Vampire Diaries 1. a place where both our routes meet

**author's note:** this fic is pretty much the brainchild of Amanda (aka habrina on tumblr) who - a million years and several months ago - so desperately wanted a klaroline/pushing daisies au, unwittingly making me realize that heck YEAH i want it too.

you don't really have to watch the show to understand what's going on here (but i'll be staring at you disaproving of your life choices because whimsical narratives! charming characters! offbeat murder-crime solving escapades! cinematography that'll blow your ass right into your couch and make you sty there for another episode or eight! see also: chi mcbride) (and do i even have to MENTION lee pace?)

**tldr:** watch the show when you can. you are missing out on a gem. also, first touch - life, second touch - death. you'll get it later.

big thanks to my beta empirically-speaking on tumblr, and DJ for pretty much making me feel better about everything i ever write ever, including this.

enough rambling, let's get to the fic.

* * *

**1. a humble abode where both our routes meet**

—

There's a certain time slot on Tuesdays between six and eight that business picks up. More coffee to be brewed, more pie to be had, more faces to remember—because if it's one thing The Pie Hole promises, it's that it wraps you up in a wonder of blueberry and butter and cream, and will never let you go.

(No but really, that's what it says on the menu. Rebekah can't even…whatever.)

Rebekah has given up trying to figure out why it's always on Tuesdays that more stains appear on her apron, why there never seems to be enough coffee going around despite putting a new pot up every fifteen minutes, why the tip jar disappears from the counter halfway into the two-hour bench. She usually finds it in the storage room in the back, with Matt huddled over it, counting quarters and dollar bills. She promises (read: threatens) not to tell Klaus if he splits the loot and hands over all the fivers.

She doesn't really mind it. Tuesdays are good days. Tuesdays are the days Klaus doesn't seem to be worked into his bones, and sometimes he even comes out of the kitchen to catch up with Marcel over the counter or to make sure nobody's _stealing from the bloody tip jar again_ (Rebekah averts her eyes, Matt suddenly becomes interested in the till).

By nine, it turns around into something mellow and the new faces file out to make room for the regular ones: there's Professor Saltzman and his droopy tie, trying to smile uncertainly at her but always looking away before she can smile back. The Salvatore brothers who take twenty minutes ordering their usual peach cobbler because they're too busy firing passive-aggressive quips at each other from behind their menus or taking turns casting furtive glances at the petite brunette in the corner there, who enjoys her blueberry slice piping hot with a side of cream.

Rebekah goes back to wiping the counter and just waiting around until closing time, gives her brother an absent-minded peck on the cheek.

As she's hanging up her apron, she asks, just to make sure, "Are you sure you don't want to co—" to which Klaus will respond, "I'm fine where I am, Rebekah".

She turns out the lights and leaves the diner with Matt hand-in-hand, and when she looks back she can see her brother's silhouette through the blinds, working steadily into the night.

.

.

Rebekah has days off on Mondays, which is when Matt can be found working overtime. Between the Pie Hole and the Grille, he actually finds himself making ends meet – nothin' like paying the bills early.

Klaus has, on more than one occasion (and more than two with knives) yelled at them about the emptying of the tip jar, but he's never really _exacted_ those threats, so Matt figures it's safe to keep poking his nose back in. It's not that he's not grateful to Klaus for the reluctant blessing of this job (he really is), but it's not like Klaus _needs_ the extra bits or anything. He's been to their place, like, maybe three times, and dude's loaded. Rebekah always drags him real quick through the foyer and up the grand staircase—yeah, they call it _the grand staircase_—so he doesn't really have enough time to gawk or anything, but he sees enough.

And like he's said, Klaus doesn't mind. Sure, he brandishes knives and threatens to shove Matt's head into the oven, but he still lets Matt leave with his pockets stuffed with loose change.

Monday turns into Tuesday, and so it was then, at 7:15pm that he's rifling through the big glass jar that the doorknob of the room jiggles and turns. In skulks Kol, his hands powdered and his apron askew.

"You're not Bekah," Matt says flatly.

"You've good observation." The way Kol is staring reminds him of those documentaries he used to watch as a kid – the ones where Vicky would shut off the TV right as the panther crouches low, fur rippling, hind legs just springing to attack. "Right, jig is up, you know the drill: hand over those bills or you will never see the light of day."

Matt thins his lips and straightens his back against a mop. Kol comes and goes as he pleases, often over-baking the pies and messing up people's orders. He drops drinks out of spite and steals from the till, which to Matt – despite he himself stealing from the tip jar – is Major Asshole Behaviour. When he feels the need to, he leans over the counter at one of the regulars and says something Matt can't quite hear (probably something rude as hell), and while Klaus fumes and grates at losing yet another customer, Kol just picks at the bits of their uneaten pie and eventually, leaves.

Matt wonders why Klaus hasn't fired Kol yet, but whenever he brings it up, Rebekah always finds that she has something to do, like cleaning the windows. Which have already been cleaned that morning.

Three times.

Elijah comes and goes even less than Kol does, but never to work (as if). He goes over the books and checks to see if everything's working, and spends the rest of the time at his reserved spot with the day's newspaper and a cup of coffee (black no cream no sugar thank you). Matt sometimes brings him a plate of ginger cookies to soften him up some, as he does now, to bring up The Kol Thing.

"Now now, Matthew," Elijah says and rustles his newspaper pointedly, "I don't ask where it is you and Rebekah disappear to between the hours of six and eight on Tuesdays, do I?"

Matt would then shuffle away, wondering why no one was getting the point.

The _point_ that: Kol seems to be able to get away with everything, and Matt, who happened to be in that unfortunate position with such unfortunate timing with such unfortunate choice of words, was about to find out why.

"You're a lunatic and a shit pie maker," Matt says, pocketing his findings. "So no."

"And you, dear boy, happen to be in an unfortunate position, with such unfortunate timing, with _such_ unfortunate choice of words." In the dim lighting of the room, Kol's face contorts into something ugly, something monstrous.

_Oh_, Matt thinks.

.

.

Klaus sighs over Matt's limp body, his lip curling up with distaste at the way his neck bent at his shoulders. Rebekah's crying had died down into a soft whimper to silence, and she sits on the floor with Matt's torso cradled in her lap, black mascara tracking down her face.

"Rebekah, I…"

She shakes her head violently. "I don't want to hear it. Do it."

"I don't think you'd like—"

"Who the wanking hell _cares_ what I'd like?" she damn well screams at him, her lips bloodless. Her shoulders aren't shaking and neither are her hands, but her eyes paint an ache in his throat, a rising in his chest. He swallows it down. "My boyfriend is _dead_, flat out dead, and you're worried I wouldn't want to hear how he died?" If her eyes were mad with grief before, now they're furious. "Fuck you."

Klaus wants to roll his eyes, _Stop being such a drama queen_, but the way Rebekah clings to Matt's dead body makes him swallow the "_He was going to die anyway. One day. The same way the sun rises and sets, the way the wind plucks out silver songs out of a wind chime, the way you're always late on Friday night shifts. It is nature, and it is life. Life, as it goes, goes. And things that go eventually have to—" _ speech he'd given on more than one occasion.

(On those occasions, his face has been slapped, shoved, or slammed before doors, which is why he's never gotten a chance to get to the end of the speech, which he was just pulling out of his ass, anyway.

Which he supposes is kind of a good thing, the whole interruption bit.)

But it's his sister, and she's upset, so he acquiesces hastily, bending down to touch Matt.

There's a zap of light where Klaus' forefinger touches Matt, and he sits up with a start, colour returning to his cheeks. Rebekah lets out a quiet sob, and he looks at Klaus: notes the way he's keeping a trained eye on his wristwatch, and groans.

"I'm dead, aren't I?" Matt doesn't wait for a response. "Just—shit. I'm dead."

Rebekah bites her lip. "I'm sorry."

Matt pinches the bridge of his nose. "Shit."

"I am so, so sorry, babe."

Matt's eyes soften. "You never call me that."

That, remarkably, makes her cry, which makes Matt pull her close, pressing kiss after kiss into her hair, her cheeks, her lips (which makes Klaus clears his throat pointedly).

"Right." Rebekah straightens herself. "Was it Kol?"

"Yeah," Matt says, fingering the collar around his broken neck. "Can't believe I died this way. In a friggen _storage_ room." He looks down his shirt. "Covered in quarters."

"That's quite unfortunate," Klaus says, but he doesn't add _Thirty-nine seconds._

"That's what Kol said," Matt shrugs. He tugs Rebekah closer. "I'm sorry. I love you."

"It doesn't have to be this way," she whispers, fingers buried deep into his cotton-clad chest. "You know that."

The smile on his face doesn't reach his eyes. "That's not a life I'd want."

"But you'd _be_ with me." Rebekah's begging. It's such a rare sight to Klaus that he has to turn away, has to keep counting down the seconds, because that is _not_ his sister on her knees, not his sister looking so lost as she pleads for the life of a boy that's already lost it. "_Please_."

Klaus shuffles his feet, an intruder in this moment that Rebekah and Matt had built for themselves. He's almost reluctant to remind them: "Thirty seconds."

"You listen to me," Matt says fiercely, "I love you. I love you when you think you're being a bitch, I love you on the days you wake up and somehow decide that you aren't worth loving, I love you in the quiet moments between six and eight that we sit in this room counting quarters, I—"

"You are not saying goodbye to me," Rebekah hisses through her teeth. She looks absolutely frightful then, and something registers in Matt's face.

"One more thing, Bekah—Kol. Before he… before he did me in, he did something weird, like veins popping 'round his eyes—"

"Time to go," Klaus says promptly, and Rebekah's eyes fly to his, wild, "_Nik—no_!"—

—but too late, a zing, a zap of light, and Matthew Donovan was dead once more.

Rebekah's shoulders shake, and her voice breaks. "You _asshole_. He had ten seconds left—" Eyes wild, she struggles to take in a breath. "You hypocritical _wank_, it's not like you've never let someone live—"

Klaus is on her in an instant, and Rebekah backs away just the slightest, all thoughts chased from her mind in the way his eyes light up like an inferno about to swallow her whole. His voice is serpentine, his inflections laced with venom. "There are people around. They might _hear_."

"That what, our brother is a vampire?" Rebekah snorts a tearful one while Klaus does everything short of tearing out his own hair and burning down the storage room to shut her up. She snorts again, turning her face into Matt's hair while he's still warm. "And you wake the dead. There, I said it. Nobody's running for the hills. Nobody's coming at us with pitchforks."

"It's the 21st century, Bekah. They'd use rifles."

"Whatever." Rebekah closes her eyes, trying to even her breathing. "Leave me be."

Klaus stands uncertainly, the fury washed out of his face. What do you do when your baby sister is crying over her dead boyfriend in a cramped storage room? "Are you sure you don't want to co—"

"I'm fine where I am, Nik."

He doesn't want to leave her there, but the front bell is jingling, they're one staff member short, and Klaus has pies to make.

.

.

Rebekah is standing by the counter on a quiet Thursday night, arranging the displayed pies and wiping down the curved countertops, because that's what she does on Thursday nights. Klaus would think that she'd be tired of this little diner with its dimpled buttercup walls and counters that constantly smell of sultanas, and most days he'd be right. These days, he'd find her staring out the display window at the passers-by, counting them as they come in one by one, lured by the smell of buttery dough and lemon zest.

(It says as much on the menus as well.)

Marcel strolls in, the bell jingling in his wake. It's not Tuesday, and Rebekah's a little confused, but she doesn't dwell on it. Just does her signature mug flip and asks how his day is going.

"How's your day going?"

She places the mint green mugs on the yellow rack, readies her pen hand and flips open her notebook.

Marcel drops into his usual Tuesday stool, chuckling. "Rebekah, Rebekah, Rebekah," he says in one long exhale, rewarding her mug tricks with a dazzling smile. "My business-only girl. You leave me wondering what you do for pleasure."

"Oh Marcel. There's a lot to be said about leaving things to the imagination," Rebekah quips in a mockery of fondness, running her hands down the front of her apron. Marcel's eyes follow them, not a subtle bone in his body as he catalogues the curve of her hips, the soft swell of her breasts. Rebekah knows she should be blushing by now, _oh _how Elijah would be furious at this, how Matt would clench his fists in the pockets of his jeans, but Elijah isn't here, and neither is Matt.

Marcel places a finger on his temple, smiling smiling smiling away. "And you do that so well."

Rebekah gives him a thin smile and cuts him a slice of his usual, sliding it in front of him. "One pancake pie, extra jam on the side."

Marcel smiles, but this time not at her, but at the delicious layers of pancake, butter, and glistening jam atop a crumbly crust dotted with pecans. Marcel was a pie man—more specifically, a jam man, with an appreciation for their fragrance and fruity taste. He owned vineyards in Italy and France, grew strawberries where he could, and even owned a little patisserie in Versailles. There was a rumour that, many years ago, he had convinced the mayor of Mystic Falls to have a Jam Appreciation Day every 3rd of March, which was dispelled when Damon Salvatore stepped up at the unveiling of the event like the cat that got the cream, while Marcel glowered by the sidelines.

It turns out people were entirely too appreciative of jam, which is how Klaus found himself dangerously short of it on the opening day of The Pie Hole—which is where Marcel swooped in, eager to make up for the loss of a day he held so dear.

Gratitude is something Klaus is not accustomed to feeling, but Marcel's supply of jam assured him a lifelong standing seat, and even a pie named after him.

Marcel digs a fork into the Marcel with gusto, all flirtatious pretence dropped. Rebekah turns away without as much as a nose wrinkle. Quite the professional she is, and she rounds up the thought with a thorough wipe-down of the counter.

.

.

It's a rainy Monday, and Rebekah really should be prepping for her pre-u courses, but instead she's unlocking the shiny double doors and reaching for her apron.

It's a goddamn travesty.

In the kitchen, Klaus is busy kneading away at some dough, his knuckles whitened by flour. Rebekah places a hand on his shoulder and he tenses, before realizing it's only his sister.

"People are asking about you," Rebekah says, peeping into the oven. "You hardly ever leave the kitchen these days."

Klaus doesn't say a word; doesn't even look up from his hands.

This is not a kitchen, Rebekah realizes, but a mausoleum. The buttercup walls gleam but they shouldn't, not in a place where all she wants is warmth in the buttery counters and definitely not in a place where dank silence is all she gets for trying to reach out, when it should be _him_ touching her shoulder, _him_ coming to check on her, especially after what he'd done, what he'll continue doing—

"Nik," she grits out. "I'm talking to you."

Klaus touches a mouldy strawberry and Rebekah watches over her shoulder as it blooms to life, juicy and red. He doesn't look up when he says distractedly, "I'm fine where I—"

"Sure." Rebekah gives a very unlady-like snort and slams the door of the oven shut. "You're miserable all the damn time and it's a right pain to be around."

"As opposed to _Oh look I'm twirling mugs again pay attention to me,"_ Klaus chants, pounding down on the dough with unnecessary force.

"My mug tricks pay for the coffee cream!" Rebekah fumes. "Anyway, even Elijah agrees."She waves an arm at Elijah, who is seated behind the counter. He looks like he's resisting the urge to role his eyes; of _course_ Rebekah would drag him into this.

