AUTHOR'S NOTE:Hello my lovelies, here is my update for the week. I'll only be updating once this week, as soon as I posted last week I was blocked on finishing the part I was writing on and now my buffer of parts I have written to parts I have posted has shrank a lot. I don't want to leave you guys hanging without updates so I'll go back to posting once a week until I get the buffer up again. With the holidays coming and with it all of the family/school stuff with my family my time to write might not be what it is now.

I just want to thank everyone who has left me reviews about enjoying the last part, I'm trying to keep things as realistic as possible when it comes to the kids so I'm glad to see that everyone is enjoying that. Also thank you to everyone who has favorited or followed.

Thanks again to CeCeVolume for her help in betaing.

Part 8

The Mikaelson kitchen looked like Fall had exploded. There were newspapers lying all over the table with piles of pumpkin guts, a few pumpkin seeds, beautiful colored leaves, remnants of caramel apples and popcorn strewn about. But Caroline thought that the mess was worth it after seeing the smiles on the kids' faces all afternoon.

It was the day before Halloween so Caroline had decided to take the kids to get pumpkins to carve. However, it wasn't just a simple trip to the supermarket; no they had gone to a nearby Autumn Festival that was complete with every Fall indulgence you could ask for. They had spent hours playing there before coming back home and getting started on the pumpkins that they had acquired. Now she just needed to get the kitchen cleaned up before their father got home.

"Daddy! You're home," Lexi squealed before launching herself into her father's arms as he walked into the kitchen.

'Damn it. He would be home early,' Caroline thought as she smiled in greeting, until she noticed the frown on his face. "Hey, sorry about the mess. I was just about to start working on cleaning it up."

Klaus's eyes skimmed over the carnage that covered his kitchen as he picked up his daughter. When he had gotten home, he had heard noise in the kitchen, and had come in search of the kids. He wasn't surprised to see them busy with some activity, but he felt disappointed hit him when he saw what they had been doing. There were several pumpkins sat on the table and stuff everywhere else. But it wasn't the mess that had him irritated. "You guys have been carving the jack-o-lanterns?"

"Dad, you should see all of the guts that came out of mine," Henry said excitedly from his spot at the table. "There was so much; Caroline said it was because I had to pick the biggest pumpkin I could find. It was warm, squishy, and slimy. Totally gross, but totally cool."

"No, it was just totally gross. I only pulled out a little bit; Caroline helped get the rest of it out. Just like you do, Daddy," Lexi explained from her perch on her father's hip before she wiggled her fingers in front of his face. Klaus noticed that they were stained with various colors. "And look, we got to draw on windows too."

"What?" Klaus asked perplexed.

"We got to draw on the store windows," Henry stated.

"It's okay. Some of the shops around the festival we were at, they were really into Halloween so they put tape on the windows in graphs and allow kids or anyone to draw Halloween pictures; they had the markers and everything there to use. There were still a couple of empty spots, so we let the kids draw on them. Um, I took pictures of the artwork since we couldn't take it with us," Caroline explained. She could see Klaus still had a frown and, if she wasn't mistaken, there was a bit of anger in his eyes. He couldn't really be that mad about the mess in the kitchen or on the kids could he? She turned away from them to start picking up the mess.

"Can we put them up?" Lexi asked. "I want to have art up like you, Daddy."

"Sure, Lex, we can put them up," Klaus replied with a smile towards her.

"But first, can we do our pumpkins?" Lexi asked.

"Pumpkins?" Klaus repeated. He wasn't sure why she was asking about the pumpkins; hadn't they already done the carving? He knew it was silly to be mad; it was such a simple thing. But it still hurt to think he had missed out on something that they did every year.

"Yeah, the pumpkins," Henry said as if his father had lost his mind.

"I thought you guys already did them?" Klaus asked.

"No way, we do them with you. We do every year," Lexi wiggled out of her father's arms before heading over to sit by her brother. "We have been drawing what we want them to look like. Can we do them?"

"Pleeeaaase..." They both looked at him with pleading eyes and their little hands clasped in front of them as a sign of them begging. Klaus smiled at them before nodding. "Give me a minute to talk to Caroline."

The twins let out a cry of victory before they turned their attention back to their drawings. Just then timer on the oven went off. He noticed that Caroline's eyes lit up when it did before she rushed to the oven. "The pumpkin seeds are done roasting."

"You roasted the seeds?" Klaus asked.

"Of course, why throw them away?" Caroline asked, her eyebrows scrunched in confusion as she looked at him. The distraction caused her to bump the inside of her arm on the hot rack, burning her and she almost dropped the cookie sheet. "Ouch!"

Klaus saw what had happened and rushed forward to help her. He grabbed a towel, before he took the tray from her and set it on top of the stove. Once he did, he turned to Caroline to see her holding her arm just below the ugly red mark on the inside of her left arm. "Henry, go get the first aid kit."

"It's okay; it's just a little red," Caroline said as Henry scampered out of the room.

"That's going to blister," Klaus interjected before he placed his hand on the small of her back and led her over to the sink. He turned on the cold water, but made sure not to turn the pressure too high so not to cause her pain. He moved his hand to her elbow and directed it to the water. "Put it under the water. It will take the sting out. Then we'll get some ointment on it before it gets too bad."

