Chapter Text
New Orleans smelled like river water and candle wax and something fried two streets over, all of it folded into a heat that never quite let go, even after the sun went down. Klaus had always found that appropriate, somehow. A city that refused to cool off, refused to apologize for what it was.
He had cleaned house before settling in properly.
Every witch between Mystic Falls and the Mississippi Delta who could do more than light a candle with a snap of intention had been offered a choice: lend their talents toward restoring Kol, or discover that death, in his case, would arrive as something close to a mercy. Most had eventually come around to cooperation, though a few had required his more particular gifts of persuasion to get there. Klaus Mikaelson had accumulated a great many skills across the centuries (languages, brushstrokes, the occasional symphony he'd never admit to composing) but persuasion had always sat near the very top of the list. He was, if nothing else, extremely good at making people want things he'd already decided they should want.
Which was precisely why the news, delivered in a low voice by a vampire who clearly understood the wisdom of not lingering afterward, gave him actual pause.
"The Bennett witch crossed into Louisiana."
Klaus swirled the bourbon in his glass, watching the amber catch the light of the study. Outside, the courtyard fountain kept up its steady, indifferent trickle. "She's travelling alone?"
"Yes."
Well. That was unexpected. Bonnie Bennett did not, as a rule, go anywhere alone that involved Original vampires. She went nowhere near them at all if she could help it, and when she couldn't, she came armed and flanked and prepared for violence in at least three different registers.
He found Elijah in the courtyard a few minutes later, seated at the wrought-iron table beneath the balcony, surrounded by enough open grimoires to make Kol roll his eyes at the sheer theatrical excess of it. Kol, wherever he currently was, sulking in whatever half-restored state their combined efforts had left him.
"We're expecting company," Klaus said.
Elijah didn't look up from the page in front of him, though something in the set of his shoulders suggested he'd already half-anticipated this. "I gathered as much from your expression."
"The Bennett witch."
That earned him Elijah's full attention. Head lifting, pen set down with deliberate care against the spine of the book, and that particular stillness his brother wore whenever a piece of information refused to fit the pattern he'd already assembled.
Bonnie Bennett. Of all the people Klaus might have expected to darken the doorstep of New Orleans, she ranked somewhere between highly improbable and the literal end of days.
"I was under the impression she disliked us."
"She does."
"Then I confess myself curious what could possibly convince her to travel several hundred miles for the pleasure of your company."
Klaus huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "If she's come for my company, she has appalling taste."
"I've heard that particular accusation leveled at you before." Elijah's mouth twitched, the closest he generally allowed himself to open amusement. "Rather frequently, if memory serves."
But something had happened. Klaus was certain of it, the way a man with a bad knee is certain of rain a full day before the sky admits to anything. Some old animal instinct, honed over a millennium of watching people arrive at his door only when every other avenue had collapsed behind them.
Which led his thoughts, inevitably, somewhere they'd been drifting with increasing and faintly embarrassing frequency these past weeks.
Mystic Falls.
More specifically, and he could admit this only to himself, and only in the quiet hour just before dawn when admitting things cost less: Caroline.
She had written to him. An actual letter, the sort almost nobody bothered with anymore. Cream stationery, slightly heavier stock than strictly necessary. Neat, looping handwriting that leaned forward as if it were in a hurry even when the words weren't. There was no return address. He had read the thing enough times now that he could recite every line without sliding it from its envelope, though he still did, some evenings, mostly for the ritual of it.
She'd thanked him for the flowers. Nothing elaborate in the wording, nothing flirtatious, not even faintly. Just thoughtful, in that particular Caroline way that assumed thoughtfulness was the baseline requirement for being a decent person. It had struck him more deeply than he was fully willing to examine, if he was honest, which he generally wasn't, about this specific subject.
Nowadays people fired off whatever passed for correspondence through some glowing rectangle, a handful of words trailed by a convenient little heart someone else had designed for them. Caroline had sat down. Taken out actual paper. Addressed the envelope in her own hand and found a stamp, of all things; he wasn't entirely sure young people still knew where to procure those. It was almost absurd, the amount of effort that small gesture represented in a world that had mostly stopped bothering.
