Mistaken Identity

Rating: PG-13/T

Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Drama/Angst

Summary: Written for the hc_bingo April Amnesty Challenge, prompt "Forced to participate in an illegal/hurtful activity". No wonder she smelled so much like a human. Supernatural crossover, hinted Elijah/Rose and Elijah/Bela.

Author's Note: …I love it when stories come out of nowhere. :3

Disclaimer: I don't own The Vampire Diaries. It belongs to L.J. Smith/The CW. I don't own Supernatural. It belongs to Eric Kripke/The CW.

()()

Klaus was a little drunk when he found Rose.

"There you are." He said with a smirk, appearing in front of her out of nowhere in a back alleyway. Her hair was a little shorter than before, and much straighter and better kept. She looked alarmed to see him, but not as alarmed as he had been expecting. Klaus reached out to grab her, and she backed away.

"Don't know who you are or who you think I am, but don't touch me." Rose snapped. She was reaching into her pocket for something, and he grabbed her wrist and forced it out. Only once Klaus had established an inhumanly ironclad grip did Rose seem to fully realize the danger she was in.

"Maybe it's the haircut, darling, but I am shocked that you don't recognize me, given how long you've been running from me." He sniffed, and she must have been hiding with humans because she smelled a lot like one. One squeeze of the wrist and she gasped, the pistol in her hand dropping to the ground.

Again, if Klaus were sober he would have realized that something was wrong.

But also, being sober would not have been enough to stop him from going through with what he was then contemplating.

()()

The next few hours were full of screams.

Klaus took Rose back to the mansion. It was empty: Rebekah was likely out stalking Damon, Finn was probably out stalking Sage (and vice-versa), Kol was probably out stalking anything that moved and looked like it could provide good sport- and Elijah he didn't know about, nor did he particularly care at the moment.

Losing Katerina was the single biggest embarrassments Klaus had ever suffered in his vampiric life, and he had been burning with a desire to rip the heads off of the vampires responsible for helping her escape. Elijah had killed the one who'd helped her escape, but Rose- For some inexplicable reason, he'd always had a soft-spot for Rosemarie, one of Mary's vampiric progeny.

But Klaus sure as hell didn't.

He wasn't feared across the vampiric world for no good reason. He made Rose suffer, and suffer well: He compelled her to follow his every command, and made her carve her name into her forearm (From where he was sitting the 'R' actually looked quite a bit like a 'B'), forced her to come within a millimeter of cutting a finger off only to have her halt at the last moment. He ordered her to press the tip of the knife to her jugular and increase the pressure until he told her to stop.

At first, Rose had been mouthy, insisting that she wasn't Rose and that she had no bloody idea who he was or what he wanted, and that he should probably kill her then and there because if she ever got free, he would regret it.

It was around the time that Klaus had compelled her to crush her ankle with a marble paperweight that she began to break down and cry (and scream, her scream was just lovely). Klaus chuckled and reclined in his seat, watching the way the wine in his glass swirled when he played with the glass in the moments when he got bored of looking at her pain.

"Next time you won't be stupid enough to let a human trick you into turning them, will you Rose?" He remarked.

"I'm not Rose," The woman pleaded through tears. "My name's Bel-"

"Stab yourself in the hand as hard as you can." The command was lazy, disinterested (and slightly slurred, if he was drunk before he was plastered now), but that didn't make it any less of a command. Rose plunged the knife into her left hand and screamed in agony. She probably couldn't hear the bone cracking and breaking beneath the blade, but he could.

Klaus heard the door open and shut and knew that one of his siblings was home. If it was Rebekah or Kol, it was a party. If it was Elijah or Finn, the world's biggest buzz-kills, the party was over.

"Niklaus."

Party over.

Klaus's eyes rolled languidly. "What is it, brother?"

Elijah didn't answer. He just pushed past his younger sibling and walked up to Rose, examining her with a critical eye for a moment before kneeling down in front of her. "Hold still. I'm pulling it out." She cried out when he removed the knife, but then pulled her shaking hands to her chest and bowed her head, whimpering. Klaus couldn't see Elijah's face, but he could picture the same pity he'd always had for Rosemarie on it. "Rose has been dead for months, Niklaus. This woman is human."

