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: R
Warnings: Hostage situation/explicit violence/gratuitous angst/dubious consent, dubious desires
Welcome to the family, he had told her on her first day.
For a long time, Elena forgot about that completely. He couldn't have been serious.
Now, though, the memory drifts back to her with ominous import.
Now, he seems to really mean it, insisting that she join his little family for dinner and pulling her into the dreadful parlor for drinks by the fire late at night and entreating her opinions on this or on that.
Welcome to the family.
The family.
It's clear that he means something different by that when he applies the term to her than he does when he applies it to the other two. He certainly doesn't try to include her in their messy dynamic, instead choosing to reserve her for himself alone.
Yet one thing stands out to her, one kernel of truth that makes her stomach clench when she lets herself think on it. He intends to keep her with him, well and truly by his side, just as surely as he means to keep the other two. His eyes are on her now.
Her eyes never leave him.
Distantly, Elena knows that Klaus is making plans to return to New Orleans, and that she is not a part of those plans. She hears his voice a few times, emanating from behind closed doors. Arguing with Rebekah, commanding his hybrids to do this or that, even once detailing to Tyler a list of maneuvers he would like learned.
She worries about what might happen to Marcel and Davina when Klaus returns. Would Klaus harm them? Would they still look of for a way to bind his power? Would he find out that she had meant to betray him?
There's nothing she can do to solve any of those questions now.
She does her best not to even think of them.
They are always on her mind.
The day after Christmas, Elena returns to the library.
She hasn't been back to this room for months. Not since before the last time Klaus left her alone here.
Everything is nearly just as she left it, and she doesn't know why she thought it might be any different. The Iliad lies open and face down on the mahogany coffee table, still unfinished. The little pile of books she had pulled to read in future still sits neatly at the foot of the sofa. It's like she could have walked out of here yesterday.
It feels like another lifetime.
Gingerly, Elena flicks on the lights in the large overhead fixture and eases into the room, shutting the door behind her softly.
This had been her sanctuary, once. The only bright spot in her life.
There are brighter spots, now, but also darker.
The deeper into the room she goes, the more she senses that something about it has changed, now that she's no longer living and breathing just to be here. The room no longer feels so alive. Klaus had been right.
I found I rather preferred it as it had been before.
Experimentally, she sits down on the enveloping sofa and puts her feet up on the coffee table. She flips through The Iliad until she finds her place, and begins to read.
Klaus comes in some time later. She knows it's him without needing to turn around, can feel it in the tingle that plucks at her skin when he is near. That feeling is weaker now than it was a few days ago, but she's also more attuned to it.
He pauses when he spies her. For a long moment, Elena pretends she doesn't know he's there. It takes all of her focus to calmly turn the page. She isn't absorbing a word.
Finally, finally, Klaus pulls some books from the oak shelves, takes a few things out of one of the trunks, and sits across from her in the leather armchair in order to sort through what he has collected.
Elena glances up at him. "Are you going to read through all of that at once?" She cocks her head and studies the spine on one of the books. It's in some kind of writing that she can't make out. Cyrillic, maybe? The antique typeset makes it hard to be certain.
"I thought I remembered reading something in one of these back in, oh, the aughts, it must've been," he tells her by way of an explanation.
"What sort of books are they?"
He gives her one of his slow, dark smiles. "The sort about witches, and rituals, and other secret and sinister things unfit for polite company."
She shivers. She's handled lots of books in here which she had no way of reading. She wonders, for the first time, if any of those books might have been dangerous even to touch.
No, that couldn't be right. Klaus had given her free rein of this room. He wouldn't have done that if she could have harmed herself in here.
Probably.
(He had let her loose in that plantation with only a thin warning about Dark Objects. She'd ignored that handily enough.)
"You're not sure how to take on the Coven, are you," she surmises.
He clenches his jaw, just the smallest tic before he replies pleasantly enough, "That's bold of you to assume." Everything about how he says it broadcasts that she's way off her mark, that he's only humoring her, playing a game of cold, cold, colder with her.
But it's just Klaus wheedling her to hide his own uncertainty. She ignores the bait. "You killed them all like it was nothing, how can just a few more be any sort of a threat?"
