47. In the corner of Maple and Vine (Ch 2.B)
title: In the corner of Maple and Vine
chapters: 2/3
fandom: the vampire diaries, the originals
characters/pairings: klaus/caroline, ensemble
word count: 15k~
summary: or, the one where Rebekah exploits mug tricks for extra tips, Klaus is a passive-mostly-aggressive piemaker, and Caroline just wants to know why Klaus refuses to touch her.
PART ONE | PART TWO A | PART TWO B | PART THREE |
So there she was, waving her discarded job application and a newly-purchased Employee and Labour Relations handbook, probably making the biggest ass out of herself, when suddenly some old guy in a cape just breezes into the diner.
No, for real. A cape. He has white gloves on and the cane he's whirling around has a diamond the size of a baby's fist on the handle, and this dude, he's so shady he makes the diner seem bright and welcoming.
(A diamond the size of a baby's fist, okay?)
Klaus is looking at him with teeth bared. His younger brother - Kol, wasn't it? - steps out from behind the counter, a smirk lighting up his face. "Look what the night descends upon us."
"A dastardly fowl with malicious intent," Klaus continues, and Caroline, feeling invisible suddenly, literally has to close her eyes and commit this moment to memory because seriously? What is up with this family?
The old man sniffs and walks around the diner, his cape swishing around his ankles. "Is this any way to talk to your own father?"
Caroline blinks. Okay. It got weirder. Wordlessly, she makes her way to the booth where a blonde girl her age - could it be the blonde girl? - is sitting and joins her. The girl barely bats an eyelid; just scoots over to make room for her.
"Familial ties have been severed long ago, Mikael. Don't pretend you weren't the one who wanted it." Somehow, Klaus' accent makes his words tougher than they actually are, makes his lips tilt into something loathsome as he regards his father. And his father, he looks down at little Baby Fist and chuckles.
"Mikael Mikaelson does not hold grudges," he announces to the room. "Yes, my fury can be brilliant and my virtues little, but never doubt that I will be petty enough to want to exact revenge. Why, I remember a time when you were still working for me, a spritely young thing in your Osh Kosh B'Gosh, looking dour as I taught you the fine, intricate ways of dough…"
In the middle of his monologue, Caroline turns to the girl next to her, a little stunned. "Is your dad's name really-"
"Yes," she says, eyes glued to the scene. She sounds like a lot of people have asked that before.
"…we could have been glorious: my young lads, my beautiful daughter and I, raking in profit and prosperity, Alas, it was not meant to be." Mikael Mikaelson stops in his hawk-eyed survey of the diner and lands his dark eyes on Klaus. "The markings in stone had been right, and you lot had to betray me."
"We had a parting of ways," Klaus retorts, his eyes narrowed to slits. "We never betrayed you."
"What do you call this then?" Mikael hisses, banging his cane down on the floor one, two, three times. A guy with a crooked-looking neck shuffles into the diner, looking wary.
The girl clutches her arm with an "Oh my God", and Caroline clutches back, because it's the dead guy.
Kol sends him a grin that matches Mikael's tooth by tooth. "Good to see you alive and well, General."
"Uh," the General says and scratches at his collar, "my name's Enzo." He gives a faint nod of greeting to them, his gaze zeroing in on Klaus' hands, bunched up into fists. Caroline picks up on this, and she feels her own hands grow clammy.
"I call that self-preservation," Klaus says and marches right up to Mikael, "after you tried to ruin Mayor Lockwood's dinner party by poisoning our pies."
"My name-" Enzo starts up again, but Mikael gives an exasperated huff and cracks the back of his head with his cane. He slumps to the floor, and Caroline wants to make sure he's not like, dead again or anything, but she finds that she can't move.
Mikael clicks his tongue. "Only to make you see, dear boy, what happens when you deny the allure of D'oh! Nuts."
It's like someone hits a huge pause on her life-Caroline leans over the girl to pull down the blinds, peering at the bakery across the street, at the cute little donut design on the windows, then lets her eyes swivel back to them, mouth slightly agape. The girl wrinkles her nose at being in such close proximity, but Caroline barely notices. She whips out her phone for a quick check on Google, lips moving wordlessly in disbelief.
The facts were these:
Mikael Mikaelson, illustrious owner of the delightful Simpsons-themed gourmet doughnut franchise that had taken the world by storm for the past two-and-a-half decades, was a self-made man. He built his empire from the ground up with bricks made of light-as-air pastry and held together by delectable jellies and cream, adorned with multi-coloured sprinkles. He recognized the love America had for the dysfunctional family and took it in stride, in the process using it to his own advantage, and apparently all his innovation paid off when he sought to bring the love to Mother England and his store opening almost blew up the entire street.
