Chapter Text
Waking up is disorienting.
The ceiling above her is too white. Not just sterile—clinical, like it's been scrubbed of all warmth, buzzing faintly with a static hum that feels personal. A slow, headache-borne whine builds behind her eyes. It’s the kind of white that dares you to bleed on it.
Right. The accident. The surgery.
Fluorescent hospital lights glare into her skull. She winces, lifting a hand to rub beneath one eye. Even that feels wrong. Her fingers are numb, disconnected—as if she’s borrowed them from someone pretending to be alive.
She smells antiseptic. Bleach. Metal. Old blood. Hers?
A second blink clears her vision just enough to see that she’s not alone.
“Elena?” she rasps, confused. Her voice sounds wrong. It's the middle of the night—she was stable, she remembers that much—so why is Elena here?
The girl standing at her bedside corrects her gently.
Katherine.
Her brain skids on that name, can’t get purchase. The gears in her head grind but won’t lock.
Before she can chase the realization, Katherine leans in close, her voice low, conspiratorial. There’s a message. Something for the Salvatores. Caroline tries to focus—tries to track the words—but her brain won’t cooperate.
The face in front of her is familiar, sweet in the way a trap is sweet. Elena’s face, weaponized.
She has smiled at that face during sleepovers. Clung to it when her father left. But this smile isn’t Elena’s. It’s slow, syrupy, a perverse echo. A parody.
“Game on,” the girl says.
Caroline doesn’t understand—not fully—until the pillow descends.
She thrashes immediately. Kicks, claws, screams—all of it wild, feral, useless. This girl is stronger than her. That’s never been true before. Elena’s always been the delicate one, softer, smaller, the kind of girl you protect even when she breaks your heart. That imbalance is what Caroline built herself against. It’s how she became Cheer Captain, despite Elena’s unending charm. It’s why she learned to sparkle like armor.
Yet here, none of that matters. Not when her lungs are losing oxygen and someone who looks like her childhood friend is smothering the life out of her.
She can feel herself slipping.
But if this is the end, she won’t go quietly. Her fingers find the other girl’s forearms and dig in deep, scraping down with everything she has left. She doesn’t care about survival now. She cares about the trace.
The signature she’ll leave behind.
If her mother finds her body—and she will, she has to believe that much—maybe there will be DNA under her nails. Maybe that will be enough.
Everything starts going black.
A sound like glass shattering inside a metal drum detonates above them.
The lights flicker. Once. Twice. Then they burst—a shower of sparks and chaos—plunging the room into a strobing red-and-white hellscape. Somewhere overhead, a shriek—inhuman, too sharp for any throat—rips through a ceiling tile.
Her attacker jerks up, cursing. The pillow drops.
Caroline gasps for air like it’s the best thing to ever exist, chest heaving and throat raw.
The window explodes inward—a roaring blast of glass, wind, and heat—and something follows it.
Figures.
Tall. Wrong. Curved in and bent in unnatural places. Silhouettes that bend the air around them like heat waves. Skin like sandpaper and bone, pale and veined, twitching at the seams, a material that resembles an oil slick covering most of its skin. Weapons shift in their hands—not held but grow. Eyes like the bottoms of wells: endless, depthless, blank.
They don’t speak or hesitate, and their gazes zero in on Caroline.
The girl who just tried killing her gives a snarl that sounds like pure instinct. She blurs forward, grabs something from a tray of medical equipment, and flings it like knives. One hits its mark with a wet thunk. Another lunges. She dodges, barely—her foot slipping in blood or maybe water. Who can tell anymore?
“What the hell are you?!” she hisses at them.
They don’t respond. One raises an arm and something beams out of it—too fast, too precise. It slices across her shoulder, searing fabric and skin.
The smell of burned flesh fills the room.
Caroline shrieks. The other girl—Katherine?—moves like lightning—not to save her, she knows. But to win, like she must eliminate the threat.
It’s a brutal, violent thing to see.
She fights like a creature born of war, wielding a jagged shard of IV pole—when did that break?—like a sword. Two fall. The third slams her against a wall, cracking the plaster. The fourth gets a blade into her gut. She takes it anyway with a perverse grin.
