Work Text:
Pale, milky skin, smooth and plump and curved, dips in between furrowed brows, sunlight hair and the kiss of death–that’s how he’ll always see her.
There had been a time in Klaus’ measly life when he would have dropped his jaw at the sight of her; a time when he would have stuttered his way into asking for a name, or maybe an invitation to dance at the edges of those huge bonfires his village used to host every month just after the full moon. When he was a child he did not understand the need of it, celebrating like fools after a night spent hidden in caves and quaking in terror with the lack of knowledge of whether they’d see the sun shine again. One of the elders–a lady he couldn’t be bothered to recall the name of–would tell him and his siblings that that was precisely the point of such festivities: a celebration for life anew, granted to them by the merciful gods who willed that they live another day. Rebekah loved hearing about it, would sometimes complain falsely just so the old woman could go and scold her. Always had a knack for fairytales, his sister. Maybe that is why after their mother made them drink the blood of the woman Klaus thought he loved and their father slayed them in their sleep and they woke up monsters, Klaus goes straight to the old lady’s hut.
He doesn’t remember her name, no, but he remembers the taste of her warm blood spilling down his throat, remembers her being too weak to even cry out in pain. He finishes quickly, drops her body like a lifeless rag to the floor and goes to wipe the smeared blood on his face with his arm. He turns for the first time not long afterwards, drops down to his knees and goes numb with pain. It doesn’t compare to what happens after, though, when he’s being held down while his mother steals a part of himself away from him. He and his siblings burn down the village and all the lifeless bodies, make a promise to each other that will haunt them for eternity (always and forever, because they were such fools), and Klaus does not think of the old lady ever again. His first kill, certainly not his last.
There are times he wishes he’d have met Caroline that way–painfully boyish, lightheaded from the mead he had forced down his throat to prove to his brothers that he was manly enough, hair half-tied back by a leather string, desperately human. That is the Niklaus she deserves; the one who would play sword fights with Henrik and let the boy win, the one who would have taken her on a walk through the woods just to talk about their hopes and desires, or perhaps a dip by the lake if the weather allowed it. That Niklaus would ravish her without tainting her beauty, would love her without taking her light. That Niklaus is dead.
Instead they meet when he’s but a hollow shell of the boy he used to be, a monster hiding his true face behind pretty words and prettier face, a wolf masking his solitude with big houses and forced loyalty. Caroline deserves better than Klaus, yes, but Klaus is a selfish man.
So he ravishes her, taints her beauty and takes her light. He doesn’t want to. He does it anyway; pushes her against the tree, uncaring if the bark scrapes her skin and claims her blood, pushes her harder, even, so that he could imprint his essence into her smooth skin and she would feel him in her bones for all the years to come.
It’s just a little taste, he tells himself when he drops to his knees in front of her open thighs and takes his first lick upwards. Just to satiate his thirst, he tells himself again, when she cries out his name and grips his hair to push his face closer. She’s bruised and bleeding and dirty when they finish hours later, and Klaus is terrified to meet her gaze because he knows that she will be dimmed down, and he doesn’t want proof that he has caused the sun to lose her light. She clears her throat, though, cracks an awkward joke that makes it impossible not to look at her, and once he does he swears his dead heart jumps right out of his chest. And how could he be so wrong, with a thousand years worth of knowledge in his wake? She isn’t tainted or dimmed or whatever it is he feared he’d see. Caroline, she’s glowing. That alone scares him even more.
And so he leaves, like he said he would, walks away and promises to never come back. He had satiated his thirst, hadn’t he? It should be enough to last him a few centuries. Except the second he takes the first step away from her he feels his need tug at the pit in his stomach, and every step afterwards he feels it harder and harder until it goes up and wraps around the organ in his chest that he thought was long gone. Klaus hates her, then, he tells himself. He hates her so much that he fills all of his sketchbooks with her face, the way her expression crumples up when she comes, the ‘o’ of her pink lips when he takes her breast into his mouth. He burns every single drawing the second he finishes creating them. It doesn’t make him hate her any less.
