Bea hadn't been so tired in what she was sure had to have been at least a decade. And as humiliated as she wanted to be at the sheer indignity of Kol simply restraining her arms at her sides as she admittedly threw a tantrum, she couldn't even call on that emotion.
Kol stood behind her, his arms wrapped around her like an errant child. When she finally stopped moving and let out a long, tired sigh, she felt him prop his chin on top of her head. Letting out a low hum, he was the first to speak.
"That was probably a long time coming. Your right hook is significantly more effective than it was one hundred years ago."
To hear Kol joking about the gap in time after she'd reacted the way she had made something in Bea loosen. It was as if something hungry in her chest had settled down upon hearing his soothing, gently mocking tone.
"I shouldn't have hit you. I'm sorry."
She could feel Kol shrug against her back – most likely an acceptance of her apology, but not respond verbally. It felt like there was a lull in time at the moment. They were in a fairly isolated part of the woods, and apart from the two of them, the only living things were a few birds that hadn't been scared off yet. His hold shifted into a simple embrace, and Bea allowed herself a moment to simply breathe and feel calm with Kol surrounding her.
Her little tirade had wrenched open and laid bare her every fear and insecurity about having Kol back. In the months that she and Rigby had been trying to find him, she had fretted about how he would react to being with her after she had changed in the last century. But not once did she consider that she might be the one to feel resentment towards him.
Bea had said her piece, and was mostly staying quiet to allow Kol to process what she had said. He was bound to be a little overwhelmed by her emotional unload, especially when she had tried to put on a happy face around him since they were reunited. So she waited.
When he finally spoke, it was in a tight, even tone that gave nothing away.
"You aren't the only one in this. But I can't kill your demons, Bea. I can apologize for being reckless and drawing Niklaus's attention a century ago, but I can't apologize for anything that followed. That wasn't my doing, and it isn't my blame to take on."
Bea squeezed her eyelids shut as tightly as she could, as if scrunching up her eyes would hold back any tears. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
When she finally spoke, she made sure there was no trace of her sadness – crying now would put them at an imbalance of power, the very last thing needed for this discussion.
"I know that it isn't fair to blame you. I'll try to work on it. But I also can't just pretend that no time passed."
At that, Kol unwound his arms and stepped around from behind her so they faced each other. With her head tilted back, Bea could see the annoyed look on his face.
"I never asked you to pretend. Maybe I needed it to be that way at first, but from now on I care more about my wife becoming an emotional nuclear bomb than I do my own anger at having missed out on a lifetime with you."
Bea nodded, but ultimately didn't have very much more to say that couldn't wait. So she reached both hands forward and gripped his, holding them tightly as she started walking back in the direction they had both run.
The journey back to the apartment was silent, both of them thinking over the things that had been brought up, and it seemed as though neither was ready to breach the quiet just yet. However when they entered the apartment and were faced with the obvious bloodstains, another issue arose.
"You were angry about the women I fed from. Even as a human you understood that I fed and didn't reprimand me seriously for it. We ate a couple together last night."
Bea felt yet another spike of anger at the reminder of the bodies she had come home to, but reminded herself that from Kol's perspective she really had freaked out for no reason. So she did the best she could to explain.
"I like violence and I love being a vampire. But it seemed too far to kill a girl who didn't have a chance at her married life yet. I'm very aware that I'm probably projecting our own issues onto it. And the lack of subtlety is dangerous now. There are security cameras everywhere and smart phones that can capture proof of your existence in a millisecond. You have to be discrete when you're – no, we're feeding. I'd much rather do it together because it feels weirdly intimate. If that's alright with you."
Kol nodded along to what she'd been saying – not in agreement but to show he was listening to her words. By the end of her explanation he was smirking at her, a bit mocking but mostly amused. In less than a blink of an eye he sped over to her and began nuzzling his face against her neck, just under the hinge of her jaw.
"Mon chéri, I'll do anything intimate with you."
