Fairytale Ending
by adlyb
Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.
Summary: Klaus takes his girl and his hybrid and gets out of that one pony town.
Spoilers: Through 3x05, The Reckoning
Rating: M
Warnings: Hostage situation/explicit violence/gratuitous angst
If it were my choice, I would want to be with you forever.
November fills Elena with a terrible loneliness.
Klaus takes all of the hybrids with him when he goes, leaving only Stefan and Rebekah in his stead, so that even the everyday, comforting sounds of conversation, laughter and companionship vanish with him.
Worse, Rebekah wastes no time after Klaus's departure in making the manor her own. Part of that entails brushing Elena aside like a cobweb, making room only for the strictest adherence to Klaus's direct orders to care for her well-being. The only laughter left in the whole place is Rebekah's. The sound of it is empty, and for some reason, late at night, it has a mournful power that cause tears to well in Elena's eyes.
The day after Klaus leaves, Stefan has been alone with Elena in her room for perhaps ten minutes before Rebekah sidles in and closes the door shut behind her. The blonde shakes her long, shiny hair away from her face and peers down her nose at Elena's dinner. "In my day," she announces, "We used to throw slop to the pigs and get on with things. We didn't stay to watch them eat."
Deliberately, Elena cuts into her veal and slowly chews the bite. She knows better than to rise to Rebekah's bait while Klaus is away. Her survival instinct is good for that much, at least. She doesn't even look at Rebekah.
And yet—there is a part—a huge part—of herself that gnashes its teeth in rage and humiliation at Rebekah's words, at having Stefan hear them, at being unable to respond to them in kind. For what good would it do to say, I agree, watching you eat disgusts me or At least I am not a monster, when she is not sure those words are even true? What would that recrimination even mean here, with nothing but murderous vampires present to hear them?
(And then there is the part of her that knows that the sharper Rebekah's insults, the closer Elena is to cutting her, and that Rebekah is only responding as all cornered beasts do.)
What might be disappointment flits across Rebekah's face when Elena fails to react. "Stefan, I don't know how you can tolerate waiting on the creature four times a day if she is always so little fun." She holds out both pale white hands to him. "Come on, now, Stefan, let's go for a picnic."
"I have my orders," Stefan tells her. The excuse is starting to sound thin.
Rebekah drops her hands. "It cannot take that long to fatten her up. I'll expect you momentarily." She leaves, then, but her presence lingers on throughout the duration of the meal.
Elena tries to avoid Rebekah the next day, but the blonde comes around again at lunch to chivy Stefan from her room.
The time after that, she doesn't even bother to acknowledge Elena at all.
What this amounts to is that Elena's meal times with Stefan become short, tense and furtive affairs, both of them all too aware that their time together depends entirely on Rebekah's jealous whims. Stefan always seems on the point of flight when he is with her, torn between his obligation (his desire?) to care for herand the necessity of returning to Rebekah before long.
Whether through necessity or inevitability, Rebekah always wins out, in the end.
No, what this really amounts to is that Elena has time—endless, endless time—to reflect back on how she has treated Tyler.
In his absence, she thinks of him now more than she ever did when he was here.
How confusing all of this must have been for him.
Sire bond. What was that, anyway? And how was it that she had never even heard of it before?
(The uncomfortable thought that she knows less about vampires than she thought slithers across her mind.)
Did Tyler know about the bond? Was he even aware of what he was doing? Aware, yet totally unable to stop himself? She imagined him, locked within the confines of his mind, unable to speak or act in any way that ran contrary to Klaus, a slave in every sense of the word... Or was he truly just blind to it all, capable, perhaps, of feeling guilt in the aftermath, but in the moment, all too eager to serve?
(How could she trust him when she didn't know?)
Stefan stops walking with her in the gardens. Rebekah keeps him with her near the open back door, and the two of them watch Elena make her slow circuit around the grounds from the shadows ringing the house. Sometimes, Elena's eyes meet Stefan's across the lawn, and she feels that old connection between them drawing tight. Someday, it will snap. She doesn't know what she will do when it does.