"It shan't be just a few more, for starters. After I butchered the lot of them in that house, they called upon what allies they have, both in the city and abroad."
"Why go back at all then?"
"Because it's my city and I won't be chased from it," he snaps.
All at once, she realizes she has been leaning toward him, closer and closer throughout the brief conversation.
It's always dangerous to get too close to a wild animal, especially when it thinks it's wounded.
Carefully, she leans back into the couch, out of his personal space, and makes a show of perusing her book.
He can probably tell it's all a ruse, can probably hear her heart fly and taste her sudden anxiety in the air, or whatever it is vampires actually do, but he has the good manners not to comment upon it.
She's not sure what that nerve was that she just touched, but it's definitely something. She files it away to mull over later.
After a few minutes, when everything seems calm again and Klaus is immersed in one of the thick old tomes, Elena pulls one of his books over and flips it open.
Unlike the book Klaus scans through with an air of impatience, flicking through pages too fast to possibly glean anything useful, this one is written in French. She'd been a good Spanish student, before her parents' deaths and everything that had rained down on her like an avalanche afterward. A lot of the words look familiar. She could probably make some of this out, as she had done with Rebekah's diaries, if she had the time.
Klaus reaches over to take the book from her just as she flips the page to a copperplate illustration.
Elena pulls it away from him and stares down at the image, her fingers clenched around the edges of the book.
She recognizes this drawing. Recognizes the sequence of circles, laid out like a diagram, from her nightmares. She'd stepped into another similar ring just a few days ago.
"You're reading about sacrificial rituals."
Gently, Klaus relieves her of the book.
"I am."
"Why?"
"Because it seems a key point. They wanted you for a sacrifice themselves, did they not? Because their quaint Harvest tradition didn't go off as expected?"
She takes the book back from him and lays it on the table. Frowns hard at the pages. None of these rings had been present when Agnes and her cronies had dragged her to that cemetery to slit her throat. A frightening bolt of insight punches through her. "These aren't just about sacrifice in general. These…" She trails off, tracing her fingers over the circle.
The circle. Eternity. A beginning that is also an end. The cycle of the sun and the moon. The faint current that runs between herself and Klaus when she touches him.
"These are for binding spells. Sacrifice to break a binding, or to create one. Are you trying to figure out how to free the wolves without going through the witches?"
"It would be useful."
"They were in league with the Coven."
"Out of necessity."
"Who are you going to kill, then? Another innocent girl?"
"Don't be jealous, now, sweetheart. You're the only lamb for me."
"I'm not a lamb."
Faster than she can blink he's on her, pinning her to the sofa with her wrists over her head. The entire steely length of him presses against her. His knee finds its way between her legs.
She knows better than to struggle. It will only excite the predator in him.
"You look like a lamb to me," he tells her softly, face only inches from hers as he lazily gazes down into her face.
Elena tilts her chin and straightens her shoulders as best as she can from her position. She absolutely, not for one second, thinks about the way even that slight movement presses their bodies all the tighter together.
"I went to my death willingly, Klaus," she tells him evenly. "I didn't even flinch. Can you say the same?"
He pulls back, eyebrows raised, lips parted to say something no doubt intended to sting her. The change in how he holds himself pushes their hips closer together and Elena feels a fierce twinge between her legs despite herself. Unconsciously, she spreads her thighs a little further to accommodate him.
His fingers twitch against her skin where they encircle her wrists.
The mood between them shifts, becoming heavy and tense. Klaus's eyes sweep over her face, taking in everything about her, from the flutter of her eyelashes to her flushed cheeks and parted lips. It's a terribly intimate examination. She feels like he notices every single detail, down to the bead of sweat that trickles down the side of her face, slipping past her jaw and into her hair.
Even just the feel of his warm, solid chest brushing against hers through the thin layers of fabric they wear makes her body tingle in frightening excitement. She aches in all the places she wishes he would touch her.
He licks his lips, and looks again like he would like to say something.
No words come.