Caroline feels herself start to hyperventilate as she reads how, one day, lithe, warm Esther Lee spies him hauling hundred-pound bags of flour, and promptly falls in love with the sinews of his arms, the ambition in his eyes. They have six children together - she counts three in the room - the last of which, Henrik, died tragically in childbirth.
So things are textbook happy, his kids working for him, learning the tools of the trade, when Esther falls sick. Strain happens. Overwork happens. Finn leaving to be a pirate of all things happens. Kol getting into bad crowds happens. Mikael realizing his kids don't have the same passion for donuts as he happens. Klaus starting his own business happens, and him pulling his siblings along happens. And the swift kick in the gut - Esther passing away and leaving the deed to their house to her children, and Mikael in his petty rage suggests emancipation, something that apparently had been a long time coming.
"And who is this?"
Caroline yelps and almost drops her phone when she finds herself staring Baby Fist, like, right between the eyes. Mikael's looking at her down the length of his nose, his teeth glinting with so much contempt that she almost falls back against her seat, if it weren't for the guiding pressure of a soft hand on the small of her back. It's the girl, it's Rebekah, and Rebekah's holding up her chin, and Rebekah's saying, "This is Caroline."
Perhaps he's a little shocked - from what Caroline had read (it had been a strangely thorough article) Rebekah had been something of a daddy's girl. He takes a step back, his eyes now coolly devoid of emotion. "You always did like your strays, didn't you? Unfulfilled pet fantasies, as I remember."
Rebekah flushes red to her ears and stands up. "I'll have you know, that Caroline here is our-she's our-"
"She's our employee of the month," Kol says, picking lint from his sweater. "Star waitress, fantastic tray balancing."
"Is she now?" Mikael turns to Klaus, like his is the only word that matters. There's that terrifying moment where all Klaus does is stand there with his wary predator stance, his eyes shooting daggers at Mikael, dancing a dance that he's danced so many dances ago. His nostrils flare, Mikael's eyebrow raises, Klaus' arms unfold, Mikael's cape swings as he tucks his cane securely at his side like a scabbard, and the air is so fraught with tension that Caroline's hair might frizz.
And then finally, finally, Klaus parts his lips and says, "Yes."
The arctic becomes the diner, so cold is the look that Mikael throws them, at the thought of them expanding and gaining loyal customers and star waitresses with tray-balancing prowess, and with another sweep of his cape he's turned his back on them, stepping right over Enzo. He pulls his cane out again, and at this point Caroline wouldn't be surprised if he unearths it to have like, a hidden blade within. He uses the claw of his cane to poke through the duct tape on the door. "What kind of lowbrow establishment are you running?"
And with that, he's gone.
So now there's two angry siblings, one who's smirking, a guy who may or may not be dead in the middle of the diner, and… Caroline. It sounds like the beginnings of a joke, one with a punchline she doesn't think she'll find funny. She sees Mikael's dark red cape swishing through the night, sees the awkward angle of Enzo's heaped body, and suddenly she sees everything as it is, as if someone's just slipped her some reverse-beer goggles: the red paintings on the walls that kind of looks like the ruby of blood when it starts to pool, the primitive chopping knives dotting the arch of the doorless kitchen, the hard lines of muscle that protrude through the two men's shirtsleeves as they stand there, arms crossed, regarding her suspiciously.
And then there's Rebekah, smiling at her like she can't believe she's actually here, when it started out the other way around, really.
All at once, it's too much.
"This is insane," she declares. "You guys are some kind of deranged mafia bakery."
"Diner," Kol corrects her. "Did you miss the part where we handed you a position here?"
"After the scene I just witnessed?" Caroline clambers out of the booth and spirals around the diner, but suddenly Kol's standing in front of the door, and-woah does he move fast. "I mean, dastardly fowls? Descending nights? Did I even hear right?"
"Of course you did." Klaus sighs a long-suffering one and unfolds his arms. "Do you want the job or not?"
Caroline beams. "Didn't I come here with that one, singular motive?"
.
.
It's great, it's wonderful, it's everything she could have ever wanted, working in that little diner with its blinds that prevent the sun from streaming in, but it's quite alright - it makes it all the more cozier, all the more easier to slide pumpkin pie in front of the smiling faes of sugar-starved patrons, chirp a little Y'all enjoy that now even though she is far from the Southern belle she sometimes pretends to be.
