take the current when it serves
by Sandrine Shaw
She wakes up with Bonnie's name on her lips.
It's chilly and dark in the crypt, and her legs are not quite steady when she takes her first steps. She can't help but think they should have left some more practical clothes for her, and maybe a pair of sneakers. The muddy ground outside is not made for shiny blue high heels, and the cool, stale air makes the skin of her naked arms rise in goosebumps.
There's no welcome committee. No Damon rushing towards her with flowers, no Caroline enveloping her in a warm hug, no one at all. Elena tries not to let herself be worried; perhaps Bonnie passed unexpectedly. Perhaps there's a situation going on that required the presence of her friends; after all, this is Mystic Falls, there's always some supernatural crisis or another. Even as she comes up with solid reasons for their absence, she feels the stony weight of anxiety in her stomach, the inexplicable but unshakable knowledge that something's very wrong.
When she gets to it, she finds the boarding house empty, but it looks lived-in. Dishes in the sink, a half-finished glass of blood on the counter, clothes piling up on the chair in Damon's bedroom. Elena takes a faded old tee and buries her face in it, breathing in his scent, aftershave and copper and Damon.
An issue of the Mystic Falls Daily lies on the bedside table with the sports section on top.
October 13, 2049, the date line reads. She's been asleep for thirty-six years.
Mystic Falls hasn't changed much.
Elena wanders through the streets and spots familiar house fronts. The bakery where her dad used to buy her croissants on Sundays is still here, and the little boutique where Caroline dragged them to get prom dresses. There's a three-story mall where the Mystic Grill once was, making Elena wonder what happened there – if the Grill was destroyed or if it was just the course of time and progress.
The Sheriff's office looks the same and Elena can't help envisioning Liz smiling up at her from behind her desk. Even after all that time, sadness still comes with the memory. Pushing open the doors and steeling herself against the sight of unfamiliar faces, Elena walks in and asks for Matt, but the deputy at the front desk – his name plate reads 'Jeff' – just looks at her blankly. "Who?"
"Matt Donovan. He used to work here."
Jeff shrugs. "Never heard of him. When was that?"
"A few years ago." She can't really tell him how many because there's no way she can explain how she looks eighteen but last saw Matt more than twice as many years before. "You know what? Never mind. I'll ask his family."
Except, of course, Matt has no family she knows, nor has anyone else. When she tries the old Lockwood mansion, it looks deserted.
With nothing and no one in this town who can offer her any information on what happened and why none of her friends are around, she does the only thing she can think of: she returns to the boarding house, takes Stefan's old Porsche out of the garage and starts driving south-west, down Interstate 85.
She could make it to New Orleans in two days, but a hundred miles before she reaches her destination, she exits the motorway and uses the credit card that she found in Stefan's bedroom to splurge for a motel room for the night. It would be easy enough to drive on, but there's an uneasy feeling that's made itself at home in the pit of her stomach, the nagging knowledge that whatever she learns in New Orleans is not something she can unlearn and this might be the last peaceful night she'll have in a while.
She finds Klaus sitting with his feet propped up on a table, not bothering to get up when Elena approaches.
"Well, well, well, look at that. Sleeping Beauty is awake." He raises a glass to her, then knocks it down. His speech is slurred, which means it's not his first drink by far. She can't quite imagine how much drink it takes to affect someone with a hybrid physique. "Come on, love, grab a glass. Join the party."
She looks around. The party only seems to consist of Klaus. The complex looks deserted. There's a dark stain on the floor that could maybe be spilled wine, but Elena doubts it.
"What happened?" She cuts right to the chase, not in the mood for banter and what passes for pleasantries in Klaus' world.
He ducks his head and laughs, like the question is cause for amusement. For a moment she thinks that he's sadistically thrilled to be the one to convey the undoubtedly terrible tidings to her, until she catches the edge of hysteria in his laughter.