She wins , eventually—by the skin of her teeth and maybe spite. The last one finally dies, she kills it with a growl and a twist. The thing collapses—its ugly skin bleeding out a color that is not red.
Silence.
Bloody, buzzing, purple-washed silence.
Katherine stands panting in the ruins of the hospital room, blood in twin rivers down her side. On the floor, it mixes with the purple blood. She looks around—not at the creatures—but at Caroline.
A look in her eyes that Caroline has seen plenty in Elena when she helped her pick out outfits for dates, except this version is much more serious: uncertainty. She glances at the broken figures. Then at Caroline.
Caroline, who is weak. Caroline, who is someone she just tried to murder.
Katherine steps toward her, then stops. “Whatever this is... It’s not my fight.”
“What were those things?!” Caroline chokes out.
No answer. The girl vanishes in a gust of blood and air, like a door slamming shut behind a nightmare.
Just gone .
Caroline is alone.
Shaking. Sitting on a ruined bed in a room full of broken things that don’t bleed right. Beeping machines struggle to reboot in the background. The scent of ozone crawls through her nose.
A tear falls. She didn’t know she was crying. She looks down. A silver glow pulses faintly beneath her skin—just once, right next to her bird tattoo. She squeezes her eyes shut, palms pressed against her face, as if she can shove it all back in.
Make it un-happen somehow. But it won’t.
Caroline doesn’t sleep.
She lies there in the ruined hospital room, her back propped stiffly against the cold, metal railing of the bed. Her eyes are fixed wide on the damaged ceiling, unblinking. The air reeks of burnt plastic and antiseptic, thick and unnatural. A single fluorescent bulb flickers weakly overhead, casting long, shuddering shadows against the walls.
The window is shattered—jagged glass glitters on the linoleum floor like teeth—and the pale curtains hang in torn, soot-smeared ribbons. The walls, once a dull beige, are now slick with a residue that gleams faintly green in the half-light.
Every now and then, she flinches. A shift in the shadows, a creak from the buckled floor tiles, the flash of memory—a weapon glinting, far too close to her face. The image comes unbidden, sharp and soundless, like a knife sliding behind her eyes.
Her fingernails are stained dark with blood that isn’t hers. It’s dried beneath the cuticles, flaked into the creases of her knuckles, and no matter how she rubs her palms together, she can’t get rid of the shaking.
She stays like that for hours. Maybe longer. Time feels cracked here, too.
Eventually, exhaustion drags her under like a rip current—relentless and cold and impossible to escape—and she doesn’t fight it. Not even when the room is still humming faintly beneath the silence, like it's waiting to breathe again.
✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧
Caroline dreams of another sky.
A denser, greener world unfurls around her. The plants are unfamiliar—thick-leafed, jewel-toned, alive in ways that whisper. The air presses against her skin like warm silk, saturated with moisture, dense with secrets.
Even in the forest’s quiet heart, she is clad in shimmering fabric that bends light, clinging to her like a second skin. Silvery threads ripple with every breath she takes, soft and hazy in the filtered sunlight. Her boots sink softly into moss as old as the world, cushioned, spongy beneath her weight.
She is alone—separated from her guard. Her vessel hovers miles overhead, cloaked, forgotten like a dream on waking. She’s come down for sport—to see the world she has just acquired. A lush, unruly thing. Supposedly unremarkable.
But the ground hums beneath her feet.
A strange feeling grips her, sudden and warm and inexplicable. It coils around her spine and makes her freeze mid-step.
She turns. The foliage parts unnaturally before her—not cut, not broken—but swaying, as if in deference.
A stone.
Imposing and cracked, embedded deep in the roots of a colossal tree. Its bark is blackened with age, and its roots twist like sleeping giants. Golden light leaks from the stone—not like any technology her people know, but purer, rawer. A pulse, slow and steady.
Drawn without thinking, she steps closer. Her hand hovers… then touches.
And the world shudders.
Not visibly—not violently. But somewhere deep within her, something ancient and waiting stirs. It cracks open like a seed under sun. Her breath catches, sharp and involuntary. A whisper slithers down her spine, slow and intimate, coiling deep into her bones. It doesn’t feel foreign. It feels known. As if a long-lost piece of herself had just stirred awake.
