TVD fic: Blue Moon
Pairing: Caroline Forbes/Tom Avery
Summary: AU where Caroline turns Tom. Partying and personal growth ensues.
Notes: For lionheartedgirl.
Disclaimer: as ever
They find him unconscious in a back room.
She knows better than to be surprised by doppelgangers by now, really. But that’s her friend’s face lying slack and pale, just with a nose that’s been broken once and few more wrinkles around the eyes than she or Stefan will ever have the chance to get.
She takes out the tube.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Enzo says
Caroline pulls Tom upright and shakes him awake.
“Tom.” She holds back both his shoulders and barrels through his eyes. “I’m your friend. I’m not going to hurt you. You trust me.”
“I trust you,” he says, simple and sweet.
She rips into her wrist and presses it against his mouth. “Drink this.”
He obliges. And obliges, and obliges.
“Okay, stop.”
He stops.
“Never stops being weird, does it.”
“Can we not do existential vampire bonding right now?”
“Your show.”
“Damn straight.” She hands him her phone with her left hand, keeping Tom pinned down with her right. “I need you to record it, though. They might not let Stefan go without proof.”
“You ready?”
She looks back at Tom. “I’m going to take care of you.”
He nods.
“Yeah. I’m ready.”
“Three… two…. one…. rolling.”
She steels her nerve and snaps his neck.
He falls to the floor.
She steps back to let Enzo capture the image for another second, feeling faintly sick. (Better than he does, though.)
“Okay, that’s all we need to prove. Not that it matters, since they’ll have felt him die.”
Enzo arches an eyebrow. “Won’t they feel him come back?”
“It’s possible. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Maybe you should go back and get Stefan out of there, though.”
“All the way back to Virginia, before UnStefan here wakes up?”
“Compel yourself a flight to Dulles. It’s, like, a two-hour drive to Mystic Falls. If you go the speed limit, which I know you don’t.”
“You’re telling me to steal, cheat, and fly Delta?” Enzo smiles. “Even more ruthless than I gave you credit for. I’m impressed.”
“Well, I am extremely impressive.” She tosses her hair. “Do you think I’ll feel it when he wakes up?”
“Haven’t the foggiest. Procreating’s best left to those who give a shit, if you ask me.”
“Yeah, well. I guess that’s me.”
“I guess it is.” Enzo eyes Tom’s body. “You sure you don’t want to go sweep in and save the day for Stefan? Can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can babysit, if you want.”
“No, I should stick around with him. Just because I have a selfish psychopath for a sire, doesn’t mean everyone has to.”
“Hey, that’s my friend you’re talking about.”
“So you’ve met him. Speaking of -” She snatches her phone out of his hand and sends the file to Damon, since he’s Stefan’s best shot at staying out of the traveler camp, then calls him. “Tell them he’s dead. Show them the video. Enzo’s on his way.”
Enzo nods and takes his leave.
“So what’d you really do, Blondie?”
“Killed a nice guy. Saved Stefan.”
“Impressive,” Damon leers like always, and then, “thanks, Caroline.”
“Go jump in a bonfire, Damon.”
She sets out her emergency blood bags and thanks the universe for the miracle of 3G. I’m going to flip through Jezebel, she thinks, I have all night and I’m going to read dozens of stupid posts, I’m going to be bored out of my skull by the time Stefan calls.
It doesn’t quite work out that way.
Stefan does call, at least. “Caroline, thank you. I’m sorry that they made you do that.”
“Me too. I’m just glad you’re okay. Are you okay? Do you have brain damage?”
“Of course not, Fiona. We’re going to order a large Hawaiian pizza and -“
She laughs, for real. “Alright! I get it, you’re fine.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I have one last thing to wrap up. Listen, I gotta go.”
And just in time, too. Fifteen minutes later, Tom’s eyes pop open. She crams a blood bag in his mouth before he has a chance to freak out. (No more transitional suicides on her watch, no ma’am.) He swallows most of it before his brain catches up with his fangs.
“Oh, my God, is this a blood bag? It’s a blood bag. I’m going to vomit.” He looks down at the blood still in and on his hands. “Why am I not vomiting?”
“Because your body knows it’s what you need.”
