Author's Note: Hello, my loves! I'm sorry about the long wait! I just adore hearing from all of you, so thank you for taking the time! I hope that everyone is having a good December so far and I hope that you all have wonderful holidays! Let me know what you think! Enjoy!
Caroline slept her weekend away. Throughout all of it, her exhaustion was beyond bone-deep. She just didn't have any energy to keep her head up off of the bed for very long throughout the whole weekend. Caroline doesn't give herself time to wonder what's wrong with her. It's been kind of interesting. Not good, obviously, with the death of Mr. Tanner, but Caroline had been hearing about his death blowing up on the internet. And over the weekend, Bonnie and Elena blowing up too. The shot that people have been talking about in regards to Mr. Tanner was taken from last year, coaching out on the field, and directly behind him, in perfect view, as if flanking him was Elena and Bonnie, clear as day.
They were in the middle of posing, bright-eyed, smiling, and beautiful and people were talking. Between them, hidden perfectly behind Mr. Tanner, was Caroline. She knew this routine, knew this placement, and knew that the spot she was supposed to be, at that moment, was directly behind him. And a part of Caroline was relieved by it. The last thing she would want was to be immortalized in a freeze-frame of a routine for a man that died. Bonnie and Elena definitely had Caroline's deepest sympathies.
Once Monday rolls around, Caroline gets up, gets dressed, makes sure she eats, and shoves past the heavyweight that's holding her down to get to school. She made sure she left early, remembering that she left her car at school and she was going to have to walk. Liz had offered to drive her, but Caroline declined, wanting to walk instead.
She needed the fresh air and hopes that it would help make her feel better. She sucks in the fresh morning air as deep into her lungs as it can go, feeling lighter with each passing moment. It's nice to be able to get out of the house and away from her bed. She knows that she can't stay in bed all day - like she did all weekend - even though she really wants to. She knows she has to get up, though. She could only sell being sick for the weekend but it all has to come to an end.
But she was so tired, all weekend. She just didn't have the energy to do anything. The most she could do was pull herself into the living room to watch a movie with her mom - which they hadn't done in forever and Liz was pleasantly surprised over - but then she went right back to bed. And despite all the sleep that she's been getting, she still feels this perpetual exhaustion hanging over her. An overwhelming lethargy that she can't seem to work her way through. It doesn't lessen, it doesn't go away, it doesn't stop, and she's not sure why.
She forces the feeling away, opting to do something that always made her feel better. Singing. She just... sings random snippets of songs that catch her fancy as she walks down the quiet morning streets as Mystic Falls slowly awakens for the day. She doesn't sing loud, just a whisper under her breath, or humming softly as she crosses the streets toward her school, having walked these streets about a million times over the course of her life. All sorts of songs. Lullabies, songs from her childhood, and even some more recent. Anything to occupy her thoughts.
Anything was better than giving thought to the exhaustion beyond bone-deep. She needed something else to focus on. Even if she was putting a simple band-aid on a stab wound. She needed something else more than anything.
So she sings, and she hums. Songs like Marry had a little lamb and that new song that she really liked. That Miley Cyrus song, The Climb too.
"My faith is shaking but I... gotta keep trying..." Caroline trails off, her feet turning to lead. She hears the bottom of her feet scrape against the concrete beneath her, peeling the top layer off of the bottom of her shoe. This feeling comes over her so strong she felt her muscles all lock up.
Fear. This stomach-lurching, bone-chilling, heart-stopping fear that roots her into place.
Her blood roars in her ears as she is brought back in time when the world was darker, walking down the street heading to her home. It was scarier then. But not as lonely as it feels right now. There wasn't as much fear, there wasn't as much pain, there wasn't as much... knowledge. She didn't know then what she was so scared of - and even though she can't put into words now what it is that she knows, she knows that she knows it. Deep down. Deep beneath... beneath the... beneath the choking... the screaming... beneath the...
Behind the brick wall.
Yes, the demons lie there, behind the scary wall. Not beneath anything. Not...
A loud horn makes Caroline jump, her heart leaping into her chest as she turns to look at the car right next to her. The man inside waving his hands around, gesturing for her to move out of the way. It's then that she realizes that she's stopped in the middle of the road. Caroline stares at her reflection on the windshield. Her eyes hone in past herself to the man and the light catches his face just right, dark hair, bright blue eyes. And a flash, an image of someone she doesn't want to imagine crosses her mind, stabbing at it painfully, with just the picture alone.
