(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
As she meanders through the merry grounds, dotted with fragrant fir trees and already softly illuminated by twinkling white lights, Elena cannot help but reflect back on years gone by. How she'd come here with Bonnie and Caroline, when the three of them truly had been inseparable. How they'd giggled over boys and drank hot chocolate and shopped for last-minute Christmas presents, never knowing that their time together just being kids would be over years early. And before that, to her childhood, when she'd raced through this festival like a wild hare, her brother toddling after her, her parents laughing and warning her not to wander off too far.
She had, though. She had wandered very, very far.
About an hour in, she spots Tyler speaking to his mother, before breaking away to whisper something to Caroline that immediately sets her off. Elena watches as she storms off in the direction of the stage, her clipboard clutched furiously to her chest.
It's probably nothing. Probably just relationship drama, which Elena has no business prying into. And she wouldn't, she totally wouldn't, except for that tingle of intuition up the back of her neck that whispers that this is something else.
Elena hurries to intercept Caroline.
And promptly knocks straight into Klaus, who catches her about the shoulders before she can trip on her ass.
"Steady on," he murmurs, a smile creeping over his mouth as he looks her over in her wool party dress and knee-high boots. "Don't you look good enough to eat."
Elena claws her way out of his grasp and quickly puts a few feet of space between them. Anything to break contact from his warm grip. Anything to block out the intensity of her body's reaction to him. The jolt of desire she'd felt at his words. Her hands dig into her coat pockets, where the vervain presses cool and reassuring against her fingertips. Grounding her.
"What are you doing here?" she snaps.
He gestures in the direction of the charity auction table, totally unperturbed by her tone. "Dropping off my painting. It's a tad bit late—there were some unexpected delays—but better late than never, I suppose."
Elena glares at him. "No, I mean: What are you doing here, with me? I thought I was clear last night that I don't have anything else to say to you."
"Indeed. It's what you're refusing to say that so interests me."
"You're sounding like a broken record."
He grows serious on her. Crosses the distance between them like it's nothing and studies her seriously. Caught in his regard, Elena looks up into his face and studies him in turn.
He's so close, like this. Close enough that she can smell his cologne, that she can feel the unnatural heat blazing from his body. Feel all of that immense power, crackling under his skin, straining to be unleashed. He's the most lethal thing of all, but more dangerous still is the threat that if this moment goes on even just a few seconds longer, Elena will break. Will lift her hand to his cheek, or bury her face against his throat, or press her mouth to his, and then it will be game over. Klaus will know exactly how much power he has over her still. How much her indifference to him has been nothing more than smoke and mirrors ever since that awful night.
"You're afraid of me," Klaus observes.
"I am not." The words spill too fast from her lips.
He tilts his head knowingly, before pointedly drawing her hand from her pocket.
Elena stands there frozen, unable to stop him, as he delicately turns her palm up and gently peels back her fingers to reveal the little bottles of vervain she had been clutching.
All in all, it's more than an admission.
Her heart flies as she watches him, waiting for him to lash out at her, to snatch away this tiny little defense. Nearly the only thing she has against him.
He never does. Instead, his fingers stroke over her hand, almost like he's trying to soothe a skittish animal. He pauses when his fingers trace over her wrist—where he must feel the straps of her brace—but he doesn't comment on it. Instead, he runs his thumb over the back of her hand one more time, and closes her fingers back up over the vervain with a tenderness that makes her head swim.
The weapons she's brought with her are enough to seriously injure or even kill a normal vampire, but he's not a normal vampire. Against him, they're nothing more than a security blanket.
He doesn't call her out on it. Doesn't call her foolish or laugh at her.
For the first time, Elena worries that he might see through her as well as she sees through him.
"You never used to be afraid of me," he muses as she tucks her hands back into her pockets.
"I was. Of course I was," she says, recalling those bone-wearying days before the sacrifice, when her march toward death at his hands had been an implacable, inescapable fact. The unbounded terror she had felt on first seeing him again, months later, in her school hallway. The damning admission that she still yearned for his bite mere weeks after that. She had been afraid every step of the way.
He waves her off. "Not really."
"I think you're misremembering things."
"Am I?" The way he asks the question tells her exactly how much he doubts the possibility.
Elena looks past him, into the distance.
She'd wandered so far off the path of the life her parents would have wanted for her. Had wandered so far from the path of the living, into the land of the dead, that she had believed herself to be truly and forever lost. And yet, now, miraculously, she has this life growing within her. This future with a child and a chance to reclaim the life snatched away from her by her parents' deaths. By her own death at Klaus's hands (no—by his mouth) last spring.
She dares to imagine herself five, six years from now, here with her child, watching as her daughter or her son races through the crowd— happy, safe.
"Do you remember when I told you that I still dream about your bite?" she asks him slowly. She doesn't miss the way his eyes darken as her question lingers between them.
"Yes."
The way he utters that one syllable makes something hot and vital clench inside of her.
This is the problem. Everything tracks back to that one moment, when she, the liar, had told him something true and secret about herself that she should have died rather than ever reveal, especially to him.
She reveals another truth to him now.
"I think… I think it was because I had gotten all twisted up inside. When I first found out about the curse, about my role in breaking it—my death—I was relieved. I'd had this feeling hanging over me, ever since I didn't die in that car crash with my parents, that something had gone wrong. That I had gone wrong. There was this huge part of me that really honestly yearned to die—that wanted what you were so insistently offering me. Even last fall, I still wanted it." She takes a deep breath. "But I don't, anymore. I think—I think I was just… grieving."
"Grieving."
"Yes."
The air vibrates between them as Klaus absorbs her words.
"How convenient for you."
"That's the point, Klaus. You were convenient. I was lonely and sad and I didn't realize it, but I was still mourning for so many people, for so much. And you were… just there."
Everything she says is absolutely true, except for the part that she omits.
(He never needs to know about everything that came after.)
"It's not so easy. You can't just pretend none of it ever happened," he warns her.
But she can. She can. She can do anything at all, if she must.
(Even cut him out.
Him, her heart's reflection.)
That future she wants for her child is only possible if he's not in it.
Elena gathers all of her anger, her jealousy, and her monstrous loneliness into a cruel little ball of neat indifference and throws it in Klaus's face. "None of what, Klaus? A one night stand? Because, yeah, basically, I have. You don't mean anything to me." She swallows. Forces out this one final lie. "You never did."
Her arrows hit their mark. She can see the way her carefully worded degradation razes him, burns him out. She knows him well enough, understands him deeply enough, to grasp how much he fears his own loneliness. His own irrelevance in the lives of others. It feels like cutting herself open as well, to do this to him, even as she feels the keen relief of having it done.
"And the father of your child?" he asks her at last.
"What about him?"
"Was he also so convenient?"
She doesn't answer him.
He clenches his jaw. Gathers himself. "Fine then. Allow me to show you how inconvenient I can be." He turns on his heel and slips into the crowd.
She watches him go for a long time.
A/N: OH MY GOSH. I asked for encouragement and y'all gave it to me in DROVES. THANK YOU.
Ummm… so here's the thing… you all were SO encourage that I may already have a THIRD update pretty much ready… Let me know how this chapter was and maybe I can get it posted ASAP as well!