"It rather depends on who you ask, I suppose. Not that there's anyone else left you could ask, so I guess my version will be the uncontested truth. There you have it, history written by the victors." He spreads his hands and gestures around, almost toppling over in his chair in the process. His arm catches the bottle standing near the edge of the table, swiping it off. It shatters on the floor with a noise that's far too loud even to Elena's insensitive human ears. "Take a good look, sweetheart, because this is what victory looks like."
It scares her, that bitterness and odd desolation in Klaus' attitude. Self-pity is nothing she isn't used to from him. He always reveled in painting himself as the tragic anti-hero, but she's never seen him without a plan, some scheming he was convinced would see him triumph over his countless enemies. Hopelessness is a terrible look on him, and Elena is afraid to imagine what could have brought this on.
"Klaus. What happened?"
"What happened is Davina Claire decided that she's been wronged by vampires one time too many. She always was a vengeful little thing, but she never had a knack for genocide before. Or maybe she just wasn't powerful enough to eradicate an entire species until now, who knows? When it came down to it, she just made a single mistake. She thought killing all vampires would also take care of the hybrids, rather than just reverting them to their werewolf state. Small mistake, and yet, it cost her her head. Quite literally, I should say."
"Bonnie —"
"Had a go at Davina. I have to give it to Miss Bennett – it was a formidable duel. All that magic crackling around. Little Bonnie had grown into a rather powerful witch. Unfortunately for her – well, for all of us, really – Davina was just a little bit more powerful. Alas, here you are."
The enormity of what Klaus just told her takes a moment too long to sink in. "Damon. Stefan. Everyone —"
"Dead. Reduced to a pile of ashes, every single one of them. Your precious Salvatore boys, Caroline, Marcel, Rebekah, everyone I ever made into a vampire and every single vampire in their bloodline. All of them gone. I watched Elijah turn to dust right before my eyes and there was nothing, not one bloody thing, I could do." Klaus suddenly spins around and grabs his chair, lifting it up and hurling it across the courtyard with a roar of pain that's utterly inhuman.
It would scare Elena, but she can't even focus on Klaus, unable to make her mind spin in circles around the fact that everyone she knew and loved, everyone she expected to see again when she awoke, is dead and gone. She clamps her hands over her mouth to hold in the scream that wants to tear free.
Later, she remembers it all like something she witnessed happening to another person. Everything from waking up in the crypt to kneeling on the stone floor of Klaus' atrium puking her guts out feels like a nightmare she can't shake. She wonders if that's a possibility: if she could still be lying in that coffin, plagued by terrible visions while Bonnie and Damon and the others are out there happily going on about their lives.
There's nothing she wants to believe more badly, but in her heart she knows it's not true. Reality has sunk its claws into her and it's impossible to pretend that it's anything but what it is.
In the library, she pours herself a generous drink and doesn't turn around when she hears Klaus entering. "I dreamed, you know."
Klaus seems almost sober now, his speech not slurred anymore. His tone has taken on a mocking lilt. "To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause."
"Really? You're quoting Hamlet now?"
He shrugs off her incredulity. "Well, you must admit that you gave me the perfect opening. And I always liked good old Bill. So, what was it your subconscious came up with to keep you busy all that time while the rest of us were fighting for our lives?"
Elena grinds her teeth. His flippancy in the face of the loss they face is grating on her nerves, making her willingness to share evaporate faster than it came. "It was thirty-six years worth of dreams, Klaus. There was a lot of it. It's not like I can remember every single one."
"And yet you brought it up, so I assume there was a point to it."
I dreamed I was happy, she doesn't say. I dreamed about the future I imagined I would have. She dreamed about attending Bonnie's funeral with Damon at her side, holding her hand. She dreamed about Stefan and Caroline happy and in love, not looking a day older than when she last saw them. She dreamed about Matt, old and mellow, surrounded by a vast family. She dreamed about the life she wanted, and now there's nothing left of it.
"No point," she lies. "I was just making conversation."
