fic: take another breath
title: take another breath
fandom: the vampire diaries
characters: Caroline (probably turned out more Caroline centric than intended), Alaric, some Elena and some Caroline/Stefan that can be seen as friendship or more, read as you like.
rating/warnings: PG-13 (For talk of subject matter but nothing you would hear on the show, also warnings for talk of torture/light torture and a slightly darker Caroline as she deals with Ric.)
word count: 2706
summary: Alaric smells like vervain when she’s too close to him. She keeps her distance, stands across the room in his apartment, across from him in the woods as she tries to teach him how to hunt she steps away when he gets too close. Caroline thinks he might notice sometimes, he gets a look in his eyes that seems almost like an apology, but he never says anything out loud. (Post S5, hints of spoilers from S6 and definite spoilers from S3. This is Caroline and Alaric gaining their footing on how to act around each other, trying to get over the last time she saw him alive, and the torture he put her through. Basically the summer they’ll never give us/the Caroline-Alaric screwed up dynamics they’ll never give us either.)
A/N: this is a very different thing than it started out as, but I like it anyways. TVD never gives me Caroline’s trauma shown/dealt with, so I wrote it myself.
The first few days she avoids Alaric as best as possible.
It’s not easy when they’re both always in the same places, on the border of a town that doesn’t want them, mourning people who have disappeared before their eyes like magic because that’s what is was.
Magic and destruction all rolled into one. Maybe that was all magic really was. Destruction.
But Elena goes from one to the other, Caroline holding her friend up, and Elena holding Alaric up, and Caroline looking around for Stefan.
(He’s gone and he didn’t say goodbye, not really.
She thinks he might have, in his own Salvatore way, the tone in his voice and the choice of his words. But Caroline Forbes has always been able to delude herself of things.)
The first days are spent crying over blood and alcohol and then things slowly break apart.
They break apart.
Until there is no more them, they are just singular units who once all knew the same people, who once had formed a family where they had all thought they belonged.
(It had disappeared too. Just like magic.)
--
It’s Elena who comes to her.
Selfish Elena looking out for only herself or grief stricken Elena, traumatized and too far gone to think clearly, Caroline debates back and forth the depending on the day.
(She tries to be a better person, she does.
But Caroline always tries and Caroline always comes in second place, Elena blotting out her golden hair with her ever reaching shadow. And somehow that’s all it ever ends up being. Caroline trying to be something she’s not.)
“He needs someone to help him, to train him-to make sure he can…”
Elena is a tangle of words, alcohol, and mascara that hasn’t been fixed properly from crying. Caroline considers offering to teach Elena how to fix it but says nothing instead.
“I can’t do it, Caroline, I can’t.” Elena says, “He needs help but I can’t…”
They’re all lost now, in the dark and groping around, and they’re monsters (all of them) and that should make it easier, their the things that go bump in the night, nothing to fear but them, but it doesn’t make it easier. Nothing about it is easy. It just makes it harder, it just pushes everything to the surface, until all Caroline can feel is what she want to run away from. All she can remember is what she wants to bury in her mind like it never existed at all.
“I’ll try.” Caroline promises.
To Elena that means she’ll succeed, to Elena it means something it doesn’t to Caroline.
--
Alaric smells like vervain when she’s too close to him.
She keeps her distance, stands across the room in his apartment, across from him in the woods as she tries to teach him how to hunt (and she doesn’t think about-she doesn’t think-she doesn’t), she steps away when he gets too close.
Caroline thinks he might notice sometimes, he gets a look in his eyes that seems almost like an apology, but he never says anything out loud. Never remembers when she last saw him and what he had done and her pleas for him to stop.
(No one ever mentions these things. No one has since they have happened.)
Alaric says nothing at all, and she thinks it’s just like Stefan. She’s seeing things that aren’t there, hearing words that aren’t said.
“You’re too loud,” Caroline tells him when another buck disappears before he reaches it, “You’re the predator but they’re prey and that means that they want to live. Their want is greater than yours.”
