60. in the corner of maple and vine (Ch 3.B)
title: In the corner of Maple and Vine
chapters: 3/4
fandom: the vampire diaries, the originals
characters/pairings: klaus/caroline, ensemble
word count: 13k~ (overall: 37k~)
summary: "Our brother's a vampire and you wake the dead. There, I said it. Nobody's running for the hills. Nobody's coming at us with pitchforks." "It's the 21st century, Bekah. They'd use rifles."
or, the one where Rebekah exploits mug tricks for extra tips, Klaus is a passive-mostly-aggressive piemaker, and Caroline just wants to know why Klaus refuses to touch her.
PART ONE | PART TWO (A) | PART TWO (B) | PART THREE (A) | PART THREE (B) | PART 4
In the corner of Maple and Vine
3.5) but it's like i'm a machine
The night passes like the longest, hardest exam she's ever had to sit through. Melissa texts her something short and shrill about jam and donuts and a boy 'W AN A$$ DAT WONT QUIT'; Dad knocks on her door and asks if she's alright, if something happened, if she'd had her pepper spray on her; Steven follows soon after enticing her with pie, but she feels sick to her stomach.
"I'm fine," she calls back each time. I'm just dead, she doesn't add.
How is that even possible? She falls, she bleeds, she heals. She'd run track in high school and her heart had beat loud in her ears, blood pumping and feet pounding and she'd been alive then. No dead girl's heart would beat that loud.
A little after midnight she lies in bed and closes her eyes, thumb pressed firmly over her pulse point. She curls up in a ball and burrows her head under her pillow, hyper aware of the sound of her own breathing. In and out, a drag through her nose and a whoosh out her mouth. How does someone dead not know that they're dead?
They don't, she realizes.
They go and find out.
She slips her feet into her shoes and pulls up her window as silently as creaky panes allow and slips out onto the roof, nearly slipping on a patch of ice and falling to her death. Second death, she reminds herself, and she has to clap her hands to her lips to muffle the hysterical giggling bubbling out of her. She's pretty sure her foot barged into one of the rungs on the trellis she's clambering down from and Steven's going to be pissy about it whenever springtime decides to show up.
A light dusting of snow had covered everything in the garden and made the world look much smaller than it is. The house stands out from the darkness, the coloured lights strung up just for Jam Appreciation Day. The hushed sounds coming from inside her house make her feel a little bit lonely. She crouches down behind a frozen bush and stares into the frosty windows, watching the blurred-out lines of her father lightly kiss Steven, just a silhouette against the fire crackling and rolling in the hearth.
Suddenly, she feels very small.
Caroline tugs her coat closed over her pyjamas and gives the street a sidelong glance. It's empty, everyone's shoes brought in, their flower pots straightened, their curtains closed tight. She walks down the street with lights blinking around her, leaves footsteps that the snow covers soon afterwards. She looks back the way she'd just tread - it's as if she was never there.
The town square's nearly deserted too, the last of the vendors packing up and heading home, or somewhere warm, somewhere with bright lights and a hot drink. Caroline stands there shivering in her coat, her mismatched socks and last year's shoes, ignores everyone staring at her, and makes her way to the centre of the square, the fountain with frozen water gushing out of the mouths of chubby cherubs, where the last man in the square is cleaning up, his neck just a little bent behind his collar.
"Enzo," she whispers.
He hears nothing but the gently-falling snow, busy as he is stacking boxes.
"General," she says, louder this time.
He looks up. A corner of his mouth lifts, and Caroline wants to tell him that a smile is supposed to brighten your face, not do… whatever it is that's going on in his. He straightens up. "Well well, if it isn't my saviour."
"How's your neck?" she asks, even though she knows it would have long healed by now.
"Crooked," the General answers in his strange accent. "How's your head?"
"…What?"
The General shrugs and folds up his table. "You've that look on your face. Same one I had when I went home and realized I'd just come back from the dead. When did it happen?"
Caroline shivers again, whispers: "Ten years ago."
With the table tucked under his arm, the General lets out a whistle. "How about that."
.
.
They could have gone somewhere warmer, but Caroline wasn't moving, so the General finds a patch of marble that isn't slippery with ice and sits next to her, the sound of gurgling water the only thing interrupting the stillness of the snowy night. He fishes a flask out of his jacket and offers it to her. "It'll keep you warm," he cajoles when she shakes her head. "Suit yourself."
"Did you feel differently when you woke up?" she asks, watching him swig deeply. "Did you know?"
Was there a way to? You can't just go your whole life thinking you were one thing, but in actuality…
"I knew because Mikael had warned me," the General said, capping his flask. "Otherwise I felt perfectly fine. Why? Fancy yourself a war hero? Out of the ash you rise?" he finishes, the burr of his voice masking the taunt.
"No," she says softly. "I feel like I should be… feeling something, you know? Dead. But it's like I'm a machine. I died, but someone just rewired my insides to get me started up again. Don't you think it's a little unfair?"
"That we got a second chance, or that you never knew?"
She considers this. "Both, I guess."
"Let me put it this way, gorgeous." When the General speaks it's like he's perpetually grinding his teeth, hardening up for a difficult truth. "We're sitting here at this awful, cold fountain with our breath coming up white when we talk, instead of buried six feet under the snow. Just because you died and came back doesn't mean you have to torture yourself about it. Some people get to ride around in a jam jar on a day dedicated to them; some people get to wade into death and live to tell the tale. It's life. Shit happens. As long as we're still breathing." He sighs. "And you're still young. No use getting worked up over things beyond your control."
But that's what she does, she wants to cry. Maybe this whole thing was better in theory, not so much when executed. What exactly had she expected from the General, anyway? She brushes snow off her knees and ice off her back. "Thanks for the pep talk."
"Not the answer you were hoping for?"
"I didn't come to you looking for answers," she says. "I just wanted a conversation with a fellow member of the undead."
General None of Your Beeswax thrums out a laugh. "Keeping the faith, eh?"
"Half my life has been a lie, General. I think faith is all I have left." She waves a goodbye and starts to walk away. Halfway out the square she hears him call out to her, so she turns back. "Yeah?"
"Why doesn't anyone just call me Enzo?"
.
.
She lingers outside the door the next day (after checking thoroughly for more animal carcasses), her key passed from hand to hand, clamped down so hard they leave ridges in her palm. It's too early for any of the Mikaelsons to be up, and she doesn't even know why she'd come today.
"You didn't have to lie, you know," she tells the door. Yeah, okay - that sounds like a good opening. "But I have decided to be the bigger person because I am totally in touch with my zen, and-"
"Good morning, Caroline."
Come freaking on, can't these Mikaelsons let their guard down just freaking once?
She keeps looking at the door, at Rebekah's reflection bursting like pop art against the snow. Rebekah looks hesitant for all of five seconds before it's pushed out of her face, replaced by something that required her to lift her chin and raise both eyebrows. Her hair sways in the morning breeze, as lofty as she sounds when she says, "Let's have a chat."
"I'm supposed to be opening up." Her eyes never leave the hole in the door, which seriously needs to get fixed by the way. They're starting to run out of duct tape.
"Oh, bugger the diner, I own the place anyway. Come," she orders, motioning her hand insistently. "Let's take a walk."
Caroline turns her head. Rebekah is looking at her with her eyebrows raised expectantly, hand still held out like she's waiting to lead her away into a crowded ballroom. Her feet push off from the front steps, the muffled sound of shoes crunching through ice. She tugs on her hat tails. "Where are we going?"