Her heart races. This could be it. It would be very, very easy to let Klaus take her here, on the couch in their library. She can imagine how heavenly it would feel just to end this, to let herself fall into this screaming abyss that's opened up beneath her.
They've already done this, in countless positions.
No, that's not right at all, she thinks. Those were just dreams.
She would never—
No, she wants—
The door to the library creaks open. The sound drives her sanity right back into her with painful force. She scrabbles to get out from under Klaus.
Klaus pulls away somewhat more slowly, his attention clinging her like a cobweb, sticky and invisible.
She turns toward the door and, with a sinking feeling, discovers who has interrupted them.
Stefan stands at the door, eyes nearly black as he watches them.
The very air is thick with choked desire. Even she can taste it, and she's only human. She cannot imagine what Stefan must be able to detect.
And, oh. She never thought Stefan would look at her the way he's looking at her now.
Shame starts to settle low in her belly. It radiates upward and outward, to her chest, where her heart hurts, and out to her limbs, her thighs and the tender undersides of her arms and to her very fingers and toes.
Who is she? How can she love Stefan so desperately, and still want Klaus?
She hears the answer whispered across her mind, but it's worse than that, worse than Katherine's coy benediction last spring, more than that simple truth about herself can contain.
(How can she even contemplate giving herself to Klaus, when he has taken so much from everyone she loves?)
"I have the grimoire you asked for," Stefan announces. The accusing silence feels like it has stretched for eons, but has lasted only seconds. He turns and hands it smoothly to Klaus, who takes it from him as coolly as though something pivotal had not been about to happen. Something earth-shattering.
Maybe for Klaus it wouldn't have been.
"Any trouble retrieving it?"
"None."
Klaus flips through the pages, tracing his fingers over an inscription here or there.
Stefan waits, and Elena huddles on the other side of the sofa, as far from them as she can get. She wants to leave. She's afraid that if she moves a muscle, that she'll have the full weight of their attention once again. She doesn't think she could take it right now.
"And Gisette? Was she amenable?" Klaus asks.
Elena senses more than sees Stefan flick his gaze to her.
"Are you sure you want to discuss this here?" he asks.
Klaus doesn't look up from the grimoire. "Elena may stay."
"No, she wasn't amenable," Stefan reports, voice completely blank. "You'll have to find another."
It's not really fair, she thinks.
She's not even sure what it is, exactly, she's referring to. It could be the fact that she has had to endure an endless parade of Stefan's romantic activities, or it could be the fact that somehow, when she wasn't paying enough attention, Klaus had seduced her. Her only advantage lay in that he didn't seem to know it yet.
None of it is fair.
Stefan and Klaus talk for a long time.
She doesn't look like it, curled up and staring off into the distant corner of the library, but she takes in everything they say.
She knows she'll have to do something, eventually.
Dinner that night is exceptionally difficult to bear. Rebekah and Klaus carry on as they usually do, but Stefan is abnormally quiet, only answering when he is spoken to directly.
She catches him staring at her from across the table.
If she stares back, who could blame her?
That is the trouble.
If she stares back, everyone would blame her.
She resumes her daily walks through the slumbering gardens. Despite the other changes, Klaus still expects her to take her vitamins and well-balanced meals, and to exercise daily for her health. He hasn't mentioned it yet, but she expects he will want another blood donation soon.
(She chooses not to dwell on the other reason he wants her healthy.)
Today, Stefan waits for her by the side door, and walks with her out onto the lawn. It's still early enough in the morning that frost coats the dormant winter grass in silver, making everything shimmer like a dream. Lacy sheets of ice crunches under her boots.
They walk, taking the slow, customary turn around the grounds, for perhaps a quarter of an hour without anything being said between them. It would be pleasant, in its own way, except this silence that has sprung up between them is new. Despite the weeks they had been separated, despite the pain at their reunion, Elena had grown accustomed to speaking with Stefan again, and this immense distance he emanates tears at the wound that opened up yesterday when he walked in on her with Klaus.
"Are you okay?" she asks, a little warily.
Stefan stares straight ahead, and after a minute passes, she realizes he won't answer her.
She places her foot poorly and slips on a patch of ice. He catches her in an instant and looks her over with a proprietary eye, his hands locked around her elbows.