"Don't mind me," he says idly, flipping through the morning's news. "Just here for my morning coffee and a dose of your transparent arguments."

Klaus grunts as he heaves a sack of flour onto the counter. "Oh come now brother, this argument could sure use your penny's worth."

"Just as this kitchen dourly needs your sarcasm," Elijah replies, licking his thumb and flicking a page. "Thought about a replacement for Matt yet?"

"I have, but Rebekah would sooner see us bankrupt than hire new help." Klaus passes the dough to his sister. "Apples and raspberries."

Rebekah sighs and covers her eyes with her hand. They've been through this. She needed time and then some to get over the fact that her boyfriend had _died_, killed by one of her own brothers no less, and more than honeyed crusts and extra tips, more than sympathetic smiles and extra days off. She needed – _more_. She needed retribution, or the certain kind of satisfaction that came with watching someone's whole world burn down while you hold the matches. She didn't _want_ to 'get over it', as Nik had succinctly put.

She pulls her hand away from her face and realizes that what she does want, what she does need, and what she does _deserve_, is to be angry.

.

.

Dangerously quiet, she sets down the rolling pin and turns to Klaus, clasps her hands together and lowers her head. "Are you there? It's me, Rebekah."

Klaus scowls. "What are you doing?"

"Praying, brother. To you," Rebekah says sweetly. "Dear Nik, do you think it's going to start snowing anytime soon? Christmas is almost here."

The air is sticky, the confusion on her brother's face enough to make her smirk into her fingertips.

"I'm feeling awfully sad lately," she continues, "and none of my brothers give a damn."

"Rebekah," Elijah begins, a warning in his tone, but she pays him no more attention than she would their competitors across the road.

Rebekah stares straight into Klaus' eyes. "And while you're at it, do you think you could make yourself less of a dick?"

Klaus feels dread settling in his stomach and in the way he keeps pounding on the dough, but he clenches his hands into fists, pushes it aside. "What do you think you're playing at?"

"I'm not playing at anything," Rebekah hisses through her teeth. "_You _are, playing God with the touch of your finger, with your ridiculously-developed holier than thou complex—you think just because you keep your head down and say nothing that I don't see right through you?"

Elijah slaps the paper down on the counter. "Rebekah!"

Klaus rounds the table, and while his sleeves had long been pushed to his elbows, he's metaphorically rolling them up again. "If this is about your precious Matt—"

"Oh however did you figure it out?" Rebekah shrieks, moving around the table as well; doesn't want him _anywhere_ near her— "He was the love of my life, and the fact that you—that both of you!—think it should be easy for me to just forget him, _oh he's just another busboy_." She swipes furiously at her eyes. "You think a life is so dispensable—"

"Because it is!" Klaus thunders, and the rolling pin goes flying across the room. "Look—" He snatches up a berry and they watch it untwist its rotted leaves, its shrivelled form turning into something lush and beautiful. Then he drops it and he touches a mouldy apple, watches it bloom to life, and the berry he'd touched earlier turned rotten once more. He snatches up berry after berry, upending bowls and bottles, sending jars crashing to the checkered floor and pans flying to crash against the glass frames on the wall, until Elijah's suddenly across the room holding Klaus' arm in a vice grip, shielding him from a shaking Rebekah who was covering her eyes and screaming enough Nik stop that you've made your point _you're scaring me_ _enough just stop_.

Klaus wrenches his arm away from Elijah. His breathing comes out in slow starts and stops, heavy in his ears. When he steps towards Rebekah she visibly balks, and he tries not to feel a twinge in his chest. "Now, I wonder what would happen if Elijah were to trip and fall, to hit his head and die. I could touch him and joy of joys, he would live—but what happens sixty seconds later?"

Rebekah shakes her head, I do not know; please don't make me say it. Klaus has her by the shoulders now, forcing her to look at him. "_You_ die, Rebekah, isn't that the damnedest thing? And I could touch you, bring you back, but then someone else would die, and then someone else, and it would go on and on and on. You think I enjoy playing God? Getting to pick who lives and who rots? It's not some form of _divinity. _It's another notch on my belt." His voice lowers as he leans closer. Rebekah stares, transfixed: she's forgotten how to breathe. "What makes you think Matt's death would mean any different to me?"

Elijah sighs and pulls Rebekah away from him, wraps his arm around her with the mannerisms of an older brother who's not quite used to giving hugs. "That's enough damage for one morning, Klaus."

Rebekah snorts into Elijah's shoulder. "It's enough damage for two lifetimes. _Kol_ would know." She pushes away from him, eyes wet and cheeks red – rips her apron off and throws it at Klaus' face. "I _quit_."

"Third time this bloody month then?" Klaus retorts to her retreating back.

She shoots him a tear strained glare over her shoulder and all but kicks the glass doors open, causing a crack near the handles. Her yell of "I don't care, dick wad!" is audibly heard through the crisp morning.

"That's coming out of your paycheck!" Klaus roars after her, "if you're even lucky enough to get it, you _ungrateful, tip-squandering_—"

"Twelve!" Elijah bellows and Klaus flinches: rarely does he raise his voice, and this makes twice already. He reaches behind the barrels of flavouring and pulls out Klaus' not-so-secret stash of whiskey, and proceeds to Irish up his coffee.

Klaus plucks the bottle from Elijah and takes a swig. "Enlighten me."

Elijah ignores him until he's done stirring his coffee. He doesn't start speaking until he's back in his seat.

"Twelve on a scale of one to ten, on how much of a prick you have been." He makes a grand show of pulling back the sleeve of his jacket to glance at his wristwatch. "And it's only 7:30 in the morning. I say you've exceeded yourself, brother."

Klaus doesn't say a thing as he picks up the remnants of the argument, sweeping shattered glass into corners and straightening the picture frames. He scoops up the berries, sighs when they wilt in his hands. "She knows I mean well."

"No she doesn't," Elijah says simply. "She would, if you ever talked about it."

Klaus shrugs and places his rolling pin by his over-kneaded dough. It'd have to be thrown out. He scrapes it into the bin, his lip curling at the morning's waste. "Father… still blames me." It sounds resigned, strained—but he figures it has to be said. "For Kol. Rebekah doesn't, she wasn't there, but you can see it in her eyes sometimes, her little head just thinking away." He leans on the edge of the table and heaves another sigh. "More so since Matt died."

"Maybe that boy was right. Maybe we give Kol too much leeway." Elijah sounds bitter and angry and sad and Klaus kind of wants to cover his ears, _I don't want to listen_, no use wasting away on maybe's and what if's – wake him up when something new happens.

"At any rate, this is bad for the books. Get her back." The threat quiet clear in his voice, Elijah looks triumphant at how sullen his brother looks. "Drop the attitude, too. We offer pies and _hospitality_ for heaven's sake." He starts to stand: coffee finished, yesterday's accounts sorted and today's bookkeeping ready to be botched up by Klaus (and much later, patched up by him Elijah) – this is why's he's the older brother, ever so wise. When he pushes on the door handle to leave it comes off in his hands. "Fix this door, won't you?"

It's all lists and logic – no rhyming, no mug tricks, no powdered sugar to top it all off. The oven dings but Klaus makes no move to check on it. "Is everything just business to you?"

"Family business, Niklaus." And Elijah looks _tired_. "It's the worst kind."

After that, Klaus goes through the motions, mechanically serving and automatically smiling – thrusting bills and accepting cards. This is what Rebekah had wanted, wasn't it? Someone to smile and make light of affairs, someone to bake extra butter into the crusts without even being offended by their lack of faith in his judgement. If his regulars are surprised by his presence they don't show it; they just ask about Rebekah and he laughs, telling them it's her off day and that she's excited to start college soon.

It's all so trivial; he wonders why he doesn't hate it yet.

He's exhausted come closing time, and there's still cleaning up to do. When he's stacking dishes, he catches sight of the sheaf of paper on his dusty work counter. Elijah, all-knowing Elijah, ever dependable Elijah, very much predictable Elijah, had already alphabetized the job applications that Klaus has to go through.

Klaus shuffles through them, crumples them up in his fist and sticks them in the oven. He's satisfied watching them curl up and burn.

.

.

He is working the tables once more and it's day three of his quest for Camelot, Camelot being the I Don't Need Anybody's Help show and its sequel, What Do You Mean This Wasn't What You Fuckin' Ordered?, and the unrated, much anticipated novel adaptation, Kiss My Ass You Lousy Tippers.

Klaus is elbow deep in pie crust and the orders are getting mixed up in his head, and he very nearly spears Logan Fell's arm when he dares grab a slice because Klaus is taking too long.

"Next time," Klaus snarls, "I'm putting this fork through your heart."

Elijah can count on Klaus being hospitable as much as he can count Klaus' streak of never once burning a pie, ever – infinitely.

Besides, Klaus has bigger fish to fry (and more pies to bake) than a few unhappy customers. There's no one managing the till, no one to convince Professor Saltzman that his waistline _isn't_ expanding and an extra slice of butter pecan would surely do no harm, no one to guilt-stare people into leaving more than a quarter in the tip jar.

It was, as Elijah would put it, bad for the books.

And then a child cries, and Klaus doesn't know how to tell its mother that he's seriously considering banning children from his establishment.

He buries his head in his arms, right there amidst the desperate wailings of stupid children, on the curved counter in the middle of his diner in full view of the patrons waiting in their booths, banging on the tables demanding their pies.

This is why he needs Rebekah.

Someone taps on his shoulder. He looks up, and it's one of the Salvatore brothers. The older one, the token wisecracking leather-wearing takes-way-too-long-to-decide-what-he-wants brat. He grimaces; he'd always preferred Stefan.

"Hey, where's my cobbler?" Damon squints at him. "Anyway, are you okay?"

"No," Klaus barks as he whips his towel over his shoulder, "I bake pies, not serve them."

He stalks back in his kitchen, paces and prowls, does an Elijah and lists down every inconceivable idea on every reason why he _shouldn't_, but ends up picking up the phone to call his sister anyway.

.

.

Christmas Day.

Rebekah barely has enough time to adorn the Pie Hole with twinkling lights and streamers, to frost the windows and string silver snowflakes, and to hang up stockings by the espresso machine before swept up with the demands of parties and double-booked pastries. She even hangs mistletoe from the arch of their doorway out of spite, remembering how her brother hated couple being intimate, couples, and just being intimate in general.

The smirk on her face is a magnificent one whenever people passing by the shop are greeted to the view of Tyler Lockwood sneaking a quick one on Elena Gilbert or Damon Salvatore all but pressing Bonnie Bennett into the door in the urgency of their kiss.

But mostly Rebekah tiptoes around Klaus, a reminder that while she is willing to grant forgiveness over most things, she's not likely to forget.

Klaus thinks what a nuisance this is as he bakes ten lemon meringue pies for Mayor Lockwood, who'd cajoled him into doing the catering at her annual Christmas party despite him sending a neatly-worded reply that he simply

Does

Not

Do

Parties.

She sends back a letter, _From the desk of Mayor Lockwood_, oh dear Klaus, I wonder who talked Pastor Remy into choosing a different landmark for his church so as to make room for your lovely little diner? Think of the children.

Klaus pens back his reluctant agreement, and also tells her to never mention children to him ever again.

All she does is send him a check in advance, and if it weren't for the fact that it soothed his conscience and Elijah's worry that they were behind on the numbers, he would've told her to eat it.

Rebekah finds one of his letters on the counter, notes the slants of his enraged penmanship and reminds him that it was _his_ bright idea to open a diner in the first place; he better damn well act like it.

Klaus bares his teeth, tells _her_ to eat it, but all she does is give him a sickeningly sweet smile before saying, "Or what, you'll stick a fork in my chest?"

He stares at her, wondering.

"Word travels fast, Nik." Rebekah rolls her eyes, but the anxiety in the set of her brows betrays her. "You don't want to start losing customers, do you?"

No, he concedes, rubbing his chin. He supposed not.

Which is how he ends up in a corner of Mayor Lockwood's grandiose living room, artfully arranging pies in silver dishes that gleamed under the golden chandeliers.

"Oh Klaus," Mayor Lockwood gushes, "this looks lovely." She quite tactfully moves the cream dish just a little to the left.

Klaus feels his eye begin to twitch.

Rebekah sweeps into the corner before, flashes a charming smile to Mayor Lockwood and quickly leads her away. As she's going she hisses to Klaus, "_We should have left you at the diner_."

Too late now, Klaus glowers. They'd left the Pie Hole in the care of Hayley, the temp who sometimes came to cover the weekends when Rebekah decided that she simply had to watch that new movie about those three guys who get smashed and always seem to leave their fourth friend behind in uncouth places. She's of the gum-cracking variety, part of the youth movement that had grown up with wry punch lines and drawling sarcastic jokes meant only for the sarcastic drawler to understand.

To say that Klaus doesn't understand would be an understatement, but Elijah had gotten someone to steal his favourite rolling pin and hide it in different places, so he has no choice but to hire her.

"As a trial," he makes sure she knows.

Hayley just shoots him a (sarcastic) smile and points him out the door.

.

.

The party is in full swing by the time 7pm rolls around, a phrase here which means Tyler Lockwood somehow got his head stuck between the banisters of the staircase, Liz Forbes had gone through four flutes of champagne, and Professor Saltzman had finally mustered up the courage to look Meredith Fell in the eye. Mistletoes were grabbed from doorways and held above objects of their affections, classical music wafted gaily through the vast rooms, there was dancing, singing, the toasting of champagne, and other wonderful sights to behold.

Rebekah drinks it all in, giggles when a boy asks her to dance despite the logo on the back of her shirt. She seemed to forget that she is on a job altogether, only going to check on the pies in the kitchen when she feels like she absolutely needs to.

Klaus is replenishing the lemon meringue and triple berry when he spots a familiar face in the mass of slow-dancing couples – the angular jaw, the dark hair swept back. _Elijah_, he thinks with astonishment, before remembering that Elijah was on a business trip in Versailles, something to do with Marcel. Besides, Elijah would never just drop into parties like these; he was much too busy for that even without the holidays.

Kol looks eerily like Elijah frozen in time; his chest constricts when Kol flashes him a cheeky smile – Klaus blinks and suddenly Kol's gone. He feels his hand tighten on a pie server almost on reflex and follows Kol into the crowd.

He finds his brother upstairs, surveying the party from the shadows. His hands rest lightly on the smooth wooden balustrades and he looks so at ease to be surrounded by the grand tapestries and oiled antique furniture that Klaus suspects that this is not his first time being here.

"If you wanted to hurt me, you should have grabbed something more wooden," Kol says without turning around. "Like a toothpick, or your butter pecan pie. It's a little dry."

Affronted, Klaus wants to slide the silver pie server right between his brother's ribs, but opts out when he sees the invitation sticking out of Kol's pocket. Sighing, he joins his brother at the balustrade. "Mayor Lockwood really wants everyone in one place, doesn't she?"

"Well it is Christmas," Kol says, as though Klaus needs reminding. "More than what I can say about my own family."

Klaus puts his weight on his hands, leans down on the smooth mahogany; allows himself to breathe. "You'd best leave. Rebekah won't be too happy to see you."

