our house made of paper (1/1)
title: our house made of paper
fandom: the vampire diaries
pairings: caroline/rebekah, caroline/klaus
summary: Klaus is good with promises, with fancy words and dreams laid out in front of you, but he isn’t capable for following through with them. Rebekah says he’s never has been.
rating: t
disclaimer: I don't own anything.
a/n: written for the team barbie ficathon, for this prompt, after centuries they leave Nik behind. (I don’t know how well I stuck to it, though.)
Klaus is right-
(He’s always right, he like to remind her)
-when he tells Caroline that Mystic Falls won’t be enough for her. Barely any time has passed when already the walls are starting to crumble in on her, when she has to leave, has to escape its hold.
She doesn’t end up on his doorstep, he is the one who finds her, but the end result is still the same. He promises her the world again, wraps his hands around her wrists and promises her the world.
She realizes too late, that he had never promised him in it.
Rebekah hates her very presence. Always and forever was never supposed to involve anyone else and it definitely was not supposed to include Caroline Forbes.
Rebekah threatens to kill her the first night, means it with everything in her. Klaus throws her into one of the walls, threatens her with a dagger in her heart until she gets her temper under control (the irony is not lost on her) and she finds she’s never hated anyone more.
She once told Caroline that she wanted to take everything from her. She never expected the girl to succeed in doing the same.
Klaus gives Caroline what he promised her. Great cities and art and music and everything her heart desires. Rebekah frowns in the background and the forefront and takes to calling her baby, a reminder of just how young she is.
(Caroline hates it more than she ever hated Damon’s nicknames for her.)
And for a while, for years, Caroline is happy. The closest she’s been to content since her dad packed his bags and left her standing in the doorway in her pink princess dress. But eventually Klaus gets tired of it all, gets distracted by a new quest, something else new and shiny and powerful. Something that he must have.
Caroline isn’t surprised when it happens. People always leave. She’s never enough to hold them there.
Klaus leaves. He fucking leaves. He needs to be in Turkey and he needs her to stay there and look out for Caroline. To watch Caroline. To protect Caroline. Rebekah thinks that he’s worried she might try to run, doesn’t realize that the other blonde isn’t smart enough herself to want to leave.
But then, Rebekah can’t really judge.
So Klaus leaves, with no returning date in sight, and she stays, and Rebekah has no idea who hates it more.
Klaus comes back. He leaves and comes back. Leaves and comes back. Leaves and comes back. Leaves. Caroline hates it and she knows Rebekah does too. Every time he leaves, they redecorate. The destruction that Rebekah causes makes it necessary.
(Klaus is good with promises, with fancy words and dreams laid out in front of you, but he isn’t capable for following through with them.
Rebekah says he’s never has been.)
Klaus leaves and she finds herself standing in Rebekah’s doorway, the other girl already in bed. Her back is to her and Caroline is nervous, because Rebekah has never stopped hating her even after all these years, but she doesn’t want to be alone. She is tired of being alone.
Klaus had promised her that she would never have to be alone. Being with him was supposed to mean having someone for forever. He was supposed to be her forever.
She keeps standing there, until Rebekah groans and snaps at her to stop being such an idiot and just get in. She doesn’t have to be asked twice, she climbs into bed and curls up beside her. Close but not touching. The way they always were.
Klaus sends them a post card, a fucking postcard, from Bulgaria. Rebekah isn’t sure which one of them is more offended. He used to invite her to come with him, even just as a pretense, because Rebekah did not like to get her clothes dirty and he knew that.
She hands it to Caroline, wants it out of her sight and out of her mind. Later she finds it in pieces in the trash can and she smiles just a little.
Something Rebekah and Caroline could actually agree upon.
They’re going out, Rebekah tells her. She throws a red dress on her bed and leaves the room. It isn’t a question but Caroline would never have considered saying no.
She hates these walls. She’s hated them since she’s first seen them and no matter how many times they redecorate, she hates them just the same.
They end up at a bar, drinking and laughing at jokes that aren’t funny with men that Caroline keeps comparing to Klaus. Rebekah takes hers to the ally, drinks them dry one by one Caroline guesses, but she doesn’t ask. Caroline compels hers to leave and never remember her, but she doesn’t drink. Klaus is prone to unnecessary jealousy and she doesn’t wish his anger on anyone.
