One, two, three bottles of beer on the wall.

[brightestlight]

Drunk.

Caroline hadn't really ever understood why Damon and Stefan drank so much, before she was a vampire. They pretty much lived and breathed scotch and brandy and whiskey, and she would just roll her eyes.

And then she was one.

It cut the hunger, and was one of the things that actually made you sort of forget the amount of crap that you had going on. It helped. And that was why, if you asked her, she was drunk as she walked home. Her heels dangled from her fingers, and she still had a glass of rum and something in her hand. It was multitasking at it's finest, and of course had absolutely nothing to do with anything that possibly happened in the last month or so.

Which doesn't really explain why, when she looked up and saw Lauren coming towards her, she actually just stopped. Not slowed down, not flashed her a smile, she just stopped, and her brows furrowed. "Hey," she said, a little loud so that she'd hear her. "Hey, do you have a second?"

And she doesn't even know what she wants to talk about out of the giant list of things she's got that she wants to talk to Lauren about, and she hasn't picked one, but she downs the rest of her drink with a shudder before she just sets it down by the wall so one of the cleaning bots'll get it.

Comments

[brightestlight]

"I can do what he can do." Her brows furrow as she looks at Lauren. "He's different. Like I said, I get why you want to have it. He's- He's really old. And different." She shakes her head. "But I can do it, too, it's just-"

She paused. "What I was going to say earlier? It was a gag soaked in it. My hands were pinned to a desk with pencils. I've been shot and drugged and strapped to a chair and put in a cage and compelled to do things that I never wanted to do. My best friend told me she'd let me fry to death. Klaus's the only one who cares."

She could have stopped there, but she's not sobering up yet, so she's still not got her filter back. "But he's not good. He's killed more people than I have ever met, probably. He's dangerous. He protects me, and everyone else is if he feels like it, or if he thinks that him not doing it is going to make me upset. And I don't know why. I know he's-" And she pauses, before she says a monster, but instead her voice falters. "Not good," she says quietly. "He's not good, which is why I get why you need it. And why you want it. You just- You have to know why it's scary and awful for me. And why even though he's not good, I still care about him."

She took a deep breath, before she opened her mouth to continue, but closed it with a click when she realised that Lauren had been trying to get a word in edgewise for... well. Caroline didn't even know how long.

[dr_lauren]

Lauren listens with a slightly disbelieving expression on her face, obviously torn about the information Caroline is revealing to her. When the other woman finally stops talking Lauren's not even sure where to begin.

"...Caroline, I'm sorry that you went through that. I don't know if you have any way to tell that I'm being truthful, but trust me, I am. It sounds horrible, and I can understand how it would make you distrust people. But I would never do anything like that, and I'd never let anybody here do that either. I promise it," she says, and she reaches out, voluntarily touching Caroline's hand for the first time since everything started happening. There's no vervain, so it's just skin to skin contact, pure and simple.

"You're not alone. And we are not the bad guys either."

[brightestlight]

"My best friend. And my Dad tied me to a chair and tortured me." She didn't pull away from Lauren, but her brows were furrowed. "I'm not saying you're a bad guy, just- you have to understand that I don't know you." And from her experience, words didn't really mean much. "... But I could get to?"

An olive branch, sort of. A tiny one, hopefully to make this be way less stressful.

[dr_lauren]

"Of course you could," Lauren says, and there's a real warmth in her voice in contrast to her usual businesslike tone. "I'd like that." Making friends with a vampire is nowhere near the strangest thing that has ever happened to Lauren - in fact, it feels downright normal. "Especially since there's only so many experiments you can run in a lab before you start to go a little bit crazy."

[brightestlight]

"Okay," she says with a nod, and who knows how she'll feel about this with her being sober, but right now, it seems like a general win. That it could be a general win.

"I... should go home. Because I need to talk to Klaus about some stuff, but- but you have a good night. Okay?" She rubbed the back of her neck with a hand, the one that Lauren wasn't still holding onto.

[dr_lauren]

"Sure." Lauren gave Caroline's hand a quick squeeze before letting it go, her own hands delving deep into the pockets of her oversized sweater. "And if you need anything, I'm here to help. Really."