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: Extremely dubious consent verging on non-con/ Miscarraiage / Hostage situation/explicit violence and torture/gratuitous angst/ potential character death


When Elena heads inside, Stefan already has coffee brewing and breakfast sizzling on the griddle. A pang shoots through her as she watches him cook for her. It's been years since Stefan cooked for her. Since she'd been taken care of in this particular way.

He plates the eggs, bacon, and toast and gestures expectantly toward the kitchen table.

Elena sits down, dazed, as Stefan slides an unopened jar of strawberry jam across the table and pours her a mug of coffee with a dash of cream, no sugar.

He still remembers her preferences.

"Well? I can hear your stomach growling," Stefan prompts when she doesn't make a move to touch her food.

It's true. She hasn't had anything to eat since breakfast the day before.

She tries to thank Stefan, but no words come out. Her throat is tight for some reason. It's hard to speak. She turns the jam jar around on the table, toying absently with the red plaid paper cover over the lid.

"Did Klaus tell you to do this?" she asks, finally, gesturing vaguely at the meal. Maybe if they're planning to stay here a while Klaus would intend to go back to the way things had been before? Which, after years of fending for herself, seems sort of silly. No matter how much the thought of going back to that simpler time stirs something soft and pained in her chest that she really would rather not examine.

Stefan quirks a brow at her. "Klaus is too preoccupied this morning. I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart." This sentiment is undercut by the knowing coolness of his tone.

Insight breaks through her like yolk seeping from a cracked egg. "You're hoping I'll spill about what went down yesterday."

Stefan sits down across from her. "I haven't asked you anything."

"Doesn't mean you're not hoping I'll share. What's the matter? Klaus not tell you any details?"

"Should he have?"

Elena shrugs. "I seem to remember he liked to talk in bed."

Something flickers across Stefan's face. "That's not the kind of pillow talk I'm used to with him."

Elena wrinkles her nose, pausing in the middle of slathering jam and butter on her toast to imagine what sort of lurid, pretty little things Klaus might mutter in Stefan's ear. The sorts of things one sleek predator with blood on their lips might say to enflame another.

"You're right," Elena allows. "I don't think I would enjoy the sorts of things that must rile you up."

Stefan snorts. "The disdainful act would be more convincing if you haven't slept with all three of us already." He pauses, tosses her an infuriating smile. "Or if I hadn't heard such sweet sounds wafting from your bedroom last night. What was it you were telling Bex to do? Ride me? Or was it bite me? It was hard to distinguish over all the panting and moaning."

Elena glares at him, willing herself not to clap a hand over the healing bite mark under her collar. "What do you want to know?" she grinds out.

"Was my brother in the city yesterday?"

The question draws her up short. For just a second, she feels a little faint. "Damon?" Her voice is higher, breathier than she expects. "Why would you suspect that?" She shakes her head. "And how should I know?"

"You've just confirmed to me that Klaus likes to share things with you that he normally prefers to keep to himself. I thought he might have said something to you."

"Klaus doesn't tell me anything anymore, so, no. We never even saw Mikael—it was one of Klaus's brothers, Finn, whom we ran into. Him and a witch. Why would Damon be there?"

Stefan pushes himself up from the table. Snags her coffee, only half-finished. "Forget I asked."


She can't.

(Her heart always remembers.)


Elena's assessment from the previous night holds even truer in the morning: there's not much house, merely the beam-ceilinged living room with its stone fireplace and the snug kitchen in the rear, plus the three bedrooms upstairs. After cleaning up from breakfast, she finds herself, bizarrely, waiting for Stefan to come out of the one shower and yelling at him about using all of the hot water up.

There is, however, a great deal of outdoor space. She borrows a forest green sweater from Rebekah's duffel bag, pulls on her jeans from the day before and her boots and her leather jacket, and goes for a walk alone in the woods, which jut right up to the edge of the front lawn.

Alone, surrounded by only the occasional, lost bird call and the crunch of dead pine needles underfoot, she feels more at home and at peace than she has felt since the summer. True, she had loved the freedom she had found in New York, the ability to pursue her own interests, but she is not a city girl at heart. If she had ever been destined to become one, she doesn't think that that will ever happen now.

