Work Text:
He’d come to me every night since we killed his brother.
Usually, it’s during the pre-dawn hours when he wakes me. His hands moving over my body, his teeth tearing into my skin. Ripping me open and infecting me.
Then he feeds me his blood to counteract the contagion and leaves me without a word until the next night. I’ve started to look forward to it.
I know it’s wrong. I know there’s something wrong with me. But I can’t stop him. He’s so much stronger than I am. Or that’s what I tell myself. I dressed for him tonight. A pretty white summer nightgown made of nothing but gauze and cobwebs like those old 70’s gothics. The only difference is that I’m not a sweet virgin, I’m a vampire, too.
When I pulled on the nightgown, I told myself it was because it was pretty. Because I liked it. That much is true, but I like it because I know he will. I like it because it will taunt him. He’ll ask me what I want, and I’ll tell him the same thing I do every night. I’ll tell him that I want him to let Tyler live.
There is nowhere I can hide from him, nowhere I can run. And as long as he’s occupied with me, he’s not hunting Tyler.
I’m afraid for when Tyler comes back. I know I won’t be me. I’m not me now, not anymore. I’m some strange hybrid. I’m becoming Klausoline, if you will. He’s inside me. His blood, his thoughts, his desires. His instincts.
His mouth is hot on my neck, his fangs like needles, as he pressed me down into the plush of the mattress. The weight of his body feels so good, so familiar. Even the pain is a comfort.
It occurred to me I could have this whenever I wanted. I don’t have to wait for him to come to me. I could go to him. But that would be too much like surrender. Too much like admitting he’s won, that I’m his.
Even though, I must be.
His blood pulsed through my veins, his cells penetrating mine, his mitochondria mating with mine. Even his thoughts were in my head, transferred by some cellular memory in his blood as I drank.
They had to be his because they were foreign and strange.
Alien images of us together on the beaches of Cyprus, making love on the ruins of some dilapidated castle in the Orkneys, and drinking the blood of the brightly plumaged Carnival revelers in Venice. The scenes flipped through my brain like a slide show and the Venetian scene came into a focus so sharp, it seemed real.
I could smell the city, taste the sweet, copper tang of blood on my tongue, and feel the heat of his hands burning my skin through the filmy silk of my dress. That burn sparked a million electric jolts that flared into a starburst deep in my core.
This movie version of me thought she might die if he didn’t keep touching her.
These were his fantasies I watched. Each splayed open before me like a halved fruit.
I kept watching Venice. I wanted to know what happened. If he just wanted this grand set up to get into my panties, or if he’d been there before. Part of me, a sick, twisted, degenerate part of me wanted to know if that’s what it would be like to be with him—with Klaus. If he could really make me feel like I would die if he didn’t touch me again.
Since it was just a fantasy, I kept thinking that any second he would pounce and ravish her—me—right there. But he didn’t.
He held me with my back against his chest so we could both stare at the stars as our gondola drifted down the canals of Venice. His hands were in my hair, touching my face, my throat, my lips. Gentle, unhurried caresses as if he had an eternity to map the topography of my skin.
He didn’t speak, or otherwise move. The scene wound back to the beginning and played through again until we were alone together under the stars.
I scrolled back to the beaches of Cyprus. The warm sun beating down on my back, a Mojito on my lips, and the brine of the ocean in the air. My thighs were sore and there were half-moon bruises on my pale skin that healed before my eyes and a sense of loss washed over me. The me in that vision wanted to wear his mark.
Every nerve receptor tingled with the aftershocks of some monumental pleasure. My throat was sore, like I’d swallowed fire. Instinctively, I knew he’d drank from me and me from him. He’d filled me both with his body and his blood. He owned me, but I owned him, too.
A small moan rang in my ears like a gunshot. It was me, my voice in the real world, mewling with pleasure as I drank from him to heal my wounds. Wounds he’d inflicted. He’d been ready to watch me die.
Even still, thinking of owning him somehow, of having that kind of power over a vampire like Klaus, it made me ache with want.
