We could be a celebration

Caroline decides that Nik is her favorite Mikaelson, at least looks-wise. He’s got curly dirty blonde hair and he’s kind of sun-touched, and there’s paint on his shirt, chains just visible under the collar.
The way that he’s looking at her makes her feel like the sun has turned on the high heat, and she’s not sure if she likes it or not. (She does of course she does, but that doesn’t matter not really. She’s an adult, she’s long past making rash decisions. Usually. When it doesn't involve pouring another cocktail.)

[Or the AU where they're all neighbors.]

Notes:

this has been a work in progress for too long but it's finally done and i'm really proud.
now on with the show~!

Work Text:

It’s a rather harmless beginning.

There’s a streetwide party, all of the people on their tiny cul-de-sac coming together to enjoy some good food and welcome the new family.

Honestly as she sips at her margarita, salt from the rim burning the raw bitten spot on her lip, it seems rather cultish.

Their street has maybe two actual familes, and she doesn’t think that Elena and Katherine’s mess counts. (Elena and Katherine are twins, but Elena was given up for adoption and Katherine grew up in Bulgaria, and now she lives with Elena and her adoptive younger brother. Usually a night doesn’t go by that doesn’t end with Elena storming out and heading across the street to where Damon lives.)

(Damon is Stefan’s older brother, but they don’t live together, and don’t actually seem to like each other, so Caroline forgets that more than she remembers it. Maybe they have more families than she thought.)

But that means that when the Mikaelson’s show up, the woman, who introduces herself to the group as Rebekah, carrying a bottle of wine in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other, the man, Elijah, smiling in a pressed white shirt and slacks, they seem to both fit right in and stand a bit out.

Katherine jolts into a standing position as soon as she sees Elijah, and Caroline watches them interact from behind the rim of her glass, fascinated by what she sees.

"He’s calling her Katerina." She and Bonnie have this down to a science, both with and without Elena. They’re pretty sneaky about their spying. If Stefan were there, he would roll his eyes, tell her that no, they aren’t spying, they’re just being gossips before trying to push her into the pool.

But Caroline can’t find him at the moment, can’t even see a glimpse of his perfectly brooding hair or his unbelievably hipster sunglasses.

Though she’s been told she’s not allowed to comment on that, since she wears almost the exact same pair as he does. But she admits that they’re hipster glasses, so she can totally say that.

She might be kind of tipsy.

Though so is everyone but the Mikaelson’s, since they’ve only just shown up. Rebekah seems to be on her way, since she’s mixing a large glass of what appears to be more vodka than orange juice. It makes Caroline think that it might not be a bad idea to get to know her better.

She taps Bonnie on the shoulder, and slides off to where Rebekah is lingering, watching her brother and Katherine be civil. Caroline wonders what the story is there, but shakes it out of her head. Katherine is a hopeless gossip, and Caroline will find out sooner or later. (Probably sooner.)

"Hello there," Caroline’s sitting her far from empty glass down on the table, adding a bit more ice and margarita mix. She spends a moment trying to decide on whether she wants to make a fool out of herself trying to resalt the rim. In the end she decides that she would just end up with too much salt in her cocktail for it to be a good idea.

”Hello.” Rebekah seems reluctant to chat, and Caroline gets another wave of that ‘this is a cult’ feeling. She pushes it down and introduces herself.

She was Miss Mystic Falls once, a tiny little title that means nothing outside of her hometown but has left her with that instinctive always-the-leader feeling, even now so many years later.

Caroline holds her hand out. “I’m Caroline. Rebekah, right?” There’s always the chance that she had misheard the new girl’s introduction, so it’s better to make sure now, than make a fool out of herself later.

Rebekah nods her heads and shakes Caroline’s hand. “That’s my brother, Elijah, over there with Katherine.” She rolls her eyes, and looks back over towards them. Caroline glances over as well and finds that they’re standing much closer than they had been a minute ago.

Maybe she should go ahead and ask what’s up with them.

She’s trying to decide on whether she should while Rebekah continues.

"And my other brother should be here-" Rebekah rolls her eyes again, as she glances towards the wooden gate to the backyard, just in time to see it swing open. "Well what do you know? Speak of the devil. Nik!”

Caroline decides that Nik is her favorite Mikaelson, at least looks-wise. He’s got curly dirty blonde hair and he’s kind of sun-touched, and there’s paint on his shirt, chains just visible under the collar.

The way that he’s looking at her makes her feel like the sun has turned on the high heat, and she’s not sure if she likes it or not. (She does, of course she does, but that doesn't matter not really. She’s an adult, she’s long past making rash decisions. Usually. When it doesn't involve pouring another cocktail.)

"Hello, sister." Rebekah hands him her cup, taking the excuse to pour herself a new drink, a margarita this time. Nik adds more orange juice to his glass, and scoops in about four of the cherries that Damon has expressly told Caroline not to touch.

"Brother." Rebekah has squeezed a lime wedge into his glass, and is now trying to decide what to do with the leftover piece. Caroline glances around and finds Damon failing to light the grill, while Stefan hides the lighter fluid (that he apparently didn’t use while setting up the grill) in Elena’s bag, and points at the plant he has hanging outside of his kitchen. Rebekah nods, and throws the lime, grinning for a moment when she makes it into the planter.

"This is Caroline." Rebekah says, as she lets herself get distracted by Elijah and Katherine again. Caroline would look over, but she isn’t sure if she wants to see. (Sparing a quick glance she doesn’t see anything terrible, but Rebekah’s still rolling her eyes. The plot thickens…)

"Hi," she says, holding a hand out, smiling her Miss Mystic smile, always falling back on the manners her father instilled in her at a young age.

Nik takes her hand and smiles this tiny little smile, that Caroline reflects on instinct, her grin falling into something smaller and softer. “Hello, Caroline.”

Something in the way he’s said her name, accent softening it, has her thankful for her bare feet, for her ability not to trip while standing still.

"I’m Klaus." And yes. That seems like it fits him much better than Nik, though she doesn’t even know him. He has an accent, like his sister, and it makes Caroline wonders what the deal is. Maybe this family is just going to ask more questions than it answers. "Nice to meet you."

She drops his hand and is about to strike up a conversation, ask them how they’re liking the neighborhood, ask him about the paint on him, ask about where they're from and why they're here, when Stefan yells for her.

"Caroline, have you seen the lighter fluid? We can’t find it anywhere. I don’t think Damon has any." She has to stop herself from giggling, from giving away that she knows exactly where it is. Damon’s glaring holes through Stefan’s head and he looks about ready to light him on fire with the fireplace matches on the grill next to him.

"I’ll help you look for it!" She yells back to Stefan, and takes a few steps away from Klaus and Rebekah. "We’ll talk more later." She says, before shaking everything out of her head, and carrying her cocktail over to give her input on where the lighter fluid is.

The Mikaelsons aren’t bad neighbors all things considered. There aren’t any screaming matches, and they don’t turn their music up too loud, and Caroline sends a small thanks towards their house every time they don’t say something about Stefan’s stereo system. (Even turned down it’s loud enough that when she’s drunk, Caroline feels that it’s shaking her out of her skin.)

Even so Caroline’s decided that she doesn’t like them, or that she doesn’t like Klaus at least. Rebekah has joined the neighborhood movie night, and is just as gossip-y as the rest of them. She’s a good addition to their friend group, even if she sometimes tries to fight Caroline for control of things.

But something about Klaus rubs her the wrong way. He hasn’t been walking through Stefan's garden or trying to peer into windows, but Caroline thinks from the way that Rebekah talks about him he’s had a lot of things handed to him, a lot of people give him what he wants.

Caroline’s had to work for every scrap of something that she has. It makes her resentful of people that have it easy.

(When it’s her turn to get the coffee, sometimes she’ll screw up the orders of the people who were handed their jobs, who work there because of their daddies’ string pulling and deep pockets. It’s nothing major, skim milk instead of whole, a few degrees cooler, vanilla instead of hazelnut. She can always blame it on the new person working the counter, because there’s always a new person working the counter, and they never think that nice little Caroline Forbes would maliciously screw up their lattes.)

Of course the same could be said of Elijah and Rebekah, the two of them (or four? Caroline thinks she remembers them saying something about them having more siblings, It had only been a passing remark though, so she can’t be sure) having also inherited a portion of their father’s estate. But there’s something about the arrogance of Klaus, the fact that he acts like he deserves everything. It makes him impossible to be around.

So she generally tries not to be around him.

Caroline doesn’t mind her work hours, for all that she wakes up at 6 every morning and then at 7 has a 45 minute commute. Traffic usually isn’t too bad and Stefan is constantly giving her new music to listen to.

It’s not particularly hard work, her double major in journalism and English lit making her ‘the best candidate for the job’, and so while she’d had to work her way up from interning for nothing, to interning for very little, to finally having an actual job, it’s worth it for the fact that she’s finally making the news.

She’s not at her dream job yet, actually delivering the news, but she’s helping to write it, and occasionally she gets sent on location. Caroline tries not to be excited about those moments, because it usually means that something terrible has happened, but there’s something nice about being one step closer to her dream career.

Unlike Stefan who works odd jobs around town, and makes enough money bartending nights at the Grill that he doesn’t have to get an everyday 9 to 5 job.

