fic: faithless you and selfish me
title: faithless you and selfish me
fandom: tvd
characters/parings: caroline/jeremy (it became a bit more caroline-centric than intended, but still plenty of these two, also mentions of past jeremy/bonnie, and caroline/bonnie, caroline/elana, caroline/alaric, caroline/stefan dynamics/friendships throughout, most of the ensemble mentioned)
rating: pg-13 (a couple of sexual scenes, but nothing too graphic, lots of drinking and some mild self-destructive behavior, and depression among the different characters.)
word count: 8887 words (because I ramble, god do I ramble)
summary: “Death is death, Jeremy.” Caroline says turning to stare at him in the eye, “And when people you love die, you feel it whether your veins are full of your blood or someone else’s. I would have thought you of all people would have understood that. All the people you have left, they’ve all died too.” (Post S5 and spoilers for bits and pieces of well spoilers I've heard for S6, though twisted and used in my own way, obviously because canon will probably never give us Caroline/Jeremy.)
a/n: written for the anything by song lyrics fic-a-thon, for the prompt: better of dead. It might of veered from what was originally wanted, but this was what came out. (also, just as a warning, this is entirely from Caroline’s perspective, so some things she may say about Damon might not be appreciated by fans, she doesn’t say a lot, but just in case, I’m warning you now. it’s nothing against the character, just how I see the character and her views.)
Caroline spends the first half of the summer trying to hold everyone else together.
But it’s hard when no one seems to want her help, when they burst out in tears at Bonnie’s name (and Caroline’s tears have to be held inside) and people disappear into Mystic Falls where she can’t reach them or just altogether.
But she pushes on.
Because she’s Caroline Forbes and she’s never met a project that she can’t make work.
Caroline Forbes succeeds.
Once upon a time Caroline was Miss Mystic Falls, valedictorian, student body president, she had planned almost every town event.
(Once Caroline Forbes was someone people remembered.)
--
She spends Tuesdays and Thursdays with Elena, scheduled lunches and movie dates, painting each other’s nails like they were twelve again, and Elena lying on Caroline’s couch and sobbing into her lap when she sees Bonnie’s picture on her mantle.
(Caroline’s mantle holds a collection of pictures of dead people. Some of them have come back to them, some of them haven’t; but they’re dead just the same.
They have all watched it happen.)
Elena sobs and sobs; words that don’t make sense coming out in between.
“We were supposed to protect her.” Elena says one day.
“We didn’t know.” Caroline says softly, stroking the other girl’s hair.
“We should have.” Elena says, a fierce look in her eye, one that scares her friend.
--
Saturdays Caroline spends with Alaric, getting him ready for his classes, getting him used to interacting with humans without trying to, well, eat them. Teaching him all the things he needs to know to survive.
It’s not easy.
One day, she shows up late and he’s taken the time to work on his syllabus and is using a number two pencil to write it out.
She can see the pencil in his hand and the world shifts, her world shifts, and she goes tumbling down the rabbit hole only there doesn’t seem to be any end to it, just more and more darkness.
All Caroline can smell is vervain, all she can feel is Ric’s hands wrapped around her neck before the snap comes loudly after, all she can remember is screaming in pain, the feel of the cloth in her mouth, the pencils pounded and pounded into her hands, and Alaric smiling and whispering into her ears, dirty things, filthy things that no one knows-
She closes her eyes and forces it all to go away. Forces it to the back of her mind, forces it into the boxes neatly labeled ‘Dad’, ‘Brady’, ‘Klaus’ and ‘Damon’.
It was just easier that way.
“Hi.” Caroline smiles cheerfully, sitting across from him. “Did you order yet?”
“Just coffee.” Alaric says, already starting to put his stuff away.
The number two pencil he was using rolls across the table, until it’s in front of her, Caroline’s hand slamming down on it and breaking it in to pieces.
There’s a moment of a silence even as the patrons talk and talk around them, their voices growing louder and louder, until its only white noise.
“Have you ever considered using a pen?” She asks looking up at him, his eyes large, regretful, “These things break really easy.”
--
It’s not meant to be a ritual, a scheduled plan, written down in stone. And it isn’t, not really. Not technically. She doesn’t have it written in her planner or put into the calendar on her phone.
Fridays are for parties and dancing and drinking; for forgetting.
Somehow even if they include all of these things, she still ends up dialing the same number.
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“You know that’s a stupid message, right? I mean, people know how to leave messages. How much of an old man are you?”
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“It’s me, Caroline, again. For like the hundredth time, so just you know, call me back, already. Alright?”
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“You’re a dick, you know that?” She slurs, “I always thought no one could be worse than your brother, but congratulations. You won the prize.”
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“Please, Stefan, I’m not asking you to come back. I’m not-I just want to make sure you’re okay. You spent all of last summer stuck at the bottom of the falls and the one before that with Klaus of all people-your summers suck. So please, just call me or text me or something. Because I need to know that someone’s okay.”
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
Caroline doesn’t say anything.
Just lets it play again and again.
Just listens to his voice.
(She does this sometimes with Bonnie’s phone too, has it packed away in a trunk in her room.)
--
Sundays she goes back to the cemetery, the closest she can get to Mystic Falls without losing her breath, without her windpipe closing and tiny pieces of cloth getting lodged in her throat.
(She had tried before, desperate and drunk. Once was enough to learn her lesson to not to try again.)
But she remembers the last place she had seen Bonnie and she brings flowers every week, different kinds that remind her of her friend.
This week their lilacs because Bonnie had always looked so pretty in purple, had shined in it, the way it had brought out her eyes. And Caroline didn’t know if she had ever told her. Because Caroline had always been selfish, had always wanted to be the prettiest girl at the party, and was an all around bitch.
But she should have said it because Bonnie deserved to hear it.
Bonnie deserved more than she ever got.
More than anyone ever gave, Caroline most definitely included.
She kneels on the grass, removes the last of the old flowers that had wilted in the heat, and looks down at the picture someone had put there (Jeremy, she thinks, somewhere in her mind) and stares down at the girl with the green eyes and the beautiful smile that used to make everything seem okay.
“I brought you some new flowers today,” Caroline says, carefully arranging them around the picture frame until it became a circle.
It reminded Caroline of all those protection circles Bonnie had drawn over the years.
“Their lilacs; purple. I think you’d like them. Who knows maybe there even witchy, maybe they mean something like peace or protection. Or maybe you could mix something up with your Grams to take over the whole world. I always kind of thought you could do that if you just tried hard enough…”
“She can’t hear you, you know?”
Caroline turns and sees Jeremy standing there, a bottle of some kind of alcohol he really shouldn’t have in his hand. This town doesn’t need any more alcoholics. They don’t need any more of them.
“I like to think she can.” Caroline says, glancing back at the picture before standing up and looking him over.
He looks like shit, but that’s not polite to say or think, so she just decides he just looks messed up, after too much loss at such a young age.
“And even if she can’t hear me, Bonnie would appreciate the gesture. She’d do the same thing for me.”
“She can’t appreciate the gesture, Car-o-line,” Jeremy says, “In case you forgot, she’s kind of dead.”
“It’s not something you really forget.” Caroline snaps at him and instantly regrets it. Bonnie was her best friend, but Bonnie was his…
“Look, come on, this is no place to be drinking.” She says stepping forward, “Whether she can see you or not, Bonnie wouldn’t want this.”
“Bonnie’s dead, she doesn’t want anything.”
“I’m dead and I-I want everything to be okay again. I want a lot of things.” Caroline says, she’s made her way closer, close enough to grab the bottle from his hand, even as he protests. “Come on, show some respect.
--
She wrangles Jeremy into her car and drives him back to her apartment because last time she checked he was still living with Tyler and she can’t take him there.
Once they’re in the car, he goes quiet, his cheek rests against the window, and the drive is so silent it makes Caroline want to scream just to get some sort of a reaction from him. Even if it’s just a groan from a hangover setting in.
“I thought it was Elena leaving the flowers.” Jeremy says quietly.
“No, she…I don’t think she’s ready to go back there yet.” Caroline says, “She sees the same picture of Bonnie every time she comes over to my place and I think it breaks her a little more each time.”
“I would have thought it would have been easier for her.” Jeremy says, and she can almost hear the sneer in his voice.
“What?”
“Being dead already.” Jeremy says as she pools into her parking lot, “I would have thought it would have made it all easier to deal with.”
“Death is death, Jeremy.” She says turning to stare at him in the eye, “And when people you love die, you feel it whether your veins are full of your blood or someone else’s. I would have thought you of all people would have understood that. All the people you have left, they’ve all died too.”
Caroline opens her door and slams it shut, waits at the front of her car for Jeremy to stumble his way out of it.
--
She dumps Jeremy into her bed, after they’ve made it up to her apartment.
Literally dumps him, because he’s losing consciousness fast, and really, that’s what she thinks he deserves when he gets drunk and goes to his dead girlfriend’s grave.
Caroline takes his shoes off and pushes him towards the middle and he doesn’t fight her, just watches her through mostly closed eyelids, and she sighs, because she thinks she just found someone else to look after and she’s running out of days of the week.
She leaves him alone and heads to the couch.
She has no plans to sleep, otherwise she would have forced Jeremy to sleep it off on the couch like the bad little boy he had been, but she had research and books that she had gotten from Alaric to look through.
It had been her plans for the night anyways.
It wasn’t like Caroline slept most nights anyways.
--
She’s still going through her research when Jeremy wakes up with a groan.
Caroline had left the curtains open and the sunlight was shining through the windows.
“I hate you.” Jeremy says, but it lacks punch, all tired and scratchy.
“I made coffee.” Caroline says pointing her mug of blood in the direction of the kitchen.
“I still hate you.” He mumbled, but after a few minutes he stumbled his way into the kitchen to get some and comes to sit next to her on the couch.
Caroline ignores him mostly, drinking her mug of blood (she’d already had her coffee) and flipping through her book, copying page numbers on a notebook she thought might help.
(That was, if they were able to wrangle any witch into this. They seemed to keep losing them and Caroline was sure they must had gained a reputation, that Mystic Falls had.)
“Why’d you bring me back here?” Jeremy asks quietly.
“Don’t you remember?” Caroline asks, flipping another page, “Dead people can’t go back into Mystic Falls anymore. All it does is kill them. Just as painfully as the first time.”
“You tried.” Jeremy whispers, and she doesn’t know if it’s because of his hangover or because of the revelation.
“I wanted to see my mom.” Caroline says, “I wanted to…go home. I thought maybe, something had changed, instead I just felt it all over again.”
“Your death?”
“The first one anyways.” She says flipping another page.