“I need them to stay alive.” Alaric says, “Doesn’t that mean-”
“You have all the power.” Caroline stares him down, “Learn how to use it or you’ll end starving and gray.”
--
Caroline catches the buck, her teeth sink in and she drains it of half its blood before Alaric finds her.
She throws it at his feet.
“Here, dinner.” Caroline smiles, blood on her mouth.
--
Luke makes Ric his daylight bracelet.
She hates them both a little for that, Elena too, for asking for it.
She hates them because she fought so hard for hers and his was just handed to him.
Everything gets handed to everyone but Caroline.
A lesson she thinks she should have learned by now.
Silly little, Caroline. She knows nothing at all.
--
“Three blood bags a day will keep you well fed,” She explains, putting blood bags in his fridge. “Eat, a lot, it will help curve your cravings, and of course hunting, it will help with your predator nature.”
More blood bags go in as she does not think about things that she wants to disappear.
“Hunting is important, especially with you being so new at this all-you were built to be a hunter, so hunt.”
Alaric is silent, so she looks at him, trying to make sure he’s listening.
He’s staring at her but she doesn’t know if he’s taking it in.
“Why are you doing this?” He asks and she hates him a little. (Hates him a little more.)
“Elena said she couldn’t do it and in case you didn’t notice, we’re running out of vampires around here.” She says and it’s supposed to sting him, the loss of Damon, his best friend, but she only feels a stab in her own heart (no satisfaction at all) because Stefan is not there with her, to help her, to hold her, and Elena might as well have disappeared with him-disappeared with Damon and Bonnie.
“Caroline…”
She stands up, grabs the vial of vervain from her bag, and finally turns to look at him. “Don’t, Ric. Just-don’t.” She says.
She hands him the vial, their hands touching (the first time they’ve touched since he came back), “To build a tolerance.” Caroline says.
He doesn’t say anything, just nods, and moves to take it, and something happens, she’ll call it an accident later (but she’ll never be sure) and the bottle slips into his hand, her fingers grabbing at it as it slips through her fingers and when it falls it shatters.
Glass and vervain imbedding, branding his skin.
“I’ll get you another bottle,” She promises, but she doesn’t apologize.
Accidents happen after all.
--
“Do you hate me?” Alaric asks.
Caroline is listening for cute little woodland creatures that wouldn’t be so cute when they were done with them and his voice is jarring in her ear. Like he is whispering the words right into them, surrounding her with his presence, right beside her.
And she smells vervain, because she’s been here before.
Does she hate him?
The man who killed her father? Who left her to find him dead and bloody on the floor, like he meant nothing at all? The man who tortured her, who called her names she never repeated, that no one knew, as he slammed the pencils in harder? That thought she deserved to die? Did she hate the man who ousted her to the town and sent her running?
Did she?
Did she hate this man who had asked for none of this, who had it forced upon him by someone more powerful, who controlled his destiny in her hand even from beyond the grave?
Caroline didn’t know.
(She hated herself for that.
“Because you always find the good in everyone.” Tyler had once mocked.
She hated him, she hated Ric, she hated herself, she hated her father, she hated Elena, and Bonnie and Stefan and everyone else.
She loved them too.
Wasn’t that the problem?)
“Come on,” She ignores him, “I hear something, I think it’s a wolf.”
(Caroline took pleasure in killing wolves, unresolved issues and all that.)
She is gone, through the forest, before he can say another word. Ric follows after, faster than her by nature, slower by practice.
--
They go to eat in a restaurant full of people that Alaric has no emotional connection too.
Full of food for people like them and not the kind served on a plate.
It looks like a date from the outside and it makes Caroline want to laugh bitterly. The teacher and his student, clandestine meetings in the dark and trips to restaurants where no one will recognize them, her alone with him in his apartment. (They write books about this sort of thing, but not quite with the same twist.)
If only the town could see them now. Miss Mystic Falls herself and the history teacher turned town drunk.
(“What a cute couple they make, the same taste in food, both liking the color red so much...”)