He hadn't expected it. He'd have wagered (and Klaus rarely lost that particular kind of wager) that she would have switched her humanity off entirely by now. He passed no judgment on her for it. Grief broke nearly every young vampire he'd ever personally observed, and he had observed quite a number, across quite a number of centuries, sometimes with more clinical curiosity than he was proud of. The eighteenth century had offered precious little in the way of entertainment, and he'd made something of a study of the pattern out of sheer boredom, occasionally nudging circumstances along where it amused him to do so. The younger the vampire, the harder the fall. Losing the last blood relation tended to be the breaking point, more often than not. Humanity gone, chaos close behind.
And Caroline, painfully young by vampire standards and barely more than a child even by human ones (she'd have bitten his head off for the comparison), apparently hadn't. He found that strangely, disproportionately reassuring. He wasn't sure what to do with the feeling, so mostly he hadn't examined it, the way you leave a bruise alone while it's still deciding what color to be.
Then, a week after the letter, she had called. He hadn't recognized the number, and his curiosity had made him pick up. His personal number was known but to few, none of whom would share it.
"This is my new number." No greeting, no preamble whatsoever. Entirely, unmistakably Caroline. Cutting him off before he could start on the very creative threat he had at the ready. "If I ever call you from it, you answer. Immediately."
"I generally do answer my telephone, love." A small smile had found its way onto his face before he'd fully decided to allow it.
"Klaus." Her voice had sharpened, all business. "I'm serious."
"So, remarkably, am I."
"If I'm calling you..." a pause, and he could picture exactly the small furrow that would have appeared between her brows, "...things have probably gone spectacularly wrong."
He'd leaned back in his chair, bourbon forgotten at his elbow. "Then I shall endeavour to keep my schedule clear."
A laugh, brief, surprised out of her. "If you make a joke while I'm actively dying from an unexpected werewolf bite, I will haunt you. I mean it. Forever."
"I look forward to the company." He hadn't been entirely joking.
"You are impossible."
"So I've been told. Frequently, and by people considerably older than you."
Then her tone had shifted, gone quiet and serious in a way that made something in his chest tighten unexpectedly. "Just," and another pause, longer this time, "pick up. Okay?"
"I will." No hesitation on his end. No bargaining, no clever conditions attached, none of the games he generally couldn't help playing even when they cost him something. Just a promise, plain as anything.
The memory sat oddly in his chest even now, lodged in some corner he had no interest in naming or disturbing.
"Perhaps," Elijah said, and the courtyard swam back into focus around him, old stone and the fountain's endless soft percussion, "Miss Bennett comes bearing information."
"Perhaps."
"Or assistance."
"Unlikely, on past form."
"Threats, then?"
"Considerably more likely." Klaus allowed himself a thin smile. "She's threatened me before. Rather creatively, as I recall."
Elijah closed the grimoire in front of him with a soft thud of old paper against old paper. "And how, precisely, do you intend to persuade her to share whatever she's carried all this way?"
There it was. The obvious question, the one Klaus would normally have answered three moves in advance. Seduction. Leverage. The threat of something precious taken away. A millennium of practice had left him with an extensive, well-organized repertoire for exactly this situation.
Instead he found himself hesitating, which was, in itself, a small data point worth noting.
Bonnie Bennett wasn't family to Caroline by blood. She was family all the same, chosen family, which in Klaus's considerable experience tended to count for rather more, precisely because nobody was obligated to choose it. He recalled one line from the letter with unsettling clarity, could see it in that looping hand even now: Bonnie and Elena are all that's left now. They're the closest thing I have to sisters.
Threatening Bonnie, then, wouldn't stay a threat contained neatly to Bonnie. Not where Caroline was concerned. That door, he understood with something like resignation, had already closed, entirely on account of one relentlessly, infuriatingly compassionate blonde vampire who probably had no idea how thoroughly she'd rearranged his options.
"We'll hear what she has to say first," he said. "Before anything else."
Elijah's eyebrow rose, slow and deliberate. "A remarkably diplomatic position, coming from you."