“I thought…”
“That once I was already dead, I couldn’t die again, not unless it was permanent.” Caroline says, “Not technically true. I’ve been shot in the head, had my neck snapped a few times, had an imaginary stake through my heart thanks to Silas; and the list goes on and on…”
“I guess I never really thought about it.”
“It happens.” She shrugs, “You get over it. You have to.”
“And Bonnie? Damon?”
“Let’s get one thing straight.” Caroline says, turning to look Jeremy straight in the eye, “You will never find me mourning for Damon Salvatore, just for the people that cared about him. The only thing that I care about, was that when he disappeared, he took my best friend with him. And no, I don’t get the luxury of crying every time I see Bonnie’s photo or drinking myself into a stupor, because not all of us do, not all of us are Gilberts, but I miss her every damn day and I would do anything it took to get her back if I thought we could.”
--
“I meant it when I said it,” Jeremy says after a long silence.
He’s finished his coffee and the rest of her blood has gone cold, room temperature probably, but still not pleasant.
“I thought it would be easier for you,” He continues, “It…looks easier for you, here with your books and your plans. You’re helping Elena and Alaric and you were at the cemetery and you weren’t even crying and I just thought-it has to be easier.”
“Being a vampire doesn’t make it easier, Jeremy.” Caroline tells him, “It makes it worse. You feel it more than any human can and I’m not just saying that, it’s just the truth.”
“But you can turn it off.” Jeremy says.
Caroline laughs and she thinks it’s the first time it’s been real in a long time. But still, it’s a bitter laugh, full of everything she had been holding in.
“Yeah, because that always works out well.” She rolls her eyes.
“Bonnie used to talk about the other side…how it wasn’t punishment, that it was a place where you could find peace.” Jeremy says, his eyes were glazed over but this time it’s not from the liquor. “I wonder if we’ll all still have a chance for that now. If she…”
“If anyone deserved peace, it was Bonnie.” Caroline says, her hand going over Jeremy’s, and he almost jumped at the contact.
(She wondered when the last time someone touched him was. She wondered how much time had spent with his sister and not just on the phone with her.)
“Whatever happened, I’m sure Bonnie found peace.”
--
Jeremy spends the rest of the day at her apartment.
He’s quiet most of the time, finds one of the books on her bookshelf (some teenage romance novel) and reads its, then flips through the channels and comments on stupid things he sees, even tries to make them dinner.
They end up ordering in.
The two don’t talk a lot, but his presence fills up the silence of her apartment and when he says he’s going to call Matt to pick him up, she almost asks him to stay. Almost begs him too.
(She doesn’t.)
--
Caroline still spends her Tuesdays and Thursdays with Elena, half pretending everything is normal and half grieving over everything that is not.
Wednesdays are still spent meeting up with her mother at a dinner outside of Mystic Falls, every night at six. It’s easier to schedule time these days, less deaths for her mother to clean (cover) up. Her mother asks questions and Caroline tells her things like how she’s decorating her apartment and what classes she’s thinking of taking when school starts again.
(It’s almost like she’s a real girl.)
Fridays are for forgetting, for dancing and drinking, and for dialing the same number again and again, for hearing the same words repeated over and over again and never getting a reply.
Saturdays belong to Alaric, and Caroline likes to think that she gets less skittish each time she sees him, but really she just gets better at acting. (Drama major, hello.) They do mundane things; going to highly populated areas, walking through hospitals, getting him used to the scent of blood, walking around campus even though the student body is small.
They go hunting in the forest and she teaches him to catch animals and she hates that he catches on so easily, that he breaks neck and tears his teeth in to fur without hesitation. (Sees him drive a pencil into her hand each time his teeth sink in, every time and flinches herself.)
But Caroline doesn’t say anything.
Caroline talks too much, talks all the time, but she never really says anything at all.
Sundays still belong to Bonnie.
Buying flowers, talking to a picture of a dead girl that Caroline refuses to let disappear completely. She whispers secrets in her ears, tells her things she hoped she already knows (knew), tells her things that Caroline has never told anyone else. Keeps talking and talking until her voice is scratchy; but no tears are shed.
Caroline thinks Bonnie would want it that way.
--
Jeremy takes over Mondays all on his own.
It’s not like she had a day off, one assigned just to herself. (The closest to that was Friday, Fridays she lets herself be selfish and shallow and pitying and all those things people called her anyways.) Instead Mondays were assigned to research and books and trying to figure out the mess that the Travelers had caused in Mystic Falls, trying to figure out what it meant, a way past the barrier.
(Caroline Forbes does not give up.)
But Jeremy shows up at her front door and he doesn’t need an invitation in, and holds up a bottle of some alcohol that he probably stole from the Salvatores, and for some reason she always lets him stay.
There’s a lot silence.
And sometimes there’s a lot of talking, like he has no one else to talk to, like he’s living in a house alone not with two roommates. Like he doesn’t have Elena or Alaric to look out for him.
Most of it is morbid; talk about death, about vampirism, about blood, about the lust for it, about how it all feels.
She always gives him straight answers, because she knows what it’s like to be kept in the dark and she won’t do it to him too.
“If you bit into my wrist right now, would you want to stop?” He asks, almost puppy like.
(A puppy with a death wish, pulling on a vampire’s pig tails.)
“Yes,” She tells him, “But I would anyways, I trained myself too. I learned to stop. Most vampires can. It’s just that they have to want too.”
Silence will hang over them after she answers his questions and the television is all that fills it, white noise in Caroline’s head as she studies books she doesn’t fully understand. Passages in languages she has to translate. Symbols she has to find new books to discover their meaning for.
(She sends Jeremy to the Bennett house for the Grimoures, looking for information on blood magic, on doppelgangers, on the Travelers, on barrier spells, on anything.
He’s hesitant, but does it anyways, ‘because she asked’, he said.)
“Do you hate Alaric?” He asks one day, out of the blue.
“No,” She answers automatically, her voice on autopilot, even and controlled.
“Are you lying?”
She stops trying to read the same line over and over, stops trying to make sense of a language she doesn’t understand. Turns to look at him instead.
“I don’t know.” Caroline shrugs, “Does it really matter?”
He stares at her for a long time after that.
--
“Do you think she always knew?” Elena asks, her head on Caroline’s lap again.
Caroline remembers when it was Elena holding her together for a night, for a day. When Elena was the strong one, pushing them through. And Caroline-Caroline was holding it together with water proof mascara and a wooden stake hidden underneath her bed.
“I don’t know,” Caroline says, as Elena adjusts, looking up at her, big brown eyes looking into corn blue ones. “I think…Bonnie was smart and she knew she was living on borrowed time. But I also think she thought she had more of it. The other side was never supposed to collapse. Tessa designed it as punishment for Silas.”
“Bonnie told Jeremy she knew before that…”
“I know,” Caroline pushes Elena’s bangs behind her ear and offers her a kind smile, “She wanted life to be normal, and she didn’t want it to hang over everybody’s head when there was no chance to save her. You of all people can understand that.”
She says it gently, but Elena’s eyes darken as she stares her down, almost accusingly, somewhere between too young for so much grief, a little child mad her favorite toy was taken away, and a woman too old, one that she knows nothing but bitterness in her life anymore.
“I just mean-she wanted us to be happy for as long as possible.” Caroline tries to fix it, “She spent her last days thinking about us. Trying to protect us, can we really be mad at her for that?”
(Caroline had been of course. It was one of the steps of moving on.
She had yelled at Bonnie’s picture, had broken the frame against the wall and the sobbed over broken glass.
Cut herself as she picked it up piece by piece.)
“Sometimes I do.” Elena says, “Sometimes I hate her so much and sometimes…”
“You just want to be with her and Damon instead.” Caroline finishes for her.
Elena might not remember, but they’ve had this conversation before.
--
There’s a bar not too far from Caroline’s new apartment.
She’s a regular there now, every Friday night, and occasionally when things get too hard, when days with Alaric bring back bad memories or Elena cries into her lap and Caroline’s tears pool in her own eyes, never to fall, Caroline comes briefly. Just long enough to numb the pain and get some sleep.
The bartender remembers her, calls her sweetheart, and always gets her the strongest drink they have, and she knocks back one after another and then one more just for good measure.
There’s a dance floor. Full of men and women and girls and boys too young to be there, but with fake IDs that say they’re old enough. Caroline slips between them all, dances alone, her hands above her head, and her eyes closed, and pretends.
Let’s the alcohol sink in, lets the music guide her, and just lets go.
There are no tears here.
There is no grief.
There is no anger or fear.
There is just Caroline Forbes, the girl who used to drink too much, the girl who used to be the life of the party, the girl who used to dance until she was too tired to go on.
(Caroline missed that girl. That beautifully human girl, who wanted everything and everyone, and never got a damn thing.
It’s not that she was all that different from who she was now. It’s just that her head wasn’t filled with everything hers was now, that she hadn’t seen everything she had. That she had felt a different kind of pain, one that didn’t stay the same way.
Yes, she missed that Caroline Forbes sometimes, the one who didn’t know what it felt like to die.)
She kept dancing and sometimes other dancers would approach her, would connect their bodies with hers, and she’d let them, because sometimes she got tired of spending all her time with other people but alone just the same. And their hands felt good on her hips and her head fit just right into their neck, and they moved at just the right pace.
She never turned around and looked to see who they were or what they looked like.
--
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“I hate you a little, you know that right?” Caroline asks out back on the curb, next to the dumpster. “You just left. No goodbyes, no…anything. Just you and your car gone and I hate you. I didn’t even know I could hate you. Turns out, I can.”
She takes a swing of the whiskey the very nice bartender had given her and sits it down.
“You left me all alone to clean it all up. You left and just expected us all to fix it on our own. Well, congratulations, Stefan. You’re an idiot. And no one is fine. And some of us…some of us aren’t even allowed to cry, because if they start, they won’t ever stop. And then who will stop Elena from ripping off her ring and joining your brother in a lifetime of agony that I hope he’s enjoying?
“If I’m not here, who will stop Professor Saltzman from torturing another one of his students?” she says, “You didn’t think of anyone but yourself before you left, you selfish dick. And yet-somehow, I keep calling this number like it will change something, anything. Like you’re actually listening to these messages and not just deleting them. Because I’m the same idiot you met your first day in school and now, now I’ll be one for eternity.”
She hangs up, there’s a distinct click and maybe it should be satisfying.
Maybe it should mean something.
Maybe one day one of these calls will sound like a goodbye and not a plea for him to come home, for him to save her again.
Instead it’s just a click and she’s just a blonde girl in an alley behind a bar and it doesn’t really mean anything at all.
--
She could walk home, be home before any car could take her, but she doesn’t want to walk home. Doesn’t want to go home to an empty apartment.
Instead she calls Jeremy.
“Are you sober?” She slurs out her first words. Not the best first impression.
“More than you definitely.” He says.