That terror awakens in her once more, pushing her forward. Caroline's flight instinct kicks her square in the back and gets her running straight for the school. Once she gets there, her feet take her straight to the near-empty parking lot - only the most diligent of students and the necessary staff are already there - to her own car on the backside of the building, where she left it on Thursday when she went over to the stadium with Elena and Bonnie.
She fumbles with her keys wildly until she manages to find the one she needs, jams it into the lock, opens the door, and crawls in, leaving all of her other things - purse, backpack, and gym bag, on the floor of the parking lot, slamming the door behind herself and locking it before falling into complete silence. Then she sits there, staring out the front windshield trying to sift through the pieces of herself that shook loose. There... there is something behind that wall in her mind. Something terrifying and ferocious, clawing away at this barrier that separates them.
The thin layers separating her from the outside world only offers her a minuscule bit of comfort. She doesn't want to be here. She doesn't want to do this. She wants to run. Run as far and as fast away from this as humanly possible. She can't do this. She can't be here. She can't face the things that sit beyond the confines of her own car. Out there is scary. Out there is evil. Everything out there wants to hurt her. Everything out there wants to break apart the fragile pieces of her soul that she is hardly holding together from something so utterly horrible she is too scared to remember.
This is her life now. This horrible, paralyzing fear keeps her rooted in place. Perhaps not of the body, not always, but of the mind. Of the soul. She is trapped here, in this place. And she feels an inch tall.
And it terrifies her. So she sits there, listening to her panting breaths, rapidly beating heart as her eyes mist up, feeling this terror clenching at her chest so tightly she's afraid to breathe too deeply for fear of what it might do. And while she sits there, paralyzed in terror, she can feel something else bubbling up inside of her. Something that begs for release that she's not sure how to give.
All she knows is that inside... inside, she screams.
It takes a knock at her window to pull Caroline out of her catatonic state. She jumps, turning wide, frantic eyes toward the window to see Matt standing on the other side with Tyler a few steps away, staring in at her.
"W...what?" Caroline asks.
Matt makes a motion for her to come out of the car. Caroline takes a few deep breaths to slow down her heart before she opens her car door and steps out, adjusting her shirt and jeans to busy her clammy hands.
"What... um, what is it?" Caroline asks, turning her eyes toward Matt to see his face twisted in concern.
"Are you okay?" He asks.
"Yeah," Caroline says, hoping he can't hear the quivering in her voice. "Yeah, I'm fine. Why?"
Matt raises his eyebrows a bit and turns to look down at the concrete around her car to see all of her stuff strewn about, tossed half-hazardously to the ground when she was desperately trying to get her car door open. She looks around to see the parking lot is getting pretty filled up, and when she digs her phone from her pocket to look at the time to see that she's been sitting in her car for over forty-five minutes and it felt like not a single moment passed for Caroline.
"Oh," Caroline says, leaning down and picking up her stuff, which Matt is quick to help with. "I'm fine," She says, glancing at him to see him staring as he helps gather her things. "I'm fine."
"Okay," Matt says, offering a little nod. "Do you need help carrying everything to your locker?"
Caroline shakes her head, taking her purse from him, and stands up. "I'm okay. Thanks, Matt."
She juggles everything in her arms before closing her car door and heading for the school while keeping her head down. She can hear people in the hall around her talking about Elena and Bonnie on the internet. About Mr. Tanner dying at the football game. And the manner of his death, too. Some say he was attacked by an animal. The one that her mother had warned them about. Some say that it was someone getting back at him for being the worst teacher... the worst type of man.
Caroline has to block it out by straining her ears and walking faster. Normally she would have her ears to the ground, listening to all the gossip going around but she just can't. Not here. Not today.
Caroline goes to her locker and tosses in everything she doesn't need into it, before grabbing onto her gym bag and heading to the gym to put her bag in that locker. Anything else to occupy her mind, to keep her moving. All she could do was able to do was walk very quickly and keep her head down, only half-listening to people talk about Mr. Tanner's death and the memorial that is being planned for him. Caroline planned a good portion of it from her bed over the weekend, feeling like she owed it to him.
She's not sure why, but she felt that she did. So she helped from behind the scenes.
"It's gonna be a full moon."
Caroline jumps, turning wide blue eyes to the person standing next to her. It's Tiki. She offers Caroline a sideways look. Caroline looks around the near-empty locker room, trying to will her racing heart to slow down. She sucks in a deep breath before asking, "What?"