No. At some point, her heart had grown attuned to the burbling of streams and the roll of soft soil and sharp, sheer rocks under her feet, to the climbing twine of green things stretching toward the sun. To the loneliness that had sunk so far inside of her that even now, surrounded by the only people who even feel real to her anymore, there is a part of her that will always be lonely. That will always be alone. The forest is her only solace in the deep of her solitude.

She spends hours traipsing through the woods, hopping over dried up stream beds and exploring the area. It's not until the winter sun dips below the tops of the tree branches that she heads back, careful to avoid getting caught out in the woods after dark.

After all, these aren't her woods.

(Her woods, now, are a deep, shadowed place, in the valley of her heart.)


Back at the house, the first thing she notices is that the sedan Klaus had commandeered the day before is missing. Inside, she finds Stefan and Rebekah hunched over a game of cards—whist, she thinks, though she's not certain.

"Where's Klaus?" she asks, cuddling up against Rebekah's side to watch her play.

"Did he mention where he was off to?" Rebekah asks Stefan, placing a card.

Briefly, Stefan glances at her. "Does he ever?"

Rebekah shrugs.

They play.


The library in the house isn't very good. The entirety of it is housed within a single bookcase that she finds tucked under the stares, comprised mostly of old paperback novels from the sixties, their pages stiff and yellow. She spends the afternoon reading Agatha Christie, curled up on the sunny side of the sofa, while Stefan and Rebekah move from whist to some other game she doesn't recognize. She tunes them out, content to merely be near them.

At some point, Stefan lights the fire, bathing the room in a warm amber glow. Rebekah produces a bottle of Spanish wine, which the three of them pass amongst each other as the evening grows long.

"Don't you two look cozy," Stefan observes, his eyes glued to the way Rebekah's fingers absently twine through Elena's hair.

"No need to be jealous," Rebekah drawls, her hand trailing over Elena's shoulder. "I'm certain my brother will be home soon to keep you warm."

Elena squints at him. He looks so unhappy, so alone. (So much like the boy she fell in love with, whom she remembers less and less clearly every day.) The wine has turned everything warm and fuzzy, and it feels like the easiest thing in the world to ask him, "What is it you really want, Stefan?"

Stefan fixes her with a look so weighted that all of the air feels crushed from her lungs. She finds herself sitting up, trying to alleviate the pressure of his gaze.

"I don't want anything at all," he tells her after a moment.

She believes him.

There's just something so hopeless about the way he says it. As though he sees no future for himself, and has decided there is no point in mourning that bleak emptiness. In pursuing anything other than the perpetual present in which he finds himself.

Behind him, the fire spits and crackles as a log breaks. He turns to prod at the fire with the iron poker, oblivious to the way his honesty has pained something inside of her—that same something that had ached just this morning, when he had made her breakfast. The part of herself that had kissed him only a few weeks back, because neither of them could ever quite abandon the other. Even now.

"You don't know yourself anymore, do you?" she says, with enough gentleness to break him. "That's the problem."

Rebekah shifts uncomfortably beside her.

Stefan jabs at the fire before throwing the iron hard enough to warp the metal and glaring Elena down. "Save the psych analysis for my ex, will you?" He turns to Rebekah. "I'm going out. Don't wait up." He flings himself out the door a second later.

Elena stares at the front door through which Stefan had just disappeared until Rebekah touches her arm.

"I better go after him," she murmurs, standing and stretching. "He's careless in the best of circumstances, but when he's upset… A massacre will just bring Mikael right back down on our heads."

"Do you think we were wrong to erase his memories?"

Rebekah's brows climb her forehead. "I thought we were happy."

"We are!" Elena stands and wraps her arms around Rebekah's waist. "We are. I'm not saying I want him back as my lover. Not at all. It's just… he seems so lost. I can't read him the way that I used to."

"People change, darling."

Elena shakes her head. "He didn't change. We changed him."

"What do you suggest? That I unlock his memories? Surely loving you can't have defined him so elementally."

Elena doesn't answer her.

Tenderly, Rebekah cups the side of her face. "It was for the best. Trust me."

"I do trust you."

"Then you should also trust me when I say that I do need to go no, but that all will be well."

She kisses her goodbye, leaving Elena alone with something that feels very like regret.


The rattle of the front door swinging shut wakes her.