(“I like my job, Caroline. I like not going to an office and not having to report to some head honcho that’s going to make me wear a tie every day.” Stefan says once over a glass of scotch as they play Monopoly. The neighborhood has a bimonthly game and Caroline is determined to keep up her winning streak.

Caroline starts to say “But Stefan-” before remembering that while Giuseppe had wanted Stefan to take over the family business Damon had claimed older brother, rightful heir status and Stefan hadn’t really wanted to fight about it. Instead dropping out of law school, and camping out on Caroline’s couch, until they decided to rent a house together.

Instead Caroline rolls the dice and finally gets the last orange deed. “Yes!” She’s been trying to get this piece for half the game, and she’s already planning how many houses to buy. Stefan’s rolling his eyes, and trying to make a bet on how long it’ll take him to lose.)

But this means that she has a routine, but having a routine means that there are ways for her neighbor to screw with her in the morning, when she’s singing cheesy pop music under her breath.

(Klaus has started swimming in the mornings. Caroline knows this because Rebekah complains about all of their pool towels being wet when she goes outside to tan. Caroline still doesn’t know if Rebekah has a job.

Elijah’s a fancy hotshot lawyer, but Rebekah’s never mentioned anything, doesn’t complain about waking up too early with a hangover, something that Caroline’s been lucky enough to never have to deal with (thank God and alcoholic ancestors).

Klaus, she knows though, is an artist. Having crashed in Elijah’s guest room for so long that Elijah decided that they needed more space so that he could actually have a guest room again. Hence the move into the empty house next to Caroline and Stefan.

That also helps to explain why he’d been covered in paint when they first met. Though he could have just been doing something normal like painting walls. Caroline overthinks things sometimes. It’s a weakness and a strength.

It doesn’t mean she’s always wrong though.

So she knows that Klaus swims in the mornings, can kind of hear the little splashes if she listens really hard and her shoes aren’t making too much noise.

(She also knows that she has no time to pause and think about Klaus dripping and smelling of chlorine, the early morning sun making his hair seem more blonde than normal.))

So when the morning comes that Caroline’s walking outside to her car, bopping her head along to whatever song was playing when she finished getting ready, something light and fast and poppy making her want to dance instead of do her hair, and she hears someone say something to her, interrupting the few moments of quiet time that she counts on every day, she's surprised.

He looks exactly the way that she’s never, never, imagined he would, but she still jumped out of her skin when he called out to her.

"Good morning, Caroline." Klaus says. He’s got his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, a newspaper on the small table in front of him. It makes a pretty picture and if Caroline were a Realtor she would take a picture of him and use it to sell the few houses on the market in the neighborhood.

As it is, she’s not a Realtor, she’s just annoyed. This was her quiet time, dammit! She shouldn’t have to deal with spoiled rich boys. Caroline still has her manners though, so she says a curt, “Morning.” before picking up her car keys, which she’d dropped when he startled her, and continuing on to her car.

She thinks she hears him laughing though, and can’t decide whether to throw a glare at him or not.

In the end she does, simply because there’s no one else around, no one else to gossip about ‘Did you see those two? What do you think is going on there? Care only gets worked up like that when someone’s really getting under her skin.’

She half expects him to still be sitting there, shirtless and dripping, when she gets home from work that afternoon. She’s thinking that if he is she’s going to talk him into helping her carry her groceries in. As it is, he isn’t there so she makes the few trips alone, using the time to decide whether she should go see Stefan at the Grill or if she should cook some of the food she’s just brought home.

Caroline decides that while she doesn’t want to cook, she doesn’t really want to go out either. So she orders a pizza, and gets caught up on one of her favorite shows before falling asleep on the couch. Only waking up after Stefan shuffles in at 6:20 the next morning, night shift finally over.

He takes her place on the couch when she gets up, stealing a piece of her pizza. “I’m supposed to be helping the Martin’s move today, so make sure i’m awake again before you leave.”

He’s asleep before she’s out of the room, one bite taken out of the piece of pizza he’d grabbed. Stefan’s always had a way of being able to survive on minimal amounts of sleep that Caroline’s been jealous of for years. She starts getting testy and less in control of her verbal filter when she doesn’t get enough rest.

Of course that doesn’t stop her from doing things that keep her up late, even when she has work the next day.

She has to rush through her routine, skipping a shower for some dry shampoo and a ponytail, putting on the first outfit that matches, throwing out silent thank yous to Stefan, God, and the owner’s decision to make the Grill their town’s only 24 hour restaurant.

Caroline makes up just enough time that not only is she not late but she can slip in a stop for coffee, having forgotten to start the coffeemaker.

She pokes at Stefan’s face for a moment, before he wakes up and wishes her a good day, mouth full of pizza, and then she’s out the door.

It isn’t until she’s in the car that she realizes that she’s thankful that Klaus hadn’t been waiting on his porch to scare her today.

The next day passes just as smoothly, and over the weekend she almost lets herself forget that it had even happened.

Caroline goes out drinking and dancing with the girls on Friday night, and comes home early Saturday morning clutching her coffee like a lifeline, feeling sorry for Elena who had to work again that day.

(She feels less sorry that Elena had kicked them all out of her house. It’s not like they were going to steal anything, but then again Jeremy had been awake and seemingly planning something so it might have been for the best. Caroline also doesn’t feel sorry that she’d taken one of Elena’s coffee cups with her back home.)

(Maybe she was the tiniest bit wrong about them not stealing anything. She leaves it on the kitchen counter so that she’ll remember to wash it and take it back over to them.)

She wakes up again to the sounds of the radio playing in the distance and her alarm clock telling her it’s 11 am. Caroline stretches and gets out of bed, grabbing a glass of orange juice, before following the sound of the music.

It leads her outside where she finds Stefan, gardening while drunk.

This is one of Caroline’s favorite sights to see.

About twice a month, on his few days off, Stefan decides that he wants to make Damon feel extra bad about the state of his roses. This means that Stefan after a quick trip to the local home improvement store he starts drinking and working in the yard.

It’s probably not the best idea and Caroline always has to remind him to wear sunscreen, though she’s never seen him sunburned, but in the end the garden always looks gorgeous and Damon spends at least an hour glaring at Stefan during the next cookout. (That reminds her that the 4th of July is coming up, and they need to start planning for that.)

She’s also pretty sure that he has to work tonight, so he’s probably just feeling extra stressed. Caroline will have to make sure that he stops early enough to have a nap and a shower, plus time to sober up a little.

As it is, she sits down on the porch with her orange juice and when Rebekah joins her in supervising Stefan (one time he’d cut his leg open with their abnormally sharp hoe, so now Caroline likes to keep an eye on him), Caroline calls for Chinese take-out and they have a picnic in the yard.

Klaus joins them and Caroline can’t make the effort to be really irritated with him, enjoying her relaxing day too much.

Sunday passes in a blur of swimming and drinking, and everyone ends up at the Mikaelson’s. It’s unplanned and fun.

(Elijah mans the grill and glares anytime that Damon gets too close. It makes the girls laugh from where they’re hanging out in the water.)

Caroline wakes up just before her alarm goes off, and takes her time getting ready. When she gets to the kitchen and finds Stefan at the table eating a breakfast sandwich. She grins when she sees that there’s a second one still warm wrapped in foil from the Grill. She grabs it and a travel mug of coffee before heading out the door.

"Good morning, Caroline." She’s not startled this morning and while her hands are full of her breakfast and her keys, nothing hits the ground.

"Morning, Klaus!" She says, feeling in such a good mood that even jerky neighbors interrupting her peace won’t bother her. She even throws a smile over her shoulder at him, before she slides into the car.

It continues like that for a while. Not every morning but a few times a week she goes outside, to find him sitting on his porch, relaxed and waiting to wish her a good a day.

On the mornings when he isn’t there she can hear him swimming laps in the backyard, and she wonders what it happens on those mornings that keeps him in the water, or gets him out of it on other days.

They see each other more than just in the mornings, but neither of them mention what’s become their morning routine, not wanting to add to the gossip pool. Especially not when Elena’s stopped stomping out of arguments with Katherine, because Katherine’s started going over to see Elijah in the evenings, sometimes not going home until the morning.

(“I tend to ignore my brothers’ sex lives.” Rebekah says as she counts the nine spaces that will send her token to jail. After her incredible defeat at the last Monopoly tournament, Rebekah had asked to join Stefan and Caroline’s practice games. As he rolls the dice, Stefan’s just glad he isn’t the only one getting crushed by Caroline this time. “Or lack thereof in Nik’s case.”

Rebekah laughs into her glass for a second, and Stefan laughs while Caroline shakes her head. As close as she’s always been with Elena and Stefan, there’s something about the faux-cruelty between siblings that she’s never gotten.)

The Fourth is quickly approaching and everyone’s getting excited. As an adult there’s not as much to get excited about, but there’s drinking and food and most people have off work. Plus fireworks are nice to look at.

After the impromptu party next door, Damon says that they can have the party at his house, and Caroline makes a note to give him a list of food that they need. Otherwise they’ll end up with too much alcohol and not enough food and Elena will almost drown in the pool again.

(Laughing, she’d fallen off of her pool raft, and being too drunk she hadn’t been able to find the right way up, and Stefan thinking quickly had jumped in after her. After that, everyone had dispersed to watch the fireworks visible from the tiny nearby park from their own yards.)