But I’m not that person. I’m not the one who gets off on manipulating others. I don’t hurt people. I don’t… Those thoughts fade away as I’m filled with everything Klaus. Another barrage of images surges and washes away everything that’s me with the force of a tsunami.
The walls of the castle in Orkney.
I’m splayed with my legs wide on the battlements. His golden head is dipped between my thighs and all those sparks and stars I felt before supernova. It’s an apocalypse of sensation and bliss unlike any I’ve ever felt before.
Every swipe of his tongue is another birth and death of a universe.
I’m edging ever closer to a precipice where Caroline will be gone and all that will be left is him. His thoughts, his needs, his feelings.
And oh my god, does he feel. He feels everything so acutely. From a whisper of the breeze on his skin, to the abject and utter loneliness of eternity. It yawns out before him like the gaping maw of some beast and he steps forward with surety into the dark.
This is why I can’t turn away, why I can’t let go and snap back into myself. I feel the same way, only I’m too afraid to step forward. I wait until my friends drag me forward, until the march of time shoves me further away from where I started.
It’s too much, but he keeps pouring into me. I’m ravenous and glutted all at once and I wonder how much more I can take before I explode into those stars, that supernova, and finally the dark.
“Caroline,” he whispered, his voice a jagged edge of glass.
I suck harder, take more of him into me, and now he’s not just in my head, but I’m in his. I can see myself, the curtain of blond hair hanging over his forearm, my fangs buried in his wrist, and the molten ecstasy he feels.
His cock is hard against my hip, and his desire coupled with my own is impossible to resist, yet he does. A younger vampire would already be burying his fangs and his cock inside of me. I’d let him. I’d let anyone to keep feeling this.
For this moment, nothing exists but sensation. And in this moment, I want that. I want him inside of me in all ways. I want to burn with him. I can taste his need in his blood, hear his voice in every fiber of my being.
Two things are suddenly clear.
I could drink him dry.
And he’d allow it.
No matter what I’ve done to him, no matter what I will do, it will always come down to this. He’ll give me anything.
Except my freedom.
I try to think about Tyler, because I love him. Warmth fills me, and it’s soft and peaceful—sweet. Like the spun sugar of cotton candy.
Nothing like the apocalypse of sensation I feel in Klaus’s arms.
Tyler is safe. I suppose it’s really screwed up that I think a hybrid werewolf is safe, but compared to Klaus, he is. Thoughts of Tyler melt away on my tongue and I feel disloyal. I’ve betrayed Tyler. I can’t control what my body wants, but my mind wants it, too.
Klaus is the ultimate predator, lithe and stealthy, designed for killing. But he’s the ultimate protector, too. Nothing would ever hurt me or my friends again if I could find some small place in my heart for him. If I could give him what he wants. Even the sane part of me is rationalizing.
I’ve fallen back into myself, into the real world. But everything is still faded and surreal except for his hands on me. I stop drinking and pull back from the wound in his wrist. It closes and part of me wants to tear him open again just to see if I can.
But I know that’s his instinct inside of me, driving me, changing me.
“Yes.” His breath is warm against my cheek and he holds his wrist there for me as if he heard my thoughts. But I don’t think he did, I think he just knows—instinctually. That’s how I know he’ll be a good lover, not only because of the way my body feels now, but because he knows it feels. Knows just how to touch, to caress…
“No,” I whispered. “That’s not me.”
“Isn’t it?” He growled and nosed against my throat like a beast.
My head tilted of its own accord to give him access to the tender flesh. He’s already bitten me, infected me, but when his teeth are inside me, it’s exquisite agony. If he wanted to bite me again, I’d let him. Hell, I might even beg for it.
The skin is so tender and my veins practically ache with the need to be punctured. The same way that heat between my thighs aches to be filled. All by him.
He’s dead, so his skin shouldn’t have a scent—except for more death. But I smell the salt, the sun, the wine… the blood. Every fantasy is carried in his scent.
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what?” It’s not the demand I wanted it to be, but a breathy whisper.