“I’m serious.” Caroline tells him and it would mean more if she actually sounded serious.
“I haven’t drank anything tonight.” Jeremy says, “Elena got to Matt and he’s gone all big brother and been monitoring me and Tyler.”
“So you can drive?”
“You need a ride?”
“There’s a bar close to my place, only the one, it’s easy to find. Can you come pick me up?”
“Can’t you just-”
“Jeremy, please, just come pick me up.” Caroline says, and she wants to curl up into a ball on the sidewalk until he comes to rescue her.
(From herself of course; she had been the one to drink the poison all on her own, she had been the one to tempt herself with what she knew would only hurt her, she had been the one to hurt herself. But it didn’t stop her from wanting to be rescued just the same.)
“I’m on my way.” He says, and it’s funny, because she can hear him grabbing his keys and heading out the door as he says it, like he was always going to come, the rest was just to fill the silence as he found his shoes.
“Thank you.” She says before she hangs up.
--
Jeremy finds her behind the bar, despite the fact that she never told him where she was.
She wonders briefly if he had searched everywhere else first, or if he just knew her well enough to know where to find her when she was desperate and calling him for a ride. If maybe he had been there before himself.
But she had drank most of the whiskey while she was waiting for him, curling into the brick wall, as her skirt rode up and scraped her pale skin against cement enough time that the blood was still showing, and all the thoughts quickly disappeared, as he leaned over her, his face full of concern.
“Caroline? Caroline, can you hear me?”
“My hero.” She whispers, but she doesn’t think he’ll ever understand.
“Come on,” Jeremy says, pushing down her skirt, and then lifting her in his arms (strong that one, vampire hunter, she should be afraid of him, but he smells like mint and lake water, and it’s hard to be scared of him at all. Not when he’s holding her so gently, like she might break and who knows, maybe this will be the night she will).
He sits her in his car carefully and drives her back to her apartment and puts her to bed, and pulls off her four inch heels and Caroline giggles to herself, burying her face in her pillow.
“What?” Jeremy asks, looking at her with those wide eyes she can never deny.
“I just remember this in reverse.” She smiles at him.
“I do too.” He says softly.
“Will you stay?” Caroline asks him.
His mouth opens but no sound comes out.
“Please.”
“Yeah, of course,” Jeremy says, “Your couch is comfortable.”
She wants to invite him to sleep on the other side of her bed. To feel the closeness of someone else, of someone else that wasn’t Elena sobbing into her lap, that wasn’t Alaric’s hand on her shoulder squeezing. That was just Jeremy, not asking for anything, just offering.
(She doesn’t. She never does.)
--
Caroline wakes up before him, he’s snoring softly on the couch. Her throw blanket over him and his boots and shirt by the door.
She smiles fondly at him, her hero of the night, the only one to come rescue her, the only one she could even think of asking anymore. And fixes the blanket a little tighter around him; her apartment is drafty for people who aren’t undead.
Caroline starts the coffee and texts Alaric saying she has to cancels lessons for the day, that something had come up and maybe Elena would be able to fill in for the day.
His response is short, a simple: “its fine.” And it’s all arranged.
She wonders if it would be this easy to get her Saturdays back.
Caroline does the creepy stalker vampire thing and drinks her coffee while she watches Jeremy sleep. It’s not fitful like she would have expected (like it was the last time he had slept there), but calm, his face buried into her pillows, into the couch, an almost peaceful look on his face.
She can’t help but wonder what he’s dreaming about.
--
Caroline’s in the middle of trying to translate ancient Babylonian without the help of a computer (she learnt that lesson the hard and annoying way) when Jeremy jolts awake, his eyes scanning the room, like he’s trying to figure out where he is.
She leaves her books and papers at her desk and whooshes over to him, leaning over his side and pushing his bangs out of his eyes as she tries to calm him down.
“It’s okay, you’re here,” Caroline says, “You’re at my apartment, you…you said you would stay when I got all pathetic last night.”
“No, no I’m fine.” He says, shaking his head, “I remember, I just-you weren’t in your bed.”
“I…”
“I thought you’d still be asleep and you weren’t there and I thought…”
“I’m fine.” Caroline promises, finally realizing.
She had woken up like that before, desperate to call everyone she loved and cared about just to know they were still there, that a flash of light hadn’t taken them away. Had even done it a few times, called Elena pretending to have hit the wrong button or called her mom asking if she had left something at the old house.
“Everything’s okay.” She says and it’s probably a lie (it is one), but it’s what they both need to hear.
“Do you want some coffee?” Caroline offers him, “And I can make pancakes. Good ones, if you’re hungry.”
“I remember,” Jeremy says, “You used to make them when you slept over. I never understood how you were so good in the kitchen and how Elena sucked at it so much.”
Caroline shrugged, “Just lots of practice.”
She got up and found Jeremy a mug and poured him a cup and when she turned around he was putting his shirt back on by the door and she did her best not to look, but his abs were appealing and so was his light skin, and her eyes lingered.
“Here.” She finally says, when his head poked through, placing the mug on the counter, “You drink it black right?”
“Yeah,” He smiles, accepting the mug, and she likes to think he didn’t notice anything at all.
“I’ll start on the pancakes.” Caroline says.
--
It was all strangely domestic.
Like they could get into a flour fight at any point and it would make sense, only it wouldn’t, because nothing about this really should.
But Caroline made the batter and Jeremy drank his coffee and the two talked and one would think that he had never picked her up wasted the night before, balled up on the sidewalk hoping to be swallowed whole. Instead they just seemed natural.
She made the pancakes and his stomach growled and she giggled until even he was laughing just a little.
Caroline pulled out the syrup and made him get the plates and silverware while she flipped the pancakes over.
And when they sat down at the counter, it didn’t feel strange at all.
It just felt like Caroline and Jeremy.
--
After breakfast, Jeremy stays and that’s new.
Saturdays are for Alaric, except for when the world goes spinning out of control. Mondays, Mondays are for Jeremy.
He makes good use of her shower and borrows a shirt she has of Stefan’s and gives her a questioning look, but is nice enough not to ask why she has it at all.
(It smelled like him in the beginning, that’s why she had it. But she was ridiculous and Stefan’s not dead, not that she knows, and there’s really no need to keep it. Caroline’s just a silly girl who holds on to things that don’t even belong to her, because she keeps losing all the things that do.)
Jeremy sits down with her at the desk, goes over her notes about the barrier over Mystic Falls, reads it all carefully, takes in her precise hand writing and puts it back exactly where he had found it. Even flips through a few of the books she has.
“Why do you want back in so badly?” Jeremy finally asks, breaking the silence. (Though not her concentration, because she is very aware of his presence beside her.)
“Mystic Falls is my home.” She says, her pen pressing down on the paper a little harder.
“It’s just a place,” He says, “Trust me, there’s no actual place that counts as a home. Only people.”
“Well, maybe it’s different for everyone.”
“Caroline,” He says, his hand over hers, stopping her writing, “Mystic Falls has never brought anyone anything but pain or death. Usually both. Maybe the spell is there for a reason, maybe it’s trying to tell us all something.”
When she turns to look at him, there are tears in her eyes, but they don’t fall.
(They never fall, she doesn’t let them anymore.)
“Or maybe it’s just a spell cast by a whole bunch of bad people who killed my friend and tortured your sister.” She says, “Maybe it’s one last act of revenge against people like me who can’t even see their mothers anymore.”
--
Caroline stops working on her plans around three, settles down on her couch with her throw blanket and a movie, trying to quiet down the voices in her head.
It’s funny how many of them sound like Jeremy.
(How the others sound like Stefan’s answering machine.)
Jeremy settles down beside her, and before she can even blink, he has her pulled to his side, her head in the crook of his shoulder and the blanket wrapped around them both.
“I hope you know I’m only watching this crappy romance movie for you.” He says and it’s almost an apology for the tears that never fell and she smiles even if he can’t see it.
“Oh, you know you like it.” She says.
He laughs gently, and she can feel the rumble, “Yeah, no. I really won’t.” Jeremy smiles.
--
Caroline falls asleep halfway through the movie, when the two main leads share their first kiss, her head is pressed against Jeremy’s neck and her eyes flutter shut and she does not wake for hours.
When she does, it to Jeremy’s hushed voice (which only gets points for efforts because, vampire), as he tells Matt that he won’t be coming home again that night and not to worry, he’s not off at some bar. He’s with Caroline.
Matt lets out a sigh of a relief at that (which makes Caroline want to snort), like maybe Caroline can fix Jeremy, set him on the right path. Like she wasn’t the one who had managed to drink herself into a stupor, even with her vampire metabolism, the night before.
“Everything’s okay, right?” Matt asks.
“Everything’s fine.” Caroline can feel Jeremy roll his eyes, “You can report that to Captain Elena.”
And then he hangs up.
“You’re kind of mean when you want to be.” She says, her voice still groggy.
“Well, I don’t like a warden.” Jeremy says, a little more angrily than intended.
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing.” Caroline tells him, “I kind of like it.”
She snuggles closer to him, pulling the blanket over them both, and her head resting against his chest. His heartbeat in her ear, pumping away.
Beat-beat.
Such a beautiful human sound.
“So how did the movie end?”
“How do they always end?”
“They fall in love, and then either one of them dies or loses their memories.” She mumbles into his chest.
He laughs. “This one had a happy ending. They rode off into the sunset, on horseback and everything.”
“Liar.” She says.
“Yeah.” Jeremy says.
Beat-beat.
“But it would have been better that way.” He tells her.
“It would have been less realistic.” She says, “Real life breaks your heart, why not movies too?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the optimist?” Jeremy asks.
“Yeah,” She says, “I am.”
--
Somehow, maybe it’s the bottle of whiskey they had shared, she convinces him to share the bed with her.
It’s more comfortable than the couch and she’s not doing it for nefarious purposes. She had laid it all out on the table and everything.
(“I just…I’m tired of sleeping in this bed alone.” She had said.
“I know the feeling.” He had said back.)
Caroline had even put on her long pajama pants to make her look more modest.
“Do you have a side?” She asks.
“Whichever’s fine,” Jeremy shrugs, “I can sleep anywhere.”
“I noticed.” She smiles, and climbs into her normal side, “You can have the right.”
“Works for me.”
--
Fifteen minutes into trying to fall asleep (Caroline counting each breath Jeremy took, each beat of his heart, trying to lull herself to sleep), she felt his arm wrap around her, dragging her closer to him.
“We can always just share the middle too.” He says, his voice in her ear.
“That works too.” She says.
She hopes he doesn’t notice that it sounds breathless.
--
Sunday is Bonnie’s day and that doesn’t change just because Jeremy is there, in her bed, by her side, in her shower, at her counter top, on her couch.