Rebekah clicks her tongue and pulls her by the hand down the street. "Does it matter? Let's just get out of here."
Get out of here turns out to be the park where she'd buried the fowl yesterday. She had dug as deep as she could, but the ice-packed earth had made it hard. She'd torn a fingernail. At least now she knows why Klaus hadn't dropped to his knees to help her dig; good to know the dude still had his courtesies tied up in a neat lying little freaking lying bow.
Okay, so she's not as over it as she'd thought she was.
Whatever.
"I wasn't expecting you to show up today," Rebekah says. She wraps a gloved hand around the chains of her swing. "But then again you never do what I expect."
"Was my coming back to life something you didn't expect?" Caroline shoots, and because she doesn't want to keep shivering in the snow like an idiot, goes to sit in the swing next to Bekah's.
"No, it was," Rebekah says, electing to ignore the sarcasm. "So do you want the full story, or-"
"It must have been you, right? Because from what I've seen of Mr. Man Pain, he would never just willingly touch me. You found me. You talked him into bringing me back to life." Caroline sighs and blows halos around her head. "And the worst part of the whole thing is, as much as I want to be angry, I can't. Because I'm sitting here in this awful, cold swing, my breath coming up white when I talk, instead of buried six feet under. I'm alive." She pauses. "But I'm angry that I wasn't told. My life is my agency and the fact that my death can be dealt so casually and none of you even give a freaking-"
"Spare me," Rebekah groans, rolling her eyes. "That'd make for an interesting conversation. Hey Caroline, is the Sweet Potato done? Oh by the way, I sort of made my brother bring you back to life when you were eight but couldn't tell you because you promptly disappeared afterwards; kind of awkward that I'm only bringing it up now, right? Oh, the crust looks lovely, can't believe it's not butter!"
"It's not," Caroline replies sullenly before remembering it's all some kind of theoretical scene in Rebekah's head. Probably with cute waiters with arms bigger than their heads just mooching around in the back, and endless shelves of mugs. Girl loves her mugs. "Didn't somebody have to die in my place?"
"It's a random proximity thing," Rebekah tells her with a shrug. "I expect the person who hit you on the head kicked it next. A certain poetic justice to it, don't you think?"
"How are you so okay with this?"
Rebekah laughs darkly. "You didn't grow up with my father. You don't know the sort of business he dealt. You think the dead fowl was horrible? You naïve little thing. And now you're lamenting your rebirth, boo hoo, where so many others would give anything to be where you are. If Matt had been given a modicum of the chance you had-" she breaks off, cheeks flushed, breathing hard. "Stop being such a drama queen. You were going to die anyway, one day, but not as a child in that alleyway. One day. The same way the sun rises and sets, the way the wind plucks out silver songs out of a wind chime, the way I'm always late on Friday night shifts. It is nature, and it is life. Life, as it goes, goes. And things that go eventually have to…"
"Have to…?" Caroline prompts.
"I… don't know," Rebekah says, looking a little surprised. "Nik's never gotten to that part of the speech before, I always smack him before he can."
"You're trying to console me by ripping off some speech your brother your brother gives you whenever you have a temper tantrum?" Caroline tcchts between her teeth and grips the chains tighter. "It is a pretty obnoxious speech, though."
Rebekah kicks off lightly from the ground. "That's my brother for you. Do you want to know how Kol died?"
Caroline looks at her for a long moment before nodding her head.
The facts were th-
"None of that nonsense," Rebekah says with an impatient click of her tongue. "I'll make it snappy. None of us were old enough to work for my father, but Kol was. He had surprising strength even before his vampiring, and Mikael had a lot of enemies, so you do the math. Kol was fast and he had wits-sometimes. Kol, he's always been a bit of a daredevil, and he's always been a bit stupid. As soon as the shop closed he'd run off God knows where, but I knew he was fascinated with one of his Professor's work. Professor Maxfield, I believe. He was on the brink of a new discovery, turning humans into rabid killing machines.
"The trick, you see, was in the blood. I won't bore you with the machinations of it, but Kol - stupid, daredevil Kol - was his guinea pig. One night, Kol had left his wits in the shop and he wasn't as fast as he should have been. One of Mikael's old pals got him. Left him lying in the alley behind D'oh! Nuts."
Rebekah says all of this with a straight face.
Rebekah says all of this without ever looking away from her.
"They'd all figured out Nik's… ability, shall we say. He'd use it on little bugs and animals, things like that. But he wouldn't use it on Kol. I mean, I don't blame him. He was eight, he was scared, but Kol was just lying there, his neck slashed red-" Rebekah swallows. "Anyway, it was all really dramatic. Long story short, Kol woke up. We grew up. And Mikael never forgave Nik."
They're swinging now. The chains creak from the winter disuse, snow shaking down on them. But the air, the cold, clean winter air, it feels good in her lungs, freezes her from the inside out, speeding up her heart as her feet pump harder, as she digests all of this.
It all makes sense, suddenly. Their fierce loyalty to each other, their blatant hostility towards anything D'oh! Nuts related. The sheer terror in Rebekah's eyes when Mikael had swept into the room that one fateful night.
"Rebekah?"
"Yeah?"
"Things that go eventually have to come to an end."
Rebekah is quiet in thought. "So they do."
Caroline swings higher, legs kicking, hair swinging.
"Do you feel like taking the day off?" Rebekah asks, high in the sky. She lets out a breathless little laugh, "And not tell Nik?"
Like it's so wicked of them, to just run off into the sunset with their hands intertwined, a place where there are no pies to be baked, orders to be barked at, customers to cajole out of their seats.
"I have an evening lecture," Caroline calls back, scandalized.
"Skip it." Rebekah lets go of her swing chains and suddenly she's flying through the air and tumbling through the snow, hair splayed around her and arms spread like she's making snow angels. She's laughing, snow burrowed in her eyelashes. "What, perfect little Caroline Forbes never broken the rules before?"
.
.
They dump their phones and take to the city, bursting into shop after shop, trying shoe after shoe, model dresses and pick at bracelets, don headdresses and pout at lipsticks. Rebekah deems all of Caroline's choices tackyand Caroline rolls her eyes at Rebekah waving around her credit card with reckless abandon.
She's pretty sure she has to drag Rebekah away from the eleventh boutique they're just passing by, for the last time, Rebekah! It's a wonder, living in the city, bright lights and loud honks everywhere you go, vine creeping up the sides of buildings. They turn a corner and are assaulted by people coming and going, but their fingers never stop grasping.
"Hey, look!" Caroline starts running before she realizes what she's doing, hat tails swinging, Rebekah tugged after her. "Hey, Tyler!"
Tyler turns with a smile on his face, but it falters when he sees Rebekah.
Rebekah raises a haughty brow, hands on her hips. "I was right about your taste, then."
"Rebekah," Caroline warns and turns to Tyler with a bright smile. "Do you wanna hang out? Wait, are you alone?"
"I was actually on the way back from seeing M-" Tyler breaks off, glances at Rebekah for the briefest of moments before continuing, "my friend. It's been a while, and I thought… You know."
It's then that they notice his dark clothing, his hunched shoulders.
Rebekah's jaw tightens but her eyebrow lowers and she thrusts her shopping at him. "I suppose you could carry our bags."
