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She looked for it in Mystic Falls, at first.
She sorted through her mom’s sock drawer and spice rack and CD-collection, found a few things she wanted to keep.
The socks had sunflowers on them, a pair Caroline remembered from when she was a little girl playing on the carpet. Liz hadn’t worn them in years, but Caroline kept them and put them on that very night, even if her feet never really got cold anymore.
The bottle of cumin was nearly empty, the paprika still sealed at the top with plastic. Caroline knew it was because her mom put paprika in everything and had to replace it like other people replaced their toothpaste. The cumin had been there since before Caroline knew the difference between it and cinnamon (a lesson she learned one morning with a bite of French toast), yet if anyone else were to look at the range of spices they would assume the opposite to be true.
Her room was still hers, with her collection of teddy bears in the bookshelf and her carefully planned schedule pinned to the wall. On the ceiling she could see a dangling piece of silly string from where Elena had sprayed it one night at a sleepover, and they’d giggled and giggled and never removed it, until eventually it was eleven years later and Elena was dating the guy who’d kept Caroline as his personal little slave for weeks.
Despite all evidence indicating otherwise, she didn’t find it there.
She looked for it in New York, where there were buildings upon buildings and not a moment of quiet.
Caroline took a boat to the Statue of Liberty, glared up at it from much too close with the sun in her eyes and saltwater in her nose, and she took a photograph that she’d never look at again.
She sat through a ballet about a princess turned into a swan, or a swan turned into a princess, or maybe nobody was turned into anything and Caroline just didn’t understand if it was better to be a swan or a princess. She thought that the one they became at the end must be the one they were meant to be. She wished there’d been a little more dialogue so she could know for sure.
She ate a hotdog at a baseball game, clapped along with everyone who wore blue and pretended to be sad when the blue team lost.
She bought a postcard at the Empire State Building, wrote her name on it, then dropped it into the dumpster with nothing in the spot where the address should be.
Because despite all the cheering and the looking and the walking, despite all the buildings she had to choose from, she couldn’t find it in New York, either.
She looked for it in Whitmore, with Bonnie as her roommate and Stefan and Elena barely half an hour away.
She woke up early to go to class, took notes that she forgot as soon as the ink was dry, drank lukewarm coffee at the university café.
She joined in every club she could find. Her butterfly float for the parade sold the most raffle tickets to save a rainforest, she reorganised the bookshelves in the study hall in alphabetical order by title and got nominated for best Halloween costume, even though some kid with fake vampire teeth beat her very real ones.
She thought she’d done everything right, until Stefan cornered her.
“What are you looking for, Caroline?”
She didn’t turn her attention away from the snowman she was covering in bits of glue-soaked paper.
“Who says I’m looking for anything?”
“I do. With every day that you don’t find it, your eyes go even dimmer and you turn into overinvolved-cheerleader-Caroline again.”
Her voice sounded hollow when she asked, “What if that’s just who I am?”
And Stefan tried to protest but she didn’t hear him because all that echoed in her ears was that she wouldn’t find it in Whitmore.
So she went to New Orleans, because he’d always managed to make her feel alive and maybe he’d taken it with him and she’d find it if she asked.
But Klaus took her to Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral and Bourbon Street, and he took her to quiet little places that he’d dug into the very foundations of the city when he’d built it, and she tried not to notice how he became more quiet, more concerned, then more agitated and more angry with every day that passed.
“Caroline, what’s wrong?” It spilled through his lips eventually, even though the question had been in his eyes and in his fingertips and in his hovering for quite some time.
“I can’t find it,” she confessed, because he could tell when she lied and if anyone would have the answer, it would be one of the oldest creatures on earth.
“Can’t find what, sweetheart?” The inflection in his voice promised that he would scour the earth, spend every resource he had to dig through even the smallest of cracks in the foundation of the world to find her what she needed.
But then she said, “Home,” and he cradled her under his chin with arms wrapped too-tightly around her and breath hot against her ear as he told her about his days on the run, days spent searching for a piece of white oak when forever started to feel too long, days when he painted until his fingers bled crimson streaks onto the canvas and he left it because he might as well.
And she knew she wouldn’t find it in New Orleans, so she left even though her eyes burned and Klaus took too long to release her hand.
She couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when she found it.
One morning she was showering, watching shampoo drip onto faded green tiles. She brushed her teeth, combed her hair, put on a jacket because it was December and she’d get funny looks if she didn’t. She also thought that she liked the colour, and that was an odd thought because she hadn’t liked anything in a while.
She walked to the store a week later and passed by a man selling yellow roses for a dollar each with charm oozing out of him even though his eyes looked a little empty. Caroline thought he might be searching, too, and she had always thought red roses were overrated so she bought ten and handed them out to the group of old ladies who did aerobics in the park every morning. They beamed at her with gummy smiles and watery eyes and she smiled back because she wanted to, not because she had to.
She bought another postcard, then went back to the shop to buy two more when she couldn’t decide who to address it to. She made one out to Bonnie, one to Stefan and the last one she tucked into her pocket to deliver personally.
She made a pitstop in Virginia, and she sat in front of her mother’s grave for a while before something melted inside her and she was helpless to stop the tears, even if she’d wanted to.
Eighty years of pent-up emotion, of unfelt grief and loneliness and anger and joy and amazement all came spilling out at once, and she hadn’t thought that she’d turned it all off but why else did it suddenly feel like her head’s been filled with cotton wool all this time?
So she ran, because she couldn’t be trapped in a car when there were snowflakes to feel on her skin and a breeze in her hair and somewhere, someone was making pancakes and wasn’t that just a lovely thought?
She hugged Bonnie tight, touched the laugh lines next to her eyes and admired the pictures of her daughter that hung above the microwave.
“It feels like I missed a century,” Caroline confessed, but she refused to cry anymore because so many people were gone but she was still here, her heart still beat just for her and her mom had told her to be extraordinary and instead she’d been dead, too.
“Nobody blames you, Care.” Bonnie handed her a striped mug with a soft smile. “I just wish we’d figured it out sooner so we could have helped you.”
And Caroline wanted to tell her that they tried, and she remembered the way Bonnie gave her space and Stefan watched her with brooding eyes and Klaus’s tears dripped into her hair, and she didn’t realise it at the time but she loved them, so much, and thank you for not pushing her when she wasn’t ready.
Because she’d brought herself back, and knowing that gave her hope that burned fiercely in her chest, because wasn’t that just extraordinary?
Klaus was still waiting for her.
She laughed when she saw him, because it was raining and she was sopping wet from watching the artists paint, and he was huddled under the roof of a bar so his curls were still dry and rumpled and beautiful.
His eyes lit up and she knew he’d noticed her, and did her heart always do that when he smiled?
It took seventy four seconds for his hair to drip big drops into his eyes, and then into her eyes when he kissed her despite all the people watching, but she didn’t want to close her eyes because she was never missing out on anything this good again.
“Better, sweetheart?” he teased, and she hugged him close enough to feel his relief sink right into her bones.
She’d been looking in all the wrong places, she thought later, after she was warm from a shower and Klaus’s blood in her veins. She had her home with her all along. She just needed to turn the lights back on.