But she does make him come with her to pick out flowers for her makeshift grave, drags him around the store until they find just the right one.
“Blue.” Caroline says her eyes narrowing on a bundle of flowers, “Bonnie always liked blue.”
“She’d like those.” Jeremy says his voice quiet.
“You don’t have to come.” She turns and tells him, “You can go home.”
“Maybe I need to go.” Jeremy says, “Maybe your right.”
“I’m always right.” Caroline forces a smile, “Haven’t you learned that by now?”
--
They buy the flowers and when they enter the graveyard, darkness is just setting in. (It’s better that way, Caroline always thinks, the blinding sun is too familiar, reminds her too much of things she wants to forget but never can.)
She kneels in front of the picture, and clears away the lilacs that have held up better than the flowers before them. And starts putting the new flowers around.
Suddenly another hand is over hers and she inhales deeply, before she realizes it’s Jeremy and he wants to participate too.
Caroline smiles at him shyly and offers up half the flowers. Together, they arrange them around the picture, designing little patterns that weave in and out of each other.
“I brought someone with me today,” Caroline says when their finally done, “I think you remember him. Tall, dark, handsome, headstrong.”
“Real nice.” Jeremy says to her.
“Don’t talk to me, Jer,” Caroline says, “Talk to her.”
“I…”
“He’s nervous.” Caroline tells Bonnie’s picture, tells Bonnie. “I don’t know if it’s because he’s scared you can’t hear him or if he’s more scared you can. Either way, he’s nervous, so cut him some slack. He’s been helping me out these last couple of days and you’ve done that enough to know how draining that can be.”
“It wasn’t hard.” Jeremy quickly interjects.
“Not to me.” Caroline smiles, placing her hand on his face and forcing him to look at the picture of Bonnie.
“It wasn’t hard.” He repeats to Bonnie, “Caroline…Caroline’s a good friend. You always had good taste in friends, it was me that never made sense.”
“Made sense to all of us, right Bon?” She says, still looking at the photo, “But that’s not the point. The point was that she loved you, even if you were the worst person ever. Which, trust me Damon already had dibs on. Bonnie might not be able to say that, but she’d want me to tell you that. I can see it in her eyes.”
“We weren’t even dating when this picture was taken-”
“Magic, Jeremy.” Caroline says, “It can do all kinds of things. Good and bad.”
Jeremy stares at the picture for a while and Caroline alternates between looking at it and looking at him.
“Do you want some time with her alone?” Caroline asks, “I’ll go to the car, I won’t be able to hear you there.”
“I don’t-I don’t know what to say.”
“Look, I don’t know if Bonnie can hear us or not. I don’t know if the universe is a cruel thing destined only to disappoint and break us.” Caroline says, “But I know that looking at her, talking to her, even if she can’t talk back, always makes me feel better. Because it’s Bonnie. And somehow Bonnie always knows how to make me feel better, even when she’s not here.”
She stood up, wiping the dirt from her jeans.
“I’ll be waiting in the car, take as long as you need.”
--
Jeremy comes back to the car with red rimmed eyes and Caroline takes him home, to her home.
Mondays were her Jeremy day after all. And Monday could start early this week.
When they get home, she gets the vodka from the kitchen and sits it down on the counter in front of him.
“Don’t expect this to happen again.” She says.
--
After the vodka, that Caroline drinks most of because despite all his bad habits Jeremy’s still kind of a light weight, like Caroline used to be, but Caroline’s a vampire now and can drink all humans under the table if she wants to.
Then they move on to the whiskey.
(The cycle repeats, more for Caroline than Jeremy, but in the end she’s giggling and he’s doing whatever the manly version of that is according to him.)
Then she pulls out the scotch, a broad smile on her face, and it’s clear she’s hammered by the victory on her face the exaggerated “shhh” as she puts a finger to her lips.
Jeremy stares at the bottle for a minute and tilts his head.
“Did you…steal that from Alaric?” He asks.
She giggles again and then shrugs. “Maybe.” Is all she says but the smile gives her away.
He just laughs but cracks it open anyways.
He pours them both a small glass, his smaller than hers.
“Why are you helping him?” Jeremy asks.
“Because someone needs to.”
“But Elena-”
“Elena doesn’t want to. And god knows what her training sessions with Damon actually taught her…”
“But he hurt you.”
“He wasn’t himself.” Caroline downs her drink and pours another one.
“It doesn’t matter, it’s all you see. I know.” Jeremy says. “Besides your helping Elena too, your trying to find a way back into Mystic Falls when everybody gave it up as a lost cause, and I know your still trying to find Stefan-because your you. And now you took me on as a project. How have you not exploded?”
“It’s just about…figuring things out. I’ve always had projects, I know how to make them work.”
“Am I a project?” He asks.
“No,” Caroline shakes her head violently and the room spins a little with all the alcohol in her system, “You’re just Jeremy. Jeremy who I’ve known forever, who helped save my life, who-you’re just Jeremy. You could never be a project.”
He moved fast, and later she would think it was all the alcohol, that made it seem so quick and so slow all at once, but then his lips were on hers and his hands on her arms pulling her off her stool and between his legs, trying to bring her as close as possible.
(It should have felt wrong.
It should have.
They had visited Bonnie’s grave hours before. Talked about her, remembered her and what made her so special.
They had picked out the flowers together.
It should have felt wrong.
But it didn’t.)
--
Caroline pushed herself closer.
Her nails gently scraping at whatever skin she could reach, her hands traveling up into his hair and pulling just enough to make him groan as his lips traveled down her throat and made her head tilt back.
His hands wandered underneath her shirt, felt bare skin, so very warm against her cold dead skin and she pressed herself closer, wanting to feel more of it. Wanted more and more.
Wanted him.
She pulled back, looked into his deep brown eyes, too much like Elena’s and all his own at the same time, and kissed him again, her tongue slipping into his mouth, her teeth nipping at his bottom lip (but never drawing blood), her hands sliding down his neck.
He pulled away, this time the one to look her in the eye and she didn’t know what he saw, it wasn’t Elena and it wasn’t Bonnie, it was just her.
“Do you want this?” He asks.
It’s a loaded question, like a gun pointed to her head because it wouldn’t kill her but chances are it would hurt like hell in the morning (for the both of them.)
But still-
“Yes.”
--
They stumbled their way to her bed.
Tripping over each other as they tried to strip each other of their clothes, tripping over their shoes, tripping over the towel Jeremy had left there earlier that morning.
(At some point Caroline would remember and scold him for that, but they wouldn’t be half naked at the time.)
She reached for his belt buckle and then whipped the belt off and threw it across the room, breaking one of the lamps in the process.
“Never liked it anyways.” She says, not bothering to check to see what it was that she had broken.
Instead, she kissed him again. His lips tasted like so many different kinds of liquor, she could dissect them all, but mostly he just tasted like him. Or how she always imagined how he would taste (though she didn’t remember imagining that since once in junior year when he had been in a suit, his hair slicked back, and she had been horny and all alone), he tasted familiar and like home should taste, with just a hint of something spicy because Jeremy had always been breaking the rules.
When he finally has her on her back and is pulling off her jeans and then his own, she smiles up at him, because maybe she didn’t know it then, but maybe she had wanted this for a long time. Even if it would only ever last one night.
(She remembered Jeremy.
She remember a younger Jeremy with both his parents, rebellious but with light shining through the cracks. And she remembered him afterwards broken and looking for an escape. She remembered him finding one in all the wrong places. She remembered him being the big hero. She remembered him dead in her arms. She remember him in so many ways. But mostly she remember the way he smiled when he was happy, like he had won something that no one else could ever have.
He was looking at her like that now.)
Jeremy leaned down over her, his body splayed over hers, as he went in for another kiss, and she flipped the tables on him easily enough.
Mid-kiss they had changed positions.
“In case you didn’t notice,” She says breaking the kiss, “I’m kind of an on top kind of a girl.”
“I kind of did.” He tells her.
But then her bra is gone, and she’s rubbing against him, and there’s very little talking after that.
--
She ends up with her head against his chest again as he sleeps.
Beat-beat.
Her heart makes the same noises, but it’s different somehow. False. A lie.
So she lies with her head against his chest, and soaks up what she can, because she can imagine how the morning will go.
Mondays will need to find a new designation and she’ll have to talk to someone about checking up on him, to make sure she didn’t break him anymore than he was already broken. That he wasn’t returning to bad habits.
Caroline plans it all out in her head (that’s what she does of course) as she listens to his heart beat again and again, like it’s some kind of a miracle.
And in some ways, she thinks it probably is.
--
When Jeremy wakes up, he stares down at her, looks into her eyes and does not run away, does not flinch, does not seem like he’s expecting anyone else.
“You look confused.” He pushes hair from her face and his hand is warm and she wants to keep that warmth forever.
“I just-I didn’t know how you’d react.”
“To awesome sex? Usually well.” Jeremy smiles.
She can’t help but giggle back.
“Well, yeah, but I meant with me.” Caroline says.
Jeremy is silent as he looks her over, trying to find something in her eyes, on her face, in her body language (only she isn’t moving, just blinking up at him).
“What?”
“I’m trying to figure out…if this is about Bonnie or about all the people that screwed you up.”
“I was talking about Bonnie.” She says quietly looking away.
He put his finger under her chin, made her (as much as he could) look up at him, “I was wrong before, when I thought it would be better to be dead, that it would hurt less.” He says, “You were right, like always, it just makes the wounds bigger. And I can’t imagine how much that must hurt.”
He pulls closer, her head resting under his chin.
“I’ll talk to Elena. She’ll train Alaric. And I’ll tell Matt that she needs someone to talk to about Bonnie, but you need a break and everything else we’ll figure out together.”
“We?” She asks.
“Unless you’re sick of me already.”
“No, I just…I haven’t been a ‘we’ in a long time.” Caroline says.
“We’ll figure that out too.”
She kisses him, lets the sheet drop as she climbs on top of him, and kisses him harder, only letting go to let him breathe (she has to remember that now, he’s supernatural but still human, still breakable, still needs things like air).
“So this top thing? I’m never going to get to do it?” He asks.
“We’ll see.” She shrugs, giving him a quick kiss on the lip and then starts going lower.
--
They’re still moving in rhythm when the phone on Caroline’s bedside table buzzes, set on silent from the night before.
Stefan’s name flashes and disappears, as Caroline and Jeremy groan together as he sits up, burying himself further inside her, her nails digging into his back.
“This is Caroline Forbes and if you’re hearing this I’m either busy, in class, avoiding you, or your name is Damon Salvatore. Take the hint or leave a message after the beep.”
“Caroline…” Stefan says.
She doesn’t hear him.
