[Whenever Caroline arrives, Tyler's already saved them a booth in the corner. He's got a London Fog latte (earl grey with vanilla) in one hand, and some fantasy novel on the table.
He hadn't exactly planned on buying it, let alone reading it - but something about it spoke to him. So much so, in fact, that he might be a little too engrossed in it for his own good. Stefan and Jeremy are clearly rubbing off him too much.]
[ She hesitates before walking over, although he may or may notice, but she also makes a stop at the counter to get herself a coffee before settling across from.
And stares for a moment because he's reading a book. ]
[He guiltily shifts the book back into his bag - it's definitely a book without pictures, and not something Tyler would openly admit to reading. (Also, just plain reading in public period.)] Sorry, that was uh, for class.
[No, it really wasn't. But college required him to read too much.]
[If she was gonna drop the subject, then he'd take that moment of opportunity and switch back to the questions he had, so...]
Sure. First, let me see if I've got this: you grew up with Bonnie, not Stefan and Damon. I became one of Klaus's hybrids - and I was stupidly loyal to the asshole, and I had to leave town because I actually listened to him. [He's counting this off his fingers, one by one.] Then we broke up, because of complicated stuff around that?
And then uh... I'm not sure about the rest. That right, or am I missing more details?
Yeah, Bonnie, Elena, and I grew up together. Stefan and Damon showed up around the beginning of junior year after Elena's parents died. That was around the time things started getting complicated too. Stefan and Elena started dating, Damon um...
He did some stuff, killed people, [used me as a tool and compelled me to do stuff with him. ], and Bonnie was just starting to really come into her powers. Alaric showed up that year too and took up a substitute position as well as moving into Elena's house when he fell for Jenna.
There were other vampires who showed up too, a girl named Anna who was set on freeing her mother from the tomb. You know about the tomb, right?
[Tyler sits up a little straighter.] That's when Bonnie showed up too. Stefan got his magic around that time, Ric came into town...
Where I'm from, Stefan and Elena've been together since the eighth grade. They sorta-kinda never broke up. [With the brief exception of their spat during senior year.]
I know Anna pretty well too. ["She's only one of our best friends."] But yeah, she wanted to free her mom from the tomb, so Damon and Stefan modified the tomb spell - now, only people with Anna's blood can go in and out of it. Last I heard, there were still 24 vampires trapped there.
Actually Elena dated Matt until after her parents died in the accident.
And you kind of dated Vicki. Did you do that in your world too? [ She stared down in her cup as she started speaking again.]
As for the tomb, Damon wanted it open because he was determined to free Katherine, who'd never actually been there in the first place. They freed the vampires and several of them ran but some stayed like Anna and her mother.
The ones who stayed were all killed, including Anna, in a move by the Founder's council using an old Gilbert invention. Thing was, it didn't hit just vampires. You almost crashed your car that night, but I guess since you hadn't triggered your curse yet, it had less of an effect on you. [Caroline was quiet for a long moment before she spoke again, her voice softer.]
They took your father too. Elena's uncle John set the cellar full of vampires on fire after they'd been neutralized.
[Tyler nearly chokes on his latte when he hears her name again - in his world, Vicki died for Matt's sake.] Briefly. Very, very briefly.
I remember that. The Gilbert compass or something? Damon was supposed to unspell it, but he didn't. [They're not even scratching the surface of their chaotic, complicated two years - and already Tyler can feel the gulf in just how different everything played out.] I wasn't actually around for Founder's Day - Mason and I weren't in town for the "big anniversary." From what I heard, Anna had given you and Matt a ride home when the device went off and... well, you can guess the rest.
[It had been Anna who had crashed the car, and it was thus Anna who tried to heal Caroline with vampire blood to speed up the process.]
Also what happened with the whole moonstone,Klaus, hybrid curse breaking? Because it's a kind of a long story on my side so if I can skip what you know, it'll probably be simpler.
[He nods, suddenly more interested in finishing his latte than he was before.]
Okay, so condensed version - Katherine wanted the moonstone, so she tried to date my uncle to get it. Mace, however, knows what Elena looks like, so he and Damon came up with some plan to get rid of her. [Tyler wasn't privy to the details. Not initially.] Katherine failed. I'll get back to her later.
You destroyed the Moonstone, actually - but Klaus broke the curse by sacrificing Jules and Vicki, and trying to sacrifice Elena. [His voice's getting shaky just thinking about that.] So he became a Hybrid. What he didn't bargain on, was me and Stefan figuring out a werewolf cure. So when Klaus tried to make me like him... [Tyler laughs. Hollowly.] He failed.