Tyler does more than just carry their bags-he has a car and they spend the rest of the day driving around, stopping at every pastry shop they see, sampling everything but turning away from anything resembling a pie or a donut. Somewhere in the middle of it all Tyler pulls a flask out of his jacket and a bottle out of his trunk and they take turns swigging, their cheeks getting redder and their eyes getting brighter the more they drink.
"Oh man," Tyler laughs helplessly as he falls into Rebekah, "I have to come in at five tomorrow and I am hammered."
"I missed a lecture," Caroline mourns, spread out in the backseat.
"Pansies, the both of you," Rebekah says scornfully with her cheek pressed into the window. But she has a smile on her face and her eyes are closed. "'Time 'ssit?"
She squints at her phone, "A little after ten." She sees the red blinkers in the corner of her screen and groans. "Twenty miscalls from Klaus, five from Elijah, seventeen texts from Kol. Most of them involve the noun strumpet warped into a verb."
Delete.
"They can close on their own," Rebekah yawns. "But if it appeases you so, text Nik telling him we're fine; untwist his knickers from his groin."
Tyler grimaces. "Did not want that image."
Caroline sits up in the backseat, head still woozy but urgently scrolling down her texts. She looks in the rear view mirror and sees that her face has gone white. "We have to get to the Pie Hole. Now."
.
.
The Pie Hole is dark.
Where the silhouettes of customers can usually be seen through the blinds, they see nothing but their own reflections in the dark glass. Caroline gulps and tugs her coat closer to her as she walks shakily up the steps. Tyler lingers by his car, shifting from foot to foot and jiggling his keys uncertainly until Rebekah tosses her head. "Come on, then."
"But Klaus-"
"He'll have to go through me first." She holds her hand out and he takes it gratefully.
Caroline screws her eyes shut there on the front step. Right back where she started. The only difference now is that she's whispering to herself, please, please, please, let it all be a joke-
She opens her eyes.
The door swings open, shedding a long rectangular light on the three of them. Elijah smiles with nothing in his eyes, steps aside to let them in.
She claps her hands to her mouth and turns away retching. No, no way, no way.
"Where the hell were the two of you?" Klaus asks silkily from a corner of the room. She jumps; she hadn't even noticed him, her eyes had zeroed in on the General's body lying in the of the room like he had lain so many months ago, except this time he's not waking up, she knows, she knows-
"Out," Rebekah snarks, but the moment she sees the General her face pales.
Tyler whispers a no.
Klaus is on him in an instant, shoving him back into the door: there's a loud crack. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Nik!"
"Easy, brother." Elijah winces. "The door-"
"I don't care about the bloody door!" Klaus thunders as he struggles against Elijah's restraining hand. He leans in closer, narrows his eyes. "Are you drunk?" He looks around at Tyler's blotchy face, Caroline's mussed curls, Rebekah's flushed ears. "Are you all drunk?"
Rebekah crosses her arms over her chest. "What's it to you?"
"Is this what you lot were doing, then? Gallivanting about town getting drunk off cheap liquor while Mikael and his men have been trying to tear this place down?"
Caroline sucks in a breath, ready to bare her teeth and snap-
"I thought you could deal with this on your own, Nik," Kol taunts from his spot by the till. He sends her a smile, derisive, deadly. She looks away because her skin crawls. "I could use a drink myself. Got anymore?"
Tyler doesn't answer. He's not even looking at Klaus but at the General, and Caroline feels something twist in her chest. Matt had been his friend, and the General… the General had worked with him too.
And suddenly she doesn't even care that she might die if she touches him, but she needs to get Klaus off of Tyler like, now. She shoves his arm - Klaus immediately backs away, hands like a marionette's strings yanked upwards - and pulls Tyler to her. He's shaking.
It's alright, she says.
Shh, she says.
She's shaking too.
.
.
Someone had banged on the back door just as Elijah was switching off the lights.
Klaus freezes. It's the familiar rap, one he hasn't heard in a long time-two slow knocks, five quick ones. The two exchanged a glance and flash to the kitchen, but of course Kol had been the fastest, and he wrenches the door open to find-
Nobody.
Kol looks down the alleyway, cranes his neck upwards, muttering. "Bloody pranksters."
It's only when they go back inside that they find-
"The General."
Twice dead, neck slashed the same way Kol's had been so long ago. In a heap in the middle of the diner, blood pooling around him.
Elijah steadies himself against the doorway and pinches the bridge of his nose while Klaus has to sit down. He'd seen the General just yesterday, walking in and out of the store getting ready for the parade in the square. If not for his neck he would have looked robust and strong, leering at everything that came his way.
But he hadn't leered at Caroline, no. And Klaus knows this because, as ashamed as he is to admit it, he had walked to her house long after she'd gone home, watched her lights flicker off and just waited there. For what, he wasn't exactly sure-he'd just needed to rectify something, maybe knock on her door, offer her parents some pie - he should have brought some pie with him - and ask if he could perhaps have a talk with their daughter, nothing important, not at 12:34am, just some unfinished business at the diner-
And then he sees her climbing out the window, almost lunges when she slips a little; stops himself just in time when she regains her footing. In her garden, she stares into her window with a hunger he's only seen in the mirror, and then she turns. He steps back into the gloom.
Where are you going, Caroline?
She looks back only once.
He follows the trail of her coat slung carelessly over her nightdress, hovers on the edge of the square when he sees where she's headed. Leaves as soon as she and the General sit down, their knees touching.
He balls his hands into fists.
"What do you reckon?"
Kol's voice startles him out of his reverie and now he's leaning against the counter, staring down at the General. The Lockwood boy's sitting silently in a booth with a silent Rebekah and silent Caroline. He tries not to think about the way his fingers had curled into the ends of Caroline's hair, how he'd clung on and she'd clung back.
He slips his fists into his pockets.
"Mikael."
"Very helpful, Niklaus," Elijah says. "Perhaps you should consider a change in careers, seeing as how this is going dreadfully."
He doesn't answer. Instead, he looks at Caroline-she's still soothing Tyler, but her eyes flit to his as if by gravity, two planets orbiting each other. "Where were you last night?" he asks. Quiet. Careful.
She doesn't hesitate, but she looks down at her hands when she whispers, "With Enzo."
Kol's eyebrows knit together. "Who?"
"Enzo," Caroline says again. "The General's name was Enzo."
Rebekah looks between him and Caroline. Asks, "Why were you with the-Enzo?"
"We were just talking." She sounds faraway, like the faintest breeze could bowl her over. "I needed to make sense of some things, and he's… he was the only one who understood."
Klaus looks away, but Kol lunges at the table in half a blink of an eye. "Did you see anyone? Did you sense anybody following you? You know, aside from my idiot brother."
How does he even-
He feels Caroline's startled gaze on him; he pulls his hand out of his pocket to flip Kol the finger. "You're forgetting that Mikael has the ability to just know things, ever wondered where Elijah got it from? And if I didn't notice anybody, I don't think-"
"I didn't see anyone," Caroline says. She pushes Kol away, glaring viciously. Curious. "This doesn't make any sense, why would Mikael kill Enzo? I mean, yeah he was here in the beginning, but he has nothing to do with this now."
"I'm afraid he has everything to do with this, darling," Kol sighs. "You see, when Mikael decides on sabotaging someone, he goes all out. He plans. He waits. Starts slow, works his way up the ladder. Care to venture a guess on who's next?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "This is why I said we needed to do something, Nik."
