Chapter Text
A hundred years and she still remembers, just as she promised.
She remembers the way his dry hands felt in hers, so warm where they were once cold as ice. She remembers the beat of his heart and the tantalizing way his blood rushed a little stronger through his veins when he first caught sight of her. So far away from him on that aisle, clutching her bouquet nervously, she remembers being amazed that her white dress was still bloodstain free (Later, she will wonder if she tempted fate with that thought).
But she remembers most that I’m a good vampire - Stefan waits for her with tears in his eyes – because of him.
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Sometimes, she thinks she hates him.
Remembers I promise I will not let anything happen to you and You have me, thinks liar because here she is. Alone for all the centuries to come with this endless wave of grief crashing into her, constantly blindsiding her just when she thought she had moved through it, and he let it happen to her. She hates him for that.
Liar.
She gets why, of course, because as selfish as she is (always will be) she knows she can’t blame him for becoming human and she refuses to blame Bonnie when it means that Bonnie is still alive to hold her hand through the heartbreak. And how can she blame him for being the man she fell in love with, the good guy, when she understands him so well. Because Caroline is Stefan’s best friend and Stefan is Damon’s brother. She never had any choice but to love Stefan and he never had any but to protect Damon. She loves him for that too.
She just wishes it didn’t always have to be him. She wishes he’d stop leaving her behind.
So, she hates Stefan, yes, but never more than she loves him, and she knows Damon understands the contradiction of feelings that well up inside of her because he once felt the same. Enough love and hate to choke him, but Damon refuses to let her drown alone.
He sits with her. Not through the first nights (Bonnie and Elena bracket her in bed, holding her close. She remembers a summer long ago, before vampires and epic loves, when Elena was the one in the middle), but through the months after when the grief comes unexpectedly. He knows that she is thinking These nights, this pain, will drag on forever, knows that he won’t be able to sit with her through them all. Knows she wishes someone else was sitting in his seat just like he wishes someone else was sitting in hers. They watch the fire blaze in the Salvatore home and sip their bourbon.
Damon loved Stefan like she did. Like Stefan was his first choice.
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Ric goes first.
She forgets sometimes how much older he is and about the whispers that flew when she was first pregnant with the twins. He was their teacher, after all. It was always going to be him first. But in a world with ancient witches and millennia-old hybrids, or even run-of-the-mill centuries-old vampires, she can be forgiven for forgetting. To him, she was always his equal.
She ignores the creak in his knees when he pushes out of a chair and the fine lines feathering at the corners of his eyes. She doesn’t want to remember, not when she has gone so many years with her black dress packed away at the back of the closet.
He goes – her friend, the father of her children, her partner in life (never love, not really, no matter how hard she tried).
As far as funerals go, she thinks she’s never seen better. She’s outdone herself, really. The church cannot hold them all – all these supernaturals who have come to pay their respects. She holds back a laugh at the irony of the once-vampire hunter being so loved by them. Alaric has lived a long and respected life preparing witches, vampires, and werewolves for the world. His students, former and current, show up in force to honor the best headmaster the Salvatore Boarding School for the Young & Gifted will ever see.
They are his legacies.
None more so than his girls. Alaric and Jo’s girls. Their girls.
Lizzie and Josie are resplendent. Strong and brave and everything Ric and her had ever wanted for them. Alive.
She watches them and she imagines Ric watching too, sitting crushed up against her. The front pew is full. Damon and Elena and Jeremy and Matt and Bonnie and…
She’s glad they’re all here (She wonders how long until they’re not. She sees them all, a line of people to lose), these people who knew her when she was human. Who remind her that she still is, even when she wears the mask of a monster. Caroline Forbes is a good vampire, and she holds tight to her humanity.
She sits tall and straight and holds herself together for her (our) girls. If her hands tremble a little, then that’s okay because nobody can tell when Bonnie clutches them tight in hers. She can count on Bonnie to hold the line.
She wishes he was here to hold them instead.
--
She celebrates the new year in Buenos Aires amidst strobing lights, loud discotheque music, and the sharp burn of tequila. She’s taken a liking to South America this decade and dreads having to leave, not because she wants to stay, but because she doesn’t really know where to go.
She remembers with a pang a time when the world was still so new to her – Rome, Paris, Tokyo…all colored now with ghosts and regrets.
The new year arrives with much festivity in the club and the sudden realization that she is now 171 years old. She is the same age Stefan was when he died, and she cannot remember his voice.
She leaves Argentina in the morning.
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Matt lives a very human life, the one he was always meant to, and dies a very human death surrounded by his wife of decades, friends of even longer, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. And a vampire who looks as eternal and bright as the day she sang her love for him, back when she didn’t know what love was.
She remembers deep’s not really your scene and your problems don’t mean anything to me anymore.
Mostly, she remembers the boy who held her when she begged Please don’t leave me alone. At his core, Matt Donovan has always been a good man.
She is proud of him and his beautiful, imperfect, human life. She wonders if it would’ve been their life together if she was still human. She thinks no.
Maybe she was never in love with him, not the way he was in love with Elena, but she loves him now in a better way. She is grateful to him for that night and all the days of friendship, however flawed, that followed.
Matt makes her glad that she is a vampire. She was never that good a human anyway.
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