Rebekah calls her ridiculous. Tells her he would never know, he would have to be around to know.
Caroline pretends that it isn’t the truth.
He promised her forever, Rebekah tells Caroline. He promised forever. He promised his loyalty. He promised happiness. He promised he would never dagger her, that she was different from her brothers.
He promised so many things.
He always comes back, Caroline whispers beside her, like that was what mattered. She’s lying in Rebekah’s bed. Rebekah doesn’t remember the last time Caroline slept in her own room, in her own bed. She thinks Caroline probably could tell her to the day.
Yes, he always comes back. Always leaves again. And they, they are always there waiting for him.
Always. Always. Always.
Rebekah is sick of always.
Caroline and Rebekah go out, again and again. Bar after bar, men flocking around them and the alcohol always flowing. Rebekah says it reminds her of the twenties, before Klaus had decided to ruin her fun.
Rebekah continues to take men into the ally (or wherever she sees fit) and drinks from them. She doesn’t always kill them, Caroline learns. Usually she compels them to forget after she gets her fill. She doesn’t heal them, but Caroline thinks it might be the most sympathetic she’s ever seen a vampire be.
Stefan tears his victims apart. Damon breaks them inside out. Klaus snaps them like twigs. Katherine makes her victims wish they had died and stayed dead.
Sometimes Caroline finds herself wishing Rebekah had been the one to turn her. She thinks it might have been gentle, that it might not have even hurt. She thinks her last moments wouldn’t have been spent gasping for breath and hating her best friend.
Caroline would have liked that.
Kol shows up on their doorstep, ten years since Rebekah last saw him but still looking just the same. The curse of a vampire; nothing and no one ever really changes.
He asks her to come with him, to leave this insipid town they’re in, that they are still in, to come with him and paint whole countries red. Rebekah is tempted. She is restless and tired, so very tired, and she wants to get lost in the oblivion that Kol will happily supply.
(Kol is all about forgetting. He doesn’t like to remember.)
But Caroline is at the window, watching for something that isn’t there, and the scene is far more familiar than she would ever admit out loud.
Rebekah can’t bring herself to leave with Kol.
Klaus comes back. (And leaves and comes back. Leaves and comes back. Leaves and comes back. Leaves.)
He smiles, says he’s happy to see his two girls getting along.
Caroline laughs, and tells him it’s not like he gave them much of a choice. Klaus doesn’t understand, but Caroline can tell that Rebekah does.
(Klaus had always been good at making promises; he wasn’t good with keeping them. It was a lesson that kept repeating itself.)
Caroline and Rebekah go out again, this time at Caroline’s insistence. She says things, uses words like trapped and cage and tired, and Rebekah relates far too much.
She lets one of the men kiss her, kisses him back with an intensity and eagerness that would enrage her brother. Caroline doesn’t feed, just kisses him, and Rebekah can’t look away.
Caroline compels him to remember her, to remember this moment forever, the girl he met in the bar with golden hair and the sad blue eyes. He was never allowed to forget her.
Never. Never. Never.
He nods his head, a mockery of consent that Caroline has taken away, and Rebekah knows she will never forget this moment either. Caroline and her full lips, begging for someone to remember her.
That is what Rebekah has always wanted too.
He thinks he’s found another doppelganger, Caroline whispers on her side of Rebekah’s bed. Klaus is back, sleeping in Caroline’s bed, but Caroline found it suffocating to stay there with him, to sleep beside him. Trapped under his arm, his bare chest too hot against her skin, the room too small; she couldn’t take it.
It’s too soon for there to be another one, Rebekah reminds her and Caroline just shrugs because apparently Klaus doesn’t seem to think so. Or is just too blinded by the possibility to see the truth. Klaus is always chasing after the impossible only to find the reality is not quite as spectacular as he had believed. He’s never willing to give it back once he’s obtained it though. What is his will be his forever.
(Klaus was supposed to be her forever.)
Petrova doppelgangers have always been blinding to my brothers, Rebekah tells her and she runs her hands through Caroline’s hair. It is soothing and comforting and Caroline finds herself leaning closer to the other blonde.
The Petrovas are everyone’s first choice, Caroline says. It’s just in their blood.
They’re not hers, Rebekah tells her. She would never choose them.
