wholeworldoutthere | Entries tagged with caroline forbes

Right on the heels of her relief, restlessness seems to steal into Caroline. Klaus has absolutely no problem following her to the holodeck, if that is what she wants. They take Star, too, because the wolf has earned the right to run around the countryside, after spending so long in a cramped space with so many humans, and not mauling any of them.

They lock the door once they're inside, and since Caroline seems to hesitate which simulation to run, Klaus speaks up. "Computer. An isolated village in Eastern Europe. Twenty-first century Earth." That way Star can run as much as he wants, and they can have a feast if Caroline feels like it.

Klaus certainly feels like it.

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.

When Klaus gets beamed back to the Porta Ianulis, he's still feeling under the weather, to say the least. He was partly healed, because otherwise, he's fairly certain he would have ended up in a puddle of his own blood in quarantine, but his left arm is still lacerated, and the neater wounds over his ribcage are barely just healed. He's only been given two blood bags during his little stay in quarantine, which is not helping this frustratingly slow rate of healing. He's sore, his arm is a mess of numb pain when he keeps it still, acute pain when he moves it, and he's hungry beyond words: the few people he crosses on his way back to his room are an incredibly tempting meal.

The tempting meals he crosses also happen to look at him oddly, because his shirt is in tatters, his lacerated arm can be seen through the tatters, and he is full of dried blood. His blood.

He's not sure whether Caroline will even be in the room, given how he left the day before, that day of all days, and didn't come back. The door slides open, and he sees her curled up on the bed in one of his t-shirts, something she hasn't done in a long time, with Star asleep where Klaus usually is. The door closes behind him and he stands there and watches her for a moment, before he walks over to the replicator, asking it for blood in a whisper. No need to wake her up.

He feeds, for a long time. Then he sits by his desk and tilts his head back, staring up at the ceiling for a good five minutes. His arm is resting across his stomach, painfully slowly healing. After a moment, he tilts his head back up and looks at Caroline and Star. A little while later, and he stands up to go get the shower. He rips the remains of his shirt right off his back, instead of trying to take it off, and manages one-handedly to get rid of the rest of his clothes.

The water only makes the pain worse, but he needed that shower.

Klaus beams in with everybody else, but a quick look around assures him that Caroline's body isn't here, and he knows just where to look. He ignores everyone, although on his way he finds John Watson and gets him to give him a proper splint. Watson clearly thinks that Klaus is a little insane for having walked even this little with his makeshift splint, and tries to get Klaus to take a crutch, at least, but Klaus ignores him.

Once he's fixed up enough that he can walk - painfully, but that's nothing, and the broken bone will have mended in a couple of hours - Klaus is on his way again, towards the morgue.

It's not an easy thing, bringing Caroline's body back to their room on a broken leg, but he does it anyway, and changes out of his Port Royal clothes. He loosens Caroline's corset, feeds her a little of his blood in case it helps, and waits. He's taken her ring off, and he's holding it and wondering what to do with it. Now that they're cut off from the bloody witch, it might not subject the wearer to her will anymore, and yet still work against the sun, if she enchanted it for that at all. Best not to trash it, but he doesn't like it.

Eventually, his leg mends, and he's sketching again, the ring abandoned on the desk - sketches of Caroline in Port Royal.

And eventually, Caroline moves, and it's an effort not to crowd her. Instead, he puts pen and paper down and leans his forearms on his thighs, body angled towards the bed where he laid her out.

( It won't protect you from anything other than de sun, though, so you still have ta be careful. )

( You souls lost on de way to da port? Nothin' but trouble dis way. I was leavin'. )

( Are you high? )

By the time Klaus reached their room, he still had the bottle in hand, although he hadn't drunk any more from it. The taste of it was still on his lips, tart and slightly spicy, like nothing he'd ever tasted before, and the strong punch of alcohol had settled warmly in his stomach.

She would have made a fine vampire, he thought again, as the door opened, and he walked in and put the bottle down on his desk.

Sunday -

( It's a good half hour after everything has stopped that Klaus hears about it. )

It was just bloody perfect. Apparently Caroline did not want to see him in private, which would have been a step up on her not wanting to see him at all if the only reason for seeing him wasn't that she needed something from him. Whatever it might be, Klaus had very little idea, or too many ideas, which all boiled down to the same thing: he did not know what it might be, but he figured that he was not going to like it.

There were not many things at all that he would like coming from her, at this stage.

He reached the Porta Ianulis within a minute or so, and leaned his back against a wall, hands in his pockets, gaze vacant. He only looked up when Caroline walked near, his face betraying nothing of whatever he might be feeling. He needed no switch to compartmentalise.

"What do you need?"

Hours. Klaus wasn't sure how long it had been, but it had been hours, hours since he'd gotten back, hours since he'd started looking for Caroline. People had seen her, she had been back, but no one knew where she was now, and he wouldn't take it. She would not be one of the missing people, not if it took beating his way through every wall in the station to make sure.

He would give it some time, though, a day or two before he got started on that particular plan. At least one plan, because he needed some proper sleep, now that he had eaten enough of what blood the replicators provided. He only fell asleep after a couple more hours, and he fell asleep at his desk, over an unfinished drawing of Caroline.

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.

That morning, Klaus did wake up with a rather horrible hangover. It was far worse than the one he had had in Venice, and it took a lot longer to vanish. A couple of hours, after sufficient blood-drinking, even if the blood provided by the replicator seemed particularly horrid. Eventually, he felt good enough to function, and saw Caroline's message when he checked his comm.

He still did not know exactly what he felt, only that he needed to know more, and now that it sounded as if she had told someone else of what they were...

It took him a while to find her, because he had expected her to seek out the company of others. She had never struck him as a solitary person, but he had never known her after an abduction to a space station, either. He ended up finding her at the end of one of the long dead-end hallways on the second level, and as soon as she spotted him he raised his hands in the international sign for 'I come in peace.'

"I want to know what happened to Finn," he told her, slowly walking closer, but something in his voice made it more like a request than it usually would have been.