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When he comes to, it's an ugly, tiring thing. He feels his blood circulating again through his ashen veins, the breaths in and out of his lungs, the way his fingertips itch to move.
He wants to groan, he wants to feed until it rains blood, he wants to open his bloody eyes.
It's an instant later that he's pulled up and cradled by the neck. Like a ragdoll, he thinks angrily. It's seconds, and then there's the hard surface of a wall at his back.
“Klaus,” Caroline whispers and that sound is so unexpected, so startling that the only thing that prevents him from reacting, a flinch, a silent gasp, a nothing perhaps, is the deep ache that had sunk in his marrow.
“Oh my god,” her voice is suddenly that much clearer, ringing in his ears, he's assaulted by a prominent stench of blood. “I get that you've been like this for weeks but now is so not the time to go all Sleeping Beauty on me.”
He lets out a laugh, a throaty, brittle one and then coughs.
There's a shaky breath on Caroline's part, yet her grip never falters.
“Here,” she says softly. “Have some AB+"
A tube is inserted in his mouth, the taste of the blood exploding on his tongue and filling his mouth. He almost sighs in relief, before he tears into the plastic.
He gorges on one bag and then another, begins to feel some semblance like himself at the fifth or the sixth.
Caroline's fingers are gentle against the skin of his neck, and she begins to talk but the note of tightly controlled panic loud and clear to him. “When Rebekah told me that you're MIA, I thought you were sulking in a like a macabre vampire town, not trapped in a creepy coffin that managed to be far creepier than the ones you have for your siblings, by the way. Karma really is a bitch.”
He licks his lips and his muscles move a bit more easily as he adjustes his position. His eyes finally listens to his commands and open.
She's the first thing his vision latches on, of course. There are wisps of curled hair at the sides of her face, the rest of it is pulled back in a braid. Her white shirt is flicked with blood, the rest of the fabric is hidden by her black jacket.
“I hit a bit of a snag,” he tells her.
She snorts, “yeah, obviously, Mr. King of the World.”
He allows himself to roll his eyes, and refrains from pointing out that it took at least three fully powered covens to even ambush him, much less incapacitate him as they did.
He had a feeling that argument would be useless.
When his visions clears, and his throat is no longer unbearably parched, he blinks to look at the room behind her.
It's littered with bodies.
There are six corpses of two witches and four warlocks nearest to them sporting empty holes in the left sides of their chests where hearts are supposed to be. They're young, faces soft and cheeks full.
Further away lies the rest of the coven. Their bodies dumped all over each other to make a mountain of broken limbs. There's a certain lack of finesse in their arrangement, and he turns to Caroline with a raised brow.
“Someone made a mess.”
She gives him her deadliest glare, but he only smiles.
Caroline sighes, sits back on her behind.
“They were annoying and getting in my way. I tried to be polite and all but dear god, they babbled like crazy, so I turned on my bitch mode, sue me.”
How could he ever?
She pauses, looking at the bodies behind her from the corner of her eye, and he watches her; searching for the ways her gaze lingers differently as she ponders the pile.
There's no longer that tinge of alarm she'd had when she stabbed through a coven of linked witches for the sake of her Bennett friend.
“You know,” she says. “They will need to get buried.”
He stifles his chuckle, “your grave digging hadn't gotten any better, has it, sweetheart?”
“Oh, shut up.”