"No, Niklaus was right." Elijah leans forward in his usual stool, fingers steepled in front of him. "This is Mikael we're talking about. He wants something. He's struck gold and now he's waiting for us to retaliate. We won't."
"What?" both Kol and Rebekah blanch.
"Excuse me," Tyler chimes in with disbelief, "he killed a guy to try and send a message to you."
"He's not dropping birds anymore, Elijah," Caroline adds. "I don't think the whole honour and nobility thing is going to fly this time."
"Just hear me out-"
Klaus rolls his eyes; as if Elijah even has to ask. Everyone's on the edge of their seats waiting as it is.
"-we do the unexpected. We set up a meeting. See what he wants. It'll be easier, less…" his lip curls as he surveys the Gen… Enzo. Enzo. "…collateral damage. In the meantime, someone go check on Hayley. If he's targeting everyone connected to us then I want nobody left unaccounted for."
"You do it," Rebekah nudges Caroline. "Her gum-cracking gives me migraines."
"Well, since everyone has clearly lost their minds, I am going to do the smart thing," Tyler says, standing up, "and quit."
He's edged out of the booth and is halfway across the room when Klaus is on him again, this boy-shaped hubris who smells like Jack Daniels and a mixture of his sister's and Caroline's perfumes, and he doesn't even want to know what they'd been up to-
"You will do no such thing. You're going to go to work. You're going to act like nothing is wrong, you're not going to rouse any suspicion-do you understand me?" Tyler's still looking a little dazed. He slaps his cheeks around a bit. "Do you understand me?"
Tyler stumbles backwards, stammers out, "I-okay. Jesus, let go of me." But he's not drunk anymore, he has the eyes of a crazed man, eyes that keep flitting from Enzo whose blood is dripping down in rivulets from his hideous, yawning throat. He looks like a boy ready to weep, a man ready to crumple.
He looks like a man who's been pushed one too many times, because he pulls himself to his full height, squares his jaw. "What the fuck is going on, Klaus? Lorenzo is dead in the middle of your diner, people I work with keep showing up dead in your diner and you're still caught up in your stupid fucking vendetta against me."
He looks like a man whose eyes are about to be ringed with bruises, that's what Tyler Lockwood looks like. "You think I have the time to deal with juvenile angst?"
"Oh that is rich, coming from you." Tyler just steps closer, filling up the space between them with his breathing coming in angry bursts from his nostrils. "Matt Donovan was my friend, and maybe he was too in love with Rebekah to see that this place poisons you, but I wasn't going to make his mistake of sticking around. Getting my life back, working for your dad-you'd think I'd committed some crime against humanity." He casts Enzo one last long look. "It should've been you, you know."
With that, he pushes past Klaus and out the diner.
The silence rings.
Everyone's staring at him-Rebekah with pity, Elijah with passive brows, Kol with a You got it coming, mate shrug and Caroline-he doesn't want to look at Caroline-and he stares back defiantly.
Nobody's moving.
Nobody wants to be the first to.
Finally it's Caroline who inches out of the booth. She's tactfully avoiding his gaze and he wants to shake her, to tell her to stop doing him any favours, stop feeling sorry for him. "Show's over. Let's clean this place up."
Everyone whirs to life. Rebekah goes to get the bleach, Elijah starts to discuss ways to carry the body out, lists out trajectories - no, his blood will drip all over the mahogany, brother - until Kol rolls his eyes and heaves Enzo over his shoulder.
Rebekah drags a bucket into the room and makes a move as if to stay, but she looks at him and he looks back and decides better of it, opting to scurry into the back of Elijah's car instead.
What they do with him Klaus doesn't know, because they don't come back for hours.
In the meantime, Caroline's started to mop up the blood, a serious, pensive look on her face. He wonders if she's mourning, if she even knows the General - Enzo, Enzo - well enough to mourn. But this is Caroline, he remembers. Caroline who rushes out of the diner to feed the strays. Caroline who lets people walk out without paying if their pockets turn up empty, no matter how much he grouses to her about it.
He kneels down beside her, grabs a sponge. "You don't have to do this, love."
"You and Elijah and Kol. You don't look too shaken up. Done this before? Oh, no need to look for an alibi, Rebekah already filled me in." She wrings the cloth into the bucket. Underneath the flippant cheer her voice is flat and hard, forced out. "I suppose you picked everything up from Mikael, huh? No wonder you have all that bleach hidden away."
She doesn't give him any room to breathe.
The way she looks up at him, arrogant thing that she is, clearly revelling in the way his shoulders have tensed. His face is a stone. Her gaze cracks. She chooses her words like stepping back to survey a masterpiece in progress, chisel tapped to her chin, mapping him out.
And then she strikes with precision. "Some deranged mafia bakery. You guys really weren't kidding."
"Diner," he corrects feebly.
Caroline ignores him. "All your talk about shoving heads into ovens, stabbing forks into hearts. I used to think they were empty threats, that maybe you just had anger issues. Or like, some weird oven fetish. But you've done all of it before, haven't you? When you worked with Mikael?"
It's all questions, except how accusing she sounds.
This time, she waits.
"Yes," he says, a bad taste in his mouth. She keeps waiting and he sighs. "He'd kill first, ask questions later. Care to venture a guess on who'd do the asking? Mikael would have Kol drag the bodies to the back room, make me touch them, make Elijah and I beat the answers out of them. All in the span of one minute. To make men out of us, Mikael liked to say." He squeezes blood and water out of his own cloth, the sound of water trickling oddly tranquilizing. "Mikael liked to watch. It only got worse after my mother fell ill, but by then she'd become too weak to stop him. Elijah formed a plan, I exacted them, Kol made sure Mikael could not follow. And there it is, the great story of why we left-and I assure you, none of it is on Wikipedia."
He says it all in the same tone, an odd calm, the automatic way his arms would reach and shelve and organize when new stocks came in. It's the unabridged version, the one he almost told Caroline all those weeks ago in the kitchen.
Look where morbid fascination gets you, sweetheart.
Have at him.
"But you're okay with it."
He meets her gaze levelly. "When it's necessary."
The blood is a thick pool that's already started to clot around her. She pays no mind to the way it seeps into the knees of her jeans. He's used to it, the sharp sting of bleach invading his nostrils, the pungent viscosity of blood. He wonders how she can stand it.
They clean in silence. She's working away at the information he's just fed her, her inquisitive mind whirring, her cogs squeaking, spilling over. Her hands stay far away from him as they wipe, scrub, wring - and it's almost sad, like a loss of innocence. She won't touch him anymore; she knows now, and what do you know, he thought he'd feel relieved. That she was one less person he had to worry about. One less person to die around him.
Right now, all he feels is the multitude of space crowding up the air between them. The way her hands jerk away as soon as his come near. She looks up at him, hard and unapologetic.
He looks back, and he so wishes he could conjure a smile as easily as Kol, as freely as Rebekah, as quietly as Elijah. But he stares back, what is he supposed to say?
Sorry I happen to be cursed, sweetheart.
And then-
"Thank you," she says tersely.
It's like someone's splashed cold water on him. He shakes his head at her, not really understanding.
"For bringing me back."
"Rebekah asked me to," he replies without thinking.
For a moment her hand stills. There is a twisting inside him, like someone's gone and prodded holes in his system and left him not quite bleeding, not quite hurting, but something nonetheless. It's the truth, he argues with himself. He's given enough excuses.
She wasn't his to save.
It's not him she should be thanking.
