She wakes up from dying with her lower half soaked completely in blood – her blood.

She wakes from dying with stomach pains that hurt more than any kind of period induced cramps she's ever experienced, which says a lot because Caroline Forbes is extremely knowledgeable about once-a-month-tear-inducing-holy-hell cramps.

And this is so much worse.

She wakes from dying wanting to dip her fingers into the blood pouring from between her legs and its happening too fast, everything is happening too fast for her to comprehend properly.

Caroline is a very smart girl, she's AP everything, but this. . . this is too much for her mind to comprehend and she can't breathe because it feels wrong, can't think because her mind is on overdrive.

She's bleeding.

There's blood.

She's bleeding.

She thinks–

She thinks–

She thinks maybe she just lost her baby.

Her tiny bean-sized baby.

The tiny baby she'd only found out about that morning, when she took the little test that told her seventeen year old her would soon be seventeen year old pregnant her.

And she was hyperventilating just like this just this morning as she sat in her bathroom waiting for Matt to come and pick her up, but for totally different reasons.

Because those reasons don't even matter anymore, do they? Her mind whispers as she stares down as the puddle of blood between her legs and on her legs and (ohgodohgodohgod).

They don't matter because seventeen year old pregnant her has turned into seventeen year old deadher and she's passed every science class she's attended since fourth grade so she knows dead people can't have babies (she's read Twilight enough to know dead people who come back to life especially can't).

She didn't even know she'd wanted her tiny baby until now. Her tiny, tiny baby who she didn't know she wanted but now she'll never have and oh god, it hurts so much.

Her baby is between her legs, she thinks. Her tiny baby is somewhere in all that blood and all she wants is to bury her mouth into the too-large, too-thick, too-mouth-watering puddle and drink.

Instead she leans over the side of the bed and vomits.

Because apparently dead people can still vomit, even if they can't have babies.

Matt visits the next day when the sheets are clean and perfect again.

The nurse who'd checked on her this morning was a different one from last night and seemed much nicer as she fixed her right up, mothering her in a way her own mother never had and Caroline might have been hungry, starving in fact, after a night of staring at the blood (her baby, her baby, her tiny baby), but the nurse had been too kind, too needed to be thought of as anything else but a woman who let her cry into her shoulder for an hour.

A woman who cleaned her sheets, who cleaned away her tiny baby and cradled a sobbing Caroline in her arms like she herself was a tiny baby.

(She supposed she was, wasn't she? Caroline Forbes, the girl who'll always be a girl)

So when Matt visits she breaks up with him because she loves him but she's dead (there's a pillow on her face and her hand is scratching at the side of her bed searching for the little button that'll call a nurse to help her, help her, oh god, she's gonna like, die) and she killed her baby. One car ride later and she's killed her baby.

Their baby.

He doesn't know it but she took a baby away from him and she can't look him in the eye anymore because of it, so she breaks it off by starting with a fight and ending with a fight and their relationship has gone out with a bang alright, and its classic Caroline because all her relationships go out with a bang, she's practically famous for it, but this time it's also gone out with blood and tears, both only on her part.

She kind of wants him to bleed and cry too.

And that thought has her screaming at him to get the fuck away from me, Matt and leave me alone, Matt and it's over, Matt, don't you get that?

She watches him leave in a flurry of confusion and anger and sadness and oh god, it hurts so much.

Bonnie wouldn't speak to her.

Elena couldn't look at her.

Damon tried to kill her.

Stefan tries to teach her.

Matt still loves her.

And through it all Caroline is too busy trying not to fall apart to notice.

She goes through her days sitting just out of reach of the sun, because even though she has a magical fucking ring (and oh god, it's tacky, isn't it? Caroline Forbes finally has a ring from a boy but that boy is Stefan and it's only to make sure she doesn't die via giant ball of burning fire in the sky) she doesn't quite trust it to suddenly turn itself off.

Because she's a murderer, isn't she? One carnival employee and one baby later and she's a murderer and murderers get their comeuppance. It's like karma, right? Karma or divine justice or whatever.

