/|\ Tourist /|\

A/N: Slight lemons ahoy... ye be warned...

/|\

Caroline hates Seattle.

It's cold, it's windy, and it rains constantly. It isn't a pleasant type of rain, either – it's the big and fat rain drops that soaks through her clothes, radiating the coldness that she despises so much deep down into her bones. She's pretty sure she scowls the entire time Klaus drags her down streets to popular destinations by her hand, but if Klaus notices, he doesn't let on, only continues to talk about their surroundings soothingly.

The hand that Klaus is so eager to hold, the hand that his thumb is stroking over and over again will eternally be covered in the blood of her mother's murderer. No matter how hard she scrubs her hand, she still sees the red droplets drip down her arm, drying into sickening clumps underneath her fingernails, as if she is still holding the bleeding distorted mass of his heart in her grasp.

Needless to say, they leave Seattle shortly after that night.

There is this need growing inside of her, Caroline notices. She isn't sure what it is at first, but it's growing and ever present in the back of her mind; it's an itch that begs to be scratched. She thinks of it constantly now, how easy it would be to just give in to what it is asking her to do. But she isn't sure what this feeling results in – all she knows is that it promises bliss and no real thinking, no feelings.

They're sitting on a private jet, Klaus reading an old and thick book while she lounges next to him watching a corny romantic comedy movie. Caroline adjusts her position, pulling the head phones from her ears. Her head rolls to the side, her eyes flicking up and down his sharp profile. She sees him grin, and he closes the book and looks back at her, mimicking her position almost exactly.

"Klaus," She begins, unsure of how to begin.

"Caroline." He replies, one eyebrow lifting.

She ignores his playfully teasing look, and continues, "I need to do something."

A look of understanding flashes across his face, but he asks, "Like what?"

"That's the whole thing, though!" She throws her arms up with exasperation. "I don't know what I have to do, I just – I have to... do it."

Klaus leans forward. "And you think that once you do whatever you think you have to do, you will feel better?"

Her eyes light up and she nods. "Yes, exactly!"

She becomes concerned when he doesn't answer her for a long time, and then finally, he croaks out, "That's your switch, Caroline."

There's a beat of silence, then a quiet, "Oh."

Klaus's hand reaches out and cups her cheek. "You need to fight that switch, love. While it may be easier to just be emotionally oblivious to it all, but you won't be Caroline anymore. What makes you you is going to be gone."

Caroline instinctively leans into his comforting touch, her lips pressing a small kiss to the inside of his callused palm.

She doesn't say anything else, and he accepts her silence with a sorrowful but appeasing smile.

/|\

Caroline is surrounded by brown cardboard boxes.

She's sprawling out on her living room floor, hair fanning out behind her as she stares at the blood spatters on the ceiling. (She wants to scream when her brain imagines how blood could get there. Turn it off turn it off turn it off.) Something aches in the back of her throat, as if her cold and undead heart is trying to pump its way back up into her mouth. She swallows back the nausea as she pulls herself up to a sitting position, where she is sorting through hours and hours of VHS home videos.

Boxes are stacked all around her, brimming with possessions – some she doesn't remember, others she remembers with painful clarity. Her hand fumbles as she pushes the home video into the VHS player. She silently gulps as the television shows static, and then she hears muffled voices.

"Daddy! Daddy are you watching?"

Caroline sits there for several moments, blinking rapidly at the recorded scene.

"Yes I am, pumpkin."

She freezes as the camera lens focuses on a little girl with bright blonde pigtails, her fathers voice echoes around the empty room. The little girl looks only four or five, but she's spinning around with a hula-hoop, showing off to the camera and her father in the backyard. The orange plastic loop goes around and around her waist, and she sees her past younger self giggle as she falls over dramatically.

Caroline smiles slightly as she sees a young Elena, a streak of creamy skin and brown hair run around with Bonnie in the background, chasing after an escaping fat toad. The camera shakes again, and suddenly it is focusing on the patio, where her mother is emerging from their house holding a pitcher of lemonade.

Caroline lets out a quiet whimper. Her mother just looks so happy – her blonde hair seems even blonder longer, and bouncier. There are less wrinkles on her smooth face and her eyes sparkle. She couldn't recall the last time she saw her mother that happy.