Ric is uncomfortable, and she enjoys it a little, as she orders wine with dilated eyes and water for him and the chef’s special for them both.
“Are you okay?” Caroline asks sipping at her ice water.
“I can hear their hearts beating, pumping.” He whispers, his hands grasping the edge of table cloth.
Caroline quickly reaches her hand across the table, grabbing one of his hands in her own, and smiles falsely at him, every bit the couple people think them to be.
Her nails dig into his skin and wounds open and heal, open and heal, open and heal, until he is looking back at her.
“I can hear them too.” She tells him, “I can hear the blood in their veins and I can smell them, I can see how easy their necks would be to snap and then to drain dry, no fight necessary.”
Her nails dig in again and this time she does not stop, she breaks skin, her fingernails dig in hard enough that blood rolls down his hand, spreads across the white table cloth.
“But I ignore it.” Caroline tells him, “And so will you.”
--
She spills her wine over the blood stain and apologizes profusely to the waiter, until somehow he ends up apologizing to her, like he had been the one to do it himself.
Caroline smiles self-depreciatingly at him and orders their food to go and the rest of the bottle of wine for herself.
And all is right with the world.
For the night.
--
“I can ask Elena if…”
Caroline is flipping through books on Alaric’s couch, looking for mentions of Travelers and spells and magical barriers and finding nothing helpful. And it’s almost funny how used to being there she was.
“I told Elena I would help you, I am.” Caroline says, conversation closed.
“Caroline…”
There is a silence where Caroline does not look at him, just studies her books, and he does nothing but look at her.
“I’m sorry.” He finally says.
She looks up at him, her eyes wide, and a hint of that patented Caroline smile on her face, “For what?”
--
Caroline calls Stefan almost daily.
A stupid ritual that doesn’t make sense.
He never answers.
But she can hear his voice, and she thinks somehow it reminds her that he’s alive, and after watching him die, she needs that.
(She needs him more, but you get what you paid for. Things never look the way they do in the magazine.)
So she listens to his message, boring and so normal, and she leaves tidbits of her days, of what she knows about the people she cares about, about her lessons with Alaric, and she thinks, she thinks maybe he could sense the way her voice changes when she was talking about Ric, if only he was listening. If only he picked up the phone.
But Stefan doesn’t, because Damon isn’t there and someone needs to fill the selfish Salvatore mantle and apparently Stefan was more than happy too.
(Eventually she would get used to people abandoning her, she would have to; she had forever after all. But she hadn’t yet.)
--
“What was it like when you found out about Isobel?” Caroline asks.
They’re at a much smaller diner, with less people and less heartbeats, and Alaric is much calmer than the last time, though their being watched closer here. (Small diners, small towns, all of them like good gossip, good stories to talk about.)
“What?”
“When Isobel-”
“No, I understood the question, why are you asking me?”
“Two reasons, one to see how you handle your anger.” Caroline says and it’s the truth, “So tell me, how did you feel when Isobel disappeared and you spent so much time looking for her killer only to realize she had turned herself into a killer all on her own, that she didn’t want to be saved at all, least of all by you.”
(There was a bite to it meant for him, but truth meant for her, truth that needed to be spoken out loud.)
“I was angry.” He says, taking a deep breath, “I…I hated her.”
“And now?”
“I still hate her, but it’s different, I moved on and it let me let go of her.” Ric says, taking a shaky drink of his water.
“How?” Caroline tilts her head.
“I…”
“How did you move on?” Caroline asks, her bitch voice in full form, like it should be a simple question.
“Because I realized she didn’t want me,” He ground out, “That she didn’t love me like I had loved her. I realized…I never knew her at all.”
One of their glasses break, and it should be Alaric’s, but Caroline’s not sure it is.
--
They go back to his apartment and he is silent and she is chattering nonstop about her research, because someone needs to fill the silence and somehow it is always her no matter who she’s with.
She grabs two blood bags out of the fridge and wine for her and beer for him and goes to the living room with him, sits them out on the coffee table and sits herself on the couch as far away as it will allow.
