Changes they are a'coming!

Reviews are little presents that light up my afternoon, whether you talk about the fic or just want to babble about Elena/Elijah, it works for me. =)

4

Denver, Colorado

Elena spends seven years with a stone where her heart should beat.

She has no concept, when she leaves her home of blood and pine, for how vast the spinning globe called Earth can be. This universe outside of Mystic Falls is filled with predators and prey, all bowing to the grace of the Original family. It would have dizzied Elena, had she been capable of wonder, to think that her tiny clan was responsible for the deaths of two of their number in a year's time, and witness to a third.

In all the lands and in all the languages, Klaus is the king of the immortals. He may not have a throne, he may not have a court, but his name means death and his promise is power. Elena walks in that shadow now, if only by reputation. To be the chosen of Elijah, one of the two paragons left standing, is to be seen walking with death.

Yet he doesn't kill as often as she expected, and it's not until their third year together that she understands why. "I don't have to," he explains, "Because I've already killed too many to count. With every year I live, I must do less to prove myself. Men like Mansa are housekeeping, nothing more. This is what is to be the first family, Elena. Petty squabbles over territory are meaningless. Save my brother, I have no rivals."

The plan for her is greater than a life of indolence and easy feeding, and this suits Elena. Young vampires bore as easily as young women, so her lessons are spread from language to math. Human money is of endless fascination to Elijah, and he hounds her until she grasps economics as thoroughly as a doctoral candidate. He teaches her to fight with hands and teeth, then with weapons, then with guile. Compulsion may not be his fondest tool, but if it crossed his mind he could make a seven-hundred-year-old teenager dance with a knife in her belly, and never drop the blade. This is the wealthiest gift he gives to Elena: mental stamina beyond her age. She is schooled in forbearance, penetration, barricades, and illusion until there are few dreamwalkers alive as talented as le Chevalier des Premiers.

Elena likes that name, because she earned it stopping a witch's poison meant for her mentor. "You don't fuck with a knight," she informs him over sushi. "Or you get disemboweled. Ever disembowel anyone? I did it yesterday." Elijah's mouth twists whenever he hears it, because the grammar is all wrong for a woman, but he rewards her loyalty with another secret.

After seven winters and seven summers, Elena carries more pieces of Elijah Mikaelson than any creature but Klaus. She never stops to think why, because questions are for people who care, and they say le Chevalier has a stone for a heart.

Yet, given time and pressure, even the earth will crack.

The doppelganger's self-imposed servitude to the prince of vampires ends when she sees a body lying face-up in the snow, and stone shatters under the weight that follows.

She kneels beside the young man, watching tiny icicles form over two red holes in his chest. Pink frost below gives a story of his ending, and the narrative is a violent one. Some gangbanger, with sloppy brown hair that reeks of marijuana and a face gone cold and white in the darkness. Elena touches his forehead, then his blue lips, and when she closes his eyes with her fingertips, a tear drops from her cheek to his. Startled, she brushes moisture away from her eyes, but the another takes its place. They flow from the broken damn within Elena, one spilling into another as they wash away the red filter that obscured her vision for seven long, empty years.

Time starts again, tick-tock, tick-tock, and under the spell of awakening she screams a harpy's shriek, then punches the brick of the alley. It cracks, little more than an eggshell to her wrath.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, the world is alive and Elena Gilbert is alive and Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy is dead.

She scrabbles at her cheeks with her fingers, scratching the skin under her eyes as she tries dig the saltwater out of her essence before it can do more damage. But Elena's body can't—won't—stop crying. Tears leech her inhuman strength until she's curled up in a knot beside a teenage gunshot victim, weeping into her coat sleeves.

"My brother's never coming back," she whimpers to the dead boy. He doesn't answer, but a pair of arms encircle Elena, lifting her up, up, up, until she's safe again.

"I called you," sobs Elena. "I called you, and called you, and called you."

"I heard you," whispers Elijah, burying his face in the crook of her neck. "And I'm here. I've always been here."