Rootless; (Caroline/Klaus, M)
Title: Rootless
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Pairing: Caroline/Klaus, Caroline/Tyler
Rating: M
Word Count: ~2.280
Written for: the tvdfic_exchange prompt "Caroline/Klaus, "the only way to get rid of a temptation if to yield to it...." by lynzie914
Summary: "It unnerves and excites her, the way he kisses her; as if he knows exactly what she likes--needs--and is bent on ensuring that she's well aware of the fact..."
+
Like any uncharted territory
I must seem greatly intriguing
You speak of my love like
You have experienced love like mine before
But this is not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight...
Uninvited - Alanis Morisette
+
Liz Forbes dies with a wooden stake to her very human heart, and Caroline Forbes thinks she would laugh (but only a little) at the irony if she could do anything but cry.
She cries for her mother just as she did for her father, only harder--feels just as empty, only emptier. Caroline Forbes loved her father, this even the thickest haze of grief could not bring her to doubt, but her mother is (was) her constant someone (something) and she can't fathom not seeing her again, not seeing her forever (and forever is a very long time).
Bonnie cries for her, green eyes glistening with the weight of her sympathy, and Caroline doesn't miss that she isn't quite as moved by her friends love as she may have once been (she can still remember group hugs over hospital beds, white sheets and white walls and yellow sun streaming through open windows, blinding in their uninhibited brightness).
Elena looks as if she may never crack a smile again, but Caroline thinks she way have looked that way long before this most recent death had come to her knowledge. What's one more loss, and a distant one at that, the ugly words come unbidden.
Matt hugs her, firm and solid and constant.
Stefan gives her solitude, gives her his presence and his sympathy--but only should she need it.
"It gets easier to bear, Caroline," he tells her, and she's almost as afraid that there may be some truth to his words as she is at the prospect of always feeling like this.
And Tyler... Tyler gives her exactly what she needs--at least then. There are few words--him never being one for them in the first place, and her having less need of them just now than she can ever remember having in the second. Instead, he lets her lose herself in the heat of his flesh against her own, in the push and pull of their bodies--the violence and the pleasure that just borders the brink of pain.
"Tell me what do so," he whispers, voice muffled against the hair at the nape of her neck. "Tell me, Caroline."
Nothing. There's nothing you can do.
+
It's the most peculiar thing really, that the one other person whose grief may possibly comprise even a modicum of her own--who truly mourns her mother, Liz Forbes, for the woman she was and not merely for the resounding effect of her loss--stubbornly refuses to approach her.
Perhaps it's just as well, she thinks (albeit with a pang), there's little love lost between her and Damon Salvatore after all.
She knows there had been more than enough between him and her mother though.
+
Klaus.
She knows he's in the house before she crosses the threshold. The danger he brings at his heels hangs in the air, thick enough to hack through, to stop her breath short.
She knows where she'll find him, intent as he is on unnerving her no doubt, and the part of her that will still be daddy's little girl when she's well past a million is set on making him wait just a little longer than he needs to.
It's with this conviction that she occupies herself with any manner of mundane and truthfully unnecessary tasks before making her way up the stairs. She warms a cup of blood, though she's nowhere near hungry; indulges in a glass of brandy, though it does her as little good as water these days.
For reasons she cannot--and does not care to--fathom, he lets her be, the only indication of his presence a slight shuffling only ears as sensitive as her could make out.
There's a twinge of anger that's quickly accompanied by a slight panic at the thought of him going through her things, prying through her most intimate belongings with the cold precision his hands seem to administer for everything else.
When she's run out of things to do, when she can feel the anxiousness nag at the pit of her belly, she climbs up the stairs.
+
"Good evening, Caroline," he turns to greet her, and he looks much the same as he always has (though she's unsure why she thought he should look any different).
"What are you doing here?"
Her voice sounds flat, dead even to her own ears, and she thinks that may scare her far more than Klaus' unwelcome presence ever will.
"Offering my condolences," he replies, as if it's nearly criminal of her to suspect anything otherwise. "I am terribly sorry to have missed the funeral."
There's a soberness to his voice that would immediately absolve him of any accusations of mockery she would have liked to throw his way. It does little to endear her to him nonetheless.