“I just need to find the right books.” Caroline continues, “I’m making Tyler go to Bonnie’s and get her grimores. They might have something in there. He was kind of reluctant to go, but I may have threatened to compel him…”
“Caroline, you know you don’t have to find a way to do this on your own.” Ric says, and she can almost remember the man who was so protective of them all, can remember the man who came to Mystic Falls with a mission and how it became something so much bigger.
“I can handle it.” She drinks her wine.
She thinks of mixing the blood bag and the wine together, and toasting to herself, because she was nothing if not determined.
“I’m not saying that you can’t, I’m just saying you don’t have to.”
“Well, who am I supposed to ask?”
He opens his mouth, like he wants to say “me”, but closes it just as quickly, no words coming out.
--
The next time she comes to his apartment there is a stack of books on his coffee table, waiting for her.
A note saying: “I thought these could help.”
She closes her eyes and does not think of anything at all.
--
“I need a place of my own.” Caroline says, on Ric’s couch, a blood bag in her hands. “I’m tired of the hotel I’m staying in. It’s so…drab. And beige. It’s very beige.”
“Caroline…”
“I want something with light.” She continues, “Something with lots of windows and light. Oh, maybe a sky light.”
“Caroline, how long do I have to do this?”
She glances over at him at the table, branches sticking out of each of his hands, piercing his skin, but not going through the table, just his hands.
“Experience says until you can learn to take it.” Caroline says, “Every vampire I know has been tortured at some point or another. Some more than others. Ask Elena if you don’t believe me.”
“Caroline…”
“Fine.” She stands and reaches him with in three steps, tearing out the branches and his yell penetrates the air, but there is no satisfaction at all.
“That was ten minutes.” Caroline tells him, “Try it for hours; see how well you handle it then.”
She turns away, and Ric’s bloody hand stops her, turns around her.
“I really am sorry.” He promises.
“And what does that change?” She asks.
There is silence for a very long time until finally he says, “Nothing.”
Caroline thinks that’s when things actually start to change.
fandom: the vampire diaries
characters: Caroline (probably turned out more Caroline centric than intended), Alaric, some Elena and some Caroline/Stefan that can be seen as friendship or more, read as you like.
rating/warnings: PG-13 (For talk of subject matter but nothing you would hear on the show, also warnings for talk of torture/light torture and a slightly darker Caroline as she deals with Ric.)
word count: 2706
summary: Alaric smells like vervain when she’s too close to him. She keeps her distance, stands across the room in his apartment, across from him in the woods as she tries to teach him how to hunt she steps away when he gets too close. Caroline thinks he might notice sometimes, he gets a look in his eyes that seems almost like an apology, but he never says anything out loud. (Post S5, hints of spoilers from S6 and definite spoilers from S3. This is Caroline and Alaric gaining their footing on how to act around each other, trying to get over the last time she saw him alive, and the torture he put her through. Basically the summer they’ll never give us/the Caroline-Alaric screwed up dynamics they’ll never give us either.)
A/N: this is a very different thing than it started out as, but I like it anyways. TVD never gives me Caroline’s trauma shown/dealt with, so I wrote it myself.
The first few days she avoids Alaric as best as possible.
It’s not easy when they’re both always in the same places, on the border of a town that doesn’t want them, mourning people who have disappeared before their eyes like magic because that’s what is was.
Magic and destruction all rolled into one. Maybe that was all magic really was. Destruction.
But Elena goes from one to the other, Caroline holding her friend up, and Elena holding Alaric up, and Caroline looking around for Stefan.
(He’s gone and he didn’t say goodbye, not really.
She thinks he might have, in his own Salvatore way, the tone in his voice and the choice of his words. But Caroline Forbes has always been able to delude herself of things.)
The first days are spent crying over blood and alcohol and then things slowly break apart.
They break apart.
Until there is no more them, they are just singular units who once all knew the same people, who once had formed a family where they had all thought they belonged.
(It had disappeared too. Just like magic.)
--
It’s Elena who comes to her.