Tiki raised an eyebrow. "Mr. Tanner's memorial at the park? It's going to be a full moon. Fitting, don't you think?"
"Um, yeah," Caroline says, wrapping her arms around herself. "Ironically, I wrote a paper about the full moon and its connections to past historical events. Honestly, it was more befitting of a psych class, but he called it trash and unrelatable."
Tiki huffs, quirking her eyebrow, haughtily. "I know, girl. I was sitting next to you while he went on his tangent. Fifteen long minutes of him ripping you a new one. I wanted so badly to walk out."
Caroline runs her hand through her messy blonde hair, shaking her head while looking down at her shoes. "Yeah, imagine how I felt."
Tiki shrugs. "I feel bad that Mr. Tanner died, but he was not a nice man and he was a horrible teacher. This memorial is... definitely going to be an interesting one, but at least the night is going to be pretty."
"Sure," Caroline says, scratching at her arms again, still unable to fight the growing feeling of ants crawling beneath her skin. She's had it with growing persistence since the game Friday night. It makes her anxious and tired and, for some reason, achy.
But that is one of the three hundred things going on with her right now that she's going to pretend isn't happening to her. That she isn't wondering what it is or if she's okay. Maybe this will be good for her - both school and this service tonight. It gives her time to focus on anything other than herself. Or as a way of just focusing on anything at all.
So, Caroline sat zoned out throughout the day, barely focusing on anything in class. And considering what happened, the teachers were offering everyone a bit of leniency, so no one held Caroline responsible for not answering the three times she was called upon in her morning classes as she just stared out the windows next to her. They would call for her, stare at her while she would just keep looking out the window for a few moments, before moving on to someone else who was a bit more aware
"Are you okay?"
Caroline, who was staring at the pathetic excuse for chicken nuggets since lunch started, looks over at Elena. She stared back at her with her pretty, dark brown eyes soft with worry. Bonnie wasn't there. Either she wasn't going to be joining them or she hasn't managed to make it there yet.
"Huh?" Caroline says, scooting a nugget across the trey disinterested.
"Matt cornered me this morning. He's worried about you," Elena says softly, leaning on the table a bit to get a better look at Caroline's face. "He said that you looked like a zombie sitting in your car unmoving. Are you alright?"
Caroline blinks slowly, running a hand through her hair. "I'm okay..."
Elena raises her eyebrows, staring right at the side of Caroline's head. "Care, come on. I know you. You've been zoned out all day. Is this about Mr. Tanner? I didn't know that you were close to him."
Caroline shakes her head, looking back over at Elena. "I'm not close to him."
Elena tucks a loose strand of long brown hair behind her ear, leaning back a bit more comfortably. "We were all there the night of the game, and you just vanished afterward. What happened?"
"I just went home."
Elena's eyebrows pull together tightly as she tilts her head to the side. "Without saying anything to anyone?"
"I wasn't feeling well..." Caroline says, not sure if it was a lie or not.
Elena stares at her hard as if trying to decide if she believed Caroline or not. Or if she was willing to push it to see what the blonde would say about it if pressed. She decides against it and asks instead, "When was the last time you saw Mr. Tanner?"
Caroline's skin breaks out in a cold sweat. Her hands grow clammy as this sinking feeling settles in her gut, and something tugs at her mind from beyond the wall. Something dark and twisty. There is a scary, dark monster on the other side of that wall, and just thinking about that makes her feel terrified. Makes her feel like a caged animal prepared for slaughter. The trepidation and fear are like ice-cold chills up and down her spine.
She can hear Mr. Tanner's voice in her mind, but it sounds like he's underwater. Or maybe her head is underwater... she's not sure. It's muffled and distant, though. But there is an urgency to his voice. There's fear. Something is wrong. Something is scary. Something is gentle luring her to the wall in her mind once more. The answers are somewhere behind it, but they are shrouded in darkness and fear, wrapped in barbed wire. If she was going to go there, she needed to be a lot stronger than she was now. But maybe... maybe she could claw her way back to the surface of the wat-
No, it's a wall. Not... not the water. There is no water. Just a large, harmless wall keeping all the bad and the scary away.
"I don't know..." Caroline mumbles, feeling all the color drain from her body as she turns wide blue eyes toward her best friend. "I... I don't know." Panic starts to build up in her chest and she knows she has to say something. She has to at least try to explain it to Elena. If she says some of the words then maybe they won't be inside her anymore, threatening to choke the life from her. Caroline wraps her arms around herself, both from the cold of her body and because it's all she can think to do to hold the pieces of herself together. "Elena... I need to tell you someth-"
"Hey."