Since Damon’s hosting, Elena offers to do decorations for him (there aren’t really children in the neighborhood but they still go all out), and Klaus apparently knows people that can hook them up with the good fireworks.

This means that Caroline has very little to do in regards to the party. She’ll still be last minute damage control, and usually everyone ends up bringing food or drink of some kind, the party as much of a pot luck as anything else, but there’s nothing that will take up a large amount of her time.

She goes swimsuit shopping with Bonnie and Rebekah, trying to get them to get along, Rebekah is slowly becoming one of her best friends, and Caroline bakes almost too many cupcakes for the party that they’re having at work that she ends up bringing a bunch of them home and eats way too many before taking them to the Grill and making Stefan take them away from her.

He pours her a ginger ale and listens to her complain, voice mumbled from where her head rests on the cool wood of the bar. “But I love food so much Stefan. Why does it hate me so?”

There are a couple of people down the bar that are sending her weird looks, and telling Stefan that maybe he should cut her off, send her home, 7 o’clock is a bit too early to be that wasted. He just laughs, explains that she’s not drunk she’s just had too much to eat before offering them a cupcake, and passing their compliments back down the bar to Caroline, who has moved on to just clutching her stomach and making tiny whine noises.

Stefan sends her home just a few moments later, just before the worst of the pre-holiday rush can roll in. She may not have wanted to move, but when she gets out of her car she can remember the last time that she’d been at the bar on the night before a holiday and it hadn’t been any fun, some mixture of sad lonely people, and happy loud people filling the place to the brim, and she’s pretty sure that at one point someone had cut off a piece of her hair, though she couldn’t prove it.

The next morning Caroline’s alarm goes off, and she curses herself from the night before for not turning it off. She isn’t able to go back to sleep so she goes and makes a cup of coffee, and goes to sit out on the back porch. They’ve got a large tree in the backyard, and she’s constantly trying to talk Stefan into them needing a pool of their own.

(“We don’t need one, Caroline!” He says as he grills their dinner. “We are surrounded by pools! Why should we spend that money when we can just use one of theirs!”

"But what if they’re not home, huh?" They don’t often have dinner together, they’re usually not home at the same time, but Caroline likes getting to spend time with her best friend. "What are we gonna do then?"

"Do you really think they’ll all always be out when you’re off and home and dying for a swim?" He throws a scowl over his shoulder at her. "Or if they were out that you couldn’t just text them to ask to use their pool?" She hadn’t had a good response to that, so she’d gone inside to make the salad.)

But she can hear splashing from next door, and even though they have a wooden privacy fence she can see Klaus splashing around. While she watches him for a minute, she doesn’t stare, though for some reason she doesn’t think that he would really mind.

Caroline enjoys the morning sun and watches YouTube on her phone while she drinks her coffee. She doesn’t usually get to do the ‘scene from an indie film’ stuff, but it’s a nice feeling when she gets to. As a teenager, she’d pictured her life as some kind of an indie romantic comedy with a lot of pastels.

There’s a lot more comedy than romantic in reality, but she did decorate her room in pastels.

She makes more cupcakes, and uses food coloring to make them red, white, and blue. They’re beautiful and even though she’d eaten too many the night before that doesn’t stop her from sitting two of them aside so that she and Stefan can both definitely have one. Sweets tend to disappear first in their neighborhood.

The afternoon rolls around, and they all head to Damon’s at approximately the same time, Klaus and Caroline stepping out their front doors at the same time.

Rebekah jogs over to Caroline and they talk as the walk down the street. “Elijah’s going to be late.” This makes Caroline raise her eyebrows. If any of the Mikaelson’s were going to the be late she would not think that it would be Elijah. "My brother Kol flew in today, and someone had to pick him up from the airport. And traffic is hell, so they’re going to be a while." There’s a smile on her face and laughter in his voice. "I had to go with Nik to pick Kol up last time and the traffic is always terrible."

"Oh darling Kol, always flying in at the worst times.” Klaus says from behind them, stepping forward to put Caroline into a Mikaelson sandwich leaving Stefan walking behind them, trying to keep a hold on the riot punch while he goes through the music on his phone.

"Don’t be jealous, brother." Rebekah’s flipping hair out of her eyes, before pushing her sunglasses up into her hair to hold them back. Klaus just rolls his eyes, before opening the gate to Damon’s backyard, letting Stefan and Caroline in.

Caroline is always so confused about the Mikaelson family. Because she’s met three of them, but there are five children, though one of them might be dead? And she knows that Mikael (Mikael Mikaelson? Really?) and Esther died. There's also the fact that Klaus is Rebekah and Elijah’s half-brother? She tries to be more drunk than this when she tries to figure it out.

There’s plenty of snacks set out in the backyard, and when she moves to put the cupcakes in the air conditioning, she sees the variety of grill foods set out just the way she would have done it.

At least Damon’s learned something from her.

Before long the party is in full swing, and people are swimming and chatting and Damon’s started to grill as Stefan stands over his shoulder, goading him in more and more inventive ways.

Caroline’s got a glass of Stefan’s riot punch, the fruit that she’s fished out of the container bitter as she bites into it. She knows that you aren’t supposed to eat the fruit, that it’s not good for her, but she eats it anyway.

Klaus does that thing that swimmers do where he uses just his arms to push himself out of the pool, and Caroline watches his tattoos move and the shift of muscles in his shoulders as he does it. It’s just as show-off-y as she would expect but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a pretty sight.

He’s drying his hair off with a towel, and Caroline’s had just enough to drink that she’s finally gonna ask the question that run through her head every morning.

"Why are you awake and swimming so early every morning?" She could probably have been less blunt about asking, but it’s been something close to a month that he’s been saying good morning to her, and she just wants to know.

Klaus moves around for another second, swiping the towel over his face and into his ears, before letting it drop around his neck. Caroline thinks that maybe he didn’t hear her, but then he makes eye contact with her and speaks. “I don’t really sleep that often, or that well when I do sleep. Most of the time though, I just haven’t been to bed yet. I assume Bekah’s told you what I do?”

"You paint, right?" Because while Rebekah has told her that he does art, she has many years of experience knowing that questions keep conversations going longer, even if it’s just a question of you being unsure of how correct your facts are.

The sun is shining down too hot, and everyone has been in the pool at some point or another to cool down, but Klaus smiles and that’s what makes Caroline really feel warm. She doesn’t like how off-kilter it makes her feel, and if she continues to sip at her drink like this she’s going to need another one very soon.

"Yes, I paint. I also sketch and have been known on occasion to attempt sculpting." She flicks her eyes down to where his hands are holding the towel hanging around his neck and imagines them holding a brush, or doing delicate detail work, a montage of images passing through her mind. Caroline has to shake her head to get them to go away. "Are you artistically inclined?"

"Unless you count high school art class, or making banners for school dances, definitely not." Caroline knows that being good at art comes with time and practice, but she’s never been patient enough to get good at anything more than doodle-y flowers and hearts, same as every other young girl at one point. "I did take a photography course in college that I wasn’t too terrible at."

Klaus smiles again, and Caroline takes a glace around the yard, looking for Stefan or Bonnie or Elena, wanting to make sure none of them urgently need her to not get that warm feeling in her chest again. “I’m sure you were wonderful, sweetheart.”

She doesn’t have anything to say in response to that, because it’s not as though she wants to get in an argument with him in the middle of the party, she does not need that attention.

The only gossip that she wants has to do with her cupcakes being the best cupcakes they’ve all ever tasted.

She just smiles instead, tilting her head to get a better look at the chains that he’s literally always wearing, the birds flying across his shoulder. Klaus may usually be shirtless in the mornings as he wishes her a good morning, but she’s never really been close enough to see them as more than just dark smudges. Or if she has, she wasn’t really paying attention.

They remind her of the faded bird that she has on her wrist, the one that she carefully covers up with make-up before going to work, the one that would not be appropriate for a newscaster, even if it’s just a small bird.

There’s probably some kind of symbolism there, but her brain is too muddled to think about it, so she let’s her fingers tingle and presses them against her own wrist, starts trying to think of something to say.

There’s a commotion from the pool, and Caroline and Klaus turn to look just in time to see Katherine falling backwards off of Jeremy’s shoulders in a mess of hair and limbs. Laughing, Stefan’s got Bonnie on his shoulders, and is jumping up and down, both in celebration and trying to get her to fall in as well.

It works and a moment later, Bonnie is falling backwards, but because her legs are hooked around Stefan’s arms, he’s falling backwards as well, though the trip is much shorter for him.

After that everyone’s laughing, and it makes Caroline forget everything else that had been happening in her head.

"They should have said something to us." Klaus speaking makes her turn away from where Bonnie is now trying to dunk Stefan. "We could have knocked them both off their feet."

"Oh, really? Because I’m sure they-" She starts before they hear his name being called.

"Niklaus!" He and Caroline both turn in time to look to whoever interrupted them. It’s Elijah, walking over to them with the man who must be Kol.

Kol looks like a mini-Elijah, if Elijah wore aviators and a ton of bracelets. She can see the start of a chain peaking out from under his shirt too.

(She wonders if Kol had seen Klaus wearing them when he was younger and wanted to be like his older brother, or if it was the other way around, or if they had both had just started wearing them on their own.)