Sometimes there are nights he’d rather stake himself than see her face, but even without Caroline by his side he sees her. Klaus doesn’t sleep, partly because he has spent such long a time running from Mikael that he can’t do it soundly now anyway, and mostly because he knows he’ll dream of her. God, how he hates her, especially when she texts him about Tokyo and he feels that same tug around his heart that he was so sure he had managed to unwrap years ago. Hates her more when his fingers tremble like a little kid when he types out his reply.
They spend a few decades like that, sending random emails and text messages about the world as she gets to see it for herself. He’d feel the tug every single time, the need to be with her and to kiss her and to taste her and to claim her for himself, witness her discover the world the way he knows she will when he brought his bleeding wrist to her mouth that night so long ago in her childhood bed on her birthday. Would she like Paris more than Rome or would she hate both of them completely? Why did she choose to go to Tokyo first, he wonders? Is her favorite city somewhere that’s tourist-bait and conventional or will she fall more in love with quieter, European towns, so different yet so similar to her own home in Virginia? He never asks her these questions, though. Klaus thinks he wouldn’t be able to handle it, hearing about her travels around the world. He pretends it’s because whatever she’ll say, he had probably witnessed for himself already. The pathetic truth is that he really just can’t bear the reminder that somehow, all those years ago when he let her light consume him and got lost in the beauty of her strength, he had allowed himself to hope that he’d be the one to show her the world. Never again. What a fool he had been. Caroline doesn’t need him to take on the world–she doesn’t need anyone because she’s so strong, that way. This only makes him want to accompany her even more.
It’s years later that she tells him she wants to go to New Orleans, and “Would you still like to show me around?”
It’s not the first time she’s been, she says, and Klaus is annoyed at the stab of hurt he feels at her confession. She doesn’t owe him anything, Caroline, but he still lets himself feel the tiniest amount of relief when she tells him, “You weren’t there.”
“Did you look for me, love?” He smirks even when she can’t see him over the phone, and she scoffs because she’s Caroline.
“Maybe,” she admits, and there’s that tug again.
She’s even more beautiful that he remembered, walking towards him with her sunshine hair and pretty smile in the middle of the French Quarter, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. Her light is brighter, this way, without the weight of her friends’ judgment and human notions on her shoulders. Klaus has to release a heavy bright at the sight of her.
“Hey, stranger,” she greets him, and because he’s not Niklaus the pathetic human fool anymore, he takes her hand smoothly to kiss her knuckles.
“Hello, love.”
They last two hours exploring his city before he gives up and takes her to his bedroom, does some exploring of his own. She is exquisite, his Caroline, when she pushes him down the mattress and straddles his lap, takes his breath away when she bares her neck and begs him to taste her blood. They spend a whole week in bed, leaving only to feed before claiming each other again. They talk in between their lovemaking, and this time Klaus cannot avoid hearing about her explorations, finds he doesn’t want to, anyway. Even though he still feels the need to join her in his bones, he finds he’s more addicted to the way she straight up glows as she talks about her endeavors, fingers tracing patterns across his naked chest and legs tangled with his own.
“What’s your favorite city?” He finally asks her on her last night. She pauses mid-talk to look at him, and there’s something so soft and unfamiliar in the glint of her eyes while she studies his face. It makes his insides churn, makes his breath stutter, and then Caroline cups his jaw and kisses him gently, just a smooth gliding of lips that’s never happened before. Klaus is used to burning passion and desperation, to taking greedily like he’d never have the chance to have her again. But this–this tenderness, this delicate feel of her mouth and caressing fingers and the slow languidness of it all–this is the kiss of death.
In the morning when he itches for his pencil and sketchbook and tries to remind himself how much he hates her, when he gazes down at her milky flesh covered only barely with his bed sheet, when he traces the shape the sunlight on her skin makes, when he finds himself searching desperately for any sign that he’s tainted her light, Klaus finds that he doesn’t hate Caroline at all. He is in love with her.
They try to keep their meetings to a minimum, not more than once every five years, in fact. He still tells himself that he’s content with little tastes of her, just enough to satiate his thirst, even when once every five years becomes once every two years, and once every two years becomes five times a year. He still tells himself he doesn’t see red whenever she skips a meeting because she’s unavailable, lets himself believe he doesn’t want to peel off the skin of whoever has her interest. And then they’re seeing each other every month, and she stops skipping meetings altogether. They show each other their favorite spots in the world and she starts holding his hand while they walk the streets of places unfamiliar to her, starts kissing him outside the bedroom and starts hugging him to herself tighter.