Selfish Elena looking out for only herself or grief stricken Elena, traumatized and too far gone to think clearly, Caroline debates back and forth the depending on the day.
(She tries to be a better person, she does.
But Caroline always tries and Caroline always comes in second place, Elena blotting out her golden hair with her ever reaching shadow. And somehow that’s all it ever ends up being. Caroline trying to be something she’s not.)
“He needs someone to help him, to train him-to make sure he can…”
Elena is a tangle of words, alcohol, and mascara that hasn’t been fixed properly from crying. Caroline considers offering to teach Elena how to fix it but says nothing instead.
“I can’t do it, Caroline, I can’t.” Elena says, “He needs help but I can’t…”
They’re all lost now, in the dark and groping around, and they’re monsters (all of them) and that should make it easier, their the things that go bump in the night, nothing to fear but them, but it doesn’t make it easier. Nothing about it is easy. It just makes it harder, it just pushes everything to the surface, until all Caroline can feel is what she want to run away from. All she can remember is what she wants to bury in her mind like it never existed at all.
“I’ll try.” Caroline promises.
To Elena that means she’ll succeed, to Elena it means something it doesn’t to Caroline.
--
Alaric smells like vervain when she’s too close to him.
She keeps her distance, stands across the room in his apartment, across from him in the woods as she tries to teach him how to hunt (and she doesn’t think about-she doesn’t think-she doesn’t), she steps away when he gets too close.
Caroline thinks he might notice sometimes, he gets a look in his eyes that seems almost like an apology, but he never says anything out loud. Never remembers when she last saw him and what he had done and her pleas for him to stop.
(No one ever mentions these things. No one has since they have happened.)
Alaric says nothing at all, and she thinks it’s just like Stefan. She’s seeing things that aren’t there, hearing words that aren’t said.
“You’re too loud,” Caroline tells him when another buck disappears before he reaches it, “You’re the predator but they’re prey and that means that they want to live. Their want is greater than yours.”
“I need them to stay alive.” Alaric says, “Doesn’t that mean-”
“You have all the power.” Caroline stares him down, “Learn how to use it or you’ll end starving and gray.”
--
Caroline catches the buck, her teeth sink in and she drains it of half its blood before Alaric finds her.
She throws it at his feet.
“Here, dinner.” Caroline smiles, blood on her mouth.
--
Luke makes Ric his daylight bracelet.
She hates them both a little for that, Elena too, for asking for it.
She hates them because she fought so hard for hers and his was just handed to him.
Everything gets handed to everyone but Caroline.
A lesson she thinks she should have learned by now.
Silly little, Caroline. She knows nothing at all.
--
“Three blood bags a day will keep you well fed,” She explains, putting blood bags in his fridge. “Eat, a lot, it will help curve your cravings, and of course hunting, it will help with your predator nature.”
More blood bags go in as she does not think about things that she wants to disappear.
“Hunting is important, especially with you being so new at this all-you were built to be a hunter, so hunt.”
Alaric is silent, so she looks at him, trying to make sure he’s listening.
He’s staring at her but she doesn’t know if he’s taking it in.
“Why are you doing this?” He asks and she hates him a little. (Hates him a little more.)
“Elena said she couldn’t do it and in case you didn’t notice, we’re running out of vampires around here.” She says and it’s supposed to sting him, the loss of Damon, his best friend, but she only feels a stab in her own heart (no satisfaction at all) because Stefan is not there with her, to help her, to hold her, and Elena might as well have disappeared with him-disappeared with Damon and Bonnie.
“Caroline…”
She stands up, grabs the vial of vervain from her bag, and finally turns to look at him. “Don’t, Ric. Just-don’t.” She says.
She hands him the vial, their hands touching (the first time they’ve touched since he came back), “To build a tolerance.” Caroline says.
He doesn’t say anything, just nods, and moves to take it, and something happens, she’ll call it an accident later (but she’ll never be sure) and the bottle slips into his hand, her fingers grabbing at it as it slips through her fingers and when it falls it shatters.
