The Vampire Diaries fic: Inside the Pocket of Your Ripped Jeans
Story Title: inside the pocket of your ripped jeans
Fandom(s): The Vampire Diaries
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,510
Summary: 2,500 words of me throwing hands with TVD’s post-S5 depiction of Caroline and Tyler’s relationship. Inspired by this fic by @cbsnforeverandalways and this post by @zalrb.
Author’s Notes: This is what happens when you find out that one of your oldest OTPs was RUINED for an abusive fanservice ship. Then to make it even worse, the show just pretends Caroline and Tyler never meant anything to each other? Aboslutely ridiculous. I've been out of this fandom for nearly a decade but when I discovered this travesty I just had to write a fix-it fic. Well, it's not exactly a fix-it since it's still canon-compliant, but close enough. JUSTICE FOR FORWOOD.
It hits her at the oddest times. She could understand the faint sense of loss if it only happened on their anniversary, or when the moon is full. Stefan understands when she’s a little mopey on those days; after all, he has days like that of his own.
It’s when it happens on days that don’t have any significance that gets her the most, though; those, she can’t tell Stefan. Because he’d look at her all half-judgy, half-sympathetic, which makes her feel the entirety of the hundred-and-fifty-year age gulf between them. Not that she wants to examine it even to herself, granted.
It would be one thing if she knew when the missing him would strike her, but it comes on without warning.
She and Tyler will be talking, as acquaintances or friends are wont to do, and there’ll be a moment. This spark of magnetism between them that used to always be there (when it was allowed to be there). And she knows he feels it, too, because she can see it in his face, and that makes it worse, because that means it’s not a figment of her imagination. She tells herself it’s just them reconnecting, because they were friends long before they were lovers, but she knows it’s a lie.
Other times, she’ll flip through a photo album and smile rather smugly at her favorite photo of her and Stefan because they are just perfect together - but then she’ll see a picture of him and Elena and the dark beast of doubt and envy will pool in her stomach, and then she’ll see a picture of her and Tyler, and now guilt and wistfulness join the party. Because how can she be jealous of the way Stefan and Elena look together, the way they just fit, when she looks at her and Tyler and they just fit, too?
Still other times, she’ll be toying with her daylight ring and will flash back to the day her father had tortured her, when Tyler and her mom had come to her rescue and he’d slipped the ring back onto her finger. He’d practically been down on one knee then. She remembers reliving that moment later, once the pain of that day had passed, only in a much more scenic locale where Tyler would present her with a ring ring, not just the lapis lazuli. When he proposes, she’d thought then, not if - even back then, when their relationship was barely in its infancy, it had felt…permanent.
Caroline still doesn’t have a ring ring, but she has a wonderful boyfriend and a wonderful life that’s not with Tyler and that’s that.
She’s fine.
Really.
She dreams of him, sometimes.
She’ll fall asleep to a vision of dark eyes, and she thinks that they’re Stefan’s, which is acceptable. But when she falls truly asleep, it is not Stefan that she sees. She sees Tyler, smiling at her the way he never quite does anymore, a smile absent of betrayal and hurt, like she’s the sun his world revolves around. Even before they’d gotten together, when they were still just friends figuring out their supernatural identities, that smile had set her heart fluttering. She’d passed it off at the time as the usual jitters of being a new vampire.
She dreams of all the times he’d swept her off her feet, or pressed her up against the wall, or stared at her in that intense way he did right before he kissed her breathless. She dreams of falling into bed with him (or onto the couch, or on a desk, or…), every nerve alive, every inch of skin alight. Sex had never been just about passion for them (though there certainly was plenty of that), it was their way of connecting when words weren’t quite enough.
She dreams of them arguing, which they did often. But it’s not a bad dream - she’d liked that she could speak her mind with him, that they could call each other out on their bullshit and that he didn’t treat her like she couldn’t defend herself. She’d liked that instead of letting issues fester or keep secrets, they hashed things out and got to the bottom of them. She’d liked that no matter the problem, he never made her feel bad about herself.
When she wakes, there is always a moment where she fully expects to see Tyler lying beside her. Perhaps she’d kiss his chest, his neck, his jaw, his lips until he stirred awake. But it’s Stefan lying there, not Tyler, because of course it is, and for that brief moment there is an overwhelming sense of disappointment.