Bea wanted to bat him off – well, no she didn't. She thought that maybe a mature adult should bat him off and remain upset on principle or something and not forgive him so easily when he hadn't made any comment on her very real concerns but…
He was dragging his lips across her neck now, and she had very little experience being a mature adult. Before she had to try to wrangle any kind of promise from him, he began murmuring against her skin.
"I can be discrete. And you've always been softer than me. I don't care about the humans, but you can play at being my moral compass if it's that important to you."
Bea tilted her head back, giving him access to more of her neck. Her body was already responding to his touch, and her mind was strangely turned on by the idea of having that degree of power over Kol. When he began walking her backwards, it was simple to hop up on to the kitchen counter, putting them at eye level. When he gripped her hips and pulled her against him, she let out a breathy sigh.
Bea's protest was half a moan as he pressed his pelvis against hers and began to rub against her.
"We should – oh god, juste là – we should still be serious –"
"We could be. Or we could accept that we both were disgustingly vulnerable today and fuck in the kitchen to reaffirm our love and devotion to each other."
Yes, Bea supposed they could do that instead. However, when she began to grind against Kol, the door to the apartment slammed open to show Rigby standing in the doorway, looking a bit distracted. With little concern for Kol, Bea shoved him aside and hopped off the counter, speeding over to throw her arms around her best friend.
"You're home! I missed you, I didn't think your little overnight bag meant you'd be gone for a week and -"
Bea froze, and pulled back from the hug with a blank face. Rigby cringed and seemed to try to put on an air of confidence, but when a wide, wicked smile began growing on Bea's face Rigby seemed to slump and accept what was going to happen.
"You smell like sex! Kol, doesn't she smell like sex?"
The question was clearly rhetorical and meant to be dramatic in order to embarrass Rigby a bit more, but he muttered in a petulant voice, "Yes, it appears that someone around here is getting laid."
Bea waved away his miffed complaint about their interruption - after all, she'd sucked him off less than twelve hours ago - and focused back on her best friend.
"Eleanor, you dirty girl! So these errands you were running happen to have a cunt?"
Rigby cringed at her wording just as Bea knew she would, but responded in a dry tone, "The errands were more interesting than I'd thought they would be, yes."
Bea hopped up and down with glee, tackling her into yet another too-tight hug as she said, "I'm so happy for you! Who is it? You didn't take the yoga-human back, right? If you were gone for a week it had to be someone supernatural. Anybody I know?"
The other woman was clearly stalling, and to Bea's amusement, Kol decided to step in and save Rigby from the interrogation.
"Come on now, love. Let her settle back in before the inquisition. There is time later, for now she probably wants to shower -" and evidently Kol wasn't entirely merciful when he said in a dramatic whisper "I can smell two types of perfume on your skin."
Bea pouted and released Rigby, but not before pecking her on the cheek and saying, "Really though, I missed you. You have to meet Kol's sister, she's a gem. We should go out tonight, I haven't been drunk in so long."
And so the three vampires made plans to bar hop through the surrounding towns near Mystic Falls.
Kol watched Bea interact with Rigby and felt a strange sense of thankfulness for the woman. Rigby was clearly the one who acted older and most likely more rational than his wife, and it was nice to know that she'd had someone like that with her for the last few decades. But right now his appreciation was mostly due to the fact that the two had been competing to see who could chug entire bottles of terrible quality liquor after Bea had needled at her friend to accept the dare for almost two hours, and they were both hilariously shitfaced.
Bea was sitting on one of the two stools at the cocktail table they had secured at the beginning of the evening, with Kol on the other side. Rigby stood behind her with her arms wrapped around Bea's shoulders and her chin propped up on shoulder. Both women were staring at him in the overly-focused way that inebriated people did when they were trying to appear sober.
Seeing as the two were swaying back and forth and had nearly tipped over numerous times, their attempted look of sobriety was ineffective.
Rigby turned her head and muttered something into Bea's ear that made his wife's eyes go incredibly wide with exaggerated surprise. A second later she slammed her palms against the table and slurred, "Rigby is gonna have beautiful gay babies with pretty hair."