(How could she trust herself?)
"What do you know about sire bonds?" she asks Stefan one rainy evening as he hands her her vitamins. She sets them aside, next to her untouched dinner, and waits for him to respond. The steam from the plate presses into her like a wet cloth, making her face damp with sweat.
"Why do you ask?" he asks. He pours her a glass of water and gestures toward her pills.
Elena shakes her head. If she does what Stefan wants her to right away, they may not finish this conversation. At least she knows he'll play along if he's still waiting for her to take the vitamins.
"It's just I'd never heard of them before," she tells him, folding her arms under her breasts and leaning back against her headboard. It's her siege position, and Stefan knows it.
"Before…?" He sits down at the edge of her bed, facing away from her. Neither of them bother finishing his sentence. "What do you want to know?" There's no curiosity in his question, just a steadiness, a willingness to meet hers.
"Are they real?"
"Yes."
"Is it like being compelled then?"
"Tyler could probably tell you better than I could."
She's silent for a few moments, considering, before she speaks again. "Elijah compelled me once. It was like I was locked inside of my mind, unable to get out, unable to control my own body…. I wonder if it's like that for Tyler now. Is it like that for you?" It's how she's always imagined him— the sweet, loving boyfriend he had been last year locked away and unable to break free of the chains Klaus had wrapped him under. Sometimes, she thought she could see the old Stefan reaching out to her, straining to be free.
"No."
His answer sinks like a stone within her. There's no tell, no shift in his expression or body language, but Elena knows him too well. Something deep inside of her, some gut instinct she cannot suppress, tells her that if she presses him, Stefan will tell her a truth neither of them will be able to walk away from. She opens her mouth to demand an elaboration, but they are interrupted by the door banging open.
"Stefan, it's been an age," Rebekah declares from the doorway. She flicks a glance over at Elena before grabbing Stefan by the wrist and hauling him from the bedroom.
Elena pushes her dinner around with her fork for a few minutes, with no real desire to eat after he conversation with Stefan.
Without the hybrids in residence, and with Stefan pre-occupied, there is no one to notice when she takes the full tray down to the kitchen and pitches it, untouched vitamins and all.
It feels like a victory, after all of these forced feedings, just to say to herself, I am not hungry.
And yet, it is such a hollow victory, compared to everything she once dreamed.
(Compared to everything she had once done.)
Her diary proves to be an immense solace to her, in the way it had been just after her parents had died. She writes in it carefully each day, though she's not precisely sure of the exact date and has not brought herself to ask Stefan for it.
Once upon a time she had been able to write pages and pages, her thoughts spilling out onto the page as easily as sand soaks up water. That tide of words had dried up, forced to a trickle by her circumstances, by the need to hold everything within her lest this diary ever be discovered.
Stefan does not come around at all the next day. Traces of him appear throughout the day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but no Stefan.
Stealthily, a little afraid of being caught by Rebekah, she prowls around the house, searching for him in all of his usual places.
She finds him nowhere.
Eventually, she gives up and returns to her room.
The fall rain patters against her window panes.
We can't touch. Or talk. And no lingering stares.
She wakes up after sunset and feels a hand on her face. In the darkness of her room, it's impossible to tell who it is. Her heart jumps painfully in her chest.
"Go back to sleep, Elena." The voice is Stefan's.
She leans into his touch, but he pulls away just as she moves closer.
She is forever chasing him, it seems.
Nooo, none of that.
Stefan comes back after that, but with Rebekah in tow. She looks beautiful and coiffed, her long hair brushed out until it glimmers.
"It occurs to me, Elena," Rebekah begins, "that although you are my brother's guest, you've never really joined us for dinner." Rebekah's smile is all sharp and deadly teeth, white and straight and perfect. Undoubtedly, Rebekah is planning something dreadful.
