(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
"We have to talk," she tells Klaus some minutes later. They'll have to do something about the body, too. They're lucky the campus is basically empty this time of year. "I overheard some things—"
The elevator dings and the doors slide open.
Bonnie steps out of the elevator, a huge stack of old books cradled in her arms.
There's a moment where Bonnie sees the two of them, locked in their intimate embrace, where confusion, anger, and suspicion all play over her face, one after another after another. Then her eyes sweep down, inevitably, to land on Shane's corpse. At first, she just stares and stares and stares, frozen, as though she can't understand the totality of what she's seeing—the friend she's been searching for, entangled with their enemy, her mentor dead at their feet. An afterthought.
Just thinking about it all makes Elena ill. When had she grown so callous?
(That morning she dragged Meredith Fell into the woods and buried her all by herself, and she hadn't even thought to ask for help.)
(That night she gave Esther her blood and condemned all five of her children to death.)
(No. Earlier than that. When she welcomed Klaus into her bed, their pasts be damned.)
The books tumble from Bonnie's hands and she dives forward to land on her knees at Shane's side. "What have you done?" she croaks. She closes her eyes and lays her hands over his heart. The air around her ripples with the current of her magic.
Klaus draws Elena into his side, out of the way. "What I had to," Klaus tells her. "He intended to harm Elena."
"You're lying," Bonnie seethes, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Shane was a good man. Passionate and curious and altruistic—he wouldn't hurt anyone." She climbs to her feet, misery twisting her beautiful face into something broken and unbearable. "Not like you, though. You hurt everyone."
Klaus pushes Elena behind him. "I haven't hurt you, hm? There's something."
For answer, Bonnie throws her hand up and twists, her fingers contorting into claws as she slams the battering ram of her power into Klaus.
An unnatural wind shrieks down the corridor. The fluorescent lights flicker and burst, one after another. The locked office doors creak on their hinges, and the all the glass in the windows spiders with fine cracks before they too shatter and explode inward—
Klaus drops like a shot, screaming all the while.
Elena drops with him, heedless of the glass shards littering the floor, her hands frantic over his face, his shoulders, his chest as he convulses and howls. A few days ago, Bonnie had barely been able to touch him with this magic—Now she devastates him.
"Stop it, you're hurting him," Elena shouts over the wind.
Overhead, the fire sprinklers hiss on. Cold water rains down over them.
"Get out of the way, Elena. I can't contain the radius of the spell much longer."
"No," Elena cries. "I won't leave him!" She throws herself in front of him, as though she could possibly hope to protect him.
An instant later, Bonnie's magic blasts into her as well.
She can feel every cell in her body and every single one of them shrieks. There's a firework exploding in her chest, all fire and smoke and terror as it screeches ever faster and brighter and higher, higher, higher. Monstrous claws rip through her, gashing her throat, clanging in her ears. There's screaming, screaming—
And then silence.
Bonnie's magic dissipates as suddenly as it had manifested.
Elena collapses atop Klaus. Takes deep, ragged breaths, her hands clenching protectively over her belly.
She barely processes Bonnie pulling her away from Klaus, tears streaming down her face as she mumbles, over and over like a mantra, "Oh God, Oh God, I didn't mean—I didn't mean—" Drained of her rage, she's never looked so helpless. So afraid.
Elena pushes herself out of Bonnie's arms and crawls over to Klaus, who stares up blindly at the ceiling. Fine tremors wrack his body, interrupted only by sporadic, violent muscle spasms. He looks gray as death. Mere seconds experiencing the backlash from that spell had been pure torture. Klaus had endured the direct onslaught of Bonnie's magic for much longer. Tenderly, she cradles his head in her lap. "What did you do to him?"
She glances up, and catches Bonnie looking at her like she's a stranger.
"How could you, Elena?"
It's not fair that Bonnie can sound so heartbroken, when she's the one who's hurt her so badly.
"How could I what?" Elena cries. "How could you?"
"He's the enemy. He's poison."
"Not to me."
"I can't believe this." Bonnie lets out a single, staccato laugh, the sound sharp and high, the way the wind wails late at night. "I've been searching for you for days, worrying myself sick, and you were with him. I bet you didn't even want to be found."