She sits back on her heels, blood-stained hands in her lap. When she smiles, there's nothing in her eyes. "Good to know."
tbc
chapters: 3/4
fandom: the vampire diaries, the originals
characters/pairings: klaus/caroline, ensemble
word count: 13k~ (overall: 37k~)
summary: "Our brother's a vampire and you wake the dead. There, I said it. Nobody's running for the hills. Nobody's coming at us with pitchforks." "It's the 21st century, Bekah. They'd use rifles."
or, the one where Rebekah exploits mug tricks for extra tips, Klaus is a passive-mostly-aggressive piemaker, and Caroline just wants to know why Klaus refuses to touch her.
PART ONE | PART TWO (A) | PART TWO (B) | PART THREE (A) | PART THREE (B) | PART 4
In the corner of Maple and Vine
3.5) but it's like i'm a machine
The night passes like the longest, hardest exam she's ever had to sit through. Melissa texts her something short and shrill about jam and donuts and a boy 'W AN A$$ DAT WONT QUIT'; Dad knocks on her door and asks if she's alright, if something happened, if she'd had her pepper spray on her; Steven follows soon after enticing her with pie, but she feels sick to her stomach.
"I'm fine," she calls back each time. I'm just dead, she doesn't add.
How is that even possible? She falls, she bleeds, she heals. She'd run track in high school and her heart had beat loud in her ears, blood pumping and feet pounding and she'd been alive then. No dead girl's heart would beat that loud.
A little after midnight she lies in bed and closes her eyes, thumb pressed firmly over her pulse point. She curls up in a ball and burrows her head under her pillow, hyper aware of the sound of her own breathing. In and out, a drag through her nose and a whoosh out her mouth. How does someone dead not know that they're dead?
They don't, she realizes.
They go and find out.
She slips her feet into her shoes and pulls up her window as silently as creaky panes allow and slips out onto the roof, nearly slipping on a patch of ice and falling to her death. Second death, she reminds herself, and she has to clap her hands to her lips to muffle the hysterical giggling bubbling out of her. She's pretty sure her foot barged into one of the rungs on the trellis she's clambering down from and Steven's going to be pissy about it whenever springtime decides to show up.
A light dusting of snow had covered everything in the garden and made the world look much smaller than it is. The house stands out from the darkness, the coloured lights strung up just for Jam Appreciation Day. The hushed sounds coming from inside her house make her feel a little bit lonely. She crouches down behind a frozen bush and stares into the frosty windows, watching the blurred-out lines of her father lightly kiss Steven, just a silhouette against the fire crackling and rolling in the hearth.
Suddenly, she feels very small.
Caroline tugs her coat closed over her pyjamas and gives the street a sidelong glance. It's empty, everyone's shoes brought in, their flower pots straightened, their curtains closed tight. She walks down the street with lights blinking around her, leaves footsteps that the snow covers soon afterwards. She looks back the way she'd just tread - it's as if she was never there.
The town square's nearly deserted too, the last of the vendors packing up and heading home, or somewhere warm, somewhere with bright lights and a hot drink. Caroline stands there shivering in her coat, her mismatched socks and last year's shoes, ignores everyone staring at her, and makes her way to the centre of the square, the fountain with frozen water gushing out of the mouths of chubby cherubs, where the last man in the square is cleaning up, his neck just a little bent behind his collar.
"Enzo," she whispers.
He hears nothing but the gently-falling snow, busy as he is stacking boxes.
"General," she says, louder this time.
He looks up. A corner of his mouth lifts, and Caroline wants to tell him that a smile is supposed to brighten your face, not do… whatever it is that's going on in his. He straightens up. "Well well, if it isn't my saviour."
"How's your neck?" she asks, even though she knows it would have long healed by now.
"Crooked," the General answers in his strange accent. "How's your head?"
"…What?"
The General shrugs and folds up his table. "You've that look on your face. Same one I had when I went home and realized I'd just come back from the dead. When did it happen?"
Caroline shivers again, whispers: "Ten years ago."
With the table tucked under his arm, the General lets out a whistle. "How about that."
.
.
They could have gone somewhere warmer, but Caroline wasn't moving, so the General finds a patch of marble that isn't slippery with ice and sits next to her, the sound of gurgling water the only thing interrupting the stillness of the snowy night. He fishes a flask out of his jacket and offers it to her. "It'll keep you warm," he cajoles when she shakes her head. "Suit yourself."
"Did you feel differently when you woke up?" she asks, watching him swig deeply. "Did you know?"
Was there a way to? You can't just go your whole life thinking you were one thing, but in actuality…
"I knew because Mikael had warned me," the General said, capping his flask. "Otherwise I felt perfectly fine. Why? Fancy yourself a war hero? Out of the ash you rise?" he finishes, the burr of his voice masking the taunt.
"No," she says softly. "I feel like I should be… feeling something, you know? Dead. But it's like I'm a machine. I died, but someone just rewired my insides to get me started up again. Don't you think it's a little unfair?"
"That we got a second chance, or that you never knew?"
She considers this. "Both, I guess."
"Let me put it this way, gorgeous." When the General speaks it's like he's perpetually grinding his teeth, hardening up for a difficult truth. "We're sitting here at this awful, cold fountain with our breath coming up white when we talk, instead of buried six feet under the snow. Just because you died and came back doesn't mean you have to torture yourself about it. Some people get to ride around in a jam jar on a day dedicated to them; some people get to wade into death and live to tell the tale. It's life. Shit happens. As long as we're still breathing." He sighs. "And you're still young. No use getting worked up over things beyond your control."
But that's what she does, she wants to cry. Maybe this whole thing was better in theory, not so much when executed. What exactly had she expected from the General, anyway? She brushes snow off her knees and ice off her back. "Thanks for the pep talk."
"Not the answer you were hoping for?"
"I didn't come to you looking for answers," she says. "I just wanted a conversation with a fellow member of the undead."
General None of Your Beeswax thrums out a laugh. "Keeping the faith, eh?"
"Half my life has been a lie, General. I think faith is all I have left." She waves a goodbye and starts to walk away. Halfway out the square she hears him call out to her, so she turns back. "Yeah?"
"Why doesn't anyone just call me Enzo?"
.
.
She lingers outside the door the next day (after checking thoroughly for more animal carcasses), her key passed from hand to hand, clamped down so hard they leave ridges in her palm. It's too early for any of the Mikaelsons to be up, and she doesn't even know why she'd come today.
"You didn't have to lie, you know," she tells the door. Yeah, okay - that sounds like a good opening. "But I have decided to be the bigger person because I am totally in touch with my zen, and-"
"Good morning, Caroline."
Come freaking on, can't these Mikaelsons let their guard down just freaking once?
She keeps looking at the door, at Rebekah's reflection bursting like pop art against the snow. Rebekah looks hesitant for all of five seconds before it's pushed out of her face, replaced by something that required her to lift her chin and raise both eyebrows. Her hair sways in the morning breeze, as lofty as she sounds when she says, "Let's have a chat."
"I'm supposed to be opening up." Her eyes never leave the hole in the door, which seriously needs to get fixed by the way. They're starting to run out of duct tape.
"Oh, bugger the diner, I own the place anyway. Come," she orders, motioning her hand insistently. "Let's take a walk."
Caroline turns her head. Rebekah is looking at her with her eyebrows raised expectantly, hand still held out like she's waiting to lead her away into a crowded ballroom. Her feet push off from the front steps, the muffled sound of shoes crunching through ice. She tugs on her hat tails. "Where are we going?"