Rebekah comes up to her, lips a tentative curve, and pulls her into the kitchen to show her the ropes. She has an apron all of her own - "Custom made," Rebekah tells her of the lace frills at the bottom and the cute little white buttons - and doesn't have to wear a nametag if she doesn't want to, but she tacks it on anyway and makes everyone call her Care. Everyone does, and everyone does it with a smile… everyone except for Klaus, that is, who always seems to be absent from the kitchen these days.
Kol flits in and out of the kitchen, always through the back door, which is probably why she never notices him sneaking up on her. He's nice enough if you don't look at him the wrong way, which is to say you shouldn't look at him at all. He's always looking at her so peculiarly, like he's just waiting for some kind of bomb to drop right out of her lace pockets, and he wouldn't be wrong - she does have a time bomb ticking away inside her, shivering in its mass of undiluted energy, waiting to be unleashed upon the piemaker who'd seemed to kaput right from his very diner.
"Care," Rebekah calls over one day as she's chopping up fruit, "you don't happen to be good at pie filling, don't you?"
Because the poor thing, she's been taking over Klaus' job of making pies despite having to refer to Klaus' meticulous yet vaguely-structured recipes every step of the way. She looks miserable; she'd much rather prefer being out there flipping notebooks and twirling mugs and charming people with her easy smile, not covered in flour from wrist to elbow. Luckily for her, Caroline does know her way around pies - Steven's a sweet tooth, and she's never thanked him more for it than in the moment she teaches Rebekah that a little nutmeg does wonders in bringing out subtle flavours hidden deep in the flesh of fruit.
Ever grateful, Rebekah tells her things while they bake. That it was indeed her and Klaus who found her lying in that alleyway all those years ago, and Caroline's heart lifts. To finally find the answer to the question that's been reeling inside her for so long feels so gratifying, like a caged bird stretching its wings for the first time in a long time, overcome with the desire to sing nothing but sweet songs for the rest of its days.
"I tried looking for you," Rebekah tells her matter-of-factly. "I wanted to see how you were doing, after that blow to your head. But you disappeared."
"I was only here visiting my dads," Caroline says. Rebekah looks a little startled, but listens eagerly to the story of how Steven and Bill had met at an IT conference, and that Steven had been wearing plaid, and her father was still very much married to Liz, but they fell dangerously, violently in love, and this is the part where she puts a hand to her breast and sighs, because to be in that much love is all that she's ever wanted in life. Rebekah sighs along with her, and they say no more, because-
Because Rebekah struggles with pie crust too, so Caroline takes over, helping her knead and roll and trim and cut, and she figures out what makes Klaus' Dutch Apple so delicious - ginger! - and breathes in all that delicious, steaming air wafting from the ovens and wonders how much time she has left before spontaneously combusting. Rebekah leaves the kitchen in her more-than-capable hands to see to her patrons.
This must be how a jiffy feels like, Caroline thinks when the second day of her hiring rolls around and still no sign of her boss. But it doesn't matter. She'll wait, however long it takes.
On the third day-
After spilt coffee and crumbly crusts and a devilishly handsome man named Marcel ordering something called, remarkably, the Marcel ("It's named after me, you see," he points out rather obviously, but she hadn't minded, because his smile was so very captivating), Caroline finally finds solace in the kitchen.
She feels his presence rather than sees it as she's slitting holes in the crust of the pie she's about to slide into the oven. He's leaning against the doorway watching her, and she wants to ask him where he's been the past few days, but it kind of feels like jumping right into the middle of a conversation that she doesn't even have with him.
Fortunately for her, it's Klaus who speaks first. "Do you always take over other people's jobs?"
Caroline goes to the sink to rinse off her hands and looks back at him. "Do you always creep in doorways watching people?"
"Do you always answer questions with questions?"
"Do you always bring dead people back to life?" she blurts, and sags with relief - the ticking within her ceases, the threat gone. Klaus, on the other hand, stiffens, and then he's turning to leave the kitchen. Caroline follows after him, bristling in his wake.
"Hey-" she reaches for his shoulder, but he's already swooped around the counter to put wood and steel and orange paint between them. It's the fastest she's seen anyone move, and seriously, does this family run track too, in addition to running this super cop-out diner? "I've seen it," she insists, and looks over her shoulder to make sure nobody's listening before leaning in close, hissing, "You bring people back to life."
"I'm a piemaker. I make pies, that's what I do," Klaus says mechanically, and walks away. On her side of the counter, Caroline follows, but not before refilling coffee along the way.
"Why is it such a big deal?" Caroline asks, although to his credit, it is a pretty huge deal. If it was her, she'd be turning cartwheels right into the sun. She'd probably drive all the way to Davenport just to dig up Cary Grant and wake him up with a touch; love him right down into his dusty bones.