She flinches when Klaus reaches around her, carelessly invading her personal space. Something seems off, and it takes her mind a second too long to understand that his skin where it brushes against hers is warm, werewolf hot where she'd come to expect vampire cool.
He takes the glass out of her hand and downs it. "Really? I can't remember you being that fond of small talk before."
Knowing Klaus, it seems unlikely that he'll let it go, so she gives in and steels herself against whatever judgement he has in store for her. "They were... good dreams. I was happy."
The bitterness is back in Klaus' smirk, but the vicious edge she expected is missing. "Thirty-six years full of happy dreams, eh? You should consider yourself lucky, love. Most people don't get to experience that much happiness in their lifetime." He grabs the bottle of brandy and fills up his glass again, raising it in a silent toast.
She doesn't argue that it shouldn't count if it wasn't real. She'd take her fake happiness over this devastating reality any day.
She never asks, Can I stay with you for a while?
She just goes to sleep in one of the bedrooms of the complex – somehow, she knows it used to be Elijah's room, but she never asks and Klaus never says anything – and she tells herself it's only for one night, it's only until she's found her footing again, it's only until she feels like a person rather than an empty shell walking on the bones of the people she left behind.
Klaus doesn't invite her to stay, nor does he tell her to leave. He just accepts her presence in his home like it's nothing to him.
They raise lack of communication to an art form. He'll pour her a glass of wine and they spend the days talking about nothing that matters at all. Sometimes, it's comforting to sit down and listen to Klaus rant about tourism and the decline of the Quarter. There are times when she just wants to shake him and yell in his face until he snaps and admits that he feels as wrecked as she does.
Sometimes she wakes up in the morning and doesn't see the faces of Damon and Bonnie and Stefan and Caroline before her inner eye, doesn't feel heartbroken at all for a moment until she remembers. Is that healing or denial? Is it healthy, or is she disrespecting her friends' memory? The first time she finds herself smiling absent-mindedly at one of Klaus' wise-crack one-liners, the guilt makes her physically sick, but every smile after that comes a little easier and she feels her heart knitting itself together one piece at a time.
One morning, she wakes up and hums along to the radio when she's making pancakes, and she feels Klaus' eyes on her, heavy and appraising. She waits for him to say something, a scathing remark about how she should not be allowed to fight her way back to normalcy when all she ever cared for has been reduced to ashes, but it never comes.
"I didn't realized how agonizing this is," Klaus tells her the morning after his first full moon as a regular werewolf. He makes a strange picture. His mouth is smeared with dried blood, streaks of red leaving trails down his neck. It should be terrifying and monstrous and appalling, but there's also foliage in his hair and he's limping naked through the room.
Elena tries to stifle the laughter when he fails to pull a particularly stubborn leaf from where it's stuck against the back of his head. He scowls. "If you think this is funny, I'm still perfectly capable of tearing out your throat."
"You'd have to wait another month for it, though." It's amazing how blasé she's become in the face of his threats. Then again, Klaus' usual MO is to punish people by killing everyone they love, which means that Elena is now as safe as she possibly can be.
He raises an eyebrow at her, clearly unimpressed by her cheek. "Or I could just kill you with my bare hands."
She watches as he puts on a pair of jeans, unashamedly leaving them unfastened as he stalks towards her. It's hard to gauge his mood – he could be angry or playful, his smile giving nothing away.
"You know, it's strange. I may not be a vampire anymore, but those instincts aren't gone. When I look at your pretty neck, all I can think about is how much I want to sink my teeth into your carotid artery." He lets his finger trail down her neck. His voice has a silky, hypnotic quality; if she didn't know better she'd believe he was compelling her. "I can almost taste your blood on my tongue, warm and full of flavor, like expensive wine."