Rebekah clicks her tongue and pulls her by the hand down the street. "Does it matter? Let's just get out of here."
Get out of here turns out to be the park where she'd buried the fowl yesterday. She had dug as deep as she could, but the ice-packed earth had made it hard. She'd torn a fingernail. At least now she knows why Klaus hadn't dropped to his knees to help her dig; good to know the dude still had his courtesies tied up in a neat lying little freaking lying bow.
Okay, so she's not as over it as she'd thought she was.
Whatever.
"I wasn't expecting you to show up today," Rebekah says. She wraps a gloved hand around the chains of her swing. "But then again you never do what I expect."
"Was my coming back to life something you didn't expect?" Caroline shoots, and because she doesn't want to keep shivering in the snow like an idiot, goes to sit in the swing next to Bekah's.
"No, it was," Rebekah says, electing to ignore the sarcasm. "So do you want the full story, or-"
"It must have been you, right? Because from what I've seen of Mr. Man Pain, he would never just willingly touch me. You found me. You talked him into bringing me back to life." Caroline sighs and blows halos around her head. "And the worst part of the whole thing is, as much as I want to be angry, I can't. Because I'm sitting here in this awful, cold swing, my breath coming up white when I talk, instead of buried six feet under. I'm alive." She pauses. "But I'm angry that I wasn't told. My life is my agency and the fact that my death can be dealt so casually and none of you even give a freaking-"
"Spare me," Rebekah groans, rolling her eyes. "That'd make for an interesting conversation. Hey Caroline, is the Sweet Potato done? Oh by the way, I sort of made my brother bring you back to life when you were eight but couldn't tell you because you promptly disappeared afterwards; kind of awkward that I'm only bringing it up now, right? Oh, the crust looks lovely, can't believe it's not butter!"
"It's not," Caroline replies sullenly before remembering it's all some kind of theoretical scene in Rebekah's head. Probably with cute waiters with arms bigger than their heads just mooching around in the back, and endless shelves of mugs. Girl loves her mugs. "Didn't somebody have to die in my place?"
"It's a random proximity thing," Rebekah tells her with a shrug. "I expect the person who hit you on the head kicked it next. A certain poetic justice to it, don't you think?"
"How are you so okay with this?"
Rebekah laughs darkly. "You didn't grow up with my father. You don't know the sort of business he dealt. You think the dead fowl was horrible? You naïve little thing. And now you're lamenting your rebirth, boo hoo, where so many others would give anything to be where you are. If Matt had been given a modicum of the chance you had-" she breaks off, cheeks flushed, breathing hard. "Stop being such a drama queen. You were going to die anyway, one day, but not as a child in that alleyway. One day. The same way the sun rises and sets, the way the wind plucks out silver songs out of a wind chime, the way I'm always late on Friday night shifts. It is nature, and it is life. Life, as it goes, goes. And things that go eventually have to…"
"Have to…?" Caroline prompts.
"I… don't know," Rebekah says, looking a little surprised. "Nik's never gotten to that part of the speech before, I always smack him before he can."
"You're trying to console me by ripping off some speech your brother your brother gives you whenever you have a temper tantrum?" Caroline tcchts between her teeth and grips the chains tighter. "It is a pretty obnoxious speech, though."
Rebekah kicks off lightly from the ground. "That's my brother for you. Do you want to know how Kol died?"
Caroline looks at her for a long moment before nodding her head.
The facts were th-
"None of that nonsense," Rebekah says with an impatient click of her tongue. "I'll make it snappy. None of us were old enough to work for my father, but Kol was. He had surprising strength even before his vampiring, and Mikael had a lot of enemies, so you do the math. Kol was fast and he had wits-sometimes. Kol, he's always been a bit of a daredevil, and he's always been a bit stupid. As soon as the shop closed he'd run off God knows where, but I knew he was fascinated with one of his Professor's work. Professor Maxfield, I believe. He was on the brink of a new discovery, turning humans into rabid killing machines.
"The trick, you see, was in the blood. I won't bore you with the machinations of it, but Kol - stupid, daredevil Kol - was his guinea pig. One night, Kol had left his wits in the shop and he wasn't as fast as he should have been. One of Mikael's old pals got him. Left him lying in the alley behind D'oh! Nuts."
Rebekah says all of this with a straight face.
Rebekah says all of this without ever looking away from her.
"They'd all figured out Nik's… ability, shall we say. He'd use it on little bugs and animals, things like that. But he wouldn't use it on Kol. I mean, I don't blame him. He was eight, he was scared, but Kol was just lying there, his neck slashed red-" Rebekah swallows. "Anyway, it was all really dramatic. Long story short, Kol woke up. We grew up. And Mikael never forgave Nik."
They're swinging now. The chains creak from the winter disuse, snow shaking down on them. But the air, the cold, clean winter air, it feels good in her lungs, freezes her from the inside out, speeding up her heart as her feet pump harder, as she digests all of this.
It all makes sense, suddenly. Their fierce loyalty to each other, their blatant hostility towards anything D'oh! Nuts related. The sheer terror in Rebekah's eyes when Mikael had swept into the room that one fateful night.
"Rebekah?"
"Yeah?"
"Things that go eventually have to come to an end."
Rebekah is quiet in thought. "So they do."
Caroline swings higher, legs kicking, hair swinging.
"Do you feel like taking the day off?" Rebekah asks, high in the sky. She lets out a breathless little laugh, "And not tell Nik?"
Like it's so wicked of them, to just run off into the sunset with their hands intertwined, a place where there are no pies to be baked, orders to be barked at, customers to cajole out of their seats.
"I have an evening lecture," Caroline calls back, scandalized.
"Skip it." Rebekah lets go of her swing chains and suddenly she's flying through the air and tumbling through the snow, hair splayed around her and arms spread like she's making snow angels. She's laughing, snow burrowed in her eyelashes. "What, perfect little Caroline Forbes never broken the rules before?"
.
.
They dump their phones and take to the city, bursting into shop after shop, trying shoe after shoe, model dresses and pick at bracelets, don headdresses and pout at lipsticks. Rebekah deems all of Caroline's choices tackyand Caroline rolls her eyes at Rebekah waving around her credit card with reckless abandon.
She's pretty sure she has to drag Rebekah away from the eleventh boutique they're just passing by, for the last time, Rebekah! It's a wonder, living in the city, bright lights and loud honks everywhere you go, vine creeping up the sides of buildings. They turn a corner and are assaulted by people coming and going, but their fingers never stop grasping.
"Hey, look!" Caroline starts running before she realizes what she's doing, hat tails swinging, Rebekah tugged after her. "Hey, Tyler!"
Tyler turns with a smile on his face, but it falters when he sees Rebekah.
Rebekah raises a haughty brow, hands on her hips. "I was right about your taste, then."
"Rebekah," Caroline warns and turns to Tyler with a bright smile. "Do you wanna hang out? Wait, are you alone?"
"I was actually on the way back from seeing M-" Tyler breaks off, glances at Rebekah for the briefest of moments before continuing, "my friend. It's been a while, and I thought… You know."
It's then that they notice his dark clothing, his hunched shoulders.
Rebekah's jaw tightens but her eyebrow lowers and she thrusts her shopping at him. "I suppose you could carry our bags."