Stefan takes ahold of Rebekah's arm. "Bex—"
"I thought I was just the bloodbank," Elena reminds her. "That doesn't exactly make me a guest."
Rebekah pauses and cocks her head.
Stefan presses himself up against Rebekah and pulls her against him, twining their fingers. He stares at Elena, waiting for Rebekah's response.
Finally, Rebekah speaks. "No, I suppose it doesn't. My mistake."
Stefan follows her out of the room without waiting for Rebekah to pull him with her.
She lets the linguini Stefan had brought her grow cold.
She stays up late writing in her diary. Doodling, really, her name, over and over, a reminder to herself of who she is, not just who she looks like. Not just what purpose she serves. She loops her name with Stefan's, draws little hearts around the design, just like she did when she was first falling in love with him, when she was supposed to be taking notes instead.
Glancing at it now, the design looks juvenile, inadequate. How can a few lopsided hearts adequately express what she feels for him?
Elena slips the diary back into its hiding spot and makes a spur of the moment decision to go to the library.
Yet once she is there, she realizes why she's been avoiding it. A memory tears loose, set off by the sight of the comfortable leather furniture, the faintly shining wooden paneling and gleaming marble fireplace.
Her touch galvanizes him. In a heartbeat his free hand is buried in her hair, drawing her forward. Instantaneously she is grasping him by the shoulders, dragging him forward and against her with all of her strength. They meet in the middle, lips and teeth and tongues pressing, pulling, dancing against each other. She's in his lap, legs wrapped around his waist, without quite knowing how she got there. Klaus's hand is still pressed to the inside of her thigh, where he's stroking over the sensitive flesh there. A deep throb pulses between her legs, hot and electric. Mindlessly, she grinds against him, not at all stopping to think about the repercussions of doing this with Klaus.
It flashes through her in an instant, searing and insistent. Ruthlessly, she quashes it down before she has time to dwell on the way her body lights up just thinking about that dream.
In the hall, she can hear a trumpet whine. It's always been a bad idea here, following music, following voices, but she can't help herself. She's a curious girl without any outlets.
As she draws nearer to the downstairs parlor, she can hear a mixture of other instruments join into the mix—upright bass, trombone, saxophone, clarinet. The instruments produce a mercurial music, riveting and running one moment, slow and thoughtful in another. Yet there's a slightly scratchy quality to the jazz music, as though it is being played off of a very old record. It occurs to Elena that it probably is.
Elena dares to peek through the slightly ajar door. There, in the corner, is an antique gramophone, something that must have been hauled out of the attic for this very purpose.
Reluctantly, she turns her attention to the two figures slowly dancing in the middle of the room.
It's no surprise to see Stefan and Rebekah together. She's seen them in various obscene poses, covered in blood and love bites, more times than she can count. What she hasn't really seen before is a moment like this.
Stefan holds Rebekah close, one hand clasped around hers, the other low on her back. They sway to the music, and though their being so out of sync with the rhythm of the song should seem wrong, it's clear that they are moving to a song (a memory) that only they can hear.
Above them, the candelabra's individual candles have been lit. The tiny flickering flames cast a warm glow over the room, and turn Stefan's dark eyes liquid as he looks down into Rebekah's face.
Rebekah leans up to murmur something in Stefan's ear, and whatever she says shifts something within him. He looks down at Rebekah with an expression Elena has seen him wear when he looks at her. One of understanding and sympathy, the sort that passes between them when they share secrets too precious to ever utter aloud… It seems that she, Elena, is not the only one with the ability to peer beneath the surface of Stefan's thoughts, to see the contents of his heart.
For the first time, she really allows herself to believe in the love match between Stefan and Rebekah.
She experiences a moment of vertigo then. Ever since this started, she has thought of Rebekah as the interloper, the boyfriend-stealer, the one in the way. She's been able to tune everything Rebekah has said to her that was much the same because she didn't want to hear it.
