"What was your family like?" Caroline asks late one night. Klaus finds it both amusing and irritating as hell that she never really shuts up.

He doesn't bother to turn and face her as he answers. "They were useless," he says coldly, enjoying the way his words make her freeze. "They didn't want to be powerful, they didn't want all that we were gifted to become. They were weak."

"Did you ever love them?"

She knows, of course, about the storage space in the unnamed town where their bodies are kept. He doesn't keep secrets from her—even though he knows she very well keeps them from him daily.

"When I was a young and naïve human, I thought I loved them," he answers, "I have since learned that there is no such thing as love—not in the way that you believe anyway."

"What does that mean?"

Klaus sighs. It is becoming very clear that this is going to be one of those nights where he sacrifices his own sleep for her curiosity. "It means that the kind of love your idealistic brain holds on to is absolutely ridiculous and nonexistent. No man worth mentioning is going to sweep a woman off her feet for any reason other than getting her into bed in the near future and no woman is going to tell a man she loves him except to prevent him from going into another woman's bed. Love is generally equated to monogamy and family which is a mask for the fundamental quality of humanity. Possessiveness."

Her small hand is tracing intelligible patterns on his back, as if relaxing him again. Maybe she can sense how worked up he gets when they talk about things of this nature—then again…. "What do you believe love is, then?" she wonders.

Klaus gets the feeling the question is more rhetorical than she leads him to believe, but he answers anyway. "Love is making someone smile simply because you wish them to be happy. Love is caring for someone without expecting anything in return." He closes his eyes. Love is putting up with an endless string of questions when you would rather get some much needed sleep.

She doesn't speak again and he wonders if she finally got the hint. Deciding she's finally ready to sleep, he turns around and gathers her in his arms.

More than a half hour later, he barely hears her through his sleepy haze. "Do you think that means I love you, then?"