All she hears is Jeremy calling her name, the sound of it echoing off the walls.
fandom: tvd
characters/parings: caroline/jeremy (it became a bit more caroline-centric than intended, but still plenty of these two, also mentions of past jeremy/bonnie, and caroline/bonnie, caroline/elana, caroline/alaric, caroline/stefan dynamics/friendships throughout, most of the ensemble mentioned)
rating: pg-13 (a couple of sexual scenes, but nothing too graphic, lots of drinking and some mild self-destructive behavior, and depression among the different characters.)
word count: 8887 words (because I ramble, god do I ramble)
summary: “Death is death, Jeremy.” Caroline says turning to stare at him in the eye, “And when people you love die, you feel it whether your veins are full of your blood or someone else’s. I would have thought you of all people would have understood that. All the people you have left, they’ve all died too.” (Post S5 and spoilers for bits and pieces of well spoilers I've heard for S6, though twisted and used in my own way, obviously because canon will probably never give us Caroline/Jeremy.)
a/n: written for the anything by song lyrics fic-a-thon, for the prompt: better of dead. It might of veered from what was originally wanted, but this was what came out. (also, just as a warning, this is entirely from Caroline’s perspective, so some things she may say about Damon might not be appreciated by fans, she doesn’t say a lot, but just in case, I’m warning you now. it’s nothing against the character, just how I see the character and her views.)
Caroline spends the first half of the summer trying to hold everyone else together.
But it’s hard when no one seems to want her help, when they burst out in tears at Bonnie’s name (and Caroline’s tears have to be held inside) and people disappear into Mystic Falls where she can’t reach them or just altogether.
But she pushes on.
Because she’s Caroline Forbes and she’s never met a project that she can’t make work.
Caroline Forbes succeeds.
Once upon a time Caroline was Miss Mystic Falls, valedictorian, student body president, she had planned almost every town event.
(Once Caroline Forbes was someone people remembered.)
--
She spends Tuesdays and Thursdays with Elena, scheduled lunches and movie dates, painting each other’s nails like they were twelve again, and Elena lying on Caroline’s couch and sobbing into her lap when she sees Bonnie’s picture on her mantle.
(Caroline’s mantle holds a collection of pictures of dead people. Some of them have come back to them, some of them haven’t; but they’re dead just the same.
They have all watched it happen.)
Elena sobs and sobs; words that don’t make sense coming out in between.
“We were supposed to protect her.” Elena says one day.
“We didn’t know.” Caroline says softly, stroking the other girl’s hair.
“We should have.” Elena says, a fierce look in her eye, one that scares her friend.
--
Saturdays Caroline spends with Alaric, getting him ready for his classes, getting him used to interacting with humans without trying to, well, eat them. Teaching him all the things he needs to know to survive.
It’s not easy.
One day, she shows up late and he’s taken the time to work on his syllabus and is using a number two pencil to write it out.
She can see the pencil in his hand and the world shifts, her world shifts, and she goes tumbling down the rabbit hole only there doesn’t seem to be any end to it, just more and more darkness.
All Caroline can smell is vervain, all she can feel is Ric’s hands wrapped around her neck before the snap comes loudly after, all she can remember is screaming in pain, the feel of the cloth in her mouth, the pencils pounded and pounded into her hands, and Alaric smiling and whispering into her ears, dirty things, filthy things that no one knows-
She closes her eyes and forces it all to go away. Forces it to the back of her mind, forces it into the boxes neatly labeled ‘Dad’, ‘Brady’, ‘Klaus’ and ‘Damon’.
It was just easier that way.
“Hi.” Caroline smiles cheerfully, sitting across from him. “Did you order yet?”
“Just coffee.” Alaric says, already starting to put his stuff away.
The number two pencil he was using rolls across the table, until it’s in front of her, Caroline’s hand slamming down on it and breaking it in to pieces.
There’s a moment of a silence even as the patrons talk and talk around them, their voices growing louder and louder, until its only white noise.
“Have you ever considered using a pen?” She asks looking up at him, his eyes large, regretful, “These things break really easy.”
--
It’s not meant to be a ritual, a scheduled plan, written down in stone. And it isn’t, not really. Not technically. She doesn’t have it written in her planner or put into the calendar on her phone.
Fridays are for parties and dancing and drinking; for forgetting.
Somehow even if they include all of these things, she still ends up dialing the same number.
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“You know that’s a stupid message, right? I mean, people know how to leave messages. How much of an old man are you?”
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“It’s me, Caroline, again. For like the hundredth time, so just you know, call me back, already. Alright?”
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“You’re a dick, you know that?” She slurs, “I always thought no one could be worse than your brother, but congratulations. You won the prize.”
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“Please, Stefan, I’m not asking you to come back. I’m not-I just want to make sure you’re okay. You spent all of last summer stuck at the bottom of the falls and the one before that with Klaus of all people-your summers suck. So please, just call me or text me or something. Because I need to know that someone’s okay.”
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
Caroline doesn’t say anything.
Just lets it play again and again.
Just listens to his voice.
(She does this sometimes with Bonnie’s phone too, has it packed away in a trunk in her room.)
--
Sundays she goes back to the cemetery, the closest she can get to Mystic Falls without losing her breath, without her windpipe closing and tiny pieces of cloth getting lodged in her throat.
(She had tried before, desperate and drunk. Once was enough to learn her lesson to not to try again.)
But she remembers the last place she had seen Bonnie and she brings flowers every week, different kinds that remind her of her friend.
This week their lilacs because Bonnie had always looked so pretty in purple, had shined in it, the way it had brought out her eyes. And Caroline didn’t know if she had ever told her. Because Caroline had always been selfish, had always wanted to be the prettiest girl at the party, and was an all around bitch.
But she should have said it because Bonnie deserved to hear it.
Bonnie deserved more than she ever got.
More than anyone ever gave, Caroline most definitely included.
She kneels on the grass, removes the last of the old flowers that had wilted in the heat, and looks down at the picture someone had put there (Jeremy, she thinks, somewhere in her mind) and stares down at the girl with the green eyes and the beautiful smile that used to make everything seem okay.
“I brought you some new flowers today,” Caroline says, carefully arranging them around the picture frame until it became a circle.
It reminded Caroline of all those protection circles Bonnie had drawn over the years.
“Their lilacs; purple. I think you’d like them. Who knows maybe there even witchy, maybe they mean something like peace or protection. Or maybe you could mix something up with your Grams to take over the whole world. I always kind of thought you could do that if you just tried hard enough…”
“She can’t hear you, you know?”
Caroline turns and sees Jeremy standing there, a bottle of some kind of alcohol he really shouldn’t have in his hand. This town doesn’t need any more alcoholics. They don’t need any more of them.
“I like to think she can.” Caroline says, glancing back at the picture before standing up and looking him over.
He looks like shit, but that’s not polite to say or think, so she just decides he just looks messed up, after too much loss at such a young age.
“And even if she can’t hear me, Bonnie would appreciate the gesture. She’d do the same thing for me.”
“She can’t appreciate the gesture, Car-o-line,” Jeremy says, “In case you forgot, she’s kind of dead.”
“It’s not something you really forget.” Caroline snaps at him and instantly regrets it. Bonnie was her best friend, but Bonnie was his…
“Look, come on, this is no place to be drinking.” She says stepping forward, “Whether she can see you or not, Bonnie wouldn’t want this.”
“Bonnie’s dead, she doesn’t want anything.”
“I’m dead and I-I want everything to be okay again. I want a lot of things.” Caroline says, she’s made her way closer, close enough to grab the bottle from his hand, even as he protests. “Come on, show some respect.
--
She wrangles Jeremy into her car and drives him back to her apartment because last time she checked he was still living with Tyler and she can’t take him there.
Once they’re in the car, he goes quiet, his cheek rests against the window, and the drive is so silent it makes Caroline want to scream just to get some sort of a reaction from him. Even if it’s just a groan from a hangover setting in.
“I thought it was Elena leaving the flowers.” Jeremy says quietly.
“No, she…I don’t think she’s ready to go back there yet.” Caroline says, “She sees the same picture of Bonnie every time she comes over to my place and I think it breaks her a little more each time.”
“I would have thought it would have been easier for her.” Jeremy says, and she can almost hear the sneer in his voice.
“What?”
“Being dead already.” Jeremy says as she pools into her parking lot, “I would have thought it would have made it all easier to deal with.”
“Death is death, Jeremy.” She says turning to stare at him in the eye, “And when people you love die, you feel it whether your veins are full of your blood or someone else’s. I would have thought you of all people would have understood that. All the people you have left, they’ve all died too.”
Caroline opens her door and slams it shut, waits at the front of her car for Jeremy to stumble his way out of it.
--
She dumps Jeremy into her bed, after they’ve made it up to her apartment.
Literally dumps him, because he’s losing consciousness fast, and really, that’s what she thinks he deserves when he gets drunk and goes to his dead girlfriend’s grave.
Caroline takes his shoes off and pushes him towards the middle and he doesn’t fight her, just watches her through mostly closed eyelids, and she sighs, because she thinks she just found someone else to look after and she’s running out of days of the week.
She leaves him alone and heads to the couch.
She has no plans to sleep, otherwise she would have forced Jeremy to sleep it off on the couch like the bad little boy he had been, but she had research and books that she had gotten from Alaric to look through.
It had been her plans for the night anyways.
It wasn’t like Caroline slept most nights anyways.
--
She’s still going through her research when Jeremy wakes up with a groan.
Caroline had left the curtains open and the sunlight was shining through the windows.
“I hate you.” Jeremy says, but it lacks punch, all tired and scratchy.
“I made coffee.” Caroline says pointing her mug of blood in the direction of the kitchen.
“I still hate you.” He mumbled, but after a few minutes he stumbled his way into the kitchen to get some and comes to sit next to her on the couch.
Caroline ignores him mostly, drinking her mug of blood (she’d already had her coffee) and flipping through her book, copying page numbers on a notebook she thought might help.
(That was, if they were able to wrangle any witch into this. They seemed to keep losing them and Caroline was sure they must had gained a reputation, that Mystic Falls had.)
“Why’d you bring me back here?” Jeremy asks quietly.
“Don’t you remember?” Caroline asks, flipping another page, “Dead people can’t go back into Mystic Falls anymore. All it does is kill them. Just as painfully as the first time.”
“You tried.” Jeremy whispers, and she doesn’t know if it’s because of his hangover or because of the revelation.
“I wanted to see my mom.” Caroline says, “I wanted to…go home. I thought maybe, something had changed, instead I just felt it all over again.”
“Your death?”
“The first one anyways.” She says flipping another page.
“I thought…”
“That once I was already dead, I couldn’t die again, not unless it was permanent.” Caroline says, “Not technically true. I’ve been shot in the head, had my neck snapped a few times, had an imaginary stake through my heart thanks to Silas; and the list goes on and on…”
“I guess I never really thought about it.”