Kol, who was only a bit drunk and not anywhere near the level of the women in front of him, tried to seem serious when he said, "Oh, do tell."
Bea and Rigby both seemed to take it as their cues to speak, and he could barely make out what either woman was saying over each other.
"Katie is sort of a bitch but Rigby makes soft eyes at her and -"
"I know she's using me, and I'm mostly using her too but her laugh is -"
"-if she hurts her I'll find a way to tear her spine out, I don't care if she's older."
"so cute and I want to make her tomato soup."
Evidently Rigby's proclamation of making Tatia's vampire doppelganger food had some significance Kol couldn't fathom, because Bea looked at Rigby as if the woman had proclaimed she was the messiah and said, "You didn't tell me it was that serious, oh no! Wait, yes. But no. I wanna be a godmother and the maid of honor."
Bea whirled around and lifted her drink - more accurately, the glass that was empty of everything but ice, and shouted to the entire bar - "a toast!"
Most of the people in the bar turned to see what was going on, and Kol really wished he had been paying better attention when Bea had showed him how to take pictures and record videos on his new phone, because it was a travesty that this wasn't going to be recorded.
"To my baby sister who's also older than me and my great niece! She's gonna have a beautiful white dress and kiss another lady in a pretty dress 'n they're gonna live happily ever after but with murder!"
Kol raised his glass and drank to that.
Caroline was trying very, very hard not to cry. She was scared though, which was something she hated. Ever since she had been turned there had been a certain fearlessness that came with being a vampire. Because she had been made into something nearly indestructible she had gotten used to the feeling that nothing could overpower her.
But the three vampires in front of her that had her cornered in an alley were doing just that.
What sucked was that she hadn't even gone looking for them or anything, in fact, she was just on her way home from the grill after having a girls night. But she hadn't realized who the three figures stumbling down the street in her direction were until it was too late.
Kol had his hand wrapped around her throat and was pressing her against the bricks while a woman she didn't recognize argued with Ms. M - no, crap, this wasn't her art teacher anymore. The woman had never really been Ms. M, she had been Bea Mikaelson the entire time.
They were discussing what they should do with her.
Kol was fairly vocal at first, but had finished speaking with a firm, "My final vote is leaving her corpse for Niklaus to find. It's only fair after what he did to Bea."
However Bea and the other woman, who they had called 'Rigby', had different ideas. What made the situation one hundred times more terrifying was that they were all incredibly drunk, and discussing her murder as if it was some kind of inconvenience. Rigby was the one who was advocating that they let her go, but she seemed to say something that set off Bea.
"Come on guys, she's just a baby. She didn't do anything wrong to deserve -"
Bea cut the woman off with a shaking, enraged voice.
"I didn't do anything wrong either. Klaus didn't give a shit."
Caroline understood for the first time that something much bigger than she had thought was going on. They were arguing, but it didn't seem like it was really her they were discussing. But in an apparent complete change of heart, Bea let out a huge breath in an annoyed sigh and stepped up close to Caroline. She tucked a strand of Caroline's hair behind her ear, and Caroline whimpered. The woman's show of kindness was somehow scarier than her rage. Rage was predictable. But this random kindness had her on edge.
When Bea spoke, it was quiet and her slurring was a little bit more obvious than it had been before.
"Her hair is pretty 'n she's always polite in class. And tonight was about Rigby and love and nice hair, so we should let her go. I don't want to kill the blondie and then deal with Klaus for the first time in a century with a hangover. She can be a messenger dove."
Both Kol and Rigby muttered, "pigeon" at the same time.
Bea seemed uncaring as she waved them off and stared into Caroline's eyes.
"You aren't going to die tonight. 'S not going to happen again." She then turned to Kol and said, "We're gonna have to deal with your brothers. I don't want the teenagers getting inserting themselves for no reason and being annoying."
The second Kol let out an exasperated noise and let go of her, Caroline ran away as fast as she could.
As always, please let me know what you think about the plot, characterizations, etc!