“What the fuck - “
Time for Vampire 101, Intro to Bloodsucking. “Touch your face.” She pops out her own fangs as his fingers crawl over his veins. “You need to drink blood now, the way you used to need to eat. You’ll crave human blood, but you only needed it for that first feed to complete your transition. Animal blood can keep you alive and healthy from now on. You can still eat food, though it’s less appealing and lacks nutritional value. You have super-strength and super-speed, and you can compel people to believe, forget, or do things. With great power, blah blah blah, you should only compel to keep the vampire world a secret and to get the things you need to survive.”
He stares blankly.
“Fortunately, you can still use non-blood substances. If you want to chill out and sleep until it gets dark, you’re welcome to a couple of my clonazepam.”
Tom nods. “That sounds like a good idea.”
She taps out four yellow tablets, pops one herself, and hands him the rest. He swallows them dry.
Tom takes the mattress off the cot, sets it on the far side of the room, and lays down with his back against the wall. He’s out in a few minutes.
This time she does read Jezebel.
*
“So, not to torment you with a major philosophical dilemma first thing in the evening, but why me?”
“You’re a doppelganger.”
“I have an evil twin?”
“He’s not evil! He’s my friend.”
“I am the evil twin? Man, that would’ve been so much sexier without the question mark.”
“You have an evil ancestor who looked exactly like you. And he has a perfectly decent descendant who looks exactly like both of you.”
“Stefan?”
She nods. “Doppelganger blood is useful in spells. Less useful now that you’re also a vampire, but still useful, apparently. You were the last living one. A group of witches wanted your line ended, so they kidnapped and tortured Stefan until I… you know.”
“Magic? Like, wizards?”
“Witches, mostly, and travelers. But yes.” He laughs a little. “What, you’re a vampire now, but magic is too big a leap?”
“Well, when you put it like that.” Tom waves his hand. “I’ll adjust. I think.”
“Yes, you will.”
“How?”
“My friends and I pretty much went back to our normal lives, more or less.”
“Oh, there’s a whole monster league.”
“Mystic Falls chapter, at least.” She runs down the list for him: vampires, Originals, werewolves, hunters, witches, no zombies that we know of.
Tom takes it all in, rolls his eyes when Stefan would and laughs at her little jokes. “I’m not sure you did go back to normal life, because it kind of sounds like you never really had one to begin with. Anyway, my normal life pretty much ended four months ago.”
“You do seem to be taking this in stride. I guess being a vampire’s better than being in a magically-induced coma indefinitely.”
“Yeah. Maybe it just hasn’t sunk in yet, but yeah, I think I’m alright.”
That’s a little close to bravado for comfort. (She knows all about putting on a brave face.) “And hey. Everybody’s gotta grow up somehow. Our way just happens not to involve wrinkle creams and calcium supplements.”
“You’re a real bright-sider, aren’t you?”
“Contrary to popular media myth and legend, it’s not all that hard to find a bright side in immortality.”
“No, no, I like that about you.”
“It seems like you are, too.”
“Well, I’ve been lucky.” She arches her eyebrows. “You didn’t have to turn me. You’d have been better off just killing me, and you found a way to save me. A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered.”
“Well, a lot of people are assholes.”
They both laugh.
“Okay, well, I have been in this dump long enough. We are going to go compel ourselves a suite downtown and then you are going to experience the world in a whole new way.”
She shoves a few things in her bag. He watches her, because he doesn’t have anything to pack. “I think I already am.”
*
The club isn’t like anything she’s seen before - not that she’s ever been to a club, unless tailgate parties with your grade school friends count as a club, which they definitely don’t - but it’s louder and busier and so much more than she would have thought to expect.
It’s perfect.
“Dance with me, Caroline.”
Over four or five songs, they move from the edge to the center and then to a corner, where the back of her knee bumps a couch with a fellow partier passed out on it. She laughs and starts to move them back to the floor, but Tom goes rigid.
“What?”
“This guy OD’d. Hold on a sec.”
“Wait, what? Tom, you can’t just go around feeding blood to junkies!”
“Why not?”
“Because!”
“I’m an EMT. You said go back to normal. Not standing around and watching someone die is my normal! Why the hell isn’t it yours?”
(Because if she hadn’t learned to watch people die, she’d be destroyed.) “Fine. Go.”
