i'm not a miracle and you're not a saint

Disclaimer: I do not own The Vampire Diaries.

Note: My last series fic of the hiatus! Inspired in part by a scene in but seriously's louder than a burning room. And because I have crazy Damon feels right now. Moving on.

And in case you ignored this part of the summary:

FOURTH IN THE SDYG SERIES. READ ALL FOUR FOR FULL HEAD CANON COMPREHENSION.

She's barely started when the barstool scrapes the floor beside her.

"My my, what would the sheriff say?"

"The sheriff," Caroline sighs, watching her drink swirl in her glass, "is out of town."

Damon is giving her the side-eye; she knows without even having to turn her head. Caroline exhales gustily, frustrated that with her tolerance magnified to vampiric standards, she could be here all night before her mind is quiet again.

"Need help with another diabolical plan, I assume?"

"Not tonight." The words sound hard-edged. Caroline finally flicks her eyes to study Damon's profile; his jaw is tight, the knuckles around his glass blanked white.

"Elena?" she guesses quietly, returning her gaze to the countertop to avoid his glare. It's no use however: the side of her head still sears hot. She thinks she's about to get a slicing comment, a jab at Tyler maybe, but instead it's this:

"Isn't it always?"

Caroline is inclined to agree. But she doesn't let that nasty thought leave her head.

"Sorry," she says instead.

Damon is silent.

Caroline calls for another drink.

x

"Should I even ask what you've been up to with him?" he asks after the third round. Or maybe the fifth. Caroline is losing count.

"Probably not."

"So you're not going to tell me about the time you spent in his bed?"

Caroline almost falls off her stool.

"How—"

"Who do you think your mom called after Klaus called her? Who had to tell the sheriff that someone shot her daughter and the only person she was with was our favourite pervader of death and doom? And that Rebekah told me?"

Even beneath the classic Damon jibe there is real frustration. Stunned, she drops her glass on the countertop with a dull thunk.

"If I didn't know better I'd think you were starting to care."

He looks, momentarily, frighteningly as he had that day they'd had a disturbingly similar conversation about another now hybrid. But Damon takes a sip of dark amber liquid, and the mask is back.

"Who do you think took you home?"

Caroline swallows. Honestly, up till now, she'd thought waking up a third time in her own room, that warm blanket still wrapped snug around her, was Klaus's doing. But this, this is strangely better.

She and Klaus are still avoiding each other. At the very least, she is avoiding him. Caroline caught the girl he'd make a snack in the Grill not three hours ago: still human, still oblivious. It had filled her with a strange mixture of relief and satisfaction.

She supposes she should thank Damon, after everything, but he's already getting up, already tossing bills on the counter.

"I'd tell you not to get involved, but clearly you are never going to listen to a word I say."

The last thing Caroline expected of tonight was Damon Salvatore's opinion on her quasi-relationship with the most dangerous being in town. But this is Mystic Falls; it's a wonder she's not used to it by now.

"This makes twice, you know," she says quietly. "That he's saved my life. It's a little past my own will at this point."

Damon makes a face that looks a little too much like regret to be comfortable for either of them, even at teetering on numbingly buzzed.

"Be careful." Caroline catches a flash of his crazy eyes that Elena hates so much. "Do not get attached."

And then he's gone.

"..'m not attached," she mutters, and orders another drink.

x

Matt cuts her off at the end of his shift.

He wants to drive her home, but that's the last thing she needs, so Caroline proves she can walk in a straight line (a skill she's always kept drunk, even before her vampirism) and leaves the warmth of the Grill for the cool night air outside. Caroline has never been afraid of Mystic Falls at night, so she wraps her coat tighter around herself simply begins walking.

She doesn't even feel the cold anymore, technically, but her skin remembers what it's supposed to feel like. Is that the same thing? Caroline wonders. Is remembering a feeling as strong as the feeling itself, even though the latter is gone?

Caroline recalls the pain of losing her Dad, of Tyler, and decides it's very much the same. Sometimes she cannot comprehend Elena's strength. All that loss...honestly, Caroline thinks she'd just curl up on her bed and never leave it.

She keeps walking.

x

Caroline decides Elena (or herself) could use a little girl time, so she takes a detour. The lumbered steps of the man following her don't end. He's been at it for a few blocks now; Caroline's senses are so well attuned that she can even smell the alcohol as though he'd swam through a river of scotch.

"Hey pretty girl, whatcha doing out alone?"

It's beginning to get annoying. The last thing she wants to do is bring a drunk guy to her best friend's door. Perhaps it's the stress of this year, of everything that's happened, or maybe Caroline's more drunk than she thought, but before she knows it her fangs are out in the deepest end of the alley.

The man however, isn't cowering beneath her glare. In fact, he's out cold in the gravel.

Her mind barely has time to register this, before someone's grabbing her arms, pushing her so hard into the brick wall at her back that she feels dust crumble.

At first, fear shuts down her mind. But then she inhales, and her mind goes somewhere else entirely.

Well this feels morbidly familiar.

"Seriously?" she snaps, knowing even before her eyes adjust who it is: she'd recognize that smell anywhere, now. Caroline doesn't even know what it is, but Klaus' scent, for lack of a better word, always makes her think of warmth and spice and deep earth.

Of a nervous, fluttering bird landing on her heart.

Right now it makes her livid.

"A lady shouldn't walk alone at night, you know."

"I can handle myself," she gets out through gritted teeth, a sudden clarity dawning on the now unconscious man, and the smirk lining Klaus' lips. "I don't need your help."

