(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
There's no point in returning to the lake house—whatever peace Elena had bought herself, she's sure that her latest run in with Bonnie has put an end to it—so Klaus takes her back to his mansion instead. They bring Bonnie's books she had dropped and Shane's journal with them as well.
"You don't look very well," Klaus observes as he helps her out of her coat.
"I feel miserable."
"Physically or emotionally?"
"Is there a difference?"
"Sometimes." He lays a hand over her heart. "I can hear your blood moving through your body," he murmurs. "Can feel it's potency. Your heart is as strong as ever."
She moves his hand, to rest against her abdomen. "Can you feel the baby?"
"…Yes." He pauses, his expression darkening. "Are you still in pain from what your witch did to you?"
"Her name is Bonnie, and no." Really, she barely feels any lingering side effects from the spell anymore at all. "I'm just—it can't be good for the baby to keep having these brushes with death."
He relaxes. A devilish glint flashes in his eyes. "I could swaddle you up in silk and feather down quilts until the child is born, if you'd like."
"You mean keep me in bed with you. Pass."
"But you're tempted."
Elena leans into him. She doesn't raise her arms to embrace him, just presses herself against him, silently asking him to support her. To take the weight from her and hold her, until she can find the strength to hold herself up again all by herself.
Klaus does. Somehow, he always understands what she needs.
"How am I ever going to make things right with Bonnie?" she sighs into the fabric of his shirt.
His hands tighten around her. "She won't be able to harden her heart against you forever. It will crack, and you will slip in."
"You make it sound so inevitable."
"Everyone who knows you loves you."
"Everyone who loves me leaves me."
Klaus draws her away from the foyer. Leads her to a parlor and coaxes her to sit down. He kneels at her feet. "You keep saying that."
"Because it's true."
"I will never leave you."
"How can I trust that? You might mean it now, but you don't know it."
He studies her seriously. "I've lived a very long time. My heart is not so easily swayed, and yet, you have changed me. It's your blood that runs in my veins. Your soul that shadows my own. How could I leave you, when you are as much a part of me as my own hand?"
"You could cut off your hand if it displeases you."
"I would never." He twines their fingers together. "Do you mark how perfectly we fit together?"
Elena stares at their joined hands. "You dagger your siblings when they displease you." What makes me any different?
"And you plot my murder when I displease you."
His words remind her. "Shane was conspiring to murder you." The conversation she had overheard in the closet comes rushing back in on her. How could she forget?
"A pity he was so slow to act then," Klaus says without any particular concern. His finger traces a blue vein on the underside of her wrist.
"No—wait—I recorded the conversation." Elena breaks away from Klaus's grasp and fetches her phone from her coat. She plays the recorded conversation for him.
The sound quality is pretty terrible, but the bulk of it is audible.
At first, Klaus obviously only listens to humor her, but his demeanor changes as the conversation progresses.
He replays it twice more after it ends.
"How many white oak stakes did you have last fall, exactly?" he asks her after a couple of tense minutes.
"I don't know—Damon passed a bunch out to us, but who's to say he didn't keep some in a private stash?"
He looks at her narrowly.
Oh. He thinks she's to say.
Elena scoffs. "That's hilarious if you think Damon would have confided anything in me by that point. Remember, the whole reason we hooked up in the first place was because I was on the outs with the rest of them?"
"Fair enough." Klaus throws himself onto the sofa next to her. "What else can you tell me about this man on the recording?"
"Not much. I never got a look at him. His name was Connor—and of course, he has some sort of invisible tattoo that somehow shifts when he kills vampires. I think."
"It's a Hunter's mark."
"A what?"
Klaus explains it to her then—the story of his first run in with the Five, the origin of the white oak ash daggers, how with each vampire slain, the Hunter's mark would grow. How exactly he had discovered the consequences for killing a Hunter. Just thinking of Klaus going through that kind of torment twists her up inside.
"But what's the point of growing the mark?" Elena asks, pushing aside Klaus's revelation of how he had passed the fifty years after he had destroyed the original Five.
"There's an old fairytale that's existed nearly as long as I have," Klaus says, his tone utterly dismissive. "Legend says that a completed mark will lead the Hunter to a Holy Grail of sorts—to a potion containing the cure for vampirism."
"It doesn't exist though."
"Oh, it most certainly does. It's just not accessible to anyone living."
Elena frowns at him, but files that away. "How does any of this have anything to do with teaching Bonnie Expression though? Or with the hybrid sacrifice?"
"Pardon? The what?"
"I answered Shane's phone before he returned with Connor. It was Hayley Marshall—that werewolf girl who warned you about the coup?"
"Go on."
"Well, before she hung up on me, she launched into this tirade about how she'd delivered the hybrid sacrifice to Shane—twelve hybrids. She was really specific about that. It's got to tie in somewhere, but how?"
Klaus taps his fingers against his knees, obviously lost in thought. She can tell from the expression on his face how much the idea of being used by anyone for anything riles him. He has never enjoyed playing anyone's puppet. If he hadn't killed Shane already, then he certainly would for this insult.
"Shane's the one who taught your friend Expression, is he not?" he says at last.
"Yeah. That's why Caroline and I were suspicious of him."
"If Bonnie were to tap into those deaths—into a mass sacrifice of such powerful, unnatural creatures like that—then that would explain why she has grown so much exponentially stronger than she was even just a few days ago. Shane might have taught her that while we were dallying at the lake house."
Elena recoils. "Expression is death magic?"
"The sort that uses up the spirits of the dead until there's nothing left, yes."
She thinks about everything she'd learned today.
"We're so stupid," Elena marvels.
"How particularly?"
"Shane's been pulling our strings, and none of us have been able to see it because none of us are talking to each other—not really. We're all keeping secrets from each other and that's what's made us such easy targets." She pulls out her phone. "No more secrets."
"Who are you dialing?"
"Caroline. We need to compare notes—"
Klaus plucks the phone out of her hands and hangs up. "It can wait until morning."
"No, I'm onto something— I need to go grab those books—"
"I know how frustrating it is to discover yourself a dupe, but Shane is dead now."
"Yeah, but who was pulling his strings? That's who we need to worry about."
"Why do you think anyone was?"
"Did Shane strike you as particularly cunning or subtle? Someone capable of manipulating everyone so easily?"
"No, he struck me as little more than a slimy weasel." Klaus pauses. "Point taken."
"There's a trap here, and someone's waiting for it to spring shut on us. Who knows us well enough to lay it?"
"Perhaps whoever has the stake," he reasons.
"Someone who wants the cure?"
Klaus shrugs. "It's probably one of my siblings. Kol is often cross with me. Come to bed."
"Why do you care so little? I just told you you were set up and someone is out to get you."
"Someone is always out to get me. My own father attempted it for centuries. I've learned not to lose any sleep over it." He smiles then, sudden as a summer storm, and sweeps her up bridal style into his arms. "I can think of much more pleasant reasons to lose sleep," he breathes against her throat.
Despite her anxieties, Elena loops her arms around his neck. Lets him carry her to what she is already starting to think of as their bed.
"But we'll talk about this in the morning," she presses one last time as Klaus peels her shirt over her head.
"The topic will have my undivided attention."
It doesn't, of course. Yet she cannot find it within her to fault him for it.
A/N: Thank you everyone for reading and for your awesome comments—y'all rock my socks!