"When diplomacy happens to serve my interests, brother, I'm perfectly capable of it."
"Does it? Serve your interests, in this instance?"
Klaus considered the fountain for a moment. "I imagine it does. Today, at least."
Elijah regarded him for a long moment, with that patient look he wore whenever he'd caught Klaus lying to himself and had decided, generously, not to say so. This time he let it pass, and returned his attention to the grimoire.
The afternoon that followed stretched out intolerably. Every interruption felt insultingly small. Every report from what remained of his hybrids landed as pure irritation, background noise against the one piece of information he actually wanted and didn't yet have.
He attempted to paint, briefly. The wolf's proportions came out wrong, too heavy through the shoulders, something off in the angle of the head, and he abandoned the canvas after twenty minutes of increasingly irritated revision. He tried reading next. The same paragraph required four attempts before he admitted, silently, that his concentration had gone somewhere else entirely and had no immediate plans to return.
Eventually he stopped pretending to occupy himself at all.
His phone rang shortly after sunset, the sky over the Quarter gone the bruised purple it wore this time of year.
"The witch has entered the Quarter."
"Alone?"
"Still alone."
"Very good." He ended the call without further comment, then dialed another number.
"Clear Rousseau's."
A pause on the other end. "The entire bar?"
"The entire establishment. Tonight, specifically."
"And Camille?"
"She can stay." Camille possessed a rare and genuinely useful talent: the skill of making people say more than they'd intended, usually without their noticing until well after the fact. Tonight, that might prove useful indeed. "And ensure my brother is occupied elsewhere for the evening. If this concerns Mystic Falls..." He let the sentence trail. It didn't need finishing. No ears he hadn't personally vetted. No witnesses. No rumours drifting back through the Quarter by morning. His fondness for Caroline was dangerous enough on its own without idle whispers making it considerably worse.
He arrived early. Ordered bourbon he had no real intention of finishing. Took the stool at the far end of the bar, where the light fell just unevenly enough to keep him half in shadow from the door.
Camille was behind the counter, polishing glasses that were already perfectly clean, the way bartenders do when they need something to occupy their hands. "You look like a man waiting for a firing squad."
"I've attended several. In both capacities, at various points."
"I'm guessing this one feels worse."
He considered that honestly, turning the glass slowly between his fingers. "Perhaps."
She laughed, low and unhurried. "That's not exactly reassuring, coming from you."
The bell above the door chimed.
Bonnie Bennett stepped inside and paused just past the threshold, steadying herself against whatever she'd find on the other side of it. Her shoulders squared, almost imperceptibly, before she started walking. It was the posture of someone crossing a line she'd drawn for herself weeks ago and was only now actually stepping over.
Klaus took in the details the way he always did, automatically. No luggage beyond a battered shoulder bag. Dark half-moons beneath her eyes that no amount of concealer had quite managed to erase. Her hands clenched tight enough at her sides that the knuckles had gone pale. She wore the expression of someone who had rehearsed a conversation a hundred times in the car, in the mirror, in the silence of whatever motel she'd stopped in along the way, and had discovered, now that the moment had arrived, that none of those rehearsals had prepared her for saying the words to his actual face.
Klaus set down his glass, all pretense of idle drinking abandoned.
Whatever had brought Bonnie Bennett to New Orleans, unarmed and unaccompanied, it was worse, considerably worse, than anything he had allowed himself to imagine.
She spotted him almost immediately. There was, frankly, no version of this city large enough to hide an Original who carried himself like every room owed him rearranging. Klaus lifted his glass in a small, silent greeting.
"Miss Bennett."
She walked over, but didn't sit.
"I'm surprised to see you in my city." He gestured toward the empty stool beside him, an invitation she visibly chose to ignore. "You've come rather a long way for the pleasure."
"I don't think you're going to enjoy the reason."
"No?"
"No." A beat, her jaw working before the words finally came. "We can't find Caroline."