“You would have liked me as a human,” he tells her one day, when they’re in the middle of the Andes and he’s carved a tiny horse out of wood using her pocketknife that he has no idea what she even uses for. “Of course I would have probably made a fool out of myself to get you to notice me, but…”
Caroline takes the wooden horse from his hands and traces the rough edges delicately as if it’s the finest piece of art she’s ever held. “I like you now.”
“You shouldn’t.” When Klaus chuckles it’s with a bitterness that shocks even him. “You’re risking so much now, spending this much time with me. One day I will destroy you, love, stomp out your light until you’ve nothing left. I won’t mean to, but I will, and one day you will wake up and you will resent me for it.”
She drops the horse, glares at him with so much passion, and oh how she glows.
“You need to stop this,” Caroline tells him in a hard voice, pointing a finger in his direction. Her hair flares around her face so brightly it’s difficult to make out her next words. “Stop being so obsessed with my ‘light’ or whatever. Stop being obsessed with preserving it. Stop convincing yourself that you will ruin me, because that is for me to decide!”
He regards her for a moment, admires the tense line of her shoulders and the defiant quirk of her lips. “You’re young–“ she scoffs at this “–you don’t get it. But you will.”
“No,” she grounds out, digs her feet harsher into the ground as if bracing herself for impact. “I am so much more than this light you claim I have. Don’t you think I notice, when you get all tensed up and start searching my face for something you’re so afraid of finding? Don’t you think I notice when you look at me like I am the sun and you’re afraid you’re going to burn me out? I’m not a baby vampire anymore, Klaus. I deserve more than giving myself over to you completely and having to wait a month for you to accept that you haven’t tainted your ideal image of me just to have you again.”
Klaus is quiet after her speech, watching her heave with fury and frustration and all the things he makes her feel that he just knows will ruin her someday. “You do. You do deserve more.”
Caroline gives him one long look before walking away. Klaus stays where he is, unmoving for five whole days.
It’s six months of radio silence after that, and Klaus has never been surer of Caroline being his damnation. He never knew how much he had depended on their little meetings, how much her kisses and her embrace became the reason for his existing until they stopped. He spends his days away in the studio, painting portraits of her hair and her eyes and her smile and all the things that make her light up, and he burns them all to the ground. His siblings come and go, but they can never stand when he’s in the mood, so they never stay that long. Rebekah mentions her once, trying to get a rise out of him, tells him all about bumping into her in Hong Kong and seeing her with a guy in her arm and “Honestly, Nik, stop being so pathetic. The girl has clearly moved on,” but she only succeeds in making him lock himself inside his studio altogether. It’s on the 189th day that he gives in.
He knows where she is, of course, knows she has in fact truly been in Hong Kong but is unsure about the part where she’s been on a date. He doesn’t expect her to be celibate, of course, but the thought still rattles him and it’s even worse now that he can’t bring himself to feel angry about it. Just hurt. But it’s been six months and it’s her birthday, so Klaus sends the wooden horse he carved from when they last saw each other as a present.
Caroline does not reply, though, does not even bother to send the package back in retaliation, and Klaus burns for her, okay? He doesn’t like the heaviness that her absence brings him. He doesn’t like that he has to hide his solitude behind forced loyalty and big houses again without her. He doesn’t like that he doesn’t deserve her, he never did, but god he wished he did.
He knows where she is, so he goes to her.
She looks at him like she expected him to show, but it’s the indifference that makes his chest ache like it’s been staked over and over.
“You don’t get it,” he starts to tell her, and he loathes the way her shoulders drop at his words, the way she looked so disappointed yet so casually accepting, like she should have known better. “I don’t separate you from your light like you think I do.”
Caroline sighs and brings her hands to cover her pretty face. “I really don’t want to talk about this anymore, Klaus.”
“I don’t have this ideal image of you I don’t want to taint,” he continues, disregards her glare and steps closer to her to ensure she’ll hear him clearly. “I don’t. But you are full of light, Caroline, and you radiate such glow that sometimes I find myself wanting to hate you for it. I am all the darkness in the world, but with you I forget that I am a monster hiding underneath the skin of the boy I once was. The boy who deserved you.”