Rebekah is feeding when she feels Caroline’s presence behind her. She can smell her, a mixture of citrus and alcohol and innocence that even her brother cannot rid her of. There is something else there as well.
Want.
She extracts herself from the human, tells him to leave and turns back to Caroline. She’s never followed her before, always made it clear she had no interest in what Rebekah was doing. She thought it was ridiculous, but she respected Caroline for still believing that way after all these years. But that didn’t explain what she was doing now.
Here for the show, she questions wiping off a bit of stray blood with her thumb. In a flash, Caroline was there before her, her hand circling her wrist and keeping it in place.
She was curious, she tells her like it’s the most normal thing in the world, before wrapping her mouth around Rebekah’s thumb, licking the blood off slowly.
(One of them let out a moan, neither one is sure which.)
Klaus comes back, unexpected and maybe unwanted, though no one will ever say that out loud.
(Caroline and Rebekah’s fingers are interlaced and their hair is tangled together until you can’t tell whose is whose and they are facing each other even in sleep.)
He slams the doors to Rebekah’s bedroom open, startling them both awake and Caroline clings to Rebekah’s hand on instinct.
Klaus is screaming and demanding and raging and Caroline is quickly out of bed, her hands on his chest as she tries to calm him down. She offers reassurances that make Rebekah and her both cringe. She was lonely without him. She hadn’t wanted to be alone. She was his. She was always going to be his.
Caroline pulls him away, out of the room and back down the hallway into theirs. His.
(She was always going to be his.)
Rebekah hates her brother for coming back, and Caroline thinks she might just hate him for it as well.
Klaus stays longer this time. He says he wants to spend more time with his favorite people, but there is something false in his tone.
Sometimes Rebekah catches him glaring at her, because Caroline loves to talk and doesn’t like silences and fills them with more talking. And Caroline can’t stop talking about her. She’s in every story, often the star, and Klaus can’t stand it.
Rebekah just smiles.
He’s very close to finding her, Klaus promises. He’s very close to finding her and soon it will be all over. He’ll come back home and they’ll celebrate properly. Everything will be like it was before. He’ll take her to Paris, to Rome, to Tokyo, anywhere she wants to go.
Klaus is always making promises, but Caroline has long ago stopped believing them.
Klaus leaves, but Rebekah is not there to see it. She has seen his retreating back far too many times.
She comes home, alcohol on her breath and blood on her clothes, and finds Caroline back in her bed. She doesn’t say anything and Rebekah hates her for it. Scoffs and turns away from her as she moves to change out of her clothes.
A hand moves to rest on her arm and she lets herself be spun around. Caroline is standing in front of her and there’s an apology in her eyes but it isn’t enough.
(Klaus had promised her happiness and he had been so close to giving it to her.)
But then Caroline’s lips are on hers and her hands are threading through her hair. She is kissing her and its different than it was with the man in her bar, its far pass desperation and moved onto something else.
Need. Want. Love. All of them blurred into one.
No one has ever kissed her like that before.
Klaus had promised Caroline the world, he had never promised to be a part of it. He had left her when he said he wouldn’t. He was supposed to be her forever. He wasn’t.
She isn’t his, Caroline promises them both. She isn’t his.
Rebekah smiles and it beautiful. Her brothers have always been blind when it comes to the Petrovas, Rebekah once told her, and Caroline thinks they must be to not see her standing there all along.
Rebekah’s grin turns into a smirk, and she shoves her down on the bed. They talk far too much, Rebekah tells her. There are much more satisfying things they could be doing.
(Klaus was supposed to be her forever. He wasn’t. She thinks she might forgive him a little for that.)
They leave a note. They are sure Klaus will be horrified at the thought of Caroline running away with his sister -
(Kol will find it hilarious, Rebekah is sure, and Elijah will find the irony of it all amusing.)
-but she isn’t worried for herself. Klaus will eventually forgive her, he always does. They always forgive each other, even if it takes years to do it, and even if they don’t deserve it. Caroline doesn’t warrant the same treatment. She is not family. Rebekah worries for her before they even leave the house.
What belongs to Klaus belongs to him, always and forever. But Caroline has long stopped believing in forevers with Klaus and Rebekah is sick of always.
Klaus had promised Rebekah happiness and he had promised Caroline the world. He had never promised to be the one to bring them it.
