Aftermath
by Sandrine Shaw
She doesn't think of herself as broken, but she knows they do. It's all right, though, because she thinks they're broken, too.
She remembers a time when things were different. When she was human, and she had a family, parents, a brother, friends. Two men, brothers, that she loved – passionately, desperately, so much that it hurt. (If broken was a term she applied to herself then, she guesses that she'd have been broken back then as well. She'd been broken for so long that she cannot even remember what it's like to be whole anymore; perhaps she never was. And if there was no before, then there cannot be an after. If something has been in pieces all along, then it's not broken. It's just the way it is.)
But that was a long time ago, and she's lost it all. Lost so much, and she still feels the loss every day even now that the days bleed into one another.
Days, weeks, months. Years. Decades.
Who's counting anyway? It's just time.
"Take me away," she told Klaus, after she buried the last of the bodies.
The bruises and cuts on her hands from the shovel were already fading. She wished they'd stick, wished they'd remain imprinted on her skin for a long time, just as the memories were burnt into her mind. Make me forget, she wanted to ask Klaus, the same way Stefan had asked Rebekah to take away his memories of Elena all those months ago, but Elena wasn't Stefan. She wanted the pain, welcomed it. At least pain meant that you still felt something. Pain meant that there once was love.
Klaus looked at her with hollow eyes. "Why would I want to take you anywhere, love? You're of no use to me anymore."
"Because there's no one else. I'm the last tie to your past. A reminder of everyone you lost." What she didn't say: it went both ways. For the first time in her life, Elena was completely and utterly alone. No family, no friends, no lovers. Not even an enemy to fight. Nothing to give her purpose. Katherine had been there before her, lost and alone and reinventing herself from the ashes of her old life, but Elena didn't want that. Didn't want to be someone she wasn't, so she clung to the one link she had to who she used to be.
"I don't need the reminder," Klaus spat. He was crowding her, hands against her throat, and for a moment she thought he might rip off her head. "What makes you think I even want it?"
"I think you do. I think you need it more than you want to admit," she told him, raising her head and holding his gaze, her throat pressing against his fingers as she spoke.
His grip tightened, then eased as his hands fell away.
An hour later, they were on the road, Mystic Falls growing smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror.
When Klaus came back one night with his grey shirt splattered red and his hands dripping blood, Elena made a choice.
"You can't slaughter innocent people just because you think it might make you feel better if someone hurts more than you do."
"Of course I can, sweetheart," he said, his tone nonchalant and condescending. He wiggled his blood-stained fingers at her. "Evidence to the contrary."
"Don't," she said sharply and slapped at his hands. The smell of blood was overwhelming her senses, and when she bared her teeth at him, they were long and sharp. "You want to rip someone apart? You want to hurt someone? Then hurt me."
It pleased her how her words evaporated the cruelly self-satisfied expression on his face and replaced it with confusion. "I don't understand you. Always willing to sacrifice yourself to save someone. What are you getting out of it?"
"I'm not really all that complicated, Klaus. I just don't want anyone ever to have to feel the kind of pain I did."
The smile on Klaus's lips was so bitter and harsh that it made Elena want to reach out and brush it away, and the only reason she didn't was that she wasn't entirely sure it wouldn't make him snap and take her up on her offer right there. But when he spoke again, his tone was light and faintly amused, and he didn't seem to be in a hurry to tear into her. "See, love, that's where we're different. I want everyone to share my pain."
When he bent down to kiss her, she wasn't sure if he was punishing her and chasing some sort of connection, but he was devastatingly gentle, in a way she hadn't expected him to be capable of, and it made her ache with sudden longing.
An unwelcome onslaught of memories of love and affection and desire, and Klaus may have been the wrongest person to focus it on, but there was no one else. She kissed back, his hands tangling in her hair, her fingers tearing at his ruined shirt. When he pushed into her, she arched her back and tried not to think of the last time someone made love to her, or the fact that every other person who'd ever slept with her was dead and buried.
"You can't take on everyone's pain, love," Klaus told her, later, his hand drawing lazy patterns on her skin.
"Neither can you make yours go away by imposing it on others," she reminded him. She leaned over to kiss him before he had the chance to object.
It was months later that Elijah found them, and Elena realized that Klaus didn't know his brother had even been alive when she saw the broken, naked look on Klaus' face, the way his arm trembled where he put his hand on Elijah's shoulder.
Then Elijah's gaze fixed her, and the relief in his eyes hit her like a stake in the gut. She threw herself at him, arms around his neck and her face burying in his shoulder, and for the first time, she allowed herself to cry.
She'd missed Elijah, she realized. Missed his certainty, his composure, his raw honesty. Around him, she was different. More willing to hide the broken, harsh edges and desperate to live up to his expectations despite knowing that she couldn't. She'd been human when she last saw him, and a part of her always felt human around him, even now.
Sometimes she thinks that it should have been harder, adjusting to this, whatever they are. She thinks of how it used to be with Damon and Stefan. All the jealousy, the fighting, the secrets and lies, and the 'you have to choose' ultimatums.
Elijah stepped into their life like he belonged.
He slipped into the bed where she was curled up against Klaus, reaching out to turn her towards him and kissing her, and there was a brief moment of panic when she was afraid of how Klaus would react. But then Klaus leaned over her shoulder and his lips left a hot, wet trail against her neck while his hand brushed down her body and helped Elijah rid her of her panties, and she thought, Oh.
"Okay?" Elijah asked, breaking the kiss for a moment. He was looking at her like he was afraid she'd fall apart and she couldn't have that, so she smiled and nodded and pulled him back to her.
She wasn't okay, not really, but she was okay with this.
She will always be okay with this.
Elijah grounds Klaus in a way she couldn't. That's what centuries of shared history will do, she assumes, and she finds herself relieved rather than jealous.
The irony is, despite the bold offer she made, that first night, Klaus never hurt her. Not since they left Mystic Falls. Before, he used to be all threats and manhandling and casual cruelty, but ever since she laid her old life to rest and followed him halfway across the world, he's been treating her like spun glass. She knows he's not incapable of violence, nor does he generally restrain himself. She's seen him kill people, witnessed him and Elijah fight so hard that the entire room was left in tatters, watched him fuck Elijah so roughly that the bruises and bitemarks would still be visible the next day.
When she asks Elijah what that's about, he regards her with an amused smile. "You have no idea how breakable you are, Elena."
"I don't want him to hold back on my account." She has trouble explaining what it is that bothers her about it, that it's not about wanting Klaus to be rougher, or even that she hates the idea of Klaus hiding a part of himself from her, but mostly about not being what he needs. But it's Elijah she's talking to, and Elijah has always known her mind as well if not better than she does.
Elijah shakes his head, and his smile doesn't waver. He reaches out and touches her face. "He wants to. He doesn't want to hurt you. Which is rare enough. I think it's safe to say that you're the only person he doesn't want to hurt."
"Oh," she says, at a loss for words.
They fall asleep in a tangled mess of limbs, Elena's head on Elijah's shoulder and Klaus' arm across her waist, her body nestled between theirs.
She doesn't know what this is, if it's love or comfort, if they're desperately clinging to shared memories or if they are indeed just three broken people trying their best to make themselves whole again. She doesn't know if they used to have this with the ones who came before her, if she's just a stand-in for Katherine or Tatia, and if maybe she's trying to find something that she could have had with Damon and Stefan, if things had been different.
It feels like stolen moments, something that's closer to happiness than what she expected after everything. An eternity of stolen moments, and it's almost enough.
End