Any Geography is Hard, the Skin Ends Where the Skin Ends

It isn't fair. She isn't supposed to have her heart crack behind her tongue, beating too hard, and too fast - she isn't supposed to allow him this. The tips of her fingers feel cold, the air skating her nape has teeth.

No one notices. Table set perfect precision, the cloth inches above her hands, the silverware old antique crystal matched with plates as thin as slivers of mother of pearl. The chandelier glows above the quiet tinkle of glass and quiet, pretty conversation. Caroline shakes off her own long drawn out silence before anyone remarks her as odd to turn to the vampire next to her, an old French aristocrat who claims he'd tailored for Marie Antoinette one decade, and charmingly dictatorial Bonaparte the next.

He isn't really as small as they say, He winks, not where it counts.

She laughs, it pleases him. Alarming how someone so old and so fashionable can still find opportunity to be so tasteless. It's all powdered lies and crystal pretty pretense underneath the weight of Klaus's scrutiny pinning her heart to the ground. Caroline - Caroline, she's good at pretending, she'd had to become good at pretending, but under his eyes from the other end of the table ... she feels paper thin, a breath and she'll tear. He knows her. He could tell her from her performance as easily as he could tell her from a painting, a sketch, the painstaking (but never detailed, oh no, you can't be pinned, darling. Not so precisely) scrawl of charcoal over yellow paper.

Caroline wishes he would stop looking at her. He's being very sneaky about it, no one notices it, he doesn't look at her directly, but he talks with others, addresses others, just as she does. Neither of them have said a word to each other all evening, not in twenty years, not since he'd had her clawing at his broad gold-river back, at his damned golden hair, at dark black earth as he licked and nipped and cursed fervent sermons between her thighs that knocked molten bolts of madness between the notches of her spine and left her screaming to some deeper, older God. Was there anything older than him? Than Niklaus and the electric suck of history between his wide, red-with-slaughter mouth?

He's a very good liar, and he's still remembering his talent for discretion, one that had all those years ago seemed painfully absent when it came to her. It's insane, his mouth is made for expressions, for constant animation - to turn wrathful, to sour scowls, to spring apart with churlish grins. It is strange to observe him as a stranger, to ignore him, to pretend with the rest that she knows him only as a country knows its oldest king, gone away for so long, now received with solemn, civil celebration to welcome him back. She is Caroline Forbes, recently made Vampire - and he is the Original Hybrid. As far as anyone is concerned none of them have ever met, and she has no right to speak of him, and he has no interest in speaking to her.

He is so good at keeping his distance to keep her safe that she almost believes he doesn't care. Believing would be easier, if she'd actually met his eyes to confirm it. But it knocks the air out of her, the thought of actually engaging him - there's too much she hasn't said, too much she is angry over that she doesn't (in hindsight) deserve to be angry about. Which, paradoxically, only insanely makes her angrier. Neither of them owed each other anything, did they? He promised her the world several times and she refused him. He promised to be her last love, and he promised never to see her again. They had sex in the woods once, like mindless savages, and she swears she can still feel the imprint of teeth where thigh dips into tender bruising flesh, where it hurts in an aching, painful, blue-green-with-old-want way.

She wondered for a while too, where he'd had sex with Hayley. But such things made her bitter, and confused her, and they made her angry - because she had no right to be angry, and she had no right to feel betrayed.

So she'd tucked it away, neurotic Caroline, compartmentalizing her feelings. It makes her a filthy hypocrite for all those times she'd warned Stefan about things like this, and he'd frown and sigh and she wouldn't dare drop the E-word, not even after all these years. She didn't know if she should wish he was here and not cavorting in Milan with a slew of Peruvian prostitutes he'd befriended eons ago. She didn't know if it would have been easier to pretend that they were all strangers if he'd been here.