Just a Glimpse
by adlyb
Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.
Summary: Curiosity killed the cat. (But satisfaction brought it back.) Before the bodyswap with Alaric, Klaus goes to Mystic Falls to investigate the rumors surrounding a certain doppelganger.
Spoilers: Through 2x21, The Sun Also Rises
Rating: R
Warnings: Highly dubious consent, explicit sexual content, sex with a minor, general creepiness
A/N: Prompt fic written for grumpr, who asked for Klaus going to check up on Elena before the sacrifice in season 2; two-shot
Some (Elijah) might like to say he has poor impulse control, but Klaus thinks differently. No, if he had to say—and he has, on several memorable, destructive occasions—if he had to say, he simply enjoys indulging his curiosities.
To be sure, this trait has gotten him in trouble before.
He had to drag Henrik along to see the wolves change their skins, just like he had to entice the beautiful and aloof village widow to dance with him. Both decisions sealed his fate, one way or another. No one has ever dared ask if he regrets them.
The long and short of it is: He doesn't.
And so it is that when he hears the first whisper of a Petrova doppelganger alive and well in the Old Dominion, he resolves to investigate for himself. Just a quick look, so he can put the matter to bed.
His curiosity has gotten him in trouble before. But never trouble such as this.
Here's the thing: Over the centuries, there have been nine girls brought forward to him as the doppelganger. Some had matched Tatia's description admirably well. Only one had been the real thing.
The last vampire to tell tale of a live doppelganger had been back in the 1830s. The girl he'd brought to Klaus had been a dark-eyed Italian girl whose chin was too square and nose too pert. Klaus had devoured her just the same. She had struggled barely at all.
He expects this girl to be much the same.
He's been given a description, and a name.
The description is vague. A lovely girl, teenaged and olive-skinned, with hair and eyes of darkest brown. Lithe of limb with a suggestive curve to her hips. All things possessed by countless girls.
The name is even less encouraging.
Elena Gilbert.
Thoroughly American. Unremarkable.
His hopes are not high.
And yet.
What is interesting is that the closer he draws to Virginia, the more savage the reports he hears surrounding the mystery of this Elena Gilbert.
Explosions. Werewolves with their hearts ripped out. Witches burned alive.
And a confused whisper of his brother's involvement in it all.
The reports are all weeks and weeks old before he ever hears them—years and years of reclusion have made him as difficult to find as a shadow at noon—and he can discover no evidence that Elijah is still at large in this fancifully named Mystic Falls.
He realizes Elijah must have heard the rumors as well. Must have investigated and found the girl disappointing. Pity, but no surprise.
He takes extra precautions anyway.
Greta crafts for him a cunning spell of forgetting, and imbues the spell into an amulet of polished ivory, hewn from the femur of a wolf, so that whosoever should wear that amulet would wear the spell's protection as well. So long as he wears the amulet, all memory of him will slip from the mind of anyone and everyone he meets mere moments after he departs.
He had once fashioned himself a king and flung his banners in blood and fire across the sky.
Prodigious age has taught him that there is greater power in letting himself fade into myth.
Greta looks at him with liquid, love-struck eyes when she drops the amulet into his outstretched palm.
She'd been an obedient daughter, sweet and virginal, when first he'd come across her.
Now her father is dead, slain in some misguided attempt to fetch her back. Klaus told her the news as he thrust himself inside of her. She cared not at all.
The witch is his creature and his acolyte, and it pleases him that it pleases her to do his bidding. It pleases him to be the object of her love, the sole master of her devotion.
She is his finest tool.
Mystic Falls fills him with a soft unease that he cannot place his finger upon until he sees the great twisting serpent of the river, and he recognizes the shape of it from his muted mortal memories.
The day is a dreary one, the gray clouds rolling furiously in the sky. The yellow spring tulips hang limp with rain water, and the smell of freshly mown grass and earth churned for planting permeates the air. The wind moves through the limbs of the huge oak and magnolia trees planted along the town green, their leaves casting strange and shimmering shadows across the pitch that flicker at the edges of his sight. The denizens of Mystic Falls stream past him by automobile and by foot. He moves through everything like a dream.
The face of the place has changed, but has the heart?
A shiver of foreboding rolls up his spine.
There were once White Oaks here, stretching to the Heavens.
There was once a widow here, too, a woman of unearthly beauty and all too earthly desires.
Her blood had been the first, and the finest.
At night, sometimes, he speculates whether Katerina's would have tasted quite the same.
He wonders what this girl will taste like.
Inquiry leads him to a large white house in a quiet neighborhood. Warm yellow lamplight spills from its windows.
Whoever lives inside this house must be very trusting of the world outside.
Anyone at all might look inside.
Any thing at all.
Amazing what kinds of information people will tell a stranger.
He so rarely must needs resort to compulsion if he instead chooses whom to question with a modicum of care and offers up the right smile. It's become a favorite pass time of his in these dull modern centuries.