She's scared the ring will stop working and she's scared it'll never stop working.

Daylight doesn't harm vampires with charmed jewellery but that doesn't stop the innate dislike she seems to have formed for light on her skin.

She imagines it burns when it doesn't, she wishes it burns when it doesn't.

She goes through her days thinking of nothing but sliding her sun ring right off her finger because she's killed a few people since the car crash, the first being her baby and emotions are heightened, Stefan says. Emotions are heightened for vampires and that makes you a crazy, neurotic, control-freak.

On crack.

(She wishes crack would work, but her best friend's boyfriend tells her drugs and vampires don't mix for some reason. But wouldn't that be nice, he muses out loud one day as he brings her a thermos full of bunny blood because she's too out of it to find one herself and he wants her to drink baby animals instead of willing donors because human blood isn't good for you right now, Caroline or blah, blah, blah.

Imagine if developing a drug problem was possible for us. Eternal life would be so much easier with a little pharmaceutical help. And he smiles at her as he makes himself comfortable in the space next to her, willing her to smile back.

She doesn't.)

She's a crazy, neurotic, murdering, control-freak who has lost her capacity to not only have children but to keep the baby she already had alive.

Her tiny, tiny baby.

Her tiny, helpless, not-dead-like-her-but-actually-dead baby.

She spends her days with eyes wide open, head spinning to try and catch sight of dark hair and smiling curly-haired evilness.

And because of that she can't really look at Elena, because all she really sees is caramel coloured hands pulling a pillow over her face and her best friend's face is smiling down at her and suddenly she can't breathe, can't think, can't do anything but struggle futilely for that little button that if she could only press, would save her life.

She sees herself gasping–

screaming–

struggling–

And then she opens her eyes and see's blood.

And oh god, it hurts so much.

So maybe she's especially out of it (slightly on purpose, possibly) when Elena comes to call but that's only because it hurts to want to rip your best friend's heart out, and she thinks Stefan would probably mind a lot and he's the one who keeps bringing her blood when she's too depressed to get out of bed.

She doesn't have a death wish, not really. She just doesn't see the point in living if she's already dead.

Stefan takes to inviting her over to his house a lot, where there are plenty of rooms but she sleeps in his anyway because he doesn't want her to leave his sight and maybe she doesn't want to be alone.

It's not like they do anything of course, because she still loves Matt and he loves Elena (always, always Elena) but he rapidly turns into her best friend because Bonnie is absent and Elena looks like her and Damon. . . well Damon is Damon and he equals pain and suffering and she's been through enough of that for one lifetime thankyouverymuch.

And suddenly it's been months and they still don't know about her baby. She doesn't think she'll ever say anything. It's her little secret.

Her tiny, tiny, too-big, too-painful secret.

Stefan warns her once about turning it off, flipping the switch and she thinks she could never do it.

Who would I be if not the Caroline who cares too much, she asks one day as her best friend prepares for a day out with his girlfriend and she prepares for a day of sleeping in his bed.

"You'd be the Caroline who nobody knows. The Caroline who doesn't want anybody to know her." He replies as he fixes his hair in the mirror for the third time and she thinks maybe he's stalling a bit, though she doesn't know why exactly.

"Wouldn't that be easier?" She asks.

"Yeah," And then he's done with the mirror and turning towards her with eyes filled with compassion, "Until it's not."

It's as he places a kiss on her forehead on his way out the door she decides never to do it. She couldn't possibly, could she?

Only she does eventually. Sometime between being kidnapped by werewolves and her mother finding out everything involving fangs, she switches it off and for the first time in a very long time she starts to think about something other than her baby.

Her tiny, tiny baby.

Flipping the switch helps her get out of bed each day.

Flipping the switch helps her get her own food, though Stefan is less than pleased when she starts eating bloodbags and/or people instead of his home-delivered bunnies but she doesn't really feel enough to care and oh god, it feels so much better now.

