The Age Of Indecency (tvd fic, Caroline/Klaus, Caroline-centric) Sequel to Sacred Geometry
THE AGE OF INDECENCY
Summary: Caroline both blossoms and withers in the bosom of the Original family… this is her story, her own coming of age.
AN: This is pretty much based on Sacred Geometry’s epilogue, so this universe most likely won’t make sense to you unless you read that at least. ‘Surviving Picasso’ , the movie is a major source of inspiration.
Pairings: Caroline /Klaus
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The thing about her life with Klaus, Caroline will come to realize a century or two afterwards, is that it made her strong. Strong enough to leave him behind after over two decades of ups-and-downs, head-blowing sex, over-the-top dramatics, amazing and unexpected moments of intimacy, terrible storms of hurt and paranoia and violence, sudden breakups and sudden making-ups .
I never knew where my head was at, -she will tell to Elena someday, - my world turned on its head in a blink. I hated it. I loved it. I couldn't live without it. I felt electrified. When it was good it was everything, and when it was bad it was nothing, *I*was nothing. He adored me and put me on the top of the world, and I cherished it and him in turn. He was the first, the one man who ever made me to feel perfect. The first to ever choose me above everyone else. But there was always this moment, you see, where his nature would just take over. He needed control, no matter how much he praised my light, my youth, my passion for life. No matter how much I already fit within his life, there was always , always a point where he would try to choose for me. Who I was, what I was supposed to do with my time, how much I needed to know about his life or his plans for the future. It was not a place for partnership, his head … the more I knew him, the more I was certain of that but still… I always came back.
When she leaves Mystic Falls with him, all she feels is relief.
There's nothing for her there - she can't look at Stefan and know he killed her mother, but she can't be the one who kills him, not knowing his Ripper stage was orchestrated by others, not knowing how much he means to Elena. There's still a tiny corner of her heart, vampire or not, that wants to make her mother proud, to remember the human things that mattered like the friendships she cherished for years and … she is not ready for giving up that last piece of humanity yet. She kills Stefan, she helps Klaus further, and she has good as killed Bonnie and Elena too. What would be the world then, without the sisters of her heart? A place that is even more alien to her than it has been since Klaus turned her. She can't let them go.
But she can't forgive them either.
They chose Stefan and Damon. They chose each other.
Above her.
This is not a hurt she knows how to defend herself against.
New Orleans, the true seat of power of the Original family, is all glitter and gold at first.
Caroline is in the spotlight for perhaps the first time in her life - she is the belle of the ball, the new, prized arrival into the family, praised ceaselessly for an impulse control newborns never sported before.
She feels young, beautiful, and indestructible.
She always loved beautiful things… it was her weakness so often, the wish to be more than she was, to look into the mirror and see someone flawless just to try so very hard at everything and beaten to the punch, every single time by Elena, who got it all without ever striving or wanting or needing.
There's nothing of that haunting her in House Mikaelson.
Klaus has many … creatures, supernatural oddities he collected and shaped within his immortal court. Females for the most, all remaining somewhat claimed through being in his employ and it's surprising just how many of them used to be his lovers and how many of them he keeps in his hold through lingering feelings for his narcissistic self.
It is no problem tough, because Klaus makes it very plain to everyone's eyes that he is all hers now, and nobody can hope to compete in his eyes. Her light, he says with a smirk, is all he sees.
Caroline is no fool - she knows his displays of public affection are as much for his benefit as they are for hers. He enjoys the jealousy he stirs , the unsatisfied need, the pain.
Because, deep down, Klaus knows he is ugly, a monster twisted by jealousy and envy and greed, and he can't stand to be thought of as beautiful, so he will punish any who do choose him and prize him as such. He will lie and cheat to have them ruined, simply because they love him whereas he loathes himself (loathes, not hates - he accepts himself for himself and knows he is never going to change… he is what he is and to change himself would be to not be).
She saw bits of it in Mystic Falls, when she flipped the switch off in her grief over her mother, as so many things look clearer without your emotions getting in the way, but she was too caught in her pursuits of vengeance to really bother and make a sense of the whole picture.
She understands him clearly now and she plays the game all the same because, you know what, those moments where he breaks hearts and presents them to her feet with a smile fill a dark, gaping abyss of need for her too.
To be on a pedestal finally, to be chosen again and again for everyone's to see, to be put first, to be ceaselessly envied… is a drug she can't get enough of.
It lights a fire in her she never suspected existing.