“It happens.” She shrugs, “You get over it. You have to.”
“And Bonnie? Damon?”
“Let’s get one thing straight.” Caroline says, turning to look Jeremy straight in the eye, “You will never find me mourning for Damon Salvatore, just for the people that cared about him. The only thing that I care about, was that when he disappeared, he took my best friend with him. And no, I don’t get the luxury of crying every time I see Bonnie’s photo or drinking myself into a stupor, because not all of us do, not all of us are Gilberts, but I miss her every damn day and I would do anything it took to get her back if I thought we could.”
--
“I meant it when I said it,” Jeremy says after a long silence.
He’s finished his coffee and the rest of her blood has gone cold, room temperature probably, but still not pleasant.
“I thought it would be easier for you,” He continues, “It…looks easier for you, here with your books and your plans. You’re helping Elena and Alaric and you were at the cemetery and you weren’t even crying and I just thought-it has to be easier.”
“Being a vampire doesn’t make it easier, Jeremy.” Caroline tells him, “It makes it worse. You feel it more than any human can and I’m not just saying that, it’s just the truth.”
“But you can turn it off.” Jeremy says.
Caroline laughs and she thinks it’s the first time it’s been real in a long time. But still, it’s a bitter laugh, full of everything she had been holding in.
“Yeah, because that always works out well.” She rolls her eyes.
“Bonnie used to talk about the other side…how it wasn’t punishment, that it was a place where you could find peace.” Jeremy says, his eyes were glazed over but this time it’s not from the liquor. “I wonder if we’ll all still have a chance for that now. If she…”
“If anyone deserved peace, it was Bonnie.” Caroline says, her hand going over Jeremy’s, and he almost jumped at the contact.
(She wondered when the last time someone touched him was. She wondered how much time had spent with his sister and not just on the phone with her.)
“Whatever happened, I’m sure Bonnie found peace.”
--
Jeremy spends the rest of the day at her apartment.
He’s quiet most of the time, finds one of the books on her bookshelf (some teenage romance novel) and reads its, then flips through the channels and comments on stupid things he sees, even tries to make them dinner.
They end up ordering in.
The two don’t talk a lot, but his presence fills up the silence of her apartment and when he says he’s going to call Matt to pick him up, she almost asks him to stay. Almost begs him too.
(She doesn’t.)
--
Caroline still spends her Tuesdays and Thursdays with Elena, half pretending everything is normal and half grieving over everything that is not.
Wednesdays are still spent meeting up with her mother at a dinner outside of Mystic Falls, every night at six. It’s easier to schedule time these days, less deaths for her mother to clean (cover) up. Her mother asks questions and Caroline tells her things like how she’s decorating her apartment and what classes she’s thinking of taking when school starts again.
(It’s almost like she’s a real girl.)
Fridays are for forgetting, for dancing and drinking, and for dialing the same number again and again, for hearing the same words repeated over and over again and never getting a reply.
Saturdays belong to Alaric, and Caroline likes to think that she gets less skittish each time she sees him, but really she just gets better at acting. (Drama major, hello.) They do mundane things; going to highly populated areas, walking through hospitals, getting him used to the scent of blood, walking around campus even though the student body is small.
They go hunting in the forest and she teaches him to catch animals and she hates that he catches on so easily, that he breaks neck and tears his teeth in to fur without hesitation. (Sees him drive a pencil into her hand each time his teeth sink in, every time and flinches herself.)
But Caroline doesn’t say anything.
Caroline talks too much, talks all the time, but she never really says anything at all.
Sundays still belong to Bonnie.
Buying flowers, talking to a picture of a dead girl that Caroline refuses to let disappear completely. She whispers secrets in her ears, tells her things she hoped she already knows (knew), tells her things that Caroline has never told anyone else. Keeps talking and talking until her voice is scratchy; but no tears are shed.
Caroline thinks Bonnie would want it that way.
--
Jeremy takes over Mondays all on his own.
It’s not like she had a day off, one assigned just to herself. (The closest to that was Friday, Fridays she lets herself be selfish and shallow and pitying and all those things people called her anyways.) Instead Mondays were assigned to research and books and trying to figure out the mess that the Travelers had caused in Mystic Falls, trying to figure out what it meant, a way past the barrier.
(Caroline Forbes does not give up.)
But Jeremy shows up at her front door and he doesn’t need an invitation in, and holds up a bottle of some alcohol that he probably stole from the Salvatores, and for some reason she always lets him stay.
There’s a lot silence.
And sometimes there’s a lot of talking, like he has no one else to talk to, like he’s living in a house alone not with two roommates. Like he doesn’t have Elena or Alaric to look out for him.
Most of it is morbid; talk about death, about vampirism, about blood, about the lust for it, about how it all feels.
She always gives him straight answers, because she knows what it’s like to be kept in the dark and she won’t do it to him too.
“If you bit into my wrist right now, would you want to stop?” He asks, almost puppy like.
(A puppy with a death wish, pulling on a vampire’s pig tails.)
“Yes,” She tells him, “But I would anyways, I trained myself too. I learned to stop. Most vampires can. It’s just that they have to want too.”
Silence will hang over them after she answers his questions and the television is all that fills it, white noise in Caroline’s head as she studies books she doesn’t fully understand. Passages in languages she has to translate. Symbols she has to find new books to discover their meaning for.
(She sends Jeremy to the Bennett house for the Grimoures, looking for information on blood magic, on doppelgangers, on the Travelers, on barrier spells, on anything.
He’s hesitant, but does it anyways, ‘because she asked’, he said.)
“Do you hate Alaric?” He asks one day, out of the blue.
“No,” She answers automatically, her voice on autopilot, even and controlled.
“Are you lying?”
She stops trying to read the same line over and over, stops trying to make sense of a language she doesn’t understand. Turns to look at him instead.
“I don’t know.” Caroline shrugs, “Does it really matter?”
He stares at her for a long time after that.
--
“Do you think she always knew?” Elena asks, her head on Caroline’s lap again.
Caroline remembers when it was Elena holding her together for a night, for a day. When Elena was the strong one, pushing them through. And Caroline-Caroline was holding it together with water proof mascara and a wooden stake hidden underneath her bed.
“I don’t know,” Caroline says, as Elena adjusts, looking up at her, big brown eyes looking into corn blue ones. “I think…Bonnie was smart and she knew she was living on borrowed time. But I also think she thought she had more of it. The other side was never supposed to collapse. Tessa designed it as punishment for Silas.”
“Bonnie told Jeremy she knew before that…”
“I know,” Caroline pushes Elena’s bangs behind her ear and offers her a kind smile, “She wanted life to be normal, and she didn’t want it to hang over everybody’s head when there was no chance to save her. You of all people can understand that.”
She says it gently, but Elena’s eyes darken as she stares her down, almost accusingly, somewhere between too young for so much grief, a little child mad her favorite toy was taken away, and a woman too old, one that she knows nothing but bitterness in her life anymore.
“I just mean-she wanted us to be happy for as long as possible.” Caroline tries to fix it, “She spent her last days thinking about us. Trying to protect us, can we really be mad at her for that?”
(Caroline had been of course. It was one of the steps of moving on.
She had yelled at Bonnie’s picture, had broken the frame against the wall and the sobbed over broken glass.
Cut herself as she picked it up piece by piece.)
“Sometimes I do.” Elena says, “Sometimes I hate her so much and sometimes…”
“You just want to be with her and Damon instead.” Caroline finishes for her.
Elena might not remember, but they’ve had this conversation before.
--
There’s a bar not too far from Caroline’s new apartment.
She’s a regular there now, every Friday night, and occasionally when things get too hard, when days with Alaric bring back bad memories or Elena cries into her lap and Caroline’s tears pool in her own eyes, never to fall, Caroline comes briefly. Just long enough to numb the pain and get some sleep.
The bartender remembers her, calls her sweetheart, and always gets her the strongest drink they have, and she knocks back one after another and then one more just for good measure.
There’s a dance floor. Full of men and women and girls and boys too young to be there, but with fake IDs that say they’re old enough. Caroline slips between them all, dances alone, her hands above her head, and her eyes closed, and pretends.
Let’s the alcohol sink in, lets the music guide her, and just lets go.
There are no tears here.
There is no grief.
There is no anger or fear.
There is just Caroline Forbes, the girl who used to drink too much, the girl who used to be the life of the party, the girl who used to dance until she was too tired to go on.
(Caroline missed that girl. That beautifully human girl, who wanted everything and everyone, and never got a damn thing.
It’s not that she was all that different from who she was now. It’s just that her head wasn’t filled with everything hers was now, that she hadn’t seen everything she had. That she had felt a different kind of pain, one that didn’t stay the same way.
Yes, she missed that Caroline Forbes sometimes, the one who didn’t know what it felt like to die.)
She kept dancing and sometimes other dancers would approach her, would connect their bodies with hers, and she’d let them, because sometimes she got tired of spending all her time with other people but alone just the same. And their hands felt good on her hips and her head fit just right into their neck, and they moved at just the right pace.
She never turned around and looked to see who they were or what they looked like.
--
“This is Stefan, leave a message after the beep.”
“I hate you a little, you know that right?” Caroline asks out back on the curb, next to the dumpster. “You just left. No goodbyes, no…anything. Just you and your car gone and I hate you. I didn’t even know I could hate you. Turns out, I can.”
She takes a swing of the whiskey the very nice bartender had given her and sits it down.
“You left me all alone to clean it all up. You left and just expected us all to fix it on our own. Well, congratulations, Stefan. You’re an idiot. And no one is fine. And some of us…some of us aren’t even allowed to cry, because if they start, they won’t ever stop. And then who will stop Elena from ripping off her ring and joining your brother in a lifetime of agony that I hope he’s enjoying?
“If I’m not here, who will stop Professor Saltzman from torturing another one of his students?” she says, “You didn’t think of anyone but yourself before you left, you selfish dick. And yet-somehow, I keep calling this number like it will change something, anything. Like you’re actually listening to these messages and not just deleting them. Because I’m the same idiot you met your first day in school and now, now I’ll be one for eternity.”
She hangs up, there’s a distinct click and maybe it should be satisfying.
Maybe it should mean something.
Maybe one day one of these calls will sound like a goodbye and not a plea for him to come home, for him to save her again.
Instead it’s just a click and she’s just a blonde girl in an alley behind a bar and it doesn’t really mean anything at all.
--
She could walk home, be home before any car could take her, but she doesn’t want to walk home. Doesn’t want to go home to an empty apartment.
Instead she calls Jeremy.
“Are you sober?” She slurs out her first words. Not the best first impression.
“More than you definitely.” He says.