There's a part of her that gets carried away by the fantasy he's spinning. She imagines tilting her head and pulling his face down to the crook of her neck – his breath on her skin, the sharp pain at the bite, the euphoria that makes her head feel light and fuzzy when he starts drinking. The sense memory shakes her to the core as she remembers how it felt with Damon, lazy mornings in bed drinking from each other – the thrill of it, the taste, the way it made her feel connected to him. She wants that back, she wants —
She wants Damon. But Damon is dead, and she will never get to share that with him again, will never share anything with Damon again. Even if she wasn't human, even if she didn't have the cure inside her, even if Klaus was still a hybrid, it wouldn't matter.
"Don't." She pushes Klaus away and takes a step back, a wave of panic clawing up inside her. He looks pleased that he rattled her, failing to understand that it wasn't his doing at all.
She's been in New Orleans for close to two months when Klaus says, "We need to talk about how we can fix this."
"Fix... what exactly?" There are a lot of things Elena would like to fix, none of them fixable at all. Perhaps once it would have been different, before the Other Side collapsed, when death was something that was potentially reversible, but the Travelers destroyed that option.
The way Klaus looks at her, eyebrows raised, implies that the answer to her question should be obvious. "What do you think? This pesky mortality business, of course. I don't much care for turning into a mindless beast every full moon, but what I care for even less is growing old and frail and dying within a few decades."
Elena frowns. "Really? This is what you're going to do with your one human lifetime? Spend it all trying to find a way to turn yourself into a hybrid again? What if there is none? Or worse, what if you find it when you're too old to reap the benefits?"
"And what else do you propose I do, love? Settle down, buy a house, have a family, wait until I die? I already did the children thing; it didn't really work out that well for me." It's the first time he mentions his daughter at all, however casually. Elena wants to ask what happened, if Hope too became collateral in the war with Davina or if some other tragedy befell her during those years when Elena was asleep, but there's something in his eyes that stops her.
"That's what people do," she says instead.
"No, it's what humans do." He spits the word like it's made of wolfsbane, burning his tongue. "Living a regular, boring human life was always your dream. You may have had Damon Salvatore so whipped that he would have followed you into that existence, but don't assume that everyone wants that. I most certainly don't."
"You might not have a choice."
There's a split-second when he looks angry enough to hit her, and she almost feels the impact of his hand on her cheek. The blow never comes, though. "My not-so-dearly departed mother once turned her children into vampires with nothing but a little spell and some doppelganger blood. I'm sure there's a witch out there who can do the same."
"Except for how all available doppelganger blood is now actually the cure for immortality and probably less than perfect to create vampires."
"Let me worry about that, sweetheart. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it." Condescension drips off his voice like poisonous honey, sticky-sweet and lethal. "In the meantime, you go off and live your precious human life with the picket fence and the little job that makes you feel useful and the happy little family you come home to every night. The guy who will never be Damon, who will never understand anything about you or where you've come from or what you've been through. Have a good life. I'll just find you when I need you for a little blood donation."
It's her who slaps him, then, as hard as she can. Considering that she's human and he's still a werewolf, she imagines it probably doesn't hurt him at all, but it's the thought that counts. The smile he favors her with lets her know how much he enjoys that he got to her. She feels like she did standing outside the vampire-proof B&B room with Caroline ranting at her about how Elena would never be happy being a vampire. It was only a few weeks ago for Elena, even when in reality thirty-odd years have passed since that day.
"You haven't changed at all, have you?"
His lip curls into a sneer, but he's back to sounding as nonchalant as ever, like nothing can touch him. "No, I imagine losing everyone I ever cared for hasn't made me a kinder person."
It's the last thing they say to each other. When Elena throws the meager belongings she gathered during her time in New Orleans into Stefan's car and slides into the driver's seat, Klaus is nowhere to be seen.
Fuck him.
Her anger is unfamiliar. She's used to hating Klaus, but it's different this time, something not quite unlike disappointment, and she chides herself for placing any expectations in him in the first place.