"Stefan?"
"I'm disappointed in you."
The words stab her like a knife.
She twists out from under his hands, and he lets her.
Tears well in her eyes. "Is that how it's going to be now? Because believe me, if anyone has a right to be disappointed, it's me. Do you think I like seeing you in love with Rebekah? Or doing God knows what with both of them every night? Because I can't stand it and I can't stand the way you're looking at me now."
Stefan clenches his jaw. "You can't understand."
"I've been nothing but understanding!"
"I warned you about him, I warned you to be careful—"
"Like it's so easy! You have no idea, you're the one who doesn't understand what it's like, how I can't get out—"
"As though I could!"
She scoffs. "You know what, I don't think you even want to. I think you're happy here right now, but one day you're going to wake up, and remember who you are, and you're going to hate yourself for doing this."
He squeezes his eyes shut, and takes three huge breaths. "I'm trying to save you, Elena. Please. Just believe me when I say that no matter how tempting he makes it seem, you won't be able to live with yourself if you give in to him."
Save her. The only way he could do that would be if he got her out, and away.
For a moment, the fantasy opens up in her mind, takes over her heart. They could run away together. She wouldn't mind that life, always moving, never settling down, if she were with Stefan.
The selfishness of that idea swamps her. To run away would mean to forfeit the lives of everyone else she loves.
So she'll stay here, and she'll keep doing her best to resist Klaus, resist herself, to remember what it means to have a human heart and human compassion. She knows that one day she'll slip. She can feel it coming, true and certain, the way she had felt her death billow up before her last year.
"That's where you're wrong, Stefan," she whispers. "I already can't live with myself."
Because one day, she'll give in.
Two weeks pass.
Somehow, things revolve back into their old molds. Stefan becomes that cold-eyed stranger again, and she almost forgets how thin the ice between them had become, how perilous. He is as distant as he ever was.
On New Year's Eve, Klaus takes Rebekah and Stefan out on the town.
(Elena's still not sure what town there might be, as she's never ventured off the property while in command of her faculties. It could be three blocks or it could be a city. No one has told her one way or the other.)
This suits her just fine.
On New Year's Eve, with everyone else out of the house, she gets Tyler to hoist her up onto the sloping roof, four stories up. They spread a blanket out on the shingles and lie back to look at the stars. Their breaths cloud milky white in front of their faces.
"Do you think Jeremy's okay?" She's asking Tyler, true, but in this moment, she's also throwing the question to the universe, hoping the stars will answer her back.
Tyler takes her hand. "I know he is."
"How?" She turns to face him, and when he turns his head as well, their faces are only a few inches apart. His face is just a shadow in the silvery winter darkness, but she can feel him, the solid warmth of him, comforting and familiar, and that's better, even, than seeing him. Just to know he's there.
Her friend—her one, unexpected, dearest friend—puts a hand over his heart. "I can feel it, here."
"Everyone must think I'm dead. How could he be alright? He's lost everyone."
"Jeremy doesn't think you're dead."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. He knows you're alive." He pats his breast, a slow rhythm in time with the beating of his heart. "He'll be able to feel it here, too."
At midnight, she says, "Make a wish."
She kisses Tyler on the cheek.
He is the only one on whom she can bestow her kindness wholeheartedly, and she pours all of it into him.
Sometimes at night Stefan plays the piano. His fingers are long and white and beautiful, and Elena remembers a time when those fingers touched her like that, light as a dove.
She likes to sit in the parlor and listen when Stefan plays.
The only light in this room comes from flickering candles, strewn like firey gems along the mantle, the table, hanging like talismans from the chandelier and dripping hot wax onto the floor. Rebekah insists she still has not gotten entirely used to the electricity, had used Klaus's absence as a chance to swap out all the lightbulbs for tapers with the fervent declaration that the artificial lights kill all the romance in a place.
Elena agrees with her, silently. It's easy in the dim light to imagine the old warmth in Stefan's eyes, to see a tenderness in him she catches only fleetingly now, and only ever when they are alone and he thinks she will not notice. It's harder to picture these things at lunch, or on their morning walks, when he is so very careful and guarded and angry, whether with her or with himself.
