(no subject)

[wholeworldoutthere]

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.

Comments

[brightestlight]

"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.

[wholeworldoutthere]

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.

[brightestlight]

"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."

[wholeworldoutthere]

"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.

[brightestlight]

"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.