#goldcaught

[lousiestruby]

requested by my sun-laced parasol @goldcaught — klaus and caroline having a fourth of july picnic together, and her in short shorts! couldn't figure out how to insert the fourth of july-ness of it all, so had them in domestic bliss instead. hope you like it melissemis <3

[lynyrdwrites]

Turn off the Lights

This is written for the request from @goldcaught. Remember that Black Eyed Kid/Adult AU I mentioned to you?  This song is perfect for that, so this takes place in that, as of yet, undeveloped AU. 

---

If you wanna take a bite

Wanna see the dark side

C’mon, turn off the light

 No one else seemed to notice her.

Klaus walked into the Grill and looked around, and for a second even he must have overlooked her. Then, suddenly, it were as if she appeared out of nowhere, sitting at a table tucked into the back of the bar. She watched him, drinking something purple through a straw.

Klaus ignored the quarterback who was glaring at him from the bar and made his way over to sit across from her.

Caroline.  That was her name.

“You’ve been looking for me,” she said after a beat of silence.

“I’ve been looking for my brother,” Klaus replied, lying easily.  Elijah had, of course, been pushing him to find Finn… but Klaus couldn’t say that was the driving force for him.  As Kol was wont to say, Finn was the boring sibling.  Truth be told, Klaus tended to forget he was even missing until Elijah reminded him of such.

“No you haven’t,” Caroline replied coolly.  “You don’t want him, so he’s mine now.”

That made Klaus narrow his eyes.  Because while it was true he might not particularly care about Finn, the idea of any of siblings belonging to someone else was… rankling.

“He’s not yours to own, Love.  He’s a vampire.  One of the oldest, in fact.  Do you really think you can control him?”

“Do you know how long my kind has been around?” Caroline asked instead of answering.

“I don’t particularly care,” Klaus replied.  When Caroline just stared at him, still sipping her drink, he gave a mock sigh, as though the whole thing were an irritant he didn’t care to bother with; it wouldn’t do for her to know how curious he was about her.  “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“I don’t know,” Caroline replied with a shrug, pushing her glass aside as she finished the drink. She looked over to the bar, and the quarterback startled, as if just noticing she was there.  She waved for another drink.  “I don’t even know how old I am.  Old enough that this world sometimes seems incredibly foreign.  But younger than humanity.  I think.”

They both went silent as the drink was delivered.  When it looked like Matt might say something, Caroline just stared at him.  He froze, but didn’t immediately leave.

Then her eyes went black, and she smiled.  

The boy all but fled, and Klaus realized that he hadn’t noticed her eyes, not before that.  But they had been black the whole time.  But it wasn’t until that moment that he’d become aware of them, as he’d been aware of them when she’d come after Finn.

What are you? The question demanded to be asked, but he couldn’t.  He couldn’t let her know she had the advantage of him in that way.

“Finn doesn’t belong to you,” he said instead, forcing the words off his tongue slowly, one by one. Caroline smiled at him, the same way she had at Matt, the same way she had earlier.

Yet it wasn’t fear that filled him now.  

“You’re playing a dangerous game, vampire,” she said, the smile slowly fading as she met his gaze. “We don’t… work, the same way you do. The same way humans do.  We are… broken.”

“Are you?” Klaus asked, raising a brow.  “What some call broken, others simply call… unique. You still cannot have Finn.”

“You don’t want him,” she pointed out again.

“You’re right,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I want you to have him either.”

“Maybe you’re broken as well,” Caroline mused.  She looked at the drink that had been delivered, and then wrinkled her nose, as though it had lost its appeal. “What you want doesn’t matter anymore.  You lost him, I found him.  I don’t give things I’ve found back.”

“No? I suppose we’ll see, then.”

Her brow furrowed, as if she didn’t quite understand him.  It made Klaus finally feel on solid ground again, as if he had gained some ground on the mystery that was Caroline, and her odd black eyes, and her smile that seemed so sweet… and so very not.