The first time the lilting music had come wafting down the hall, Elena had hung back in the entrance to the parlor, afraid he would lash out at her if he noticed her.
"You can sit down Elena," he had told her as the music died out, his fingers still on the keys. "I won't bite." Coming from Klaus, the statement would have been an innuendo at least. From Stefan, the words sounded so, so tired.
"I didn't want to disturb you."
He stares hard at his hands on the keys. "You could never do that, Elena."
Rebekah likes to listen to him, too. She never seems to pay Elena any mind when she settles herself on the opposite velvet sofa to listen, long legs curled up beneath her, the firelight setting her golden hair to glowing.
"Do you still love her, then?" Rebekah asks, as though the answer is of no import. She has arrived in the parlor first, and thinks that she and Stefan are alone.
The music pauses.
Elena flees before she can hear the answer.
Happiness has become a negotiation. It's not the big, self-fulfilled happiness of following a calling and doing important things and having an epic love, but there is real happiness to be found in the small snatches of time she steals with Tyler. It's in the simple things, in the evenings spent flipping through a glossy book of 250 Masterpiece Paintings, sprawled out on the floor in Tyler's room with their heads close together, or in the quiet afternoons when they can sit quietly together, resting shoulder to shoulder against his headboard, and Tyler pours her whiskey or bourbon or whatever he has at the moment and they remember their childhoods together, which had ended so abruptly only a little over a year ago.
She's learned to ask for less, to live with less, but finds that it is, for just the short stretches of time when she shuts herself away with Tyler Lockwood, enough.
At night, she wonders how Stefan would have answered if she had stuck around to hear it.
The top row of books in the library goes all the way to the ceiling, fourteen feet up, and is entirely out of her reach. There's no library ladder in sight, though Elena assumes there must be one somewhere, and that surely Stefan would bring it to her if she asked, but she prefers not to summon him overly much. She hasn't been avoiding him, per se, but neither has she especially sought him out.
So it is that Elena has to climb the shelves themselves, using the edges for footholds as she leverages her way up, trusting that the bookcase will not to tip forward and crush her to death. Lately, though, she's learned to trust that while death is her nature, it is not in her nature to die.
On the top shelf, stuck behind all the other books, is a large, glossy book of Caravaggio paintings. She can just make it out, the familiar letters of that long Italian name. She'd remembered the name from Tyler's book, recalling the way his fingers had brushed over the painting.
She's never had an eye for art, not like Jeremy, but after spending so much time looking at it in New Orleans, after spending pensive hours slowly turning through artworks with Tyler, she's beginning to develop a real appreciation. Since finishing The Illiad, she's begun exploring what this library has to offer in prints and etchings and folio books with bright, slick reproductions. She likes to flip through them and imagine that one day she'll have the chance to look through them with Tyler, and that maybe, as they work their way through each image, she can see the world a little bit more like he sees it, flashes of color and light and line, shape and weight, beautiful things amidst all of the horror.
When she sees the Caravaggio book, the scenario plays through her mind before she can stop it—the surprised look of pleasure on his face when she brings that book with her the next time she sees him, the shy smile he'll give her, the lazy enchanted hours they'll spend poring over it. It would be so nice, to do that for him.
At the top, Elena reaches for the book with her left hand, her right grasping the edge of the shelf with sweat-slick fingers. The book is stubbornly wedged in there, heavy and almost too big for the shelf. Bracing herself and repositioning her footing, Elena tugs, tugs, and with a mighty yank, finally frees the book, which flies loose like a snapped rubber band. The momentum throws her backwards. She slips.
Her fingertips scrabble futilely at the shelf. The ground rushes up to meet her with a sickening lurch that makes her stomach heave.
Strong arms catch her in a bridal carry before she hits the ground.
She swallows and shuts her eyes, clutching the book to her chest. She knows the lean strength of these arms, the planes of this chest. She knows that clean, masculine scent that even now prickles insistently at her senses. Elena takes a deep breath, and when she looks up, she gets caught in Klaus's magnetic blue eyes.