She has a nearly boundless capacity for self-deception.
Suddenly, she can see so clearly how this must be for Rebekah. Rebekah, who had loved Stefan in that wild, savage way that she seemed to experience all of her emotions. Who had been daggered and left in a dreamless sleep for the better part of a century, and when she awoke, yes, Stefan was at her side, but suddenly he was no longer simply hers. Instead, here was Elena, the wedge between them, the interloper, the one wrecking their happy home.
No wonder Rebekah desired so badly to label Elena as Klaus's chit and be done with it.
How much simpler that all would be.
She really wishes that Tyler were here with her now.
(She hopes Klaus brings him back at all.)
Rebekah always joins Stefan for Elena's meals now. Her feedings, she calls them.
Elena watches, always, for some hint of the honest affection she had noticed between them that night with the jazz. Now that she is looking for it, the bond is obvious. It's in the way that Stefan presses his fingers to Rebekah's wrist, in the way that Rebekah always scrutinizes Stefan's face. Once, Elena had interpreted these gestures so differently—as Stefan stopping Rebekah's violent tendencies, as Rebekah's jealous paranoia. She's had everything so warped.
More and more, she finds she doesn't have the appetite to finish her meals.
Outside, the Japanese Maple is losing its leaves.
Sometimes she still hears jazz filtering through the house at odd hours of the day. The sound of it gets stuck in her head, recalling to her something she was once told.
I much preferred the twenties. The style. The parties. The jazz.
If she dreams about Klaus, she does not dwell on it.
She skips her period. Stress, she thinks.
"Elena."
She turns from the window she had been looking out of and gives Stefan a nod. The room isn't really a music room, anymore, after Rebekah smashed up the upright piano, but the window seat overlooking the grounds is still one of Elena's favorite spots.
At first, after that incident with Rebekah, she had been nervous about coming back to this room. Now that Klaus has gone, it seems stupid to worry about that. There is no place Rebekah would hesitate to follow her, if she wanted to.
He's not dressed appropriately for the weather. The dark long sleeved tee-shirt he's wearing wouldn't do a thing to protect a human from the chilly winds outside. He used to make such an effort to appear human.
"What are you doing here?" she asks him. "Where Rebekah?"
"She left this morning to go shopping in town."
"You didn't go with her?"
Stefan shrugs. "You can't be left here by yourself. She knows that."
He comes over to where she sits, moves her legs out of the way to make room for him. Her feet rest in his lap.
Outside, it starts to rain again.
"What's the date?" she asks him.
"November 26th."
She frowns. "What day of the week is it?"
"Friday."
"Oh. Thanksgiving must have been yesterday, then." Last year, Aunt Jenna had invited Stefan over for their family Thanksgiving. He had helped her do the dressing, and even Jeremy had come out of his room to mash the potatoes. Damon had tagged along, of course, which had annoyed everyone, except secretly both Stefan had been happy about it, and Damon and Jenna had had too much to drink. It had been nice.
She'd spent yesterday alone. Of course, she hadn't even realized what day it was.
Stefan seems to read her mind. He wipes a tear away from her eye. She hadn't even realized she had been crying. "Cheer up," he tells her. "It's not that big a deal. We didn't even celebrate Thanksgiving when I was growing up."
"Do you think I'll ever have another Thanksgiving again? Surrounded by family and friends? Or do you think it's going to be like this forever?"
She can see, so clearly, the two answers warring within Stefan. The truth, and whatever answer he wants to give her.
"I think," he finally tells her, very slowly. "I think that you'll be happy again."
Elena feels extraordinary gratitude towards him for making this effort to comfort her.
She leans into him then, because he is the closest thing to comfort that she has, and dammit, she's going to take what she can right now. After a moment, Stefan puts his arms around her, and he doesn't say anything when her silent tears soak through his cotton shirt.