There’s no moving the guy to a darker corner, so Tom goes all out, straddling the guy’s legs and wrapping an arm all the way around his head before tearing open his wrist. Once the guy comes to, Tom keeps his eye for a moment before coming back to her.
“What’d you compel him to do?”
“Lay off the junk. I don’t know if we can really compel people more strongly than addiction can, but I think it was worth a try.”
She nods. “Dance with me, Tom.”
*
They leave tonight's salsa bar buzzed and happy. He nudges her toward the curb.
“You go get a cab. They’ll stop for you. I’ll be right back.”
Waiting for a cab, something else you don’t need to do in Mystic Falls. It takes longer than it ever does on Sex and the City. Good thing she can’t feel chill, or be (too) bothered by her heels.
But when one does pull over, he’s still not back. She waves the taxi away to look and listen, and follows her senses to the closest alley. Tom has his back against the wall, his wrist in a club kid’s mouth and his fangs in the kid’s neck.
She rips them apart. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Eating. Do you mind?”
“Yes, I mind. You can’t just - “
“Why not? Blood loss is damage to the body like anything else. We can heal the people we feed off of. Maybe that’s why we’ve evolved this way, to be able to keep things in balance.”
“Not to get all Scopes monkey on you, but we didn’t evolve. We were created. I’ve met our creator. She’s a bitch who tried came back from the dead to try and kill us all, because she thought we were too dangerous to live.”
“And what, you agree with her?”
“No! What?”
“Well, you think we can’t control ourselves, just like she did.”
“That’s not what I said!”
“It’s a little bit what you said.”
“I’m saying, we can choose to avoid situations where we might get out of control.”
“I’m not out of control, Caroline. I haven’t killed any of them.”
“You will.”
“What, you don’t trust me?”
“Everyone does it.”
“Even you?”
“Yes! And I don’t want you to have to live with that forever. Literally, forever. Do you understand that?”
“I’m Catholic, Caroline. I was always going to have to live with myself forever.”
“Come on. Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“But you’re a vampire now. We kind of famously avoid churchy stuff?”
“We don’t have to.” He undoes two buttons and, sure enough, a crucifix hangs from his neck on a fine gold chain. “I get it, okay. I get that there are moral imperatives to watching ourselves in the face of temptation. I’m doing it differently now, is all. I’m handling it.”
She reaches up and touches his collar, close to a symbol of - something outside of even her frame of reference. “So you’re, like. A nice boy.”
He wraps his arms loosely around her waist, hands clasped behind her. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I don’t know anybody quite like you.”
“Which is ironic, considering.”
She laughs and startles back (but doesn’t move her hands). “Weird!”
“So, this isn’t about some hangup on someone else?”
“No! Stefan’s my friend’s ex. He’s my friend.”
“Well, I’m your friend.”
She leans back in. “Maybe not just my friend.”
*
“We need to make some plans, because we have to lay low for a while.” A while won’t mean five hundred years for them. She hopes. “The travelers bought that you died -“
“- technically, that’d be because I did -“
“- but they’re powerful enough that we need to steer clear.”
“Powerful enough that I need to steer clear. Caroline, you can’t stop your life for me.”
“I’m enjoying my life now.” It’s true. Probably a vampire shouldn’t need a breath of fresh air, but things are better with Tom, better in the big city that’s loud enough to drown out all her super-hearing.
“If you stay away, they’ll know something’s wrong.”
“If I go back there, something will be wrong. Everything is wrong there.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“I was planning to take a year abroad.”
“I wanted to and never got around to it.”
“Well, then. No reason not to make it happen.” She smiles. “We do have all the time in the world.”
“What do we need to do?”
“I need to do that which I very much prefer to avoid doing.”
He lets it ring four times - yeah, right, like he’s some kind of dating mastermind. “Caroline! To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I’m calling to say, you were right.”
“Always, love. About what this time?”
“I want to see the world.”
“Well, I’m a bit tied up at the moment with -“
“Yeah, yeah, Hayley and her litter. But I don’t wanna stick around Mystic Falls while you build your empire or whatever.”
“…..and?”
“And I…turned someone? Congratulations, you’re a great-great-great-whatever to someone who doesn’t have any reason to hate you. Yet.”