"Your track record begs to differ, darling."

She snarls, feeling it in her throat, but before she can do anything else, his hands trap her wrists high above her head. It almost hurts, but not quite.

"Easy now."

Caroline refuses to buck his grip pinning her to the wall. For whatever reason, it feels infinitely more intimate, dangerous, than his hand cutting off all of her air. Her sides are exposed, the column of her neck defenseless.

A spindling fear takes root around her heart. Wings flutter, panicked. Trapped. It's the strangest feeling.

She is so vulnerable her stomach flips nervously watching the Original's Adam's Apple bob in his throat. Her head is spinning. Clearly rounds with Damon was not a good idea. The image of Klaus' teeth dragging across her collarbone is so vivid she has to close her eyes in order to be rid of it.

"I thought you hated me."

"I could say the same to you," he drawls. What is his deal? "Yet here we are."

It's exhausting, this back and forth, this constant in between. Caroline feels her debt to him, a forever kind of debt, heavy beneath her skin like the alcohol is still heavy on her tongue.

Klaus' scent is nearly overpowering, weighted in itself, curling into her hair. Though her body is rigid in response to the electric, dangerous air, her mind refuses to be swayed from what it associates most of all with the odor of his skin.

Safety.

The bird settles.

And that, Caroline knows, is the most dangerous idea of all.

x

"Just do me a favour?" she asks, sighing. "When you kill me, don't leave my body for my mom to find, okay?"

Klaus' smile fades away. He opens his mouth to say god knows what, but all this is just getting to Caroline, and she barrels on.

"I mean, if it's going to be anyone it's going to be you, right? And I just...I'd really rather you rip out my heart than let my mother suffer through me fading away and going crazy. Maybe killing her. I couldn't stand it."

She shivers.

This is probably more than needs saying. Caroline has never had to consider death so deeply until her birthday all those weeks ago, when it became a permanent possibility. Her death in transition feels like a lifetime ago. She's never admitted these ideas to anyone.

But here she is, in a dark alley with the Original Hybrid, slowed with drink and completely at his mercy.

Talking about him murdering her.

She is never drinking with Damon again.

"Let Damon tell her." All the alcohol is catching up with her; Caroline's eyelids are heavy. "She still trusts him, after everything. Someone has to do it who won't break down. She will. Elena'll be f—"

She can't say it. She cannot say that she thinks Elena will carry on, as she always does, that Caroline will just become yet another casualty of war. Because that is just too much to bear, especially into whatever lies beyond everlasting life.

"I think," Klaus says slowly, dropping one hand to brush her hair from her face, "that you underestimate your worth."

She is already shivering again when his thumb traces the curve of her ear, the skin of her jaw, aids two other fingers in lifting her chin. It occurs to Caroline that it's now her two hands against his one atop their heads, that she probably could, if she wished, free herself from his grasp.

She doesn't move.

Caroline just breathes, slow and deep that becomes harder and harsh as Klaus dips his head, his nose brushing the bridge between her eyes, his lips hovering just above the tip of her nose. It seems like an age, the time they stand there, breathing each other in.

Their foreheads touch. It feels like a kiss.

Safe.

If this is it, she thinks, if this is the last memory Caroline has before she has none at all, it will eclipse every possibility the centuries to come could have offered her.

And strangely enough, that's okay.

"You," Klaus growls, low and deep in his throat, "will be the death of me."

Her heart twists and Caroline knows she will never be able to fully explain why.

Her breath hitches. Damn it. "Not if you're mine first."

She's going cross eyed trying to look at him, trying to regain some level ground, but this is Klaus she's trying her hardest to stare in the eye. This is Original Hybrid to youngling vampire, a millennia to a meager seventeen years, this is the vicious heartbeat that she remembers so vividly against that of a man who chooses to feel nothing.

Caroline is never going to win.

It's a depressing realization, really. Before she can do anything about it, however, Klaus is looking at her, like that, and her heart does that horrible spasming thing, like always, and she can't breathe. He's letting his lips hover over hers, murmuring words she can't hear but she can practically taste in the night air.

They taste of sadness and impossible thing she will probably never understand. That's a depressing thought too.

Sometimes I wake up screaming, Caroline wants to say abruptly. Sometimes I wake up and curl up with your blanket until I fall asleep again.

It still smells like you.

And then Klaus peels away, their fingers tangled together as he lowers her arms and releases them altogether. It feels like they're going to fall off. Her fingers prick and tingle.

"Enjoy Elena's," he says, almost gruffly. Caroline blinks; he disappears. She sinks to the ground, light headed with the rush of crisp air filling her lungs. It is several minutes before she is able to pick herself up off the cold gravel and out of the alley.

Caroline picks up her pace to the Gilbert house, her mind filled with noise all the while, the noise she's been trying so hard to drown out, and above all what she is still trying to understand: where exactly they stand now.

She gets to Elena's and still has no answer.

Author's Note: I hate posting right before a new head canon derailing episode airs, but what can you do, I suppose. Delving in further to who I believe Caroline to be, because I adore her and can't imagine how much she's been struggling lately. But mostly because I really wanted to write that scene with Damon.

And before you ask WHY HAVEN'T THEY KISSED ALREADY? I'm trying to remain as true to canon as possible, so the second we're given an inclination of change from what's happened, the series will do its best to adapt accordingly. And by the series I mean me. :P

For now, enjoy the lack of boundaries and lots of eye sex!

Opinions are greatly appreciated.

Annie