He blinked, and she was no longer in front of him.  He looked around, trying not to appear shocked, though he knew some of it must show on his face.  

A napkin floated down in front of him, and he grabbed, it, turning his head to meet that black gaze once more, just before Caroline left the bar.

The door closed behind him, and Klaus looked at the napkin. There was writing on it, in a carefully precise hand.

One question. To be asked, if you dare.

And Klaus smirked, realizing he wasn’t the only one left off balance by a surprise.

Send me a song + a ship

[little-miss-sunny-daisy]

30 30 30 30 30 30 :)

30. Post a snippet from your current WIP without context - no more than 300 words.

Just for you Melissa, from interludes:

Sioux Falls gets one final enormous—freak, Bobby calls it—snowstorm at the end of March; the winds howl outside as Caroline spreads her acceptance letters out on the floor of her tiny room. She chews her lip and stares at them, each of them holding an entire future in between the black and white of the printed font. 

She clicks her pen and leans forward, writing cheapest in neat cursive at the top of the VCU letter. After a moment’s hesitation, she adds close to home to both VCU and UVA’s letters. 

“What’re you doing?” Dean wants to know from the doorway. 

Without looking up, she says, “Figuring out where to go to college.” 

“Need help?”

The sigh she lets out is heavy enough to rustle the paper in front of her. “Got a spare fifty thousand?” 

“In my other pants, maybe,” he quips, then she hears heavy footsteps make their way over to her before Dean settles in across from the semi-circle in front of her. 

Fic Writer Ask Game

[thetourguidebarbie]

kc + SPIES who take the company trust building exercise of hide and seek Very Seriously

"We should probably get back to the game," Caroline breathed, moaning softly when Klaus nipped at the base of her throat, soothing the bite with his tongue, his hands on her hips, pushing her back against the tree. "Don't you think?"

"Do you want to?" he murmured between kisses up her neck to her cheeks, his breath hot on her ear.

"I mean, no," she admitted, her hand tangling in his curls to make sure that he stayed exactly where she wanted him. It just felt so good.

"Then let's not."

"Making out against the base tree is probably cheating, though," she pointed out between soft moans as one of his hands slid below the waistband of her dark jeans to tug gently at the cotton of her panties, creating a delicious friction against her pussy.

"Not if we switch who's pressed against it at least once a minute," he teased. "We can dethrone Katerina from her place as the reigning champion once I've made you come around my fingers."

"Do it fast, then," Caroline demanded, more for her own benefit than the game. God, he was good at this.

"With pleasure."

[hellsbellschime]

goldcaught said: i’m so sorry bb, i hope your mom levels out and you never experience any serious symptoms until it passes for you both 💕

LOL WELL she already got released from the hospital despite the pneumonia and we’re supposed to monitor her oxygen levels here, which is both the sketchiest thing I’ve ever heard in my life and a sign of how utterly fucked CA is when it comes to coronavirus, because I can’t imagine they bounced her for any other reason than that they just have zero room in the hospitals.

[honestgrins]

kc + WEST WING ELECTION TRAIL AU

Promotions

“You did well today.”

Caroline nearly spit out her beer at the unexpected compliment. Judging by the dimples in his smirk, her surprise did not go unnoticed. By sheer force of will, she met his gaze without hesitation. “That hurt you to say, didn’t it?”

The smirk deepened in amusement. “I never doubted your skills, love,” Klaus answered quietly. Their group had dwindled over the last hour, and the hotel bar only held a very few late-night owls left. It had become something of a habit throughout the campaign for senior staffers to debrief the day’s events. For the deputy campaign manager to offer her unprompted praise, though, that was an outlier - the fond look he gave her, less so. “Despite the suddenness of your promotion, I think you’ll more than rise to the occasion.”

