wholeworldoutthere | The Night After Jurassic Park (March 5th, 2am)

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caroline forbes

The Night After Jurassic Park (March 5th, 2am)

It's not like Caroline not to be there late at night, and at first, Klaus thinks it might be that the lift's refusing to take her up to their floor. It wouldn't be the first time. Sometimes, they also get locked in their room, or out of it. But he lets her be, anyway, and he paints, instead. He's been thinking about his time in Narnia again, since he first drank from Regina, and he needs something to occupy his brain.

The brushes have taken a little used to, but he likes the new style it's created, in his hand. Something he's never done before, but something he still meant to do. And painting calms him down; it's always calmed him down. He's taken the biggest canvas he has, and he's painted something in dark colours, glowing eyes in the night, shapes of almost beings, and yet it's nowhere near as eerie as he'd set out for it to be, and he likes it that way. It's not actually threatening, and it was a pleasant realisation, halfway through, when he could still have taken it in another direction. It's not threatening, it's family.

By the time he's done, he heads towards his communicator to check the time, right when it beeps. A text, from Caroline, asking him to meet her in the holodeck. No, not asking him. Telling him she needs him. It's enough that he's out of their room in a heartbeat, leaving a puzzled wolf there on his own, as he heads towards the holodeck at full speed (such as it now is), the door sliding open for him. There's small smudges of paint on his face and arms - a little dark blue over his right brow and on his left forearm, an ochre near his jaw, some white by his right wrist - but he clearly could care less. Caroline needs him, that's all he knows.

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She looks up at him when he says her name, and everything about her looks like an animal in flight, a deer in the headlights. Like she's only just realised where she is and what's happening. "I don't know what I expected," she said, and there it is again, any time she's not holding onto something, her hands go. "We're monsters. We kill. We hunt and eat and kill-" And her voice is getting strained, even as she grips her upper arm so tightly that there'll be bruises.

"We're predators," Klaus agrees, and corrects her at the same time. "We hunt, and eat, and kill." His chest feels tight from watching her, her body language, and hearing the strain in her voice. "And we're human. We hope, we struggle, we love."

He's losing her as soon as he's had her. He can see it in her eyes, and it's all he can to remain calm, and not go tearing through the throats of every cheering fan above their heads.

"We're not human. We do things they do, but we're not-" She stared at him. "You've killed thousands of people, and you're in love with me," she said, her voice oddly raw. "How? How does it not consume you? They said-" Her voice cracked. "If I did this, they'd hate me. They'd kill me, because I'd just be a monster, but I'm not-" She's confused and terrified, her arms crossed again so her hands stop."You're not just a monster." And it's got her in knots. "How do you live with it? Knowing you've ended their lives?"

"There's no other way, love," he answers, because his own personal how isn't going to help, although he's fairly certain this isn't either. "There's only so long anyone can hate themselves." You stop, eventually, and you find a way to accept what you are, a way to live with it. He's not even sure he could say how, exactly.

"If they were people-" And her voice is strangled, and she's not getting more calm. "How can I- I want it. I want this, Klaus, I want- But I-" And she's so pulled into herself that if she could, she'd just disappeared. "He called you a freakshow and I'm the same."

The crowd above them goes wild, and she startles like the afformentioned animal - backing away from the slope of the bleachers, and she's seconds from backing into the quarterback without even realising it.

It's the only reason Klaus moves towards her, because the last thing she needs is to trip over a body. He puts on a burst of speed, and he stops her before she backs up into the corpse, a hand on her arm. "So. Am I a freakshow?" he inquires almost conversationally, but his eyes on hers are a little too intense for that.

She almost says what she'd decided, when this came up. If he is, I am, too.

Instead, it's a strangled word - the Yes coming as if it was yanked from the depths of her, and she's not talking about him, even though she is. That both of them are, that they're something other. "I want to kill people, Klaus-" And she doesn't know what to do.

"If they were people, I would have just- I did that. I killed- The man I killed, he had a family. They all have families, and how can I not be- how can I not care?"

