I love this scene so much because you can truly see how much he cares about her here. Not that you don’t see it before this, but damn is it just crystal clear.
Klaroline + meeting in a bar + baroline friendship
So, I know I said I would post chapter 8 to Evolution next, but I got this ask and I couldn’t resist writing this.
I know, I know, I'm incorrigible.
This is like my mid-exam stress relief.
One of the lines I've used in this is an iconic one from Grey’s Anatomy, but I couldn’t resist putting it in here. I love that line, and it just seemed to perfect to not use.
This takes place when Klaus is in Mystic falls trying to break his curse, and he meets Caroline under slightly different circumstances.
Disclaimer: I own neither Grey's Anatomy nor TVD.
Enjoy!
XXX
Mystic Falls looked so peaceful in the winter.
It always had, with its quaint small-town personality, then and a thousand years ago. Of course, then it had been a Viking village, and it had looked as peaceful as Viking villages were.
And now, the only problem was it wasn’t winter, it was summer, and it was hot.
So hot, in fact, Klaus had been contemplating scrapping the whole plan with the doppelganger to just retire to the Swiss Alps and live in peace.
Well, in reality, that was Rebekah’s plan, he had just approved of it slightly.
He, Rebekah, Kol, and Elijah were back in Mystic Falls, something they had thought they’d never do, to break his curse and unlock his werewolf side. Rebekah had not been pleased when she had heard of the location, whereas Klaus had been exasperatedly amused.
Of course he’d have to go to the place where he was bound to unlock the curse. How fitting.
And he was not leaving simply because of a temperature problem.
Kol had been off radar for the past two years, occasionally resurfacing for a call or two to let them know he was alright. Rebekah took her trips, but always came back within a month or two, and where Klaus went Elijah went.
Finn, on the other hand…well, thank god for silver daggers.
He already had his sights on the doppelganger, and already had plans for her two so-called boyfriends. They were more like bodyguards, and honestly, didn’t they ever let her think for herself or make her own decisions? Feminism was a thing, and people said he was old.
Which he was, but that wasn’t the point.
Mystic Falls had lost its abundance of witch covens, now only having four or five lying in the background. So far, he knew of only three, a grandmother, mother, and a daughter, the grandmother now dead and the mother MIA. The daughter wasn’t strong enough to cater to the spells of his needs, so of course he had to take extra measures and find a new witch after his had been murdered by the werewolf boy.
Irritating fucker. He had had plans for the boy, planning to make him his very first hybrid after he broke his curse, but now he just held a very strong dislike for the boy for pushing back his plans. He was contemplating using him as the werewolf sacrifice in the ritual, and he already had the doppelganger, now he just needed to find a vampire.
Which, ironically, Mystic Falls was full of.
He had heard from Kol that there was a coven or two on the outskirts of Mystic Falls and he and Elijah were currently in a skeevy looking bar, nursing a glass or two, on the eye out for witches.
“Niklaus, I fail to understand why you think you could find powerful beings such as witches in a place like…this,” Elijah said distastefully, picking at a spot on his coat.
“Come now, brother, you do realize that witches aren’t the purest of souls on the planet, do you not? You do recall the uprising in 1478?”
“We both know that was Kol’s fault,” Elijah pointed out immediately.
Klaus smirked. “Indeed.” He motioned to the bartender to get them another round, then shook his head in amusement when Elijah let out an offended sniff. “Really, Elijah, the liquor’s not that bad, must you always—”
He broke off as he realized that Elijah was in fact, not looking at the bartender, but instead at a pair of girls who had just walked inside the bar.
One of them, the shorter one, was giggling drunkenly and waving her arms around in the air, her dark hair flying around her as she whirled around on the spot, a feather boa wrapped around her neck. Elijah stared at her disapprovingly, his attention fixed on the way she immediately stumbled over to the bar and ordered a round of shots.
“That kind of alcohol is not good for the system,” Elijah said sniffily.
But Klaus wasn’t focusing on him; hell, he had stopped looking at him a few seconds ago.
A very ravishing looking blonde had just followed her friend into the bar, nearly toppling over in her high heels in her haste to get to the bartender. She was just as drunk as her friend, tapping her on her shoulder and whispering something in her ear, then giggling when the brunette eagerly nodded. She promptly turned to the deadbeat live band playing a few sad 1970s tunes (who obviously didn’t know that the 1960s and 1990s were the better decades in which western music was composed, the idiots) and snatched the microphone from the singer. Either the boy was too tired to take it back or had just given up on getting the crowd to listen.