Caroline Forbes learns then, desire and erotism are hardly the same thing. Desire is a flush of heat, the rush of seeing something you like and going after it. That is something she has been familiar with for as long as she started noticing the opposite sex, and being noticed in turn. This is something entirely new.
She does not like Klaus because he is handsome, powerful, rich or even the boss of vampire mafia clan, or because he made her and his blood flows in her veins.
No, most of time she is certain that she does not like him at all, the flaws in his character twisting in her mind any desirable trait in something less than acceptable.
To like him for real would be to make herself into someone she would loathe. Her sire has, in the end, still played an hand in determining her mother's death. For even only that tiny significant factor, she might never allow herself to love him.
But…
Her body and his body, entwining, make art, and it's not even truly about the physical.
His need to dominate and his masochism, her need for control and perfectionism marry each other without a flaw to bleed into a multifaceted pleasure.
She likes to be spanked raw the days she feels far too distant from that perfect vision of herself that lives on in her mind - his hands and his vicious tongue bring her just enough on the edge between humiliation and release to erase any shame she ever felt over her perceived faults.
He likes to be whipped bloody the days he feels more of the bastard, unwanted son of a too numerous family than not a king.
It's, oh so beautiful the way their jagged edges blend to form one perfect, healthy whole - her issues and his issues merging in and overlapping to fan a fire that only grows and grows until it devours them both.
When she rides him, she feels like a queen, and when she sheds her dominatrix mantle to be more of a wicked daddy's girl in need of discipline … well, her inner sex kitten would never stop purring.
That's eros, she decides - that individual, heady combination of complex desires that pile to add up between a man and a woman.
Bedroom secrets that leave even secretive, controlled Klaus Mikaelson completely bare and exposed in her arms.
Liking what she sees has nothing to do with anything in here…there's just knowing and feeling and the unavoidable, visceral pull that draws them together and apart in turns.
For about three years it goes like this: Caroline is in college, and she spends Klaus' money without remorse to live well, inside his house, among his family, with the unspoken promise that she will join the 'family business' as soon she is finished.
She lets herself to be spoiled without limits, and she certainly coddles Klaus well in turn.
She would call it a grand love-story if not for the fact often she doesn't feel like somebody's girlfriend at all. She never understands how she manages to live among the Originals without never qquite becoming party of them, but it might have something to do with Klaus not liking to share anyone he cares about… he is not interested in sharing her, not even with his siblings … and he certainly is not interested to share Rebekah and Elijah with her.
Caroline finds it almost endearing, in the beginning.
Rebekah she finds a spoiled and insufferable ice bitch, but there's no denying her frost melts to sugar and sunlight when she is with her older brothers. Despite that, she seems to enjoy running from her family and its business every a few months with a new, shiny boy-toy, a fact Klaus teases her mercilessly about.
Elijah instead, Caroline learns to know at a safe distance as his brother's right-hand and keeper.
The person Klaus probably loves the most in the world, if he could bring his head out of his ass long enough to see it.
She is in time, almost envious of the way, those three love each other without realizing it … it reminds her of …three girls in a small town they wanted to leave together, once upon a time.
And so it's Kol, the witch collector who brews drama anywhere he goes and constantly seeks to plant trouble among his other family members, she grows closer to.
She knows the look in his eyes after all, that longing and that anger of wanting to belong among people that already picked an allegiance to each other and being excluded instead.
Funny thing, how your past never leaves you, even after you run away from it .
When she finishes college, Klaus does his worst to keep things the way they are.
We are happy like this, why should we be risking it?
I want to be something too, and not just your mistress.
You are my *princess* if anything. I thought you liked it.
I did. I do. But it's time to let it go.
Klaus pouts, but in the end he gives her a charity project. A refuge for homeless children. Caroline is quite happy until she catches Marcel, one of Klaus' henchmen, poking around. And she realizes the place is truly a bait to recruit new candidates to turning or employing as drug mules.
Even if she knows exactly who she is dating and the type of business he runs, she had bonded with those kids. They trusted her to not sell them out and she finds, at last, she does not want to let them down.
So she stands between them and the vampires of the Klaus' clan. There's one epic row, but Klaus let her have her way.
She makes her place a safe place, dedicates the center to her mother's memory.
It feels good, but more than that, it feels right, more than anything did in long time.
She thinks leaving the Mikaelsons, briefly. Wonders if it would feel right too. They are not family but …
She stays.