The Yes feels like it's torn out his heart. Rationally, he knows that it's about her perhaps more than about him, but he can't help his emotional response, the devastation he feels. All he can do is shut down.

"You tell me, love," he answers, and it's his fake nonchalance all over again, and he's moving now, grabbing the stand-in quarterback by his collar and dragging him away from her, dropping him beside the cheerleader as if he were so much dead meat. He is. The bite at Klaus's neck is itching as it scars over, and he wants to kill someone all over again.

"I didn't force you into any of it." It's quieter, and more real than the nonchalance a second ago.

"What?"

She says it softly, and her face twists. "You think I think that?" And it's there, hurt and something deeper, that he thinks she'd blame this on him, that he thinks that of her. She shakes her head, and straightens her back, her words clear even if they're quiet.

"I asked you to come here, and I'd already torn his throat out."

She says it flatly, like there isn't something in what Klaus said that makes her hurt deep inside, that makes her want to ask him what the hell he thinks of her anyway, now that they're being honest and it's not sunshine and roses and apparently all the chips are on the table. Because he's been the one who has always told her to be herself, and she's trying, desperately, and now she's getting this. And she takes it somehow both as an admonishment and a decrying of responsibility on his part when she hadn't assigned him any.

"My point is," and there is irritation clear in his tone, "I don't have the answers for you."

The irritation is with himself as much as her, and it's there in his eyes, too, in the way he looks at her. He's never been any good at being hurt without being angry, and this is no exception.

"Right." She just sort of stops, then.

"Right, of course you don't." And that's when it's actually a danger, the thing he's been afraid of all this time. Not until now, not until he's drawn the line in the sand and what's she's hearing isn't what he's said, what she's hearing is you're on your own.

And for the first time, she doubts. She doubts her choosing him, she doubts a lot of things.

"Computer, end program." She says it quietly, and just like that, it's gone, the silence is deafening, the transition from the dull roar of earlier. The hunger comes roaring back - not as loud as it was before because she'd fed from him, but the sudden emptiness of her stomach made her pull in a breath.

She's always been afraid of it, that she was asking too much, needing too much, that he was supporting her too much, and yet whenever she asked him something, he always turned it back onto her, that she needed to make the choices for herself. "Do you think I blame you?"

And then, her face twisting, her jaw tight. "Are you done with this?" And by this, she doesn't mean the program, she means them. He doesn't have the answers, and it's not just that. It's a lot more than that, for her.

"I think you can't hate yourself without hating me, so you tell me," he answers her two questions at once. Should he be done with this? This is a make or break moment, and this is what it's about, for him. The sudden hunger only adds to his frustration, and he doesn't want to know why she had to end the programme.

He has killed thousands, and he's never pretended otherwise, but this is when it matters.

She's so tired of all of this, and she feels it, she feels where she can just push, somewhere inside her, and she wouldn't care. She does, and it would solve so many problems, to not care. To be herself, to be whatever Katherine made her into. To be a vampire and embrace it.

It wouldn't be hard. She wouldn't care, she knows, if he ended this. If he didn't. If they killed everyone, if she killed everyone.

But right now, she cared. Right now, she wondered if he was having second thoughts. If she'd been wrong, even though every bit that she knew him said that there was something there. Something more than before, in the last months.

"I don't hate myself." She said it succinctly, and it was honest. She didn't. She hated what her friends had done to her - putting her in this position. She wished that she could somehow be past all of this, that she could just jump past it, and not care about the people that she killed. It was odd, she didn't really think of the deputies, even though she'd known them, but when you feed from someone, when you kill them - to her, it was different.

And she knew why, and the reason had a lot to do with Bonnie. "I asked you two questions." And, as far as she's concerned, he didn't answer either of them, and they were possibly the most important questions she's ever asked him.

"And I answered them," he tells her, feeling even more vulnerable for the hope beating inside his chest again. It takes more self-control than he usually exercises not to fall back into anger again, because if she's saying that, it means she doesn't understand, and he'll need to spell it out.

