(The Stars Were Brightly Shining)

by adlyb

Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.

Summary: After a one night stand with Klaus, Elena discovers she's not going to be alone for Christmas after all.

Spoilers: Seasons 3 & 4

Rating: R

Warnings: canon typical violence/ teen pregnancy / angst angst angst and Christmas


Elena tries to slam the door shut, but Klaus casually intercepts it with an open palm, throwing the door wide open again. There's an inauspicious crack when it rebounds off the wall before slowly creaking forward, the wood quivering in its frame.

They stare hard at each other, Elena breathing raggedly, trying, trying, trying to pull herself together, to not fall apart at the sight of him standing on her doorstep, the nightmare, the dream, the memory made real and whole and very very dangerous again. Every tense line in his body screams threat. Barely bridled fury.

Somehow, she had begun to tell herself that Klaus wasn't real. That he really had gone away, and she would be safe to box him up into an abstraction, part of a vague recollection of a time when she had had to think faster and dare more than everyone else around her, when she had been more, somehow, fiercer and brighter than the remote and gravely silent woman she's become.

And oh, God! She had wished for him to return. It had been so easy, when she'd forgotten that being with him was like sprinting headlong into the howling eyewall of a hurricane. How impossible to think that in those quiet, drifting weeks after Alaric had died and Damon and Stefan had left her she had wished that Klaus would come back and give her life meaning again. Give it interest. She had wished for him to return with the wistful carelessness of someone who didn't really believe anymore in the possibility of obtaining her heart's secret desires, and so had never really seriously considered the consequences of what would happen if her wish came true.

How perilously foolish she had been.

(She is always foolish. One of the many things she has in common with her forebears. She can strategize and maneuver her way through any battlefield, but her reckless heart will always find ways to trip her up.)

And it had been reckless to let herself be so complacently happy. To put him so firmly behind her. As though she ever really could. How could she forget that it's always when he finally slips her mind that he always finds a way to creep back in and ruin everything?

"Invite me in, Elena," Klaus repeats, tearing her from her rapidly spiraling thoughts with the lure of his soft, persuasive words.

As though he is not asking her to do the most deadly thing of all.

(As though she hadn't already invited him in once before to somewhere she should never ever have let him tread.)

There is a terrible, small part of herself that wants to.

"I thought you were supposed to be anywhere but here," she says, still too stunned by his presence to come up with a more substantial remark.

Klaus is all false cheer as he replies. "Oh, I was, and I had a lovely, interesting time away from this flyspeck village. I spent six weeks in Greece, then another two in southern Italy, where my courier delivered this blood packet to me." He tosses it to her, and she catches it on reflex, the blanket around her shoulders spilling onto the floor.

She shivers from more than just the sudden chill as she juggles the bag around in her hands. Now that she's holding it, she can see that it's already about half empty. "What does this have to do with anything?" she asks him carefully as she puts the bag down on the entrance table, dread curling in her stomach. Hoping against hope that this sample was taken before the mystical conception took place. As certain as she had been that Klaus would be fine with this pregnancy were he to ever even find out about it, she now senses how misguided her assumption had been.

"Don't play naïve. I could smell it in your blood the moment I unsealed the bag. Subtle, nascent, yet unmistakable all the same. You're with child."

Elena closes her eyes. "Yes." There's no point in denying it now that she knows for certain that he's onto her. He can probably smell it on her body even as they speak. Can probably hear her baby's heartbeat.

Klaus presses in as close to the threshold barrier as the magic repelling him will allow. "Who's the father?"

Startled by the soft menace infusing the question, Elena opens her eyes to gape up at Klaus. "Excuse me?"

"Who. Is. The. Father?"

"Why do you care?"

Something calculating enters Klaus's expression. "Perhaps because it might have something to do with why each and every one of the wolves I attempted to turn in Tuscany bled out and died rather than completing the transition. I lost an entire bloodline when I tried to use that most recent batch." His eyes sweep over her from head to toe. "In light of your predilection for inviting the supernatural into your bed, whoever sired your offspring is undoubtedly at fault."

Elena wraps a protective arm around her middle. "So my blood isn't effective while I'm pregnant. That's not even that surprising, when you think about it. My blood and the baby's blood are bound up in a circuit, right? That's probably what the problem is. Why are you assuming this pregnancy is supernatural at all?"

"Is he a witch? A werewolf? Something else?"

Elena frowns at him, offput by his insistence on discovering her child's paternity. "None of the above."

Klaus glares at her the way Rebekah often would when she fantasized about tearing her throat out. "What do the ever-so-dashing Salvatore brothers think of this?" he asks. "I'm surprised they haven't already relieved the culprit of his vital parts."

