brightestlight | I do what I waaaaant.

I do what I waaaaant.

Caroline didn't have much preamble when she walked into their suite, a bottle in her hand. "We need to talk, and you need a drink." She moved to pour him one without hesitation, looking back at him over her shoulder. She knew that the last thing he'd wanted to do was go to the party, and while she'd wanted to try and get out because even with his sort of not-super-overwhelming questions, she's been avoiding the answers, the times that she's actually not just straight up changed the subject.

Which, he's not exactly been super communicative, either. It'd been a lot of both of them totally ignoring the matters at hand. Now, though? Now things were different. Now, she was home, and she looked fantastic, if you asked her, and she was going to pour him a drink (in fact, she had, and was holding it out to him) and they were going to talk and then things could somehow maybe go back to normal a little.

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"Because I didn't want to be having this conversation, Caroline," he answers, sardonic sharpness in his tone echoing the sharpness in hers. "I couldn't tell you then or you would've kicked up a fuss, and I didn't tell after it was over because you wanted to pretend that everything was alright, and I was too bloody exhausted for this!"

Any attempt at pretending that he didn't care was gone by the time he finished his sentence, in a shout, and his glass, still mostly full of whisky, shatters against the nearest wall. He's enraged by Star's death, and the thought that he could have lost her, too, and that's not changed.

She flinches when the glass explodes, and she's thankful for the fact that the walls are mostly soundproof and they have no neighbors when she stand up abruptly, and she sets down her glass hard enough the the whiskey sloshes from the rim as she moves towards him, getting up in his face. "What, and you think I'm not exhausted? Yes, I would have kicked up a fuss, but that's part of what doing this is about. This. This whatever it is that we have, it's not you just doing whatever the hell you think is best and whatever I think might as well not even exist!"

She's yelling at him, too, and she can feel the fury and anger and fear and trauma of the last few weeks and months bubbling to the surface from where she'd kept it neatly contained.

"This doesn't matter if you're dead!" he yells back at her, and there are tears in his eyes, and he's as angry as she's ever seen him.

"So, what? It doesn't matter what I want, if you can keep me safe? I won't be me anymore-" And that's part one, and then she knowingly leaps over the line with both feet. "I'm not them, Klaus. You can't just make me be safe!" Both of them are yelling at one another, and she's just as upset as he is.

Klaus had opened his mouth to yell back, but by the time she finished that sentence, all words had left him. The rage was too sharp, too dangerous, and how dare she talk about them now, as if - he closed his mouth and, for fear of doing anything he would actually regret, sped out of their suite.

He runs.

He runs, and she stares at him as he leaves.

She downs the rest of the whiskey in her glass. She changes - not caring that she breaks the zipper on her dress.

She cleans up the glass, after she steps on a piece of it.

What Caroline doesn't do is go to sleep. Or go after him. Or cry. Or break anything.

She drinks, and she waits, and she doesn't particularly care that she's still that same level of drunk-not-tipsy when he returns, to her sitting cross-legged on their bed, her communicator flickering with something from the Cortex. What she really wants is ice cream, and after several failed attempts from the replicator a few hours ago, she gave up.

Klaus goes and loses himself in the small maze of rooms on the other side of their floor. Some of them are dangerous, some of them are empty, some of them are puzzling, and he likes that they're small, multiple, and that he never knows what's coming next. It's unexpected, for such a control freak, but right now, they're exactly where he needs to be.

Eventually, he feels that he might be calm enough to come back and finish this. So he waits a little while longer, just to make sure, and then walks back to their quarters, and rings before he opens the door, to give her a heads-up. It seems only fair, and yes, he cares about giving her fair, when he can.

"I won't apologise for what I did," he tells her, without preamble. "And I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I thought it would keep you alive. Make of that what you will."

She's welcome to yell at him again. He's determined to remain calm, and just let her. Even if she brings them up. Even if she brings Star up.

"I never said that you wouldn't do it, or that I didn't expect you to." She hadn't moved from the bed when he rang the bell, just waiting for him, although she did reach forward and flipped her comm over so it'd be less distracting. "I asked you to tell me when you do it, next time, and wanted to know if you actively tried to keep it from me."