You can't exactly make a hybrid out of a human - and you can't exactly use vampire blood to make a sleeping werewolf a vampire, because you end up with one very pissy werewolf. So you're kinda stuck. That's... well, that's when he forced Bonnie to turn her humanity off.
[He finishes off his latte.] It took Anna and Damon forever to switch it back on - so while Klaus's mom was trying to off her kids, Stefan and his cousins basically creamed her into next Tuesday.
Since that left Klaus in debt to us, he peaced out of town the summer before our senior year, never to bother us again as long as we didn't sell the werewolf cure to everyone. They headed down to New Orleans, I think? Or maybe Memphis.
Yeah, um...Damon kind of killed your uncle in my version. Bonnie tried to destroy the Moonstone but this witch she met actually ended up handing it over to Elijah. Katherine's plan failed, yeah, but Vicki had been dead months after Stefan staked her when she tried to kill Elena.
He still sacrificed Jules, but he also turned Jenna and then used her as the vampire in the ceremony. Elena would have died, but her uncle..or well, her father, did some spell thing that let her live on as a human and not a vampire.
Stefan went with Klaus when he left, since he'd been compelled to turn his humanity off, and they kind of cut a swath through the south more or less, in their attempts to make more hybrids. At least until he figured out he needed Elena's blood, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
We kind of set up a plan to bring Klaus back and kill him, involving Mikael. Of course it backfired, but Stefan also took the coffins holding the rest of Klaus's family as a bargaining chip.
Bonnie and her mom got the locked one open which apparently cotained Esther, The Original witch?
[Why wasn't he recording this? Tyler listens to it, his bafflement growing by the second as he realizes that Damon killed Mace. They were best friends (and oft mistaken for a couple) - and Damon killed him? In what world?
He feels like he's gonna be sick, because he remembers Esther - and he hates her guts (or what remains of them) with a bitter, bitter passion.]
As if it weren't complicated before. [He rubs his temples.] That whole family, I swear to God---
[He sighs.] Yeah. Yeah, I think that's where my world diverges from yours - we didn't deal with Esther for very long.
We didn't either really. I mean, she threw the ball and Elena helped her link Klaus and the others together, which was all well and good. We were actually going to use the spell to take them out.
We ended up killing Finn and that's when we figured out taking out an Original took out every member of his line so killing the others didn't really work and Klaus had gotten Bonnie to do the unlinking.
Her mom got turned during that too. Once Esther was gone, then the other Mikaelsons kind of scattered, except Klaus and Rebekah, but even with Esther dead, she wasn't out of the running.
She turned Alaric into what Mikael had been and sent him after Klaus.... He'd um...
He'd been having backouts due to the Gilbert ring? He killed some members of the Founders Council and tried to kill Meredith Fell...
He killed my dad too. Not that it was really his fault.
And at the end, Klaus faked his death and Rebekah killed Elena and nearly killed Matt. Elena came back as a vampire though.
And then Klaus left for a while and Rebekah stayed.
[He's going to need something stronger than his favorite kind of caffeinated beverage. Alaric had been having blackouts (?!) and Caroline's dad was dad and Klaus just decided to fake his death and -
And Tyler gets up, once Caroline's finished, holding up his empty latte weakly.]
Shit. [He takes a breath.] I-I think I'm gonna get a refill. Thanks, uh, for filling me in.
[He scuttles off for maybe a minute and a half, to grab a refill and get some much needed space. Now that he's starting to process everything, it hits him: this all happened in the span of two years.
Every single chaotic, crazy, stupid thing had happened during "the best years of their lives." This wasn't real, or possible, except it had happened to her. And the gnawing in his stomach just gets worse.
He checks with the barista, if they stock anything for supernaturals (they don't), and he comes back with two drinks - his latte, and then what (he remembered) as Caroline's favorite. It was only polite, he figured.]
Can, uh... can we wait? [He smiles apologetically, taking the first sip of his second drink. It's just as warm and cozy as he remembered - and for a moment, his guard slips completely.]
Sorry. I really thought I could've handled the whole thing.
Yeah, waiting is good." [Let him come to terms with the deaths she already mentioned before telling him what else happened. Especially since the events come up next were more personally relevant.