Because it would be so easy to push her away, make sure she couldn't hurt him any more by doing it first, but he doesn't want to, not while there's still hope. He's always thought that hope was one of the most cruel of feelings.

"Five minutes ago, you said I was in love you," he answers her last question, and she might not think it's an answer again, but it's his, and he's not going to play her game of having two conversations at once, but really neither, so he's sticking to just one question at a time. "Now you think I might be done with you?"

"You can be done, even if you love someone," she says, and she's different then she was before, when she was asking those questions, because it's not safe. That much, she's picked up. To not ask him those things, when before she'd thought it was safe.

"You love me, and I know it makes you human. I'm asking if you have enough faith in me to-" And she revises what she was saying, then. "If you thought I'd blame you. If you thought that's the kind of person I am. I asked you here. I needed you here, with me, and that may have been the wrong choice."

"I don't blame. I don't hate what you've done, mostly. Honestly, what I want? What I want is to figure out how to fix what's wrong with me. But it's not about blaming you. I have never blamed you for something I've done."

"I never said you have, I was making a point," Klaus points out, again, because clearly it didn't register with her the first time he explained, or she wouldn't still be stuck on it.

He strides towards her, Original-on-nanites-fast. "What is it you think is wrong with you, exactly?"

"I don't have an issue killing people," she says, staring up at him. "I've killed people by snapping their necks. It was the right choice, I don't regret it. They weren't even trying to hurt me."

She pauses. "I can't- Every time I feed on somebody - I mean, except the last time, until after-- My dad-" And that's when it falters, when her eyes are shiny. "He tortured me. My father strapped me to a chair and showed me blood and when my face would change, he'd open the window so I would fry. Bonnie told me that if I ate anyone, anyone ever, she would just make my ring not work. Just like that, she'd kill me. I- I know they're wrong. I know they are, I just- I am so-" And she doesn't know the world for it; afraid maybe, or something else, but she's nearly crying.

"It's wrong. It's something that's wrong with me, there's no difference what I did and feeding, but it's not the same."

"There's nothing wrong with you," Klaus tells her, eyes on hers, as intense as he gets (which is a lot), before he pulls her into his arms, just like that, and strokes her hair. He would kill her father in a heartbeat, for having done this to her, and he never felt much fondness for the witch, but she has her uses.

Bennett witches. Can't live with them, can't perform a lot of specific rituals without them.

"You just have to break free of what they've taught you, love," he tells her, but that 'just' doesn't mean he thinks it's easy. "Find out who you really are. That'll take time. And I'll be here every step of the way." As long as she let him, anyway. But maybe even if she didn't.

"How can I break free of it when people hate me so much for it? My Dad-" And her voice cracked, and she's curled against him, and she's so tense and fraught and it's so hard. So hard. "It's not about you. You know it's not about you. You have to know- You have to know that."

"It's not about me," Klaus confirms, and he's never thought that it was. He did, and does think, that she might grow to hate him as a consequence, but it's never actually been about him. "It's all about you and them." He kisses her temple, fingers sliding through her hair. "It's about cutting ties with them, if you want to break free."

"He's dead. He's dead, and it's-" She was still with him, with Klaus, and she doesn't hate him. In all of this, she hasn't hated him, she'd just been afraid that he was going to hate her. That this whole mess she was in was going to be too much, and she's heard it from her mom and Matt and even Elena and Bonnie.

"Tell me you're okay with this. That I don't know how to do this, that it's not... easy. That it's-" She finally pulled back enough to look up at him. "That the part of it is wrong with me, and that it's not-" And she's not going to cry, she's not going to let herself. "It's going to be messed up for a while?"

"Love, we have all the time in the world," Klaus assures her, quietly but no less genuinely. "I'm not going anywhere. I want to see you become the vampire you're meant to be. It's going to be beautiful."

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The Night After Jurassic Park (March 5th, 2am)

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