She paused, and her eyes flicked up to his, and she said quietly, "You know-" And this was the sort of thing she didn't know how to say, and she didn't know if even saying it was close to the right thing. "Eventually," she says, and her voice wavers, and she can't tell him how upset she is saying it even though he probably can tell, especially when she's been bottling it up for weeks. "I'm going to die, sometime. For good, and it won't be your fault, really." Probably, anyway.

He's told himself he would be calm, and composed, no matter what she said, no matter who she brought up. Of course she catches him in his blind spot, of course she says the one thing he isn't ready to hear.

He moves over to her, as quickly as he can (not that quickly, once again, certainly not quickly enough), and cups her face with his hand, his eyes full of tears. "Shut up, Caroline."

Edited 2013-06-23 04:31 (UTC)

She shakes her head, even as she starts to cry. Messy, un-pretty sort of crying, and she pulls in a breath before she can even talk. "I would have died," she says thickly, "And you wouldn't have known. It's okay-" And her hand finds the back of his neck. She shakes her head again. "I'm not like you, or like them, it's going to happen, and-"

She swallows hard, trying to keep herself together. "Not for a long time, but you can't make it not happen. This-" And that'd happened just as he left before, her talking about This, the thing between them, and she shook her head. "This won't ever have been nothing, if- At least to me. So-" And that's when her voice catches, and all she can think - oddly enough - all she can think is It nearly tore me in half.

"Of course it won't ever be nothing," Klaus agrees immediately, his voice rough for the tears lumping in his throat, but as usual, he sounds angry more than teary, even if his gestures are tender. "I won't let it happen, love. There's no reason why you should die, and I won't let you."

He's just a little more difficult to kill, but she's right up there, too, and she has him watching her back. Of course she's not going to die.

"But that's the point." And she hasn't ever been overwrought in this way, not with him. Of course, she's had hard times, both of them have. It's never been like this, the way her face twists with the emotion, her voice raw as she shakes her head yet again. "I'm not immortal. It's not soon, but it's going to happen someday, and you can't-"

She shakes her head again, and she's trying to breathe and speak and she's still crying. "It's not letting me, Klaus. I love- I love that you keep me safe and that you care, but you can't change me and lock me up forever. It almost tore me in half-" She stops talking then, because she can't continue.

Of course she's immortal, the same way he is. She has a few more loopholes attached than he does, and that's all. But what she says next takes precedence, and Klaus frowns. "What did?"

She shakes her head. "Before. The Alien," she says, like it's enough of an answer and like she's not telling him something she hadn't. She'd downplayed it when she'd told him the first time, to a ridiculous degree, but she certainly doesn't remember that now. She pulls in another shuddering breath. "I know it's over. I know it's over now and there aren't any more. I know it." Even though she clearly didn't, deep deep down.

Edited 2013-06-23 15:05 (UTC)

"Love, we're going to live a bloody long time." He already has, but he means together. "There are going to be more, at one point or another. But the beautiful thing is, what's a little gut-spilling when you can just heal up."

The sooner she gets used to not-dying, the better for her. She should have by now, but it's harder to get used to with the nanites affecting their recovery time, so he's not surprised that she still hasn't.

She actually pulls away from him, scooting back on the bed, shaking her head, and she makes herself take deep breaths, before nodding. "Right. Right, it was- Small." And she laughs, a short unpleasant sound, and she tries to scrub her face with her hands. "And so was the radiation poisoning, and everything else. So-" Nevermind she didn't tell him about that, either. "I guess neither one of us should worry, since it just doesn't matter."

She chokes on the last word - this was, by far, the worst thing that's ever happened to her, but she doesn't know what to do, now, besides acting like nothing happened.

This is more like their usual patterns, and Klaus is effortlessly calm, now. He comes to crouch in front of her. "Physical pain's a bitch, but it's just that," he tells her, without touching her, looking up at her. "The quicker you learn that, the easier it'll be. And you're never going to be able to accept it if you keep pretending nothing's wrong. You need to own your pain, if you don't want it owning you."