It should surprise nobody that Klaus has a therapist, considering his raging paranoia and predisposition to both suffer and create stress anywhere he goes, but indeed Caroline finds the idea of her boyfriend welcoming such treatment very puzzling.
So of course, she investigates the matter personally.
Camille O'Connell is the first hint things in New Orleans are not going to stay perfect long.
She has a soft, unremarkable presence and Caroline is at first glance reminded of Elena, all grace and compassion, or of the woman she imagines Elena might have become.
She lets the thought go, as she usually does when faced with a reminder of anyone in Mystic Falls.
She regrets the day she sees doctor and patient speaking softly to each other, on a balcony, at a party, his hand over her hand, and overhears…
He is reading a poem to her. He wrote it as a gift, he says.
"She does something to him she can't understand. She mends him, makes him whole. Without his needing to control her, love her in the flesh. He just needs to know she exists, to prove to him that goodness is real, to be something on a pedestal for him to worship. He needs not to touch her to have her, to feel she is his. She matters to him exactly because she remains distant, too whole for him to ruin, too beautiful to let him have her."
So transparent, this gift.
Caroline leaves the party without a glance back, knowing all too well Rebekah's eyes are on her. Her boyfriend will know she listened in soon enough.
Not like he even tried to not have that conversation in a room full of vampires.
When she returns to Mikaelson House, after a night spent in an expensive hotel crying her eyes out and bleeding a waiter dry, she is set well past anger and toward the determination to fill her suitcases and leave.
"You humiliated me."
It is all she all admits in his blank face.
"A man can love two women at the same time."
She thinks of the past again, Elena between Damon and Stefan, herself between Tyler and Matt. Klaus between her and all others.
And she laughs. It's a bitter sound even to her ears.
"No, a man can want two women, maybe even three or four at the same time. Love is something else."
He snickers. "What would you know about it? You barely even started living. I had centuries …"
"Of not loving anyone, not even yourself." She snickers back "But don't worry, I don't love you. How might I? I know the reality of you. It would cure anyone of any romantic delusions."
He kisses her for that, a bruising, vicious bite of a kiss that leaves her mouth aching even as she returns aggression with aggression. They have the most violent sort of sex right there, against the wall, halfdraining each other in the process, leaving scratches and bruises on each other' back. Then, she moves out without an hitch.
The weeks later, she buries herself in work. Sometimes, before going to sleep, she is so achingly aware of how empty her bed is she weeps the anguish out, unable of believing how used she grew to be to everything. The house, the family that never became hers, him.
The feeling of absence, of emptiness almost leaves her numb.
Two months after, Camille dies a bloody death, courtesy of some act of reprisal by Aurora, one of the elders of Klaus' court and possibly the most unhinged one.
Of course, the way Klaus dispatches her in turn causes some kind of war Caroline decides to keep herself out of. But her sire comes to her, one night, in the hotel room she never left because she never found an apartment she liked enough, and his eyes are dark and lost and full of tears he won't shed.
She keeps him to her chest like a child as all he sobs is 'she believed in me, she did'. It should be weird, she realizes.
What a place has she, comforting him over the loss of a woman that he held in his mind as a dream at a time *she* was the reality he lived?
She should turn him away. But she thinks of Bonnie, the way Bonnie used to tell her she didn't need to compare herself to Elena all the time, of how it felt to have a person who believed you could be special and unique on your own when you did not see it in yourself, and she thinks she understands. Perhaps.
So she allows him to stay, guides him to her bed, gathers him against her body for all the night as he grieves.
In the morning, when he kisses her eyes and mutters he is sorry about breaking her precious, beautiful heart, she smiles and kisses him lightly, softly.
I never gave you my heart. I could never quite trust you with it.
Caroline thinks, and even she can't tell whether it is a lie.
Maybe she doesn't know what it is love, after all.
They return to house Mikaelson together.
It's not home so it doesn't feel like homecoming but … it is the closest thing she has for now. She will hold on it.
She lasts two weeks of Klaus grieving another woman in her presence, before she decides a break is in order. She takes a stroll in Ireland with Kol, getting on a plane without a word of warning to none, nerves frayed.
Klaus does eventually call them back.
She and Kol last a month of wandering before surrendering the royal summons.
Years pass.
There's a surprise crisis when Ester Mikaelson gets herself resurrected.
Then another one when a long-time lost sister comes to liberate entombed Finn, who will later proceed to try eliminating his siblings again.
Kol dies. Finn and Freya manage to leave the town unpunished, somehow, because the witches are on a riot and chaos is erupting anywhere in New Orleans.