She told Damon she wanted a loft in Tribeca with a bar underneath, a surgical residency, a couple of kids later. But when she thinks about it now and imagines living that dream, all it does is remind her of what she lost, and the happy fantasy turns to ash.
So she chooses a different road, deliberately turning left where she once would have gone right. She opts for pediatrics rather than surgery, she dates guys who are nothing like Damon, and when she finds someone she feels she'd like to settle down with, she doesn't protest when he suggests moving to the suburbs.
Tom finds them the perfect little house up in New Hampshire. It reminds Elena of the home she grew up in, the one she set on fire after Jeremy died.
"I spent a childhood in a house like this," she tells Tom, but he doesn't understand why the similarity sometimes hits her like a freight train and makes tears shoot into her eyes. There are a lot of things Tom doesn't understand about her, a lot of things he doesn't know about her.
They try to have kids for a while, but it doesn't work. Maybe it's him, maybe it's her. Maybe it's just fate deciding that there shouldn't be another doppelganger in five hundred years' time.
They're happy enough without children, at least for a while.
She's used to tragedy striking in big ways, those monumental catastrophes that make your whole existence crumble. Death, destruction, prophecies, supernatural wars, epic struggles between good and evil that leave a trail of havoc in their wake. Tragedy is a woman with your face trying to take over your life. It's standing in a circle of fire watching your aunt die before your eyes. It's coming back from the Other Side and leaving your best friend and the love of your life behind. It's waking up from three decades of slumber, utterly alone in this world, and learning that your baby brother died less than three months before in a car crash.
Everything used to be larger than life back in Mystic Falls, so maybe that's why she isn't prepared for the little things that tear your life apart. The long working hours, the petty fights over money and the sparse free time they share, the workplace affairs. She likes to think it would have been different with Damon in her Tribeca flat, with their two kids und the cat. It's easy enough to believe when nothing can prove her wrong.
The divorce is surprisingly quick and painless.
"I never felt like you really let me in," Tom tells her after they both signed the papers, awkwardly standing outside the courthouse. The finality of the situation hasn't yet hit Elena. "I'm not saying that it wasn't my fault as well, but – I don't know, El. It was like there was this whole other you inside that you wouldn't let me see."
Elena kisses his cheek. "I don't think you would have liked her, Tom."
She's not sure if she likes her herself, that girl she tried to leave behind the day she sped out of New Orleans in a red sports car that she's kept in storage those past eleven years.
The human mind is a funny thing. You live your life and you go through the motions, routine and habit dragging you on. You're so busy focusing on the little things, the everyday troubles that keep you constantly on your feet that you lose sight of the bigger picture, and you never notice how unhappy you are until suddenly it all crashes down on you at once when you least expect it.
Elena is on her way home from a medical conference in Boston, driving through the night with the rain drumming against the windshield in a rhythm that spells misery. The road ahead lies in darkness, the wet asphalt swallowing the glare of the headlights, and hers is the only car as far as she can see.
Sixty-something miles from home, she crosses an old bridge – it's the same bridge she's crossed a hundred times before, but tonight, she finds herself thinking that all she'd have to do is pull the steering wheel to the right, break through the railing and drive the car into the river. She remembers how it felt to be surrounded by cold, dark water and stillness, and even though the thought should be frightening, it's not. It's comforting and altogether too easy to imagine doing it for real.
She hits the brakes hard, hands clenching around the steering wheel until her knuckles turn white and her fingers ache. The last time – the only time, before now – she thought about killing herself was after her parents died. This isn't her. She doesn't want to die.
Her vision blurs with tears that she wipes away angrily, her mascara leaving dark smudges on the back of her hand. Later, she can't retrace the train of thought that made her dial Klaus' number, except for the knowledge that he's the only person still walking this earth who could possibly understand, who might have a measure for what she lost and what she left behind, both willingly and not.
A calm, polite voice tells her that the number is disconnected.