Henry returned then with the kit and handed it to his father before gazing at Caroline's arm. "Wicked."

"Henry," Klaus chastised. He knew that the boy was just interested in the wound like he was in anything that had to do with science, but now was not the time for him to be staring at Caroline like she was on the Discovery Channel.

"Sorry," Henry apologized though he didn't look away. "Is she going to be okay?"

"I'll be fine, Sweetie. Your dad is going to patch me up real quick. Thanks for getting the first aid kit," Caroline assured him. He looked at her for a minute, as if he wasn't sure if she was telling the truth or not before deciding she was and rejoining Lexi at the table.

"Thank you," Klaus said, trying to express his gratitude. She looked at him oddly before he went explained. "For waiting for me. I was irritated when I thought I might have missed out on our pumpkin tradition."

Caroline looked up and saw that the frown and look in his eyes was gone. It made her heart flutter a little at the thought of how he had been upset over the possibility of missing a moment with his kids. "It's all Henry and Lexi have talked about since I told them where we were going. They said that you all do one, so I thought it would be easier if we got the messy part out of the way. Plus, they would have driven me nuts if they had been stuck staring at the pumpkins as they waited."

"Again thank you," Klaus declared as he opened the kit and started sifting through to find the burn ointment. Once he did, he reached over to pull her arm out of the water towards him and placed it on the counter. The small red mark had already darkened considerably and started to blister. As he looked over the wound, the faint tattoo just above the burn caught his eye. He remembered seeing it when he first looked at her burn but hadn't paid much attention to it; he had been focused on her injury. It was of a bird, a dove outlined in blue, very light almost inconspicuous. In fact, he couldn't remember seeing it until today. It seemed very…Caroline.

Caroline watched as Klaus lightly patted the ointment onto the burn. The skin of her arm felt very warm, and she wasn't completely sure it was solely because of the burn. He placed a large bandage over the area to keep it covered. As soon as he was done, she pulled her arm away. "Katherine wanted me to remind you that dinner will be early tomorrow night, that way you guys will have plenty of time to eat before you take the kids trick or treating."

"Did she call here?" Klaus asked. He used a paper towel to wipe the ointment off his fingers before he pulled out his phone to make sure he hadn't missed a call from his sister in law.

"No, she was with us earlier. We met her and Daniel as well as Sage and her kids at the festival we went to. They called me this morning to see if we were interested in going," Caroline clarified. Since first meeting Katherine and Sage, they had become sociable, not necessarily friends but working that way. "The kids wore their costumes earlier, it was part of the festival but I made sure that they were hung up. Their buckets are up there on the hangers as well. You guys should have a blast."

Klaus nodded. "What about you? Are you doing anything tomorrow?"

"Bonnie, Damon, Elena and I are going to a Halloween party at a friend of Damon's. We are going to dress up, and have fun," Caroline replied as she got up and started cleaning the kitchen up

Klaus smiled. "You have a costume?"

"Yeah, I always get dressed up."

"The kids will love seeing that."

"Um, no. I'm getting dressed at Bonnie's place," Caroline said uneasily. "It's not exactly PG."

"Oh," Klaus replied in understanding as his mind conjured up various costume that he had seen when he had taken the kids shopping. He had wandered around the store while they were trying to decide what they wanted to be and had seen the wall of adult costumes and what little the women's consisted of. He couldn't help it as his mind wandered to which one of them Caroline might have chosen to wear. A couple of the ones he had seen sprung to his mind instantly; a little Red Riding Hood outfit that would make any man looking at her want to be the Big Bad Wolf to chase after her and a vampire seductress costume that would have people lining up to bare their necks. "Right."

"I mean, it's not like its lingerie or anything," Caroline explained, whispering the last part. She didn't want her boss to think she was a slut. Her costume wasn't that revealing, but she didn't think she should wear it around the kids; it was party wear.

"No need to explain. You can wear whatever you want, it's your choice. I know Bekah has worn some stuff in the past that made us not want to let her out the house, sometimes it wasn't even Halloween." Klaus's face grimaced when he thought of some of the arguments all of the brothers used to get into with Rebekah over her choice of wardrobe; Kol didn't help much either with some of the comments he had thrown in.

"It's just a little tight and shows some skin," Caroline declared as he pulled the trashcan over and started helping her clean up the mess from the counters. "And the party probably will run late so I'm going to stay at Bonnie's. That way I don't wake anyone up when I come in."

"You don't have to, you know. I mean this is your home as well; you can come and go as you please. I'll make sure the kids don't bother you," Klaus announced. Caroline had made the habit on most weekends when she was off duty of staying at her friend Bonnie's apartment. He could understand some of her reasoning; it was hard to live where you worked but he didn't want her to feel like she had to.

Caroline just smiled and nodded as they continued to clean up the mess from the day.

I hope you liked this part, the Halloween theme will continue to the next part.

The festival and drawing of the Halloween art on the windows is a real thing, just not in Boston that I know of. Most of the time when I place a fic in a city I try to keep events or activities that actually take place there, but in this case I'm using something that happens in my hometown. There is a small town within the city I live in where Halloween is a huge event and a week ahead of time they set stuff up and invite people to draw Halloween art on all of the shop windows. Since I'm dealing with Klaus' kids, I think it was fitting.