They would do that for each other.
fandom: the vampire diaries
pairings: caroline/rebekah, caroline/klaus
summary: Klaus is good with promises, with fancy words and dreams laid out in front of you, but he isn’t capable for following through with them. Rebekah says he’s never has been.
rating: t
disclaimer: I don't own anything.
a/n: written for the team barbie ficathon, for this prompt, after centuries they leave Nik behind. (I don’t know how well I stuck to it, though.)
Klaus is right-
(He’s always right, he like to remind her)
-when he tells Caroline that Mystic Falls won’t be enough for her. Barely any time has passed when already the walls are starting to crumble in on her, when she has to leave, has to escape its hold.
She doesn’t end up on his doorstep, he is the one who finds her, but the end result is still the same. He promises her the world again, wraps his hands around her wrists and promises her the world.
She realizes too late, that he had never promised him in it.
Rebekah hates her very presence. Always and forever was never supposed to involve anyone else and it definitely was not supposed to include Caroline Forbes.
Rebekah threatens to kill her the first night, means it with everything in her. Klaus throws her into one of the walls, threatens her with a dagger in her heart until she gets her temper under control (the irony is not lost on her) and she finds she’s never hated anyone more.
She once told Caroline that she wanted to take everything from her. She never expected the girl to succeed in doing the same.
Klaus gives Caroline what he promised her. Great cities and art and music and everything her heart desires. Rebekah frowns in the background and the forefront and takes to calling her baby, a reminder of just how young she is.
(Caroline hates it more than she ever hated Damon’s nicknames for her.)
And for a while, for years, Caroline is happy. The closest she’s been to content since her dad packed his bags and left her standing in the doorway in her pink princess dress. But eventually Klaus gets tired of it all, gets distracted by a new quest, something else new and shiny and powerful. Something that he must have.
Caroline isn’t surprised when it happens. People always leave. She’s never enough to hold them there.
Klaus leaves. He fucking leaves. He needs to be in Turkey and he needs her to stay there and look out for Caroline. To watch Caroline. To protect Caroline. Rebekah thinks that he’s worried she might try to run, doesn’t realize that the other blonde isn’t smart enough herself to want to leave.
But then, Rebekah can’t really judge.
So Klaus leaves, with no returning date in sight, and she stays, and Rebekah has no idea who hates it more.
Klaus comes back. He leaves and comes back. Leaves and comes back. Leaves and comes back. Leaves. Caroline hates it and she knows Rebekah does too. Every time he leaves, they redecorate. The destruction that Rebekah causes makes it necessary.
(Klaus is good with promises, with fancy words and dreams laid out in front of you, but he isn’t capable for following through with them.
Rebekah says he’s never has been.)
Klaus leaves and she finds herself standing in Rebekah’s doorway, the other girl already in bed. Her back is to her and Caroline is nervous, because Rebekah has never stopped hating her even after all these years, but she doesn’t want to be alone. She is tired of being alone.
Klaus had promised her that she would never have to be alone. Being with him was supposed to mean having someone for forever. He was supposed to be her forever.
She keeps standing there, until Rebekah groans and snaps at her to stop being such an idiot and just get in. She doesn’t have to be asked twice, she climbs into bed and curls up beside her. Close but not touching. The way they always were.
Klaus sends them a post card, a fucking postcard, from Bulgaria. Rebekah isn’t sure which one of them is more offended. He used to invite her to come with him, even just as a pretense, because Rebekah did not like to get her clothes dirty and he knew that.
She hands it to Caroline, wants it out of her sight and out of her mind. Later she finds it in pieces in the trash can and she smiles just a little.
Something Rebekah and Caroline could actually agree upon.
They’re going out, Rebekah tells her. She throws a red dress on her bed and leaves the room. It isn’t a question but Caroline would never have considered saying no.
She hates these walls. She’s hated them since she’s first seen them and no matter how many times they redecorate, she hates them just the same.
They end up at a bar, drinking and laughing at jokes that aren’t funny with men that Caroline keeps comparing to Klaus. Rebekah takes hers to the ally, drinks them dry one by one Caroline guesses, but she doesn’t ask. Caroline compels hers to leave and never remember her, but she doesn’t drink. Klaus is prone to unnecessary jealousy and she doesn’t wish his anger on anyone.