Torture him and he would scream as much as the next person. It wasn't about not feeling it, it wasn't about being tough. It was about knowing that it would be gone even as it happened, it was about knowing it couldn't have a hold over you. All physical pain was transient.

"It's not that it hurt." The words come in an explosive rush, and she's shaking her head. "It's not that it hurt," she repeats, quieter now as she looks away. "Things hurt. Nothing's worse than your spine stitching itself back together, so far. I get that things hurt."

She doesn't think he understands, but she doesn't know how to tell him without it being her, her, her, without it being that she's so immature and whatever else people thought about her.

"What is it, then?" Klaus asks, eyebrows raised, the picture of attentiveness. He's resting in an easy crouch, forearms propped on his knees, entirely focused on her.

"I cooked from the inside out, and was nearly torn in half," she said flatly, her eyes welling with tears and her face twisted for a moment, until she forced herself to take another breath, rubbing her eyes with shaking hands. "I had radiation poisoning. They pulled Sam into the walls. I'm not like you, Klaus. What happens when a vampire gets torn in half? What happens when you're so blasted with radiation that the cells of your heart are damaged? I don't know, and-" She had pulled herself into the smallest amount of space she could take up, even as she stared at him. "I don't-"

She took a deep, deep breath. "It's not like before," she whispers, and she's gone white, and doesn't know what to say anymore. It's the abject terror, the fear - and she doesn't know what else to say to him, to get him to understand. Honestly, she doesn't know if he can, because he's never had to have those fears.

"You thought you might die," Klaus states, simply, because it's what he thinks she's saying, and he wants confirmation that that is it.

She doesn't say anything, except she nods only slightly. It's because it's sort of that, it's kind of that she might have died, but she was alone - she was alone, and no one would have known, and she just knows it, that she could have lay there and no one would have known, and she could feel herself dying and it wasn't the way it was when her neck was broken or anything else.

So yes, it's that she thought she might die, that she would die, but it's also more than that. It's also that she would have been alone, that it just would have ended. It's being face to face with an Alien. It's knowing she has to do the good thing, the right thing, and she would have just died.

It's thinking about the aftermath of all of it, of him finding out, and she honestly can't say how he'd react and it's the rest of the station, their life here, and her mom would never know, and it's so much all wrapped up that all she can do is look away and scrub the tears from her cheeks - but he's not wrong.

"But you haven't, love," Klaus goes on, after she's nodded. "You're still here. So be here, and live. There's nothing else for it."

He remembers Mikael's hand around his heart, the stake in his other hand, but it doesn't claw at him the way it is clawing at her. He doesn't know how to help her, and that, that is clawing at him.

"That's not it," she says, and she shakes her head. "I've never- I know you've seen almost everything, I know- I know you're not like this. It was- it was so awful--" And she doesn't know what else to say, and just shakes her head. "I'll get better," she says quietly. "And I'm not just trying to say that, I know I will. I will."

"You wouldn't have known," she says then, quietly. "And nobody else-- My mom, or Elena, or anybody else would have known, and it just- I know it's over, I just keep seeing it. It keeps feeling like it's happening, and I can't- If I act like nothing's happened, then it's okay." She's trying to tell him why it's different. Why all of this is different, and why she's upset. She can't not be, not without pretending like it didn't happen at all. Because she remembers it, the way it felt and sounded and smelled and looked, the lighting and everything, and she was so afraid.

Klaus doesn't understand, it's as simple as that. He would have known, even if afterwards, he would have known, not that he wants to think about that. And her mother and Elena, he doesn't understand what that's about. He's long since reconciled with the fact that he's still over there, even as he is here. He doesn't expect anything from anyone over there. The rest of it sounds just like PTSD to him, and he's not exactly qualified to help her deal - at least, not with his powers as they are again.

"What can I do to help?" he asks simply, instead of saying anything else. He wants to help her, but he has no idea where to start.

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