When the tears stop, it's the most natural thing in the world to tip her face up to look at him. Their eyes meet, and it must be muscle-memory, or instinct, because she leans up to brush her lips against his. His mouth yields to hers. He tastes like she remembers, and she is so irrationally glad of it.
And then he freezes. Right in the middle of kissing her, he just goes stiff on her.
She tries to pull back, the apology is already on her lips, but Stefan catches her by the shoulders and drags her closer. His fingers dig into the flesh at her shoulder-joint, hard enough to bruise. She struggles, a little, trying to twist away. He's still kissing her.
He's kissing her and his mouth is opening wider, and wider, his kisses hungrier and more savage with each pass.
His fang pricks her lip. She tries to pull back, but he won't let her go. The cut stings. Blood sluices down over her teeth, pools onto her tongue. She tries not to panic.
Stefan sucks at the cut, tongue prodding at the wound, distended fangs tearing it further. Elena struggles against him, pushes at him with all of her strength, but her frantic attempts to escape only seem to invigorate the frenzy. He pins her arms to her side, and when she cries out, he only opens his mouth wider, fangs sinking into the skin above and below her mouth, piercing through the skin until his teeth clink against her own. She screams then, her frustration and fury and terror, all of it she screams into him.
It's only then, sewn together by his bite, his bloody kiss, that he stills. He pulls away from her, with a dawning horror in his eyes as he sees what he has done to her.
"What happened?" he asks. Her blood drips from the corner of his mouth, is smeared all down his chin.
The sight of him overwhelms her.
She tries to speak but her mouth feels wrong, the lips swollen enormously, teeth all at odds from where they should be. Her hands tremble when she touches her fingertips to the ravaged skin. Just the barest pressure makes her hiss with pain.
When she can finally bring herself to look at Stefan again, he looks like he's going to be sick.
"Elena, I don't know what happened, I don't remember—"
"Am I interrupting something?" Rebekah calls from the doorway. She leans against the doorjamb, long legs shown off by a pair of black leather boots, paired with a soft grey knit dress. She has shopping bags in her hands. When she catches sight of Elena's ruined mouth, she bursts into gales of laughter. She laughs, and she laughs, until she has to drop her bags. Something inside of one of them breaks. "You're so predictable!" she cries, finally, catching her breath. She comes over and stands beside Stefan, combing her fingers through his hair.
There's snot mingling with Elena's blood, dripping into the wounds on her lip. She doesn't know when she started crying again, and can barely bring herself to care enough to catalogue it further.
"What do we think, Stefan? Shall we leave her like this? I think she's much improved."
Elena wants to retort, but when she tries to speak she only ends up gasping from the pain of it all.
"Klaus'll rip my heart out if he comes back and finds her like this," Stefan mutters. There's something defeated about the way he rolls up his sleeve and bites into his wrist. He looks like he, too, wants to cry.
"Oh, I doubt that, very much," Rebekah murmurs. She doesn't make any move to stop Stefan from healing her, though.
As much as Elena would like to reject Stefan's blood on principal, she's a survivor at heart and doesn't hesitate to take what he offers her.
The magic takes its course immediately, stitching up and smoothing out what should have been ruined forever.
Elena wipes the blood from her teeth with her tongue.
"You did this."
"What was that?" Rebekah asks.
She stands up and stares Rebekah down. "You did this."
"The blood's on Stefan's teeth, darling, not mine."
"But you're the one literally crowing with victory." Elena glares. "So what was it? Did you compel him?"
Rebekah rolls her eyes and takes Elena's spot on the window seat next to Stefan. "Obviously. Ages ago, after the last time I caught you together in here, though, I'd honestly forgotten about it until just now."
Stefan clasps his hands together in front of him and stares straight ahead. "What was the compulsion, Bex?" He asks her with the same grave quiet with which he used to question Damon.