Glass and vervain imbedding, branding his skin.
“I’ll get you another bottle,” She promises, but she doesn’t apologize.
Accidents happen after all.
--
“Do you hate me?” Alaric asks.
Caroline is listening for cute little woodland creatures that wouldn’t be so cute when they were done with them and his voice is jarring in her ear. Like he is whispering the words right into them, surrounding her with his presence, right beside her.
And she smells vervain, because she’s been here before.
Does she hate him?
The man who killed her father? Who left her to find him dead and bloody on the floor, like he meant nothing at all? The man who tortured her, who called her names she never repeated, that no one knew, as he slammed the pencils in harder? That thought she deserved to die? Did she hate the man who ousted her to the town and sent her running?
Did she?
Did she hate this man who had asked for none of this, who had it forced upon him by someone more powerful, who controlled his destiny in her hand even from beyond the grave?
Caroline didn’t know.
(She hated herself for that.
“Because you always find the good in everyone.” Tyler had once mocked.
She hated him, she hated Ric, she hated herself, she hated her father, she hated Elena, and Bonnie and Stefan and everyone else.
She loved them too.
Wasn’t that the problem?)
“Come on,” She ignores him, “I hear something, I think it’s a wolf.”
(Caroline took pleasure in killing wolves, unresolved issues and all that.)
She is gone, through the forest, before he can say another word. Ric follows after, faster than her by nature, slower by practice.
--
They go to eat in a restaurant full of people that Alaric has no emotional connection too.
Full of food for people like them and not the kind served on a plate.
It looks like a date from the outside and it makes Caroline want to laugh bitterly. The teacher and his student, clandestine meetings in the dark and trips to restaurants where no one will recognize them, her alone with him in his apartment. (They write books about this sort of thing, but not quite with the same twist.)
If only the town could see them now. Miss Mystic Falls herself and the history teacher turned town drunk.
(“What a cute couple they make, the same taste in food, both liking the color red so much...”)
Ric is uncomfortable, and she enjoys it a little, as she orders wine with dilated eyes and water for him and the chef’s special for them both.
“Are you okay?” Caroline asks sipping at her ice water.
“I can hear their hearts beating, pumping.” He whispers, his hands grasping the edge of table cloth.
Caroline quickly reaches her hand across the table, grabbing one of his hands in her own, and smiles falsely at him, every bit the couple people think them to be.
Her nails dig into his skin and wounds open and heal, open and heal, open and heal, until he is looking back at her.
“I can hear them too.” She tells him, “I can hear the blood in their veins and I can smell them, I can see how easy their necks would be to snap and then to drain dry, no fight necessary.”
Her nails dig in again and this time she does not stop, she breaks skin, her fingernails dig in hard enough that blood rolls down his hand, spreads across the white table cloth.
“But I ignore it.” Caroline tells him, “And so will you.”
--
She spills her wine over the blood stain and apologizes profusely to the waiter, until somehow he ends up apologizing to her, like he had been the one to do it himself.
Caroline smiles self-depreciatingly at him and orders their food to go and the rest of the bottle of wine for herself.
And all is right with the world.
For the night.
--
“I can ask Elena if…”
Caroline is flipping through books on Alaric’s couch, looking for mentions of Travelers and spells and magical barriers and finding nothing helpful. And it’s almost funny how used to being there she was.
“I told Elena I would help you, I am.” Caroline says, conversation closed.
“Caroline…”
There is a silence where Caroline does not look at him, just studies her books, and he does nothing but look at her.
“I’m sorry.” He finally says.
She looks up at him, her eyes wide, and a hint of that patented Caroline smile on her face, “For what?”
--
Caroline calls Stefan almost daily.
A stupid ritual that doesn’t make sense.
He never answers.
But she can hear his voice, and she thinks somehow it reminds her that he’s alive, and after watching him die, she needs that.
(She needs him more, but you get what you paid for. Things never look the way they do in the magazine.)