Blearily, Elena rubs at her eyes, realizing she must have fallen asleep reading on the couch. By now, the fire has burned down to just glowing embers in the hearth, casting the entire room in a faint, red-orange glow. She sits up and peers into the semi-darkness of the front of the house, ignoring the way that the room spins a bit before settling into focus.

Klaus stands paused in the doorway, watching her.

Transfixed, she watches him too.

The creeping feeling that she has fallen into one of her old dreams steals over her. The details of time and place fall away. They could be back in her old library, orange-lit by the crackling fire, the familiar, comforting scents of leather and parchment and bourbon permeating the air. In a minute, maybe, Klaus will join her on the sofa. Heat races over her skin. The sweet, familiar tinge of guilt that swiftly follows it only serves to amplify the illusion that she's been thrown back in time by years. That Klaus is still her unlikely confidante, her almost-lover.

It would be so easy to let herself fall into the shape of her old relationship with him, if only he hadn't broken her heart.

"Were you waiting up for me?" Klaus asks her, a wry, mocking note to his voice.

She'd known that whatever closeness had returned between them the day before couldn't last. Had prepared for just this very return to the barbed comments and empty pleasantries which were all Klaus seemed willing to truly afford her. That's okay. She can handle that. She can play along.

Elena rolls her eyes. "For your sister, obviously."

"Oh?" Klaus cocks his head, listening. "Where have she and Stefan gone?"

"Stefan went to go cause trouble and Rebekah went to make sure he didn't cause too much."

"Because my sister is ever so known for her restraint."

"I said she went to make sure there wasn't too much trouble, not that she went to stop it altogether."

Klaus's mouth quirks. He plucks up one of the half-consumed bottles of wine littering the floor and joins her on the sofa with it.

She watches him as he drinks from the bottle before offering it to her.

"You're not going to go join them?" she asks instead of accepting the bottle.

"Should I?"

Elena snags the bottle from him and takes a long, deep swig. The lip of the bottle is cool, as though he had not just pressed it to his lips at all. Vaguely, she wonders when the last time he fed must have been.

"Where did you go today?" she asks him as she passes the bottle back to him.

Klaus pauses in the middle of raising the bottle back to his mouth. "Why should I tell you?"

"Because you like to tell me things," she says. She claps a hand over her mouth as soon as she says it. Curses the wine from earlier still obviously clouding her thoughts. The compulsion loosening truths from her unguarded lips. Stefan for putting the thought in her head in the first place.

Klaus laughs. There's something odd about it that she cannot quite put her finger on. Like he's not laughing at her, or what she said, at all—

Like he's laughing at himself.

Elena frowns. That can't be right.

"Forget I said that," she mumbles.

A dangerous light creeps into his eyes. His smile reveals too many gleaming sharp teeth. "Why should I? I am afforded so few moments of genuine surprise—and you supply them in abundance." He reaches into his coat and pulls out a terribly familiar object—a silver white oak ash dagger.

Elena almost reaches for it, but checks herself at the last moment. "Where did you get that?"

"I went back to the City today to retrieve it."

The room spins harder. Just the idea of Klaus venturing back into enemy territory like that has her heart slamming against her ribs and adrenaline flooding her system until she can hardly think. "You didn't."

Klaus examines her. "You're upset with me."

"I can't believe you risked that after yesterday."

He shrugs. "The risk was not so great on my own with no fragile mortals to protect."

Of course that's how he sees this.

To think of the effort she had gone through yesterday to warn and save him.

Elena swallows back her fear, tells herself it's wasted on him.

There's really only one question that matters, then.

"Why are you showing me this?"

"Because I like telling you things." He hesitates. "And because I've learned through hard experience that it's no use keeping you in the dark. Better to share my secrets with you than have you ferret them out at the worst possible moment."

There's nothing she can say to that.

He passes the bottle back to her, and she takes it.


She creeps upstairs when the last of the fire's embers smother beneath their ashes, when it is too dark to see Klaus properly anymore.

She doesn't like the idea of being alone with him in the dark.


She can feel his attention on her, silent and predatory, the entire climb up the stairs.


Imagines she can still feel it when she shuts the door and settles into bed.


She turns her face into the pillow Rebekah had slept on the night before. Takes a deep breath. Pushes Klaus away.