She shrugs uneasily. "No idea. They left the same day as you."

This surprises him. "Oh? My hybrids never mentioned." He pauses, considering. "Nor did they ever report your condition to me."

Hell. "Did you specifically order them to?" she asks, hastily drawing up a smokescreen for Tyler's rebellion before Klaus can dwell too much on this informational gap. "They seem kind of literal to me. Anyway, I've been disguising my symptoms."

He cocks his head to the side. Takes his time looking her over. "Indeed."

She tries very hard not to react to his scrutiny, no matter how much she wants to. She wishes she hadn't dropped the blanket, that it wouldn't be so obvious that she wanted to use it as a shield if she bent to pick it up now. No. She doesn't dare move a muscle. To do so would be to admit her many weaknesses.

The moment stretches on in potent silence. They both watch each other with the intensity of a predator and its prey regarding each other across a short distance, one waiting for the right moment to pounce, the other for the right moment to bolt. The charge between them becomes unbearable.

There's something about him today that's throwing her. Something in his expression and his general aura of hostility that she can't quite put her finger on. It's right there, in the heavy silence hanging between them, if only she could grasp it.

"I thought you wanted me to have children," Elena finally ventures, when she can't take the silence between them any longer without crumbling under Klaus's oppressive regard.

"I do."

"Well, I'm having one, and you don't seem particularly happy about it."

"You speak as though you know me so well."

She does, though. It wouldn't be possible, to go through what he had put her through, to surrender herself to the death he had offered her so completely that she still yearned to return to it, without coming to know him more intimately than she had ever known anyone else in her life. Doubly impossible to make his death her mission without bringing him close to her heart. Even when he had been gone for months, even after she had tucked him away into a part of her past she never let herself dwell upon, it had only taken a few minutes resubmerged in his presence for everything to come rushing back to her. For she had discovered the loneliness that lay at the bottom of his wretched, violent heart like a wild black ocean, deep and endless… and a perfect reflection of the loneliness within her own heart. A mirror where she had never expected to find one.

She knows him well enough to understand that she can never tell him any of this. He would never forgive her for seeing him so clearly.

Instead, she does something she very rarely does. She cuts to the heart of the matter. "Why are you really here, Klaus?"

"Obviously to discuss your condition."

"You could have done that over the phone, or had one of your hybrids deliver the message. And unless you're going to tell me to end this pregnancy—which I'm not going to do, by the way—then there's nothing to be done, other than wait for me to have the baby." She takes a step closer to the threshold, so she is right there. Squints up at him. "Why are you really here?"

He looks away first. Off to the side, as though there could possibly be anything of interest on her parents' covered porch "I never thought I'd see the day when someone could tempt you free of the Salvatores." He says it like he's changing the topic. Like he's hoping to distract her. Somehow, Elena gets the feeling that he's actually doing neither of those things.

Insight grips her.

"You're jealous."

Klaus's attention whips back to her in an instant. "Don't be absurd."

"You're unhappy that I'm having this child you yourself told me you wanted me to have one day because you're jealous. You want to know who the father is so you can—let me guess—kill him? Make a big production of it by saying it's about the hybrids who wouldn't turn, just to hide your real feelings?"

"If you'd simply indulge my curiosity, then I could be on my merry way and you need never concern yourself over my motives ever again."

"I thought we were through indulging each other."

He clenches his jaw. "Are you going to tell me, or must I resort to other means of persuasion?"

"I don't even understand why you care," Elena huffs. "You've been crystal clear that you don't want anything more to do with me. Not personally, anyway. So what gives?"

His expression freezes over. "You're right. I don't care. Forget I asked." He turns on his heel and stalks away.

Elena watches him storm off, lingering at the door for long minutes after he had gone.

No matter what he'd said at the end, she knows she'd had the right of it. Klaus had been jealous. She just doesn't understand why, after the way he'd treated her last fall.

No. She can't afford to wander down that path. If she gets to understand Klaus's twisted mind any more than she already does, she may never be able to kill him when the time inevitably comes round again.

She shuts the front door on their conversation and any Klaus-related thoughts altogether. Trudges back to the living room, where the Christmas lights are still twinkling merrily, oblivious to the winter storm that just blew in, and picks up her cell phone.

Bonnie answers on the fourth ring.

"Get the gang together," Elena tells her without preamble. "We've got a problem."


A/N: Sooo many problems on the horizon. A jealous Klaus is a violent Klaus, lol. Thanks for reading, and for your lovely comments!