"Brother, it’s wonderful to see you." Klaus says before he starts to walk towards them, sounding as though it’s anything but. There’s a smile on his face, and Caroline follows him. They hug when they get close enough and when they pull away, Caroline introduces herself.

"Caroline Forbes." She holds a hand out to Kol, and his hand feels the slightest bit cool when she shakes it. "I live in the house next door to your family."

Something she says makes Kol smirk and for a moment she wonders if he ever really smiles, if Rebekah is the only one who gives out smiles like candy on Halloween. “So you’re Caroline? I’ve heard so much about you.”

"You have?" That makes the smile fall off of her face. Finding out that people have been talking about her always knocks her a bit off balance, even though it’s something that she should probably be used to by now. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been quite popular in high school. She forces herself to smile again, though it’s not really hard to do. "Good things, I hope."

"Of course. Rebekah is very fond of you it seems. I can certainly see why." His accent is foreign like Rebekah and Klaus, but there’s something different about it that she can’t quite figure out. While trying to figure it out, she looks towards Rebekah in the pool and misses the look that Kol shoots Klaus, only looking back when Kol speaks again. "Now, if you’ll excuse me, my dear brother and I need drinks."

He claps a hand up on Elijah’s shoulder, and Elijah just rolls his eyes before walking them towards the alcohol. By the look on his face, it would seem that Elijah has been wishing he had a drink for a while now.

Klaus turns to Caroline and looks like he’s about to say something, when all of a sudden there’s a person wrapping their arms around Caroline.

Rebekah is cool and dripping pool water, and Caroline barely avoids a party foul as she tries to get used to the new colder half of her body. “You met Kol!” Rebekah has had more to drink than Caroline and while she isn’t yelling, but she is speaking very loudly into Caroline’s ear.

"Yes. I did." Caroline’s speaking more slowly in the hopes that she can lull Rebekah into being calm enough to let her slip a few inches away so that she isn’t deafened.

"He’s my favorite brother. Sometimes. Mostly when he isn’t around." That makes Klaus laugh, and Caroline smile. "What are you laughin’ at Nik? You’re never my favorite brother. Never. Never ever." This just makes Klaus smile more, and makes Caroline wish that, for as much as she enjoyed being an only child, as much as she enjoys that she can avoid her brat of a step-sister, that maybe she had a real sibling of her own.

Though that’s probably just the alcohol making her lonely and tomorrow morning when she’s good and sober, she’ll look back on this moment and laugh, will thank Stefan for not being related to her in any sort of blood commitment way.

"Now come on Caroline. We need more people for this game that we’re playing."

Rebekah is slowly dragging her back towards the the pool and Caroline has to chug what’s left of her drink so as to not add alcohol to the chemicals in the pool. “Duty calls.” Caroline says to Klaus after emptying her cup, throwing it in the direction that he’s standing.

He reaches an arm out and catches it and Caroline has just a moment to throw an arm in the air as a sign of success, careful not to hit Rebekah, and celebrate before she’s toppling sideways into the water.

The rest of the night passes in a blur of alcohol, chlorine, and sulfur, and before Caroline knows it, she’s walking back home, an arm slung across Rebekah’s shoulders as they loudly sing some pop song that Klaus claims to detest. Kol is performing an intricate dance as they walk, somehow managing not to fall over and impale himself on something.

Stefan is just recording the entire thing on his phone, probably so that he doesn’t get roped in to singing with them.

Caroline doesn’t know what to do with her arm when Rebekah moves away to head into the Mikaelson’s house.

"Goodnight, Rebekah!"

Caroline’s leaning off of her porch, yelling to where Rebekah stands leaning thirty feet away from her.

The night is dark but Caroline thinks that if she steadies herself and looks away from Rebekah she can see Klaus laughing at them from the dark of the porch. “G’night, Caroline. I love you!”

She looks back to Rebekah and sees a grin on the girl's face. “I love you too! Goodnight!”

Caroline faintly hears Rebekah calling goodnight again, before Stefan’s shuffling her far enough away from the door that he can close and lock it behind them.

She needs to drink some water and make sure that the Advil is by the bed before she lays down, just in case, but when she gets into the kitchen she sees the cupcakes that she had saved earlier and wants to go back in time and thank herself for being such a genius.

"Stefan!" She yells, already peeling the paper wrapper off of the cupcake. She can hear the TV quietly playing in the other room, but there’s still the sound of footsteps a moment later.

"Cupcakes!" Her mouth is full of cake, and there’s a smear of icing on her lips. "I saved us cupcakes!"

Stefan’s leaning against the counter, peeling the paper off of his own cupcake, watching Caroline dance around a bit, her crumbs dropping to the floor. “Didn’t you just have one of these before we came home?”

Caroline can’t really remember eating a cupcake but that doesn’t mean that she didn’t, so she shrugs and stuffs the last bite into her mouth before finally getting a glass of water and taking the bottle of painkillers to her room.

The rest of July seems to pass quickly, with drinking and working and Damon coming outside to find that there’s blood in his pool.

(It’s not actually blood, it’s super concentrated pool dye that Stefan found in some weird novelty shop. He’d bought about 15 bottles of it, and then poured it all into the water at once, making it a much darker more blood-like color. Stefan laughs and laughs and says that it’s worth being woken up when he’s just finally gotten to sleep to hear the worry in Damon’s voice as he asks what they did, apparently sounding like he’s going to have to coordinate a police cover up.)

Kol is still staying with his siblings towards the end of the month, and Rebekah gets extremely excited when she tells Caroline that Kol has no plans to leave until the end of September for some festival somewhere. Rebekah’s a bit less excited when she says that Elijah might buy a plane ticket and ship him off sometime before then because there are, apparently, too many people in that house.

Caroline’s never had to deal with that, requesting and working for single rooms in college, it only ever being her and her mom before that. The closest she’s ever come is sleepovers where 10 girls packed into her living room and were all gone by noon the next day. That’s one of the few things that she misses about middle school.

It’s really the only thing she misses about middle school.

On one of the particularly nice days when she gets off at two instead of five, she takes her laptop, a book, and the biggest glass of sweet tea that she can find, outside and decides that she’s going to enjoy the day.

She has to put her book over the top of her cup when she’s on the laptop to keep the bees away, that being the one bad thing about Stefan’s love of flower bushes. Plus she can hear someone’s lawnmower, loud and insistent and terribly close so it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely better then the sounds of Walter at work complaining about how he’s been awake since 5 that morning since they had a mandatory early meeting.

She’d wanted to tell him that he got into the wrong business if he wasn’t up for early mornings and late nights, though she seems to experience more of the former than the latter, but she kept her mouth shut and focused on what they needed from the store.

Caroline tries to get some work done, fact checking about one of the hot button topics for the next day’s cycle, going through her google alerts and seeing if twitter is freaking out over anything, but she gets through way less than she would have at her desk, and starts thinking of things that she can make for dinner, and whether or not she or Walter will be the first one promoted and sent out on their first big solo story.

She wants to be the one to deliver the news that she writes, wants to do more than fact check and edit, and send the stories off in an email never to be seen again, or at least not to be seen until the evening news if she ever bothered to watch it.

As it is she tucks her laptop over into the shade so that it has a break from the heat of the sun, and tries to read for a little while. She’s not sure how she likes her book so far and it shows in the way that she stops reading after just a few minutes and stares out into the garden, letting the sun relax her and lull her to sleep.

She dreams that she’s reporting a story about a beehive in her backyard, about how the flowers look like they will last forever. She feels too hot and she knows that she’s sweating too much to look professional, isn’t acting professional either. She’s too excited to show off their garden before fall comes and everything gets too cold, like it seems to be right now.

Then there’s water on her face, and it’s not raining, it can’t be. The sun is shining too brightly and there’s no chill in the air.

There’s more water on her face and then she’s awake and blinking sunlight out of her eyes. “Ugh, Stefan what are you doing? I was having such a nice nap.”

She’s not sure whether she remembers that Stefan’s helping Mrs. Stanlow steam her carpets this afternoon, or that that laugh isn’t Stefan’s. It doesn’t really matter, because a moment later Klaus has taken a step over, and is blocking the sun with his body.

"I’m sure it was lovely, but I also know that you don’t want to get a sunburn. I made a promise once to never let that happen to someone when I could stop it." It’s hard to tell with the sun behind him but he doesn’t look like he’s been swimming and now she’s worried that it wasn’t water he splashed on her face, but tea or sweat or who knows what. The worries fades, when she glances down to his hands and sees the water bottle in them.

It always takes her a few minutes to get back on full blast when she gets startled awake. “Wait, so you’re telling me that you fell asleep in the sun and got a sunburn?”

That makes him laugh again and it feels good inside her chest, she wants to curl up inside of it and go back to sleep. Now she definitely knows that she needs to wake up, so she shifts to sit up further and get the sleep out of her eyes.

"No, but Rebekah did once, and I had to listen to her whine about it, and listen to her complain about looking like a lobster." He takes a swig of his water as Caroline wipes a hand across her forehead. It’s pretty covered in sweat, and she’s thankful for the small breeze that’s managing to make it through the bushes. "It had been a sight to see, but I made a promise, so-"

"So you woke me up?" She makes her voice sound irritated, and like she was much sleepier than she actually was. She had been tired, but it wasn’t anything that she couldn’t handle.