"But you see, brother…" Kol fishes a card out of his pocket. It's glittery and pink, with hearts printed on it. "I came to apologize. Couldn't find one that said "sorry I killed your boyfriend", so I chose a Valentine's themed one instead. Gave me an excuse to buy chocolates as well."

Klaus looks at his brother for a very long time. He still looks young, not yet twenty, his cheeks not even hollowed the way Elijah's is. Kol looks as though the dew is still upon him, fresh and clean in the winter air, like nothing could rip it away. But there's an emptiness in his eyes, the sort of sadness reserved for soldiers back from war, the sort of silence that you feel on nights when you cannot sleep but just stare at your ceiling.

Klaus sees his own eyes reflecting back at him and has to turn away.

Kol rests a hand on his shoulder. "You look tired, Nik."

"I'm just getting old." And he can feel it, in his bones, the weight of the world crashing down on him. He wants to wrap his arms around it, crush it right back, but he's afraid to _touch_. "It's quite annoying."

"I suppose I would know how that feels," Kol says, "if you hadn't let me die."

Klaus shuts his eyes then, the weight almost crippling. "Kol—"

"The poison's still in me. I can't get it out." Kol glances down at the party below them, looking grim. "Every single one of those people down there is a meal. I _hunger_ for them; my teeth hum just looking at their throats. I crave nothing else. Which is a shame, really. I do miss your triple berry pie."

"I didn't mean—"

"You didn't mean to, you didn't know the extent of your powers, you were afraid, blah blah blah," Kol intones, already bored. "And now I have to watch my younger brothers grow older than me and compel people to forget my real age. And what do you do? Pour your angst into pies."

Despair is not something he's unfamiliar with, but he's always been good at hiding it – all of a sudden he's eight years old again, baking pie after pie after pie, flour dusting his cheeks made worse by his hand that keeps trying to brush them away, the way Kol's looking at him.

"I was eight," Klaus reminds him, vexed.

Kol snorts. "Yeah, well, I'm supposed to be thirty-nine. How's that for perspective?" After a while, he sighs. His apology is stiff, but it's one anyway, and Klaus knows they don't come at just any expense. "Look, I'm… sorry. You were a kid. But you could have just gone for it."

_It wasn't hard_, Kol's eyes seem to say. Just a touch, one touch, and it would have been so much different.

All at once, it's just too much. He's sick of standing down, sick of the gnarled nails pointed at his direction; he brings the sharp end of pie server down on the balustrade, a sharp stab, and it stands there vibrating. "What about the company you kept, then? The venom in your system that made you who you are today? We're not going to talk about that, about your little trips to Professor Maxfield's?"

"That's none of your concern," Kol says. His eyes flash; his voice seeps acid. "He stopped being one, after I snapped his neck. We're not so different, you and I. We grant lives as easily as we take them."

Years ago, Klaus would have scoffed at this, turned his back and walked away, _you're delusional_. But now… now, he's not so sure. He looks at Kol's hands and sometimes they drip red, but were they any different than his own? He thinks of Rebekah, of the furious tilt of her lips, _It's not the first time you've let someone live_, but it also meant that it wasn't the first time he'd let someone die. It's all a frenzy in his mind and he wants to bring a fist to his temple, knock some clarity into his head. But Kol's still there, staring at him with an expression devoid of emotion.

Klaus knows better.

"I'm going to check on the pies," he tells Kol starchily and heads for the stairs. He shoulders his way through the crowd, on more than one occasion almost walking into a faceful of pie – were people seriously dancing and eating at the same time? – checks on the dessert table before finally making it to the kitchen.

There's someone in the kitchen tending over his pies, but it's not Rebekah.

"You're not Rebekah," he tells the man bent over the banana custard. The dropper in his hand stills.

"You've good observation," the man responds, before leaping over the table and the pies straight for Klaus.

Had Rebekah actually been there, she would have rated their crash to the ground a 6, the way Klaus' elbow hits the man's neck a 7, and the right hook Klaus receives a 7.5. Had Rebekah actually been there to watch over the pies, maybe Klaus wouldn't be trying to knee the man's groin, and maybe the man wouldn't be trying to claw Klaus' eyes out with his caramel-stained fingers.

Klaus gathers a fistful of the man's shirt and swings him into the stainless steel fridge with as much force as he can muster; the pounding in his head doesn't help much. The man groans and Klaus keeps his foot down on his back, and tries to catching his breath. Wiping his bloody lip with the back of his hand, Klaus realizes he's a little dazed—but not too dazed to the point where he can't recognize the donut insignia on the man's collar, and the dose of Ipicac he'd dripped into his pies.

With newfound strength, he heaves the man to his feet and slams his back against the wall. "Who are you?" he hisses, but the man just blinks at him, wincing. "Did Mikael send you?"

"You're going to have to kill me," he grins, blood colouring his teeth.

Bloodlust hums in his veins, and Klaus, almost spitting in his fury, just might. He snarls when he's angry, dangerously quiet when he's on to something – mother had always called him her wolf. My little wolf, she'd say fondly and ruffle his hair. What trouble comes knocking today?

The world held as much mystery as it did his mother's rounded belly, and he would press his ears to it, his mother coaxing him, coddling him, _listen to your sister breathe_.

Just breathe, Niklaus. Breathe along with your sister.

And he does, in and out, in and out. When he's calmer (or as calm as a man is after he's found that his pies had been spiked with poison), Klaus shoves the man one last time for good measure, sneers, "A little melodramatic, don't you think?" but lets him go.

Which is a stupid move on his part, because the man produces a knife, and Klaus barely registers the sharp flash of silver before it's lodged in his side. Blinded with pain, he staggers back, presses a hand down on his abdomen. His palm is printed in red on his white shirt and along the wall as he struggles to get away, and he can see it all: this is Klaus Mikaelson, and this is how he dies. Can't bring yourself back to life when you yourself are dead, can you?

This is Klaus, and this is how he goes.

In the kitchen of the Lockwood Manor, covered in pie crust.

It's such a ridiculous notion he might laugh, but the pain keeps his teeth gritted together. The man advances, bloodied knife still in hand, bloodied teeth still bared at him, but then his neck twists in an odd way – Klaus hears a snap and suddenly he's lying in a heap on the marble floor, Kol standing above him.

"Who's Donut Guy here?" Kol prods the dead man's side with the toe of his shoe.

"Well, we'll never know now, can we?" Klaus coughs, and the front of his shirt is lightly sprayed with his blood and spit.

He can practically hear Kol rolling his eyes as he crouches down. "Who knew on the brink of death, that you'd be so stupid? Touch him."

"I don't—" It's an effort to sit up, even more of an effort to shake his head. The kitchen is starting to sway around him, and the only clear thing he sees are his brother's dark eyes peering at him through the stark white. "Can't. Too tired."

The light is too bright in his eyes.

He wants to tell his sister he's sorry. He's dying, and he's sorry. He wants to walk her home from school again, take her through shady alleyways like he used to, the brave older brother who isn't afraid of a man with a knife (but look at him now). She's guiding him now, pulling and tugging at his hand even as he's saying, "Rebekah—leave it, no darling, we should be on our way now—"

His sister's little blonde head fills his vision, but suddenly it's a different blonde, so young and so still, lying in that little alleyway—

"Leave it," he whispers, pupils dilating, "Leave it alone."

He can't hear Kol's response over how loud his breathing is in his ears, but suddenly his mouth is filled with the metallic taste of blood – warm blood, heady blood, blood that isn't his. He almost chokes, wants to wrench his head away, but Kol's wrist is firmly pressed to his lips.

"Relax, would you?" Kol snaps. "I'm trying to heal you."

"What's going on here?"

Rebekah.

Now's his chance—

A clatter of heels against marble and suddenly she's kneeling down by his side, hands on his chest as he fights, holding him down. What are you doing? he wants to ask, but he's too weak. I don't want this poison in my system, get him away from me—Rebekah's hands push him down harder.

"Stay still," she grits. Her cheeks are still pink from dancing, her hair looks a bit windswept. "Stay down Nik, or so help me God I will kill you myself."

Wheezing, Klaus slumps back against the cabinets, tearing his shirt from where it's tucked under his trousers as he feels the torn flesh in his stomach mend itself. He takes in great lungfuls of air as his head clears and his vision stops flitting in and out, searching for his brother – but Kol's already gone. He breathes a laugh through his nose. So much for Valentine's cards.

Rebekah gingerly picks up the discarder dropper off the floor and sniffs at it. "It smells like…"

"Ipicac," Klaus says. The sweat is cooling on his skin and his pulse is racing, but he manages to find his feet. His legs are shaking; he grabs the counter to steady himself and waves Rebekah's hand away. "Makes you vomit. A lot."

The man on the floor is young, barely older than Kol had been the day he died. He smells faintly of powdered sugar as Klaus bends down over him. His hand hovers in mid-air, but hearing Rebekah's impatient click of her tongue makes him reach down and touch him.

He immediately sits up and Klaus backs away, already pushing back his sleeve to check on the time. "Alright, first thing's first: you're dead."

The man groans. "Mikael said this would happen."

Klaus exchanges a look with Rebekah over his shoulder. "What's your name?"

"General None of Your Beeswax," he shoots, surveying them with disdain.

"Be nice, General," Klaus wags a finger in his face, "or I'll touch you again. Now tell me why Mikael sent you, other than wanting to sabotage this dinner party."

General's eyes are crossed as he stares at Klaus' finger, and Klaus can see sweat start to collect in the man's temples. He's going to break, Klaus thinks triumphantly. General is going to tell him _everything_, and he'll finally have something on his father, finally be able to wipe that smug grin off his face whenever he swung by the diner to run a gloved finger down the mantelpiece or pick at the crusts of his pie.

Wolfish in his feat, Klaus leans closer and bears down on him a frightening grin, and he almost forgets to check his wristwatch. He flicks his eyes away for a third of a second—then Rebekah's gasping, jostling his arm. He whips his head around and sees a blonde in bright floral prints rooted at her spot in the doorway, her hand still twisted around the doorknob.

"I—" she waves her empty glass uselessly, "I can come back."

It takes only a second.

Klaus doesn't even have the time to ask her what she's seen – judging from the look in her eyes it was _everything_ – doesn't even have time to convince her it's all one really twisted Christmas prank when General None of Your Beeswax's boot is kicked into his chest and he bangs against a table leg, winded. Rebekah's pushed to the floor, too shocked to even scream, and suddenly cold wind is blowing into the room as the back door swings on its hinges. Klaus scrambles to his feet, fingers clawing at the air where, moments before, the hem of the General's shirt was billowing in his wake.

The Lockwood's lawn is vast and dark, and the General is already lost to it.

"Shit," Klaus curses, and turns back to the doorway—as his luck would have it, the blonde is gone as well. He brings his fist down on the table. "_Fuck."_

"Nik." Rebekah's eyes are wide, fearful, but there's a hint of wonder in them, and nope, Klaus won't have it, Klaus _can't_ have it—he turns away.

The kitchen is too bright, too white, and he yearns for the monochrome of his diner, of the warm glows and nostalgic accents. His freshly-healed wound tingles and he traces a finger on it, knowing full well that Rebekah is aware of how he's standing steady on his feet when only mere minutes ago he had been lying in a pool of his own blood. He presses down, wondering why Rebekah hasn't brought it up yet.

He busies himself with the cabinets, opening and closing, rooting around until he finds a bottle of Bailey's as Rebekah puts a hand to her forehead, pushes her hair back. She looks ashen. "The girl… I recognized her."

"You should. You saved her." Klaus finds a crystal glass, plops it down on the table with a clatter. He checks his wristwatch again.

59 seconds.

Here we go.

He fills it to the brim with whiskey and downs it in one go. The inferno burning down his throat and coursing through his blood is a welcome feeling, and he reaches for the bottle again. He needs another drink before the screaming starts.

.

.

**tbc**

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**yay notes:** you made it to the end! care to leave a review? maybe yell at me for the lack of klaroline here? there will be more in the next (and final) chapter, i promise - i just needed to have a solid foundation before we dive into all the angsty goodness.

second chapter will be up as soon as my beta gives it the thumbs up. in the meantime... click the review button? i'd love to hear what you think.


	2. park that car, drop that phone

**yay notes: **Hello beautiful readers and wonderful reviewers. So you may have noticed that the rating just got bumped up to an M. Ahem. I wonder what's up with that.

Anyway, I know a few of you have expressed confusion in the last chapter, and I hope this one clears it up. It's the final chapter, yaaaaaay. Anyway, pies the flavour of your choosing to whoever reviews, delivered by grumpycat Klaus himself. This fic is _still_ for Amanda whom I will love her forever for prompting this – it's been a blast to write.

BUT. BEFORE YOU EVEN THINK OF READING THIS CHAPTER, I strongly urge you to **drop everything you're doing** and **freak the frickle frack out** because DJ aka flesh and bone telephone updated not one, but _two fics _in the span of one week, and do you know when the last time this happened? When the last time our klaroline muses went running amok like this? That's right, two years ago, bitches. I haven't freaked out in my pre-fic notes like this for years; the last time I remember screaming about dj is in one of my updates when I wasn't even 17 teen yet, and now here I am on the cusp of being a full grown adult flower (I turn 20 in August!) and I'm still doing it just shows how AMAZING her writing is and how much of an impact they leave on your life. I need her writing like I need air; I need her tragically neurotic attention to detail like I need to drown a burning kingdom with dust, and if _only_ you knew how I feel you'd be clicking out of this fic to go read hers. In fact… Get on it get on it get on it get on it (sung in the tune of High School Musical's Bet On It).

AND ONE LAST THING! Shout out to Jennifer (CBK1000) because it's her birthdaaaaaay. So I'm a bit early, whutevs. I just needed to tell you now because I'm probably in Thailand right now miles away from wifi. Happy porn day, my friend. She's definitely one of my favourite author's here so you should go drop kinky shiet in her tumblr inbox and tell her I sent you. like, right now.

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**2. park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor (dream about me)**

—

Professor Saltzman is a mess.

He's giving a lecture on the crisis of the third century and diocletianic reforms when suddenly his shoulders are heaving and his nose is wheezing and Melissa Harp from the first row has to pass him a Kleenex.

"It's clean," she assures him, despite it being crumpled and dug from the recesses of her pockets. To Caroline, she whispers, "It's practically a relic. I've had these jeans since freshman year."

Caroline glances down at her notebook and sighs. Her slanted script have hardly filled a page – Professor Saltzman had mumbled through ten minutes of barbarian invasions, and his diatribe on the ruin of the local elite had been forced at best with stammers and jerks in between, when finally, he'd collapsed on his table crying out some woman's name.

Like, right in the middle of his European History class.

It was all really sad.

But Professor Saltzman's breakdown, Melissa Harp tells her, has been a long time coming.

Caroline half-listens as she stows her notebook and pen back into her bag. Melissa Harp tells her that since she's new, she's probably going to think it's a little weird (it's a lot weird) but she's just going to have to get used to it. Melissa Harp tells her that he can't help it.

"He has a fragile soul," Melissa Harp insists. "He's _sensitive_."

"What a stud," Caroline replies agreeably as they step out of the lecture hall and head for the stairs. She's shivering – the vents in this place went on and on for miles, and the people who were supposed to come and repair the heaters probably got lost in there. Kind of like those poor whales that get disoriented and, like, beach themselves. That mouldy bologna smell wafting through the vents in the cafeteria is probably them.