Caroline's heart breaks all over again.
He was almost a brother, almost a best friend.
She flips the switch off for a span of four years. None of her personal relationships benefits from it, but she is past caring.
What is love anyway? She doesn't think she remembers anymore. What she knows is violence, lust, need.
The way her wounds and Klaus' wounds used to fit, the way they sometime still do.
He still tries to control her, she still fights him, and the friction there… it burns, it feeds, it pleases. Their games of master and servant are a sweet habit, but there's a coldness inside them both carnal appetites can't quite shake away.
When Bonnie dies, Caroline feels it.
In a dream, she sees the other girl as she used to be, and herself as she too, used to be. They were so full of dreams, Caroline wants it all back … the sisters she lost, the innocence she let go of …
But, as the old adage says, once you leave home you can never come back.
She wakes up crying, a feeling of lips kissing her forehead in goodbye. The gaping hole in her chest piercing that veil of numbness as the switch flips back on.
"What is wrong?"
Klaus asks, beside her, voice still rough from sleep.
"Bonnie is gone. Gone."
Right at that moment Caroline does not know how she is so certain, so aware … but the world is a little emptier, and the loss she feels is a living pain in her bones.
It's been decades, and Bonnie is someone she didn't see since her girlhood and yet… she can just tell Bonnie is not in this world anymore. Feel it. It was always a loss in the background of her senses, the absence of her and Elena, but Caroline never tried to contact them. Never thought she could forgive them until this very moment. All the same, Caroline always felt them close, always kept the memory of them tucked somewhere inside.
The hollowness of this awakening is a completely new sensation.
My sisters. I let them go. I let Bonnie to grow into an old woman without me.
It hits her, that they were significant to her, those two girls, and she didn't bother to try repairing their relationship even if she knew deep down, they loved her back as much she loved them.
It looks suddenly so silly, because she has not found friends like those since them and she tried.
She tells herself the dream was a common night terror, just an alarm bell her bell set off to warn her that she misses her girlfriends, that it is time to make amends, enough time has passed and… yes, she will look up Bonnie and Elena tomorrow.
But, when she does … she doesn't like what she finds.
It's Elena who answers her phonecall, who spills every detail about Bonnie and Damon, the awesome family they built together, their daughter's accident, Bonnie's heroic sacrifice to bring the latter back.
They both cry through that conversation because, Caroline thinks it is so like Bonnie to go in such a way, to even return to her, for goodbye, almost as if she had meant to let her Caro know they were still friends where it mattered. That no matter the many years apart, she was still important enough to warrant a goodbye.
It hurts and Caroline thinks this time it won't fade in the background, because she missed so much and she could have been there, to see Bonnie's children coming into the world and growing up, to be another bridesmaid to Stefan and Elena's wedding, and for so many other special days.
Instead, she spent those years with people who left her with one foot in their lives and one foot outside, and that did not matter as much, in comparison.
Hell, she never even noticed they didn't matter the way they were supposed to until now.
But, the instant she remembered she knew what love was… it was all so clear suddenly, as if she had looked to the world through a fogged window for years and then realized she needed how to wipe out the glass properly to look outside.
The way her mind kept wandering back, to her mother, to Elena and Bonnie, to her father. A few others she told herself were just people that had no place in her life, the way those people felt present even when they weren't. The way she felt alone now even when she was not, in this house where she almost but not quite belonged.
Love, Caroline remembers, is feeling as if you are part of each other even when you don't want to be. And you are not trying to be.
Her mother - how hard they used to fight when she was alive, and yet how often Caroline has thought of what Elizabeth Forbes would have done in her place, when she was in doubt over anything, last twenty years? How often she found herself thinking of her mother face, her gestures, her catchphrases like she never died? How often she remembered Elena and Bonnie, missed them, told herself it was the innocence of her teenager years she missed and not the actual girls?
And that bittersweet familiarity she had felt , as Elena described Bonnie's last years, like Bonnie had changed but not changed at all at the same time.
A strange mystery, love, to bring back some part of herself Caroline had lost with a dream and a phonecall .
Because, while she and Elena were talking, hours after so many years apart, crying together and laughing together, Caroline had remembered something else.
Who she was, who she had never stopped being after all.
A bossy, perfectionist girl with a longing for beauty and friendship that just wanted to be happy, to live like it was never ending party to share with the people she loved and not to take anything too seriously while being casually the best at everything.
Bizarre, that she ever could have forgotten.