Caroline and Elena both look to see Stefan standing by their table, his hands stuffed into his jean pockets.
"Hey," Elena says, twisting around to face him. "You suddenly vanished the other day. I called about a hundred times, I was worried about you. Where did you go?"
Stefan's lips part, the words, "I had a bit of a family emergency," slide easily from his mouth before a pair of pretty green eyes turn to Caroline and she feels terror like a dagger to the chest.
Staring into his eyes, Caroline can feel her heart beating like a drum in her chest, pounding away at her chest plate as her blood roars in her ears and she feels it again. For the second time that day. A paralyzing terror that forces her body into conflicting feels of fight or flight. Her body so badly wants to run away but the muscles tense up so much that she can't even move. His green eyes study her face, eyebrows pulling together as his lips part slowly, her name forming on them before her flight instinct finally overpowers her frozen muscles.
Without saying goodbye, Caroline pops to her feet and runs away, runs as far and as fast as she can.
She doesn't remember running through the halls of the school and only really comes to at the sound of a slamming classroom door. The lights are off with only the sun from outside offering any light into the room. Caroline sinks to the floor with her back against the door and pulls her legs to her chest and wraps her arms around them.
She feels like she should be a choking, slobbering, bawling mess of a person, but instead, she sits in the dim room quietly, terrified to even breathe too loud, and stares off out the window to the bright world beyond. So close, yet somehow so terribly far away. Her body shivers from a chill she can't shake and her eyes burn from tears she can't shed. She doesn't move from that spot for the rest of the school day.
Caroline wanted to go home. She helped plan the memorial service for Mr. Tanner in the park that the community showed up to, but she didn't want to be there. If she had left that room just a minute later, she wouldn't have run right into Tiki who would have insisted that they go over to the park together to help set up. Then she could have just gone home and crawled into bed. She didn't want to move anymore, she could hardly bring herself to think. She sat in that classroom unmoving for hours. Her back, legs, neck, and arms were killing her. But even all of those were eclipsed by her hips. Sitting like that for so long without moving an inch. She was hurting now, but she was definitely going to be feeling it tomorrow.
Caroline made sure to provide the volunteers with all the information that they needed to set everything up for the service, but didn't do it with her normal - no doubt annoying - brand of zest and nitpick. She just nodded at everything that was shown to her for approval and just stared off into the nothingness when nothing immediately caught her attention.
Eventually, people started to show up and Caroline was relieved to tell Tiki to take care of everything and disappear into the bustling crowd. She was finally starting to pull back into herself, despite her mounting anxiety, and tries to clear her mind. She's not sure why she ran away earlier when Stefan showed up, but she's not ready to face Elena and Bonnie - who Elena no doubt told about her odd behavior - and whatever good, honest questions, and concerns they no doubt have. She just wants to forget. She wants so badly to forget. She can't not forget. She needs to. She's barely holding herself together as it is.
So a nice way to occupy her mind was to keep an eye out for her friends and avoid them like the plague as more and more people filled up the park in honor of Mr. Tanner. She spotted Bonnie once, talking with Tiki. She saw Elena three times, once with Matt, once with Stefan and Jeremy, and once with her aunt, Jenna. Caroline managed to avoid her all three times. Caroline made sure to catch her mom's eye as the sheriff and her deputies monitored the gathering and also came to pay their respects and offered her a little wave before disappearing into the crowd.
The sky darkened and everyone started lighting up their candle cups in his honor but Caroline couldn't. As the Mayor and the Principal stood up on the stage giving heartfelt speeches about how good a man and an educator that Mr. Tanner was, Caroline couldn't stop hearing him screaming in her ears. These horrible, painful, gut-wrenching screams made Caroline sick to her stomach and made her hands start to shake and grow clammy once more.
Then, she saw him. She saw him standing at the edge of the crowd watching carefully with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his leather jacket. He stood as still as a statue, staring out over the crowd with bright blue, disinterested eyes. And all the terror that Caroline has been feeling on and off all day today hits her a thousand times harder than ever before.
This time, her body didn't get the chance to lock up before she's spinning on her heel, running away as fast as she can. Her eyes are blown wide in terror but she can't see anything as she runs away. Something sharp whips across her cheek but she barely feels it. She has to jump over something and scrapes her hands as she goes, and it's not until something strong catches around her ankle that tosses her to the ground that she finally pulls back into her body. Her chin scrapes the ground and her nose is buried in the dirt when she pushes herself up.
