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The city is more alive late in the night than in the day.
The dingy alleys are sedated, silent as a cemetery on those nights she can hear the wind susurrates its secrets with the merest of brush, the windows are closed, shutters rolled down and flying curtains allowing nothing but glimpses at outlines of swaying shadows cut into near-blackness, the skyscrapers are enclosed in wan silver light, the roads are deserted and seemingly unlimited as the headlights-illuminated expanses spread out, the streets are calm after the activity of the day.
The world seems asleep.
The world seems dead.
But like for many things, it’s only the beginning.
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After the sun dies on its last citrus-red rays and before the night sky slant to submit to the day, appearances are the first thing to fall apart.
The shroud of normality vanishes and the dingy back alleys are vibrating with hushed whispers and ugly shouts that break the silence, the closed windows conceal the vices boxed in that arch up in the confined space, stretch out like they can’t in the judging candescent daytime, the silver lights distract from the multicolored neon-bright signs of entertainment all over the city, the roads indicate who couldn’t get out before dusk settled, the streets hide the stealthiest night creatures.
In the city that never sleep, monsters made a nest for themselves, prowl smoke-hidden the neighborhood and startle unsuspecting meals who waste their last breath to scream a soundless scream, bone-shredded bodies found in the middle of torn chunks of their own flesh and attributed to various criminals, bloodbaths that easily disappear when water licks at stains.
Thankfully, nobody pays enough attention to see through the cracks and connect split-second understanding with lifelong rationality.
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When they can no longer find refuge in their convenient ignorance, compulsion has to be used.
It’s always the case when Caroline throws a party.
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It wasn’t always like that.
Caroline Forbes was kind, once, or tried her hardest to be. She wanted simple things, had dreams not that singular for a teenage girl; she craved love, and acceptation, and friendship and nice things and she was willing to pay for it, accepted to bend her spine and crack her bones so that she might fit into a shape people she loved and who claimed to love her would choose.
Caroline Forbes bit molar-shaped ugly holes in her tongue from holding up everything she had to say but couldn’t, she presented her hands for people to step over uncaringly and thought with shyly fluttering hope in her stomach that they would hold them instead, she scrubbed away the spit of their condescension and pretended it was never there, trapped herself in a claustrophobic basement where they decided they could finally love her if she acted like someone she wasn’t.
Caroline Forbes died on February 26, 2010. One moment she was talking to her friend, and the next air was everywhere except in her lungs. No one noticed, no one cared and no one would.
She died and memories came flooding back to her, slicing through a clueless brain, filling in blanks with blood-soaked horror and humiliation she was forced to see again, replaying right before her very eyes like a bad cliche horror movie. The stupid superficial blonde cheerleader who stupidly goes home with that guy who so obviously isn’t that into her and whose sexual promiscuity gets her abused and nearly killed but doesn’t because the brooding hero saves her for the virtuous heroine, the one who really matters in that movie. You’ve already seen that movie. You don’t care about that girl. But then again, no one did.
She killed that night. First, the nurse, and then, her abuser. She relished in the blood spilling on her tongue, in the screams she ripped with razors from Damon’s throat, a crimson rain bursting from his chest, had played with her toy for days as Stefan and Elena and Bonnie were running around looking for Katherine who had evidently abducted people Elena cared about to get to her out of sheer viciousness. She listened to the fluid of his body leak as his pissed and shit himself like an animal, shackled up to the Lockwood cellar wall, and then she staked a sharp wooden weapon into his heart.
She didn’t look back as she left the town.
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Once or twice every year, Caroline hosts a party that is more a rallying point for vampires to save beneficial connections with the oldest and the strongest of their kind than an opportunity to relax and appreciate the evening, even though their motives mingle and overlap in frenzy hedonism at the end of those nights she always finds herself panting with her dress blood-damp and a body close to her as she drains it dry, with the rest of her guests feeding or dying, or watching in a sleepy fog where fear can’t break through compulsion.
Everything is golden.
Caroline thinks with the nostalgia reserved for ancient dreams, for the phantom of past expectations, that this is exactly the kind of party a little small-town girl would have looked at with earnest stars glinting in her young eyes. The Old Hollywood kind, pretentious but elegant and dignified. Pale honey everywhere, splashed from the constellate crystals attached at the chandeliers by fine ropes of dusky rose pearls down to the high ornate walls and taffeta curtains and cold marble floor her heels clink over.
Her frozen-green dress rubs like liquid warmth against her bare skin as she dances with her guests, twirls and sways and laughs with the others at the latest insignificant gossip they hear. It’s like a vicious game they intentionally drag out, a different kind of chase they partake in as the humans mill around with a confidence that comes with wealth and power and who forget the fragility of life, paper-thin, easy to tear through.
She’s standing alone near the buffet where she’s just ruined her perfect manicure with macaroons-brown strains, laugh not yet having died in her throat and hand flicking up to grab a champagne flute, bracelets jingling down her forearm, when the crowd is cut into two neat sides.
Klaus emerges smoothly from the space he cleanly cut into the room, wearing a coal-black tuxedo with a bowtie, offering a few nods to the vampires whose back twist down with bowed heads and pointedly ignoring those don’t with a sort of indulgent disinterest. Murmurs vibrate and resound across the assembly, a thousand drops of water falling into the chilled icy surface of a lac in winter, waking up the nearly drowsy serene gathering; some know him, know his reputation, know who she is to him, others doesn’t and look with imperious questions and doubts that their survival instincts stifle.
In the end, it doesn’t matter.
