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open | super super super rusty brief surprise revival...

Quick and painless — that was a lie. There was nothing quick or painless about having your neck broken. Maybe it seemed quick and relatively painless to the inflicter and the observer, but to the one experiencing that 'quick and painless' death, the brief moments that seemed to go on for hours and sharp spikes of pain unlike anything you've ever felt before said otherwise.

It hurt. It hurt a lot, and the darkness that enveloped him while he waited out his return wasn't exactly what you'd call comforting. Unsettling was more like it. There was nothing. Nothing but a dark veil cast over you, like you were underwater and unable to surface.

But eventually that ice cracked and Matt surged past it, taking a great big gulp of air that went rushing into his lungs so powerfully it startled him. He bolted upright, bumping against the cool metal of the railing that gnashed against the line of his spine. Vision still blurry, a rush of sounds assaulted him: birds, footsteps, voices, and the distinct sound of waves slapping against the side of a boat.

He'd only been on a boat once, with Elena's family out at the lake before her parents passed away, but the sound of water rushing against the side of a boat stuck with him as one of the most soothing sounds he's ever heard.

It had him twisting around and grasping the railing to peer down over it, to try and get an idea of where the hell he was. Had Damon gone back on his word and done away with his body? Had Elena? Had their attempt to get her to turn it back on gone awry?

Matt couldn't say. All he knew was that he wasn't where he should be, this wasn't exactly a boat, and there was a strong possibility that the ring hadn't worked like Damon said he would and death was having a good laugh at his expense over daring to trust the word of a Salvatore.

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Caroline never really gets used to the fact that the boat can just take someone from anytime, anywhere. You think she would, with the number of her friends that are so far back from when they were before, when she has so much time on all of them, but she doesn't. Every time someone she lost, someone she loves, someone she misses, finds their way onto the boat, it's like she's being smacked in the face with it all over again.

(Oddly enough, the first thing that strikes her is that he looks so young. It's such a vain thing to notice, but she forgets that they were kids then, dumb and stupid and while she never changes, she knows that he did.)

It's the fact that he doesn't look okay that starts her back into action again, towel for the pool abandoned as she drops it at one end of the deck, zooming with vampire speed over from the other. Her knees connect with the deck hard, one hand moving to the side of his face as she draws his attention back to her.

"Matt? Hey, Matt, it's okay. You're okay."

She's not sure when he's from yet, but from what she can tell, it doesn't look good.

She doesn't look any different to him, still appearing as the same old Caroline. He forgets, just as she does, that he ages and she doesn't. Matt hasn't really put much thought into the fact that one day, he'll be old and wrinkled and his best friends will still be as youthful and unchanged as they were when they were teenagers and the hopes of living a normal life were pulled out right from under them.

"Caroline?"

His vision's still a little fuzzy, his neck still stiff from the dying experience. He'd reach up to rub that spot on the back of his neck that still feels like it's snapped in two, but his arms feel limp and as weak as noodles. Damon was right about it being disorienting at first, even if what he'd shared with Matt when he handed him the ring had been second hand knowledge from Jeremy and Alaric — nevermind Damon being the one to make them experience that disorientation in the first place.

"What happened? Where am I? Did it work?" Had Damon even told her what they were doing? She and Bonnie seemed to have washed their hands of Elena.

"You're on a boat." She decides to start there, since she can't answer his last question until she finds out when he's from, what he just left. The Gilbert ring is sitting on his finger, but Matt wore that for a while. She can't say for sure which death this was.

(There's a part of her that hates that she can quantify them.)

"It's weird ... sort of like a holding room between worlds. It grabs us out of nowhere and just drops us here for as long as it wants."

And that's not really the weirdest part, but she's easing into it slowly.

"With what, Andy Samberg and T-Pain?"

On a boat... Get it?

It's probably not the best time to joke, but they've had enough seriousness to last them a couple lifetimes. And Matt has no idea how many lifetimes Caroline's lived at this point, and joking about their location is better than talking about what it was like to die and how he can finally relate to something she's experienced herself.

It's a moment where she has to pause, and not just because it's been decades since Andy Samberg was actually relevant. It's also a moment where she's just smacked in the face with how much she's missed him.