“And why is that?”
“Oh, you go around making whole species but I need a reason to turn one little human.”
“Yes, well, I’m the big bad wolf and you’re the principled Caroline Forbes, so I’m fairly certain you had a reason. Making a little conversation.”
“Some travelers found another doppelganger. They were going to kill Stefan if I didn’t….deal with it.” Sorry, she mouths to Tom.
Rude, Tom mouths back.
“Another Katarina on your hands, and just when you were well shot of the last one. My deepest sympathies.”
“Well, what are you going to do.”
Tom arches his eyebrows. She draws her fingers across her throat.
“And what can I do to congratulate you on this joyous occasion?”
“Well, we’re going to get out of the continent for a while, and our first stop is a new daylight ring. I was hoping you could direct us to some friendly witches in the neighborhood of, I don’t know, Prague?”
Ooooh, Prague, Tom mouths, and mimics flipping hair out of his eyes.
Shut up, she mouths back.
“Ooooh, Prague, excellent choice. There’s a coven in Wrocław who know what’s good for them. They meet in an Old Town cemetery twice a month under the quarter moon. Tell them I sent you and if they’d like to avoid a repeat of 1537, they’ll give you anything you want.”
The fuck?
She rolls her eyes and nods.
“And if anyone asks, I visited you and then went on vacation.”
“I’ll be your alibi anytime, love.”
“Thanks, Klaus.”
Klaus? Tom sniggers. Silently, but it’s a definite snigger.
She hangs up. “We’re not staying in Prague.”
*
She informs the ticket agent that they’ll be flying first class.
“What? You can’t sit in a cabin with too many windows, and I can’t fly without mimosas on the hour.”
“What happened to only compelling what we need to survive?”
“Oh, we do need to do this to survive. If we’re going to escape a fate worse than death we have got to get far away from here, like, yesterday.”
“So why didn’t we go yesterday?”
“Um, we were having a good time?” She finishes twisting up her hair. “Anyway, the rules are…. Aspirational. We try.”
“We try.” Tom somehow manages to look up at her, even standing up straight. “I like that.”
She smiles. “Me, too.”
Summary: AU where Caroline turns Tom. Partying and personal growth ensues.
Notes: For lionheartedgirl.
Disclaimer: as ever
They find him unconscious in a back room.
She knows better than to be surprised by doppelgangers by now, really. But that’s her friend’s face lying slack and pale, just with a nose that’s been broken once and few more wrinkles around the eyes than she or Stefan will ever have the chance to get.
She takes out the tube.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Enzo says
Caroline pulls Tom upright and shakes him awake.
“Tom.” She holds back both his shoulders and barrels through his eyes. “I’m your friend. I’m not going to hurt you. You trust me.”
“I trust you,” he says, simple and sweet.
She rips into her wrist and presses it against his mouth. “Drink this.”
He obliges. And obliges, and obliges.
“Okay, stop.”
He stops.
“Never stops being weird, does it.”
“Can we not do existential vampire bonding right now?”
“Your show.”
“Damn straight.” She hands him her phone with her left hand, keeping Tom pinned down with her right. “I need you to record it, though. They might not let Stefan go without proof.”
“You ready?”
She looks back at Tom. “I’m going to take care of you.”
He nods.
“Yeah. I’m ready.”
“Three… two…. one…. rolling.”
She steels her nerve and snaps his neck.
He falls to the floor.
She steps back to let Enzo capture the image for another second, feeling faintly sick. (Better than he does, though.)
“Okay, that’s all we need to prove. Not that it matters, since they’ll have felt him die.”
Enzo arches an eyebrow. “Won’t they feel him come back?”
“It’s possible. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Maybe you should go back and get Stefan out of there, though.”
“All the way back to Virginia, before UnStefan here wakes up?”
“Compel yourself a flight to Dulles. It’s, like, a two-hour drive to Mystic Falls. If you go the speed limit, which I know you don’t.”
“You’re telling me to steal, cheat, and fly Delta?” Enzo smiles. “Even more ruthless than I gave you credit for. I’m impressed.”
“Well, I am extremely impressive.” She tosses her hair. “Do you think I’ll feel it when he wakes up?”