Tyler does more than just carry their bags-he has a car and they spend the rest of the day driving around, stopping at every pastry shop they see, sampling everything but turning away from anything resembling a pie or a donut. Somewhere in the middle of it all Tyler pulls a flask out of his jacket and a bottle out of his trunk and they take turns swigging, their cheeks getting redder and their eyes getting brighter the more they drink.
"Oh man," Tyler laughs helplessly as he falls into Rebekah, "I have to come in at five tomorrow and I am hammered."
"I missed a lecture," Caroline mourns, spread out in the backseat.
"Pansies, the both of you," Rebekah says scornfully with her cheek pressed into the window. But she has a smile on her face and her eyes are closed. "'Time 'ssit?"
She squints at her phone, "A little after ten." She sees the red blinkers in the corner of her screen and groans. "Twenty miscalls from Klaus, five from Elijah, seventeen texts from Kol. Most of them involve the noun strumpet warped into a verb."
Delete.
"They can close on their own," Rebekah yawns. "But if it appeases you so, text Nik telling him we're fine; untwist his knickers from his groin."
Tyler grimaces. "Did not want that image."
Caroline sits up in the backseat, head still woozy but urgently scrolling down her texts. She looks in the rear view mirror and sees that her face has gone white. "We have to get to the Pie Hole. Now."
.
.
The Pie Hole is dark.
Where the silhouettes of customers can usually be seen through the blinds, they see nothing but their own reflections in the dark glass. Caroline gulps and tugs her coat closer to her as she walks shakily up the steps. Tyler lingers by his car, shifting from foot to foot and jiggling his keys uncertainly until Rebekah tosses her head. "Come on, then."
"But Klaus-"
"He'll have to go through me first." She holds her hand out and he takes it gratefully.
Caroline screws her eyes shut there on the front step. Right back where she started. The only difference now is that she's whispering to herself, please, please, please, let it all be a joke-
She opens her eyes.
The door swings open, shedding a long rectangular light on the three of them. Elijah smiles with nothing in his eyes, steps aside to let them in.
She claps her hands to her mouth and turns away retching. No, no way, no way.
"Where the hell were the two of you?" Klaus asks silkily from a corner of the room. She jumps; she hadn't even noticed him, her eyes had zeroed in on the General's body lying in the of the room like he had lain so many months ago, except this time he's not waking up, she knows, she knows-
"Out," Rebekah snarks, but the moment she sees the General her face pales.
Tyler whispers a no.
Klaus is on him in an instant, shoving him back into the door: there's a loud crack. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Nik!"
"Easy, brother." Elijah winces. "The door-"
"I don't care about the bloody door!" Klaus thunders as he struggles against Elijah's restraining hand. He leans in closer, narrows his eyes. "Are you drunk?" He looks around at Tyler's blotchy face, Caroline's mussed curls, Rebekah's flushed ears. "Are you all drunk?"
Rebekah crosses her arms over her chest. "What's it to you?"
"Is this what you lot were doing, then? Gallivanting about town getting drunk off cheap liquor while Mikael and his men have been trying to tear this place down?"
Caroline sucks in a breath, ready to bare her teeth and snap-
"I thought you could deal with this on your own, Nik," Kol taunts from his spot by the till. He sends her a smile, derisive, deadly. She looks away because her skin crawls. "I could use a drink myself. Got anymore?"
Tyler doesn't answer. He's not even looking at Klaus but at the General, and Caroline feels something twist in her chest. Matt had been his friend, and the General… the General had worked with him too.
And suddenly she doesn't even care that she might die if she touches him, but she needs to get Klaus off of Tyler like, now. She shoves his arm - Klaus immediately backs away, hands like a marionette's strings yanked upwards - and pulls Tyler to her. He's shaking.
It's alright, she says.
Shh, she says.
She's shaking too.
.
.
Someone had banged on the back door just as Elijah was switching off the lights.
Klaus freezes. It's the familiar rap, one he hasn't heard in a long time-two slow knocks, five quick ones. The two exchanged a glance and flash to the kitchen, but of course Kol had been the fastest, and he wrenches the door open to find-
Nobody.
Kol looks down the alleyway, cranes his neck upwards, muttering. "Bloody pranksters."
It's only when they go back inside that they find-
"The General."
Twice dead, neck slashed the same way Kol's had been so long ago. In a heap in the middle of the diner, blood pooling around him.
Elijah steadies himself against the doorway and pinches the bridge of his nose while Klaus has to sit down. He'd seen the General just yesterday, walking in and out of the store getting ready for the parade in the square. If not for his neck he would have looked robust and strong, leering at everything that came his way.
But he hadn't leered at Caroline, no. And Klaus knows this because, as ashamed as he is to admit it, he had walked to her house long after she'd gone home, watched her lights flicker off and just waited there. For what, he wasn't exactly sure-he'd just needed to rectify something, maybe knock on her door, offer her parents some pie - he should have brought some pie with him - and ask if he could perhaps have a talk with their daughter, nothing important, not at 12:34am, just some unfinished business at the diner-
And then he sees her climbing out the window, almost lunges when she slips a little; stops himself just in time when she regains her footing. In her garden, she stares into her window with a hunger he's only seen in the mirror, and then she turns. He steps back into the gloom.
Where are you going, Caroline?
She looks back only once.
He follows the trail of her coat slung carelessly over her nightdress, hovers on the edge of the square when he sees where she's headed. Leaves as soon as she and the General sit down, their knees touching.
He balls his hands into fists.
"What do you reckon?"
Kol's voice startles him out of his reverie and now he's leaning against the counter, staring down at the General. The Lockwood boy's sitting silently in a booth with a silent Rebekah and silent Caroline. He tries not to think about the way his fingers had curled into the ends of Caroline's hair, how he'd clung on and she'd clung back.
He slips his fists into his pockets.
"Mikael."
"Very helpful, Niklaus," Elijah says. "Perhaps you should consider a change in careers, seeing as how this is going dreadfully."
He doesn't answer. Instead, he looks at Caroline-she's still soothing Tyler, but her eyes flit to his as if by gravity, two planets orbiting each other. "Where were you last night?" he asks. Quiet. Careful.
She doesn't hesitate, but she looks down at her hands when she whispers, "With Enzo."
Kol's eyebrows knit together. "Who?"
"Enzo," Caroline says again. "The General's name was Enzo."
Rebekah looks between him and Caroline. Asks, "Why were you with the-Enzo?"
"We were just talking." She sounds faraway, like the faintest breeze could bowl her over. "I needed to make sense of some things, and he's… he was the only one who understood."
Klaus looks away, but Kol lunges at the table in half a blink of an eye. "Did you see anyone? Did you sense anybody following you? You know, aside from my idiot brother."
How does he even-
He feels Caroline's startled gaze on him; he pulls his hand out of his pocket to flip Kol the finger. "You're forgetting that Mikael has the ability to just know things, ever wondered where Elijah got it from? And if I didn't notice anybody, I don't think-"
"I didn't see anyone," Caroline says. She pushes Kol away, glaring viciously. Curious. "This doesn't make any sense, why would Mikael kill Enzo? I mean, yeah he was here in the beginning, but he has nothing to do with this now."
"I'm afraid he has everything to do with this, darling," Kol sighs. "You see, when Mikael decides on sabotaging someone, he goes all out. He plans. He waits. Starts slow, works his way up the ladder. Care to venture a guess on who's next?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "This is why I said we needed to do something, Nik."
"No, Niklaus was right." Elijah leans forward in his usual stool, fingers steepled in front of him. "This is Mikael we're talking about. He wants something. He's struck gold and now he's waiting for us to retaliate. We won't."