She tells Melissa Harp this, but all Melissa does is wrinkle her nose, _gross_.

Whatever. She'd had a weird weekend, okay?

It's warmer in the main hall, where students mill around the notice board and huddle together for warmth. The stone flooring is so old they it's speckled and grooved in places, eroded by centuries' worth of footsteps from people coming and going.

The walls are smooth varnished wood that reflect the light streaming in from the windows: it's a pleasant winter day, snowflakes just beginning to settle on the trees. The whole college is just buzzing with post-holiday jitters, which Caroline finds uplifting and even a little charming, when a boy thrusts a cracker at her in passing and she tugs at it to produce a loud bang and a paper hat.

When she steps outside, her footsteps sink three inches and leave little holes on the ground, and she looks down at them with a quiet satisfaction, all thoughts of her manicure chipping away in the cold forgotten.

It never snowed in Virginia.

Here, there's plenty of it sticking to the soles of her boots and the folded cuffs of her jacket. She thinks she'll collect them; tiny little snowflakes in the lines of her jacket and in the curls of her hair, shake them off in her room and watch them melt in her shag carpet.

Melissa's still talking, and Caroline feels a twinge of guilt – stand taller, walk faster. Chin up, laugh a bit – _Pay attention, Caroline_, Professor Hawke always used to say.

"…still so heartbroken over Dr. Fell, _oh_ she was so gorgeous, wish I had her hair…"

Hair. Pretty girls. She can do this, she was the queen of all the pretty girls, anyway, isn't that what Dad says? Caroline smiles at Melissa: encouraging, friendly.

Melissa Harp blows out a yearning sigh, a white trail. "It's so sad, like all he used to do was sit around in this diner and like, pine after her. And now she's dead. Just fell down in the middle of a party, like a heart attack or something. Sad, right? I mean, how tragic is th… hey, you gonna keep up or what?"

Caroline, without realizing, had stopped in her tracks. "Did you say diner?"

"Uh." Melissa cocks her head. "Yeah?"

Caroline rushes up to her, hands gripped tight on her new friend's shoulder. "The… same diner that did the catering for Mayor Lockwood's party last week?"

"Yeah, I guess, just – personal space much?" Melissa wriggles away. "You were there?"

"My dad was invited," Caroline says absently. "I came with him."

Melissa continues walking, kicking at the odd dried leaf, a pinecone. She drags lines into the cobblestones with the shuffling of her boots. "I would've gone I guess, if it weren't for the sick blowout at Vicki's. You know her, right? Vicki Donovan? Poor girl, she just lost her brother. He was around our age, apparently he, like, _fell_ while cleaning or something. What a way to go, right? Vicki should so sue the Pie Hole, that's what I think, but we love them too much and besides, it's such a hassle—"

"The Pie Hole, was it called?" Caroline interrupts, scrabbling for a pen, God, she needs to write this down or something. "Which street?"

"Corner of Maple and Vine, but – hey! Where are you going?"

The words "pie binge!" are barely out of her mouth before she's running, the tassels of her snow hat flying behind her. She can hear Melissa Harp's voice getting fainter and fainter as she skips over frozen puddles and dodges dog walkers and cat walkers alike. She had just one thought on her mind, and that was to get to the diner, yes, get to the diner, push open the door and, and – well, she'll figure out the rest later.

This town becomes a blur of purple doors and flower pots and snow-dusted front steps as she runs. She bumps into fewer people the deeper into town she gets, and really, she should have slowed down, looked around, maybe ask for directions, but always determined to do things on her own, she is – until finally she's all alone in the street.

Her jog slows into a skip into a stroll and she groans, because of _course_ she'd taken a wrong turning. Maple and Vine, she'd scrawled in the bit of paper she now clutches in her hand. Looking around the deserted streets and boarded-up windows, this was so not it.

She walks around anyway, something about the scraped-up walls and dusty pavements pulling her in. She stops short in front of an alleyway, pulls a hand down its red-bricked walls, and something clicks into place in her mind.

It was here, wasn't it? She'd been mugged here once.

As absent-minded then as she is now, she'd taken a wrong turning on the way home from – somewhere. The post office maybe, to send grandma a postcard. Dad had let her out on her own (_just don't tell your mother_) she'd felt so tall walking down the street in her yellow galoshes, her hand wrapped firmly around her stamp-money.

Caroline steps further into the alley. She'd been eight, maybe nine, and she'd lost her favourite necklace that day: the silver prancing horse she'd gotten for a birthday she hardly remembers. She counts the bricks on one wall, wondering what else these walls have seen, what other misfortune that cost other people a knock on the head as strong as the one she'd gotten.

Hit her right in the head, like – what an asshole.

She doesn't remember telling Dad about it. Maybe it was the fall, the shock of her head hitting gravel and then wham, nothing. If not she would have told him about the girl who'd held her hand out when she came to, of the elder brother, much much much older than the two of them, fidgeting from being in such a shady area of town.

"You hit your head and fell," she said.

"You scraped your knee, too," she said.

She reached for Caroline's hand. "Do you wanna walk home with me?"

And she'd peered down at Caroline with eyes as blue as her own and asked if she wanted to be friends. They walked ahead of the girl's brother, who kept his hands in his pockets as the rain started falling in sheets of blue and grey around them. Caroline went straight to bed after that, her head a little woozy. That winter was probably the last time she had visited Dad; Mom finds out about her necklace and is furious, even more so when Caroline had just shrugs when asked how she lost it.

Her sharp Sheriff eyes train over her pale cheeks, her trembling hands. "Let me see your head."

A phone call. An argument.

A terrible one too, judging by the shouting and brandishing of hands and the banging of doors even though Daddy was a million miles away, probably doing the same thing.

A bump on the head and suddenly Caroline doesn't see Daddy for ten years.

Ten long winters without his dry roast chicken and mushy carrots, his winsome smiles and toothpaste breath, without his big warm hand around hers when they walk around the labyrinth roads of this new town he'd decided to call home, this place with its winding turrets and peeling shutters and horse-voiced pageboy who still bellowed the day's news every morning and every night.

Gawd, it's the 21st century, she wants to tell them. Ever heard of free wifi? Online newsletters? _Central heating?_

Ten years away and nothing much has changed, not these empty alleyways with its crumbling corners and masonry that reached the sky. A knock on the head and suddenly Caroline sees everything – the girl with yellow pigtails who'd just wanted a friend; the boy whose hands he kept hidden away in his pockets like he had whole universes within his palms.

But somehow – _somehow_—

She closes her eyes, rubs at them with her cold fingers. It was that damn dinner party. Mayor Lockwood's dazzling Crest white strips smile, the strawberries floating in the champagne. There's more she's not remembering, and then there are things she tries to forget, but can't.

The facts were these: The man had been dead, she knows, she's _sure_, but one touch and suddenly he's whooping ass and kicking down doors. The boy who touched him was a man grown now, with blood sopping down his shirt and fury bared in his teeth.

The girl standing in the doorway was the girl lying in a puddle in the alleyway, and this girl sees this spectacle unfold before her (this girl sees a man come back to life), and this girl—

She runs.

The facts were these: Champagne is scandalously ignored, Tyler's head is still stuck between the bannisters and he calls out for help, but she totally disregards him; just grabs her coat from the coat check girl and all but flings herself out the front door, _peace out_.

The facts were these: With the wind biting at her knees and her breath blowing up great plumes of white about her face she runs, she runs and doesn't stop, not for the stitch screaming in her side, not for her breath that's starting to come up in pants and wheezes.

It's a little after midnight when her phone starts blowing up with concerned pseudo-angry texts from Dad that she finally slows to a stop, red to her ears, the hem of her coat damp with mud. She's fidgety, restless; her hands won't stop shaking, so she shoves them in her pockets, scrapes her nails into her palms.

It's ridiculous, she thinks, her first day back and this damn town's already started to make up for lost time.

It's ridiculous, she thinks, all this running.

"It's ridiculous!" she cries into the night.

The stars shiver and the naked trees scratch at the wind, but they give no sign of having heard her. It's ridiculous, it's insane, it's witchcraft, it's whatever the hell she wants to call it, because she's pretty sure there have been no recorded incident of the scene she'd just witnessed back there in that white kitchen – not in life, not ever.

She doesn't know how long she stands in that alleyway, fingers digging into red clay brick, snow falling around her cheeks in light touches, cold caresses. She's vaguely aware of how… _dramatic_ it all is, like those gaudy K-dramas Davina makes her watch.

Her phone bleats out her dad's ringtone and she clicks the green button, glad for the distraction.

Dad's voice fills her ear, warm and gruff all at the same time. "You on your way home yet?"

"Pretty much," Caroline says, obediently turning her feet to the right direction.

"Great. I made lasagna—hey, what are you… get your fork out of there!" There's a shuffling, some muffled laughter in the background. "Steven wants me to tell you it's some delicious lasagna. I'll try holding him off, Carebear, but I can't promise it won't all be finished by the time you get home."

"I'll run," she promises.

She stuffs the bit of address on that bit of paper in the back pocket of her jeans. Tomorrow, then.

.

.

Steven Forbes (née Langdon) insists on setting the mood for every occasion in life, be it incense in the bathrooms, bringing an actual food truck to all his step-daughter's meets, and the ever timeless lighting of candles during dinnertime. Usually, his antics are met with exasperated sighs or the humiliated hiding-of-face behind pompoms, and sometimes Steven wonders idly if he's overstepped some line as he sneaks into Caroline's school gym in the middle of the night (after a secretly-booked flight ticket to Virginia to avoid Bill's judgmental gaze), fixing lighters and adjusting the Swarovski, not that he doesn't trust his step-daughter's taste in style, but _oh _honey, this stage could do with one more smoke machine.

The look on her face as she steps up in her beautiful white gown wipes any doubt in his mind, and he gives himself a little pat on the back from up in the rafters where's he's perched, hidden from sight, and adjusts his utility belt. Line? _What line_?

Steven surveys Caroline affectionately over his glass of red wine. At the head of the table, Bill frowns down at the day's newspaper, the screen of his phone shedding light on the small print. Every now and then he'd cast an annoyed but affectionate look at Steven, who had set the rules: lights switched _off _during dinner.

Bill casts the newspaper aside with a sigh. So much for reading about Dr. Fell's post-mortem. "How was school today, Caroline?"

"It was good," Caroline ventures, spearing a cherry tomato. "Professor Saltzman had a nervous breakdown, I found out Vicki Donovan had a brother who just died, there may or may not be a dead repairman in the vents of the cafeteria. And – oh! I learned about the diocletanic's reforms."

"Lovely," Steven claps.

Done with her meal, Caroline gets up to wash her plate. With her hand gripping her sponge she asks, oh so casually, "Dad?"

"Yeah?" both Steven and Bill pipe up – one airy and the other brusque.

Caroline smiles down at the soapy suds. "The dad who's stayed here longer."

"That would be me." Steven pushes his chair back and plunks the empty casserole dish next to the sink. "What's up?"

"How long has the Pie Hole been here?"

Steven frowns, thinking. "Not that long."

Huh. Caroline scrubs a little harder. "What about the person that owns it, then?"

"The Mikaelsons?" Bill says, twisting in his seat. "Why would you want to know about them? And be careful with that - you're scraping the Teflon off."

There's a gleeful grin on Steven's face as he leans in and jabs her side with his spoon. "Got a little crush, Carebear?"

A crush? As _if_. The notion's so absurd she grips her sponge tighter, spilling soap suds into her palm. "_No_," she says, bristling, "it's just, you know, people are so in love with their pies and stuff."

"They're some British family who moved here way back when," Steven says, waving it off. "Elijah's the one who really runs it; Klaus just bakes the pies."

"Klaus," Caroline echoes quietly, even as the word _British_ resounds inside her. She feels her cheeks warm, and – _urgh_, _Care_, can you not be so shallow right now? So what if some hanky panky guy who happened to bring a dead person back to life had an accent? He was still some hanky panky guy _who happened to bring a dead person back to life._

Bill shakes his head. "They're constantly at war with the donut shop across the street. These people with their family businesses' taking everything so _personally_ – it's some deranged mafia diner, let me tell you."

"But they make good pie," Steven discounts through a mouthful of leftover cheese. "_And_ they have nice faces. Especially the grumpy one."

While Bill just throws his hands up all _oy vey,_ he's used to it, Caroline pushes away from the sink—nope, so not here for this. "I'm going to bed."

"It's 8:20," Steven says, raising an eyebrow.

"Just play _along_," Caroline calls as she runs up the stairs. Her head's swimming.

.

.

Tomorrow—

Caroline passes by Professor Saltzman in the hallway, and he's wearing green tweed and an orange tie, loose around his neck. He looks drawn, his lips are bloodless, and there's an air of something forlorn about him. He's probably going to end up in the college's _Herald_, Voted Most Likely to Have Nervous Breakdown Twice in a Row or something.

Poor thing.

Melissa Harp falls in step with Caroline as she's making her way across the courtyard. The air is rife with the smell of hot chocolate, floral perfume, library books, and stale cheese as students sneak alcohol into aforesaid hot chocolate on school premises to abate the neurosis side effects that came with having double sessions of Astrophysics with Professor Mahmood.

"Could've waited for me yesterday, you bitch," Melissa grumbles. She's fumbling with the tail of her braid – she has a shock of black hair that always seemed to get tangled up in cold weather. "I'm always down for pie. Especially the Mikaelsons'. Their Sweet Potato? Imagine an orgasm but like…" she trails off, fingers telling a story her lips haven't finished, grappling for the right word.

"On your tongue?" Caroline guesses.

"Yes!" Melissa looks at her appraisingly. "You _get_ it. Anyway, I gotta jet. See you tomorrow."

Caroline waves a goodbye and makes her way down the street, slow paces this time, glaring at every street sign to make sure she's on the right one. Last night, she'd painstakingly tapped the address into Google Maps, even dragged the little orange man onto the screen. She's practically memorized every speckle bricked into the walls, every crack in the cobblestone, every tree that lined the corners.

She walks up Maple Grove, eyes raking over the display windows with bated breath, and when she spots Vine Street her breath catches in her throat so sharply she almost passes out. Right there, in the pile of crunchy brown leaves.

For a moment she's eight years old again, splashing into puddles in her yellow galoshes.

Her hands are shaking. She stuffs them into the warm pockets of her coat as she walks up to the circular diner with its large display windows and roof shaped like a pie crust. There's a snazzy neon sign that she swears she's seen in a movie somewhere, and she wonders how it'd look like lighting up the corners of this dark screen, all bright red and burning yellow.

This is it. This is what she's been crazy-obsessing over for a week now, and it's right there at the tips of her fingers, all tangy and delicious (and smothered with cream). She has to get this over with, one way or another.

Taking a deep breath, Caroline pushes open the door. A bell jingles and almond air flutters around her face, coaxing her to loosen the scarf wound tight around her neck. The place is so retro – she's talking checkered patterns, red lights mounted on the walls, black and white marble floors, a circular counter with an old-school mint-green-and-yellow till at the end of it. There's a girl with dark hair slouched behind the till, snapping on her gum.