Bonnie hadn't been sure what she'd expected, walking in. Some small, ugly part of her, the part that had never stopped seeing exactly what kind of monster he was, dresses and paintings and centuries of manners notwithstanding, had wanted indifference from him. If Caroline had only ever been a passing obsession, a curiosity he'd eventually tire of, then she'd be actually free to live however she chose without him casting a shadow over the rest of her life. Bonnie was honest enough with herself, in the privacy of her own head, to know why that mattered: as long as she was around, she could keep reminding Caroline of every terrible thing Klaus had ever done. But Bonnie wasn't going to live forever. And Klaus was cultured, and handsome in the specific, dangerous way that made people forget to be careful, and entirely capable of playing the gentleman for as long as it suited him. Caroline wouldn't keep resisting that combination forever. Not if he seriously pursued her.
On the other hand (and this was the part Bonnie hated most, the part she'd wrestled with the whole drive down) some smaller, quieter piece of her had wanted him to care. Because if he genuinely did, he'd do whatever it took to find her. And right now, four weeks and a dozen dead ends deep, Bonnie needed somebody who could actually do that.
What she found, standing there in the low light of an emptied-out bar, was stillness. It had no indifference in it, and no performance of alarm either. Just a very specific, focused quiet that told her everything she needed to know.
Klaus set his glass down with exaggerated care, like a man buying himself a second to arrange his face. "Explain. All of it."
Bonnie drew a breath. "Liz died."
"I know."
"Caroline planned the funeral. Every detail. Then she disappeared."
"Humanity off?"
Bonnie nodded once, sharp. "She broke Elena's neck. Drugged me with something in hot chocolate, of all things. Left letters for people she wouldn't say goodbye to in person. And vanished."
Letters. Klaus's face gave nothing away, but his thumb stilled against the glass. "How long."
"Four weeks."
"And you've found nothing. In four weeks."
She laughed, and there was no humor left in it, just exhaustion wearing the shape of a laugh. "Nothing. Damon and Stefan have been chasing every animal attack from here to Tennessee like it's a scavenger hunt. They've put down two Rippers already, thinking one of them might be her. They're convinced she's acting like..." Bonnie stopped herself, made herself finish anyway. "Like them."
Klaus's expression didn't shift, not even slightly. "She isn't." It wasn't phrased as a question.
Bonnie stared at him, something in her chest loosening a fraction. "No. I don't think so either."
He leaned back a degree, considering. "Surely this presents rather little difficulty, then. A locator spell would seem the obvious first step."
"It usually is the obvious first step."
"Then I confess I fail to see why you've traveled several states rather than simply performing one. I was under the distinct impression that particular skill set fell rather squarely within your area of expertise."
Bonnie looked away, toward the rows of bottles behind the bar, toward anything that wasn't his face. Here it was. The part of this conversation she'd been dreading since somewhere around the Georgia state line. "It does. But..."
Klaus waited. He had, she noted, an unsettling talent for waiting without seeming impatient, like a man who genuinely had a thousand years of spare time and no intention of rushing her.
"...She planned for that too."
His eyebrow rose, genuine surprise crossing his features for the first time since she'd walked in. "What, precisely, does that mean?"
Bonnie reached into her bag and pulled out the folded photocopy of the grimoire page, edges already soft from being handled too many times on the drive. She held it out.
"I thought I was helping her preserve her mother's wedding ring."
Klaus took the page, eyes moving quickly across the old handwriting. Then his gaze lifted back to her, something sharpening behind it. "This isn't a preservation spell."
"I know. I figured that out afterward. It protects whatever identifier gets burned during the actual ritual."
He looked, for the first time all evening, intrigued, with the particular light in his eyes that Bonnie imagined he reserved for very few things after a thousand years of having mostly seen it all.
"I never saw what she'd prepared to burn," Bonnie went on, voice tightening. "It was already sealed before I sat down at the table. And now..." She spread her hands, helpless in a way she rarely allowed herself to be in front of people, let alone him. "I can't find her. No witch can. I've tried everyone I know."
Klaus read the page a second time, more slowly, then folded it with unexpected care and handed it back. "Remarkable."
Bonnie blinked. "Remarkable is not the word I was hoping for."