[It'll take him more than a few seconds to really process this - a world without Mace, or half the people that he cared about. Caroline hadn't mentioned Anna much, which worries him more than he wants to let on.]
Yeah. I thought my world was complicated but it's like... a whole different kind of complicated.
It's a mess, basically, but it's home. [Which doesn't really make it less of a mess but it's the life she's gotten through.]
I mean, not that I'm making light of everything, but we're kind of in a constant of, okay what next at home because every time things look to be calming down, something else pops up.
[He's gonna get a massive headache from this, he can feel it already.]
My Mystic Falls had a ton of chaos, don't get me wrong, but we had a lot less... it didn't end nearly as badly. [He lets out a low, slow breath as he forces himself to take a sip.] I'm sorry, Care. I don't think it's something I can process overnight.
I don't know. [He peers back at her. She's still the young woman he loves, and yet, her life is completely different from what he remembers.] You're the one who lived it, Care.
If anything, I should be asking you that question.
I wouldn't say better, just... different. I grew up with the Salvatores, and their powers were different, so things wouldn't have remotely ended up like they did for you.
[From the sounds of it? He would've hated her Stefan big time.]
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He hadn't exactly planned on buying it, let alone reading it - but something about it spoke to him. So much so, in fact, that he might be a little too engrossed in it for his own good.
Stefan and Jeremy are clearly rubbing off him too much.]no subject
And stares for a moment because he's reading a book. ]
Hey.
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[He guiltily shifts the book back into his bag - it's definitely a book without pictures, and not something Tyler would openly admit to reading. (Also, just plain reading in public period.)] Sorry, that was uh, for class.
[No, it really wasn't. But college required him to read too much.]
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[She shrugged a shoulder a moment later. ]
If you have questions, it's probably better to ask and we can go from there?
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Sure. First, let me see if I've got this: you grew up with Bonnie, not Stefan and Damon. I became one of Klaus's hybrids - and I was stupidly loyal to the asshole, and I had to leave town because I actually listened to him. [He's counting this off his fingers, one by one.] Then we broke up, because of complicated stuff around that?
And then uh... I'm not sure about the rest. That right, or am I missing more details?
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He did some stuff, killed people, [used me as a tool and compelled me to do stuff with him. ], and Bonnie was just starting to really come into her powers. Alaric showed up that year too and took up a substitute position as well as moving into Elena's house when he fell for Jenna.
There were other vampires who showed up too, a girl named Anna who was set on freeing her mother from the tomb. You know about the tomb, right?
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Where I'm from, Stefan and Elena've been together since the eighth grade. They sorta-kinda never broke up. [With the brief exception of their spat during senior year.]
I know Anna pretty well too. ["She's only one of our best friends."] But yeah, she wanted to free her mom from the tomb, so Damon and Stefan modified the tomb spell - now, only people with Anna's blood can go in and out of it. Last I heard, there were still 24 vampires trapped there.
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And you kind of dated Vicki. Did you do that in your world too? [ She stared down in her cup as she started speaking again.]
As for the tomb, Damon wanted it open because he was determined to free Katherine, who'd never actually been there in the first place. They freed the vampires and several of them ran but some stayed like Anna and her mother.
The ones who stayed were all killed, including Anna, in a move by the Founder's council using an old Gilbert invention. Thing was, it didn't hit just vampires. You almost crashed your car that night, but I guess since you hadn't triggered your curse yet, it had less of an effect on you. [Caroline was quiet for a long moment before she spoke again, her voice softer.]
They took your father too. Elena's uncle John set the cellar full of vampires on fire after they'd been neutralized.
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I remember that. The Gilbert compass or something? Damon was supposed to unspell it, but he didn't. [They're not even scratching the surface of their chaotic, complicated two years - and already Tyler can feel the gulf in just how different everything played out.] I wasn't actually around for Founder's Day - Mason and I weren't in town for the "big anniversary." From what I heard, Anna had given you and Matt a ride home when the device went off and... well, you can guess the rest.
[It had been Anna who had crashed the car, and it was thus Anna who tried to heal Caroline with vampire blood to speed up the process.]
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Did Katherine kill me in your version?
Also what happened with the whole moonstone,Klaus, hybrid curse breaking? Because it's a kind of a long story on my side so if I can skip what you know, it'll probably be simpler.
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Okay, so condensed version - Katherine wanted the moonstone, so she tried to date my uncle to get it. Mace, however, knows what Elena looks like, so he and Damon came up with some plan to get rid of her. [Tyler wasn't privy to the details. Not initially.] Katherine failed. I'll get back to her later.