It should hardly be a surprise – it's an old number and she hasn't been in touch with Klaus since she left New Orleans all those years ago after– Afterwards. Still, it hits her like a punch to the gut, like a shot of vervain when she was a vampire: her last connection to her old life is gone, out of reach. All that remains is her: Elena Gilbert, doppelganger and former vampire with the cure running through her veins. But the face that looks back at her from the rear-view mirror has long since outgrown Katerina Petrova's and Amara's features; she's grown into another woman.
She wipes the last bit of wetness from her cheeks, smearing her make-up, and takes a deep breath. All her plans for the future may have been scorched by Kai's final vengeful scheme and the fire of Davina's rage, but that doesn't mean she can't make new ones. This is her life now. It's the life she chose, and if she doesn't like it, she can go ahead and change it, but she's not going to quit.
She tells herself that she owes it to her parents and Bonnie and Damon and Stefan and everyone who gave up so much for her to live.
So she lives.
Elena is a week past celebrating her forty-second birthday (she's technically seventy-eight now, although her body is barely forty) when her doorbell rings around midday on a sunny Sunday. Some part of her knows who it is even before she makes her way downstairs to open the door.
Klaus' grin is still the same, even when his face is more lined and there's grey on his temples and in his beard. Over his left eye sits a new scar that Elena doesn't remember from before. The past two decades clearly haven't been as peaceful for him as they were for her.
"Klaus." It's harder than it should be not to smile at him. She wishes she could say she had never longed for this day to come, or that her whole body wasn't drumming with excitement at the sight of him. "Do you need to be invited inside?"
"Not yet, but funny you should mention it because, you see, I recently met this delightful witch..."
He crosses the threshold and casually brushes past her like he's an old friend dropping by, rambling on about his quest to fix his condition and the ritual he and his witch friend came up with. Elena listens, immersing herself in supernatural mythology for the first time since she left New Orleans.
Standing in her kitchen and helping himself to a glass of her most expensive red wine, Klaus seems like the blast from a past Elena could never quite leave behind. She feels seventeen again, cooking up half-baked, risky plans with her friends to prevent whatever crisis threatened their lives this week.
"The whole cure thing is obviously a little problem, but none we can't work around. You know how it is with magic – there's always a loophole."
"Is there a loophole around how I can never be turned into a vampire again as well?" Elena asks, faux-casually, even though she knows how much he'll mock her for it.
Klaus is nothing if not predictable. He laughs. "What, love? Already tired of the precious human life? It wasn't all it was cracked up to be after all, you say? I'm shocked."
"Go to hell."
He sets the empty glass down and steps closer, tilting her face up with both his hands at the side of her neck. The intimacy of the touch hits her low in the gut, and the mixture of fear and desire feels achingly familiar. "Now, is that a way to talk to someone you're asking to turn you into a vampire? Lucky for you, we already worked out a fix for that too, and if you ask me very, very nicely, I might just offer you my blood and a quick snap of your neck later."
She matches his teasing with a playful suggestion of her own. "Or I could just wait for some random person you've turned wants some vampire companions of their own."
"Or I could drain you dry in the witchy ritual to make myself a hybrid again."
"Or I won't agree to take part to begi— "
Klaus cuts her off with his lips on hers, swallowing the rest of her bickering. He tastes of coffee and apples, and smells like sun and fresh sweat. She imagines him driving all the way here in an open convertible, the sun beating down on him and rock'n'roll from the previous century blasting from the speakers, and it occurs to her that she doesn't even know what music he likes. It's a strange and random thought, and it makes her lips curve into a smile when she kisses him back.
"So what do you say, love, you and me and eternity? How does that sound?" His tone is cocky as ever, but there's an odd tenderness in the way he looks at her.
The brush of his thumb against her lips feels like a promise, and she realizes for the first time that he might not be immune to the sense of familiarity that hit her when she saw him. She, too, is the last connection he has to a life that has forever been torn away from him, and he can't escape that bond any more than she can.
"Terrible," she says, with conviction, and doesn't mean it at all.
End.