She leaves town because Mystic Falls is too small for her. A small town girl is no longer who she is, especially when there's a dead baby in this town.

(And don't even get her started on how everybody seems to think she'll miraculously forget about the girl who looks like the person who killed her or the fact she seems to be living with her abusive ex-boyfriend who suddenly isn't that much of a bad guy and oh wow, it's getting really complicated, isn't it? The whole 'not being dead, like, for real' thing.)

Mystic Falls is her Hell and her new instincts tell her to get out, get out, get far away before this place kills her.

Like it did her tiny, tiny baby.

So without telling her best friend, the real one not the two who grew up with her, she runs away from home, literally, because she's a little bit terrified of cars now and running is easy when she's a vampire.

It might actually be faster than a car and it's not like she can't get anything she needs on the road, is it? So she doesn't tell Stefan she's leaving and she doesn't pack anything to take with her.

All she needs is credit cards and credit cards and credit cards and she has a lot of those.

She used to be Caroline Forbes after all.

Running is fun, she thinks somewhere between Seattle and New York. Running is fun and harmless and there's no way she can crash and potentially die.

Nothing bad can happen to her if she doesn't get into a car.

Ever again.

She's stopped running for a while, just long enough to get a room at a Four Seasons and go shopping for some new clothes. Walking past the maternity wear section of the mall is . . . bizarre.

She thinks it hurts but everything is numb so maybe it doesn't.

She doesn't even realise she's stopped walking past the store and is instead walking intot he store until she's lightly fingering dresses that would always be too big around the stomach section.

She buys a small teddy bear that's the softest thing she's ever felt and smiles softly to herself as she hugs it tightly to her middle.

She might have turned it off but it doesn't stop her thinking about her tiny, tiny baby (though sometimes she can go days without thinking of it, but mostly she just can't stop) and she wonders if it's better this way? To be able to think about it without feeling anything but an odd sense of a lack of something that should be there.

Caroline Forbes, the girl who should have been a mother by now.

The teddy bear is her only companion now because she left her phone in Mystic Falls and her nightly meals don't exactly have enlightening conversations with her.

She takes the bear home (to the hotel room, because home is long dead), along with the bags upon bags of new clothes she won't wear for long anyway, and sets it upon her bed. She begins going through her recent purchases and smiling slightly every time she gazes at the small blue thing with the black glass eyes and the unpacking process is done in minutes but the smiling doesn't stop with it.

She doesn't know why she's smiling so much when she doesn't feel happy or why she's taken to sleeping with it every night, lovingly stroking its soft body as she whispers secrets to it, about her old life and her old self and about her old best friend who'd really, really have liked the little bear–

Stefan may have even grown to love the little bear.

– and she doesn't even want to think about what comparisons could be created from that thought.

My little baby would have loved you, she tells it one day, over a year later. But I killed it so you're stuck with me instead, okay?

The bear doesn't reply but she likes to think the little blue thing is agreeable to their situation.

Their situation takes a turn for the worst when the little bear that should have belonged to her tiny, tiny baby goes missing from her room one night while she's out hunting for something to take the edge off (and she thinks Stefan was wrong. Who needs crack when there's blood?).

She kills everybody on the same floor as her when she comes home to her hotel room to find her bear missing from its spot on her bed.

And it's as she's tearing through each room, crying, screaming ("Where is it?" She pulls out the heart of a businessman, "Give it back!" She tears into a bellhop's artery, "What have you done with it?" She breaks the arms, legs, necks of an old couple, "I want it back!" She rips into the stomach of a still half-asleep woman) and covered in blood she has little to no interest in drinking that he arrives.

"Now what has you so excited, love?" He smirks at her, leaning against the wall stained with bloody handprints without a care to his clothes. Her own are stained deep with blood and organ matter as she gazes up at him from her spot on somebody else's bed.

A somebody else who is now dead. How poetic, she muses. There are three people in the room including herself and she doesn't know any of them.

"I've lost it," she says. "I've lost it or somebody's taken it and I can't find it and I need it back."