You destroyed the Moonstone, actually - but Klaus broke the curse by sacrificing Jules and Vicki, and trying to sacrifice Elena. [His voice's getting shaky just thinking about that.] So he became a Hybrid. What he didn't bargain on, was me and Stefan figuring out a werewolf cure. So when Klaus tried to make me like him... [Tyler laughs. Hollowly.] He failed.
You can't exactly make a hybrid out of a human - and you can't exactly use vampire blood to make a sleeping werewolf a vampire, because you end up with one very pissy werewolf. So you're kinda stuck. That's... well, that's when he forced Bonnie to turn her humanity off.
[He finishes off his latte.] It took Anna and Damon forever to switch it back on - so while Klaus's mom was trying to off her kids, Stefan and his cousins basically creamed her into next Tuesday.
Since that left Klaus in debt to us, he peaced out of town the summer before our senior year, never to bother us again as long as we didn't sell the werewolf cure to everyone. They headed down to New Orleans, I think? Or maybe Memphis.
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He still sacrificed Jules, but he also turned Jenna and then used her as the vampire in the ceremony. Elena would have died, but her uncle..or well, her father, did some spell thing that let her live on as a human and not a vampire.
Stefan went with Klaus when he left, since he'd been compelled to turn his humanity off, and they kind of cut a swath through the south more or less, in their attempts to make more hybrids. At least until he figured out he needed Elena's blood, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
We kind of set up a plan to bring Klaus back and kill him, involving Mikael. Of course it backfired, but Stefan also took the coffins holding the rest of Klaus's family as a bargaining chip.
Bonnie and her mom got the locked one open which apparently cotained Esther, The Original witch?
And that's when things got even more complicated.
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He feels like he's gonna be sick, because he remembers Esther - and he hates her guts (or what remains of them) with a bitter, bitter passion.]
As if it weren't complicated before. [He rubs his temples.] That whole family, I swear to God---
[He sighs.] Yeah. Yeah, I think that's where my world diverges from yours - we didn't deal with Esther for very long.
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We ended up killing Finn and that's when we figured out taking out an Original took out every member of his line so killing the others didn't really work and Klaus had gotten Bonnie to do the unlinking.
Her mom got turned during that too. Once Esther was gone, then the other Mikaelsons kind of scattered, except Klaus and Rebekah, but even with Esther dead, she wasn't out of the running.
She turned Alaric into what Mikael had been and sent him after Klaus.... He'd um...
He'd been having backouts due to the Gilbert ring? He killed some members of the Founders Council and tried to kill Meredith Fell...
He killed my dad too. Not that it was really his fault.
And at the end, Klaus faked his death and Rebekah killed Elena and nearly killed Matt. Elena came back as a vampire though.
And then Klaus left for a while and Rebekah stayed.
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And Tyler gets up, once Caroline's finished, holding up his empty latte weakly.]
Shit. [He takes a breath.] I-I think I'm gonna get a refill. Thanks, uh, for filling me in.
[He scuttles off for maybe a minute and a half, to grab a refill and get some much needed space. Now that he's starting to process everything, it hits him: this all happened in the span of two years.
Every single chaotic, crazy, stupid thing had happened during "the best years of their lives." This wasn't real, or possible, except it had happened to her. And the gnawing in his stomach just gets worse.
He checks with the barista, if they stock anything for supernaturals (they don't), and he comes back with two drinks - his latte, and then what (he remembered) as Caroline's favorite. It was only polite, he figured.]
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I know it's a lot. Do you want to hear the rest or would you rather wait?
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Sorry. I really thought I could've handled the whole thing.
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Well to her Tyler, anyway.]
So...yeah.
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Yeah. I thought my world was complicated but it's like... a whole different kind of complicated.
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I mean, not that I'm making light of everything, but we're kind of in a constant of, okay what next at home because every time things look to be calming down, something else pops up.
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[He's gonna get a massive headache from this, he can feel it already.]
My Mystic Falls had a ton of chaos, don't get me wrong, but we had a lot less... it didn't end nearly as badly. [He lets out a low, slow breath as he forces himself to take a sip.] I'm sorry, Care. I don't think it's something I can process overnight.
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....Want to talk about it?
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If anything, I should be asking you that question.
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It's just...it's what life was at home for me. Seems like yours is a lot better, at least.
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[From the sounds of it? He would've hated her Stefan big time.]
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