"What?" both Kol and Rebekah blanch.
"Excuse me," Tyler chimes in with disbelief, "he killed a guy to try and send a message to you."
"He's not dropping birds anymore, Elijah," Caroline adds. "I don't think the whole honour and nobility thing is going to fly this time."
"Just hear me out-"
Klaus rolls his eyes; as if Elijah even has to ask. Everyone's on the edge of their seats waiting as it is.
"-we do the unexpected. We set up a meeting. See what he wants. It'll be easier, less…" his lip curls as he surveys the Gen… Enzo. Enzo. "…collateral damage. In the meantime, someone go check on Hayley. If he's targeting everyone connected to us then I want nobody left unaccounted for."
"You do it," Rebekah nudges Caroline. "Her gum-cracking gives me migraines."
"Well, since everyone has clearly lost their minds, I am going to do the smart thing," Tyler says, standing up, "and quit."
He's edged out of the booth and is halfway across the room when Klaus is on him again, this boy-shaped hubris who smells like Jack Daniels and a mixture of his sister's and Caroline's perfumes, and he doesn't even want to know what they'd been up to-
"You will do no such thing. You're going to go to work. You're going to act like nothing is wrong, you're not going to rouse any suspicion-do you understand me?" Tyler's still looking a little dazed. He slaps his cheeks around a bit. "Do you understand me?"
Tyler stumbles backwards, stammers out, "I-okay. Jesus, let go of me." But he's not drunk anymore, he has the eyes of a crazed man, eyes that keep flitting from Enzo whose blood is dripping down in rivulets from his hideous, yawning throat. He looks like a boy ready to weep, a man ready to crumple.
He looks like a man who's been pushed one too many times, because he pulls himself to his full height, squares his jaw. "What the fuck is going on, Klaus? Lorenzo is dead in the middle of your diner, people I work with keep showing up dead in your diner and you're still caught up in your stupid fucking vendetta against me."
He looks like a man whose eyes are about to be ringed with bruises, that's what Tyler Lockwood looks like. "You think I have the time to deal with juvenile angst?"
"Oh that is rich, coming from you." Tyler just steps closer, filling up the space between them with his breathing coming in angry bursts from his nostrils. "Matt Donovan was my friend, and maybe he was too in love with Rebekah to see that this place poisons you, but I wasn't going to make his mistake of sticking around. Getting my life back, working for your dad-you'd think I'd committed some crime against humanity." He casts Enzo one last long look. "It should've been you, you know."
With that, he pushes past Klaus and out the diner.
The silence rings.
Everyone's staring at him-Rebekah with pity, Elijah with passive brows, Kol with a You got it coming, mate shrug and Caroline-he doesn't want to look at Caroline-and he stares back defiantly.
Nobody's moving.
Nobody wants to be the first to.
Finally it's Caroline who inches out of the booth. She's tactfully avoiding his gaze and he wants to shake her, to tell her to stop doing him any favours, stop feeling sorry for him. "Show's over. Let's clean this place up."
Everyone whirs to life. Rebekah goes to get the bleach, Elijah starts to discuss ways to carry the body out, lists out trajectories - no, his blood will drip all over the mahogany, brother - until Kol rolls his eyes and heaves Enzo over his shoulder.
Rebekah drags a bucket into the room and makes a move as if to stay, but she looks at him and he looks back and decides better of it, opting to scurry into the back of Elijah's car instead.
What they do with him Klaus doesn't know, because they don't come back for hours.
In the meantime, Caroline's started to mop up the blood, a serious, pensive look on her face. He wonders if she's mourning, if she even knows the General - Enzo, Enzo - well enough to mourn. But this is Caroline, he remembers. Caroline who rushes out of the diner to feed the strays. Caroline who lets people walk out without paying if their pockets turn up empty, no matter how much he grouses to her about it.
He kneels down beside her, grabs a sponge. "You don't have to do this, love."
"You and Elijah and Kol. You don't look too shaken up. Done this before? Oh, no need to look for an alibi, Rebekah already filled me in." She wrings the cloth into the bucket. Underneath the flippant cheer her voice is flat and hard, forced out. "I suppose you picked everything up from Mikael, huh? No wonder you have all that bleach hidden away."
She doesn't give him any room to breathe.
The way she looks up at him, arrogant thing that she is, clearly revelling in the way his shoulders have tensed. His face is a stone. Her gaze cracks. She chooses her words like stepping back to survey a masterpiece in progress, chisel tapped to her chin, mapping him out.
And then she strikes with precision. "Some deranged mafia bakery. You guys really weren't kidding."
"Diner," he corrects feebly.
Caroline ignores him. "All your talk about shoving heads into ovens, stabbing forks into hearts. I used to think they were empty threats, that maybe you just had anger issues. Or like, some weird oven fetish. But you've done all of it before, haven't you? When you worked with Mikael?"
It's all questions, except how accusing she sounds.
This time, she waits.
"Yes," he says, a bad taste in his mouth. She keeps waiting and he sighs. "He'd kill first, ask questions later. Care to venture a guess on who'd do the asking? Mikael would have Kol drag the bodies to the back room, make me touch them, make Elijah and I beat the answers out of them. All in the span of one minute. To make men out of us, Mikael liked to say." He squeezes blood and water out of his own cloth, the sound of water trickling oddly tranquilizing. "Mikael liked to watch. It only got worse after my mother fell ill, but by then she'd become too weak to stop him. Elijah formed a plan, I exacted them, Kol made sure Mikael could not follow. And there it is, the great story of why we left-and I assure you, none of it is on Wikipedia."
He says it all in the same tone, an odd calm, the automatic way his arms would reach and shelve and organize when new stocks came in. It's the unabridged version, the one he almost told Caroline all those weeks ago in the kitchen.
Look where morbid fascination gets you, sweetheart.
Have at him.
"But you're okay with it."
He meets her gaze levelly. "When it's necessary."
The blood is a thick pool that's already started to clot around her. She pays no mind to the way it seeps into the knees of her jeans. He's used to it, the sharp sting of bleach invading his nostrils, the pungent viscosity of blood. He wonders how she can stand it.
They clean in silence. She's working away at the information he's just fed her, her inquisitive mind whirring, her cogs squeaking, spilling over. Her hands stay far away from him as they wipe, scrub, wring - and it's almost sad, like a loss of innocence. She won't touch him anymore; she knows now, and what do you know, he thought he'd feel relieved. That she was one less person he had to worry about. One less person to die around him.
Right now, all he feels is the multitude of space crowding up the air between them. The way her hands jerk away as soon as his come near. She looks up at him, hard and unapologetic.
He looks back, and he so wishes he could conjure a smile as easily as Kol, as freely as Rebekah, as quietly as Elijah. But he stares back, what is he supposed to say?
Sorry I happen to be cursed, sweetheart.
And then-
"Thank you," she says tersely.
It's like someone's splashed cold water on him. He shakes his head at her, not really understanding.
"For bringing me back."
"Rebekah asked me to," he replies without thinking.
For a moment her hand stills. There is a twisting inside him, like someone's gone and prodded holes in his system and left him not quite bleeding, not quite hurting, but something nonetheless. It's the truth, he argues with himself. He's given enough excuses.
She wasn't his to save.
It's not him she should be thanking.
She sits back on her heels, blood-stained hands in her lap. When she smiles, there's nothing in her eyes. "Good to know."
tbc