“Folks!” the girl cried out, and even though her speech was slurred, Klaus noticed she had a musical lilt to her voice. “Gather round, because my very good friend Betty—”
“Bonnie!” the brunette shouted drunkenly, swaying on her feet.
“Yeah, Bennie,” the blonde girl said, then turned back to the microphone, “anyway, she's just had a really bad breakup, so she’s just looking for something to cheer her up, okay? I mean, the guy fucking cheated on her, okay, and that is so not okay. Right?”
The crowd was silent, so the blonde indignantly huffed. “Right?”
The people surrounding him nodded readily, and she grinned, and Klaus couldn’t help but smile at her antics.
“Yeah, so anyway, she’s just very, very, very, sad right now, aren’t you, Binnie?”
“Mm hm,” the other girl—Bonnie, if Klaus remembered correctly—said distractedly, already making eyes at a boy across the room. “Yep, whatever you say, Care.”
Care? What kind of a name was Care?
Well, modern people did like strange names nowadays. Really, what kind of a name was Harry Styles?
“Is anyone single here?” the girl asked loudly, and a few patrons raised their hands, and she nodded. “Great. So, just hook up with Bessie, and you can just leave in the morning, please and thank you. I'm Caroline Forbes, so you can personally thank me for giving you a chance of a lifetime, cause hooking up with Betty is great. At least, that’s what she says.”
Caroline. Her name was Caroline.
A fine name, if he thought so himself.
Elijah huffed irritably next to him, and Klaus laughed. “Oh, let it go, Elijah. Not every person is as sophisticated as you are.”
Elijah shifted on his seat, delicately sipping his bourbon, making a face at the taste. “I thought we were here to look for the Bennett witch’s daughter, Niklaus.”
“We are,” said Klaus, his eyes still fixed on the blonde girl—Caroline—watching her as she climbed up onto the surface of a table. The deadbeat band had resumed their efforts in entertaining the crowd again, this time with slightly more gusto. Caroline was dancing on the table top as a few dozen people around her clapped, a few even cheering when she did a sort of dip and her skirt rode up a few inches. Klaus felt his mouth go dry as her thighs were exposed, and his head nearly exploded when he thought he saw a flash of pink lace in the air.
“Niklaus, don’t stare,” Elijah sad grumpily. “It’s unbecoming.”
“Yes, well,” Klaus smirked, regaining his composure, “so is dancing on a table top in the middle of a bar which I'm pretty sure hasn’t been washed in at least a decade.”
“Hooligans,” Elijah sniffed. “The lot of them.”
But Klaus wasn’t paying attention; he had gotten up and walked over to where Caroline was dancing. Her blonde hair was flying around her face, and she immediately tripped when she stuck one leg in front of the other in the hope of doing some weird modern hip hop move, probably.
She fell down, her arms in the air, and it was only due to Klaus’s vampire reflexes that he manged to swerve through the crowd and catch her.
Caroline groaned. “You know, this is the first time I have ever had a movie moment and no one’s even there to see it. Great.”
“Oh, I assure you, love, a conversation with me would be better than any movie you’ve ever watched.”
She snorted. “Very smooth, buddy. I'm impressed.” She stuck out a hand and smiled slightly. “Caroline. You?”
“I'm Kl—” he started, then broke off when he noticed a very familiar stone on her hand.
Vampire.
He smiled. If this girl was a vampire she could very easily be an ally of the Salvatores and the doppelganger, and he did not want any disturbance or any information getting to them.
And this girl really was lovely, it would be a shame to kill her.
He gave her a smile that was all teeth. “Nik,” he said, and shook her hand. “Pleased to meet you, love.”
She immediately withdrew her hand, and raised an eyebrow at him. “You're a vampire.”
Well, this was a surprising turn of events.
“I could say the same for you, love,” he said, nodding towards her hand.
She scoffed. “Do all vampires immediately assume that seeing a lapis lazuli ring automatically means that the wearer is a vampire? Obviously not. I just have good taste in jewellery.”
“Obviously,” he said, rolling his eyes playfully. “How’d you know?”
“You're wearing a ring too,” she said dryly.
“How deductive of you. And hypocritical.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You know, if I wasn’t so drunk right now I’d wouldn’t actually find you attractive.”
“Now, love, let’s not lie to ourselves and say you wouldn't find me attractive even when you'd be sober.”
She scoffed. “You're really full of yourself, you know that?”
“I know,” he said, giving her a dimpled grin. “So, if you're not a vampire, and you're obviously not a werewolf or a witch, otherwise I would’ve sensed it—”
Caroline snorted. “You would’ve sensed it? Sorry, Nik, but you don’t look like a witch to me.”