Her voice is shrill when she responds. “Stop trying to separate parts of me! And yes, you do separate parts of me and you do have this ideal image of me. Klaus, It’s all you do! You take the parts of me you feel you’ll never have even when I try so hard to give them to you. You do it even to yourself, take the Klaus you think deserves me and separate it from the Klaus you are now and it’s all because you’re so convinced that you don’t deserve anything. You’ve put us in boxes so it’s easier for you to stop yourself from dealing with what you truly feel and you know what? It doesn’t make you any less deserving. It just makes you a coward.”
“I know what I feel. I am in love with you,” Klaus tells her, and Caroline gapes at him like she doesn’t already know. “And I do put us in boxes, you’re right, only because it’s the only thing that I know will keep me from ruining you. That doesn’t make any of what I say less true. I will ruin you Caroline. It’s all I know to do.”
She sighs like she’s tired of the conversation already. “That’s not true.”
“Yes it is,” he chuckles almost manically. “I know I love you, and I know I will do everything in my power to keep you safe. But I don’t know what to do with what I feel, Caroline. I know blood and death and destruction. I know I’ll never satiate my need for you. But what do I do, love? Do I rip out my heart and offer it to you? Do I watch as you do the same for me, knowing I don’t deserve it?”
Caroline steps into his space, then, cups his face with chaste ferocity. “Things don’t work like that, Klaus. You can’t just decide what parts of me you deserve and what parts of me you don’t. I am whole, and so are you. You’ve been deprived of love so much you feel like you have to either ruin yourself or someone else just to feel it, and it’s why you hold back every single time I try to reach out for you. But Klaus, I do love you. And that doesn’t mean I’m a goner or that you’ll destroy me or whatever. It just means that I love you.”
“Caroline…” Klaus says in a warning, because he’s suspected it over the years, of course, when she fits her head in the crook of his neck and kisses the skin there just because she could, or when she grips his hand while she walks ahead and looks back at him with a huge grin splitting her face, or when they make love slowly, tenderly, and he has to pretend he doesn’t see the tears falling from her pretty eyes at the sheer intimacy of their embrace, because he’s always squashed down the hope that builds inside of him every single time the thought comes. He can’t have hope. He can’t.
It’s hope along with foolish curiosity that made him go out of the cave that fateful night, baby brother in tow; because surely, the gods will have willed them to be safe from the wolves? Surely the gods have seen the feast they’ve been preparing for the next night to honor them and thus will keep them safe? The old lady said so, didn’t she? Or did they will Henrik to die in his arms that night, will them to become monsters so everyday he shall remember his stupidity? Hope is for fools, he tells himself when he drains the old lady dry and marks his first kill. He doesn’t feel remorse for what he had done, at the beast he had become. Instead when he drops her body, he smiles. Where are your gods now?
Still, Caroline’s words ring in his ear. He can’t have hope, but he also can’t describe the elation that fills his whole being at the sound of her voice and her sincerity. Surely, he doesn’t deserve this? Surely, he didn’t hear her right? But he did, and Klaus has to close his eyes shut in absolute disbelief.
“I love you, Klaus,” Caroline repeats, and he trembles. “God, we’re going to spend a shit ton of money on couple’s therapy, aren’t we?”
“Caroline,” he says again, and this time his voice is raw, broken, trying to search for a hint of mistruth in the pretty lines of her face and wanting to just crumble when he finds none.
Caroline drops her head on his chest and wraps her arms around his waist and when did she get this close, he wonders? When she speaks, her voice is a mere whisper, but he hears every single word like gunshot to his ears. “Please don’t let yourself pull away from me, because only then, only then will you ruin me. I love you, Klaus.”
He’s never felt more afraid than when he kisses her then, tugs her to him and brands himself on her lips, bites it for good measure, marks her and hopes he’s carved his way into her skin as deeply as she did him. “I’ll work hard everyday just to prove to you that I can deserve you, Caroline.”
“Seriously?” She groans, rolls her eyes before patting his face teasingly. “We’ll have to work on that.”
They laugh against each other’s lips, and for the first time when he tastes her he lets himself savor the tendrils of an emotion he has banned from his heart for a thousand years; and god did it taste so good.