Some losses are easier to take than others. Matt was one of them, not because she didn't love him, but mostly because she knows that it came at the end of a good life. He grew up, he grew old, he was loved, and those are the things that matter. His death didn't come violent and bloody at the hand of a unseen monster in the dark. Matt died human, and so when the time came for Caroline to say goodbye, she could almost say her tears were happy ones - happy that her friend that she loved got to live the life they all should have lived.

The one they would have lived, if not for vampires. Living as long as they do puts things in perspective that way.

That doesn't mean Matt wasn't missed. It used to sneak up on her when she would catch the tail end of a high school football game or see a classic car. There were fewer and fewer of those as the years went on, and it was usually something small and subtle that would eventually pass, as most things usually do, but this is different. This is Matt and he's here and she can touch him, and she's missed him in a way that makes her chest clench.

Even his dumb stupid jokes in the face of insanity.

"No mermaids," she says with a bright grin, one that she hopes covers the tears that she can feel blurring her vision. "I'm sure that's probably a big disappointment."

"Little bit," he admits, though the admission is mostly to cover up the fact that he does notice those tears.

There are times when he doesn't know how to act around Caroline. Things between them didn't exactly go well towards the end there, and he still feels like an ass for teaming up with her mom to take care of the threat he perceived all vampires — including Caroline — to be at the time. He knows better know, and his intentions had been entirely noble and pure, but they hadn't exactly gone off without a hitch. He's just glad he came to his senses in time, even if his inability to deal with the fact that his girlfriend was a vampire meant that their relationship would never be what it used to and had come to an end.

Nevermind the fact that she's with Tyler now. Or was. He's a bit sketchy on where his ex and best friend stand now that Tyler's on the run, but as awkward as he feels in their presence since they became an item, he does hope that it works out for the best. If anyone deserves happiness, it's those two.

"Knowing our luck, they'd be the scary type of mermaids that want to drown us all instead of the kind in The Little Mermaid." Elena may have made him sit through several replays of that when they were kids.

She laughs a bit at that, nodding in agreement. "Yep. With super gross teeth and claws. Mermaids are nothing to be trifled with."

Though who knows, maybe saying it aloud will make a flock of them appear somewhere on the boat. Caroline wishes to discourage this like of thinking, but she's mostly caught up in the Matt of it all. And, for the record, she and Tyler never get less complicated. In fact, she and Tyler kind of split up. But it's something they work through, and maybe in some ways they come out better for it.

Caroline isn't really sure. Before the boat, she hadn't seen Tyler in a while, and this Tyler isn't her Tyler.

There's a moment where she just looks at him, those tears just sitting there, and before she can think better of it, she's throwing her arms around him and pulling him close. Gently, in deference to his recently resurrected state, but still tightly, like she doesn't really want to let him go.

"I missed you."

Missed him? "What? Care, I wasn't—"

But he doesn't finish that, sensing that something's off. There's something he's missing here, a big piece of the puzzle that would explain why Caroline's hugging him like it's been years since she last saw him, not the few hours it ought to have been. So he hugs back, wrapping his arms around her and running a soothing palm up and down her back.

She's glad that he just goes with the hugging for now. She wraps her arms around him tightly and just sinking into the hold for a moment before she starts to explain. She knows it's weird. She's well aware of how she might seem to him right now, but she needed the hug first.

"Time's a little weird here," she says as she pulls back. "People get pulled from different times, and time doesn't really move the same way for people back home. I've been on the boat for a few months now."

That didn't make sense, but since when did anything about the world they live in make sense? He used to think it did, but it turned out he was living a blissfully ignorant lie where vampires weren't real and he wasn't a guy wearing a magic ring who just rose from the dead. Tim going weird and people winding up on strange ships in the middle of nowhere was relatively tame in comparison to some of the other things that had happened to them since the Salvatore Brothers breezed into town.

And it's okay, because he needed that hug, too. As gun-shy as Matt can be with the affection he honestly craves underneath it all, sometimes you just had to take what was offered. It helped to steady his nerves and settle his stomach, the adrenaline slowly seeping out of his veins.