He looks right back at her, mouth ajar, as frozen as she as he holds her close to him.
Somehow, everything about this feels a thousand times more precarious than when he had had her pinned beneath him on the couch. A thousand times more precarious, and a thousand times more dangerous.
Elena pushes herself out of his arms and puts as much space between them as possible. Her sudden move must surprise him, because he lets her go without protest.
He takes a moment to visibly collect himself before he turns to face her. When he does, something about him has infinitesimally shifted back into his usual demeanor. He eyes the oversize volume pressed tight against her chest.
"I didn't realize you had taken such an interest in the Masters."
"Well, that's your oversight, not mine."
The phantom of a smile quirks at the corner of his mouth. "Then may I offer my services, the next time you must needs reach a book from my highest shelves?" His tone drips with suggestion, immediately conjuring every which way he might service her.
She watches him like he's a wolf whose cornered her, her mouth gone very dry.
He is and he has.
"You may." Her voice sounds foreign in her ears.
Klaus opens his mouth to say something else, doubtlessly something glib or insinuating, but whatever it was going to be dies on his lips as he looks upon her.
She sees again, for a moment, the crack in his veneer that had so arrested her when he held her in his arms.
It's gone one moment to the next, a figment of the imagination.
"I shall count on it, then," Klaus murmurs, finally, before withdrawing from the room.
His answer leaves her unsatisfied.
She replays it over and over again throughout the day, but she can't find the series of events that would have made her any happier.
The next morning, she finds a note tucked under her pillow.
Elena sits up and pulls out the thick stationary. Instantly, she recognizes Klaus's hand from the few lines of writing she's come across in the library, stuck haphazardly into books and into drawers.
I will be attending to business elsewhere today. Your evening meal will be brought to your room.
-KM
She taps the thick edge of the stationary against her fingertips as she reads and rereads the note. Strange to think of Klaus writing her courtesy notes. Strange to think of Klaus thinking of her at all, outside of his usual disturbing ruminations.
She tucks the piece of paper into her dresser drawer, beneath all of her sweaters, where she hopes she won't have to see it or think about it again for a very long time.
It never occurs to her to question why she keeps it.
All day she thinks about finding Tyler, especially with Klaus out of the house, but all day the stars just don't seem to line up her way. Either Stefan snags her for their silently charged walk, or Tyler's taken the hybrids out into the woods beyond the grounds, or she's supposed to be back in her room in time for dinner.
It's only after Stefan leaves with her dinner tray, and everything falls quiet and still, that she dares sneak down to Tyler to share the Caravaggio book with him.
"Where did you get this?" he breathes when they turn it open on his desk and examine the pages under the yellow light of his desk lamp.
"Do you like it?"
"It's from his library, isn't it?" There's no need for either of them to elucidate whose library Tyler means. There can only ever be one man between them. (If she dares to call him a man at all.)
"I'm allowed to borrow whatever I like."
Tyler shifts his feet, clearly uncomfortable, but the rich colors and fine brushwork persuade him. "I wish I could see these in person."
"I bet you will one day. I bet you'll travel the world."
He doesn't give her false platitudes and tell her that she will too, and he doesn't raise the question that no doubt must hang over him—the question of whether or not Klaus will ever one day let him free from him.
Hours pass by like minutes, and it feels over far too quickly when they say goodnight.
"Tomorrow?" she asks.
"Tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that," he replies. This farewell has become a habit between them, a promise that even though neither of them can truly control their lives, that they will find each other. That they'll always be there for each other.
Elena hugs the book to her chest as she climbs out of the basement and onto the first floor.
Long blue shadows spill across the marble floors in the front foyer and clock the grand main stairs. The dining room emits a deep, cavern like darkness that seems to beckon her inward and causes her to hurry past as quickly and lightly as she can. When she approaches the front parlor, though, she sees that the door is cracked open.
"Oh, Elena," Rebekah calls from inside. "Dear Stefan and I were just talking about you, weren't we?" There's a crystal tedium to her voice, tonight, as though everything bores her, because there is not a single new or unexpected thing left in the world.