"So I woke you up." He nods down at her, before taking a couple of steps to leave. "And now I’m leaving."

"Oh! You don’t have to go." There’s still a softness in her voice that comes from sleeping, but it’s nothing like what she’d been putting into it before.

Klaus doesn’t laugh again but he smiles, small and open and hopeful. “Actually, sweetheart, I was just on my way to do some shopping. Bekah broke the coffeemaker this morning and if Elijah has to buy one, it will make great coffee but be probably too complicated for her to deal with first thing. Bekah’s hopeless enough as it is. So I’m off.”

"Well, I wish you luck." She had seen Rebekah try and make pizza for one of their game nights, and while it hadn’t turned out too badly, Caroline did have to scrub bits of pizza crust off of the over rack from where it had gotten stuck when they’d taken it out.

"Thanks."

He glances back when he’s almost at his car, and she smiles at him.

It’s a reversal of their normal morning routine, and she doesn’t think about the pleased feeling that leaves in her chest, doesn’t wonder if this is how he feels when she heads to work. If there’s one thing that Caroline Forbes is good at, it’s ignoring things that she doesn’t want to think about.

"We’re out of milk." Stefan says, shoveling another spoonful of cereal into his mouth. He’s sitting on their kitchen counter, kicking his legs, eyeing his bowl like he’s not sure what’s in it.

"Okay, I’ll get some on my way home." Caroline fills her to-go mug with coffee and doesn’t think about the fact that she’s using the last of the creamer, the sugar container looking oddly empty, adds them both to her mental list of milk.

"We’re also need other things to cook probably, since you’re probably still on that whole eating healthy kick. And this is the last bowl of Captain Crunch. I’m eating it with water." She doesn’t want to but Caroline has to check that he’s telling the truth. It probably isn’t that bad tasting but the thought of it makes her almost nauseous.

Stefan isn’t lying and she has to close her eyes as she takes a sip of her coffee.

It’s been her turn to go the grocery store for a week now, but they’ve been coasting by on cereal and pizza. Caroline looks into the cabinets and sees that they are incredibly empty, just a few cans of soup, a surprising amount of spaghetti, a lone pop-tart left in the box. She grabs the pop-tart and the grocery list off of the fridge.

"I’ll go after work. I will get groceries and you will never have to eat cereal with water again."

"You know," he says, putting one last spoonful into his mouth. "I think I almost prefer it this way. It wasn’t half bad."

Caroline just walks away before she can think about that too much.

By some stroke of luck the store isn’t packed to the brim when she gets there, and Caroline says a quiet thank you when she pulls into a thankfully empty parking space near enough to the front doors.

She bops along to the music that she can hear playing over the store’s speakers, changing the lyrics as she sings quietly to herself because no she does not like pina coladas, though she loves the song.

When she was in high school, grocery shopping for her and her mother, she would listen to music on her phone, loud and trying to block out the rest of the world, ignoring those adults that gave her weird looks and whispered their bigoted opinions to each other even years after her father had left.

Now that she’s an adult, she doesn’t really have to worry about that. She’s not too far from home, one small town traded for another that’s both too different and too much the same, but she’s not in a place where people know everything about her. There are only a few people that know her as more than that girl they've see on the news once or twice.

She’s looking at spaghetti sauce on the shelf, trying to remember if they have any at home and whether they have any pasta, when someone comes down the aisle that she’s standing in the center of. Trying to decide between the garlic and herb or the traditional as she shimmies her cart off to the side, she doesn’t pay any attention to whose path she was blocking.

"Caroline?"

She looks up, having finally decided to get one of each sauce, to see her neighbor standing there pushing a shopping cart of his own.

"Klaus. Hi."

There’s something awkward about running into someone at the grocery store, because unless one of you is just running in to quickly pick something up you’re bound to see them again in the store, and then you have to either awkwardly make small talk, or skip that aisle and come back to it later.

Klaus is looking intently at the shelves, his shopping cart a few feet from hers. Caroline is debating what to say, when he asks a question. “What’s your favorite kind of macaroni and cheese?”

It seems to come out of nowhere, and it’s definitely not what she was expecting. She walks over and grabs a box of the store-brand shells and cheese box, something she ate too much of in college but has a nostalgic soft spot for now. it’s good for nights when she doesn’t really feel like cooking something that takes effort. “Usually this one. Though if you’re up for more work, that’s pretty good too.” She points at one of the more expensive packages. It comes with breadcrumbs and makes you buy a bag of shredded cheese.

She grabs a package of it, and tosses it into her cart, grabbing through her purse for her pen to write a specific kind of shredded cheese to her list, just to be sure she won’t forget.

"Thank you for the help. Bekah is determined to make all of the recipes that she’s even seen that involve macaroni and cheese." She hears the rattling of pasta, and sees Klaus putting 7 boxes of shells and cheese into the cart. "I’m hoping the shells mess up whatever blog posts she’s making, Knowing her luck it’ll help get her more hits."

Rebekah had mentioned something about that to Caroline, but hadn’t gone into much detail and so in trying not to pry, Caroline really had no idea of what was going on. They still play monopoly, and they’ve taken to watching True Blood a couple of nights a week, because Rebekah has some fascination with vampire lore, and Caroline has a fascination with Alexander Skarsgård’s face.

But it’s still surprising that Caroline doesn’t know more about how things are going with the blogging. She thinks that she’ll invite her over sometime later this week, and serve something that has nothing to do with macaroni, so that she can ask about it.

She maneuvers her cart around where Klaus is standing, and is again surprised when he turns around and follows her. They backtrack to the bread, because Caroline forgot to pick up a loaf, and she’s seriously craving those little almost plastic tasting chocolate covered doughnuts.

Eating and indulging in junk food are two of Caroline’s favorite things, though due to stress levels and the fact that the neighborhood is almost always having some kind of outdoor party, you wouldn’t be able to tell. When the winter comes she’ll try and decide whether to get a gym membership or suffer through borrowing Damon’s treadmill.

Klaus doesn’t say anything about the fact that they’ve gone backwards through the store, but he does mention that she should grab for the fresher bread at the back of the shelves. “They rotate everything to keep the older stuff selling first. It doesn’t matter as much with canned food, but it’s something to remember about bread.”

She feels silly reaching into the back of the shelf, but the loaf of bread that she pulls out does have a date three days after the one at the front of the shelf. “Thank you.” Caroline says, before they’re off and moving again, this time headed towards the meat department because apparently she skipped this entire part of the store.

Then they spend too much time standing in front of the cooler cases debating what to get.

(“No one gets full chickens anymore, Klaus. It’s just not worth it for the extra effort that it takes to cook.” She has her hands on her hips and she’s looking at all of the different kinds of ground beef.

"But there’s more variety when you buy a whole chicken, and if you can cook a turkey at Thanksgiving then surely you can roast a chicken, sweetheart." He’s grabbing a plastic bag to put the chicken into before putting it in his cart.

Caroline has to look away to decide on if it’s worth it go to get the larger package as he says that. “Seriously though, it’s a goddamn chicken. How much variety can there be?”

Klaus doesn’t say anything in response to that, and Caroline looks smug when she puts her food into the cart.)

After that she doesn’t question the fact that Klaus is just hanging around her, shopping while she shops. It strangely doesn’t feel creepy either. It had felt strange at the beginning, but now they’re both just shopping together, asking opinions on which soup brand is the best, and agreeing that the only thing better on toast than mixed fruit jam is apple butter, though Klaus has a soft spot for orange marmalade.

It turns what would normally be a pretty slow afternoon, into something nice. She likes spending time with him alone, when there isn’t really anyone else there for him to worry about. They talk about TV and movies that they want to see and Caroline talks him into coming over with Rebekah for Mario Party sometime.

"You’re going to lose so hard." She’s grabbing a couple of frozen pizzas and putting them into her cart while Klaus is grimacing at some of the more disgusting looking microwave meals. "I have had a lot of mini-game practice."

"I’m sure you have, sweetheart." He opens the case to grab one of the meals to get a better look, and Caroline grabs it and sticks it back in the right spot, before he can think about it too much.

She’d had a lot of frozen dinner practice as well, being a college student with no time and little money, but a microwave and ample freezer space. They aren’t all bad, but some of them are just horrendous. “You don’t want to go there.”

Klaus shrugs and they both grab their carts, wheeling them around into the last aisle.

Caroline grabs the cheeses that she wrote down on her list and grabs a dozen eggs, checking to see if any are cracked, before moving to look at the ice cream on other side of the aisle.

Klaus runs back to grab a tub of sour cream and some tortillas, while Caroline watches their carts and decides on what ice cream to get. There’s a Caramel deLite flavor that looks really good, but there’s always falling back on what she knows that she likes.

She decides that since Stefan went crazy and bought 15 tubes of Pringles the last time it was his turn to shop, she can get both kinds of ice cream, because goodness knows they’ll eat it all either way.

She checks her phone, while she’s waiting on Klaus and realizes that more time has passed than she thought. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s strange. Time seems to go much more quickly when she’s with Klaus and she doesn’t really want to think about that right now.

She answers Elena’s text about who that one actor on that one show who was in that movie is, and looks up just in time to see Klaus jogging around the corner, tortillas and sour cream in hand.