"As long as it doesn't involve some crazed ancient immortal, unkillable nightmare, I think I can deal with wacky time."

She laughs a bit at that, before shaking her head. "Not one we've found so far. Just a never ending kidnapping cruise ship. According to Elena it's not the only place like that out there, but I have to say ... this is a first for me."

She moves to sit next to him, shoulder to shoulder next to the railing that he was leaning against. "So which ancient immortal unkillable nightmare are you coming from?"

"The ancient immortal, unkillable nightmare," he says, turning to look at her, as if there wasn't any others they had (or would ever have) to contend with. "Silas."

It hasn't yet occurred to him that Caroline could be from the future — the far future. Yeah, he's realized that his friends will outlive him and go on to live for hundreds of more years after he's gone, but he hasn't really stopped to think about what that means.

"Silas." She makes a face because ugh. That year particularly sucked. Between Elena becoming a vampire, Klaus being a douchebag and Silas they were way in over their heads from day one. But as she thinks back, trying to place where Matt is in that mess if he has the Gilbert ring and he ...

It hits her in a flash. "Oh, God. You're right from where Damon ... "

Killed him to save Elena. To bring her back to them. Caroline still has a lot of mixed feelings on that particular tactic, considering what it meant for Matt in the long run. She looks at him more critically now, concern all over her features.

"Are you okay?"

Oh, so she knows. Matt frowns. He and Damon hadn't exactly been forthcoming about their plan, and it had been foolish of him to even agree to do something so reckless and desperate -- but they were desperate. They were out of options and Elena was continuing to spiral out of control. It was coming down to getting to turn her switch back on or dealing with her by other means and Matt was one of last in Mystic Falls who didn't want it to come to that.

"Yeah, I think so." He holds up the hand with the ring. "This thing seems to have worked, so I should be."

A beat and then he asks in turn: "Are you?"

"I ... "

She takes a breath, trying to figure out how best to explain it. For her it was so long ago, and she's simply glad to have Matt here and be able to talk to him again. But she knows that he can't tell that by looking at her.

"Do I think that it was the best plan? No. He killed you, Matt." And that is never okay ever, magical ring or not. "Especially considering we know what those rings can do if you wear them for too long."

"Clearly, it didn't make me go crazy, unless this whole ship thing is part of the blacking out process."

He doesn't mean to sound so clipped, but Matt did what he thought he had to do. Everybody else had given up on Elena and Damon, even though his plan was nuts and reckless, was willing to give it one last try. And so was Matt. He owed it to her and would gladly do it again.

"No, no, I know. And I'm glad you got her back."

It's Elena. Caroline was ready to do anything to have her best friend back then too. But at the same time, letting Damon snap Matt's neck on the off chance that it would get her to turn her humanity back on, it doesn't seem like a sane plan. Getting her to unleash her grief by giving her more is cruel at best.

"I just worry that one day those magic fixes that we expect to work, won't."

"You're not the only one."

Matt didn't put much faith in them, to be honest. He let Vicki talk him into putting his faith in magic once and it blew up in his face. He would take the risks for his friends, but he still feared that one day he'd wake up and find out that none of this was real or that it was all falling apart. The magic would die and everyone would just... fade away.

Leaving him alone.

Caroline nods a bit, because even though she knows how things end for Matt, telling him that now probably won't help. Right now, he just needs a distraction more than anything else. "Want to know the one great thing about this ship, though?"

And there's that mischievous Caroline Forbes smile that no one wants to see, ever.

"What's that?"

Good news, yes. He could use some positivity in a world that's been mostly negative since that night his truck took a plunge in the river.

"There are like ... two bars on every deck of this boat." Because no matter how much time has passed, the alcoholic tendencies of everyone in Mystic Falls will probably never change. "And the booze is vampire-proof, so I can actually get drunk again."

Okay, maybe not the good news he's hoping for, but it's certainly a distraction from much more serious topics.

"I feel like we both could use a drink right about now."

"You read my mind," because she's right. Matt could really, really use a drink right now.

Lead the way, Caroline.

And off they go to drink their troubles away. Good times to be had by all.

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