“Haven’t the foggiest. Procreating’s best left to those who give a shit, if you ask me.”
“Yeah, well. I guess that’s me.”
“I guess it is.” Enzo eyes Tom’s body. “You sure you don’t want to go sweep in and save the day for Stefan? Can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can babysit, if you want.”
“No, I should stick around with him. Just because I have a selfish psychopath for a sire, doesn’t mean everyone has to.”
“Hey, that’s my friend you’re talking about.”
“So you’ve met him. Speaking of -” She snatches her phone out of his hand and sends the file to Damon, since he’s Stefan’s best shot at staying out of the traveler camp, then calls him. “Tell them he’s dead. Show them the video. Enzo’s on his way.”
Enzo nods and takes his leave.
“So what’d you really do, Blondie?”
“Killed a nice guy. Saved Stefan.”
“Impressive,” Damon leers like always, and then, “thanks, Caroline.”
“Go jump in a bonfire, Damon.”
She sets out her emergency blood bags and thanks the universe for the miracle of 3G. I’m going to flip through Jezebel, she thinks, I have all night and I’m going to read dozens of stupid posts, I’m going to be bored out of my skull by the time Stefan calls.
It doesn’t quite work out that way.
Stefan does call, at least. “Caroline, thank you. I’m sorry that they made you do that.”
“Me too. I’m just glad you’re okay. Are you okay? Do you have brain damage?”
“Of course not, Fiona. We’re going to order a large Hawaiian pizza and -“
She laughs, for real. “Alright! I get it, you’re fine.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I have one last thing to wrap up. Listen, I gotta go.”
And just in time, too. Fifteen minutes later, Tom’s eyes pop open. She crams a blood bag in his mouth before he has a chance to freak out. (No more transitional suicides on her watch, no ma’am.) He swallows most of it before his brain catches up with his fangs.
“Oh, my God, is this a blood bag? It’s a blood bag. I’m going to vomit.” He looks down at the blood still in and on his hands. “Why am I not vomiting?”
“Because your body knows it’s what you need.”
“What the fuck - “
Time for Vampire 101, Intro to Bloodsucking. “Touch your face.” She pops out her own fangs as his fingers crawl over his veins. “You need to drink blood now, the way you used to need to eat. You’ll crave human blood, but you only needed it for that first feed to complete your transition. Animal blood can keep you alive and healthy from now on. You can still eat food, though it’s less appealing and lacks nutritional value. You have super-strength and super-speed, and you can compel people to believe, forget, or do things. With great power, blah blah blah, you should only compel to keep the vampire world a secret and to get the things you need to survive.”
He stares blankly.
“Fortunately, you can still use non-blood substances. If you want to chill out and sleep until it gets dark, you’re welcome to a couple of my clonazepam.”
Tom nods. “That sounds like a good idea.”
She taps out four yellow tablets, pops one herself, and hands him the rest. He swallows them dry.
Tom takes the mattress off the cot, sets it on the far side of the room, and lays down with his back against the wall. He’s out in a few minutes.
This time she does read Jezebel.
*
“So, not to torment you with a major philosophical dilemma first thing in the evening, but why me?”
“You’re a doppelganger.”
“I have an evil twin?”
“He’s not evil! He’s my friend.”
“I am the evil twin? Man, that would’ve been so much sexier without the question mark.”
“You have an evil ancestor who looked exactly like you. And he has a perfectly decent descendant who looks exactly like both of you.”
“Stefan?”
She nods. “Doppelganger blood is useful in spells. Less useful now that you’re also a vampire, but still useful, apparently. You were the last living one. A group of witches wanted your line ended, so they kidnapped and tortured Stefan until I… you know.”
“Magic? Like, wizards?”
“Witches, mostly, and travelers. But yes.” He laughs a little. “What, you’re a vampire now, but magic is too big a leap?”
“Well, when you put it like that.” Tom waves his hand. “I’ll adjust. I think.”
“Yes, you will.”
“How?”
“My friends and I pretty much went back to our normal lives, more or less.”
“Oh, there’s a whole monster league.”
“Mystic Falls chapter, at least.” She runs down the list for him: vampires, Originals, werewolves, hunters, witches, no zombies that we know of.