"Don't," she bites out, glares at him in a way that leaves little to the imagination regarding her thoughts of his condolences (in a way that she's learned keeps the film of moisture over her eyes from spilling over her cheeks).
"Alright then, onto the present," he concedes. "I'll be leaving again, soon enough."
"And?"
"And, perhaps you'd like to join me this time, all things considered?"
She laughs then, and it jars her to think that this may be the first time she's done that since, well, before. It's a bitter sound though, as flat as her voice and completely devoid of anything resembling mirth. Good, it's far too soon for that anyhow.
"I lost a parent, not my mind," she responds coldly, watches his eyes flicker and his face twitch with a detachment that scarcely acknowledges the warning in it.
"Very well then," he says after a considerable pause. "I imagine we'll be seeing one another again regardless. Until then."
He inclines his head in courteous farewell before he disappears all together (it unnerves her that she didn't see him actually move so much as an inch before he's gone).
The unsaid soon enough hangs in his wake.
+
She leaves a little over a month later, though she's certain it comes as a surprise to no one at that point.
It's strange, she thinks, that one thing could break her a way a string of others (rape, her father's death, her own) could not. Fitting certainly, particularly given the gravity of sad thing, but strange nonetheless.
Be that as it may, Caroline realized soon enough that her mother's death was indeed that single thing that would render her homeless in the most cardinal sense of the word.
She ends up in New York, though it could just as easily have been anywhere else really. But, she thinks it may be just right, for now--close enough so that any of her friends (Tyler) could find her if they so chose, and different enough to expel the memories that hid behind every corner of the small town she once called home.
She promptly enrols at NYU after her first week of idleness. The fact that she still happens to be Caroline Forbes has not changed, after all (as much as she sometimes thinks it has, or should).
Save a few marked differences, the life of a college student does not vary considerably from the life of a high school student with the grappling for sorority memberships and the desire to fill one's list of extracurricular from one end of the wall to the other, all while maintaining a distinguished grade point average, naturally. It's a niche in which she seamlessly fits.
The nights, however, are an entirely different story.
The nights are when she frequents the sort of dwellings that Caroline Forbes, Miss Mystic Falls, Cheer Captain, and high school event planning extraordinaire, had never been privy to. From fine dining where a single bill can easily rack up to a couple of hundreds, to bars where some of the world's most wealthy and powerful dwell, to clubs that reek of blood and sex and danger (it doesn't escape her that she's the dangerous one in that particular equation).
It's in one of these finer establishments that she finds him (or he finds her).
Her first instinct is to bolt, the put as much distance between herself and the naked fear everything Klaus represents stirs in her. Her second is to grudgingly admit that he looks as if he belongs here, with the light from the chandelier, filtered through beautiful translucent crystal, playing off the darker blonde of his hair. She wonders vainly if it has the same effect on her own meticulously curled locks.
She follows her first instinct when he raises his glass in a distant toast, a half smile on his lips coupled with a wicked gleam in his eyes.
But, she knows even before she hears the sound of his insistent footsteps that he would follow. Fine, better to get it over with then, she tells herself.
"What are you doing here?" She demands as soon as he's near enough.
He raises both brows in a fashion that suggests she should already know the answer to that particular question.
"Why, enjoying a quiet meal--"
"Don't," she cuts in. "Don't give me that. You know exactly what I mean."
"Very well then--though I could just as easily ask you the same."
"And I would just as easily tell you that it isn't any of your business."
"No matter," he smiles, not put out in the slightest (much to her annoyance). "I think I know you well enough to know the answer to that one."
"You don't know the first thing about me!"
Her voice is louder than it needs to be, panicked almost, and she could almost murder herself for it (were she not already--technically--dead).
"Don't I?" His eyes narrow slightly as he considers her.
"Come back inside," he says, quietly. "Let me offer you a drink."
"No."
And with that she turns and leaves. It doesn't escape her that he does knows her well enough not to follow (this time).
+
He also knows her well enough, it seems, to keep his distance in the weeks that follow, though she knows he's never far. She finds herself discreetly seeking out a glimpse of dark blonde far more than she'd like to admit (even to herself).
"New York isn't without its charms, but there are far superior places, love," he tells her on one of the occasions he chooses to make his presence known.