Rebekah wakes Elena when she slips into bed some time later, in the dark gray hour before dawn. She presses the length of her fevered, bare body against Elena's back, gathering her into her arms to spoon her and press hot, open-mouthed kisses against her neck. Her hand trails down Elena's side, splays briefly against Elena's hip before plunging into the slick heat between her legs.

Elena arches back against her, opening her thighs further to encourage Rebekah and twisting around to clutch at Rebekah's hair and kiss her on the mouth.

There's something tangy about Rebekah's kiss tonight, something boiling. Right now, barely awake and already barreling toward release, she can't say exactly what.

When she comes, Rebekah pulls her fingers from her pulsing sex and sticks them in her mouth, licking them clean. Dark as it is, the sight of her tasting her redoubles her need.

Elena shifts, groaning, her hands searching out Rebekah's hips, only for Rebekah to roll her onto her back and straddle her. Her hands lock around Elena's wrists and pin them over her head as she slowly, torturously lowers her hips to grind herself against Elena's own aching need.

The relief lasts only a second before Rebekah twists against her, the friction sharp and overpowering. Elena sees stars. Can barely think coherently enough to roll her hips and moan out her rapt adulation for this wild thing she has welcomed into her bed.


"Tell me you love me," Rebekah pleads against her breast. Her fangs prick against sensitive skin along the full bottom swell of it.

Elena threads her fingers through Rebekah's hair and tightens her legs around her waist. Her entire body feels numb, her mind stoned. "I love you," she says. How can you doubt me?

Rebekah bites her, then, and the question is driven straight from her mind.


The sun's not quite up when Elena rises, leaving Rebekah asleep and mussed in their warm bed. The floor shoots an instant chill through her feet.

In the bathroom, she flips on the light, barely glances at her reflection before stripping and turning the shower on to let the water heat. Her hand freezes on the knob as what she had seen so briefly in the mirror catches up to her.

She backpedals to the sink, to stare at her reflection in the tiny mirror. Turns her head from side to side and stands on her tiptoes so she can see the full effect of what she had not noticed in the dark of her bedroom.

Her body is stained in bloody handprints, the crimson imprints of kisses on her throat and breasts, belly and thighs.

She looks like a vampire's plaything.

She is a vampire's plaything.

Suddenly, the strange flavor of Rebekah's kiss comes back to her, this time with a name. Blood. Rebekah had been kissing her, and all that time, she had been tasting someone's death on her lips.

She had kissed her anyway.

The memory does not repel her.

Instead, she cannot help but focus with fascination upon the desperate way Rebekah had asked for her to love her.

She had held her wrists over her head, but it had been Elena who had held the true power.

Elena tucks her hair behind her ears and reexamines herself. Sees herself for what she is.

Not a vampire's plaything at all.

A vampire's consort.

(Or—no—a vampire's queen.)

Steam from the shower fills the small room, slicking the mirror until Elena's reflection is indistinguishable in the glass.

She steps into the shower and rinses the blood from her skin.

It does not take very long to get clean.


In the hallway, she can hear Klaus and Stefan, the tenor of their hushed voices perfectly clear, even with their door closed.

She has enough experience in bed with both of them to know exactly what they are doing behind that closed door.

She hurries to dress and scrambles downstairs and out the front door, a blush scoring her cheeks.


There aren't a lot of good climbing trees amongst the pine and evergreen forest, but she does eventually find an elm, slender but strong, and hoists herself up.

A thick fog blankets the forest, smothering everything in murky white. The sun is up, but too low as of yet to reach the forest floor. Everything not swallowed by the fog is bathed in shadow.

Elena feels transported, as she climbs, freed from the limitations of her life, her past, her relationships.

By the time she makes it to the top of the trees, she feels like she could be the only person in the entire world.

Not just any world—her own world.


Perched amidst the highest branches of the elm, she watches the sun slant over the tree tops, and ponders what a world of her own making would look like.

She holds her hand in front of her face, flexing and unflexing her fingers. Tries to see through the veil of flesh, of muscle and tendon and bone, down into the blood coursing through her veins. To the magic inside of her—her magic. Inaccessible. Potent beyond measure.

She knows so much more than she knew four years ago, the first time she ever heard the word doppelganger applied to her. The first time she realized that she might be human, but she wasn't ordinary. Years spent locked within the confines of the manor, cooped up with books and journals, some of them directly useful, thanks to Klaus's fixation on her bloodline, and some of them much more abstract, requiring her to form her own connections and work through long hours of reasoning out magical theory, have bequeathed her with certain convictions, certain ideas, of what she might be capable of.