"Welcome to the Pie Hole," she drawls. Caroline glances at her nametag: HI! I'M A TRAINEE AND MY NAME IS Hayley.

"I—" Caroline stops, flushing. She doesn't really know what to say, now that she's here. Which is weird, because she's Caroline _Forbes_, she single-handedly threw the best prom Mystic Falls High had had in years, all by referring to a worn book she'd sketched her ideas into since she was in seventh grade.

Hayley gives her a bored once over. "You?"

"Pie," Caroline manages to chirp out, and fights the urge to screw her eyes shut, because _seriously_? Hayley doesn't hold it against her; all she does is shuffle to the pie display, grabs one from the bottom and sloppily cuts Caroline a piece.

Cracking her gum the whole way, Hayley gestures to a stool and slides the plate down the counter.

"I… haven't ordered yet," Caroline says to the warm slice of Banana Cream.

Hayley rolls her eyes. "Were you ever going to?"

Caroline blinks at her, privately just appalled, but she's got a point. She picks up her fork and takes a bite – and it's so good her eyes like, legit close, and she may or may not have let out an appreciative moan.

"I think this is the only part I like about this job," she hears Hayley say. "That shitfaced 'I just orgasmed' look you're rocking."

A little embarrassed, Caroline tucks a curl behind her ear. "Um, is Klaus in today? He makes the pies, right?"

"Actually—" Hayley pauses and actually brings herself to her full height. "No. He went out to lunch."

Caroline's eyebrows furrow. "He went out to lunch, during lunch rush hour… at his own diner?" Seriously? "When will he be back?"

"Um." Hayley inspects a nail. "In a jiffy."

Caroline's not exactly sure how long a jiffy's meant to be (not too long, she hopes – Dad wants her back by dinner). A jiffy shouldn't be too long, right? Especially not for the girl who's had Steven set a timer every time she brushed her teeth, to ensure 'adequate and thorough brushing'. She flashes her pearly whites at Hayley, fully prepared to wait. "By the way, why is there duct tape holding up the door handle?"

"Don't question the man," Hayley says it with the straightest face Caroline's ever seen on a person. "If you ask me, the whole family's a little…" she whistles, points her finger at her temple in circles.

Caroline chews on this, and then forks more pie into her mouth so she can chew on that too. "But they make good pie."

.

.

"You'll never believe it!" Rebekah breezes into the kitchen through the back door, looking utterly pissed off. She has a glossy photograph in one hand and a thick brown envelope in the other. "Tyler Lockwood has turned coat! Tyler Lockwood is a _traitor_."

Before Klaus can even utter a befuddled _What_?, Rebekah slaps the photograph down on flour-dusted table. It's a picture of their sometimes-delivery boy and son of the town Mayor, exiting the donut shop across the street.

"So?" Klaus asks, but he feels the sting. "Whatever preferences he has with his dessert has nothing to do wi—"

Rebekah clicks her tongue impatiently, _stupid brother_. "Nik, _look_ at his jacket."

Klaus studies the photo. Brown jacket with pink and green trimming and – wait a minute, he knows this jacket, knows how it scratches in the shoulders and how it's missing some buttons at the bottom. He knows this jacket so well he's surprised it wasn't the first thing he noticed.

"Filthy bastard," he declares vehemently. Tyler is wearing the crest of their _arch nemesis_. The sudden betrayal cuts so deep that Klaus savagely tears the circle of dough he's been trying to cover his Chocolate Cream pie filling with. He drops the dough and brushes his hands off on his trousers. There are more pictures in the envelope – Tyler walking down the street hauling several boxes, Tyler smiling at a customer as he delivers right to their doorstep, Tyler hunched into his jacket as he exits his snow-swathed delivery car.

The _nerve_ of the boy – sure, he only works part-time, coming in about the amount of times Hayley does, but to their competitors across the street? After everything they've _done_ for him? He snatches at the pictures. "How did you get these?"

"Elijah mailed them," Rebekah says simply. "You know how he always knows these things. So what are you going to do?"

Klaus scratches at his stubbly chin, marking it with flour and butter. "I'm going to send him a pie. Yep, Dutch Apple. That's his favourite, isn't it?"

Rebekah blinks owlishly at him. "Send him a pie? Really? He spits in the face of our family venture and you want to send him a gift on the way out?"

"Don't be silly, sister," Klaus mutters as he strides to the pantry. "It's going to be laced with Ipicac. The very thing those wanks tried to spike our pies with."

Rebekah smiles and follows him into the pantry, where he's rifling through the shelves for some cinnamon. "Won't he be suspicious, though?"

Klaus rolls his eyes. "He went to them as silent as a snake in the grass. Obviously he assumes we're still in the dark. You'll ask him over for dinner, serve him this pie – lay the guilt on thick."

The smile on his sister's face widens into something devilish, and they hear the front door jingling almost as if to accommodate it. "Wonderful. Or we could always feed the pie to Kol. Two birds, one stone and all that jazz."

Though tempting, Klaus has to banish the thought from his mind. As scheming and evil as their brother was, he _had_ saved his life not one week ago, even helped kill General None of Your Beeswax, but look where that led them…

The hand that's roving for the jar of cinnamon powder stills.

That girl, he should have stopped her. Instead, he'd waited in that blood-splattered kitchen, counting down the seconds until a person died in the General's place, and what a shame that it had to be Meredith Fell. She'd been an intellectual witty thing, her favourite had been coconut cream pie, and she always left good tips.

"One at a time, sister." His hand closes around the cinnamon and he turns to leave. "And if we don't have any Ipicac, maybe grab the rat pois… oh, bloody _hell—_"

Klaus turns on his heels and almost collides into Rebekah in his haste to get back into the pantry. Rebekah, doubled over a barrel, hisses in pain. "_What _is your problem?"

Klaus, breathing hard, has pressed his back flat against the door of the pantry. He tugs on his sister's arm and makes her peek through the door's little window.

Her face clouds over. "Oh."

.

.

"She's eating pie," Rebekah says with bated breath. "Shouldn't be long now."

Thirty minutes pass and Klaus' legs are starting to cramp from his position on the floor. The pantry isn't even that big to begin with, and with Rebekah taking up more leg room than a normal teenaged-girl should, he has to lean against the door with his feet up on one of the shelves across from him. Rebekah's knees stab into his face whenever she stands on tip toe to peek out the window.

"What's she doing now?" Klaus asks wearily another twenty minutes later, arranging some spice tins into a pyramid.

"Still eating pie." Another knee jab.

Klaus swats her knee away. "Is she a slow eater?"

"Very."

Klaus sighs, and starts on a castle.

.

.

"Sniff it."

"No."

"Come _on, _Nik—_sniff it_."

Klaus groans and leans forward, eyes blindfolded by Tyler's old apron (which they'd taken great pleasure in tearing to pieces) and takes a cautious whiff. "Anise seed."

"Yay," Rebekah whisper-cheers, and Klaus can hear her move aside tins to grab another cannister. "_Rebekah_, we've been at this for more than—"

"Sniff," Rebekah commands.

Why does he even bother? "Cardamom."

"_Wrong_," Rebekah sings. "It's ginger powder. Not bad though, that's seventy-three out of eighty. One more?"

Klaus just groans.

.

.

"Do you think," Rebekah asks, "if you'd touched Kol, he would've come back a vampire anyway? Because you'd have to die to turn into one, don't you? And technically he was already dead…"

Rebekah frowns deeply, mulling this over, confusing herself even more.

Klaus doesn't answer because he's not even sure he knows the answer. "Does this mean you've forgiven him?"

"He's our brother," Rebekah says, and Klaus wonders if it sounds as hollow in her ears as it does in his.

.

.

"Rebekah," Klaus pushes at his sister, "get off of me. My foot's asleep."

"This is stupid," Rebekah complains loudly, getting to her feet. Klaus instantly tugs her down, all the while furiously hissing _Shhh_. "We've been here for more than two hours and _I_—" She pushes open the pantry door with a bang, "am going to say hi."

"Rebekah!" Klaus clambers to his feet as well, but his sister's already in the kitchen, and he shuts his eyes, _cursing_ himself for listening to Elijah's suggestion of having an open kitchen.

"So people can see you work," Elijah had said while drawing a big _X _over the wide door in Klaus' designs. "So I don't have to keep dispelling those rumours that you slip razor blades in your pies."

"What do they take us for, some deranged mafia diner?" Klaus grumbled, but altered his blueprints anyway.

From her designated spot behind the till, Hayley just rolls her eyes and predictably cracks her gum. "You guys can come out now. She left like thirty minutes ago."

Klaus pokes his head out of the pantry, rubbing his sore calves. "Thanks for telling us sooner. So glad our misery seems to have amused you."

"Only _his_ misery. I had a grand time." Rebekah is regarding Hayley with an impressed look on her face. "How did you know not to tell her where he was?"

"For one," Hayley says while procuring a nail file out of thin air, "I've never seen her before; definitely new around here."

Klaus frowns, not following, but allows her to continue.

"For two," Hayley stresses, "she was a pretty girl. A nice girl. A pretty, _nice _girl. A pretty, nice girl asking for Klaus. Doesn't that sound laughable to you?"

Apparently it does, to his sister, who's clutching her stomach from giggling. Klaus glowers at the both of them and goes to collect the dirty dishes from deserted tables that Hayley hadn't even bothered to clear. "You know, Hayley—"

The unruly look in his eyes stops Hayley's laughter, and she slouches a little behind the till.

"—if I weren't about to give you a bonus this month, I'd fire you," Klaus finishes. He sweeps into the kitchen and starts on the washing up. It's late in the evening and _not_ a Tuesday, so the flow of people is slower.

"That's as much of a 'thank you' you'll ever get," he hears his sister say.

It's the slowest day of the week, and he catches Hayley dozing on the countertop, _in plain view of their customers_ more than once; is about to flick her awake when he sees it, the stapled papers she's using as a padding for her head.

"Oi," he says, jostling her awake. "What's this?"

Hayley stretches, and gives a delicate yawn. She blinks a few times, pops a fresh piece of gum into her mouth before answering. "From pretty nice girl. She applied for a job."

Klaus feels his stomach drop to the floor, even hears a little _splat_—but it's just that clumsy Josh staring forlornly at the remains of his pie on the floor. Rebekah's already on the way to clean it.

"Well, Hayley," Klaus says through gritted teeth, "why didn't you talk her out of it?"

"There's a HELP WANTED sign right there."

Klaus shoots her a look that can only be described as scathing, marches out the door, grabs the sign from where it hangs and flings it across the street.

(It hits Damon Salvatore in the face, and that is the story of how he gets to have free pie for an entire week.)

.

.

While all traces of the Girl (he's started capitalizing it in his mind) have been removed from the diner—her plate is scrubbed twice; Rebekah carelessly tosses the fork into a pile and Klaus spends hours polishing every single fork in the kitchen just to be sure; her application thrown out by a disgruntled Hayley without even a look over—it isn't as easy to banish her from his mind.

She's looking for him, clearly—

"Yeah," Kol snorts, "it's very apparent in the way she ordered a piece of pie and left as soon as she was finished with it. She very much wants you, Nik."

Rebekah steps into the kitchen with a load of dirty dishes and throws her brother an even dirtier look, but says, "For once I'm inclined to agree with him."

Elijah rustles his newspaper in their direction_, now now_ – play nice. Klaus looks around the kitchen in despair, how Kol's boots are resting on his freshly-scrubbed table and how Rebekah is totally disregarding the dishes and is now perched on the counter, doing her nails with the bottle of nail polish Hayley had left behind, smack dab in the middle of the pie display.

Probably on purpose, Klaus snarls inwardly, the brat.

Elijah finally sets down his newspaper. There are the beginnings of dark circles under his eyes; he'd came to the diner straight from the airport after Klaus had called to tell him that Rebekah and Kol were actually being amicable. And by amicable, he meant "not gouging each other's eyes out with forks" – but that was most likely because Klaus has been obsessively hoarding them.

It's been a while since all four of them were together like this. With the exception of Hayley packing up her things to go home for the day, it feels like those dinners they used to have together – before Elijah started taking the executive seat, before Rebekah started falling for boys with fragile hearts, before Kol realized he had a penchant for ripping out aforementioned boys' fragile hearts, and before Mikael kicked all of them out but – _details_.

"Still haven't fixed that door," Elijah murmurs, but it's so quiet that Klaus surmises he must be at it again, making lists in his head. Compartmentalizing everyone. Probably already drawn up graphs in his head complete with annotations on how Klaus, as head (and only) piemaker here could motivate Hayley to not take naps behind the till while people are queuing up to pay.

His whetstone grinds against his stainless steel knife with seasoned precision, the sharp gritty noise as soothing as the Enya Elijah sometimes puts on after closing time. He looks up from his sharpening to glance at Rebekah, who is now being accosted by Kol's brandishing of a wrinkled Valentine's day card. What is it about her, he wonders, that makes her so susceptible to his half-arsed apologies? That she would just welcome her brother into the diner with arms that were not quite open, but inviting either way, after Kol had killed her boyfriend – it grates on him. Grates on him, because he's quite sure he can never be that forgiving.

He does not feel, and he does not care, but every time he says this Rebekah insists that he must be lying. But doesn't she _realize_? Love and forgiveness, they go hand in hand, right into a dark pit that was weakness.

"So what is this business with the Girl?"

"What?" Klaus asks blearily.

"The Girl," Elijah enunciates slowly. "The one who saw you bring the… General back to life."

"Oh, yes. That." Klaus slides the knife back in its knife block, brushes the dust off his hands and straightens up. "Right. Listen up and listen well, brothers and sister. We are moving."

Rebekah stops shoving Kol's face. "Wait, what?"

"We. Are moving." Klaus reiterates. He grabs his favourite rolling pin and smacks it into the palm of his hand. "Rebekah, darling, you handle all our customers. Tell them not to worry, we're not disbanding – we're simply going _underground_. And Kol. You're fired."

Kol looks like he's just been force-fed a whole lemon. He sputters an "Excuse you?" while Rebekah mutters under her breath, "About bloody time."

"You're no longer our busboy. You have been demoted. You are now our delivery boy." Klaus stabs the map of the town hanging from their wall with the end of his rolling pin. "Delivering secret pies all over town to our loyal customers to let them know we are still at it. Inhabitants need not know where we're going. This will be fun. A venture. An adventure. A venture-adventure. Of Pie."

Elijah stops leaning on the table, gauging the scene with practiced silence. But Rebekah – oh, Rebekah slaps a palm to her forehead.

"You started not making sense about five sentences ago," Rebekah says. "Venture-adventure? Secret deliveries? Nik, untwist your unmentionables and _tell _us what's going on."

Klaus bangs down his rolling pin like a gavel. "We've been found out! The Girl could be running around town sticking notices under people's doors, alerting people of the secret happenings of our diner, sharpening their pitchforks to thrust _straight_ through our skulls—"

"Macabre much?" The rolling pin had scuffed the precious worktable, but Klaus pays not an inch of a mind to it. Kol shuffles forward to inspect the damage and groans. "Nik, I had to bribe someone a right fortune to get this table for your gallingly fickle arse."

"We'll get a new one," Klaus fires back, incensed. "Not only will we metaphorically go underground, we'll actually _move_ there. Imagine a hole – and people scale down to get to our diner. _Literally_ a pie hole."