Tom takes it all in, rolls his eyes when Stefan would and laughs at her little jokes. “I’m not sure you did go back to normal life, because it kind of sounds like you never really had one to begin with. Anyway, my normal life pretty much ended four months ago.”
“You do seem to be taking this in stride. I guess being a vampire’s better than being in a magically-induced coma indefinitely.”
“Yeah. Maybe it just hasn’t sunk in yet, but yeah, I think I’m alright.”
That’s a little close to bravado for comfort. (She knows all about putting on a brave face.) “And hey. Everybody’s gotta grow up somehow. Our way just happens not to involve wrinkle creams and calcium supplements.”
“You’re a real bright-sider, aren’t you?”
“Contrary to popular media myth and legend, it’s not all that hard to find a bright side in immortality.”
“No, no, I like that about you.”
“It seems like you are, too.”
“Well, I’ve been lucky.” She arches her eyebrows. “You didn’t have to turn me. You’d have been better off just killing me, and you found a way to save me. A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered.”
“Well, a lot of people are assholes.”
They both laugh.
“Okay, well, I have been in this dump long enough. We are going to go compel ourselves a suite downtown and then you are going to experience the world in a whole new way.”
She shoves a few things in her bag. He watches her, because he doesn’t have anything to pack. “I think I already am.”
*
The club isn’t like anything she’s seen before - not that she’s ever been to a club, unless tailgate parties with your grade school friends count as a club, which they definitely don’t - but it’s louder and busier and so much more than she would have thought to expect.
It’s perfect.
“Dance with me, Caroline.”
Over four or five songs, they move from the edge to the center and then to a corner, where the back of her knee bumps a couch with a fellow partier passed out on it. She laughs and starts to move them back to the floor, but Tom goes rigid.
“What?”
“This guy OD’d. Hold on a sec.”
“Wait, what? Tom, you can’t just go around feeding blood to junkies!”
“Why not?”
“Because!”
“I’m an EMT. You said go back to normal. Not standing around and watching someone die is my normal! Why the hell isn’t it yours?”
(Because if she hadn’t learned to watch people die, she’d be destroyed.) “Fine. Go.”
There’s no moving the guy to a darker corner, so Tom goes all out, straddling the guy’s legs and wrapping an arm all the way around his head before tearing open his wrist. Once the guy comes to, Tom keeps his eye for a moment before coming back to her.
“What’d you compel him to do?”
“Lay off the junk. I don’t know if we can really compel people more strongly than addiction can, but I think it was worth a try.”
She nods. “Dance with me, Tom.”
*
They leave tonight's salsa bar buzzed and happy. He nudges her toward the curb.
“You go get a cab. They’ll stop for you. I’ll be right back.”
Waiting for a cab, something else you don’t need to do in Mystic Falls. It takes longer than it ever does on Sex and the City. Good thing she can’t feel chill, or be (too) bothered by her heels.
But when one does pull over, he’s still not back. She waves the taxi away to look and listen, and follows her senses to the closest alley. Tom has his back against the wall, his wrist in a club kid’s mouth and his fangs in the kid’s neck.
She rips them apart. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Eating. Do you mind?”
“Yes, I mind. You can’t just - “
“Why not? Blood loss is damage to the body like anything else. We can heal the people we feed off of. Maybe that’s why we’ve evolved this way, to be able to keep things in balance.”
“Not to get all Scopes monkey on you, but we didn’t evolve. We were created. I’ve met our creator. She’s a bitch who tried came back from the dead to try and kill us all, because she thought we were too dangerous to live.”
“And what, you agree with her?”
“No! What?”
“Well, you think we can’t control ourselves, just like she did.”
“That’s not what I said!”
“It’s a little bit what you said.”
“I’m saying, we can choose to avoid situations where we might get out of control.”
“I’m not out of control, Caroline. I haven’t killed any of them.”
“You will.”
“What, you don’t trust me?”
“Everyone does it.”
“Even you?”
“Yes! And I don’t want you to have to live with that forever. Literally, forever. Do you understand that?”
“I’m Catholic, Caroline. I was always going to have to live with myself forever.”
“Come on. Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“But you’re a vampire now. We kind of famously avoid churchy stuff?”