In all the world, she's the only one capable of rewriting the Laws of Nature with laws of her own. Perhaps the fact that she is not a witch, that she cannot directly harness her own power, is the one way in which any sort of balance could be achieved. Without that one safeguard, there is very little of which she would not be capable.

(There are already so few lines she refuses to cross.)

Elena doesn't precisely know what she would do with her own power were she ever to figure out how to access it. The inclination exists as a murkiness within her, deep and shrouded as the fog-strewn woods.


An hour later she heads inside, hoping that by now Stefan and Klaus will have… finished their activities. How Rebekah could sleep through that, Elena doesn't know.

The horrid thought that maybe they couldn't sleep through her and Rebekah, that maybe that's why they were up, burns a furious blush up the sides of her face.

Living in close quarters again like this after so long apart is hell on her composure.

She sublimates all of her rampant embarrassment into making coffee, which she drinks while sitting atop the counter, nervously swinging her legs.

The thing is, she can't really say why she's so jittery. At this point, she's witnessed such lewd and debauched acts from all three of her companions, been reduced herself so often to being just a body, that being able to hear each other fucking through the walls shouldn't even ding her shame radar. And yet.

"You're up early," Stefan notes when he joins her in the kitchen some twenty minutes later.

"So were you."

He winks at her. "I never went to bed."

Elena watches him rummage through the cabinets, the refrigerator. Every line of him is so familiar, and yet, she is coming to realize, he is more opaque to her than he has ever been. Pulling her close with one hand, pushing her away with the other.

She knows this song, knows this dance. Eventually, he's going to push her so far away that she'll never be able to reach him.

The thought of losing Stefan completely like that is unbearable.

"I'm sorry about last night," she tells him.

"No you're not," he immediately replies, cracking eggs into a bowl. He doesn't sound the least bit resentful. Only certain.

He's right, of course. She wants to be sorry for prying where she no longer belongs, but she can't help herself. She will probably always pry where Stefan is concerned.

Deep down, she still believes in It's you and me.

Even if she no longer loves him in the same way. Even if he cannot remember that he'd ever loved her back. They're two of a kind, and she has to watch out for him, the way he once tried to watch out for her.

"Why are you making me breakfast again?" she asks him instead of pushing him further just now.

"You never have outgrown your habit of looking a gift horse in the mouth, have you?"

"It's kept me alive, hasn't it?"

Stefan laughs. "I don't think making you breakfast is a life or death situation."

No, but it implies that he cares. The very thing that had gotten him into a life or death situation before, although he doesn't know it.

(The very thing she wants—desperately—to still be true.)

If she says any of that, though, he'll only shove her away again.

"Maybe you're planning to poison my eggs," Elena suggests.

"I'd more likely poison your coffee. Easier to hide the flavor."

Elena lowers her mug from her lips and sticks her tongue out at him.

The sun streams in through the kitchen windows, dust motes dancing in the warm beams. The safe, homey smells of eggs and sausages and good, strong coffee fill the air, and Stefan smiles at her.

He probably doesn't understand himself well enough to understand the things he does. That's okay. She'll work harder to understand the person he's become. To love the person he's become, whoever he is, enough to make up for the love she'd stolen from him.


After the myriad excitements of the city, it's almost strange to settle into the quiet pass-times of the country again.

She spends the morning reading, a pleasure she hasn't indulged in nearly enough lately.

Klaus passes through the living room at some point. She's painfully aware of him when he sits down across from her and begins to draw. She can hear the slow drag of a charcoal pencil against the toothy page of his sketchbook, in sync to the tide of her breath.

He doesn't speak to her, and she takes care not to look up from her book. Not even once.

Relief and disappointment commingle within her when he gets up to leave without having said a single word to her, or acknowledged her at all. Annoyed with herself, she turns the page in her novel sharply enough to rip the paper.

The morning passes, her novel absorbs her, and the incident slips her thoughts.


Around noon, Rebekah finally emerges from upstairs, looking fresh and fair, and not at all like she had come home covered in blood.

Elena wonders if there is a spare set of sheets anywhere for their bed. She shudders to consider how wrecked the ones from last night must be.