"And what are we, the filling?" Rebekah lowers her face into her hands and moans. "Oh Nik. You've gone insane."

Elijah rests his fingertips together, a deep frown forming on his face. "How sure are you that she saw you?"

"Sure enough that she came by and applied for a job," Klaus says. His hands won't stop clenching and unclenching. "This is it. All my – our – hard pie work, burnt to a crisp, pureed into mush."

(Nobody laughs. Klaus scowls; he'd thought they were clever.)

"Don't be so dramatic, Niklaus," Elijah says, even as his eyebrows draw together in worry. "There is always an alternative."

Kol smirks and touches the tip of his tongue to his fang. "Always."

"_No_, Kol," they reply in unison, Rebekah angered, Elijah exasperated and Klaus half-hearted. He's very nearly considering it, but seeing as how protective Rebekah is of the girl…

"I don't see why we can't just pull her aside and explain things to her," Rebekah says, rolling her eyes. "She doesn't have to know anything else. And I, for one, would like to see how she turned out after all these years." She pushes herself off the counter to pry the rolling pin from her brother's hand. "I'd like a friend."

Elijah looks amazed. "But don't you have friends?"

"No," Rebekah says sulkily. "Between the three of you you've scared off all the potentials."

Klaus rolls his eyes, _You've got a point_, but Elijah looks indignant, _I assure you, sister_—

"It's true," Kol confirms. "I may or may not have been the bane of most of them." His tone turns serious. "I'm sorry. Won't happen this time."

Rebekah looks at Klaus beseechingly. "Please, Nik."

.

.

Klaus says no.

We've other things to worry about, he tells Rebekah, even more so now that no one seems to have taken his suggestion of moving to heart.

He's constantly on edge, like a panther prowling in capture, just waiting to be met with its fate. He shoves everyone out come closing time instead of letting them nurse their hot chocolates or have one last slice as he usually would. He installs blinds. On Fridays when Rebekah is predictably always late for her shifts, he's always waiting by the window, peering out into the streets for her.

Kol clicks his pen over the Times' crossword puzzle. "What's a seven letter word for _paranoid_?"

Even normally passive Hayley expresses irritation at having to not only juggle the _utterly tiresome_ job of balancing the till, but she also has to keep a sharp eye out for the door. "How the hell am I supposed to do my nails with all these things you keep piling up on me?" she asks with a huff.

Elijah, having finished with his bi-monthly check ups gets on the next plane to Italy to broker another deal. Maybe, he'd said, if we moved out of that absurdly lavish house mother left us, we wouldn't have to keep treading water. When Rebekah had heard, she'd looked so terrified at the prospect of having to leave home with the walls that still whispered Esther's name that the subject is dropped.

So Elijah flies off, Klaus talks Marcel into another year of free jam, Rebekah adds more flair to her mug tricks, and Kol scares competitors away. This would guarantee that they're the only dessert place people keep coming back to, if it weren't for the damned donut-shaped hellhole across the street…

A day goes by, two days, five days, a week, and there is no more sign of the Girl. He deduces that she might still be waiting for that call from them that is never going to come, and he knows he can't avoid it forever. Kol sometimes passes through the diner (he uses the kitchen's back door as a shortcut; the people he scares off have their own henchman he needs to remain scarce from) and looks at him knowingly, but Klaus glares back – _no_. But he still keeps the thought in mind, in case of dire emergencies.

And then the weekend passes, and Klaus finally allows himself to breathe, to stop looking over his shoulder every time the front bell sounds.

Maybe it was just a passing whim, like when Rebekah had wanted a miniature horse when she was younger, and Finn, who'd been away at sea had actually come home to talk her out of it because none of them had been able to. Rebekah had taken to shutting herself in her room in a fever of childish want.

"You wouldn't like a horse," Finn had said sombrely. "They don't eat pie."

And that promptly changed Rebekah's mind.

Mikael had been puzzled over this one-eighty, how easy it was for Rebekah to come around from this obsession; he'd never really understood his children's love of pie. In fact, Mikael hated it, always curled his lip in disgust when he comes home to find Rebekah covered in flour from helping Niklaus bake. Mikael preferred other delicacies: indulgent cream profiteroles, crème brûlée burned with great technique, light and airy donut holes dusted with icing sugar.

He even came home one day with a breeder's brochure for miniature horses, but the damage had been done. Finn packed his bags and left town again, along with Rebekah's _equus ferus caballus_ fancies.

What if, like his sister, the Girl had changed her mind? Was it his pie? Was it too flaky? Was the cream too thin for her liking? It couldn't be that, because Marcel's People – his one friend always referred to them as People, capitalized – had reviewed the Pie Hole early last year and had given the cream special mention (which was unexpected), along with the mention of the Marcel (which was). But then again he couldn't fathom why he should even care, why she should be any different from the General, busboy Matt, or anyone else for that matter.

He hadn't even _wanted_ to touch her, but Rebekah had begged.

Clung to him like a life rope, absolutely tugged him down that alleyway with brute strength surprising for an eight-year-old. It was that mean old geezer who'd rushed past them with a panicked flush to his face, but before Klaus could stop and ask what the matter was, he was already gone.

And then Rebekah had gasped, seeing the body.

"Rebekah—no darling, we should be on our way now—"

He had been sixteen and terrified, and you would think his baby sister would be too, but she'd knelt down by the girl and _cradled _her in her lap. "It was that mean old geezer who'd rushed past us with that panicked flush to his face, wasn't it?" she asks. She looks upset and angry.

Klaus stands there in the rain, weighing his options.

"She looks about my age," Rebekah whispers, brushing the poor, dead girl's hair away from her forehead. It's a matted fizz plastered to her face, damp from the drizzling rain. "How awfully sad. Don't you think so, Nik?"

She looks up at him, eyes so earnest and so blue. "If I can't have a miniature horse, can I have this, then? Please, Nik."

And Nik, ever the big brother, extends his finger.

.

.

Another Friday.

Kol takes a crack at auditing the day's accounts, but he ends up making a big chicken scratch mess out of it. Klaus bends over it, trying to figure out where Kol went wrong, lines and lines of numbers and calculations muddling up his head that he doesn't even look up when the front bell jingles.

"Read the sign," he says without turning around. "We're closed."

"Well, you pretty much violated the Outside Activities and Employment section under the Employee and Labour Relations Act, so guess what? _I don't give a shit_."

Klaus cranes his neck around so fast he hears his neck cracks. Wasn't Hayley supposed to—

Hayley glances up from painting her nails a bright fuchsia. "Oops."

In the corner, Rebekah, who'd been lounging in one of the booths, straightens up. Kol leans his elbows on the counter, an amused onlooker.

There are snowflakes clinging to her hair, to her eyelashes, but she seems unperturbed by them. She slaps her application down on the counter with Technicolor fury, her eyes bright and trained on his. "I'm Caroline Forbes, and I want to know why my job application was in the trashcan on Grand Street."

Klaus gapes, awash with something like horror and irritation pricking in his temple, but it might be a side-effect of the valium he'd taken earlier-

"I'm pretty sure this validates an answer," Kol yawns.

So entranced was Klaus on the fact that it's the girl – _The_ Girl – standing in the middle of his diner, hair like spun gold under the light of his overhead lamps, that her words almost don't register. "You idiot, shut up Kol. Do—do you make a habit out of digging through people's trash?"

"Is throwing out resumes a habit of _yours_?" she bristles. She's pacing now, back and forth, wringing her hands. "So there I was on an innocent stroll, taking in the sights of this whimsical town I haven't seen in for_ever_, and I'm about to dump my empty latte cup when, what do you know, I found my job application." She pushes it towards him; it suspends in air for about a second before floating down to his feet. "Right there. Crumpled for the world to see. I did my research, okay?"

Klaus doesn't doubt that she did. Her eyes are a little crazy and her ears look flushed. "This is like, so wrong. I wasn't even _interviewed_."

Klaus shoots Hayley a glare, and Hayley throws back an irritated one; like, a trashcan three blocks away isn't _get-rid-of-it_ enough? She snorts and pockets her nail file (too annoyed to even _think_ about upkeeping right now) while he scrubs a hand down his face. "The position has been filled."

"Actually," Hayley begins, scooting around the counter, "I kinda quit. My doctor says I have this like, you know…" she waits expectantly.

No, Klaus does not know.

"Anyway," she wraps up, "I'm not allowed any strenuous activities. Peace out."

"All you do is sit behind the till!" Klaus exclaims in disbelief, but Hayley just gives her gum one last crack, shrugs her coat on and peaces out.

The door swings closed, and the bell jingles with finality – and then there's silence in the diner. Rebekah shuffles her feet and Kol is darting his eyes back and forth between the three of them. He looks amused, his eyes crinkled at the corners. Klaus clears his throat and turns back to Caroline. "Well, this is certainly awkward."

There's another jingle of the bell. Maybe it's Hayley coming back for her nail polish. Klaus whirls around to tell her to just _piss off_, but the words die in his throat, because it's not Hayley standing there.

It's Mikael.

He leans his weight down on his crane and sends his children a leering grin. "Awkward does not even begin to cover it."

.

.

So there she was, waving her discarded job application and a newly-purchased _Employee and Labour Relations _handbook, probably making the biggest ass out of herself, when suddenly some old guy in a cape just breezes into the diner.

No, for real. A _cape_. He has white gloves on and the cane he's whirling around has a diamond the size of a baby's fist on the handle, and this dude, he's so shady he makes the diner seem bright and welcoming.

(A diamond the size of a _baby's fist_, okay?)

Klaus is looking at him with teeth bared. His younger brother – Kol, wasn't it? – steps out from behind the counter, a smirk lighting up his face. "Look what the night descends upon us."

"A dastardly fowl with malicious intent," Klaus continues, and Caroline, feeling invisible suddenly, literally has to close her eyes and commit this moment to memory because seriously? What is up with this family?

The old man sniffs and walks around the diner, his cape swishing around his ankles. "Is this any way to talk to your own father?"

Caroline blinks. Okay. It got weirder. Wordlessly, she makes her way to the booth where a blonde girl her age – could it be _the _blonde girl? – is sitting and joins her. The girl barely bats an eyelid; just scoots over to make room for her.

"Familial ties have been severed long ago, Mikael. Don't pretend you weren't the one who wanted it." Somehow, Klaus' accent makes his words tougher than they actually are, makes his lips tilt into something loathsome as he regards his father. And his father, he looks down at little Baby Fist and chuckles.

"Mikael Mikaelson does not hold grudges," he announces to the room. "Yes, my fury can be brilliant and my virtues little, but never doubt that I will be petty enough to want to exact revenge. Why, I remember a time when you were still working for me, a spritely young thing in your Osh Kosh B'Gosh, looking dour as I taught you the fine, intricate ways of dough…"

In the middle of his monologue, Caroline turns to the girl next to her, a little stunned. "Is your dad's name really—"

"Yes," she says, eyes glued to the scene. She sounds like a lot of people have asked that before.

"…we could have been glorious: my young lads, my beautiful daughter and I, raking in profit and prosperity, Alas, it was not meant to be." Mikael Mikaelson stops in his hawk-eyed survey of the diner and lands his dark eyes on Klaus. "The markings in stone had been right, and you lot had to betray me."

"We had a parting of ways," Klaus retorts, his eyes narrowed to slits. "We never betrayed you."

"What do you call this then?" Mikael hisses, banging his cane down on the floor one, two, three times. A guy with a crooked-looking neck shuffles into the diner, looking wary.

The girl clutches her arm with an "Oh my God", and Caroline clutches back, because it's _the dead guy_.

Kol sends him a grin that matches Mikael's tooth by tooth. "Good to see you alive and well, General."

"Uh," the General says and scratches at his collar, "my name's Enzo." He gives a faint nod of greeting to them, his gaze zeroing in on Klaus' hands, bunched up into fists. Caroline picks up on this, and she feels her own hands grow clammy.

"I call _that_ self-preservation," Klaus says and marches right up to Mikael, "after you tried to ruin Mayor Lockwood's dinner party by poisoning our pies."

"My _name_—" Enzo starts up again, but Mikael gives an exasperated huff and cracks the back of his head with his cane. He slumps to the floor, and Caroline wants to make sure he's not like, dead again or anything, but she finds that she can't move.

Mikael clicks his tongue. "Only to make you see, dear boy, what happens when you deny the allure of D'oh! Nuts."

It's like someone hits a huge pause on her life—Caroline leans over the girl to pull down the blinds, peering at the bakery across the street, at the cute little donut design on the windows, then lets her eyes swivel back to them, mouth slightly agape. The girl wrinkles her nose at being in such close proximity, but Caroline barely notices. She whips out her phone for a quick check on Google, lips moving wordlessly in disbelief.

The facts were these:

Mikael Mikaelson, illustrious owner of the delightful Simpsons-themed gourmet doughnut franchise that had taken the world by storm for the past two-and-a-half decades, was a self-made man. He built his empire from the ground up with bricks made of light-as-air pastry and held together by delectable jellies and cream, adorned with multi-coloured sprinkles. He recognized the love America had for the dysfunctional family and took it in stride, in the process using it to his own advantage, and apparently all his innovation paid off when he sought to bring the love to Mother England and his store opening almost blew up the entire street.

Caroline feels herself start to hyperventilate as she reads how, one day, lithe, warm Esther Lee spies him hauling hundred-pound bags of flour, and promptly falls in love with the sinews of his arms, the ambition in his eyes. They have six children together – she counts three in the room – the last of which, Henrik, died tragically in childbirth.

So things are textbook happy, his kids working for him, learning the tools of the trade, when Esther falls sick. Strain happens. Overwork happens. Finn leaving to be a _pirate_ of all things happens. Kol getting into bad crowds happens. Mikael realizing his kids don't have the same passion for donuts as he happens. Klaus starting his own business happens, and him pulling his siblings along happens. And the swift kick in the gut – Esther passing away and leaving the deed to their house to her children, and Mikael in his petty rage suggests emancipation, something that apparently had been a long time coming.

"And who is _this_?"

Caroline yelps and almost drops her phone when she finds herself staring Baby Fist, like, right between the eyes. Mikael's looking at her down the length of his nose, his teeth glinting with so much contempt that she almost falls back against her seat, if it weren't for the guiding pressure of a soft hand on the small of her back. It's the girl, it's Rebekah, and Rebekah's holding up her chin, and Rebekah's saying, "_This_ is Caroline."

Perhaps he's a little shocked – from what Caroline had read (it had been a strangely thorough article) Rebekah had been something of a daddy's girl. He takes a step back, his eyes now coolly devoid of emotion. "You always did like your strays, didn't you? Unfulfilled pet fantasies, as I remember."

Rebekah flushes red to her ears and stands up. "I'll have you know, that Caroline here is our—she's our—"

"She's our employee of the month," Kol says, picking lint from his sweater. "Star waitress, fantastic tray balancing."

"Is she now?" Mikael turns to Klaus, like his is the only word that matters. There's that terrifying moment where all Klaus does is stand there with his wary predator stance, his eyes shooting daggers at Mikael, dancing a dance that he's danced so many dances ago. His nostrils flare, Mikael's eyebrow raises, Klaus' arms unfold, Mikael's cape swings as he tucks his cane securely at his side like a scabbard, and the air is so fraught with tension that Caroline's hair might frizz.

