i had this written months and months ago as a request on tumblr, and after months of anxious nail-biting i decided to finally post it up here. prompted by anon on my tumblr: something katherine/caroline take over the world, hopefully with undertones (or overt tones) of klaroline and some original fun in the background.

you can get what you want (or you can just get old)

—

A hundred years down the line and everything still looks the same. They're sitting in a little roadside stall in Penang breathing in the salty-blue air and eating soft, silky steamed flat rice noodles—well, Katherine's eating. Caroline's poking at it dubiously with her chopsticks.

"Is there peanut butter in this?"

Katherine licks some shrimp paste off her thumb. "Shut up and eat."

"Why are we here?"

"You needed a vacation."

"I didn't ask for one."

"That's why I said—needed." This time, Katherine does affect an eyeroll.

Caroline pushes her Chee Cheong Fun away - so like a child, the arch of Katherine's eyebrows seem to say - and crosses her arms. "I want to go home."

The smile that spreads across Katherine's lips is sweet and treacly like the sauce Caroline had so suspiciously sniffed at earlier. She knows what it means—knows what message she's trying to send her with her teeth. Caroline, baby, you want to go home? Where is home? Show me, honey—map it out in stars, scratch the way into my skin and may the swell of my blood lead us there.

"You think you're so clever," Caroline says heatedly. She pushes her chair back, hails a teksi and flies right out of the country.

—

Katherine finds her, of course. Years of travelling together has made Caroline a novice in reverse-existing, a glint of her curls in the sun but that's all you get to see of her, really.

She's chilling in the Caribbean with Rebekah, sipping bright cocktails with umbrellas in them, when Katherine drapes herself in the lounge chair next to her. She groans - yeah, she's had a few years of Katherine-free bliss, but it's not nearly enough to make up for all the shit she's had to put up with over the years.

"Thought you said you didn't need a vacation," Katherine purrs, and not ten seconds go by before a waiter drops a drops a drink into her hand.

Rebekah tilts her sunhat up to fix her with a withering glare, "This isn't much of a vacation now that you're here, is it?"

"Hear, hear," Caroline says smoothly, and they clink glasses.

The snarky response is ignored as Katherine leans back and lifts her ankle lazily, wriggling her toes and studying the ember of her pedicure. "Our empire isn't going to build itself, you know."

Caroline doesn't want to respond—really, she doesn't. She's spent the last few weeks laughing over mojitos and getting her skin soaked with brown sugar and figs and had had Katherine kneaded and massaged right out of her bones, but here she is again, bunching up her nerves, making her skin crackle. She takes another sip of her cocktail and says, through pursed lips, "Does Katherine Pierce actually care enough to stick to something for once?"

"Oh darling, don't you know - Katherine does care about certain things; things that begin and end with herself." Rebekah stretches luxuriously, her sheer shawl slipping off her shoulders.

"Okay, bitch?" Katherine launches her drink at Rebekah's face but the Original knocks it away with a flick of her forefinger without as much as speckling her face with it. "I was talking to my daughter."

Caroline turns away, but Katherine's already caught the pout. "Just because you made me, does not—"

"And just because you slept with Klaus that one time does not make you two sisters-in-law." Katherine says, already getting to her feet. The sand feels good between her toes, hot and burning, but now isn't the time for sun and surf.

"Katherine!" Caroline shrieks, tumbling out of her lounge chair, as Rebekah makes a face.

"You slept with my brother?"

—

Sure, Elijah does a magnificent job at auditing their accounts, but even Katherine has to admit that their business partners were getting restless, bored, and she needed Caroline back in her seat with her easy smiles and little threats wrapped up in sunshine. She doesn't lick blood off her teeth because she's careful not to leave any there, whereas Katherine is obsessed with staining her lips with anything redder than the lipsticks she hoards.

Rebekah plants her ass on the long mirrored table and smiles deviously as Logan Fell of Fell Industries tries his damned best not to track her legs with his hungry little eyes.

"I—I didn't know you two had expanded," Logan clears his throat. "For the longest time…"

"It was just us, we've heard it all," Katherine says, bored. "Thought we'd spice things up a little."

Caroline taps her fountain pen with a hard clink against the glass and shoots Rebekah a pointed look. Rebekah just shrugs and slides off the table, sinfully slow, and even Logan's personal guard shifts a little.

"So, boys," Caroline says, leaning forward, blinks her cat lashes in slow flutters. "What's all this talk about a merger?"

—

There isn't a lot that Rebekah, Katherine and Caroline would agree on, but they did share the same sentiment.

"Let's rule the world," Katherine says, and scribbles a date in her Filofax in permanent red.

Their top-floor office offers them a view of the entire city, gleaming with the allure of a greatness waiting to be explored, plundered, picked apart by their capable fingers.

Caroline imagines them screaming her name, but then thinks better of it with a shake of her head. She imagines them screaming nonetheless, begging her to take their blood, bite their necks, offering up their wrists.

"It's ours for the taking," Rebekah says, like she can read her mind.

—

"You look stressed."

"I'm not," Caroline says, not turning away from the window that stretched floor to ceiling, wall to wall. "Nice try, though."

His chuckle is a rumbling through her ear as he traces his nose along the back of her neck, breathing her in. She swats him away. "Kol!"

"Was worth a try," he smirks, raising his glass at her. "I love how delightful my brother gets when he comes home and you smell of me. Last time, he burnt my apartment down."

Caroline eyes him curiously. "And you were okay with that?"

He shrugs. "Yeah. I've been looking for a reason to move out, anyway - place was horrendous… Oh, don't you raise your eyebrow at me—alright, fine, I broke into the Hermitage and splashed red across that masterpiece of his." But he grins like he's just been itching to tell her that.

"I knew it was you," Klaus says as he sweeps into her penthouse, door cliking quietly behind him. "I switched it out before you could get your grubby little hands on it."

The soft peck of a kiss on Caroline's cheek earns him a smile as he plucks Kol's drink right out of his petulant little fingers. "Cheers, mate."

Kol swings himself down from the bartop and shrugs his jacket on, but leaves it hanging loosely about his frame, unbuttoned. "I'm off. See you in a few decades, probably. How Rebekah still hasn't found out about the two of you…" He shakes his head, mutters something indecent, plants a kiss well and good right on Caroline's lips and is gone before Klaus can quite rip his heart out.

"You're going to have to burn your lips off with acid," Klaus says in a mockery of sympathy and Caroline bats at his arm, but it's not meant to hurt.

"Your lips burn enough," she tells him, and maybe this is meant to.

Klaus rolls his eyes and leans in for a kiss; makes a face the entire time, but it presses her against the window and his tongues ghosts hers, lingering all the same.