That’s when it strikes her that this is exactly what it would be like if she were shopping for groceries with Klaus, instead of just with him. That if they lived together, they would go shopping like this and she would make him walk back through the store when they forgot things.

It’s an odd thought and she doesn’t know where it came from but she really wishes she hadn’t thought it, because now they’re on their way to the checkout, and she’s never wanted to spend an extended amount of time in a grocery store, but now for some reason she doesn’t quite want to leave.

That’s exactly why she decides that she needs to go. All of these strange thoughts are probably caused by low blood sugar and she’ll stop by a McDonald’s on her way home, because she can’t be thinking this stuff. She just can’t.

She’s supposed to hate Klaus. She’s always hated him. There is no room in her head for these traitorous thoughts.

(She knows it’s not really that bad, that there wouldn’t be anything wrong if she did like him more than just this kind of friendship that they almost have, but there would be so much teasing from Rebekah and Stefan and that alone makes it something she does not want to think about.)

When they get to the checkout line, she teases him again for the fact that he’s buying four different kinds of pop-tart, but then she sees that he’s looking at the different kinds of ice cream in her cart, and she just laughs.

Klaus gets rung up first, but instead of leaving as soon as he’s finished paying he waits around for Caroline to get done and they walk out of the store together.

They part ways just outside of the door though, because they’ve parked in completely different areas of the lot.

She doesn’t mean to say the first thing that comes to mind, but as she says goodbye the rest of it just slips out. ”I had a nice time this afternoon.” Which is definitely an odd response to spending a couple of hours grocery shopping with someone, but she feels better after Klaus’ reply.

"So did I, sweetheart."

It makes Caroline smile as they walk off to their cars, and if anyone asks her, her smile definitely does not last until she gets all the way home.

September blows in shockingly warm, but they’re in that part of the almost south where things don’t really get cold until October, and the worst of the snow that they get comes in January. They throw an afternoon cookout for Labor Day, everyone lounging in the glow of the day off of work, while the sun is still shining and they can wear their shorts and go swimming, and Caroline doesn’t even wait until the next day to start talking about plans for her birthday and Halloween.

There’s still more than a month until then, but she always plans things out with enough time to fix it if something goes wrong.

Plus Rebekah’s been talking about Halloween for three weeks already, so Caroline can totally get away with it now that it’s September.

This is the time of year when Stefan starts to go stir crazy.

People are still asking for his help but there’s less lawn-mowing and gardening, since everything is slowly dying, and more making sure that there are no leaks in their attic, and helping re-insulate the place while he’s up there.

It means that he takes to laying in is garden more often, as he gets to looking more and more tired.

"It’s like he’s a plant too." Rebekah says as she stares out of Stefan and Caroline’s front window. Caroline is too far away to look out the window, busy pouring snacks into bowls and making sure that everything’s set up right, but she knows that if she were to walk over and join Rebekah she’s be able to see just a bit of Stefan from where he’s crawled in under the bushier parts of the garden. "Like soon he’s going to curl up and wait for spring to come."

They’re having a Monopoly day to try and help him feel better, though if he doesn’t get inside soon, they’ll be forced to start without him and that would defeat the purpose of playing Monopoly to cheer him up.

But she doesn’t have to worry about it because just as Caroline is thinking about the best way to get his attention (she’s thinking a glass of water thrown on him, because the garden always gets kinda dry this time of year), Rebekah sighs and steps away from the window.

"He’s coming inside finally." She takes her seat at the table, and starts laying out her little pile of money. It’s always weird to see the different ways that people play games, and Caroline thinks that if she were still in school she could probably write an essay for psych on the ways that people play board games vs. the way they handle things in real life.

She shakes her head at that and grabs the plate of cupcakes (apple! for the season and to also help cheer up Stefan) and a beer for each of them to take to the table. That’s what she gets for not having anything more exciting to write about than a filler piece about distracted driving. She would have even preferred the story about the man who went running every day for 20 years.

At least that would have been more interesting than some three line thing that she had to re-write four times, because apparently she doesn’t know how to do anything right. (Later she laughs when she tells Rebekah and Stefan that she just re-handed in the first draft, and the editor loved it and Caroline smiled, before going back to her desk to wait for the end of the day.)

Stefan’s got a handful of some of the flowers that still have blooms in his hand, and he sets them on the table, next to the board and Caroline sits the beers down, swapping the flowers out for the cupcakes.

She’s back a moment later, the flowers in one of the mason jars that Stefan uses to insulate in the early spring. They bring more life into the room, and more life into Stefan. She takes a swig of her beer and sets to sorting her money.

Later, they’ve turned some music on and Caroline is halfway through a third cupcake and owning all of the railroads, Stefan’s talking and smiling and laughing, and he’s eaten a few cupcakes, but when Caroline and Rebekah are taking their turns he keeps looking at the flowers.

He’s always gotten down this time of year. With his main hobby slowly dying and it growing cold outside, his moods seem to stay more on the down side of things. He mainly just takes up more shifts at the bar (which shouldn’t be possible considering how much he works already) and naps in his room more than on the couch.

Stefan’s holding the box just out of her reach and Caroline’s stretching to reach for a house without having to get up when she has the best idea, and she has to stop stretching to let just how good it is wash over her.

"I knew you didn’t want a house that badly, Caroline Forbes." Stefan’s sitting the box back on the table. "It is too early in the game for houses. It’s bad enough that you’ve got, like, two monopolys already."

She uses the distraction of him taking a drink to swipe three houses from the box to put them on the board. “I did want them as a matter of fact, but I just had the best idea.” They’re all just starting on their third beers, and everything just feels smooth and light. She picks up one of the houses from the box, not wanting them to think that she’s selling one of the ones that she just bought.

"It’s probably not the best time, since it’s getting so late in the year, but in the spring we could definitely do it." All she’s getting from Stefan are his confused eyebrows, so she passes him the Monopoly house. "You should build a greenhouse. Next spring. We’ve got room in the backyard and then you can grow stuff all year round."

Stefan doesn’t say anything for a minute, and just rolls the tiny green house around in his hands. “You’re right. That was a great idea.” He smiles at Caroline, and she wonders if the research and plans for that will be a helpful distraction for the coming months.

They’re thankfully saved from having an intense moment in the middle of their game by Rebekah waving fake money in their faces. “I was elected chairman of the board.”

(Stefan slides the little house into his pocket, and Caroline is pretty sure he keeps it with him all the time after that.)

Soon after that Caroline has to get down to business with party planning, because while she isn’t having some huge house party like she would have in high school, that means that she had even more reason to make things perfect.

Plus Halloween is also coming soon, so she can get a headstart on that too, since it’s both soon enough that costumes are out, but that she can make sure that she’s got everything she’ll need with time to spare.

She got her fill of last minute Halloween shopping last year when Elena somehow ripped her dress in half. Caroline didn’t ask, and spent all day with Elena and Bonnie in a costume shop as they looked for another suitable costume.

(In the end she went as a nurse, though due to Jeremy’s zombie fake blood getting everywhere, she was a nurse just out of surgery.)

"Is my birthday too close to Halloween to have a themed party?" Caroline picks up a vintage style flapper dress. It’s red and lovely, and she likes it but she’s not sure it’s right for Halloween, but a 20's themed party could be great.

"Probably." Katherine says from somewhere to her right, looking at a rack of costumes that seem to be made entirely of felt and maybe carpet. "But I say go for it."

Rebekah doesn’t respond, busy looking at blue gingham. Caroline thinks that she would make a great Dorothy and tells her so, before shoving the red flapper dress back on the rack. It’s only the three of them there, because when Katherine and Elena go shopping it always becomes a day filled with jealousy and anger, so Caroline’s going again in a few days with Elena and Bonnie.

She’ll probably have to go a third time with Stefan, but that’s okay.

By the end of the day, Caroline is no closer to having a costume of her own, but Katherine’s got a long black dress to wear and is going as Morticia Addams, and Rebekah’s discussing the best way to do her hair and how to get glitter to stay on shoes.

Caroline spends the evening looking up costume ideas and bakeries, eating the last of the girl scout cookies in the freezer.

Since it’s getting later in the year, and the mornings are cooler, Klaus stops swimming every day, and on the days that he does, he starts getting dressed before enjoying his coffee, and Caroline finds out that he looks just as amazing when he’s in a sweater in the mornings as he does shirtless. She almost wants to walk over and steal the sweater from him, because no, he can’t keep throwing these curveballs at her. Making grocery shopping into a pleasant afternoon was one thing, but looking almost as amazing in a sweater as out of it is too much.

That’s why when Caroline finds a few water balloons in the kitchen junk drawer while she’s looking for the power cord for the griddle, she knows just what to do with them.

It’s hard work to fill them up at the kitchen sink without the little plastic spigot that they usually come with, but she only has one burst all down her front which seems like a miracle in itself.

Stefan gets home from his monthly meeting with Damon, which is usually just the two of them having a late lunch as Damon makes sure that Stefan isn’t starving to death, as she’s mopping up the water that spilled on the floor. It hits her that she can test one of the balloons out on him to make sure that they actually pop, instead of just bouncing off of him and splatting onto the ground which would ruin her plans. Today is just her day for ideas.

"Hey, Stefan. Will you come out back with me?" She spreads the towels out on the floor, before grabbing a balloon from where she's left them in a bowl next to the sink.

