I think I'll always need you [Open]

[vampire_barbie_girl]

Night - February 8: Highgate Cemetery

Caroline's mother isn't buried in this cemetery. Elizabeth Forbes was buried almost a year ago in the family plot, back in Mystic Falls. Elena should have made sure that flowers had been put there today, flowers that Caroline had carefully ordered weeks ago.

But this is the closest she can get to marking the first anniversary of her mother's death - wandering through the graves of strangers in the moonlight.

She'd come a long way in the last year, both physically and otherwise. At first, she'd tried to shut it all away and only ended up getting consumed by anger and grief. Vampires, it would seem, had an extra stage of grief: carnage. But she'd moved past that and come to London, creating a whole new life for herself in the process.

There were some parts of her old life though that she wasn't ready to let go of. Her mother's memory was at the top of that list. And so, as she walked through past graves and crypts and some rather amazing trees, she began to sing softly the same song she'd sung at the funeral.

Go in peace, go in kindness
Go in love, go in faith
Leave the day, the day behind us
Day is done, go in grace
Let us go, into the dark
Not afraid, not alone
Let us hope, by some good pleasure
Safely to, arrive at home



[The cemetery is partially in Haringey, Camden, and Islington. She'd be coming and going through Camden and Islington, if your character isn't the type to wonder cemeteries in the middle of the night.]

Comments

[dredefulchilde]

"You're actually rather good at that."

Joscelin isn't usually one to lurk cemeteries at night--that would border on cliche--but he still hasn't quite adjusted to being able to move about during the daytime and he finds he's awake most nights out of force of habit. A walk does the insomniac vampire body good.

"The singing, I mean."

[vampire_barbie_girl]

Caroline stiffens when she hears Joss' voice. She can't say he was the last person she wants to see right now but he's not that much further down the list. At least this time, he seems clear-headed.

"Thank you."

[dredefulchilde]

Joss looks around at the gloom of the cemetery. "Are you visiting someone?" he asks, raising an eyebrow. "Dead lover, or something like that?"

He sounds like he's commenting on the weather.

[vampire_barbie_girl]

If he's going to play it cool, Caroline can too. Or at least, she can try.

"No, I don't know anyone buried here," she shrugs, hoping to look casual, though the movement feels stiff. "But it suited my mood tonight."

[dredefulchilde]

"To go around Highgate in the middle of the night singing like a Disney princess?" Joscelin arches an eyebrow. "That's some mood."

[vampire_barbie_girl]

"Yes, it is," she replies, her tone sharp. She sighs, then takes a deep breath. She can be the bigger person here and try and let bygones be bygones. "My mother died a year ago. I sang at her funeral."

[dredefulchilde]

Joss stops. "Oh," he says. "I'm sorry." But he isn't, though he's trying to pretend to be. He doesn't understand this kind of emotion very well. "Humans do have a nasty habit of dying, and you're still young enough you haven't outlived them yet. You will; give it time." Joscelin's not very good at sympathy or saying the right thing to someone who's grieving.

He reaches under his shirt and pulls out his daylight ring on its gold chain. "I didn't know my real mother very well; Father sent her off to a nunnery somewhere once I was old enough to do without her. But my sire was the closest thing I had to a mother. This was her ring. She was murdered in 1598; Millicent sent hunters after her. Some sort of power struggle.

"It gets easier, over time, and you've got a lot of it. It'll hurt, sure, but it hurts less."

[vampire_barbie_girl]

He really isn't good at this bit, though with how long Joss has been a vampire, Caroline figures that shouldn't be too surprising. Especially given how young he'd been when he was turned. So at very least, she can appreciate the attempt.

"So I've been told. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon." Or for it to have absolutely no connection to anything supernatural. Who would have thought that people in Mystic Falls still died of natural means?

She looks carefully at his ring. Joss isn't the first vampire here to talk of their sire as a parent figure, which still seems weird to her, since she didn't feel anything even close to that where Damon was concerned. In fact, she tried not to feeling much of anything where Damon was concerned, though she had eventually realized that she forgave him for what he'd done when she was still human.

[dredefulchilde]

"Humans die," Joscelin repeats, a little more forcefully. "You're already dead, even if your corpse is an exceptionally well-preserved one. You'll go on being dead for centuries, if you're lucky, before something happens and that pretty voice of yours stops for good. Meanwhile, you'll keep losing people. Doesn't matter if they're mortal or vampire; you'll lose them."

He looks up at the girl with solemn eyes.

"I'm sorry you lost her. It's never pleasant. But it's part of your condition now."

[vampire_barbie_girl]

Caroline and her friends had lost so many people in so little time. Her mother, her father, Elena's parents and aunt, Bonnie's grandmother ... and each one left a hole in their lives.

"I know. Knowing doesn't exactly make it hurt any less, at least not yet. But thank you."

[excrucior]

Micheletto had only been expecting to find silence in the cemetery tonight. So when he hears the mezzo-soprano melody echo through the graves, he grows curious. So he releases his powers, reappearing from the shadows and slipping into the moonlight. Caroline could spot him in a few seconds, sitting on the steps of a crypt and leaning against the outer wall leading into the structure.

"I didn't know you could sing, Miss Caroline," Micheletto states in his usual softspoken tone - but over the quiet, any sound would cut through the silence like a knife.

[vampire_barbie_girl]

Caroline hadn't been expecting to run into anyone tonight but she doesn't mind - at least, not too much. Actually, some company might be nice now.

"I actually sing professionally, at the jazz club Rhapsody in Red. I don't know if you'd have heard of it." After all, he didn't exactly strict her as the type to be out on the town.

[excrucior]

"I haven't." Micheletto sits up, leaning his elbow on his knee. "But I might take a look at it myself, sometime."

He pauses for a long moment, his breath coming out in a soft white puff. The nip in the air is just enough to remind him that even among the dead, he is still living, and breathing. "What brings you out here tonight?" He asks, getting to the point of the matter. "Surely not a pleasant moonlight stroll."

[vampire_barbie_girl]

"I'll keep an eye out for you then," she says with a smile.

She shakes her head at his question. "No, it's just ... my mother died a year ago. I thought walking here might help me feel close to her, even though she's buried back home in Mystic Falls."

[excrucior]

Something softens in Micheletto's face when Caroline mentions her mother, even if his neutral expression does not falter. "You were close?" He asks, fingers fiddling with the Witch's Amulet beneath his shirt.

The only thing left he has of his mother.

[vampire_barbie_girl]

Caroline smiles. "Yeah, we were, at least at the end. I put her through some really awful teenage years before then but we worked all out." It still amazes Caroline to realize how many things were actually made better by her becoming a vampire; her relationship with her mother was at the top of quite a long list.

[excrucior]

Micheletto nods knowingly, his eyes studying Caroline for a moment before he answers, "I can tell by the way you speak of her that you loved her dearly. I am sure, were she here today, she would be very proud of you."

[vampire_barbie_girl]

"I think so," she says with a nod. "Or at least, I hope so. Some of the things that happened after she died ... well, it's probably best she doesn't know about that." It wasn't something Caroline liked to think about much, all that grief turned into coldness, then rage. She hated that she'd forever be mourning more than one death on this day every year.