(She has Bringing Up Baby in a special, reserved spot right in her heart.)
"It's not a big deal," Klaus says. "It's a big nothing, because what you are implying sounds pretty ridiculous, a bundle of incoherent babble that is about as meaningful to me as this little spoon here." He holds up a teaspoon, shiny in the overhead light.
"But spoons are important," she quips, "otherwise you'd be eating soup with your hands, and that's kind of an unsavoury sight."
"They make mugs," he points out, "and thermoses, and flasks. You can drink from bowls; have you seen the Asians? They're quite happy." He stacks up several plates to pass to her. "Spoons, they keep you company. They're not a necessity."
Caroline cradles the stack in one arm and uses her free hand to pluck the spoon from Klaus' fingers. It drops onto the top of the stack with a clatter. "It really depends, doesn't it? I mean, there's nothing wrong with drinking soup. It just has to be the right soup in the right vessel at the right time. Like a clear bouillon, or a puree. I'd like to see you try to drink chunks of miso."
Which is probably how they end up seated at the worktable facing each other, a bowl of steaming miso soup placed in front of them. Caroline daintily picks up her spoon and sends him a smile, while Klaus, looking grouchy, starts to gulp the whole hot mess of it down. And then comes the picking of the solid ingredients, and it's such a sight - hapless fingers picking at them, a shrimp slipping through his fingers with a squick - that she hides her mouth behind her hand and laughs.
"Alright," Klaus says later as they're washing the bowls. Just two bowls and a few stray spoons, Caroline really didn't need his help on this, but he finds himself reaching for a cloth to help her dry them. "So you might have a point. Spoons are important."
"And useful," Caroline says. "For totes nothing to be kept hidden from the world. Or at least to people who've seen the, um, useful parts of it."
Klaus scrubs a hand down his face. "Can we stop talking in metaphors now? It's confusing. And I'm not much a fan of spoons, so there's only so many allusions I can make. Yes, I bring people back to life. Is that what you wanted to hear?"
"Touchy," Caroline tuts. She peers up at him, trying to find some kind of secret in his eyes (she's not sure what, but Liz has used this particular move on her more than once and it works every time, even if she has nothing to confess). "Do you like, chant something? Maybe wish for it really hard? Were you born with it? Or were you cursed as a kid because D'oh! Nuts was doing so well and people envied you so much they sent death threats at your door?"
"I-" Klaus blinks. "What?"
Caroline holds her phone up sheepishly. "Did you know they have you guys on Wikipedia?"
.
.
So it happened. Suddenly. Klaus is eight, guiding a still-wobbly on her legs Rebekah to a slice of pie he'd helped his mother bake, when it happens. A whooshing, a tingling in his fingers, and he suddenly finds himself having to sit down.
"And then what happened?" Caroline asks in a hushed voice. She's feeding herself bits of strawberry from a pie that's supposed to have made its way into the oven twenty minutes ago. Klaus is sitting in a chair flipped backwards across the room, reluctantly telling her the story of his first zing, as she had proudly coined.
"Nothing," Klaus says flatly. "I got up. The world continued to turn, Rebekah learnt how to walk, and Mikael's business flourished."
Caroline gives a long groan. "Seriously? Then what's with all the sitting down business?"
Klaus opens his mouth, about to reply, but then he sort of look like someone's hit the back with his head with a tea bag. The tea bag here being a metaphor for a revelation. "What's with your sitting down business? Didn't you come here to work?"
Caroline hops down from the counter and straightens her apron. Klaus is tetchy, one thing she's learned, always growling out something or other, always baking pie with the vengeance, tucking in the extra folds of dough like it's done him some personal wrong. And always staring at D'oh! Nuts across the street, his shoulders blocked and heavy like he's expecting some sort of assault.
Which is perfectly justifiable, seeing as Mikael did try to poison their pies and he did kind of leave the General for dead in the middle of their diner (Kol had dragged him outside to leave him for dead in the alleyway instead, and Caroline had tried her best to look the other way the way Rebekah didn't even bother asking if he was alright, but after everyone had left and after the whole diner was dark, she snuck her way through the streets to kick the guy awake, getting him home), but a man can only be steeped in so much suspicion before his business takes a dive.
She's surprised, really, at how many people keep coming back to the Pie Hole despite all the hostility. It's partly due to Rebekah and her winsome little smiles and the flounce of her apron. When Klaus leaves someone offended it's Rebekah who comes to soothe, offering a glass of milk or extra cream and would you like another slice of that, love?