“I’m serious.” Caroline tells him and it would mean more if she actually sounded serious.
“I haven’t drank anything tonight.” Jeremy says, “Elena got to Matt and he’s gone all big brother and been monitoring me and Tyler.”
“So you can drive?”
“You need a ride?”
“There’s a bar close to my place, only the one, it’s easy to find. Can you come pick me up?”
“Can’t you just-”
“Jeremy, please, just come pick me up.” Caroline says, and she wants to curl up into a ball on the sidewalk until he comes to rescue her.
(From herself of course; she had been the one to drink the poison all on her own, she had been the one to tempt herself with what she knew would only hurt her, she had been the one to hurt herself. But it didn’t stop her from wanting to be rescued just the same.)
“I’m on my way.” He says, and it’s funny, because she can hear him grabbing his keys and heading out the door as he says it, like he was always going to come, the rest was just to fill the silence as he found his shoes.
“Thank you.” She says before she hangs up.
--
Jeremy finds her behind the bar, despite the fact that she never told him where she was.
She wonders briefly if he had searched everywhere else first, or if he just knew her well enough to know where to find her when she was desperate and calling him for a ride. If maybe he had been there before himself.
But she had drank most of the whiskey while she was waiting for him, curling into the brick wall, as her skirt rode up and scraped her pale skin against cement enough time that the blood was still showing, and all the thoughts quickly disappeared, as he leaned over her, his face full of concern.
“Caroline? Caroline, can you hear me?”
“My hero.” She whispers, but she doesn’t think he’ll ever understand.
“Come on,” Jeremy says, pushing down her skirt, and then lifting her in his arms (strong that one, vampire hunter, she should be afraid of him, but he smells like mint and lake water, and it’s hard to be scared of him at all. Not when he’s holding her so gently, like she might break and who knows, maybe this will be the night she will).
He sits her in his car carefully and drives her back to her apartment and puts her to bed, and pulls off her four inch heels and Caroline giggles to herself, burying her face in her pillow.
“What?” Jeremy asks, looking at her with those wide eyes she can never deny.
“I just remember this in reverse.” She smiles at him.
“I do too.” He says softly.
“Will you stay?” Caroline asks him.
His mouth opens but no sound comes out.
“Please.”
“Yeah, of course,” Jeremy says, “Your couch is comfortable.”
She wants to invite him to sleep on the other side of her bed. To feel the closeness of someone else, of someone else that wasn’t Elena sobbing into her lap, that wasn’t Alaric’s hand on her shoulder squeezing. That was just Jeremy, not asking for anything, just offering.
(She doesn’t. She never does.)
--
Caroline wakes up before him, he’s snoring softly on the couch. Her throw blanket over him and his boots and shirt by the door.
She smiles fondly at him, her hero of the night, the only one to come rescue her, the only one she could even think of asking anymore. And fixes the blanket a little tighter around him; her apartment is drafty for people who aren’t undead.
Caroline starts the coffee and texts Alaric saying she has to cancels lessons for the day, that something had come up and maybe Elena would be able to fill in for the day.
His response is short, a simple: “its fine.” And it’s all arranged.
She wonders if it would be this easy to get her Saturdays back.
Caroline does the creepy stalker vampire thing and drinks her coffee while she watches Jeremy sleep. It’s not fitful like she would have expected (like it was the last time he had slept there), but calm, his face buried into her pillows, into the couch, an almost peaceful look on his face.
She can’t help but wonder what he’s dreaming about.
--
Caroline’s in the middle of trying to translate ancient Babylonian without the help of a computer (she learnt that lesson the hard and annoying way) when Jeremy jolts awake, his eyes scanning the room, like he’s trying to figure out where he is.
She leaves her books and papers at her desk and whooshes over to him, leaning over his side and pushing his bangs out of his eyes as she tries to calm him down.
“It’s okay, you’re here,” Caroline says, “You’re at my apartment, you…you said you would stay when I got all pathetic last night.”
“No, no I’m fine.” He says, shaking his head, “I remember, I just-you weren’t in your bed.”
“I…”
“I thought you’d still be asleep and you weren’t there and I thought…”
“I’m fine.” Caroline promises, finally realizing.
She had woken up like that before, desperate to call everyone she loved and cared about just to know they were still there, that a flash of light hadn’t taken them away. Had even done it a few times, called Elena pretending to have hit the wrong button or called her mom asking if she had left something at the old house.
“Everything’s okay.” She says and it’s probably a lie (it is one), but it’s what they both need to hear.
“Do you want some coffee?” Caroline offers him, “And I can make pancakes. Good ones, if you’re hungry.”
“I remember,” Jeremy says, “You used to make them when you slept over. I never understood how you were so good in the kitchen and how Elena sucked at it so much.”
Caroline shrugged, “Just lots of practice.”
She got up and found Jeremy a mug and poured him a cup and when she turned around he was putting his shirt back on by the door and she did her best not to look, but his abs were appealing and so was his light skin, and her eyes lingered.
“Here.” She finally says, when his head poked through, placing the mug on the counter, “You drink it black right?”
“Yeah,” He smiles, accepting the mug, and she likes to think he didn’t notice anything at all.
“I’ll start on the pancakes.” Caroline says.
--
It was all strangely domestic.
Like they could get into a flour fight at any point and it would make sense, only it wouldn’t, because nothing about this really should.
But Caroline made the batter and Jeremy drank his coffee and the two talked and one would think that he had never picked her up wasted the night before, balled up on the sidewalk hoping to be swallowed whole. Instead they just seemed natural.
She made the pancakes and his stomach growled and she giggled until even he was laughing just a little.
Caroline pulled out the syrup and made him get the plates and silverware while she flipped the pancakes over.
And when they sat down at the counter, it didn’t feel strange at all.
It just felt like Caroline and Jeremy.
--
After breakfast, Jeremy stays and that’s new.
Saturdays are for Alaric, except for when the world goes spinning out of control. Mondays, Mondays are for Jeremy.
He makes good use of her shower and borrows a shirt she has of Stefan’s and gives her a questioning look, but is nice enough not to ask why she has it at all.
(It smelled like him in the beginning, that’s why she had it. But she was ridiculous and Stefan’s not dead, not that she knows, and there’s really no need to keep it. Caroline’s just a silly girl who holds on to things that don’t even belong to her, because she keeps losing all the things that do.)
Jeremy sits down with her at the desk, goes over her notes about the barrier over Mystic Falls, reads it all carefully, takes in her precise hand writing and puts it back exactly where he had found it. Even flips through a few of the books she has.
“Why do you want back in so badly?” Jeremy finally asks, breaking the silence. (Though not her concentration, because she is very aware of his presence beside her.)
“Mystic Falls is my home.” She says, her pen pressing down on the paper a little harder.
“It’s just a place,” He says, “Trust me, there’s no actual place that counts as a home. Only people.”
“Well, maybe it’s different for everyone.”
“Caroline,” He says, his hand over hers, stopping her writing, “Mystic Falls has never brought anyone anything but pain or death. Usually both. Maybe the spell is there for a reason, maybe it’s trying to tell us all something.”
When she turns to look at him, there are tears in her eyes, but they don’t fall.
(They never fall, she doesn’t let them anymore.)
“Or maybe it’s just a spell cast by a whole bunch of bad people who killed my friend and tortured your sister.” She says, “Maybe it’s one last act of revenge against people like me who can’t even see their mothers anymore.”
--
Caroline stops working on her plans around three, settles down on her couch with her throw blanket and a movie, trying to quiet down the voices in her head.
It’s funny how many of them sound like Jeremy.
(How the others sound like Stefan’s answering machine.)
Jeremy settles down beside her, and before she can even blink, he has her pulled to his side, her head in the crook of his shoulder and the blanket wrapped around them both.
“I hope you know I’m only watching this crappy romance movie for you.” He says and it’s almost an apology for the tears that never fell and she smiles even if he can’t see it.
“Oh, you know you like it.” She says.
He laughs gently, and she can feel the rumble, “Yeah, no. I really won’t.” Jeremy smiles.
--
Caroline falls asleep halfway through the movie, when the two main leads share their first kiss, her head is pressed against Jeremy’s neck and her eyes flutter shut and she does not wake for hours.
When she does, it to Jeremy’s hushed voice (which only gets points for efforts because, vampire), as he tells Matt that he won’t be coming home again that night and not to worry, he’s not off at some bar. He’s with Caroline.
Matt lets out a sigh of a relief at that (which makes Caroline want to snort), like maybe Caroline can fix Jeremy, set him on the right path. Like she wasn’t the one who had managed to drink herself into a stupor, even with her vampire metabolism, the night before.
“Everything’s okay, right?” Matt asks.
“Everything’s fine.” Caroline can feel Jeremy roll his eyes, “You can report that to Captain Elena.”
And then he hangs up.
“You’re kind of mean when you want to be.” She says, her voice still groggy.
“Well, I don’t like a warden.” Jeremy says, a little more angrily than intended.
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing.” Caroline tells him, “I kind of like it.”
She snuggles closer to him, pulling the blanket over them both, and her head resting against his chest. His heartbeat in her ear, pumping away.
Beat-beat.
Such a beautiful human sound.
“So how did the movie end?”
“How do they always end?”
“They fall in love, and then either one of them dies or loses their memories.” She mumbles into his chest.
He laughs. “This one had a happy ending. They rode off into the sunset, on horseback and everything.”
“Liar.” She says.
“Yeah.” Jeremy says.
Beat-beat.
“But it would have been better that way.” He tells her.
“It would have been less realistic.” She says, “Real life breaks your heart, why not movies too?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the optimist?” Jeremy asks.
“Yeah,” She says, “I am.”
--
Somehow, maybe it’s the bottle of whiskey they had shared, she convinces him to share the bed with her.
It’s more comfortable than the couch and she’s not doing it for nefarious purposes. She had laid it all out on the table and everything.
(“I just…I’m tired of sleeping in this bed alone.” She had said.
“I know the feeling.” He had said back.)
Caroline had even put on her long pajama pants to make her look more modest.
“Do you have a side?” She asks.
“Whichever’s fine,” Jeremy shrugs, “I can sleep anywhere.”
“I noticed.” She smiles, and climbs into her normal side, “You can have the right.”
“Works for me.”
--
Fifteen minutes into trying to fall asleep (Caroline counting each breath Jeremy took, each beat of his heart, trying to lull herself to sleep), she felt his arm wrap around her, dragging her closer to him.
“We can always just share the middle too.” He says, his voice in her ear.
“That works too.” She says.
She hopes he doesn’t notice that it sounds breathless.
--
Sunday is Bonnie’s day and that doesn’t change just because Jeremy is there, in her bed, by her side, in her shower, at her counter top, on her couch.