The forest. She ran into the forest. Caroline takes a few huge gulps of air as she looks around, trying to orient herself once more to make her way home. She showed her face, people saw her, she paid her respects, she's going home. Now.
She looks around, sweating profuse bullets and her body hurts. Despite the cool night air as they slowly transition from fall to winter, Caroline's skin is burning like a fire is flowing through her veins. Through the thick trees, the full moon beats down at her, offering her enough light for her eyes to be able to see somewhat within the darkness. It's quiet. She can't hear the gathering in the park, so she must have made it pretty far away in that memory lapse. It would explain why her whole body is aching more than it did before.
She dusts off her hands and face from the dirt and moves to stand but as soon as it does, a shooting pain runs up and down her right leg and she crumbles to the ground in a loud yelp of pain that accompanied a sickening snap. Caroline, figuring she must have someone twisted her leg wrong when she went to stand, but when she looked down at it. The horror of seeing her own shin bone snapped in two and pressing tight against her skin made her vomit, almost immediately. She twisted to the side and puked stomach acid. She hasn't eaten anything all day.
Then, her shin snaps back into place and this burning, agonizing pain washes over her.
"Wha...what?" Caroline chokes out as her arm, the one she's leaning on, cracks in two and she collapses into the dirt, probably getting vomit into her hair. Caroline barely has a second to focus on that before bones across her entire body begin to break and set in rapid succession. Caroline rolls around in the dirt and twigs and screams in agony, not able to understand what is happening to her.
Writhing in the dirt in agony, Caroline can hear herself sobbing hysterically as she tries desperately to hold herself together. Absolutely everything hurts. Her head, her bones, her muscles - which she's tightened up instinctively and it only hurts more - and her heart. It feels like it's going to explode in her chest. She feels like she is actually tearing apart at the seams and she can't do anything to stop it. All she can do is scream and cry and writhe.
Her mind, desperate to hold the shattered pieces of herself together, tries to cling to something good. Anything good. Something that she could focus on that wasn't this horrible breaking and splintering and cracking across all parts of her body, and the sounds of her own screaming in her ears. First, her mind goes to her best friends. Who never ceased to make her happy ad be pillars of joy in her life.
They offered her no comfort.
Then she thought of the father that she has always adored, but remembered, painfully, how much of a price she paid for thinking that way. And the price was the only person that did in fact bring her comfort.
Liz.
Her mother has always been there for her even when Caroline was too bad of a person to notice and too terrible of a daughter to acknowledge. Caroline never truly gave credence to Liz's love and affection that she offered without asking for an ounce of it in return and Caroline will regret that for the rest of her life. Especially since now, in this moment of unbelievable terror and agony, certain that she is going to die, Caroline doesn't want Elena or Bonnie or Bill. Caroline wants Liz.
"Mommy!" Caroline sobs, reaching out to the darkness in front of her like Liz was hiding just on the other side of it. "Mommy, please!" Cracks work down Caroline's spine like they are piano keys and all Caroline can do is beg and scream for her mom, hoping that just by thinking of her, Liz's tremendous strength will seep into Caroline and help her survive this.
Because she doesn't think she will. She doesn't think she can. And if she dies here and no, there is only one person in the world that she wants by her side. The only person who has always loved her. She wants Liz. She wants to go back in time to when she was young and could curl up into the arms of her mother and pretend that all the horrible, nasty evils of the world could get to her. What she wouldn't give to go back to when she was five years old and that was her reality?
Caroline's mind, blinded by pain and fear, begins to turn fuzzy as her entire perceptions start to change and her bones stop cracking back into the same shape they were when they broke. She's going to die. There is no way that she's going to survive whatever it is that is happening to her. No one could survive something like this. And the one person that she wants to see, her own mother, the last thing that she did was offer her a half-hearted wave. She didn't even go to speak to her because she knew Liz would know something was wrong and Caroline was too much of a coward to face it.
And that'll be it. That'll be the last memory that Liz has of her ungrateful daughter alive. A simple wave before vanishing into the crowd.
Caroline begs for her mother, through snot and tears until she can't even recognize her own voice behind the sounds of an animal growling and snarling. Howling in agony.
And then nothing. For the first time in months, the perpetual screaming in Caroline's mind finally, finally tappers off into silence.