And the pie. She's slowly making her way through the menu, a bite here and a slice there when she comes home laden with leftovers, and they're phenomenal, as good as the first bite she had here, as good as Melissa had said, like an orgasm-
"Only in your mouth!" Steven enthuses, spraying Bill with bits of berry and saliva.
Klaus may bake them like beating down Mikael's soul into bottom crusted pockets of fruit, but he also put a lot of heart into them, which she supposes is why they taste so damn good. Even if is eating a piece of Mikael Mikaelson's allegorical soul.
Klaus has magic hands, in more ways than one, and she can't help but stare at them when she's leaning over the counter to refill Elena Gilbert's coffee. Sometimes he catches her staring and she has to pretend to be absorbed in conversation with the Salvatore boys to save her burning, red face, but he never says a word. If anything, it makes him stay in the kitchen even more. Which is fine, the man likes to work, whatever - but isn't he even the least bit curious why, after finally finding out the truth of the boy with whole planets in his hands and then the blood-splattered man in the too-white kitchen, even after all of that, she still stayed?
Rebekah flips her mugs and sends her a smirk. "Don't try to figure him out. Countless people have, and trust me; it always leads them to a road lit with neon signs flashing Nowhere. Pass the sugar bowl, won't you darling?"
"Don't you worry," Caroline sighs. "I don't plan on getting wrapped up with people who don't even like spoons. I mean, what's up with that?"
"Come again?" Rebekah swings her mugs slower, her eyebrows fusing together in confusion.
"Your brother," Caroline tells her, "doesn't like spoons."
"And he told you this?"
Caroline fishes a cloth out of the pocket of her apron and starts to clean up after a leaving customer. "In so many words, yeah."
Rebekah's mugs have been set down on the rack, and she's looking at Caroline fully now. Caroline finishes wiping the counter and darts her eyes to Rebekah. "What?"
"Nothing," Rebekah says, and smiles.
.
.
A month into this shindig and she's already gotten the hang of it. She exits her morning class and follows the buzz and hum of Valentine's Day chatter, the excited titters and the longing gasps, the opening of bags to find pink and red confetti spilling out of it, to sit on wind-cooled benches with your partner and smile over exchanging gifts.
Caroline looks upon all of this with a little smile on her face; claps excitedly for Melissa when not one, not two, but three boys approach her with hopeful looks and arms laden with candy. The grin slides off her face when Melissa turns all of them away, not a blush tainting her cappuccino skin, and she casts a mournful look at Professor Saltzman. Caroline slaps a hand to her forehead, because-duh. How had she not seen this? She used to be so good at this, her keen eye detecting the smallest of gestures and the slightest of shifts and the tiniest range in pitch.
She'd been wrapped up in pie, that's what. After class she would zip right to the diner, hat tails tangled up in her hair, hang up her coat and yank on her apron. She doesn't know how many times she's had to mend the straps because she'd yanked too hard in her eagerness, but no matter, she really does love it here. She loves the smiling customers with their easy tips, loves sitting with Rebekah in their designated corner booth during their break laughing over Damon's bad hair or gossiping over the fact that Bonnie Bennett was dating Elena Gilbert's younger brother, the shock of it all.
Sometimes they don't laugh and sometimes they don't gossip. Sometimes they talk, too - somber faces and mugs of hot chocolate that have long cooled, and Rebekah tells her about Matt Donovan, her boyfriend.
"Well-" Rebekah's head tilts. "Ex now, I suppose. How do these things go? We didn't break up, he just died."
Caroline doesn't really know what to say, so she lifts her mug to her lips and says, "If it's love, it's love."
Kol had been sloppily picking up plates from the booth opposite theirs, and Rebekah glances at him and sighs, "I suppose."
It's on this particular day of Saint Valentine that a serious-looking man in a serious-looking suit walks in, and Rebekah all but shrieks her way out of the booth and jumps right into his waiting arms. "This is my brother," Rebekah says, her smile so wide her eyes turn into little slits. "Elijah, say hi to Care."
Elijah greets her cordially, but Caroline doesn't miss the quick sweep of his gaze and how it shakes her from the inside out. He's quiet in his command, his shoes so Italian and so polished that Caroline's kind of surprised they don't make a sound as he steps across the diner, checks on the till and rearranges the pie display. Kol unceremoniously drops a platter of ginger cookies onto the counter in front the third stool from the till, the one with the direct view of the kitchen where Klaus is sliding a pie out of one of the ovens.
"Elijah looks over the books," Rebekah says. "And we bake ginger cookies especially for him whenever he comes by every month or so. They're his favourites."
So that would explain all the muttering in the kitchen this morning; Klaus' yell of "YouidiotKol, why'd you have to use up all the ginger?"