But she does make him come with her to pick out flowers for her makeshift grave, drags him around the store until they find just the right one.
“Blue.” Caroline says her eyes narrowing on a bundle of flowers, “Bonnie always liked blue.”
“She’d like those.” Jeremy says his voice quiet.
“You don’t have to come.” She turns and tells him, “You can go home.”
“Maybe I need to go.” Jeremy says, “Maybe your right.”
“I’m always right.” Caroline forces a smile, “Haven’t you learned that by now?”
--
They buy the flowers and when they enter the graveyard, darkness is just setting in. (It’s better that way, Caroline always thinks, the blinding sun is too familiar, reminds her too much of things she wants to forget but never can.)
She kneels in front of the picture, and clears away the lilacs that have held up better than the flowers before them. And starts putting the new flowers around.
Suddenly another hand is over hers and she inhales deeply, before she realizes it’s Jeremy and he wants to participate too.
Caroline smiles at him shyly and offers up half the flowers. Together, they arrange them around the picture, designing little patterns that weave in and out of each other.
“I brought someone with me today,” Caroline says when their finally done, “I think you remember him. Tall, dark, handsome, headstrong.”
“Real nice.” Jeremy says to her.
“Don’t talk to me, Jer,” Caroline says, “Talk to her.”
“I…”
“He’s nervous.” Caroline tells Bonnie’s picture, tells Bonnie. “I don’t know if it’s because he’s scared you can’t hear him or if he’s more scared you can. Either way, he’s nervous, so cut him some slack. He’s been helping me out these last couple of days and you’ve done that enough to know how draining that can be.”
“It wasn’t hard.” Jeremy quickly interjects.
“Not to me.” Caroline smiles, placing her hand on his face and forcing him to look at the picture of Bonnie.
“It wasn’t hard.” He repeats to Bonnie, “Caroline…Caroline’s a good friend. You always had good taste in friends, it was me that never made sense.”
“Made sense to all of us, right Bon?” She says, still looking at the photo, “But that’s not the point. The point was that she loved you, even if you were the worst person ever. Which, trust me Damon already had dibs on. Bonnie might not be able to say that, but she’d want me to tell you that. I can see it in her eyes.”
“We weren’t even dating when this picture was taken-”
“Magic, Jeremy.” Caroline says, “It can do all kinds of things. Good and bad.”
Jeremy stares at the picture for a while and Caroline alternates between looking at it and looking at him.
“Do you want some time with her alone?” Caroline asks, “I’ll go to the car, I won’t be able to hear you there.”
“I don’t-I don’t know what to say.”
“Look, I don’t know if Bonnie can hear us or not. I don’t know if the universe is a cruel thing destined only to disappoint and break us.” Caroline says, “But I know that looking at her, talking to her, even if she can’t talk back, always makes me feel better. Because it’s Bonnie. And somehow Bonnie always knows how to make me feel better, even when she’s not here.”
She stood up, wiping the dirt from her jeans.
“I’ll be waiting in the car, take as long as you need.”
--
Jeremy comes back to the car with red rimmed eyes and Caroline takes him home, to her home.
Mondays were her Jeremy day after all. And Monday could start early this week.
When they get home, she gets the vodka from the kitchen and sits it down on the counter in front of him.
“Don’t expect this to happen again.” She says.
--
After the vodka, that Caroline drinks most of because despite all his bad habits Jeremy’s still kind of a light weight, like Caroline used to be, but Caroline’s a vampire now and can drink all humans under the table if she wants to.
Then they move on to the whiskey.
(The cycle repeats, more for Caroline than Jeremy, but in the end she’s giggling and he’s doing whatever the manly version of that is according to him.)
Then she pulls out the scotch, a broad smile on her face, and it’s clear she’s hammered by the victory on her face the exaggerated “shhh” as she puts a finger to her lips.
Jeremy stares at the bottle for a minute and tilts his head.
“Did you…steal that from Alaric?” He asks.
She giggles again and then shrugs. “Maybe.” Is all she says but the smile gives her away.
He just laughs but cracks it open anyways.
He pours them both a small glass, his smaller than hers.
“Why are you helping him?” Jeremy asks.
“Because someone needs to.”
“But Elena-”
“Elena doesn’t want to. And god knows what her training sessions with Damon actually taught her…”
“But he hurt you.”
“He wasn’t himself.” Caroline downs her drink and pours another one.
“It doesn’t matter, it’s all you see. I know.” Jeremy says. “Besides your helping Elena too, your trying to find a way back into Mystic Falls when everybody gave it up as a lost cause, and I know your still trying to find Stefan-because your you. And now you took me on as a project. How have you not exploded?”
“It’s just about…figuring things out. I’ve always had projects, I know how to make them work.”
“Am I a project?” He asks.
“No,” Caroline shakes her head violently and the room spins a little with all the alcohol in her system, “You’re just Jeremy. Jeremy who I’ve known forever, who helped save my life, who-you’re just Jeremy. You could never be a project.”
He moved fast, and later she would think it was all the alcohol, that made it seem so quick and so slow all at once, but then his lips were on hers and his hands on her arms pulling her off her stool and between his legs, trying to bring her as close as possible.
(It should have felt wrong.
It should have.
They had visited Bonnie’s grave hours before. Talked about her, remembered her and what made her so special.
They had picked out the flowers together.
It should have felt wrong.
But it didn’t.)
--
Caroline pushed herself closer.
Her nails gently scraping at whatever skin she could reach, her hands traveling up into his hair and pulling just enough to make him groan as his lips traveled down her throat and made her head tilt back.
His hands wandered underneath her shirt, felt bare skin, so very warm against her cold dead skin and she pressed herself closer, wanting to feel more of it. Wanted more and more.
Wanted him.
She pulled back, looked into his deep brown eyes, too much like Elena’s and all his own at the same time, and kissed him again, her tongue slipping into his mouth, her teeth nipping at his bottom lip (but never drawing blood), her hands sliding down his neck.
He pulled away, this time the one to look her in the eye and she didn’t know what he saw, it wasn’t Elena and it wasn’t Bonnie, it was just her.
“Do you want this?” He asks.
It’s a loaded question, like a gun pointed to her head because it wouldn’t kill her but chances are it would hurt like hell in the morning (for the both of them.)
But still-
“Yes.”
--
They stumbled their way to her bed.
Tripping over each other as they tried to strip each other of their clothes, tripping over their shoes, tripping over the towel Jeremy had left there earlier that morning.
(At some point Caroline would remember and scold him for that, but they wouldn’t be half naked at the time.)
She reached for his belt buckle and then whipped the belt off and threw it across the room, breaking one of the lamps in the process.
“Never liked it anyways.” She says, not bothering to check to see what it was that she had broken.
Instead, she kissed him again. His lips tasted like so many different kinds of liquor, she could dissect them all, but mostly he just tasted like him. Or how she always imagined how he would taste (though she didn’t remember imagining that since once in junior year when he had been in a suit, his hair slicked back, and she had been horny and all alone), he tasted familiar and like home should taste, with just a hint of something spicy because Jeremy had always been breaking the rules.
When he finally has her on her back and is pulling off her jeans and then his own, she smiles up at him, because maybe she didn’t know it then, but maybe she had wanted this for a long time. Even if it would only ever last one night.
(She remembered Jeremy.
She remember a younger Jeremy with both his parents, rebellious but with light shining through the cracks. And she remembered him afterwards broken and looking for an escape. She remembered him finding one in all the wrong places. She remembered him being the big hero. She remembered him dead in her arms. She remember him in so many ways. But mostly she remember the way he smiled when he was happy, like he had won something that no one else could ever have.
He was looking at her like that now.)
Jeremy leaned down over her, his body splayed over hers, as he went in for another kiss, and she flipped the tables on him easily enough.
Mid-kiss they had changed positions.
“In case you didn’t notice,” She says breaking the kiss, “I’m kind of an on top kind of a girl.”
“I kind of did.” He tells her.
But then her bra is gone, and she’s rubbing against him, and there’s very little talking after that.
--
She ends up with her head against his chest again as he sleeps.
Beat-beat.
Her heart makes the same noises, but it’s different somehow. False. A lie.
So she lies with her head against his chest, and soaks up what she can, because she can imagine how the morning will go.
Mondays will need to find a new designation and she’ll have to talk to someone about checking up on him, to make sure she didn’t break him anymore than he was already broken. That he wasn’t returning to bad habits.
Caroline plans it all out in her head (that’s what she does of course) as she listens to his heart beat again and again, like it’s some kind of a miracle.
And in some ways, she thinks it probably is.
--
When Jeremy wakes up, he stares down at her, looks into her eyes and does not run away, does not flinch, does not seem like he’s expecting anyone else.
“You look confused.” He pushes hair from her face and his hand is warm and she wants to keep that warmth forever.
“I just-I didn’t know how you’d react.”
“To awesome sex? Usually well.” Jeremy smiles.
She can’t help but giggle back.
“Well, yeah, but I meant with me.” Caroline says.
Jeremy is silent as he looks her over, trying to find something in her eyes, on her face, in her body language (only she isn’t moving, just blinking up at him).
“What?”
“I’m trying to figure out…if this is about Bonnie or about all the people that screwed you up.”
“I was talking about Bonnie.” She says quietly looking away.
He put his finger under her chin, made her (as much as he could) look up at him, “I was wrong before, when I thought it would be better to be dead, that it would hurt less.” He says, “You were right, like always, it just makes the wounds bigger. And I can’t imagine how much that must hurt.”
He pulls closer, her head resting under his chin.
“I’ll talk to Elena. She’ll train Alaric. And I’ll tell Matt that she needs someone to talk to about Bonnie, but you need a break and everything else we’ll figure out together.”
“We?” She asks.
“Unless you’re sick of me already.”
“No, I just…I haven’t been a ‘we’ in a long time.” Caroline says.
“We’ll figure that out too.”
She kisses him, lets the sheet drop as she climbs on top of him, and kisses him harder, only letting go to let him breathe (she has to remember that now, he’s supernatural but still human, still breakable, still needs things like air).
“So this top thing? I’m never going to get to do it?” He asks.
“We’ll see.” She shrugs, giving him a quick kiss on the lip and then starts going lower.
--
They’re still moving in rhythm when the phone on Caroline’s bedside table buzzes, set on silent from the night before.
Stefan’s name flashes and disappears, as Caroline and Jeremy groan together as he sits up, burying himself further inside her, her nails digging into his back.
“This is Caroline Forbes and if you’re hearing this I’m either busy, in class, avoiding you, or your name is Damon Salvatore. Take the hint or leave a message after the beep.”
“Caroline…” Stefan says.
She doesn’t hear him.
All she hears is Jeremy calling her name, the sound of it echoing off the walls.