"I fancy a picnic." Rebekah says as she flounces over to throw herself onto the sofa. "What do you think?"

They grab the quilt off of the bed in the third bedroom—the one apparently no one is using—and spread it out over the lawn, in the one sunny spot where neither the creeping shadows of the forest nor the house reach.

They pass a lazy afternoon stretched out on the lawn, the rustling of the wind through the leaves and the slow turning of the pages of the books they read side by side the only sound. They both lay on their bellies, Elena pressed close against Rebekah, grateful for the heat she exudes like a burning star. The sandwiches and apples and wine they'd brought out with them go untouched.

She'd found a copy, in the original Spanish, of 100 Years of Solitude in the bedside table drawer of that third bedroom. The book had exhaled a thick cloud of dust when she'd cracked it open, so much so that Rebekah had protested her taking it to read, but Elena had taken it out with them anyway. Now, she reads carefully, slowly puzzling through more complex and whimsical prose than she is used to. Every now and then she points out a section to Rebekah for help with the meaning. Eventually Rebekah gives up on reading her own book and simply pulls the novel from Elena's hands and reads aloud to her.

Elena lays back and watches her. The sight of her mouth, effortlessly forming the syllables, the sound of her voice, pure and high like the chime of struck crystal as she gambols through the story, the way she tilts her head and kicks her feet up behind her—all of it fills her with an intense adoration that throbs throughout her entire body.

"You're staring at me," Rebekah says without looking up from the page.

"I've always loved it when you read to me."

Rebekah lowers the book. "I know. Didn't you wonder why I read to you so often last summer? I was trying to seduce you."

Elena laughs. "You were wasting your time. I think I've loved you since you baked me that birthday cake."

For answer, Rebekah rolls on top of her, pinning her beneath her. She kisses her along the side of her throat. "How foolish of me. I should have been less subtle." Her hands roam under Elena's sweater, thumbs grazing over the thin lace of her bra to brush against her nipples. "To think, I need not have played so coy. I could have simply tipped you onto your back at any time, and you would have opened your mouth and your arms and your thighs for me."

It's a rush to imagine. The syrupy summer repainted with scenes of Rebekah, nude and shimmering on the lawn. The long, lazy hours they could have spent in bed, on the chaise longue, stretched out beneath the leaves of the Japanese Maple.

She knows why this spark between them never quite ignited last summer—can remember their aborted kiss in Rebekah's bedroom. It had been too soon. Her heart had not been clear enough.

The idea of it though is intoxicating.

Before Elena knows it, Rebekah has her stripped half naked, the chill autumn wind pebbling her flesh as Rebekah works at the button and zipper on Elena's jeans.

"Wait," Elena says, clinging to Rebekah, as much for warmth as to preserve her modesty. "Anyone could see."

Rebekah pauses, canting her head to the side. "You didn't mind at the park."

"Those were strangers who might have seen us, not Klaus and Stefan."

"It's nothing they haven't heard or imagined by now."

"Rebekah…"

Rebekah glances up toward the second floor windows. "I promise you they're not bothered by it."

"Are they watching?" Elena turns, trying to see if she can see either of them in the window without flashing them.

"Relax, dearest. No one cares."

Elena lies back down, worrying her lip.

"When you do that, I can't help but want to bite your mouth," Rebekah says, her eyes fixed on her lips. Already totally distracted from the subject. Like it's of so little consequence to her that it's not worth fixating on in the slightest.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"You're right. No one cares what we do." Elena opens her arms to pull Rebekah into her embrace. "So do what you will with me. I'm yours."


She doesn't see either Klaus or Stefan the rest of the day. She assumes they are either locked behind their bedroom door or had gone out when she had been distracted by Rebekah. She's a little grateful. She'd prefer to avoid them for a little while after letting Rebekah talk her into putting on that show this afternoon.

It's late that night, long after she had gone to bed, that she overhears Klaus and Rebekah talking downstairs. It's Rebekah's voice that wakes her. The tone of Klaus's vehement, implacable response which intrigues her into full alertness.

They must not realize how their voices carry. She can hear them, quite clearly, from her bedroom.

At first, she doesn't understand what they're even talking about.

"You ask too much."

"It's inevitable, Nick. Why not get it over with?"

"And have her haunt my steps forever? No thank you."