She’s not just touching the stone—it’s touching her back. Calling to her. Welcoming her. Like it had been waiting all this time. Like she had been meant to find it. Impossible recognition blooms in her chest, irrational and certain, the kind that defies logic but roots itself anyway.
A rustle. A voice crackles through her comm, sharp and too human, asking after her well-being.
The spell breaks.
Her breath escapes in a slow exhale. The forest draws back around her, like a curtain falling. The strange pulse vanishes, the hush returning—but it is emptier now, as though something vital has slipped away. The world contracts, its edges dulling, the colors draining into quieter tones, as if someone had turned the saturation down
She blinks.
The light is gone. And the stone is dull and lifeless again, just another part of the land. She steps back, her fingers still tingling, her heartbeat loud in her ears.
She never mentions it again, not even to Kaelvar. But deep inside her, something keeps restless.
✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧
She wakes up gasping—air tearing into her lungs like she’s drowning on dry land. Clutching the pillow—oh God, the pillow—like a lifeline, fingers cramped, knuckles white, vision blurred, chest rising too fast, skin slicked with sweat.
She bolts upright—ready to scream, ready to run—but stops cold.
The room is too quiet. Too still. Disgustingly intact.
The window is unbroken, and the lights are steady and the same fluorescent as it has ever been. The linoleum floor gleams, scrubbed spotless. No burn marks, or gashes in the walls, or shattered IV poles, much less strange corpses leaking metal-smelling ichor.
Only her ragged breathing and the faint scent of antiseptic. Just clean, sterile hospital stillness.
A nurse stands near the door with a clipboard, peeking in. Her voice is light, almost cheerful. “You okay? Bad dream?”
Caroline blinks at her. “What…?”
“You had a concussion and a nasty bump to the head. You know, in the accident, ” the nurse says, stepping a little closer, pen poised over paper. “Nightmares are normal after that kind of trauma.”
Caroline nods slowly. Her body moves before her mind does—legs swinging off the side of the bed, feet touching cold tile. She scans the room again, eyes searching for something—anything—that shouldn’t be there.
The nurse doesn’t seem concerned. No alarms. No damage. Not even Elena’s crazy, impossibly strong and fast evil twin.
The hum of the lights continues. It’s annoying. The window glows with harmless morning light. Her hands are clean, fingernails prim and perfect, and not at all like she desperately clawed into a murderer’s skin. Actually, they look longer than she remembers keeping them, filed into perfect ovals just the way she prefers.
Her heart, though? It is still racing in her chest like she just crawled out of hell.
✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧
Matt talks the whole drive. Caroline hates him for every second of it.
The car smells like fast food and sun-warmed vinyl and something she thinks might have been Vicky’s perfume. Every bump in the road sends a dull throb through her skull. Her temples pulse in rhythm with the ache.
He tells her how Bonnie showed up while she was in surgery, how Elena’s worried, how Tyler’s being Tyler.
She nods occasionally, the way someone might nod through a language they don’t speak. Her mouth forms a mechanical “yeah,” a brittle “totally,” whenever she senses he’s waiting for noise.
But her head is splitting open and her skin itches like something's crawling beneath it. And she thinks— seriously thinks she’s losing her mind—because she’s sure the sun is screaming at her.
So she’s not exactly hearing him.
Not really.
All she can hear, beyond the sun (and wow, huge question mark inside her brain there), is the high, glassy ringing in her ears—the sound of glass and metal breaking apart, and something snarling deep inside her mind. Not Katherine’s, although that alone was terrifying. But those… things.
The memory alone makes her shudder.
When they pull up to her house, she fumbles her seatbelt with fingers that don’t quite feel like hers and mutters, “Thanks. I’ll text you.”
Matt hesitates. “You… want me to stay? For a bit? Just in case?”
Her answer is too fast. “No, I’m fine,” and makes sure to smile at him. Too bright. Too practiced. It tastes like a lie. She gets out of the car on shaky legs and hopes he doesn't notice.
He watches her for a second longer—and her brain compares it to the way someone watches a fire, uncertain if it’s out or just hiding its heat—then gives a quiet nod and drives off.