So she listens to his message, boring and so normal, and she leaves tidbits of her days, of what she knows about the people she cares about, about her lessons with Alaric, and she thinks, she thinks maybe he could sense the way her voice changes when she was talking about Ric, if only he was listening. If only he picked up the phone.
But Stefan doesn’t, because Damon isn’t there and someone needs to fill the selfish Salvatore mantle and apparently Stefan was more than happy too.
(Eventually she would get used to people abandoning her, she would have to; she had forever after all. But she hadn’t yet.)
--
“What was it like when you found out about Isobel?” Caroline asks.
They’re at a much smaller diner, with less people and less heartbeats, and Alaric is much calmer than the last time, though their being watched closer here. (Small diners, small towns, all of them like good gossip, good stories to talk about.)
“What?”
“When Isobel-”
“No, I understood the question, why are you asking me?”
“Two reasons, one to see how you handle your anger.” Caroline says and it’s the truth, “So tell me, how did you feel when Isobel disappeared and you spent so much time looking for her killer only to realize she had turned herself into a killer all on her own, that she didn’t want to be saved at all, least of all by you.”
(There was a bite to it meant for him, but truth meant for her, truth that needed to be spoken out loud.)
“I was angry.” He says, taking a deep breath, “I…I hated her.”
“And now?”
“I still hate her, but it’s different, I moved on and it let me let go of her.” Ric says, taking a shaky drink of his water.
“How?” Caroline tilts her head.
“I…”
“How did you move on?” Caroline asks, her bitch voice in full form, like it should be a simple question.
“Because I realized she didn’t want me,” He ground out, “That she didn’t love me like I had loved her. I realized…I never knew her at all.”
One of their glasses break, and it should be Alaric’s, but Caroline’s not sure it is.
--
They go back to his apartment and he is silent and she is chattering nonstop about her research, because someone needs to fill the silence and somehow it is always her no matter who she’s with.
She grabs two blood bags out of the fridge and wine for her and beer for him and goes to the living room with him, sits them out on the coffee table and sits herself on the couch as far away as it will allow.
“I just need to find the right books.” Caroline continues, “I’m making Tyler go to Bonnie’s and get her grimores. They might have something in there. He was kind of reluctant to go, but I may have threatened to compel him…”
“Caroline, you know you don’t have to find a way to do this on your own.” Ric says, and she can almost remember the man who was so protective of them all, can remember the man who came to Mystic Falls with a mission and how it became something so much bigger.
“I can handle it.” She drinks her wine.
She thinks of mixing the blood bag and the wine together, and toasting to herself, because she was nothing if not determined.
“I’m not saying that you can’t, I’m just saying you don’t have to.”
“Well, who am I supposed to ask?”
He opens his mouth, like he wants to say “me”, but closes it just as quickly, no words coming out.
--
The next time she comes to his apartment there is a stack of books on his coffee table, waiting for her.
A note saying: “I thought these could help.”
She closes her eyes and does not think of anything at all.
--
“I need a place of my own.” Caroline says, on Ric’s couch, a blood bag in her hands. “I’m tired of the hotel I’m staying in. It’s so…drab. And beige. It’s very beige.”
“Caroline…”
“I want something with light.” She continues, “Something with lots of windows and light. Oh, maybe a sky light.”
“Caroline, how long do I have to do this?”
She glances over at him at the table, branches sticking out of each of his hands, piercing his skin, but not going through the table, just his hands.
“Experience says until you can learn to take it.” Caroline says, “Every vampire I know has been tortured at some point or another. Some more than others. Ask Elena if you don’t believe me.”
“Caroline…”
“Fine.” She stands and reaches him with in three steps, tearing out the branches and his yell penetrates the air, but there is no satisfaction at all.
“That was ten minutes.” Caroline tells him, “Try it for hours; see how well you handle it then.”
She turns away, and Ric’s bloody hand stops her, turns around her.
“I really am sorry.” He promises.
“And what does that change?” She asks.
There is silence for a very long time until finally he says, “Nothing.”
Caroline thinks that’s when things actually start to change.