"And I suppose you'd know all about them?" She asks, though she knows the answer and her words do not necessarily suggest a challenge.
"Indeed I do, and so could you for that matter."
He adds the last bit with what she characterizes as a rather suggestive smirk.
"I suppose I could," she concedes with a noncommittal shrug.
He does not tell her that he could show her, but she knows that the offer stands between them nonetheless.
There's a poetic sort of liberation in it, she supposes--in chucking out the sorts of doubts the Caroline Forbes she'd been would have had for the unknown and undoubtedly dangerous implications of such an offer.
He hasn't changed, after all.
+
The first time he kisses her (the first time she lets him) is the day after she breaks up with Tyler, severs what is perhaps her last concrete tie with the life she once knew.
It was inevitable, she tells herself, has been since the day she packed her bags and ventured beyond the boundaries she's known all her life.
It unnerves and excites her, the way he kisses her; as if he knows exactly what she likes--needs--and is bent on ensuring that she's well aware of the fact.
She does not love him (scoffs at the very thought), does not even particularly like him, but if the coiling at the pit of her belly and the light throbbing between her legs are any indication, she certainly feels something for him.
"Paris, Rome, or Tokyo?" He pants against her lips when they pull apart.
+
They end up in Paris less than a week later and, were she still the Caroline Forbes of a mere two years past, she would have thought him madly in love her.
There are gifts at her bedside every morning--an amber ring, a diamond necklace, a green laced gown; an event planned for her every evening, soirees and theatres and the most extravagant dinners.
"Let me worship you," he whispers to her that very first night they share.
And he does; pays homepage to every inch of her body in a way no one ever has. He presses searing, open-mouthed kisses against her neck, the tips of her breasts, the smooth slope of her belly, and lower still...
There's still that dangerous edge to his adoring ministrations though, that looming threat in the way he lightly nips at the smooth flesh of her inner thighs--not quite hard enough to break the skin, but enough to let her know that all it would take is a bit of pressure.
She does not let herself forget it.
+
The day she feels as if she's grown to like him, as if there's an even distant possibility that she may (if she allows herself) grow to love him, she leaves. Some temptations are simply far more dangerous than others.
She does not consider her reasons for choosing Rome.
+
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Pairing: Caroline/Klaus, Caroline/Tyler
Rating: M
Word Count: ~2.280
Written for: the tvdfic_exchange prompt "Caroline/Klaus, "the only way to get rid of a temptation if to yield to it...." by lynzie914
Summary: "It unnerves and excites her, the way he kisses her; as if he knows exactly what she likes--needs--and is bent on ensuring that she's well aware of the fact..."
+
Like any uncharted territory
I must seem greatly intriguing
You speak of my love like
You have experienced love like mine before
But this is not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight...
Uninvited - Alanis Morisette
+
Liz Forbes dies with a wooden stake to her very human heart, and Caroline Forbes thinks she would laugh (but only a little) at the irony if she could do anything but cry.
She cries for her mother just as she did for her father, only harder--feels just as empty, only emptier. Caroline Forbes loved her father, this even the thickest haze of grief could not bring her to doubt, but her mother is (was) her constant someone (something) and she can't fathom not seeing her again, not seeing her forever (and forever is a very long time).
Bonnie cries for her, green eyes glistening with the weight of her sympathy, and Caroline doesn't miss that she isn't quite as moved by her friends love as she may have once been (she can still remember group hugs over hospital beds, white sheets and white walls and yellow sun streaming through open windows, blinding in their uninhibited brightness).
Elena looks as if she may never crack a smile again, but Caroline thinks she way have looked that way long before this most recent death had come to her knowledge. What's one more loss, and a distant one at that, the ugly words come unbidden.
Matt hugs her, firm and solid and constant.
Stefan gives her solitude, gives her his presence and his sympathy--but only should she need it.
"It gets easier to bear, Caroline," he tells her, and she's almost as afraid that there may be some truth to his words as she is at the prospect of always feeling like this.
And Tyler... Tyler gives her exactly what she needs--at least then. There are few words--him never being one for them in the first place, and her having less need of them just now than she can ever remember having in the second. Instead, he lets her lose herself in the heat of his flesh against her own, in the push and pull of their bodies--the violence and the pleasure that just borders the brink of pain.