Rebekah calls her ridiculous. Tells her he would never know, he would have to be around to know.
Caroline pretends that it isn’t the truth.
He promised her forever, Rebekah tells Caroline. He promised forever. He promised his loyalty. He promised happiness. He promised he would never dagger her, that she was different from her brothers.
He promised so many things.
He always comes back, Caroline whispers beside her, like that was what mattered. She’s lying in Rebekah’s bed. Rebekah doesn’t remember the last time Caroline slept in her own room, in her own bed. She thinks Caroline probably could tell her to the day.
Yes, he always comes back. Always leaves again. And they, they are always there waiting for him.
Always. Always. Always.
Rebekah is sick of always.
Caroline and Rebekah go out, again and again. Bar after bar, men flocking around them and the alcohol always flowing. Rebekah says it reminds her of the twenties, before Klaus had decided to ruin her fun.
Rebekah continues to take men into the ally (or wherever she sees fit) and drinks from them. She doesn’t always kill them, Caroline learns. Usually she compels them to forget after she gets her fill. She doesn’t heal them, but Caroline thinks it might be the most sympathetic she’s ever seen a vampire be.
Stefan tears his victims apart. Damon breaks them inside out. Klaus snaps them like twigs. Katherine makes her victims wish they had died and stayed dead.
Sometimes Caroline finds herself wishing Rebekah had been the one to turn her. She thinks it might have been gentle, that it might not have even hurt. She thinks her last moments wouldn’t have been spent gasping for breath and hating her best friend.
Caroline would have liked that.
Kol shows up on their doorstep, ten years since Rebekah last saw him but still looking just the same. The curse of a vampire; nothing and no one ever really changes.
He asks her to come with him, to leave this insipid town they’re in, that they are still in, to come with him and paint whole countries red. Rebekah is tempted. She is restless and tired, so very tired, and she wants to get lost in the oblivion that Kol will happily supply.
(Kol is all about forgetting. He doesn’t like to remember.)
But Caroline is at the window, watching for something that isn’t there, and the scene is far more familiar than she would ever admit out loud.
Rebekah can’t bring herself to leave with Kol.
Klaus comes back. (And leaves and comes back. Leaves and comes back. Leaves and comes back. Leaves.)
He smiles, says he’s happy to see his two girls getting along.
Caroline laughs, and tells him it’s not like he gave them much of a choice. Klaus doesn’t understand, but Caroline can tell that Rebekah does.
(Klaus had always been good at making promises; he wasn’t good with keeping them. It was a lesson that kept repeating itself.)
Caroline and Rebekah go out again, this time at Caroline’s insistence. She says things, uses words like trapped and cage and tired, and Rebekah relates far too much.
She lets one of the men kiss her, kisses him back with an intensity and eagerness that would enrage her brother. Caroline doesn’t feed, just kisses him, and Rebekah can’t look away.
Caroline compels him to remember her, to remember this moment forever, the girl he met in the bar with golden hair and the sad blue eyes. He was never allowed to forget her.
Never. Never. Never.
He nods his head, a mockery of consent that Caroline has taken away, and Rebekah knows she will never forget this moment either. Caroline and her full lips, begging for someone to remember her.
That is what Rebekah has always wanted too.
He thinks he’s found another doppelganger, Caroline whispers on her side of Rebekah’s bed. Klaus is back, sleeping in Caroline’s bed, but Caroline found it suffocating to stay there with him, to sleep beside him. Trapped under his arm, his bare chest too hot against her skin, the room too small; she couldn’t take it.
It’s too soon for there to be another one, Rebekah reminds her and Caroline just shrugs because apparently Klaus doesn’t seem to think so. Or is just too blinded by the possibility to see the truth. Klaus is always chasing after the impossible only to find the reality is not quite as spectacular as he had believed. He’s never willing to give it back once he’s obtained it though. What is his will be his forever.
(Klaus was supposed to be her forever.)
Petrova doppelgangers have always been blinding to my brothers, Rebekah tells her and she runs her hands through Caroline’s hair. It is soothing and comforting and Caroline finds herself leaning closer to the other blonde.
The Petrovas are everyone’s first choice, Caroline says. It’s just in their blood.
They’re not hers, Rebekah tells her. She would never choose them.
