy and boy had to die. Unfortunately, Professor Longbottom didn't agree with his plan to kill one of his students even after defiling his workplace.
Kol just nodded in agreement, knowing full well that Caroline was well aware of what happened in those cursed green houses with Lockwood and Kol's only sister. It was something of a legend now in Hogwarts.
"And two years later, when I'm so sure he's going to propose, I find him in bed with some girl who wasn't me." Caroline gave a pained, bitter smile and took a long swallow of her nearly forgotten drink. "So now I'm here talking to you, one of the last people I thought I'd ever see again."
"The Wizarding World isn't that small. We were bound to run into each other at some point." He replies but she waves him off and nearly falls over her seat had he not caught her with his fast reflexes. "Whoa there. Just how many have you had to drink?"
She waves him off again and he pushed her drink away from her, smelling more alcohol than grape juice in it. He grimaced and was about to offer to take her to her apartment so she could sleep it off – he's bitter but not a total asshole – when his target finally notices he's being followed and bolts for the back door where Jeremy easily knocked him down with a hard punch.
Jeremy looked up at him expectantly and Kol glanced at Caroline, telling her to wait for a minute as he went to talk to his partner. "Could you do me a favour and take him in yourself? I kind of need to take care of something."
Jeremy just nodded, having already seen him with Caroline. He had been a few years behind Caroline back at school but everyone knew of Kol's relationship with her and the sudden disintegration no one saw coming. One minute they were so happily in love, the next she dumped him without remorse.
Kol quickly returned to Caroline and coaxed her into letting him take her home. They're walking outside in the snowy night, both shivering from the unavoidable cold as she told him her address. They walk slowly on the ice, his arm around her waist to steady her. It felt like torture to remember how she felt in his arms and what she smelled of – oranges and sandalwood – that perfect scent forever embedded into memory.
Caroline was quiet through the walk and it wasn't until they've gone up to her loft that she spoke. "Thanks for taking me home."
She took off her black coat and threw it on the back of the chair which told him she was still a bit tipsy. Caroline was a total neat freak and hated untidiness of any sort and it had made dating her a little nerve-wracking but at the time he thought she was worth it.
She took a seat on the white couch in the living room and unzipped her boots, throwing them on the white carpet and letting herself relax into the white cushions. He merely watched her from the doorway, still not having entered her space. She blinked at him like he's a mirage that would disappear and said, "You can come in, Kol."
He finally stepped into her loft and took in the mural of pictures on one of the walls, looking closer he saw pictures of Caroline with her family and her friends from when she was a baby up to now. He nearly balked at the photo of them in his Seventh Year.
It was at the end of a very important Quidditch match. They had just won against Gryffindor and he was hovering over the stands on his broom with her leaning over the railing so she could give him a victory kiss. If he tried hard enough he can still feel the cool wind in his air and sticky sweetness of her lip gloss on his mouth. How things have changed.
He took the photo of the wall and walked over to where she was seated on the couch. Having sobered up some she sat on the couch eyeing him apprehensively as he handed her the photo. "You still have this?"
"It's a memory." She answered, her eyes on the photo in her hands. "One I particularly cherish."
"I thought you said it was all a waste."
She kept staring at the photo wordlessly, biting her lips before she looked up at him and there she was – his Caroline – the girl who kissed him in that photo and there are tears forming in her blue eyes, waiting to fall. 'I…" Her voice wavers as she spoke. "I may have embellished a few things."
"About what exactly?" He asked, almost urgently. He'd been thinking about having this conversation with her for years, just to know why? Why did you stop loving me?
She swallowed and looked down and he took the seat beside her on the couch, taking her hands in his. His grip almost too tight as he tried to persuade her to tell him all the things he'd been dying to know but never had the chance to find out. "Please tell me, Caroline, please."
He was not one to apologize, she'd known that. He was not one to beg but for her he'd do anything. She was always the girl who could tear him apart and put him back together in one breath. "Caroline…"
She sniffed as she begun to speak. "I-I never…stopped."
"Stopped what?"
Her watery eyes glared at him. "Do I have to say it out loud?"
Yes! Merlin, yes! "Please."
She shook her head but still told him the words he'd been aching to hear. "I never stopped loving you."
"Then why did you…" Leave me, break my heart, hurt me like you did? "Why did you end things between us?"
"Because I was pregnant." She sobbed out and bowed her head as her hands shook his off to cover her face. Ice ran down his spine as she continued to speak. "And when I told you, you were so wrecked about it because we weren't ready for a baby and so I told you it was a false alarm and then I…I…I lost it…the baby…and it was just gone.
"The baby died." She finished and she's crying fully now, years' worth of keeping in this secret and all this pain finally taking a toll and he's frozen on that couch not knowing what to do but just wanting to be able to somehow stop this lovely, beautiful girl, the only one he's ever loved to stop crying, to stop hurting. And so he wrapped his arms around her and held her until she stopped crying, even after that.
A part of him cried as well. A part that never knew he wanted any of the things he could've had with her. Because if that baby had lived, he would've fought for him or her and Caroline. He would've married Caroline and they could've been a family. They never would've broken up. They wou;d've been happy.
But all those woulds and coulds were all dust in the wind and he let fly away as he threw away with it every bad thought or feeling he ever associated with Caroline because there were no room for them anymore. Not now, not ever again. He would rebuild everything they lost and they would d be -not whole- but maybe happy again. Like they both deserve to be after years of being aimless, being pulled together but denying it.
She's stopped crying now but doesn't disentangle from his embrace, her fingers tightly grasping his expensive but too-thin coat while his arms were around her, one hand going through her blonde hair and his mouth kissing the top of her head. And they're not cold. Not anymore, never again.