"Tell me what do so," he whispers, voice muffled against the hair at the nape of her neck. "Tell me, Caroline."
Nothing. There's nothing you can do.
+
It's the most peculiar thing really, that the one other person whose grief may possibly comprise even a modicum of her own--who truly mourns her mother, Liz Forbes, for the woman she was and not merely for the resounding effect of her loss--stubbornly refuses to approach her.
Perhaps it's just as well, she thinks (albeit with a pang), there's little love lost between her and Damon Salvatore after all.
She knows there had been more than enough between him and her mother though.
+
Klaus.
She knows he's in the house before she crosses the threshold. The danger he brings at his heels hangs in the air, thick enough to hack through, to stop her breath short.
She knows where she'll find him, intent as he is on unnerving her no doubt, and the part of her that will still be daddy's little girl when she's well past a million is set on making him wait just a little longer than he needs to.
It's with this conviction that she occupies herself with any manner of mundane and truthfully unnecessary tasks before making her way up the stairs. She warms a cup of blood, though she's nowhere near hungry; indulges in a glass of brandy, though it does her as little good as water these days.
For reasons she cannot--and does not care to--fathom, he lets her be, the only indication of his presence a slight shuffling only ears as sensitive as her could make out.
There's a twinge of anger that's quickly accompanied by a slight panic at the thought of him going through her things, prying through her most intimate belongings with the cold precision his hands seem to administer for everything else.
When she's run out of things to do, when she can feel the anxiousness nag at the pit of her belly, she climbs up the stairs.
+
"Good evening, Caroline," he turns to greet her, and he looks much the same as he always has (though she's unsure why she thought he should look any different).
"What are you doing here?"
Her voice sounds flat, dead even to her own ears, and she thinks that may scare her far more than Klaus' unwelcome presence ever will.
"Offering my condolences," he replies, as if it's nearly criminal of her to suspect anything otherwise. "I am terribly sorry to have missed the funeral."
There's a soberness to his voice that would immediately absolve him of any accusations of mockery she would have liked to throw his way. It does little to endear her to him nonetheless.
"Don't," she bites out, glares at him in a way that leaves little to the imagination regarding her thoughts of his condolences (in a way that she's learned keeps the film of moisture over her eyes from spilling over her cheeks).
"Alright then, onto the present," he concedes. "I'll be leaving again, soon enough."
"And?"
"And, perhaps you'd like to join me this time, all things considered?"
She laughs then, and it jars her to think that this may be the first time she's done that since, well, before. It's a bitter sound though, as flat as her voice and completely devoid of anything resembling mirth. Good, it's far too soon for that anyhow.
"I lost a parent, not my mind," she responds coldly, watches his eyes flicker and his face twitch with a detachment that scarcely acknowledges the warning in it.
"Very well then," he says after a considerable pause. "I imagine we'll be seeing one another again regardless. Until then."
He inclines his head in courteous farewell before he disappears all together (it unnerves her that she didn't see him actually move so much as an inch before he's gone).
The unsaid soon enough hangs in his wake.
+
She leaves a little over a month later, though she's certain it comes as a surprise to no one at that point.
It's strange, she thinks, that one thing could break her a way a string of others (rape, her father's death, her own) could not. Fitting certainly, particularly given the gravity of sad thing, but strange nonetheless.
Be that as it may, Caroline realized soon enough that her mother's death was indeed that single thing that would render her homeless in the most cardinal sense of the word.
She ends up in New York, though it could just as easily have been anywhere else really. But, she thinks it may be just right, for now--close enough so that any of her friends (Tyler) could find her if they so chose, and different enough to expel the memories that hid behind every corner of the small town she once called home.
She promptly enrols at NYU after her first week of idleness. The fact that she still happens to be Caroline Forbes has not changed, after all (as much as she sometimes thinks it has, or should).
Save a few marked differences, the life of a college student does not vary considerably from the life of a high school student with the grappling for sorority memberships and the desire to fill one's list of extracurricular from one end of the wall to the other, all while maintaining a distinguished grade point average, naturally. It's a niche in which she seamlessly fits.
The nights, however, are an entirely different story.