For Rebekah, that tone is deadly.
What would be the safest course of action? Pretend she hadn't heard her, and go back to her bedroom? Or face the beast in her lair?
Rebekah takes the decision out of her hands. In a heartbeat she throws the parlor doors open, revealing the scene inside. Although the candles have all burnt down to waxy stubs and none have been replaced, cold starlight dimly illuminates the room. It churns Elena's stomach just to see it. Dismembered limbs are strewn in a haphazard pile on the floor. A beautiful dark haired woman slumps sightlessly against the velvet upholstery, blood streaming from wounds in her wrist and thighs. Her other arm is missing altogether. It must be one of the many littering the floor. Rebekah has clearly just vacated the spot to the woman's right, and Stefan sits on the edge of the sofa to the other side of her, his head in his hands. And his hands—his hands are stained red to the elbows. When he looks up to meet her eyes, she can see that gore paints his face, jaw, and chest as well. There's a glazed look in them that she recognizes all too well. He's probably so high on blood that he has no idea if she's really standing in front of him or just a vision.
Just a couple of feet away from her, Rebekah cocks her head and sizes Elena up. The vampire holds herself preternaturally still, except for her tongue, which she runs over her sharp silver teeth. Her eyes glitter in the dark.
Elena's gorge rises.
You're prey, her mind whispers.
I am not a lamb! her soul fiercely whispers back.
"Are you having a nice time?" Elena asks, her voice wobbling over the syllables.
"Oh, we are. Dinner for two is always so romantic. Though, in fact, I think the evening would be even more delightful if you joined us." Rebekah reaches out and nearly touches Elena's hair, but a low growl stops her a millimeter out. Rebekah looks over Elena's shoulder and lets out an irritated sigh, before musing to Elena, "He's terribly possessive of you, isn't he?"
Klaus ignores his sister as he grabs Elena by the arm and pulls her toward the stairs.
Over her shoulder, Elena watches as Rebekah passes back into the parlor and crawls into Stefan's lap like a shadow in the night. She licks a trail up Stefan's throat until she finds his mouth, and fists her hands in his hair while she kisses him.
"Care to explain what you were doing down there?" Klaus asks her when they reach the second floor. His eyes flick to the heavy tome still nestled in the crook of her arm.
"I didn't realize I was confined to my room."
"Fair enough." He turns to go. She has the sinking feeling that he plans to join the dinner party downstairs.
"Is that it?" she calls after him.
He pauses. "Were you hoping for more?"
"No. Good night."
They resume family dinner the next night. She's disgusted with herself for actually calling it that in her head.
She rarely participates, as they often choose languages other than English to converse in, depending upon Rebekah's whim.
("It's far better to keep her happy," Klaus whispers in her ear.)
Tonight, however, she quickly realizes that they are arguing over Klaus's upcoming return to New Orleans. Appropriately, Rebekah has chosen French for this evening. The choice makes it easy for Elena to catch familiar phrases like La Nouvelle-Orléans and Croissant and loup garou.
After a while, and a couple of glasses of wine, the dispute seems to have only gone round in circles without any sort of resolution. Klaus wants to return to New Orleans, smite the witches, and get the werewolves, Rebekah thinks challenging that particular coven is too risky, Stefan has proven to be an altogether inadequate peacemaker between them, and Elena cannot take it any longer. "I don't understand why you don't just ask for Marcel's help," she interrupts between impassioned outbursts.
Everyone turns to look at her.
Faced with the collective attention of three vampires, Elena straightens in her chair.
"Come again, sweetheart?" Klaus asks her.
"Why don't you just ask for Marcel's help? He's got that witch with all of the French Quarter Coven's power—I'm sure she's strong enough to release the werewolves, if she could be persuaded, and if she can take on her entire coven, she can probably take on whatever allies might have come to their aid."
Rebekah immediately takes a shine to this idea.
"That's not a bad plan, Nick. If you must engage them, then we should reach out to our allies as well."
"Marcel's not an ally. That implies he's my equal."
Rebekah rolls her eyes. "Come off it, he's not your ward anymore. And by the sound of things, he's no longer your loyal subject, either."