"Oh, and there the monster is!" She hears her father's teasing voice in the back of her head, and her mother on the screen smiles wide at the zooming and shaky camera.

"Oh Bill, don't film me. Film the girls," Liz chastises, turning away from her husband to pour the drinks. Condensation clings to the plastic cups.

Caroline watches with rapt fascination as her mother calls the girls for a break in the shade, and they all run off to the table. The camera follows them all – Bonnie and Elena get there first, hands dirty from the toad, but Caroline drops the hula-hoop and begins sprinting at her mother. Her mother on the screen smiles, her arms outstretched, and Caroline unconsciously leans forward to watch the moment she had lived so long ago. Her younger self leaps off the ground, reaching up for her mother, and she was just about to see herself get pulled into a warm and loving hug she barely remembers –

And then the camera goes black.

A breath escapes her as she slumps to the side, her eyes beginning to sting with unshed tears. She just wanted to see her mother one more time, just one more time. Her fingers stab at the eject button, and the old machine whirs as it pushes out the clunky black VHS tape. Her fingers struggle with her hastiness, and it breaks the tape into small pieces, the film pulled out of the side. Caroline snarls, feeling the familiar pang of fangs elongating in her mouth as she pitches the ruined article at the wall. It breaks into more pieces on impact, a loud crash ricocheting around the empty room.

(Turn it off turn it off turn it off)

There is that itch again, the thing she wants to just dive into the most. It promises relief, it promises no more pain no more thinking, and would it that hard to just turn it –

"Caroline?"

Elena's voice interrupts her, and Caroline jumps at the intrusion, partially feeling guilty for even considering to turn off her vampire switch. She stares blankly at her friend, and Elena gives her a puzzled look in return.

It takes several moments for Caroline to connect the dots; Elena wants a response, "Yeah. I'm totally fine. I'm perfect. I'm great. Never better..."

Elena nods, pausing awkwardly. "Well, Damon and I filled up the storage truck. You good here?"

She pulls herself to her feet, ignoring the way her knees crack from sitting in the same position for so long. "Yeah, I'll bring all this to the storage unit myself."

Elena smiles, and she begins to make her way to the glass front door, clearly trying to avoid all the dried blood spatters.

Her friend's name escapes from her mouth before she can stop it. "Elena?"

Elena whips around quickly, an expectant look on her face. "Yeah?"

She breathes deeply. "Thank you for helping me. It really means a lot."

The doppelganger smiles. "You were there for me when my parents... died," Caroline resists the urge to visibly flinch. "Of course I would be here for you. I always will be."

And with that, Elena is out the door. Caroline looks at the empty boxes that are filled with her entire life surrounding her, a frown forming on her face.

In the back of her mind, the switch is still there, begging to be flipped.

/|\

She stays at Klaus's mansion for her mother's funeral.

She's sure her friends all mentally call her a coward – who exactly would actually say that to her face? – but Caroline likes to think of it as bravery. She can't even imagine any scenario where her mother and father lay six feet under the ground, or watching them be buried as she stands idly by, powerless to help them. She cringes at the visual of them surrounded by dirt and bugs and decay in wooden boxes for the rest of eternity. So instead, she sits on the large leather couch with Rebekah, silently watching old Buffy the Vampire Slayer re-runs.

She wakes up from a nap on the couch later in the day, when the sun sets, she hustles up the stairs to Klaus's room, where he lays on the bed, sketching a picture. He is still clothed in an expensive suit, the clothes he wore to the funeral. He sees her form shadowing in the doorway, and he tosses the sketchbook aside, quietly watching her.

She can feel his stare heavy on her face, and then using her vampire speed, straddling him in barely a second, her hands gripping the side of his face as she roughly pulls his lips to her own, sucking, wanting, and taking.

He has no quarrels with her silent demands as he kisses her back, their teeth clacking, tongues battling as his own arms reach around her waist and pull her flush against him. She moans loudly, ripping his shirt off and tossing it across the rooms with fervor. He pauses for a moment when her cool hands rub against the deep scars on his back – the ones she's never questioned, only kissed dotingly when the time came around – and he grunts in her ear.

"Caroline," He says.