There’s a moment of hesitation before she hears Stefan moving towards the kitchen. “Why?”

She barely has enough time to get to the doorway before he sees her and ruins the surprise, though with the hand she keeps behind her back, it’s probably not much of a surprise that she’s up to something.

"Because I asked you to?" She tries, hopeful that maybe this once he’ll just go along with it, but he doesn’t have to do anything more than give her the eyebrow before she’s sighing. "Because if you do, you can decide on what we have for dinner? I’ll even cook it! Or pay for it if you want to order in."

That gets him to agree, and a moment later she’s ushering him through the house, pushing him with one hand as she keeps the other one wrapped loosely around the plastic behind her back, being sure not to pop it.

When they get outside, the sun is still shining a little bit, and the wind isn’t blowing too much, so she isn’t doing anything too bad, not like she will be in the morning. “You might want to take your jacket off.”

Stefan just looks at her for a moment, before shrugging out of it and handing it to Caroline. He looks like he’s about two seconds from just giving up the reigns to dinner and going inside, so she just quickly throws the balloon at him before either of them can change their minds.

It explodes in a burst of water right onto the center of his shirt, and Caroline bursts into laughter. “Success!”

Stefan is stunned for a moment, before he starts laughing too. The water isn’t cold, so he isn’t shivering, but it’s not warm either. It’s just sort of there. “Where did you even find that?”

Her laughs have turned into giggles, and she’s sure that she’s gonna remember the look on his face, confusion flowing into shock when he realized what had happened. “There were a few of them in one of the drawers in the kitchen, and then I had the best idea.”

"Hitting me with a water balloon was the best idea?" He’s heading inside, stripping his shirt off to use the drier parts to dry himself off. Caroline’s still a little damp from her earlier failure, but she’s past the worst of it, and decides that she’ll be fine.

"No. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Especially if I change my mind about it." She doesn’t think that she will, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure.

The two of them order probably too much pizza and pasta, and Rebekah comes over and they watch more of whatever they’re marathoning at that moment, and it’s a good evening.

The next morning comes, and Caroline eats breakfast and gets ready on time, but makes sure she’s walking out the door with a couple of minutes more than she would have had otherwise.

She walks to the car like usual, trying to keep everything as normal as possible, because this is less fun if he suspects something.

"Good morning, sweetheart."

"Good morning." She’d poured some warm water into the bowl with the balloons earlier, when she had started the coffeemaker, so the rubber in her hand is warm. Hopefully it won’t get him sick.

She gets to the car and unlocks it, opening the door to stick her purse inside so it won’t be in her way because this is where the acting really begins. She’s ducked halfway into the car, about to sit down when she gets back out, an oh! said just loudly enough that it could have been heard, but that Klaus knew she wasn’t talking to him. It’s an exclamation of I’ve just remembered something!

"Klaus?" She moves so that she’s walking away from her car and onto the Mikaelson’s driveway. They’ll have to shout less this way, and while she doesn’t have a bad throwing arm this will make it easier to be sure that she hits him. Hopefully he can’t tell that she’s holding something hidden in her hand.

"Yeah, sweetheart?"

"Rebekah did tell you about the party, right?" She can’t linger on that because it’ll remind her that her birthday is only a week and a half away.

"In fact, she did. Next Friday." He looks up and smiles at her, and her heart does the same thing it had done while they were shopping together and she thinks that maybe by pelting him with the balloon she’ll be able to get that to stop. "I’ll be there with bells on."

"Good, I’m glad." For a second they’re just standing there smiling at each other, but then Caroline takes a deep breath and moves her arm.

The balloon lands perfectly on his upper chest, making the fabric on today’s sweater (some grey thing that Caroline could see herself wearing, though she’s definitely not thinking about that) making it cling to his collarbone. The water has splashed up to his face and neck too, stray droplets landing all over the place.

She can see that Klaus’ first instinct is to get angry. Really Angry with a capital A. But then something snaps, and it might be the way Caroline is grinning with her whole face, or the way that she’s just standing there and giggling. Maybe it’s just that he’s decided not to take himself so seriously for a little while because something breaks in his face and then he’s smiling right back at her.

The two of them are sure to be the talk of the street now, with the way that Caroline is laughing too hard to get in her car and drive away, while Klaus sits there, covered in water and tiny bits of busted balloon, grinning at Caroline, but Caroline doesn’t even think about that.

She just catalogs everything that’s happening in this moment so that she’ll always remember it.

It takes Stefan leaning out of the house, and saying, “I’m pretty sure I can guess what just happened here, but Caroline, you do need to get going before you’re late.”

Before she knows it, it’s her birthday and she has to run around and make sure that everything is good. She gets fairy lights and has Stefan string them up around the house, and thinks about looking up something to spice them up, but this way she can have them up all year, and decides to leave them plain.

She buys a lot of alcohol, even though she knows that people are going to bring some of their own, (as she pours ice into a cooler, she’s thankful that they won’t run out until at least Halloween) and picks up the cake, grateful that they didn’t mess anything up, because she just wants everything to go smoothly today. This is the first time that she’s invited some of the people that she works with over to her house, and while they aren’t any of her bosses and it’s only the people that she really likes, they are the ones who’ll be able to spread gossip around the office if something goes wrong.

Caroline showers and gets dressed as soon as she’s home from running her errands, leaving Stefan to do the set-up that she didn’t get to earlier. It’s not much more than setting the food out, making sure that there’s nothing embarrassing that Caroline might have missed seeing, and doing what she tells him to do when she yells from her bedroom.

Elena and Bonnie show up first, the two of them walking into the house early to give opinions and help with the things that Caroline’s not sure about. The three of them together make sure that everything is put together and ready and after that it’s just time to put on music and wait.

It doesn’t take long for the house to fill up, people from the neighborhood showing up before most of the people that had to drive, giving the house the illusion of being both full and empty, though soon enough it seems like someone is always coming in or going out the door. She actually catches a glimpse of Klaus, Rebekah, Kol, and Elijah come in but she loses them in the next second when she turns her head to talk to Anna.

Once everything is in full swing, Caroline doesn’t really get a moment to even breathe for herself due to all of the people that want her attention. She makes sure that she’s eaten enough that she’s not gonna be falling down drunk right away, before she does a few of the shots that people keep handing her.

It’s not a big important birthday, but everyone still gathers around to sing her happy birthday, and then she gets the first piece of cake, (some amazing chocolate chip thing that she saw amazing reviews for online) and then Stefan’s handing out the rest of the cake, and people are dancing and Caroline’s feeling buzzed and warm, and light and is shockingly not worried about someone getting icing on her furniture.

(She’ll frantically check everything in the morning, wondering where the inevitable drunk-people-at-a-party mess is, and won’t believe that there isn’t one until after the house is spotless again.)

She dances crowded together with Rebekah and Elena and Bonnie, and they talk about how Jeremy’s totally drunk, and does he really expect them to not notice that? Caroline even manages to get Stefan out on the floor for a little while, before he goes to make sure that Klaus and Tyler From Work don’t get into an actual fight about who knows what and end up ruining the night.

When things start to wind down a bit, a few of the more tired designated drivers taking people home, Caroline steps out into the backyard to drink a bottle of water and take a breather. It’s been a great night, and she’s going out to lunch tomorrow with most of the people from the street because for some reason they have gifts that they want to give her even though she told them it wasn’t necessary.

She’s still in her heels, having not wanted her toes to get crushed inside, so she has to be very careful as she walks down the deck stairs into the yard, hoping to get a glimpse of a few stars when her eye can adjust to the darkness of the yard, though she does leave her shoes on the bottom step. The cold damp of the ground is worth not ruining her shoes, or getting herself hurt accidentally. She walks out into the center of the yard, stepping carefully over the terrain that she knows almost by heart.

She can almost see her breath in the air and she’s not planning on being outside for very long, so she’s surprised when the back door opens to let someone else out of the house.

"Caroline, I’ve been looking for you,"

It’s Klaus and she glimpses at him, before putting her eyes back on the sky. He’s coming down the stairs, his boots making his trip louder and easier than her heels, and she’s grateful when she doesn’t hear the sound of him stepping on her shoes. “You found me.”

He doesn’t say anything else until he’s standing next to her in the yard. From the corner of her eye, she can see him look up at the sky for a second, before dropping his eyes to look at her again. “I wasn’t sure what to get you for your birthday. I thought maybe a mini-fridge for convenience’s sake but decided against it.

"Then I thought about a plane ticket, to Rome or Tokyo maybe, but then I realized that you probably wouldn’t accept that," Caroline turns her whole body to face him, looking away from the stars that she can barely see. The lone tree that grows in their backyard may have dropped most of it’s leaves, but where she’s standing there are still some branches in the way. Why did she choose to stand here? "Even if I weren’t on the plane with you.

"So I figured that I should just ask you." He looks so good tonight, the moonlight mixing with the light spilling out of the house and onto him, pale blue and gold mixing on his face, and Caroline for once knows exactly what she wants. "What would you like, sweetheart?"

It feels like she’s got to be dreaming, this sort of thing happens to Elena and Katherine, but not to her. She doesn’t say anything, but he must be able to tell by the look on her face that she’s thought of something.

"What do you want, Caroline?"