Rebekah is feeding when she feels Caroline’s presence behind her. She can smell her, a mixture of citrus and alcohol and innocence that even her brother cannot rid her of. There is something else there as well.
Want.
She extracts herself from the human, tells him to leave and turns back to Caroline. She’s never followed her before, always made it clear she had no interest in what Rebekah was doing. She thought it was ridiculous, but she respected Caroline for still believing that way after all these years. But that didn’t explain what she was doing now.
Here for the show, she questions wiping off a bit of stray blood with her thumb. In a flash, Caroline was there before her, her hand circling her wrist and keeping it in place.
She was curious, she tells her like it’s the most normal thing in the world, before wrapping her mouth around Rebekah’s thumb, licking the blood off slowly.
(One of them let out a moan, neither one is sure which.)
Klaus comes back, unexpected and maybe unwanted, though no one will ever say that out loud.
(Caroline and Rebekah’s fingers are interlaced and their hair is tangled together until you can’t tell whose is whose and they are facing each other even in sleep.)
He slams the doors to Rebekah’s bedroom open, startling them both awake and Caroline clings to Rebekah’s hand on instinct.
Klaus is screaming and demanding and raging and Caroline is quickly out of bed, her hands on his chest as she tries to calm him down. She offers reassurances that make Rebekah and her both cringe. She was lonely without him. She hadn’t wanted to be alone. She was his. She was always going to be his.
Caroline pulls him away, out of the room and back down the hallway into theirs. His.
(She was always going to be his.)
Rebekah hates her brother for coming back, and Caroline thinks she might just hate him for it as well.
Klaus stays longer this time. He says he wants to spend more time with his favorite people, but there is something false in his tone.
Sometimes Rebekah catches him glaring at her, because Caroline loves to talk and doesn’t like silences and fills them with more talking. And Caroline can’t stop talking about her. She’s in every story, often the star, and Klaus can’t stand it.
Rebekah just smiles.
He’s very close to finding her, Klaus promises. He’s very close to finding her and soon it will be all over. He’ll come back home and they’ll celebrate properly. Everything will be like it was before. He’ll take her to Paris, to Rome, to Tokyo, anywhere she wants to go.
Klaus is always making promises, but Caroline has long ago stopped believing them.
Klaus leaves, but Rebekah is not there to see it. She has seen his retreating back far too many times.
She comes home, alcohol on her breath and blood on her clothes, and finds Caroline back in her bed. She doesn’t say anything and Rebekah hates her for it. Scoffs and turns away from her as she moves to change out of her clothes.
A hand moves to rest on her arm and she lets herself be spun around. Caroline is standing in front of her and there’s an apology in her eyes but it isn’t enough.
(Klaus had promised her happiness and he had been so close to giving it to her.)
But then Caroline’s lips are on hers and her hands are threading through her hair. She is kissing her and its different than it was with the man in her bar, its far pass desperation and moved onto something else.
Need. Want. Love. All of them blurred into one.
No one has ever kissed her like that before.
Klaus had promised Caroline the world, he had never promised to be a part of it. He had left her when he said he wouldn’t. He was supposed to be her forever. He wasn’t.
She isn’t his, Caroline promises them both. She isn’t his.
Rebekah smiles and it beautiful. Her brothers have always been blind when it comes to the Petrovas, Rebekah once told her, and Caroline thinks they must be to not see her standing there all along.
Rebekah’s grin turns into a smirk, and she shoves her down on the bed. They talk far too much, Rebekah tells her. There are much more satisfying things they could be doing.
(Klaus was supposed to be her forever. He wasn’t. She thinks she might forgive him a little for that.)
They leave a note. They are sure Klaus will be horrified at the thought of Caroline running away with his sister -
(Kol will find it hilarious, Rebekah is sure, and Elijah will find the irony of it all amusing.)
-but she isn’t worried for herself. Klaus will eventually forgive her, he always does. They always forgive each other, even if it takes years to do it, and even if they don’t deserve it. Caroline doesn’t warrant the same treatment. She is not family. Rebekah worries for her before they even leave the house.
What belongs to Klaus belongs to him, always and forever. But Caroline has long stopped believing in forevers with Klaus and Rebekah is sick of always.
Klaus had promised Rebekah happiness and he had promised Caroline the world. He had never promised to be the one to bring them it.
They would do that for each other.