"Simple enough, really." Rebekah picks at a nail while she talks, feigning casual but clearly all too happy to reveal what she had done. "All I did was instruct you that should Elena try to kiss you again, you were to tear her mouth off. It looked as though you'd done a charming job of it."
"What would have happened if I hadn't been able to stop?"
"Oh, don't act so aggrieved. She got what she deserved, and it looks like you did too."
Stefan lifts his head to look at her. With a shock, Elena realizes that there are unshed tears matting his eyelashes.
Rebekah notices, too. There is a tense moment in which Elena is not certain how violently her rival will react. It's so clear on Rebekah's face, how Stefan's anguish tears at her. How any evidence of Stefan's feelings for Elena just eats her alive. In that instant, it seems just as likely as not that Rebekah's may rip Stefan's heart out.
She makes it clear that her decision to flounce out of the room is only a reprieve, not a stay of judgment.
Looking at Stefan, Elena is certain she has finally awoken something human inside of him.
He cannot go on like this.
It hadn't occurred to her that his humanity might be the thing that kills him.
She had thought herself a puppet doomed to dance on everyone else's strings when she first arrived. The thought had made her bitter and resentful, of Klaus, of Rebekah, and even of Stefan. She sees, now, though, that Stefan is just as much a puppet as she. Lover and servant and object of desire and of jealousy, jerked around between Klaus and Rebekah with no guaranty that they will not tear him apart in the process of trying to claim him.
She had never imagined that she, too, had had her hands on his strings.
Once she has wiped the blood from her mouth and chin, she studies her reflection in her bathroom mirror. There's nothing left except for a series of silvery scars on her upper lip and over the curve of her chin. One of them is deeper than the rest, a dimple that curves into a slight line distending from her upper lip, where Stefan had torn the flesh clean through.
It's you and me, Stefan. Always.
In the end, there's really no other decision to make.
She finds him alone the next afternoon, down in the kitchen. It is half past noon, and Stefan has not yet begun putting her next meal together. His back is to her as he looks through the cupboard, and she takes a moment to study him.
"I'm surprised you're willing to be alone with me," Stefan tells her without turning around.
"Why wouldn't I be?"
"You're not scared, after yesterday?"
"Should I be?"
"I am."
Elena takes a deep breath, and, steeling herself, reaches out to put a hand on Stefan's shoulder. He leans into her touch. How much this would have meant to her just a few months ago. How much this means to her now.
He turns to face her. "I don't know what other compulsions Bex may have laid on me."
"It doesn't matter."
"That's foolish. I can't—"
"Stefan. Listen to me. Just—Know that I love you. And that even though I can't let go of that, I can let go of you." This is the first time since they came here that she has put her feelings for him into words.
"Elena, I know that you're upset after yesterday."
"I don't want you to be hurt because of me."
Under her hand, she can feel the tension in him engendered by her words, like the split in the ice just before an avalanche. "I don't want to stop this. I don't want to give you up. I feel... I feel…"
The old Stefan, the one with his humanity on, would never be so selfish after yesterday. The guilt would have eaten him alive by now. And yet, she knows that if she lets him finish, if she lets him tell her how he feels, she will not have the strength for this parting.
"Then tell me that you won't get hurt. Promise me that my loving you isn't going to be the thing that kills you." Tears blur her vision and make her voice almost too thick to speak, and God, she is so sick of crying. She doesn't think she can ever stop.
He shakes his head. "I can't make promises like that."
"That's why I'm putting an end to this."
When she leaves him, he does not try to catch her.
I love you, Stefan. Hold onto that. Never let that go.
The last leaf falls off the Japanese Maple, pale and brown.
A/N: Thank you for reading. Please leave a review if you are enjoying this. Hearing your feedback really does make all the difference in keeping this going!
Klaus will be back next chapter, now that Stefan and Elena have had room to really break up. And he may be less than happy about how Rebekah has chosen to handle his absence…
In the mean time, be on the lookout for a Klaus/Elena oneshot that I will be posting this week!