“We don’t have to.” He undoes two buttons and, sure enough, a crucifix hangs from his neck on a fine gold chain. “I get it, okay. I get that there are moral imperatives to watching ourselves in the face of temptation. I’m doing it differently now, is all. I’m handling it.”
She reaches up and touches his collar, close to a symbol of - something outside of even her frame of reference. “So you’re, like. A nice boy.”
He wraps his arms loosely around her waist, hands clasped behind her. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I don’t know anybody quite like you.”
“Which is ironic, considering.”
She laughs and startles back (but doesn’t move her hands). “Weird!”
“So, this isn’t about some hangup on someone else?”
“No! Stefan’s my friend’s ex. He’s my friend.”
“Well, I’m your friend.”
She leans back in. “Maybe not just my friend.”
*
“We need to make some plans, because we have to lay low for a while.” A while won’t mean five hundred years for them. She hopes. “The travelers bought that you died -“
“- technically, that’d be because I did -“
“- but they’re powerful enough that we need to steer clear.”
“Powerful enough that I need to steer clear. Caroline, you can’t stop your life for me.”
“I’m enjoying my life now.” It’s true. Probably a vampire shouldn’t need a breath of fresh air, but things are better with Tom, better in the big city that’s loud enough to drown out all her super-hearing.
“If you stay away, they’ll know something’s wrong.”
“If I go back there, something will be wrong. Everything is wrong there.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“I was planning to take a year abroad.”
“I wanted to and never got around to it.”
“Well, then. No reason not to make it happen.” She smiles. “We do have all the time in the world.”
“What do we need to do?”
“I need to do that which I very much prefer to avoid doing.”
He lets it ring four times - yeah, right, like he’s some kind of dating mastermind. “Caroline! To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I’m calling to say, you were right.”
“Always, love. About what this time?”
“I want to see the world.”
“Well, I’m a bit tied up at the moment with -“
“Yeah, yeah, Hayley and her litter. But I don’t wanna stick around Mystic Falls while you build your empire or whatever.”
“…..and?”
“And I…turned someone? Congratulations, you’re a great-great-great-whatever to someone who doesn’t have any reason to hate you. Yet.”
“And why is that?”
“Oh, you go around making whole species but I need a reason to turn one little human.”
“Yes, well, I’m the big bad wolf and you’re the principled Caroline Forbes, so I’m fairly certain you had a reason. Making a little conversation.”
“Some travelers found another doppelganger. They were going to kill Stefan if I didn’t….deal with it.” Sorry, she mouths to Tom.
Rude, Tom mouths back.
“Another Katarina on your hands, and just when you were well shot of the last one. My deepest sympathies.”
“Well, what are you going to do.”
Tom arches his eyebrows. She draws her fingers across her throat.
“And what can I do to congratulate you on this joyous occasion?”
“Well, we’re going to get out of the continent for a while, and our first stop is a new daylight ring. I was hoping you could direct us to some friendly witches in the neighborhood of, I don’t know, Prague?”
Ooooh, Prague, Tom mouths, and mimics flipping hair out of his eyes.
Shut up, she mouths back.
“Ooooh, Prague, excellent choice. There’s a coven in Wrocław who know what’s good for them. They meet in an Old Town cemetery twice a month under the quarter moon. Tell them I sent you and if they’d like to avoid a repeat of 1537, they’ll give you anything you want.”
The fuck?
She rolls her eyes and nods.
“And if anyone asks, I visited you and then went on vacation.”
“I’ll be your alibi anytime, love.”
“Thanks, Klaus.”
Klaus? Tom sniggers. Silently, but it’s a definite snigger.
She hangs up. “We’re not staying in Prague.”
*
She informs the ticket agent that they’ll be flying first class.
“What? You can’t sit in a cabin with too many windows, and I can’t fly without mimosas on the hour.”
“What happened to only compelling what we need to survive?”
“Oh, we do need to do this to survive. If we’re going to escape a fate worse than death we have got to get far away from here, like, yesterday.”
“So why didn’t we go yesterday?”
“Um, we were having a good time?” She finishes twisting up her hair. “Anyway, the rules are…. Aspirational. We try.”
“We try.” Tom somehow manages to look up at her, even standing up straight. “I like that.”
She smiles. “Me, too.”