A girl flits in front of the window, her face obscured by the curtain of her hair.
The lamplight sets the girl's hair to glistening. It is the exact shade he remembers.
His heart leaps.
The girl does not reappear again that night.
He watches until he sees her window go dark.
There are things about this story that bother him very much.
Why had Elijah spent months here, and why did he leave, and whence did he go?
How did the Martin witches' deaths factor in?
He tells himself this: If she were the real thing, a genuine Petrova doppelganger, no force on this earth would have pried Elijah from her side.
He still finds himself seeking her out.
There are many interesting things to be learned about this Elena Gilbert.
All agree she is a beauty.
A tragic beauty, some might say. Orphaned this last year in a terrible accident.
Some say she is sweet.
Others claim wild things about her—that she openly keeps two—no three—no four lovers, men who are all far too old for her, save for the much-wronged high school sweetheart. He's told that she's been seen gallivanting through the town at all hours, running naked through the woods, walking slowly as though in a daze to her home, all the while splashed in blood. In his mind's eye he can see her, shining incarnadine like a primordial goddess.
One of them, an old man named Fell, suspects she is a vampire.
The idea that he has finally caught Katerina does flit across his mind before he dismisses it.
Everyone has an opinion on this Miss Elena Gilbert. Everyone knows her, and there is not a soul in this blasted town who is not all but fascinated by her.
So it is quite frustrating that no one can tell him just where to find her. When he visits her school, she has skipped class. When he has a drink at the tavern she favors, she doesn't show, and when he waits for her at her home, she stays out the whole night long.
Save for that one inconclusive glimpse, he has not seen her at all.
It's enough to drive him mad.
He is nothing if not persistent.
If she is nowhere to be found, then he will search for her everywhere.
That single indistinct glimpse of her haunts and hounds him, interrupting his thoughts day and night.
Despite his best efforts, he finds himself as bewitched by Elena Gilbert as the rest of Mystic Falls.
Eventually, the name of that high school lover filters through to him.
Stefan Salvatore. His lost brother.
All too vividly he recalls the way Stefan's long white fingers would glide up his sister's thighs. How she would gasp and bat at his shoulder, pretending to be anything other than utterly delighted by his carnal attentions.
He imagines those same fingers on Elena Gilbert's golden thighs, imagines that smirking mouth he remembers too well pressed against her throat, her breasts, to the tender flesh between her legs.
Elena Gilbert is little more than a shadow, a phantom looming over all his thoughts, but loom she does, larger and larger with each day he fails to find her, and the idea of Stefan plying her with lovely words and lovely caresses, of Stefan tasting what must undoubtedly be lovely, lovely blood, fills him to the very brim with a hot and seething rage he has not felt in centuries.
He had felt like this the night Katerina fled from him.
The return of that feeling, so writhing and alive inside of him, makes him feel almost young again.
Almost.
He wonders if Elena Gilbert knows what Stefan is.
Klaus cannot decide which answer he prefers.
The Boarding House is empty when he arrives. Never one to be constrained by the mores of polite society, he tries the front door. It swings open easily enough, though, a human's ownership of the property repels him at the threshold.
No matter.
He circles round the house, peering through the musty glass windows into a room lavishly appointed in the style of a bygone century. Littered throughout the room are the artifacts of the countless hours spent here by some teenage girl, doubtlessly Elena Gilbert herself. A leather jacket, thrown carelessly over the back of a chair. The bookbag and text books for the school she apparently never attends, strewn over the floor by the fire. Hair ribbons and stray tubes of lipstick and the smell of her, pungent and frightfully familiar even through the glass. Her presence pervades the home itself, sinks into the warm and polished woods and plush velvet sofas.
And still she is not here.
She is not here, and she is not anywhere.
He begins to think he made her up.
Until—
On the outskirts of town there is a bridge that leads over the deep and silent river, and beyond it, to the ancient forest of his youth, and to the deafening thunder of the town's eponymous water falls. As a child, he was taught to revere the gods that lived within and beyond those falls.
Old gods like those he can understand. Forces of raw and absolute power and caprice. Figures of wrath and ruin. Much like him, some might say. Whisper, more likely, if they believed in his very existence well enough to give the thought voice.
To these gods he ventures when he has had nothing but ill luck for turn upon turn of moon and sun.
It's on the bridge, this Wickery Bridge, that he finally finds Elena Gilbert.
A/N: Please read and review, and I'll work on getting the conclusion posted soon! Next chapter is going to earn the rating.
Also, if you're new to my writing, and like the Klaus/Elena pairing, please check out my other fics!
PS if you're wondering about the rumors about Elena, the explanation is that the townspeople have also seen Katherine around town before she was trapped in the tomb, and thought it as Elena. So some of that is Elena, and some of that is Katherine.