Those aren't the right words to say. Elena can already see the dangerous way Klaus's eyes cloud when Rebekah tells him this. Stefan seems to sense it too; he tenses like someone waiting to see where the next bolt of lightning will strike.
Deftly, Elena lays her fingers against the back of Klaus's hand. "I know it's your city, Klaus. But it's just an alliance, not a surrender."
"I do admit, I am curious about his little witch," Klaus concedes after a prolonged, somewhat strained moment. He raises his glass, proposing a toast. "To building brides?"
Across the table, Stefan gives her a brief, approving nod.
In the morning, Klaus comes to take her blood again.
She's been expecting this ever since they returned, so it is a relief to finally have it over with.
"I'm off at sunset," he tells her as he threads the needle into her arm.
"Just like that? No forewarning?" Dutifully, she pumps the little rubber ball he places in her hand to speed up the process.
"I'm telling you now."
She hesitates for a moment, but decides she may as well ask the next question on her mind. "Did you call Marcel?"
"I did."
"And?"
"We shall see what we shall see." It's a typically cryptic answer. She hopes, with Klaus hellbent on returning to New Orleans no matter what, that this proposed alliance will ease the way for Marcel and Davina, hopes that they will be safer if Klaus consciously categorizes them as friends rather than foes.
"My sister has been given firm instructions not to interfere with Stefan's care of you," he continues.
Elena drops the ball. "You're not taking them with you?" Her blood continues to flow sluggishly into the plastic bag.
He frowns. "I can't very well leave you here alone. And you can't come with me, not until this is over with."
Elena tears the needle out of her arm and jumps to her feet. She doesn't know what she thought would happen. She just assumed that after the last time, he wouldn't dream of leaving her alone with Rebekah.
"I'll die if you leave me alone with them," she starts. "I really will. You'll come home and I'll be dead."
Klaus fishes the barely-filled bag up off the floor, wraps the tubing around it, and places it in an insulated case. He pulls a fresh bag out and snags Elena by the wrist, forcing her back down into the chair.
"No need to be overdramatic," he tells her as he wipes her arm off and positions a new needle.
"Please, Klaus. Please, don't leave me alone with just Stefan and Rebekah again." Inspiration strikes her. "You'll need them with you anyway. Your loyal family. Won't you want the ones you can truly rely upon with you?"
He wavers. "And who would I leave your care to in their place?"
"Tyler."
His eyebrows rise halfway up his forehead. "Mr. Lockwood? Were that the case, I'd truly worry about coming home to find you dead.
"Why? He's been nothing but trustworthy and loyal. He's done everything you've asked him to."
"That's hardly significant."
"Exactly! Rebekah already told me he's sired to you. That means, unlike your sister, he has to follow your instructions. Just…" – she takes his hand— and here she knows she is stupidly, brazenly playing with fire—"Just, if you have to leave me again, please don't leave me with them."
He gazes down at where her fingers curl around his hand. "This arrangement would please you very much?"
"Yes."
"Then how could I deny you? So be it."
She doesn't have to feign the smile that blooms across her face.
Elena doesn't realize it, in that instant, but it is this smile that has led men happily to their dooms before, and will do so again.
On January the sixth, Three King's Day, Twelfth Night, Elena awakens to find the Toulouse-Lautrec painting she had so admired hanging on her bedroom wall, above the dresser.
There is no note, but Elena knows it is her Christmas gift from Klaus, all the same.
She steps closer to admire the painting.
A pain shoots through her breast.
She does not remember those bright pink flowers looking quite so dead the last time she had seen them.
A/N: So, what do y'all think? How long until Elena succumbs to Klaus's devilish charms?
Thank you once again for reading and sending in your reviews—hearing from you is what keeps this fic going, and has gotten me this far. I appreciate all of you so, so much.
Special shout out to brokenbell, who made an AMAZING aesthetics post for the Nola Arc, and also put together a devastating and moody playlist for the fic over on tumblr 3
For chapter sneak peeks, fic aesthetics/inspiration, or just to drop me an anon if you're shy, you can find me over on tumblr at livlepretre
Until next time xx