She thinks about lying and saying that she does actually want the mini-fridge, but then she’s almost lunging at him, propelling herself the two steps forward to press her mouth against his before she can change her mind.

It’s not a soft kiss, and it’s kind of off place since she didn’t really have the best chance to be sure of where her mouth was gonna land, so she readjusts and tilts her head, bringing a hand up to his face, and then it’s perfect. She pulls away to make sure that she wasn’t misreading everything between them and that she hadn’t just made a huge fool of herself, she can see the smile form on his face.

It’s the same smile from before she threw the water balloon last week, and just like then she can feel herself grinning back at him.

Then he’s leaning in and they’re kissing again. It’s better this time, deeper and when her tongue presses to his lips she can taste cake and one of those cocktails Stefan was making earlier as he got more show-offish. She thinks that at least she probably tastes pretty similar, before he’s got his hands on her back, wrapping his arms around her to pull her closer to him.

He’s guiding her backwards so that he can press her against the tree a few feet away. It’s kind of clumsy, her with her bare feet tripping over tree roots and her dropped water bottle, and the fact that neither of them seem to want to be more than two inches apart from the other, but they make it there without much trouble and he doesn’t step on her toes, so she counts it as a success.

Plus then she’s got something to lean against, with him then leaning close to her, keeping the chill away and that’s the best.

She can’t keep her hands still, one on the back of his neck as the other wraps around his shoulders, that one moving to rest on his neck as she scratches up through his hair. He’s got one hand resting on her hip, while the other travels down her side, continuing to move, until he’s got just enough of the skirt of her dress bunched up in a fist at her hips.

Caroline thinks that she could push his jacket off of his shoulders right then, that he could push her skirt up more and grab at her thighs to her wrap them around his waist, and she gets an image in her mind of the buttons flying off of the corset of her dress and him pressing closer as she tries to work his shirt up to get at some skin.

She’s got a hand under the back of his jacket, enjoying the warmth even though she’s about to push it down and off of him, when the back door opens and she hears Stefan.

"Care! Elena and Damon are leaving and they want to say goodnight."

She doesn’t say anything for a moment, still busy focusing on the way that Klaus’ mouth just keeps pressing against hers, and the way that his tongue keeps lightly pressing against her lower lip over and over. It’s incredibly distracting.

"Care? Don’t tell me you fell asleep out here. I didn’t think you were that drunk.” She can hear the sound of him stepping onto the deck, and while they’re currently hidden from view in a shadow and by the tree itself, she does not need Stefan seeing this. At least not right now.

She turns her head away so that Klaus can press his lips against her neck and she can speak. “No! I’m not asleep. I was just taking a breather.” She thinks she's managing to hide the fact that she’s actually still out of breath pretty well, but it makes Klaus laugh up against her skin. He can feel just how much she’s lying by the way her chest is moving, trying to suck in lungfuls of air. “I’ll be in in just a second. I took my shoes off to be more comfortable and I don’t remember where I left them.”

She hopes that he can’t see to the bottom of the deck stairs from where he’s at. He hesitates for a second before she hears. “Okay. I’ll see you inside.”

Klaus finally lets go of her and takes a step back, and after she peeks out to see that Stefan actually has walked away from the door, she steps out into the light so that she can make herself presentable again.

She feels pretty put together. Her dress has a few barely noticeable creases from where it had been bundled up in his hand and she tries to straighten them out, and she dearly hopes that her hair isn’t too much of a mess. She could always say that she had laid down in the yard, but who knows if anyone would believe her. Ultimately her lipstick is the main thing that she’s worried about.

“Do I have lipstick all over my face?”

"No. Just on your lips." He leans forward to kiss her again, and Caroline almost lets herself get distracted back to the "let’s have sex against this tree" thoughts that she was just having. She pulls away when she goes to run her hands through his hair again, and remembers that they’re trying to look like nothing happened.

Klaus looks like he’s been making out against a tree for five minutes. It’s even worse in comparison to Caroline who looks perfectly put together. She takes a moment to straighten his hair so that it doesn’t look like she’s just had her hands in it, while he fixes his shirt and jacket.

They walk back to the stairs holding hands, and Klaus helps her step into her shoes. “Just wait a couple of minutes before you come inside. I can make sure that everyone’s distracted enough that they don’t realize. I just don’t want this to be a thing tonight.”

She takes a couple of steps away from him, up the stairs before turning back to kiss him one more time. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen once they go back inside and she wanted to do it one more time while she could.

"I think I’m actually gonna head home." He doesn’t look offended or upset at her, but she can’t think of why he would want to leave. She doesn’t ask him to stay though, and he’s at the gate to the backyard fence, before she has the thought to say anything. "Goodnight, sweetheart."

"Goodnight." She says, before the gate can close completely behind him.

She goes in and also says goodnight to Damon and Elena. Everyone is slowly leaving; Bonnie following Elena out the door, the two of them sharing a piece of cake on a plate that Bonnie was carrying.

Caroline grabs a blanket and tucks Rebekah in where she’s dozing on the couch, and finds Stefan wrapping food up in the kitchen.

"Thank you for helping with the party and for putting the food away." Caroline feels like she’s been through the highest highs and now she’s dropping down and is ready for sleep. She’s just gonna help him put stuff up first. "Thanks for everything, honestly."

Stefan grabs her hands and puts them back at her sides. “I do actually live here too, you know. You don’t have to do everything.” He wraps her in a hug and Caroline feels the last bit of energy that she had draining away. “Happy birthday, Care. I hope it was a good one.” He pulls away, and grabs one of his flowers from the vase on the counter, tucking it behind her ear. “Now go get some sleep.”

She just nods and walks back to her room, leaving her shoes in the middle of the hallway.

She doesn’t even change out of her dress before she crawls into bed. She does take the flower out of her hair though, and sits it on the table by her bed as she drops into sleep.

The next morning she wakes up early, starts her morning routine but skips the shower (she'll wait until all of the cleaning is done. That way if she gets sweaty while dancing and cleaning she won't have to worry.) and cleans up the house a little bit, before heading outside. She has no real reason to go, because she doesn’t have to work today, but she feels like maybe she’ll find Klaus there.

He is in fact there when she gets outside, and she walks over towards where he sits on his porch.

"Good morning." she says, breaking their routine just a bit by being the first to speak.

"Would you like to join me?" He’s holding a mug in his hand, but he reaches over and picks up a second one, steam rising above the rim of the cup, and holds it out to her.

She can’t grab it just yet, because she’s too far away, but when she gets onto the porch, she picks it up. There’s sugar and non-dairy creamer on the table, next to a bowl of fruit. There is also a spoon, two forks, and a slender wrapped package sitting on the table.

"I thought we might have breakfast together." He grabs one of the forks and stabs at a strawberry in the bowl. "Or at least what Kol is talking Bekah into saying is breakfast. She’s been obsessing with fruit lately."

"I know. Last week, she talked me and Stefan into having some kind of fruit dessert pizza." She grimaces at the memory. It hadn’t been bad, the dough just wasn’t great. Caroline had eaten the chocolaty fruit off of her piece and left the rest to Stefan and Rebekah. "Fruit salad is definitely a better choice."

The two of them sit quietly, watching each other and eating fruit, and when the bowl is almost empty, Caroline makes to leave. “I have to clean up before lunch.”

"Wait, I wanted to make sure this was ready for you this morning. It’s why I left last night." Klaus pushes the wrapped box towards Caroline and he watches her unwrap it.

"It’s beautiful." Inside the box is a gorgeous bracelet. It’s stunning and Caroline loves it, but she can’t keep it. "It’s too much. I can’t-" She closes the box and pushes it back toward him, only for him to place his hand over top of hers and push it right back to her.

"I want you to have it. You deserve it." Caroline still doesn’t really believe him, but she does pick it up off the table.

She doesn’t know if it’s okay to do now that the sun it out and anyone could see, but she wants to kiss him so bad, so she decides, to hell with it. As she gets up to leave and go back home, she presses her mouth to his lightly, like she had right before he left the night before. He deepens it a bit, and all of Caroline’s worries disappear as he brings a hand up to her neck, before she pulls away and takes a step back.

"I really do need to leave and clean up a bit before lunch. Maybe have a shower." Klaus raises his eyebrows at the shower part, and she laughs before heading off the porch and back to her home.

"I’m showering alone." She waits until she’s almost at her door so that she can stun him with the last bit. "Or at least I am today." And she can hear his laughter in her ears even after she’d closed the door behind her, feeling like the world is full of sunshine and good kisses.

(“Can you seriously believe that they thought I didn’t know?” Stefan says, leaning with Rebekah and Katherine against the wall as they watch Caroline laugh at Klaus getting icing from his cupcake all over his face. “I also can’t believe that you didn’t think I was telling the truth. I definitely won the bet.”

Katherine digs a twenty dollar bill out of her cleavage and hands it over. “They are so obvious.”

Rebekah nods, before taking another gulp of her drink. If she’s going to have to watch Klaus’ puppy dog eyes all the time from now on, she’s going to need more alcohol. At least before she had gotten some kind of break when he was moping.

It’s seriously almost ruining Halloween for her.

"Does anyone want anything? I need another." She drains what’s left in her glass.

Stefan and Katherine both nod and the three of them head to the kitchen together, leaving Caroline and Klaus to be cute and stupid, and stupidly cute out of their sight.)

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