It could have easily been a fiasco when their press secretary had to quit with no notice, after a blistering argument with the candidate that left him unable to do the job required. As one of his deputies, Caroline had already been on camera when the news broke, a reporter quickly asking for a comment she was hardly prepared to give. But she handled the moment with a grace that shocked even her, and the interview played well on every outlet. So well, in fact, that the campaign manager and the candidate herself offered her the job on a trial basis. She was young and still new to national politics, and it all felt like a dream come true.

Klaus granting her a respectful not without even the hint of a grudge? Somehow, that felt just as good. “Thank you,” she finally said, a mischievous grin pulling at her lips. “But you doubted my skills a bit.”

“I thought your initial hiring was a bad play for demographics,” he defended.

“Because I’m too hot for the male audience to actually listen to me, yeah, I remember.”

His chagrin was marred by the smile he tried to hide. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

She shrugged, tapping her bottle to his with a clink. “You made it pretty easy to read between the lines. I, after all, don’t have a problem actually listening, even if the person speaking is hot.”

“You think I’m hot?”

Her cheeks warmed with what must have been a fierce blush. “I didn’t say that.”

Klaus’s teeth shone white as he smiled, almost predatory. Or maybe Caroline just felt like prey. “You don’t usually make it so easy to read between the lines,” he teased, his voice low and inviting.

Swallowing, she drained the last of her beer and slowly lifted herself from the couch they’d been sharing. “I think I’m going to go to bed,” she said without looking away from him.

He gave a solemn nod, but didn’t move. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Caroline. Congratulations again.”

She wet her lips and glanced down to the table before turning away. Her feet felt like lead as she walked to the elevators, anticipation and dread itching at her spine. When the doors opened, she resigned herself to the classical music playing inside and leaned back against the rail - but a hand stopped the doors from sliding shut. 

They opened again, revealing Klaus just outside, her card key in his hand. “Forgetting something, sweetheart?”

Her hand was already twisted in his shirt, pulling him in with her when he grinned. This time, the doors finally closed without further interruption.

[cbk1000]

goldcaught the entire freaking GROUND AROUND YOUR HOME HAS BEEN BURNED, it looks like you live in a WHEAT FIELD babe it is not dramatic to need some time

I know that intellectually; I just still feel guilty about it. I stayed up all of Tuesday night thinking our house was gone because I knew it was burning really badly in this area, finally passed out maybe an hour before my alarm went off, then Wednesday got up, felt physically awful because I hadn’t slept, and jumped on my laptop to work a bit to at least have something to do with my brain. Got the news that our house was intact and felt a bit better, so I went into the office for a couple of hours for some training related to this project. Then the fire blew back up at my parents’ place, where they had gone back for a couple of hours to check on things, so we were calling one another back and forth as they were evacuating. Then they told me they were going to head out into a nearby canyon and park, and shortly after that I read that the fire was heading into that area, so then I tried calling them to warn them that they needed to turn back, and they were outside cell reception and I just had to hope they’d run into road blocks and turn back and call me when they could. That was immensely fun. 

I took off the rest of the day after they finally got in touch with me to go out and see if I could get into our place because I just wanted to reassure myself by seeing it physically (I also wanted to see how much had burned around us because the more burned the better; makes it a lot less likely the fire will blow back through here). I slept better last night, but then my parents were hearing about looters near them and I was worried about the house sitting out here empty, so I headed out this afternoon to guard it. I brought my laptop and had intended to continue working remotely from the house, but my parents came over with some of our stuff and we brought that in, and I was honestly just too exhausted to even think about jumping back on. I do recognize that’s a lot of stress to be under and it’s normal to need to decompress, I just feel like I don’t have anything to complain about.

[hedgewitches]

18 & 22 :)))

18. do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them

not aus! but def versions and storylines that were dropped witch novel is both a rewrite and then a combination of several prn ideas i had when i was much younger, and the a lot of book 1 of the wolves of braxton hall were buried from a historical romance a wrote yeeeeeeears ago that i never shared with anyone

22. do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?

answered! :D