"No, I didn't." She strokes slick, curling strands of hair back from Klaus's face. "Not while you were so busy planning to murder my baby."
Bonnie clambers to her feet. "It's not a baby, Elena!" Her foot catches on Shane's arm as she yells, and she trips, falling hard, her hands and legs tangling with Shane's. Bonnie shudders violently, a raw, wounded groan escaping from her lips as she scrambles to disentangle herself. Emotion makes her clumsy. She stumbles as she pries herself away from Shane, her face awash with a fresh surge of tears.
When she finally frees herself, she turns again to face Elena. "It's not a baby, Elena. And no matter what you think, Klaus isn't a man. A man wouldn't have done this." She jabs a finger at Shane's body. Her voice wobbles over every word. One little push could lay her flat.
Elena gathers herself. Pushes. "And a friend wouldn't hurt me the way you just did. A friend would give me the benefit of the doubt."
Bonnie's face crumples. "I loved Shane," she tells her. "How could you take him from me?"
"I didn't mean to."
"I'm always losing everyone I care about because of you—my Grahams, my mom, Jeremy—"
"That's not fair."
No more fair than the way that Klaus had stripped everything from Elena.
And yet that has never held her back from him.
He quivers in her arms, something like her name trembling from his lips.
"—and now I don't even have you, Elena."
"No. I'm only here because of you. Because I was worried about you. Shane isn't who you thought he was."
"I can't hear this right now."
"I have it all on tape—"
Bonnie shakes her head. "I can't. I just can't." She flees.
Elena lets her. What else can she do?
The minutes tick by. Bit by bit, Klaus's color improves as the aftershocks from the Expression wear off of him. He grips her hand, hard enough to ache.
(She always aches where he touches her. Aches as though her whole body is one tender, raw wound.
That's okay.
She'd rather ache than feel nothing at all.)
She lays her hand against his face. "Hey there. Do you think you can move?"
He blinks up at her like she's the sun and he's made the mistake of looking right at her. Slowly, he sits up and shakes his head, hard. Water droplets spray from his damp hair and trickle down his throat. Tiny beads of glass fall loose from his clothes. "The witch is a fair deal stronger than I anticipated," he observes.
"I think if you'd been anyone else she would have killed you."
He pins her with a look of utter wonder. "You tried to protect me."
"I've told you there isn't a risk I'd hesitate to take for the ones I care about."
He turns his face against her hand and kisses the middle of her palm. "Don't do that again—please, don't ever do that for me again."
"I can't promise you that."
Whatever he might have replied, the words are lost when Caroline arrives.
"Sorry I'm late!" she calls. "Oof, this building's a mess," she says, picking her way through the detritus of Bonnie's spell. "Why are you two sitting in a puddle on the ground? And wait—why are you here, Klaus?" Her eyes land on Shane's corpse and she pauses. "Oh."
"Bonnie was here," Elena explains. She fills Caroline in on the utter catastrophe of the past twenty minutes. It had all happened so quickly.
Caroline cringes. "What a disaster. Did you find anything out about Shane before—" She gestures with a sharp slicing motion against her neck—"you know, his timely death? Because all I found were these painted amphora shards—they were about this creepy myth—"
"Elena's very tired," Klaus breaks in. "Perhaps we could compare notes later?"
She doesn't even realize how true that is until he says it. The memory of Bonnie's magic still sings in her bones, a constant, weary sear that drags on her almost as much as the accusation that had limned Bonnie's eyes.
Nothing sounds better right now than curling up in bed and sleeping for a thousand years.
Caroline starts. "Oh! Right! Sorry." She turns back to the corpse. "Well. First thing's first," she declares with her uncannily sunny pragmatism. "Let's bury the body."
What does it say about her that she knows from intimate, personal experience that it's infinitely better to bury a body with friends than to do it alone?
She's not sure. She's just relieved not to have to do this by herself anymore.
The car ride with Klaus back to Mystic Falls passes in quiet. He holds her hand the entire time.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Please comment xoxo