Elena's heart races as she realizes what they're discussing. Were it not for her bracelet, which she hasn't taken off since Klaus gave it back to her, they would be able to hear her, would know she was eavesdropping.

Somehow, she had not anticipated that this would come up. She had always assumed Klaus's will that she live a long, human life to be inviolate. Had always assumed that Rebekah would never cross that line with her, or even argue for her.

She's not certain that the idea that Rebekah wants to turn her doesn't frighten her. Maybe even more than the idea of Damon turning her had frightened her, because now, she is already halfway down the road to being a vampire, and she knows it. If Klaus gives his consent, she's not certain that there will be any turning back, or that she will even ultimately have a choice in the matter.

She's surprised that Klaus's instant rejection of the idea of turning her could sting her as much as it does. She tells herself it's just her pride.

"Maybe she'll haunt mine instead," Rebekah retorts, hauteur strong in her voice.

"You're in love with her," Klaus says. "Do you truly fancy she loves you back?"

"I know she does."

"Then she's lied to you, and lied well."

"Are you really this selfish? I have a real shot at happiness, here, Nick. A real shot. She loves me, I know that she does. How can your hybrid army outweigh the happiness of your only sister?"

His response is quieter than his previous words. Elena has to strain to hear him.

"Elena doesn't want to be a vampire."

"How can you know that?"

"Because I offered to turn her, once. She was clear. It's not the path she desires."

The fact that he would bring this up at all takes her aback.

"When was this?"

"Years ago now. Our last night in New Orleans."

"Just before she betrayed you."

Whatever the answer, Elena cannot hear it.

Tears sting her eyes as she remembers that night. How Klaus had offered to put aside everything he wanted in order to keep her safe. In order to keep her by his side.

How he had relented when she had asked him not to.

She wonders what it means, that he would bring up the wishes she had expressed back then now. If, maybe, here lies the true heart of his objection. Somehow, he still respects her enough to respect her choice to remain human. To block Rebekah from making a romantic, selfish, impulsive decision to turn her without really waiting for Elena's consent.

Deep down, Elena knows it's something Rebekah is capable of.

"Things are changed. She's changed," Rebekah insists downstairs. "She cannot possibly prefer to age, to wither, to die. She cannot possibly prefer to leave me."

"Does she love you so much as that?"

"I know that she does."

There is a prolonged silence that twists Elena's stomach into knots as she tries to interpret it. A palpable cold seems to emanate from the bones of the house itself when Klaus answers.

"My word is final. I forbid it."


For a long time afterward, Elena lies alone in the dark, the conversation she had overheard tumbling through her thoughts.


Rebekah slides into bed next to her what feels like hours later. Immediately, she pulls Elena close and buries her face in her hair.

The only reference she makes to the conversation she had had with Klaus is to murmur, her voice soft, girlish, and vulnerable, "You want to stay with me forever, don't you, darling?"

Forever doesn't mean the same thing to Elena as it does to Rebekah.

She can't possibly answer a question like that right now. Can't possibly decide, in the still, quiet dark, whether she is ready to make that leap.

She pretends to be asleep and does not answer.

After a moment, Rebekah sighs, and settles down beside her.


The house is utterly still and quiet in the morning.

When Elena goes downstairs, she notices that the sedan is gone from the drive.

"Where are the guys?" Elena asks Rebekah when she traipses down the stairs some hours later.

"They've gone on ahead. We have a larger property up north that should suit us much better than this little hovel. You'll like it there. It's positively picturesque."


They don't really have anything to pack, so they are able to get on the road within the hour. Elena requests to drive, happy to take Rebekah's directions, which are not particularly good and result in more than a few u-turns, if it means she can experience the freedom of the road under her again.

She had loved driving, once. The exhilaration of being behind a wheel again after so many years is nearly enough to eclipse the unease Elena feels over the conversation she had overheard the night before.

With just the two of them in the car, Elena keeps expecting Rebekah to bring up the topic of turning her, but she never does.

The road stretches on ahead of them.

Elena drives.


A/N: Thank you for reading. I'm hoping to have the next chapter out later this week :)

I know some of you experienced a glitch with the last chapter—it seems like it's fixed now. It was unfortunately a problem with FFN itself, and out of my hands completely. If you are ever having trouble with reading the new chapter, I also cross-post on AO3.