It’s trivia night, when their entire group is supposed to hang out together, but Elena, Matt, Jeremy, and Damon had all bailed, so it’s just Caroline, Tyler, Stefan, and Bonnie, with Bonnie and Stefan currently tied for the lead. Bonnie swears she hasn’t used her powers to get ahead. Caroline’s not entirely sure about that: she still bitterly recalls the incident in fourth grade when Bonnie swore she didn’t move the Ouija board pointer and then the next year revealed that in fact she had. She’s peeved about Stefan, too, because she doesn’t think it’s exactly fair when he has so many more years’ worth of trivia knowledge. Bonnie ends up winning the battle for first place, and thus becomes the mediator for Caroline and Tyler’s battle for third.
“We should probably just give Caroline the crown right now,” she snorts as she reads the card. “ ‘In The Real Housewives of Orange County, which housewife departed the show between seasons two and three?’ ”
With hardly a minute’s hesitation - and just a split-second before Caroline recalls the name - Tyler answers, “Jo De La Rosa.”
Bonnie and Stefan stare at him, dumbfounded. “Uh…correct,” Bonnie says. “How do you know the answer to that?”
“Just from around,” Tyler says with a wince. “It’s not like I watch that reality TV trash or anything.”
Caroline, huffy at having lost, objects, “No, I have it on good authority that you enjoy this ‘reality TV trash,’ Tyler Lockwood. You watched every episode with me.”
“Yeah, because at the end of each season you gave me a bl - ” He abruptly cuts himself off, glancing at Stefan. “-ueberry muffin.”
Caroline desperately hopes her blush isn’t visible. It was blowjobs she gave him in exchange for watching the show with her, not muffins. In fact, Tyler’s allergic to blueberries, and by the dubious expressions on both Bonnie and Stefan’s faces, it’s clear they know of that particular allergy and further don’t believe a word of Tyler’s fumbled explanation.
“Well,” Bonnie announces, “that’s my cue to leave.”
“I’ll walk you out,” Stefan offers.
Caroline waits until the door closes behind them, then remarks, “That was awkward.”
“It’s not like they don’t know we were together,” Tyler says, helping clean up the game. “What, does Stefan think all we did was make out or something?”
“No, but still.”
Tyler looks a bit perturbed at that, though doesn’t reply. She used to be able to read him like a book, but now she can’t decipher at all what he wants. What, is she supposed to talk about their sex life in front of their friends? In front of Stefan? That sounds like something pre-werewolf Tyler would do, not the selfless, sensitive Tyler she dated for over a year.
She doesn’t want them to part on bad terms, though, so she goes to give him a hug goodbye. She intends for it to be brief, but when they embrace, she finds herself unable to break it. As a hybrid, his vampire half cooled his body temperature to more or less that of any other vampire; she’d almost forgotten how warm werewolves get, and it sends a shiver down her spine. More than that, she’d almost forgotten (or perhaps willed herself to forget) just how good it felt to be close to him. He’s shorter than Stefan, but she kind of likes that her head rests next to his instead of against his chest, his pulse a temptation. His arms are tight around her, his hands low on her waist, and it feels…right.
She pulls away because that most definitely isn’t right, not anymore, but she makes the mistake of looking up at him. It would be dangerously easy to kiss him right now, if she wanted. And the way his eyes are dilated and his lips slightly parted, somehow she knows he would kiss her back. She blinks a few times to try to clear out the lustful fog, ashamed of the fact that despite the acrimonious way they ended, despite the fact that she’s now dating Stefan, she wants to kiss him.
She steps back more fully and says, “Well, drive safe.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
She watches him leave, and feels an odd sense of emptiness. Worse still, the sound of the door shutting triggers that deep-set déjà vu that she’d endured for so long; a closing door, after all, always followed a goodbye. A goodbye and not knowing how long it would be until she would see him again, or even if she would see him again. That’s not the case now, he’s not leaving for good, but it still makes her chest constrict.
A few minutes later, the door reopens, and her heart, not her head, leaps. Perhaps he’d forgotten something, or perhaps he’d returned for something else entirely that they would both surely regret. But that guilty, hopeful sensation falters when she sees that it’s Stefan who enters, evidently done fending off Bonnie’s gloating.
