#which i listened to approx twelve fucktrillion times while working on this

[averseunhinged]

sup! i'm halfway thru a 30 day course of antibiotics and most of my fun writing time has been converted into gonna die if i don't nap immediately time. so, i've just been toddling along, but there's finally enough of something coherent to share.

this is another bit of i never said i had the answer, the sequel to 24/7 sylvia plath. i cannot express enough what hot messes klaus and caroline are in this. things do get slightly more relaxed later in the series, but they have to get out of s4 first, and hahahahahaha.

Being in the mere vicinity of the Gilberts’ home was excruciating. The place where his brother was murdered, where he was held with the body, where he’d had to make a decision, perhaps the first real choice he’d made in years, rather than a series of gut reactions along a path he’d long ago set for himself. Now, he felt the place as he always did the tingling prickle along his nerves hailing danger.

Caroline was staring at him silently, her face fallen into the hard blankness that made him more and more desperate to reach her each time it appeared. She wasn’t conscious of it; he was certain enough of that much. He knew her now. She didn’t think he knew her, but he did. Or maybe she did realize how far he’d penetrated the masks and walls and moats and fucking dragons with which she’d surrounded herself and could not abide it.

Caroline had two emotions she was comfortable expressing: a sort of weaponized optimism, grown increasingly brittle over the months he had known her, and cutting irritation. She was sarcastic, unintentionally calculating, sometimes deliberately manipulative, had a cruel streak the width and breadth of the Mississippi, and he adored her for all of it.

But by God, he wished she’d give him something to work with.

He wanted to leave. To run away and free himself from the double agony of both Kol and Caroline just out of his reach. But there was a creeping premonition through the weave of him that said leaving would permanently set himself and Caroline on separate paths. No maybe. No someday. No potential. Just two different lives, always lived apart.

Or perhaps it was that flicker in her eyes, the stuttering projector of unavoidable thoughts and inconvenient desires. She tried to bury it beneath the weight of his innumerous atrocities, but it was there in the way she looked at him. No matter the impassivity in her face, she was thinking. An overactive mind, his Caroline. One dismissed by nearly everyone she knew. Klaus tried to avoid their mistakes.

And he was thankful he did, because moments (too many breaths, in and out, waiting for her to banish him) later, that flicker happened again. It started a chain reaction chasing across her face, first her forehead wrinkling and then a pretty, pouting frown that was far more charming than it had any right to be.

She took a step towards him, a shuffling lurch that seemed not entirely under her control. He held his breath and waited through another step and then another one, until she was less than an arm’s length away. It had always been the sweetest form of torture, having her so close to him, while she was still so far from his. She lifted her right hand, and with the barest pressure of her fingertips, traced where the veins around his eyes would raise and blacken when the monster emerged. Her touch grew in confidence, pressing in and smoothing over his cheekbone. He could hardly contain the shudder of pleasure twisting through his spine when she ran her fingers through the shorn curls at his temple and skated around his ear, before she came to rest, palm firmly cupping his cheek.

It was too much. It was all he wanted. Her eyes on him and no-one else. Her mind filled with him the way his was with her whenever she was near, everyone and everything else become a blurred, inconsequential hum. Her skin against his, connecting him to her, to this moment. He couldn’t bear it, the press of her undeserved affection, her easy palliation of the marauding beast within him, and the way she continued staring at him, cutting him open as relentlessly as he had seeped into her.

And because he couldn't step away, couldn't force himself to lose her willing touch, he had to close his eyes to protect himself. She pulled in a breath. The universe stilled and Klaus prepared himself for what she might say.

“I need to take a shower.”

Well. She'd never been predictable, had she?

“I'm going to use yours.”

And there was that cruelty again.

“I mean one in your giant, creepy mansion. Not...not yours specifically.” Her voice wavered, faltering along with whatever unwitting courage she'd found.

He adored this part of her, too, the way she went from self-possessed confidence to awkward sweetness she no longer wore very well. It was as ill-fitting on her as Mystic Falls was becoming. Had they ever known what to do with her, this modern little dictator? Or had they always tried to shape her into what they wanted and finally washed their hands of her when she simply could not, no matter her efforts. She'd grow out of it all--this town, these people, her childhood unsurety--sooner rather than later.

It was all the more precious, catching her in these last moments of girlish embarrassment, the apples of her cheeks flushed fuchsia.

Caroline bit her lip and looked away. “It's the vervain? My house is on town water, so I've been showering at the boardinghouse, but everyone’s gone, and that place is scary even during the day, and I'm really not happy with—" Caroline broke off and sighed. “Anything. I'm not happy with anything, lately.”

For a moment, Klaus was paralyzed by the thought of Kol's skin sizzling under the Gilberts' attack. It took Caroline murmuring his name to realize he'd drifted off, looking in the window of this house he now loathed, his hand tightened around hers and brought down to his chest.

“Sorry,” she murmured, her face softening despite everything.

“Caroline,” he warned.

“Yeah,” she blurted quickly. “Yup. Definitely fine with not talking about…literally any of this. That is not our thing.”

“Finally admitting we do have a thing?”

“Never.” The apple of her cheek rounded, one corner of her mouth cheating up shyly.

The least of her smiles, but he’d take it.

“Why are you doing this? You hated me a moment ago.”

“I’m not--” Caroline trailed off as she tugged at her hand in his grip. “Klaus.”

“Caroline.” He ducked his head, forcing her to meet his eyes. “Don’t lie to me. Not tonight.”

It was her turn to shut her eyes to avoid his gaze. She took a calming breath before opening them and meeting him head on. “I don’t want to be here anymore. We can talk. And I’ll even try to be less squirrelly than usual. Just please not here.