“What you want from me.”
So many things burned to ash on the tip of my tongue. Tyler—“Again,” I said instead.
“Again, what?” He still nosed at the tender place on my carotid.
I’m thankful because I don’t think I could say this looking into his eyes. There’s too much there. Accusation, approval, need. That empty chasm of eternal blue sea staring back at me. No, I can’t look.
“Drink from me.” It came out with the same heated expectation as if I’d asked him to make love to me.
He froze, almost like he’d been daggered. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m not finished with you.”
Klaus grabbed my chin and turned my head. I have to look at him now, drown in that endless dark.
“Say it again,” he demanded, his full lips curled into a sneer. He didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me.
Every muscle was as taut as piano wire and my blood roiled like lava. I bit my own lip to pierce the skin and blood welled. I flicked it with my tongue.
“Drink from me,” I repeated, bolder.
He looked at me as if I was some strange creature he’d found on the bottom of his shoe. “What trick is this, Caroline? You hate me and I want you to hate me.”
So I don’t have to feel this anymore, was the rest of the sentence he left unsaid. It clanged in my head louder than the police sirens that screamed down the road outside.
I didn’t bother to argue with him because I had no reassures to give him. I didn’t give a damn about reassurances, or right or wrong. I just needed him inside me again. To be part of him.
“Please.” I pulled his head down to smear my blood on his lips with my tongue.
It was so screwed up, but there was something about the way he looked then, the pale light of the moon on his face, my blood stark on his mouth, and the glinting white of his predator’s teeth.
“Beg,” he demanded.
All it would take was the first pressure of his fangs against my throat and be writhing in the best orgasm of my existence underneath him. It fluttered against my belly, a million butterfly wings.
The part of me that would never beg anyone for anything wasn’t above begging for this.
But I didn’t have to beg. Before I could speak, he crushed his mouth against me, hard—punishing. I didn’t care, tenderness was for school girl dreams and boys like Tyler. I bit him back, nicked his lip with the edge of my teeth and sucked it into my mouth.
This would change everything. But if I didn’t have him now, in all ways, I felt what his version of me felt in Venice. If he didn’t touch me, fill me, claim me, I’d die.
The guilt, the horror at what I wanted all melted away as my hands slid over his shoulders and down the smooth plane of his back. I ventured lower and down to the button on his trousers.
He hitched my nightgown up around my waist and entered me with no preamble just as his teeth tore into my throat again.
Exactly what I wanted.
He moved like a jaguar, sleek and powerful as he slammed into me, muscles rippling.
I tightened my legs around his waist and clung to him, thrashing and crying out as he pushed me toward completion.
I was still shuddering my release when he offered me his throat, his hips still pistoning as he thrust into me. I didn’t think about what it meant, I only wanted him to feel what I felt—the ecstasy.
So I bit him and I drank. Not from his wrist, but straight from the carotid. It was hot, sweet—gold and fire—and it caused another orgasm to rip through me.
We clung to each other as we spasmed, blood and bliss pairing like wine and chocolate.
Then I awoke, the sheets fisted in my palms, my flesh aching with the want of all the things I’d dreamed about. All the things I kept dreaming about since that night. Yes, Klaus came to me, but never in person. Only in my dreams. His blood inside me gave him a free pass into my head, which he used indiscriminately.
I flashed to the window and saw him standing there, looking just as he had in my dream when he first pressed me down into the bed. The sodium glare of the streetlamp haloing him, making him look like some kind of angel.
He really was beautiful, all sharp angled brutality and strength. He was made of hard edges and pain. Except for the fullness of his mouth. His lips were soft and supple, and I knew what they felt like on my skin, retracted as his teeth burrowed into my neck.
His eyes glittered black like the Mediterranean at night, or rather what I imagined it looked like. What I could gather from those shards of his memory that rattled around in my head.
I watched my hand as it acted without my consent—pushing forward through the impossible distance of space and time toward the window. The cool pane against my fingertips as I pushed the window open and invited him inside.
Inside my house.
And irrevocably, inside me.