"Most vampires flee, Miss Bennett. They panic, and they run, and they leave a trail a blind bloodhound could follow within the hour. They do not, as a general rule, think several steps ahead to protect themselves from magical surveillance before they've even packed a bag." He set the page on the bar between them. "I confess I underestimated her."
It came out sounding unmistakably proud. Bonnie stared at him, something cold sinking in her stomach at the tone of it.
"This doesn't worry you at all?"
"I didn't say that."
"But you seem satisfied." She searched for a better word, came up short, tried anyway.
"Why wouldn't I be?"
"She's alone. Humanity off. She could be doing anything, could be in actual danger, could..."
He cut in, gentle but certain. "Making poor decisions?"
Bonnie nodded, throat tight.
Klaus turned the idea over for a moment, then dismissed it with a small shake of his head. "I rather doubt that's what's keeping you up at night."
"...No."
"Then what is."
Bonnie looked down at her own hands. When she finally answered, her voice had shrunk to something small and unguarded, the kind she didn't let many people hear. "I don't want her to be alone out there. That's all. I don't care where she is, or what she's done, or who she's had to hurt to disappear this well. I just don't want her doing it alone." Her eyes burned, and she blinked hard. "When she turns it back on — and I know she will, eventually — she's going to remember everything. Every single thing she lost. Everything she did while it was off. And I just..." A shaky laugh escaped her, half despair. "I wanted somebody to be there. So she wouldn't have to sit with all of that by herself."
For one unguarded moment something moved across Klaus's face, a flicker of every one of his thousand years surfacing at once, old and tired and faintly tender underneath. "I see."
Without another word he reached into his jacket, retrieved his phone, and pressed a name on the screen.
Bonnie almost smiled despite everything. "You don't have to bother."
He glanced up, brow furrowing slightly. "And why is that."
"She left her phone. Sitting right in the middle of my dining room table like some kind of statement piece. She wanted us to know calling it wouldn't do any good." Bonnie let out a long breath. "She thought of everything."
"That isn't the number I'm dialing."
She stared at him. Nobody had his number. That had been the whole problem, the reason she'd burned a day and a half of gas money to say this to his face. It hadn't occurred to her, not once, that the arrangement might run in both directions.
Klaus looked, briefly, almost offended on behalf of good technology everywhere. "Though I agree it was a rather unnecessary waste of a perfectly functional device."
The line began to ring, and Bonnie had almost given up hope when someone answered.
Klaus set the phone flat on the bar between them, speaker on, and the voice that came through made Bonnie's whole body go rigid.
"Honestly, that took you longer than I expected."
Caroline. Bonnie froze, hand halfway to the bar for balance she suddenly needed. Klaus's mouth curved, slowly, into some third thing between a smile and relief, private and complicated.
"There you are."
"I've been the one waiting on your call, actually."
"I've been terribly occupied."
"So have I."
Bonnie watched every line in Klaus's face ease, fractionally, in a way she suspected almost nobody else alive would have caught. She'd spent enough years reading rooms full of people who didn't want to be read.
"Caroline, love. I was informed you'd vanished entirely."
"I did."
"I rather assumed you possessed better manners than to disappear without a word to me."
"I did call you. That counts."
"You instructed me to answer if you called. Nothing was said regarding disappearing acts on your end."
A short, sharp laugh. "Fair point."
Her voice sounded lighter than Bonnie expected, almost cheerful, almost teasing, with an edge running underneath that hadn't been there a month ago. The warmth was still Caroline's. The softness that used to sit alongside it had gone.
"So." Klaus swirled his bourbon, unhurried, as if they were discussing the cricket. "How goes the grand adventure."
"I'm having fun." The answer came immediately. "Slept in six different states. Flirted with a state trooper enough to get out of a speeding ticket, no compulsion needed. Learned to count cards properly. Also, truck stop pie is criminally underrated, for the record."
Bonnie closed her eyes. That was so exactly, unmistakably Caroline that it hurt in a completely new way.
"And when," Klaus asked, still deceptively casual, "do you intend to conclude this adventure and return home."
"When I feel like it."
"Not before."
"No. I'll know when it's time. I’ll always do."
"I could, of course, simply locate this new telephone of yours."
Bonnie's head snapped toward him. That was his plan?