He says a lot of their names like that. Kol is one long exhale of YouIdiotKol, and Rebekah's is RebekahDarling, fetch Professor Saltzman his tea, would you?, and Elijah, as she learns now, always includes some iteration of brother. Once, when it had been just her and him in the kitchen, he'd said, "Caroline love, is the triple berry done?"
No commas in between, not a pause in his breath. He'd said it like it was one sentence, like it was part of her name, Carolinelove, and she'd just stood there with her hands clutched in her apron, staring, not quite knowing what this quiet noise inside her head was. Carolinelove, he'd called her that day, and a few days later it was "Carolinelove, you don't have to rush out to feed every dog that passes by this place," with exasperation. She'd looked at him long and hard then, wondering if he even realizes what he does, and he'd looked back, and - why yes Caroline, maybe he does-
Because he never really did say her name the same way after that. It's always a clipped Caroline in an equally-as-clipped order, a careless glance thrown over his shoulder, and she doesn't know why she's being so neurotic about it, but she is, okay?
"Caroline." And there it is, the snip of his voice. "Bring my brother his coffee, would you?"
Caroline pours it black and steaming from the pot, sets it down in front of Elijah, who's perusing the inventory counts. "Will that be all?" Her voice almost wobbles out his name - what to call him? Elijah? She barely knows him, but Mr. Mikaelson sounds so formal, so… Mikael-esque, and it's just so weird how this family and their little quirks always seems to flash in her head like a given. Like she already knows their whole life story from that one - or five - Wikipedia visits.
"I'm fine for now," Elijah tells her, and he folds up the worksheet and looks up at her. Smiling at her, without quite smiling. She feels appraised and daunted all at once, and puts this ability of his down on her list of I Aspire (right next to Audrey Hepburn's rested look). "So, you're the Girl."
"I'm the girl?" Caroline repeats, fiddling with the lace of her apron.
Elijah ignores her befuddled look. "How long have you been working here?"
"A little over a month." She refrains from adding sir. God, how dumb would that sound? She feels like she's being interviewed for a job that she already has, never mind the fact that she was never interviewed in the first place. Elijah, ever so polite, asks her if she could fetch another cup and saucer for him, and she does, relieved to be out of the line of assault from his eyes.
"Care?" Rebekah asks when she's rooting through the good china. "You look a bit shaken."
"Elijah wants." Caroline doesn't know why she's too frazzled to finish her sentence. She lifts the tea set instead. Rebekah nods and goes back to waiting on the pie, just thirty seconds away from perfect lemon-meringue bliss.
Kol's nowhere to be seen when Caroline rounds the worktable and stands opposite Elijah, the other side of the counter (fiddly hands hidden behind the polished wood). She's about to send him a curt smile and leave, but Elijah reaches for the coffee jug, pours, and nudges it towards her all before the words "Enjoy your meal" could even become a proper sentence on her lips.
"Would you join me for some coffee, Caroline?" He's already piling ginger cookies in front of her.
Caroline can't find it in herself to say no. She looks down at the cookies, at all that black coffee, and asks, "Do I get to choose my own drink?"
.
.
"Nik."
Klaus' head snaps away from the scene before him-Elijah, too casual in his smart suit, having tea with Caroline. There's an easy laughter in her voice and a charmed glint in his brother's eye that he doesn't feel very easy about, and he fervently hopes Elijah isn't coming to any conclusions now-just because the girl who happened to be the Girl is working for them now, doesn't mean-
Rebekah tugs her apron off and folds it up; she needs to mend that little patch that had gotten caught on Klaus' sharp table edge. "I didn't know you never cared much for spoons."
Klaus' fingers clench around his wooden spoon. The smell of Banana Cinnamon fills his nose, but the smell of Rebekah's shit-eating grin overpowers it. He sets the spoon down. "You talked to Caroline."
"No brother, you talked to Caroline." She looks gleeful, delighted - if not a little sad. "You don't talk to people."
"I do," he replies, chagrined. Trust Elijah to compartmentalize; trust Rebekah to haunt it. "I talk to you. To Kol, to Elijah-"
"Don't be silly, brother." Rebekah waves an impatient hand. "We're family, we're not people"
He tries again. "Marcel-"
But Rebekah, she tries harder. "Only to talk jam."
Pie filling forgotten, his stomach in anxious little knots, he asks, "So jam isn't right up the alley of spoons?"
"Nik," she admonishes, and he sighs.
"Yes, I talk to her. A little, when we're closing up because you never want to stay that late." Klaus folds his arms across his chest and scowls at his sister. "What of it?"