“And I'm not. But what are you? Not a witch, vampire, or werewolf. Human, then?”
Caroline shrugged. “What's left? I'm not anything special, just a very drunk seventeen year old girl who’s very, very drunk.”
“Just because you're a human doesn’t mean you aren’t different,” said Klaus, who was immediately puzzled by how easily the words had come out. Humans were different, but not in a good way. They were food, and only a few were innovative. The rest were like every other; boring and uninteresting.
She’s different, a voice in his head whispered.
She’s drunk, Klaus snapped to the voice inside his head. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s being open with a stranger because she’s drunk. That’s all.
Caroline let out a bark of laughter. “Oh, I'm different, alright. I'm very different according to my ex-boyfriends.”
“Your ex-boyfriends are idiots,” Klaus said indifferently.
“I like to think so too,” Caroline murmured. She waved the bartender over and asked for a round of shots, getting them almost immediately.
Klaus looked at her in surprise. “I thought you were underage.”
“You're in Mystic falls, Nik. Nobody except the parents cares. The bartender’s probably underage as well,” she shook her head, then raised her glass. “Cheers, Nik. To many more months of being dumped by guys.”
“Now, love, surely you can't be that pessimistic.”
“I'm not, usually,” she said, looking at him with wide eyes. Blue, he noticed. “I'm optimistic. I am. But Bennie’s whole cheating episode jut brings back memories, you know?” she muttered. “Not of me, but of my parents. They didn’t have the greatest marriage.”
Klaus looked hesitant. “My parents didn’t get along either.”
He was sharing important details of his life with a complete stranger. And not just a complete stranger, one who could possibly be friends with the Salvatores and the Bennetts, judging by her knowledge of the supernatural.
Wonderful. Obviously, he needed to stop thinking with his dick.
She looked at him, her eyes heavily-lidded now. “Huh. Guess it’s true what they say.”
“And what do they say?”
“That meeting strangers in bars can really change your perspective at the moment. Of course,” she said haughtily, “my perspective on life hasn’t been altered. Just the whole movie moment’s in my brain. Which makes me ditzy.”
Klaus smiled at her. “I like ditzy.”
He hated ditzy.
“No one likes ditzy, Nik,” she smiled. “You know,” she said, leaning towards him, “when I get drunk, I usually have no filter at all, so if I say something weird and embarrassing, you have to excuse me. I don’t mean to say it.”
“On the contrary, I find your candor refreshing, sweetheart.”
She giggled. “Nice accent,” she said, resting an elbow on the countertop and Klaus gently pulled away the tray of shots away from her when she wasn’t looking. “Where’re you from? London? Or Wales?”
“Wales,” he said, pleased that she had asked him. It wasn’t a complete lie, his old village had been in a part of Wales. “But I’ve, er, stayed in London since my childhood.”
She nodded, and he smiled. “And, how about you? Where are you from?”
She laughed. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm right from here. My house is fifteen minutes away.”
“You should come to Wales. You’ll love everything about it. The city, the culture…have you been?”
She laughed once again. “I've…never really been anywhere.”
“Where would you like to go?”
She pondered his question, then spoke, “Switzerland, probably. I've always wanted to go. It sounds amazing,” she said wistfully.
“You'll get to go,” said Klaus, looking at Elijah out of the corner of his eye, who was looking at him irritably, pointedly gesturing towards his watch. Klaus made a threatening face at him and turned back to Caroline. “And if you never get the chance you always have me.”
She grinned. “And you’d take me?”
“I’d take you,” he said. “Rome, Paris…Tokyo?”
“Oh, wow,” she laughed. “I can't believe I'm actually talking to a person who’s offered to take me around the world. While I'm drunk. Which is actually kind of sad since I kind of like you and I want to kiss you.”
Klaus’s throat felt like sandpaper. “You should. Kiss me, then.”
Caroline smiled ruefully. “I don’t kiss guys when I'm drunk, Nik. I did once, and it turned out badly. And I know you're not like the other guy, I do. I don’t know why, but I do. And the problem is, I would kiss you. But I can't.”
Klaus leaned towards her, noticing she smelled of tequila. “You don’t have to. Right now. But you could. Tomorrow.”
What was he doing?
Caroline cocked her head. “Why?”
“Why?”
“Why. Why do you like me? I'm nothing special. I'm a human. You're a vampire. Why are you even talking to me?”
“Because you're beautiful,” Klaus said honestly. “And intelligent. And honest. Even when you're drunk. And you intrigue me.”
Caroline snorted. “I intrigue you? Really? I'm just a girl in a bar.”
He smiled, tipping his glass to her. “I'm just a guy in a bar.”