Caroline laughed, and this one was different. Slowly Bonnie realized that it was the laugh she hadn't heard for... years, since before the Salvatores had come to town. She hadn't known until now that she had missed that sound, hadn't realized that Caroline had been performing a laugh for who-knows how long, and this... This was real.
"Klaus. Sweetheart." The endearment came out almost mocking. "You're welcome to try. I'd genuinely advise against wasting the effort."
"And why is that."
"You do remember I'm a sheriff's kid. Or was, anyway." Pride bled into her voice. "One of the first things I did after leaving Virginia was track down someone whose entire livelihood depends on making phones impossible to trace."
Klaus actually blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"You heard me perfectly well. I specifically looked for somebody high enough in a criminal organization to know what they were doing, but low enough that his disappearing wouldn't leave some power vacuum somebody else would have to deal with. That part matters. Sloppy work makes messes, and messes make people ask questions."
Bonnie stared straight ahead at nothing in particular. Of course she'd thought of that too. Of course.
"I enjoyed making him regret assuming I was easy prey," Caroline continued, and there was something almost gleeful under the words now. "I could see exactly how he'd climbed as high as he had, and exactly why he was never going to climb any higher. Nobody's going to miss him. Not even his own family, from what I could tell."
Klaus couldn't quite stop the smile spreading across his face. "I confess myself impressed."
"I know." She sounded thoroughly, insufferably pleased with herself. "I impressed myself, honestly."
His smile only widened. "You do realize this merely deepens my resolve to find you."
"You do realize that's precisely why I intend to keep making it difficult."
"Perhaps we could simply have an adventure together."
"I sincerely doubt you'd enjoy the laundromats and the roadside motels with questionable ice machines nearly as much as you think you would."
"I've endured considerably worse accomodations over the centuries, love."
"I'm sure you have." A pause, longer this time, the silence shifting. "Klaus?"
"Yes?"
"I'm okay." The teasing dropped away for those two words, leaving something plainer and more fragile underneath. "I'm safe. I promise you that much."
Bonnie heard Klaus exhale, slow and controlled, like a man setting down something heavy he hadn't realized he'd been carrying the whole conversation. "I never asked."
"I know you didn't." Another pause. "But Bonnie would want to know.” Bonnie could hear the smile in her voice through the speaker, small and worn but genuine. "Now you know."
"I will find you. Eventually. You understand that." Klaus said it as a promise.
"I'm counting on it, actually." A beat. "Just not yet."
Click. The line went dead, and the bar went unnervingly quiet in its absence.
Neither of them spoke for several long seconds. Somewhere behind the bar, Camille had gone very still and very deliberately busy with a rack of glasses that didn't need her attention.
Finally Bonnie let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding since the line connected.
"She's alive," Klaus said, mostly to himself.
"She is."
"And she sounds..." He considered the word with the care of a man choosing a wine to go with something difficult. "...efficient."
Bonnie laughed despite everything, a little wetly. "I would have gone with terrifying, personally."
"The two needn't be mutually exclusive." He slid the phone back into his jacket, and something in his posture had eased that hadn't been there an hour ago. "I rather admire the thoroughness of it, if I'm honest."
Bonnie looked at him properly for the first time since she'd walked in. "You admire that she managed to plan for every contingency."
"I admire competence wherever I happen to find it, Miss Bennett. It's rare enough that I've learned not to waste time being precious about where it turns up." He finished the last of his bourbon in one slow swallow. "And Caroline has evidently decided that if she was going to disappear at all, she might as well do it properly. Thoroughly. On her own terms, start to finish." A slow smile spread across his face, equal parts pride and something warmer he clearly wasn't going to name out loud and she wouldn't either.
For the first time in four long weeks, Bonnie felt something dangerously close to hope loosen the knot that had sat in her chest since the funeral. Caroline wasn't lost. She wasn't in the kind of danger they'd all been imagining, chasing dead ends through four states of mauled hikers and misdirected fear. Or six as the case may be.
She had simply made herself impossible to find.
And Bonnie was only now starting to understand, all the way down, that those two things had never been the same thing at all.