“Are you all right?” Stefan asks with a frown.
Caroline fixes her expression, waving him off. “You know me, I just don’t like losing.”
It’s an accurate enough statement, so Stefan accepts it. He helps her collect their empty beer bottles and puts the popcorn bowl in the kitchen. It was an aberration, she tells herself. It’s natural to still feel an attachment to your ex for a while, right? It means absolutely nothing.
She just wishes it felt like nothing.
Matt doesn’t have to repeat himself when he calls to tell her Tyler’s dead by Damon’s hand. She can hear just fine, thanks very much, and the information registers. It’s not the first time they’ve lost a friend and probably won’t be the last, and Tyler and Damon had always hated each other anyway, so really it was just a matter of time. She hadn’t even talked to Tyler in months.
“After everything we went through, I guess I just always assumed that he would be there,” she tells Stefan. It’s truer than she can express; even when he was gone, he was constant. He was white noise, always there even when he wasn’t, even if other things drew more attention.
She’s not sure whether Stefan simply doesn’t hear her or ignores her, for he switches focus from Tyler to Damon. She ends up comforting him when it was her ex-boyfriend who was murdered, and she wonders if that’s normal.
The first funeral is interrupted and so later they have an informal gathering at the empty carnival grounds. Everyone says nice things, but it doesn’t quell the pain.
“I loved him,” she says. God, she loved him. But Stefan’s here and she doesn’t want anyone to read anything into it, so to be safe, she qualifies, “You know, we all did.”
Talk then switches once more to Damon. Someone makes a casual remark about how Tyler’s not even the first Lockwood Damon has personally killed. They talk about how to save Damon, how they can bring Damon back from the brink, how lost Damon must feel, as though something like this is remotely out of character for him, and Caroline excuses herself to go throw up in the bushes.
She doesn’t get any time to herself afterwards; Stefan convinces them all to enjoy the carnival’s offerings, and then there’s the chaos with the twins, chaos in general, and life moves on because it has to. She figures she’s buried all of it - we hadn’t talked in months - until one day she’s doing some spring cleaning and empties out her jewelry box, systematically untangling necklace chains and setting aside rings to be polished. From the pile, she slowly pulls out an old charm bracelet, the silver now tarnished but its origin unmistakeable.
She runs her fingers over the charms - a paw print, a football helmet, a heart, a cheerleader, her initials. They were broken up at the time, Klaus’s sirebond in the way, but it was her eighteenth birthday so he’d gifted her the bracelet anyway. She stares at it, and stares, and stares, and the grief slams into her all at once. She clenches the bracelet in her fist, cries until she can’t breathe and then cries some more.
He’s dead. He’s dead.
Klaus had been mistaken when he said Tyler was her first love. It was Matt who fit that bill. Matt was the sweet, innocent love of youth, where everything seems both too much and not enough.
But Tyler…
We’re immortal, he’d said. He was wrong about that. She stayed immortal but he didn’t.
We will find a way, he’d said. He was wrong about that, too. They never found a way.
What if we don’t? she’d said. She was the one who was right. She, the eternal optimist, had become the pessimist, and she was right.
It would be silly, wouldn’t it, to still call him the love of her life? She’d thought he was at the time, because obviously. She was in love and their relationship at that point was a patchwork of goodbyes, sex, and yearning, filled to the brim with thoughts of, If we can only get past this hurdle, we’ll be home free, so of course she’d thought it would last. People always think love will last, don’t they, in the moment?
But here by herself in this great big house, she can admit the truth. What she has with Stefan isn’t just different, as for so long she’d assured herself. She’s content and comfortable with him, but it’s…less. She doesn’t feel complete when he’s near nor empty when he’s gone. The noise and worries of the world don’t fade when she’s in his arms. She doesn’t feel alive.
Because the truth - the truth she will admit now with the silver bracelet in her hand and her chest overflowing with sorrow - is that she gave away her heart a long time ago, her whole heart, and she never got it back.
And it doesn’t even matter because Tyler’s fucking dead, and she’s going to live forever. There will be no closure to be had, no apologies, no amends, no nothing.
I’m not moving on from anything, he’d said. I love you.
She polishes the bracelet until it’s gleaming, fastens it around her wrist, and thinks, I never really moved on either.