The nights are when she frequents the sort of dwellings that Caroline Forbes, Miss Mystic Falls, Cheer Captain, and high school event planning extraordinaire, had never been privy to. From fine dining where a single bill can easily rack up to a couple of hundreds, to bars where some of the world's most wealthy and powerful dwell, to clubs that reek of blood and sex and danger (it doesn't escape her that she's the dangerous one in that particular equation).
It's in one of these finer establishments that she finds him (or he finds her).
Her first instinct is to bolt, the put as much distance between herself and the naked fear everything Klaus represents stirs in her. Her second is to grudgingly admit that he looks as if he belongs here, with the light from the chandelier, filtered through beautiful translucent crystal, playing off the darker blonde of his hair. She wonders vainly if it has the same effect on her own meticulously curled locks.
She follows her first instinct when he raises his glass in a distant toast, a half smile on his lips coupled with a wicked gleam in his eyes.
But, she knows even before she hears the sound of his insistent footsteps that he would follow. Fine, better to get it over with then, she tells herself.
"What are you doing here?" She demands as soon as he's near enough.
He raises both brows in a fashion that suggests she should already know the answer to that particular question.
"Why, enjoying a quiet meal--"
"Don't," she cuts in. "Don't give me that. You know exactly what I mean."
"Very well then--though I could just as easily ask you the same."
"And I would just as easily tell you that it isn't any of your business."
"No matter," he smiles, not put out in the slightest (much to her annoyance). "I think I know you well enough to know the answer to that one."
"You don't know the first thing about me!"
Her voice is louder than it needs to be, panicked almost, and she could almost murder herself for it (were she not already--technically--dead).
"Don't I?" His eyes narrow slightly as he considers her.
"Come back inside," he says, quietly. "Let me offer you a drink."
"No."
And with that she turns and leaves. It doesn't escape her that he does knows her well enough not to follow (this time).
+
He also knows her well enough, it seems, to keep his distance in the weeks that follow, though she knows he's never far. She finds herself discreetly seeking out a glimpse of dark blonde far more than she'd like to admit (even to herself).
"New York isn't without its charms, but there are far superior places, love," he tells her on one of the occasions he chooses to make his presence known.
"And I suppose you'd know all about them?" She asks, though she knows the answer and her words do not necessarily suggest a challenge.
"Indeed I do, and so could you for that matter."
He adds the last bit with what she characterizes as a rather suggestive smirk.
"I suppose I could," she concedes with a noncommittal shrug.
He does not tell her that he could show her, but she knows that the offer stands between them nonetheless.
There's a poetic sort of liberation in it, she supposes--in chucking out the sorts of doubts the Caroline Forbes she'd been would have had for the unknown and undoubtedly dangerous implications of such an offer.
He hasn't changed, after all.
+
The first time he kisses her (the first time she lets him) is the day after she breaks up with Tyler, severs what is perhaps her last concrete tie with the life she once knew.
It was inevitable, she tells herself, has been since the day she packed her bags and ventured beyond the boundaries she's known all her life.
It unnerves and excites her, the way he kisses her; as if he knows exactly what she likes--needs--and is bent on ensuring that she's well aware of the fact.
She does not love him (scoffs at the very thought), does not even particularly like him, but if the coiling at the pit of her belly and the light throbbing between her legs are any indication, she certainly feels something for him.
"Paris, Rome, or Tokyo?" He pants against her lips when they pull apart.
+
They end up in Paris less than a week later and, were she still the Caroline Forbes of a mere two years past, she would have thought him madly in love her.
There are gifts at her bedside every morning--an amber ring, a diamond necklace, a green laced gown; an event planned for her every evening, soirees and theatres and the most extravagant dinners.
"Let me worship you," he whispers to her that very first night they share.
And he does; pays homepage to every inch of her body in a way no one ever has. He presses searing, open-mouthed kisses against her neck, the tips of her breasts, the smooth slope of her belly, and lower still...
There's still that dangerous edge to his adoring ministrations though, that looming threat in the way he lightly nips at the smooth flesh of her inner thighs--not quite hard enough to break the skin, but enough to let her know that all it would take is a bit of pressure.
She does not let herself forget it.
+
The day she feels as if she's grown to like him, as if there's an even distant possibility that she may (if she allows herself) grow to love him, she leaves. Some temptations are simply far more dangerous than others.
She does not consider her reasons for choosing Rome.
+