She ignores this, her other hand fisting in the coarse curls at the nape of his neck as her hips grind downwards, pushing him further in to the bed. Her fingernails leave crescent moon shaped marks imbedded in his skin.

"Caroline," He says.

She peppers kisses down his neck, teeth scraping the soft skin she finds there, her hand slipping in between their warm bodies, cupping the hardness she finds there eagerly, and he hisses against her, saying her name again in a breathy pant. She feels powerful, a highness that only a woman knowing exactly what she can do feels, and she revels in the only control she has in her life. He is hers, she is his, and it will always be like this. She continues her steady and deliberate ministrations against him, feeling his breath stutter as he squirms underneath her, hiding his moans.

"Caroline," He says.

His pants are gone, she's already naked and ready and aching for a blissful release. Her knees bracket his hips, and she's about to slide down his length, to take and hold and never give back, when Klaus stops her quickly with his hands, pushing her back slightly. She doesn't meet his eyes, only grunts in disapproval, and his hand pull away from her hipbones to cup her cheek, pulling her face to his own with a quick kiss. She doesn't respond, and his blue eyes open and pierce through her own.

"Caroline," He says slowly.

"What?" Caroline growls at him, her arousal ever growing with mounting frustration.

Klaus sighs, "You don't want to do this."

She freezes, her blood running cold.

He takes her silence as an invitation to continue, "You're just feeling stressed about the funeral, Caroline. I understand, but this," he gestures to their bodies, "won't help. It'll make you feel emptier."

Rage curdles deep down in her stomach, her muscles clenching as she glares at him. "Don't you dare try to tell me what I'm feeling right now."

He says her name again, but she's already snatched her clothes off the floor and is stomping out the door, hastily sliding the fabric over her naked body.

She's out on his lawn and sprinting off into the darkness before he can even protest.

/|\

The Mystic Grill is closed, much to Caroline's chagrin. She leans against the locked doors, her head banging against the glass windows as she moans in disappointment.

She begins to stumble her way home, but she freezes in the middle of the road when it hits her like a ton of bricks: she has no home. She can't go back to that empty little childhood house of horrors, spattered with her mothers blood and filled with ruined memories. Caroline turns, seeing motion out of the corner of her eye, and she sees a man taking out the trash, hidden by shadows. She blinks and then smiles; it would be extremely easy to just take the life and drink, just forget about everything–

No. I am human. I do not need to flip the switch.

A sneering voice in the back of her head interrupts her train of thought, You don't need to feel. Everything will be gone. You can always flip the switch back on later...

Her muscles seem to move on their own accord, and before she even knows what's happening, her hand encloses around the man's mouth, silencing his screams, and her fangs did into the side of his neck, sucking the warm lifeblood from his veins like a thief. He twitches in her arms, quickly dying, and she drops him with a sharp "ahhh." His body hits the cement hard, and she watches with a bland facial expression, blinking, as dribbles of blood pool away from the body.

Caroline feels the panic well up inside of her and she hunches over, about to shake the man awake, and all she can think about is how similar the position she is in now is like the one she had been in almost a week ago, caving in upon herself as Klaus held her in her home, screaming for her mother. She straightens automatically, ignoring the blood dripping down her face and the way her blonde curly hair sticks to it.

It's so tempting to switch it, and oh, what if I just–

Flip.

She blinks, a puzzled expression forming across her face. Everything around her is so quiet. She decides it's nice.

Her eyes rake over the body of the man at her feet with polite disinterest, and she nudges it with the tip of her boot, as if expecting him to just get up and walk away, brushing imaginary dirt off of his pants. When the man doesn't move, she shrugs, turning on her heel gracefully. She begins walking down the street, casually swinging her arms as the night swallows her into it's comforting shadows.

Caroline feels absolutely nothing.

/|\

I KNOW I HAVEN'T UPDATED I'M SORRY I'VE BEEN IN THE HOSPITAL AND I MAY HAVE TO GO BACK TO MY HOME COUNTRY, BUT YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT MY PROBLEMS.

I'm not happy with this chapter. I don't know... but I seriously love dark!Caroline. Here, have her with her switch flipped off. Should be fun, yeah? Can't wait for all the chaos I get to write... mwahaha...

**Lovely home video scene inspired by ~DJfleetfox

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