Rebekah smiles at him and rests her chin on her apron-padded palms. "Do you like it?"
She doesn't ask do you like her? like some teeny-bopper, even with her head a dizzy whirl of Saint Valentine's. His sister had always loved today, decorating the diner with confetti and hearts and pink placemats with as much gusto as she had Christmas Day. This year she's a little quieter; he caught her standing by the tip jar and he's about to berate her for stealing again, until he notices her hands circling the mouth of it with a dreamy sadness, her mind not in the diner but far away.
Rebekah, ever the hopeless romantic, the one who loves too freely, the one who so eagerly tucked her hand into the crook of Caroline's arm and giggles out some absurd abbreviation for best friend forever, doesn't even ask the obvious question. It would be too easy, wouldn't it? Klaus exhales sharply. "It's mostly mindless chatter, things that don't even make sense. She talks about spoons for heaven's sa-"
"So what if she does?" Rebekah says with a click of her tongue. "So what if she talks in weird metaphors and talks a lot and talks too much - she talks to you, which isn't something I can say about a lot of people. Lord knows how she stands you."
His sister nuzzles her face into her hands. It might be the pink twine in her hair, but she looks a little delirious in her delight. "She's quite taken with you, you know."
"Don't be ridiculous," Klaus mutters, but he finds himself unable to maintain his sister's eye contact. Once, when he was eighteen and the idea of walking away from Mikael and all the bullshit that came with him was just insistent dreams pulling and tugging at him, he'd started to bake pies in the back of D'oh! Nuts' kitchen, always making Rebekah or Kol eat them or throwing them out before Mikael would get back. What he didn't know was that Mikael knew all along, and one day, in tasting his latest creation - The Triple Berry, which is now his signature pie - he bites down on something that isn't the light crunch of berry seeds, but more of the painful, teeth-cracking variety. His head reels and he spits out the offending object - and it's a token of his father's store, donut insignia and all.
"Oops," his father sings, appearing out of nowhere. "You must have accidentally dropped it in there while you were busy doing things I do not pay you to do."
His sister's declaration of Caroline's… affection was like that very token, out of the blue, a kick in the ear, meant to be spat out once found and never looked at again. He has half a mind to tell Rebekah all of this, using his stern older brother voice, but Rebekah looks like she's not in a mood to have her notions skewed by him; not today.
She doesn't even tease the stutter in his reply like he'd expected her to. She just rests her head in the palm of her hands and sighs mournfully at him. "Isn't it strange, how things turn out? I notice her looking at you, and I know you look back at her, and you've known me your whole life and you still think these things past me by. Strange. You are a really strange person, Nik."
"Rebekah," Klaus says, and he sounds miserable even in his ears. "You're talking nonsense."
"Am I?" his sister says a little wickedly. "Have you ever felt like there's a part of you missing? Like a spoon without its fork, a bird that comes home to finds its nest gone?"
Klaus pulls a face. "Eh?"
"No?" Rebekah shrugs. "Good. I was just being dramatic. It doesn't feel like that, not really. But you'll know it."
"Know what?"
"White doves taking flight, six bells a-ringing," his sister hums, bundles her apron into her arms, bustling out through the back door before he can demand a straight answer out of her.
.
.
She's not really a coffee person, Caroline tells him as she's stirring her tea. Elijah nurses his two cups of coffee - she thinks he might be a little presumptuous - and asks if she's enjoyed her time working here.
"So far?" Caroline blows on her tea, nibbles on a bit of cookie. "It's been nice. Good. Great, in fact. Last week, Rebekah and I talked a drunk out of peeing on the espresso machine."
"Charming," Elijah nods, and he does indeed look charmed. She wonders if this is all just a front, but then she wonders why she's even analyzing this guy like he's a production of Macbeth. He certainly fits the part, with his dark hair and shadowed eyes, lady love thrown out of a tower somewhere with all the seriousness he carried in the starch of his sleeves.
"Kol given you much trouble?"
Caroline tucks a curl behind her ear, wondering what answer he's expecting, wondering why he asks questions he already knows the answers to. "Kol's not around enough to be much trouble," she admits.
"Ah," Elijah says. He stirs his coffee without as much as a tinkle, while her spoon had clattered a little on her saucer. "And Klaus?"
Caroline smirks into her tea. There it is. She'd been right to be suspicious - this dude might carry himself off as King of Genovia or whatever, but there was still that too casual pause between the sip of his coffee and the bite of his ginger biscuit, the nonchalant way he pushes the sugar bowl towards her.