Inside, everything switches to autopilot. The way it always is when she’s alone and has reached that dangerous intersection between numbness and crisis mode.
Keys clink onto the hook. Shoes off, one kicked, one pulled. Bag dropped on the coat closet floor with a dull thump.
The house is dim, hollow, suspended in time. Untouched, as if the entire day hadn’t happened. No scent of coffee, no recent clutter on the counters, not even a note. She sees no trace of her mom having been home in the last 24 hours—knowing her, it was probably longer. Liz Forbes acts like the house itself is a plague out to get her.
Caroline doesn’t even bother turning on the lights. Just lets shadows and muscle memory do the work for her. She stumbles upstairs, each step echoing in the stillness. Down the corridor, through her bedroom, past the faint creak of the bathroom door’s hinge—onto the cold tiles.
She peels off her clothes in silence. Steps into the shower. Stands there, forehead pressed to the tile, the sting of heat against her skin dulling slowly. Until the water runs cold enough to match how she feels inside.
Steam swells, fogging the mirror, blurring the edges of the room. Blurring the edges of her. The thing burning her vision isn’t the steam—it’s tears. Hot and involuntary and bitter.
She towels off. Goes to bed with her hair still wet. Knows it’ll be a puffy, frizzy mess when she wakes. Knows and, for once, doesn’t care. She curls in on herself beneath the sheets, knees to chest, flushed to mattress, heart pounding like it doesn’t know how to stop. Like she did when she was ten and scared of monsters in the closet.
Except now, they’re not in the closet.
“Something tried to kill me,” she finally whispers it to herself. And something about saying it out loud makes it terrifyingly real. Like naming it might summon it back. Like it already heard.
She falls asleep crying.
✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧
The room is warm. Humming. Alive.
Not like any hospital Caroline has ever known—in truth, not a hospital at all. The walls gleam with the soft iridescence of pearl, curving seamlessly into one another. There are no sharp edges here, no sterile chill. Everything glows with a pulsing gold, the light ebbing in sync with her breath, as if the room itself is exhaling with her.
And yet... she’s calm.
Exhausted, yes—her body aches in strange, unreachable places, her limbs heavy like they’ve been weighed down with sand—but the pain is fading, replaced by something deeper. Not numbness. Not quite peace. Something anchoring , as if a part of her has finally been returned.
A cry slices through the golden hush.
Sharp and real.
Her head turns, slow and instinctive, and someone—a shape half-shadow, half-radiance—steps forward and places him in her arms.
A baby.
Her baby.
She knows it as surely as she knows her bones. His weight and warmth. The impossible, all-consuming love that floods her chest like it’s always been there, waiting to be unlocked. He’s flushed and small and perfect. Soft wisps of silver-blonde hair curl like starlight at his temples. And when his eyes open—just for a moment—they are oceans she’s never seen before, full of gravity and meaning.
She clutches him close. The world narrows to this. To him .
“Caelion,” she breathes, the name slipping out like it’s always been his. Like the stars whispered it to her in a dream. “My little bird…”
He coos, a gurgling sigh that shatters her. Her chest aches with the immensity of it.
All around her, figures move—servants, attendants, midwives in robes of flowing opal light. Their hands are practiced and delicate, and yet they do not touch unless necessary. Machines she’s never seen before glide silently through the air, their surfaces sleek and mirrored, their lights soft, almost reverent, as if they too understand this moment is sacred.
A servant lifts her hair with invisible hands and, in one smooth motion, replaces her robe with something softer, lighter—a gown of woven light that clings like mist and drapes like silk. Her child’s blankets are refreshed just as quickly: the old ones dissolve in a blink, the new ones forming midair, threads shimmering like moonbeam and snowfall.
She doesn’t question any of it. In the dream, it makes sense. In the dream, she belongs here and nowhere else.
The moment stretches, endless and brief all at once. And all the while, her focus stays locked on the baby she holds to her heart.
Caelion stirs in her arms, blinking up at her, and she hums something low under her breath—not a song she knows, but one she somehow remembers.
Her fingers gently sweep the soft strands of silver-gold from his brow. “You’re going to change everything,” she whispers. The words are a promise and a prophecy. “And I’m going to protect you.”