She sounds like the little girl she'll always be, the little blonde girl with a daddy who left her and a mummy who did too, in her own way. She sounds like the little girl who woke up dead with her chance at a normal life lying dead between her legs.

I need it back, she insists as she gazes up at a too-beautiful man who apparently must be a vampire too.

(Only he has a heartbeat while she doesn't so maybe he's just a serial killer or something)

He smirks down at her, and its half in amusement and half with something else she can't quite explain, only knows that something else makes his eyes go soft and make her insides go all fluttery.

Stefan! He calls over his shoulder, his eyes never leaving hers. I found your little baby.

And she knows he sees her flinch at that because his eyes narrow and he suddenly looks both solemn and calculating though the little smirk on his face doesn't change. "I think you were right, Stefan, mate. It looks like it was hers."

Suddenly he's there, her best friend's boyfriend who became her own best friend, when he'd hand fed her blood and stayed with her at night while she had nightmares.

And he's holding the blue bear in his hands, the soft, tiny blue bear that should have belonged to her tiny baby but instead found its way to Caroline herself. The tiny teddy she'd lost, just like she lost her baby.

And just like that everything is fine again.

Her best friend is here and he found her bear.

And all was right in the world.

Stefan helps her off the body she's been sitting on, the hand not holding onto her little blue bear wrapped around her waist tightly as he gazes down at her in remorse. "Oh, Caroline." She's reaching for the bear almost absentmindedly as he speaks at her not to her, "What have you done to yourself?"

She ignores his eyes as they glide over her body, in a decidedly non-sexual way because he's Stefan and she's not Elena and he's her best friend not her boyfriend, as the brown eyes catalogue all the bloodstains and tears in her very, very expensive dress.

"Now, now, Stefan." The stranger chuckles as his eyes do something similar, though his version is the opposite of the man by her side, "Leave the poor thing alone. She doesn't need a pity party to be thrown for her, do you, love?"

And his tone is teasing and testing at the same time but she takes no notice of it because her best friend is here with her bear and everything is perfectly fine in the world now.

The bear now in her arms, Caroline sighs contentedly even as she rolls her eyes and pushes away the arm wrapped around her, "'Course not, I'm totally fine, Stefan. How have you been? How's Elena? Bonnie?" Matt, her mind whispers.

How's Matt?

Does he know I killed our baby?

Did he figure it out?

Does he hate me now like I thought he would?

"Dead." The stranger says simply. "All dead, you have my condolences."

Eyes wide with shock she turns from the handsome stranger to gaze up at her best friend, "What? Oh, wow, that totally sucks."

Stefan's gaze searches hers for something, but she's too preoccupied with the fact her beautiful blue bear is turning purple by the second as it rubs against her blood soaked body to really take notice of it.

Besides, it's probably been a while now she's really thinking about it. How long has it been since she left? God, they probably died of old age or something.

The stranger's eyes rake over her body, smirk firmly in place and he mock sighs, "I take it you want her to go with us then, Stefan?"

And apparently her best friend does because they're gone within the next thirty seconds.

"Why'd you leave, Caroline?" Stefan asks one night, about three years later when they're in Amsterdam finding Klaus some more wolves. They're both bundled under his covers – Klaus offers to get her her own room each time they move countries, cities, hotels, but she declines every time.

It's become a bit of a game for them.

Lots of things have over the past few years. With him, she has fun. She stops thinking of babies and doppelgangers and starts thinking of other, less painful things.

Like wolves.

And Valentino.

She takes her time answering, wonders why it took him this long to ask, figures he must have just been happy she was back, just like she was. She'd missed him.

(in that weird, not really feeling it, but still sure she's meant to way)

"Lots of reasons," She muses. She wouldn't tell him, not ever. Her tiny, tiny baby would not be brought up as an excuse, "For one, Damon was a bit of a dick." She says instead.

He believes her.

And later when she closes her eyes, snuggled safely next to Stefan with Klaus next door, she dreams of Klaus and Stefan and a tiny, tiny baby.

Her baby had blue eyes.