So she says, "Oh, he's swell. I talked him out of whopping Damon Salvatore with his rolling pin and saved a guy from his magical little hands." Okay, so she'd walked the General back home. It wasn't exactly equivalent to her stopping Klaus' touch, but hey - it's the thought that counts. And what counted even more was Elijah's look of surprise as he regards her with new eyes.
Also, she doesn't add, he never touches me.
Isn't that weird? Like, not once. But then again she's watched the way he is, and even in those rare moments he's handling the till his palm never slides across palm when he's passing dollars, and he's weirdly alert to people coming and going so they never have to resort to bodily distractions to get his attention.
He's guarded, she wants to say. Very much so.
She doesn't just talk to Rebekah on her breaks. Sometimes Rebekah has her own classes to go to, and when Kol's done flipping off customers he leaves with his pockets full of tips and the cleaning is left to Caroline and Klaus.
"I notice you don't like touching me," Caroline says before she can stop herself.
Klaus replies without missing a beat, "I don't like touching a lot of people."
"Yeah, but-" Caroline turns away from the pile of dirty dishes. "Is this like a side-effect to your little curse thing? Sometimes it's like you're afraid to even look at me."
Klaus stops arranging the pie pans and turns, facing her fully. "I'm looking at you now."
"You know what I mean," she snaps.
"No," Klaus says, "Not really."
Caroline straightens up, adjusts her metaphorical glasses, and tells him with all the authority of an eighteen-year-old speaking to her much older boss, "You have intimacy issues."
"Lovely," Klaus says. "How'd you suss that out? Which episode of Teen Wolf made you an expert on interpersonal problems."
"Hey, I resent that-it's a really good show, okay? And for one," Caroline presses on, "you're never with a girl. Don't get me wrong, you're working and stuff, but boys come and flirt with Rebekah! Boys come and flirt with me, for God's sake, and it's great because of the tips, and heck, I even saw that catlady who always comes on Mondays making eyes at Kol-"
"Is there a point to this?"
"The point," Caroline says, "you're a pretty good looking guy. You've even got an accent, like who doesn't just die for that? And yet…" Caroline waves her arm around the empty diner. "Nada."
Klaus scratches the back of his head. "Caroline love, we're closed."
And that, curse her, quiets her down. She picks the sponge up once again and starts on the scrubbing. "Don't you ever feel lonely?"
"With all this riveting conversation you and I have?" Klaus says dryly. A tilt of his head, a roll of his eyes. "Never."
He leaves soon after that, finally trusting Caroline to lock the place up, and feels so very much like a teenager when she counts it up on her fingers like some sort of victory and whispers to herself, four.
Elijah's voice brings her back to earth, and she blinks a little dazedly at him. "Um. What?"
"I asked if you have any plans for Valentine's Day," Elijah hums. His coffee's all finished, and her tea is reduced to dregs at the bottom of her cup. "Rebekah's already asked for half the day off. What about you?"
Out of habit, she looks into the kitchen. Klaus' eyes meet hers for a fraction of a second before he flicks them back to his pies. "Um," she says again, throat gone dry, and when she turns back to Elijah she realizes with a pang that he'd caught every last scorching second of that.
"No plans," she manages to stammer out, already slipping out of her seat. "I really should be getting back to work - my break ended like, ten minutes ago-"
"Of course," Elijah says obligingly. "I have business to attend to myself, and a door that needs fixing." He stands and gives her a nod, actually pulls her stool out for her, and she doesn't know whether to laugh or like, do something drastic, because Elijah probably think she's half in love with his brother by now and she's not, she totally isn't-
"Look, Elijah," Caroline starts, but Elijah just shakes his head, Another time, Caroline. She doesn't know why it makes her mouth snap shut, but it does. Alright then.
She goes back into the kitchen, and weirdly enough, Klaus is looking every bit perplexed as she feels. She's wringing her hands again, pacing back and forth, and his eyes follow her, ever the silent one. She stops when her stomach hits the worktable, and she looks at him, the way he's leaning back against the shelves that hold all the delivery boxes, just… lounged there, looking at her oddly.
"A whooshing," Caroline says carefully, palms pressed flat against the table. "A tingling in your fingers. And then you had to sit down."
Klaus frowns and she just - she finds herself wishing for the day he'd stop frowning at every little thing she says, like it's some silly babble that isn't worth his time. She pushes her hair out of her eyes, takes a deep breath, and asks, "What happened after that, Klaus?"
And it's like she's in that goddamn alleyway again, staring up at a boy who's looking at her with an almost fearful look in his eyes, space and time and planets bending between them, a hundred million suns and stars in the weight of silence that follows. It feels like he's silent for a very long time, and he looks at her even longer before he finally says, "My brother died."
.
.
tbc