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caroline forbes

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It's all at once the shortest and the longest walk back to his room. Her head is on his shoulder and her hair tickles his cheek, her fingers are intertwined and he never wants them to get there. There's something perfect about just this moment, but no matter that they're walking slowly enough, eventually they get there.

The door slides open for them and she hasn't been here since that first day, her arrival, and she's here now for reasons so entirely different - or so he hopes, a voice at the back of his mind says - not because he's the only person he knows, but because she chose to come here, to be here.

"Would you like a drink?" he asks as the door slides close behind them, and his fingers gently brush her cheek.

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"I'm..." he starts, but pauses, amused, as she gets enough blood for the both of them out, regardless of his answer, which is, "alright, but I'm apparently joining you all the same." It's amused, though, not reproachful, and he walks up to her and puts a hand in the small of her back as he grabs another glass, and takes a sip. It's not good, and he's pretty certain it's not going to help the migraine any more than it already has, but then she says his name, and he looks at her with raised eyebrows. "Yes?"

"What is this?" She asks him quietly, and it's obvious she doesn't mean the blood (maybe because there's no way to know what it is) but she means them, she means him with his hand on her back, means the way she wants to kiss him and the way they danced in his room barefoot, and she'd sat half in his lap while he told her about art. About the drawing, about the bracelet, about the dress and the invitation. About how he'd stared at her when she'd ran into him, the way he said I've got you and had her go, told her to run - and the way he'd both taken her life from her and given it back on her birthday.

She doesn't know what this is, but she's in it, she's in the middle of it, and she's sliding further down, not escaping, because she doesn't want to escape.

"Whatever you want it to be, love," he tells her, honestly, because that's the truth of it, in the end. Over time, there isn't much this couldn't become, he feels, so he tells her that, too, moving his hand to her shoulder, his thumb stroking her skin through his shirt, and his eyes are on her and he doesn't care about the sour aftertaste of terrible blood in his mouth, he only cares about answering her truthfully. "If you let it, it's only a beginning."

"I don't know," she admits, and it's that she doesn't know what it is, and she's big into labels, because labels let her sort her life, and maybe part of the reason she doesn't feel bad, that she's not lost in guilt is because he's not asking her to love him, and he's not asking her to date him, and he's letting her choose. And she's saying he's something different, but she doesn't know what that is, but all she knows--

"Reschedule," she says, and this time it's not a question, and her eyes flick from his mouth to his eyes. "Just today, okay?" Because she wants to spend- no, because she's going to spend it with him, and she moves enough to down the blood she needs so that her head calms down, so it stops pounding. "What do you want to know about me?" She asks it after she rinses out her mouth from the gross-tasting blood, and she pads to his bed, slipping back into it because she wants to curl up and be comfortable and she doesn't care if he sits on the edge of the bed or whatever, because she's not compromising. "And don't say everything."

"Okay," he says, easily, like it's the easiest thing in the world, and he does, abandoning the blood and picking up his communicator to send a quick message to Nuada, cancelling today's sparring session in a quick flurry of fingers over the digital keys.

"But I do want to know everything," he answers her when she speaks again, and he grabs his unfinished glass of blood and brings it over to his nightstand, puts down both blood and communicator there, and joins her on the bed, but not inside it. He's still in his t-shirt and boxers, and his head is still a very unhappy place migraine-wise, but it's okay because he's sitting beside her, legs crossed, and he reaches for her hand and threads their fingers together just because he can. "What will you study, in college?" It's a bit of a minefield, that topic, he understood that last night, but she'll have to learn to defuse those mines, and he really is interested, and convinced that she can and will go to college if she wants, when they get back to their world.

"I dunno," she said softly, her cheek pillowed on one hand as he holds the other. "I thought about being a journalist, for a while, but I mean, I can't be on TV or whatever because I won't change, and I'm-" She stops herself before she says what she's thinking, and she just shakes her head. "Maybe something to help people," she says quietly. because that's not the sort of thing that you have to really be smart for, you just have to understand people and if Caroline can do something, it's understanding people.

"I'm not really cut out- I mean, I think I'd be good at that. Like, working for, I don't know, those people on TV with the starving children, but actually helping the kids, not just giving them a bunch of money." And she's a little bit altruistic, but it's mostly because it's the only thing she can see herself doing, that people don't stay in long enough to know her, that she can be killed and it's okay, and that isn't going to have her jumping through impossible hoops with classes she can't pass.

All of it is fine, and he won't argue the being on TV thing, because she has a point, but he isn't certain she realises just how often she is gong to have to change lives, screentime or no screentime.

"The beautiful thing about being a vampire," he tells her, and reaches out for a drink of blood, because it's bad enough when it's slightly warm, so he won't let it cool off, "is that you can have a thousand jobs if you want. Or none at all. The ugliest thing is how often you'll have to move on. Change everything. Make certain that you can't run into someone that knew you twenty years ago."

It's part of why his family matters so much; it's difficult to keep anybody else in his life for any given length of time. It's why they turned so many of them in their early days, too. They didn't want to be alone.

"How do you have any friends?" She asked him it quietly, her fingers tight on his. This scares her, too, because Caroline feels like she's nobody without her friends, or without some friends. She's a bright star in a dark room, and she knows it, because she does it for them.

But in a hundred years, who is she going to have? "I don't want to talk about this, anymore," she says quietly, because she doesn't want to hear that you don't have them, that it's just being by yourself for hundreds of years, because she never wants to wonder if she'll regret telling him yes on her birthday.

"Promise me we'll always be able to be at least whatever this is. That if I come to you in 500 years, no matter what's happened, it'll be okay."

"Without knowing what this is, it's not a promise I can make," Klaus points out, because he has to. He doesn't want to hurt her, although he suspects his words will, but lying to her would hurt her more in the long run.

And he can't promise her, because there are some things that he couldn't forget, even from her. They couldn't be this in 500 years if she's betrayed him by then, a true betrayal, something worse than she's done for now, after he actually comes to trust her.

"Oh," she just says quietly, and yeah, she's sort of hurt, but she just says that one word, that Oh, because it's making this seem even bleaker than it was before, and she just nods. She knows she's probably not going to be around in 500 years, and she just sighs, and she then does that thing that's ask-telling. "Lay down." Because she knows what she wants, and when he lays down, when he does what she wants she just curls up against his side, and she's not going to push anymore, or say anymore, but just be here with him.

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