He doesn’t concern himself with them, isn’t there to reassert his authority but for her. He wears that boyish smile that makes his forever-youthful face wrinkle around his eyes and lips, he has that look in his eyes that punch into her chest because it doesn’t—never ever—graze at anyone else’s form, and from where she stands with a sparkling champagne flute she hasn’t tasted yet his smile flashes hello, sweetheart and it was a long time and I missed you and many other things he won’t say with so many ears listening.
And then it changes.
Klaus pauses. The two men to her right still. Someone else says something, urgently. That something must be important
In the blink of an eye, in the backspace it takes for thoughts to roll back, for her to understand—
The room erupts into a chaos of bursting organs and horror-stricken screams and fleeing feet and flying stones and tumbling bodies as Klaus cleaves flesh from bone.
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Her scowl is steadfast as he compels the last police person to leave and report a fight that devolved into some bleeding but nothing serious. The man nods, in a daze he won’t get out from so soon, and repeats the words, the paramedic by the small pond do the same and they both leave with compulsion-induced steps and self-confidence.
The bloodied footprints marking the floor are carefully measured as they make their way back to a fuming Caroline sitting on a plush padded chesterfield sofa that was maroon when she brought it but turned ruddy-red a few hours ago, holding her anger tight when she feels it quietly slips away from her with every minute like a small fragile-winged butterfly. Which she knows is what he wants, has waited for, stalling for time.
“Elijah’s men just found the last of your guests. They’ve all been compelled,” Klaus says with the resigned acceptation of a man who knows he’s not getting away with this one with the marked absence of an apology. “I admit,” he adds when she doesn’t flinch a muscle, arms still folded over her chest and neck metal-rigid, “that I should have chosen another course of action.”
“I can’t believe it,” she bleats, jumping to her feet and throwing at him a gold-rimmed cushion he catches easily with amusement.
“No, you know what?” She inhales sharply through her nose. The pestilential odor of decaying bodies hit her nose, makes her wrinkle it. “That’s exactly what I expect from you. You just don’t think of anyone else but your own precious person.”
Her words sting, she knows it when his jaw clenches, juts out, amusement fading from his eyes. He wouldn’t care about that remark coming from someone else, not if she wasn’t included in it as a faceless unimportant person, worthless to him, but his eyes narrow as he says, almost disapprovingly, “You know that’s not true.”
She knows. But she doesn’t want to delve into the barbed maze of their latest breakup tonight, had anticipated none of what happened tonight. The ends to her parties are always messier, if she’s honest, more gore and more screams and more bodies strew around like the cast-off broken dolls she’d get bored with as a little girl.
Caroline ducks her head, fiddles with her bracelets, looks around and feel an old itch to clean, the disorder making her insides churn unpleasantly, and finally glares back at him. “No one’s going to come to my parties before a long time now. Not if they think they will get chopped off on a whim.”
She flops down, refusing to look at him.
She hears a rush of air, feels a hand touch her jaw, tipping her chin up and the other combing her curls, and she swallows thickly. The firm touch of his hand is charring, leaves imprints-blackened burns that never disappear, that she can always feel to the marrow of her bones. It’s everlasting. Like them. Like a curse.
“Who were they?” she asks before he can say anything, referring to the pile of arms and feet sticking out of a huge garbage bag.
“Old enemies,” he answers, smirking with devilish glee.
“They tried to overrule me, questioned my authority, gathered more than a few who thought they could kill me without killing themselves.” Gleaming white teeth show over the edge of his cherry lips, not in a smile. “Those three escaped,” he goes on with regret. That he hasn’t made it worse, last longer, she sees. Understands, really, because she’s learned that the only answer to an attack is to eliminate it, to hit harder, to hit fatally, otherwise the impending threat never cease, not for an obsessive brain like hers and a paranoid mind like his, like an analog clock, the hands rotate and circle and overlap and eventually come straight to the same point they started from. If they can’t reach their goals, can’t get rid of a problem, can’t find a solution—time stops. Everything stop, freeze and burn in a puddle, and freeze again, indefinitely—until they get what they want.
She frowns at the triangular table where hot and cold intricate dishes remain untouched, shakes her head and thinks that this is the saddest excuse for a party she’s ever had.
“You are officially dead to me,” she grumbles, but it’s half-hearted, at best.
A laugh slither along the side of her jaw, a pulse of breath that punishingly reminds her where he has touched her face tonight, every other times he touched her everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, not one inch of her skin uncovered by his skin and lips and tongue, oh—Her breathing quicken, copper still present in her mouth from the appetizer she’s had earlier, from the less than human-potent blood in the ballroom. She closes her eyes, chest heaving slowly, savoring the sensation of blood coursing through her body to the apex of her thighs, skin too sensitive in the room that feels stifling-hot all at once.
His eyes are the first thing she sees when she opens them again, swirling with unmasked desire, gold-splotched and raw. The entranceway to his mind isn’t open to her but she doesn’t need to slip in the lock to see what he want to do with her right now, shoulders set straight with tension and glance flickering to the slit of her dress that almost reach her hip in that position—he wants to turn her around, bend her and fuck her and watches her takes him from behind.
She raises up so fast he’s forced to take a step back, drawing out of his daze like someone might blink up at the blazing morning; it takes a while to adapt.
“I think you should stay tonight”, she starts, her intention clear when she runs her eyes all over him. “To help me clean.”
Neither of them mentions they have minions for that.
“Of course,” he drawls, the quality if his voice rougher now, “that’s the least I can do.”