And then finally, _finally, _Klaus parts his lips and says, "Yes."

The arctic becomes the diner, so cold is the look that Mikael throws them, at the thought of them expanding and gaining loyal customers and star waitresses with tray-balancing prowess, and with another sweep of his cape he's turned his back on them, stepping right over Enzo. He pulls his cane out again, and at this point Caroline wouldn't be surprised if he unearths it to have like, a hidden blade within. He uses the claw of his cane to poke through the duct tape on the door. "What kind of lowbrow establishment are you running?"

And with that, he's gone.

So now there's two angry siblings, one who's smirking, a guy who may or may not be dead in the middle of the diner, and… Caroline. It sounds like the beginnings of a joke, one with a punchline she doesn't think she'll find funny. She sees Mikael's dark red cape swishing through the night, sees the awkward angle of Enzo's heaped body, and suddenly she sees everything as it is, as if someone's just slipped her some reverse-beer goggles: the red paintings on the walls that kind of looks like the ruby of blood when it starts to pool, the primitive chopping knives dotting the arch of the doorless kitchen, the hard lines of muscle that protrude through the two men's shirtsleeves as they stand there, arms crossed, regarding her suspiciously.

And then there's Rebekah, smiling at her like she can't believe she's actually here, when it started out the other way around, really.

All at once, it's too much.

"This is insane," she declares. "You guys are some kind of deranged mafia bakery."

"Diner," Kol corrects her. "Did you miss the part where we handed you a position here?"

"After the scene I just witnessed?" Caroline clambers out of the booth and spirals around the diner, but suddenly Kol's standing in front of the door, and—woah does he move fast. "I mean, dastardly _fowls_? Descending _nights_? Did I even hear right?"

"Of course you did." Klaus sighs a long-suffering one and unfolds his arms. "Do you want the job or not?"

Caroline beams. "Didn't I come here with that one, singular motive?"

.

.

It's great, it's wonderful, it's everything she could have ever wanted, working in that little diner with its blinds that prevent the sun from streaming in, but it's quite alright – it makes it all the more cozier, all the more easier to slide pumpkin pie in front of the smiling faes of sugar-starved patrons, chirp a little _Y'all enjoy that now_ even though she is far from the Southern belle she sometimes pretends to be.

Rebekah comes up to her, lips a tentative curve, and pulls her into the kitchen to show her the ropes. She has an apron all of her own – "Custom made," Rebekah tells her of the lace frills at the bottom and the cute little white buttons – and doesn't have to wear a nametag if she doesn't want to, but she tacks it on anyway and makes everyone call her Care. Everyone does, and everyone does it with a smile… everyone except for Klaus, that is, who always seems to be absent from the kitchen these days.

Kol flits in and out of the kitchen, always through the back door, which is probably why she never notices him sneaking up on her. He's nice enough if you don't look at him the wrong way, which is to say you shouldn't look at him at _all_. He's always looking at her so peculiarly, like he's just waiting for some kind of bomb to drop right out of her lace pockets, and he wouldn't be wrong – she does have a time bomb ticking away inside her, shivering in its mass of undiluted energy, waiting to be unleashed upon the piemaker who'd seemed to ka_put_ right from his very diner.

"Care," Rebekah calls over one day as she's chopping up fruit, "you don't happen to be good at pie filling, don't you?"

Because the poor thing, she's been taking over Klaus' job of making pies despite having to refer to Klaus' meticulous yet vaguely-structured recipes every step of the way. She looks miserable; she'd much rather prefer being out there flipping notebooks and twirling mugs and charming people with her easy smile, not covered in flour from wrist to elbow. Luckily for her, Caroline does know her way around pies – Steven's a sweet tooth, and she's never thanked him more for it than in the moment she teaches Rebekah that a little nutmeg does wonders in bringing out subtle flavours hidden deep in the flesh of fruit.

Ever grateful, Rebekah tells her things while they bake. That it was indeed her and Klaus who found her lying in that alleyway all those years ago, and Caroline's heart _lifts_. To finally find the answer to the question that's been reeling inside her for so long feels so gratifying, like a caged bird stretching its wings for the first time in a long time, overcome with the desire to sing nothing but sweet songs for the rest of its days.

"I tried looking for you," Rebekah tells her matter-of-factly. "I wanted to see how you were doing, after that blow to your head. But you disappeared."

"I was only here visiting my dads," Caroline says. Rebekah looks a little startled, but listens eagerly to the story of how Steven and Bill had met at an IT conference, and that Steven had been wearing _plaid_, and her father was still very much married to Liz, but they fell dangerously, violently in love, and this is the part where she puts a hand to her breast and sighs, because to be in that much love is all that she's ever wanted in life. Rebekah sighs along with her, and they say no more, because—

Because Rebekah struggles with pie crust too, so Caroline takes over, helping her knead and roll and trim and cut, and she figures out what makes Klaus' Dutch Apple so delicious – ginger! – and breathes in all that delicious, steaming air wafting from the ovens and wonders how much time she has left before spontaneously combusting. Rebekah leaves the kitchen in her more-than-capable hands to see to her patrons.

This must be how a jiffy feels like, Caroline thinks when the second day of her hiring rolls around and still no sign of her boss. But it doesn't matter. She'll wait, however long it takes.

On the third day—

After spilt coffee and crumbly crusts and a devilishly handsome man named Marcel ordering something called, remarkably, the _Marcel_ ("It's named after me, you see," he points out rather obviously, but she hadn't minded, because his smile was so very captivating), Caroline finally finds solace in the kitchen.

She feels his presence rather than sees it as she's slitting holes in the crust of the pie she's about to slide into the oven. He's leaning against the doorway watching her, and she wants to ask him where he's been the past few days, but it kind of feels like jumping right into the middle of a conversation that she doesn't even have with him.

Fortunately for her, it's Klaus who speaks first. "Do you always take over other people's jobs?"

Caroline goes to the sink to rinse off her hands and looks back at him. "Do you always creep in doorways watching people?"

"Do you always answer questions with questions?"

"Do you always bring dead people back to life?" she blurts, and sags with relief – the ticking within her ceases, the threat gone. Klaus, on the other hand, stiffens, and then he's turning to leave the kitchen. Caroline follows after him, bristling in his wake.

"Hey—" she reaches for his shoulder, but he's already swooped around the counter to put wood and steel and orange paint between them. It's the fastest she's seen anyone move, and seriously, does this family run track too, in addition to running this super cop-out diner? "I've seen it," she insists, and looks over her shoulder to make sure nobody's listening before leaning in close, hissing, "_You bring people back to life_."

"I'm a piemaker. I make pies, that's what I do," Klaus says mechanically, and walks away. On her side of the counter, Caroline follows, but not before refilling coffee along the way.

"Why is it such a big deal?" Caroline asks, although to his credit, it is a pretty huge deal. If it was her, she'd be turning cartwheels right into the sun. She'd probably drive all the way to Davenport just to dig up Cary Grant and wake him up with a touch; love him right down into his dusty bones.

(She has _Bringing Up Baby_ in a special, reserved spot right in her heart.)

"It's not _a_ big deal," Klaus says. "It's a big nothing, because what you are implying sounds pretty ridiculous, a bundle of incoherent babble that is about as meaningful to me as this little spoon here." He holds up a teaspoon, shiny in the overhead light.

"But spoons are important," she quips, "otherwise you'd be eating soup with your hands, and that's kind of an unsavoury sight."

"They make mugs," he points out, "and thermoses, and flasks. You can drink from bowls; have you seen the Asians? They're quite happy." He stacks up several plates to pass to her. "Spoons, they keep you company. They're not a necessity."

Caroline cradles the stack in one arm and uses her free hand to pluck the spoon from Klaus' fingers. It drops onto the top of the stack with a clatter. "It really depends, doesn't it? I mean, there's nothing wrong with drinking soup. It just has to be the right soup in the right vessel at the right time. Like a clear bouillon, or a puree. I'd like to see you try to drink chunks of miso."

Which is probably how they end up seated at the worktable facing each other, a bowl of steaming miso soup placed in front of them. Caroline daintily picks up her spoon and sends him a smile, while Klaus, looking grouchy, starts to gulp the whole hot mess of it down. And then comes the picking of the solid ingredients, and it's such a sight – hapless fingers picking at them, a shrimp slipping through his fingers with a squick – that she hides her mouth behind her hand and laughs.

"Alright," Klaus says later as they're washing the bowls. Just two bowls and a few stray spoons, Caroline really didn't need his help on this, but he finds himself reaching for a cloth to help her dry them. "So you might have a point. Spoons are important."

"_And_ useful," Caroline says. "For totes nothing to be kept hidden from the world. Or at least to people who've seen the, um, useful parts of it."

Klaus scrubs a hand down his face. "Can we stop talking in metaphors now? It's confusing. And I'm not much a fan of spoons, so there's only so many allusions I can make. Yes, I bring people back to life. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Touchy," Caroline tuts. She peers up at him, trying to find some kind of secret in his eyes (she's not sure what, but Liz has used this particular move on her more than once and it works every time, even if she has nothing to confess). "Do you like, chant something? Maybe wish for it really hard? Were you born with it? Or were you cursed as a kid because D'oh! Nuts was doing so well and people envied you so much they sent death threats at your door?"

"I—" Klaus blinks. "What?"

Caroline holds her phone up sheepishly. "Did you know they have you guys on Wikipedia?"

.

.

So it happened. Suddenly. Klaus is eight, guiding a still-wobbly on her legs Rebekah to a slice of pie he'd helped his mother bake, when it happens. A whooshing, a tingling in his fingers, and he suddenly finds himself having to sit down.

"And then what happened?" Caroline asks in a hushed voice. She's feeding herself bits of strawberry from a pie that's supposed to have made its way into the oven twenty minutes ago. Klaus is sitting in a chair flipped backwards across the room, reluctantly telling her the story of his first _zing_, as she had proudly coined.

"Nothing," Klaus says flatly. "I got up. The world continued to turn, Rebekah learnt how to walk, and Mikael's business flourished."

Caroline gives a long groan. "Seriously? Then what's with all the sitting down business?"

Klaus opens his mouth, about to reply, but then he sort of look like someone's hit the back with his head with a tea bag. The tea bag here being a metaphor for _a_ _revelation_. "What's with _your _sitting down business? Didn't you come here to work?"

Caroline hops down from the counter and straightens her apron. Klaus is tetchy, one thing she's learned, always growling out something or other, always baking pie with the vengeance, tucking in the extra folds of dough like it's done him some personal wrong. And always staring at D'oh! Nuts across the street, his shoulders blocked and heavy like he's expecting some sort of assault.

Which is perfectly justifiable, seeing as Mikael did try to poison their pies and he did kind of leave the General for dead in the middle of their diner (Kol had dragged him outside to leave him for dead in the alleyway instead, and Caroline had tried her best to look the other way the way Rebekah didn't even bother asking if he was alright, but after everyone had left and after the whole diner was dark, she snuck her way through the streets to kick the guy awake, getting him home), but a man can only be steeped in so much suspicion before his business takes a dive.

She's surprised, really, at how many people keep coming back to the Pie Hole despite all the hostility. It's partly due to Rebekah and her winsome little smiles and the flounce of her apron. When Klaus leaves someone offended it's Rebekah who comes to soothe, offering a glass of milk or extra cream and would you like another slice of that, love?

And the _pie_. She's slowly making her way through the menu, a bite here and a slice there when she comes home laden with leftovers, and they're phenomenal, as good as the first bite she had here, as good as Melissa had said, like an orgasm—

"Only in your mouth!" Steven enthuses, spraying Bill with bits of berry and saliva.

Klaus may bake them like beating down Mikael's soul into bottom crusted pockets of fruit, but he also put a lot of heart into them, which she supposes is why they taste so damn good. Even if is eating a piece of Mikael Mikaelson's allegorical soul.

Klaus has magic hands, in more ways than one, and she can't help but stare at them when she's leaning over the counter to refill Elena Gilbert's coffee. Sometimes he catches her staring and she has to pretend to be absorbed in conversation with the Salvatore boys to save her burning, red face, but he never says a word. If anything, it makes him stay in the kitchen even more. Which is fine, the man likes to work, whatever – but isn't he even the least bit curious why, after finally finding out the truth of the boy with whole planets in his hands and then the blood-splattered man in the too-white kitchen, even after all of that, she still stayed?

Rebekah flips her mugs and sends her a smirk. "Don't try to figure him out. Countless people have, and trust me; it always leads them to a road lit with neon signs flashing _Nowhere_. Pass the sugar bowl, won't you darling?"

"Don't you worry," Caroline sighs. "I don't plan on getting wrapped up with people who don't even like spoons. I mean, what's up with that?"

"Come again?" Rebekah swings her mugs slower, her eyebrows fusing together in confusion.

"Your brother," Caroline tells her, "doesn't like spoons."

"And he told you this?"

Caroline fishes a cloth out of the pocket of her apron and starts to clean up after a leaving customer. "In so many words, yeah."

Rebekah's mugs have been set down on the rack, and she's looking at Caroline fully now. Caroline finishes wiping the counter and darts her eyes to Rebekah. "What?"

"Nothing," Rebekah says, and smiles.

.

.

A month into this shindig and she's already gotten the hang of it. She exits her morning class and follows the buzz and hum of Valentine's Day chatter, the excited titters and the longing gasps, the opening of bags to find pink and red confetti spilling out of it, to sit on wind-cooled benches with your partner and smile over exchanging gifts.

Caroline looks upon all of this with a little smile on her face; claps excitedly for Melissa when not one, not two, but _three _boys approach her with hopeful looks and arms laden with candy. The grin slides off her face when Melissa turns all of them away, not a blush tainting her cappuccino skin, and she casts a mournful look at Professor Saltzman. Caroline slaps a hand to her forehead, because—_duh_. How had she not _seen _this? She used to be so good at this, her keen eye detecting the smallest of gestures and the slightest of shifts and the tiniest range in pitch.

She'd been wrapped up in pie, that's what. After class she would zip right to the diner, hat tails tangled up in her hair, hang up her coat and yank on her apron. She doesn't know how many times she's had to mend the straps because she'd yanked too hard in her eagerness, but no matter, she really does love it here. She loves the smiling customers with their easy tips, loves sitting with Rebekah in their designated corner booth during their break laughing over Damon's bad hair or gossiping over the fact that Bonnie Bennett was dating Elena Gilbert's younger brother, the shock of it all.

Sometimes they don't laugh and sometimes they don't gossip. Sometimes they talk, too – somber faces and mugs of hot chocolate that have long cooled, and Rebekah tells her about Matt Donovan, her boyfriend.

"Well—" Rebekah's head tilts. "Ex now, I suppose. How do these things go? We didn't break up, he just died."

Caroline doesn't really know what to say, so she lifts her mug to her lips and says, "If it's love, it's love."

Kol had been sloppily picking up plates from the booth opposite theirs, and Rebekah glances at him and sighs, "I suppose."