"Is she?" Klaus remarked. "That must be why she smells so much like one." He tipped back another glass of wine. "Doppelganger alert."

Elijah shot him a dirty look before turning back to the woman, who was eyeing him with hope and terror all at once. Klaus saw his hand come up to brush her face, saw a thumb come out to rub away a tear-streak. "Don't be afraid. You're safe."

"Who are you?"

"Vampires," Klaus piped up, sounding positively bored.

"It's not important who we are." Elijah brought his wrist to his mouth, and the woman who wasn't Rose made a small noise of alarm; she probably saw his eyes turn red. He bit down hard enough to draw blood, and offered it to her. She looked at him like he was mad. "If I ask my brother for a cup, he'll probably throw it at us."

"Right-o, brother." Klaus drawled, flipping his now empty wine glass up and down in his hand. The woman gave the blonde a look of barely repressed hatred and fear before reluctantly, tentatively, closing her mouth onto Elijah's wrist. Klaus did not fail to notice the way that Elijah's free hand stroked her hair. "God you're going soft."

His big brother shot him a cold look before turning back to the woman. "There, that should do it." She pulled away, and she still looked a little dizzy. But that was to be expected: Vampire blood wasn't an instant cure-all. "What's your name?"

She shook her head, swayed a bit and cleared her throat. "Bela." Elijah did not prod for a surname.

"Let's kill her and make her a vampire if she isn't one." Klaus suggested. Bella stiffened, alarmed, but Elijah clasped her shoulder and directed her attention back to him.

"No. That's not-" He glanced towards Klaus. "-We're not doing that. Bela, look me in the eyes."

Immediately, though, she averted her gaze. "That's how he got me." She muttered, jerking her head in Klaus's direction.

"I can't just let you leave with your memories of us-"

"I already know about vampires, and I already have a pretty good idea as to who you both are." Without pain and now aided by someone who didn't intend to kill her, Bela's strength was coming back: Her voice was hard, icy.

"And who do you think we are?"

"Originals." Bela responded shortly. "He thought I was a vampire and he knew he'd be able to compel me. Only Originals can compel other vampires. And if you're his brother, then you must be one too."

"Elijah," Klaus sang the warning in a low, dark voice. Elijah was far too fond of smart women, and Bela's knowledge of their species and their particular niche in vampiric society seemed to be a pretty clever deduction.

"Bela, I have no intention of harming you." Elijah was employing that charm that both they and their brothers- and hell, Rebekah when she felt like acting sane- had inherited (from which of their parents they had no idea: Esther was not the flirtatious type and Mikael had all the charm of a rusty axe).

Bela hesitated, and then let her eyes dart up to meet Elijah's. She flinched as though she had expected to see them contract in the way they did whenever compulsion was starting, but nothing happened. "Elijah," Klaus growled.

"Be quiet, Niklaus." I still have a dagger, Niklaus, I can still wrap you in chains and lock you in a coffin until you desiccate, Niklaus. "If she already has a working knowledge of who and what we are, then I don't see the harm in letting her leave with her memories in tact." And ever the goddamn gentleman Elijah was, he offered Bela a hand and helped her up. "I'll let you out."

As much as he dearly wanted to, Klaus knew that there was no arguing with Elijah about things like this. As Klaus already knew, the man had been too bloody fond of Rosemarie for his own good.

"Goodbye Bells, it's been a blast. Have a nice trip." Klaus then promptly tossed his glass into the fireplace. Bela kept one hand on Elijah's arm until they'd left the room.

There was a mirror in the foyer. Klaus leaned over the arm of the chair and craned his neck to get a look into it, and he could clearly see Elijah and Bela's reflections in the glass.

"Good night, Bela." He heard Elijah say. And while Klaus couldn't see his brother's eyes, he could see the slightly slack expression that suddenly overtook Bela's face, followed by Elijah's soft utterance of, "Go back to whatever you were doing, and please forget what town and state we live in and when precisely you met us."

And then he kissed her on the forehead and let her go.

Klaus snorted and settled back properly into the chair, not bothering to look at Elijah as he reentered the room. "Soft, brother, very squishy-soft you've beco-"

Elijah smacked him on the back of the head and then went up to his room.

-End