Klaus observes her packing with a pensive expression that seems to aim to absorb her newfound energy in himself.
"Where will you go? After the funeral?"
"I have not decided yet."
"We do have estates, near Salem."
"I think it would be good for me to be out of the family business for a time. I'll pick an hotel."
Klaus has the gall to look annoyed at her.
"We are not the people we were when we were children, Caroline, don't let grief and … people blind you to that. We are the people we grow into. That's what is real."
"A strange opinion for someone who only ever allowed himself to be close to his favorite brother and sister. "
"It is different."
"Yes - she admits, choosing to focus on straightening the folds of the blue dress she is tucking in - but it doesn't change the fact you are never going to let me in the same way. If you had wanted to… we had twenty years. You just didn't need me in that capacity, not when you had built your life around sharing it with them. "
"Out of everyone, you are jealous of Elijah and Rebekah? What about Katherine, or-"
"I never wanted to be a possession, but you wouldn't let me be anything else. I need a partner, okay? Someone who wants to make plans with me, not over me …I want build a life with someone and know we are going somewhere together, to feel that I am an essential part of something bigger, not… this century's passing fancy put on display. There's a reason nobody ever took our relationship seriously. You never treated me like I was … as important as family. "
He surprises her by laughing openly.
"All this, to say you want a ring around your finger? Honestly?"
"I want to matter !- Caroline stresses, suddenly exasperated- and if I can't, if you are not ready or willing to make a real place for me in your life, then you need to let me go."
"You are already leaving!" Klaus lashes back, fury in his eyes, if not on his features. "you have been leaving a bit more every day last decade!"
"And you have never been there at all!"
And if her voice is tight as she admits that, at last, well… maybe she came closer to love him than she would like.
"Let's own up to it, I could … stay. Fall in love with you. Take care of you. But you would still go looking for the next bimbo to shape into your precious collection because god forbid you might actually be happy instead of being in control. It would mess up drastically with the epic story of self-loathing you got going on with yourself."
He looks at her like he might murder her, right there, right now.
"You-"
"I want to be happy, Klaus. And you are not ready to be happy. You are too busy to be at war with the world to do anything but destroy anything you touch. I can't change that, but I can go on. Allow me to."
"Or what?"
It's an empty threat tough, and he looks away. "So go. Go away and onwards to any glorious, rosy future you imagine at the horizon..Don't come back. Not even when you remember the world is not a fairy tale."
"My best friend just died, I know it is not-"
"Your teenager best f-"
"Don't presume to tell me how I feel about anything or anyone. You always -"
He leaves after that, and Caroline is too exhausted to even cry or scream after him .
She is done packing now.
It's telling that Elijah and Rebekah don't come to bid her goodbye - they never took to her particularly well, and they always looked at her like they couldn't quite understand the point of her lingering presence in their home or her significance in Klaus' life. She can't blame them, considering she often felt similarly.
It's still strange tough, such a large part of her life ending without a sound and yet… she feels free, if heavy with grief for Bonnie and the time they never got to spend together.
Two years after, she is a successful event planner in Paris, the same city Stefan and Elena are living too, preparing for a baby shower because her friends are adopting a little girl and she is going to be an aunt. Finally.
She is happy, proud of her well-organized, peaceful life. Proud of this woman she took her sweet time in becoming.
She doesn't look back to the past anymore.
She is dating a rusalka, nothing too serious, but that's how she likes it now - having a bit of time for family and a bit for friends and a bit for romance and whole a lot for herself.
The sort of lovestory that never ends, the love affair you have with yourself.
Sure, someday it might be nice to have what Stefan and Elena share, but she is in no rush. Life is good, so exciting the way it is.
And if there was a book in her mail today, from a sender unknown, and the dedication on last page was in a vaguely familiar handwriting … she didn't quite make a sense of the gift significance anyway. She didn't waste any time wondering, because 'Love in the Time of Cholera' was a boring novel the first time she read it and she has no intention of reading again the pompous, messy adventure of two people who only manage to get it right and understand they were made for each other in their old age.
' I had a feeling, as I read it, that it is possible that the first real love can be last one too, but that it needs to blossom late to last forever.
K. '
It was a beautiful dedication, and maybe she put away the book in some drawer so she wouldn't be tempted to open it again, to run her fingertips over the letters, to believe in some thought or feeling that had not yet taken its proper form.
She has forever stretching in front of her and she is not waiting for anything or anyone.
She is living for now, not for some dream of tomorrow.
Yet, she can't deny he has always had a way with words.