It's on this particular day of Saint Valentine that a serious-looking man in a serious-looking suit walks in, and Rebekah all but shrieks her way out of the booth and jumps right into his waiting arms. "This is my brother," Rebekah says, her smile so wide her eyes turn into little slits. "Elijah, say hi to Care."

Elijah greets her cordially, but Caroline doesn't miss the quick sweep of his gaze and how it shakes her from the inside out. He's quiet in his command, his shoes so Italian and so polished that Caroline's kind of surprised they don't make a sound as he steps across the diner, checks on the till and rearranges the pie display. Kol unceremoniously drops a platter of ginger cookies onto the counter in front the third stool from the till, the one with the direct view of the kitchen where Klaus is sliding a pie out of one of the ovens.

"Elijah looks over the books," Rebekah says. "And we bake ginger cookies especially for him whenever he comes by every month or so. They're his favourites."

So that would explain all the muttering in the kitchen this morning; Klaus' yell of "_YouidiotKol_, why'd you have to use up all the ginger?"

He says a lot of their names like that. Kol is one long exhale of YouIdiotKol, and Rebekah's is RebekahDarling, fetch Professor Saltzman his tea, would you?, and Elijah, as she learns now, always includes some iteration of _brother_. Once, when it had been just her and him in the kitchen, he'd said, "Caroline love, is the triple berry done?"

No commas in between, not a pause in his breath. He'd said it like it was one sentence, like it was part of her name, _Carolinelove_, and she'd just stood there with her hands clutched in her apron, staring, not quite knowing what this quiet noise inside her head was. Carolinelove, he'd called her that day, and a few days later it was "Carolinelove, you don't have to rush out to feed every dog that passes by this place," with exasperation. She'd looked at him long and hard then, wondering if he even realizes what he does, and he'd looked back, and – why yes Caroline, maybe he does—

Because he never really did say her name the same way after that. It's always a clipped Caroline in an equally-as-clipped order, a careless glance thrown over his shoulder, and she doesn't know why she's being so neurotic about it, but she is, okay?

"Caroline." And there it is, the snip of his voice. "Bring my brother his coffee, would you?"

Caroline pours it black and steaming from the pot, sets it down in front of Elijah, who's perusing the inventory counts. "Will that be all?" Her voice almost wobbles out his name – what to call him? Elijah? She barely knows him, but Mr. Mikaelson sounds so _formal_, so… Mikael-esque, and it's just so weird how this family and their little quirks always seems to flash in her head like a given. Like she already knows their whole life story from that one - or five - Wikipedia visits.

"I'm fine for now," Elijah tells her, and he folds up the worksheet and looks up at her. Smiling at her, without quite smiling. She feels appraised and daunted all at once, and puts this ability of his down on her list of _I Aspire_ (right next to Audrey Hepburn's _rested_ look). "So, you're the Girl."

"I'm the girl?" Caroline repeats, fiddling with the lace of her apron.

Elijah ignores her befuddled look. "How long have you been working here?"

"A little over a month." She refrains from adding sir. God, how dumb would that sound? She feels like she's being interviewed for a job that she already has, never mind the fact that she was never interviewed in the first place. Elijah, ever so polite, asks her if she could fetch another cup and saucer for him, and she does, relieved to be out of the line of assault from his eyes.

"Care?" Rebekah asks when she's rooting through the good china. "You look a bit shaken."

"Elijah wants." Caroline doesn't know why she's too frazzled to finish her sentence. She lifts the tea set instead. Rebekah nods and goes back to waiting on the pie, just thirty seconds away from perfect lemon-meringue bliss.

Kol's nowhere to be seen when Caroline rounds the worktable and stands opposite Elijah, the other side of the counter (fiddly hands hidden behind the polished wood). She's about to send him a curt smile and leave, but Elijah reaches for the coffee jug, pours, and nudges it towards her all before the words "Enjoy your meal" could even become a proper sentence on her lips.

"Would you join me for some coffee, Caroline?" He's already piling ginger cookies in front of her.

Caroline can't find it in herself to say no. She looks down at the cookies, at all that black coffee, and asks, "Do I get to choose my own drink?"

.

.

"_Nik_."

Klaus' head snaps away from the scene before him—Elijah, too casual in his smart suit, having tea with Caroline. There's an easy laughter in her voice and a charmed glint in his brother's eye that he doesn't feel very easy about, and he fervently hopes Elijah isn't coming to any conclusions now—_just_ because the girl who happened to be the Girl is working for them now, doesn't mean—

Rebekah tugs her apron off and folds it up; she needs to mend that little patch that had gotten caught on Klaus' sharp table edge. "I didn't know you never cared much for spoons."

Klaus' fingers clench around his wooden spoon. The smell of Banana Cinnamon fills his nose, but the smell of Rebekah's shit-eating grin overpowers it. He sets the spoon down. "You talked to Caroline."

_"_No brother, _you _talked to Caroline." She looks gleeful, delighted – if not a little sad. "You don't talk to people."

"I do," he replies, chagrined. Trust Elijah to compartmentalize; trust Rebekah to haunt it. "I talk to you. To Kol, to Elijah—"

"Don't be silly, brother." Rebekah waves an impatient hand. "We're family, we're not people"

He tries again. "_Marcel_—"

But Rebekah, she tries harder. "Only to talk jam."

Pie filling forgotten, his stomach in anxious little knots, he asks, "So jam isn't right up the alley of spoons?"

"Nik," she admonishes, and he sighs.

"Yes, I talk to her. A little, when we're closing up because _you_ never want to stay that late." Klaus folds his arms across his chest and scowls at his sister. "What of it?"

Rebekah smiles at him and rests her chin on her apron-padded palms. "Do you like it?"

She doesn't ask _do you like her?_ like some teeny-bopper, even with her head a dizzy whirl of Saint Valentine's. His sister had always loved today, decorating the diner with confetti and hearts and pink placemats with as much gusto as she had Christmas Day. This year she's a little quieter; he caught her standing by the tip jar and he's about to berate her for stealing again, until he notices her hands circling the mouth of it with a dreamy sadness, her mind not in the diner but far away.

Rebekah, ever the hopeless romantic, the one who loves too freely, the one who so eagerly tucked her hand into the crook of Caroline's arm and giggles out some absurd abbreviation for _best friend forever_, doesn't even ask the obvious question. It would be too easy, wouldn't it? Klaus exhales sharply. "It's mostly mindless chatter, things that don't even make sense. She talks about _spoons_ for heaven's sa—"

"So what if she does?" Rebekah says with a click of her tongue. "So what if she talks in weird metaphors and talks a lot and talks too much – she talks to you, which isn't something I can say about a lot of people. Lord knows how she stands you."

His sister nuzzles her face into her hands. It might be the pink twine in her hair, but she looks a little delirious in her delight. "She's quite taken with you, you know."

"Don't be ridiculous," Klaus mutters, but he finds himself unable to maintain his sister's eye contact. Once, when he was eighteen and the idea of walking away from Mikael and all the bullshit that came with him was just insistent dreams pulling and tugging at him, he'd started to bake pies in the back of D'oh! Nuts' kitchen, always making Rebekah or Kol eat them or throwing them out before Mikael would get back. What he didn't know was that Mikael knew all along, and one day, in tasting his latest creation – The Triple Berry, which is now his signature pie – he bites down on something that isn't the light crunch of berry seeds, but more of the painful, teeth-cracking variety. His head reels and he spits out the offending object – and it's a token of his father's store, donut insignia and all.

"Oops," his father sings, appearing out of nowhere. "You must have accidentally dropped it in there while you were busy doing things I do not _pay you_ to do."

His sister's declaration of Caroline's… affection was like that very token, out of the blue, a kick in the ear, meant to be spat out once found and never looked at again. He has half a mind to tell Rebekah all of this, using his stern older brother voice, but Rebekah looks like she's not in a mood to have her notions skewed by him; not today.

She doesn't even tease the stutter in his reply like he'd expected her to. She just rests her head in the palm of her hands and sighs mournfully at him. "Isn't it strange, how things turn out? I notice her looking at you, and I know you look back at her, and you've known me your whole life and you still think these things past me by. Strange. You are a really strange person, Nik."

"Rebekah," Klaus says, and he sounds miserable even in his ears. "You're talking nonsense."

"Am I?" his sister says a little wickedly. "Have you ever felt like there's a part of you missing? Like a spoon without its fork, a bird that comes home to finds its nest gone?"

Klaus pulls a face. "Eh?"

"No?" Rebekah shrugs. "Good. I was just being dramatic. It doesn't feel like that, not really. But you'll know it."

"Know what?"

"White doves taking flight, six bells a-ringing," his sister hums, bundles her apron into her arms, bustling out through the back door before he can demand a straight answer out of her.

.

.

She's not really a coffee person, Caroline tells him as she's stirring her tea. Elijah nurses his two cups of coffee – she thinks he might be a little presumptuous – and asks if she's enjoyed her time working here.

"So far?" Caroline blows on her tea, nibbles on a bit of cookie. "It's been nice. Good. Great, in fact. Last week, Rebekah and I talked a drunk out of peeing on the espresso machine."

"Charming," Elijah nods, and he does indeed look charmed. She wonders if this is all just a front, but then she wonders why she's even analyzing this guy like he's a production of Macbeth. He certainly fits the part, with his dark hair and shadowed eyes, lady love thrown out of a tower somewhere with all the seriousness he carried in the starch of his sleeves.

"Kol given you much trouble?"

Caroline tucks a curl behind her ear, wondering what answer he's expecting, wondering why he asks questions he already knows the answers to. "Kol's not around enough to _be_ much trouble," she admits.

"Ah," Elijah says. He stirs his coffee without as much as a tinkle, while her spoon had clattered a little on her saucer. "And Klaus?"

Caroline smirks into her tea. There it is. She'd been right to be suspicious – this dude might carry himself off as King of Genovia or whatever, but there was still that too casual pause between the sip of his coffee and the bite of his ginger biscuit, the nonchalant way he pushes the sugar bowl towards her.

So she says, "Oh, he's _swell_. I talked him out of whopping Damon Salvatore with his rolling pin and saved a guy from his magical little hands." Okay, so she'd walked the General back home. It wasn't exactly equivalent to her stopping Klaus' touch, but hey – it's the thought that counts. And what counted even more was Elijah's look of surprise as he regards her with new eyes.

Also, she doesn't add, he never touches me.

Isn't that weird? Like, not once. But then again she's watched the way he is, and even in those rare moments he's handling the till his palm never slides across palm when he's passing dollars, and he's weirdly alert to people coming and going so they never have to resort to bodily distractions to get his attention.

He's guarded, she wants to say. Very much so.

She doesn't just talk to Rebekah on her breaks. Sometimes Rebekah has her own classes to go to, and when Kol's done flipping off customers he leaves with his pockets full of tips and the cleaning is left to Caroline and Klaus.

"I notice you don't like touching me," Caroline says before she can stop herself.

Klaus replies without missing a beat, "I don't like touching a lot of people."

"Yeah, but—" Caroline turns away from the pile of dirty dishes. "Is this like a side-effect to your little curse thing? Sometimes it's like you're afraid to even look at me."

Klaus stops arranging the pie pans and turns, facing her fully. "I'm looking at you now."

"You know what I mean," she snaps.

"No," Klaus says, "Not really."

Caroline straightens up, adjusts her metaphorical glasses, and tells him with all the authority of an eighteen-year-old speaking to her much older boss, "You have intimacy issues."

"Lovely," Klaus says. "How'd you suss that out? Which episode of Teen Wolf made you an expert on interpersonal problems."

"Hey, I resent that—it's a really good show, okay? And for _one_," Caroline presses on, "you're never with a girl. Don't get me wrong, you're working and stuff, but boys come and flirt with Rebekah! Boys come and flirt with me, for God's sake, and it's great because of the tips, and heck, I even saw that catlady who always comes on Mondays making eyes at Kol—"

"Is there a point to this?"

"The point," Caroline says, "you're a pretty good looking guy. You've even got an accent, like who doesn't just die for that? And yet…" Caroline waves her arm around the empty diner. "Nada."

Klaus scratches the back of his head. "Caroline love, we're closed."

And that, _curse her,_ quiets her down. She picks the sponge up once again and starts on the scrubbing. "Don't you ever feel lonely?"

"With all this riveting conversation you and I have?" Klaus says dryly. A tilt of his head, a roll of his eyes. "Never."

He leaves soon after that, finally trusting Caroline to lock the place up, and feels so very much like a teenager when she counts it up on her fingers like some sort of victory and whispers to herself, _four_.

Elijah's voice brings her back to earth, and she blinks a little dazedly at him. "Um. What?"

"I asked if you have any plans for Valentine's Day," Elijah hums. His coffee's all finished, and her tea is reduced to dregs at the bottom of her cup. "Rebekah's already asked for half the day off. What about you?"

Out of habit, she looks into the kitchen. Klaus' eyes meet hers for a fraction of a second before he flicks them back to his pies. "Um," she says again, throat gone dry, and when she turns back to Elijah she realizes with a pang that he'd caught every last scorching second of that.

"No plans," she manages to stammer out, already slipping out of her seat. "I really should be getting back to work – my break ended like, ten minutes ago—"

"Of course," Elijah says obligingly. "I have business to attend to myself, and a door that needs fixing." He stands and gives her a nod, _actually_ pulls her stool out for her, and she doesn't know whether to laugh or like, do something drastic, because Elijah probably think she's half in love with his brother by now and she's not, she totally isn't—

"Look, Elijah," Caroline starts, but Elijah just shakes his head, _Another time, Caroline_. She doesn't know why it makes her mouth snap shut, but it does. Alright then.

She goes back into the kitchen, and weirdly enough, Klaus is looking every bit perplexed as she feels. She's wringing her hands again, pacing back and forth, and his eyes follow her, ever the silent one. She stops when her stomach hits the worktable, and she looks at him, the way he's leaning back against the shelves that hold all the delivery boxes, just… _lounged _there, looking at her oddly.

"A whooshing," Caroline says carefully, palms pressed flat against the table. "A tingling in your fingers. And then you had to sit down."

Klaus frowns and she just – she finds herself wishing for the day he'd stop frowning at every little thing she says, like it's some silly babble that isn't worth his time. She pushes her hair out of her eyes, takes a deep breath, and asks, "What happened after that, Klaus?"

And it's like she's in that goddamn alleyway again, staring up at a boy who's looking at her with an almost fearful look in his eyes, space and time and planets bending between them, a hundred million suns and stars in the weight of silence that follows. It feels like he's silent for a very long time, and he looks at her even longer before he finally says, "My brother died."

.

.

**tbc**

* * *

**yay more notes: **so i know i said this was going to be a two parter, but when i was writing the second chapter it just grew and grew and grew i had to cut it in two. this chapter is already a whopper as it is at 15k words. i'll post the third and final chapter when i get back from my trip in a few days. for now... leave a review and tell me what you think? i'd appreciate it a lot.

also, the biggest of thank yous to my beta Sam (empirically-speaking on tumblr) who put up with my incessant bitching and freakouts the whole time i was writing this. the first 13k words of this is beta'd, the last part isn't. i just really wanted this up before i leave tomorrow morning - or in four hours.

also v2.0 - happy birthday again, jennifer! NOW GO DROP SOME PORN IN HER ASK.


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Vampire Diaries, Humor, Romance