(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
She tries reading through Shane's journal the next morning in bed, but it's terribly hard to focus while propped against Klaus's chest, his arms banded around her and his chin hooked over her shoulder so he can murmur his commentary in her ear as he reads along over her shoulder with only vague interest. Doubly hard when he's still naked, his skin glowing with delicious heat, his hair mussed from her own hands and his voice bedroom deep.
The sound of his voice distracts her. The low rumble of it hums against her skin, reverberates in her bones. Calls to the deepest, hidden parts of her that had remained slumbering at the bottom of her soul until he first spoke her name and woke her up.
She cannot help but to melt back into him, to succumb to the patient, wandering caresses of his hands over her arms, her ribs, her belly and her hips. She's wearing nothing but one of his tee-shirts. The slow drag of the shirt as he pushes it up past her hips so he can palm at her breasts feels unbearable. Inch by inch, he hitches it higher. The anticipation of waiting for his touch, all the while feeling his breath stir her hair, feeling the restrained strength of him as he holds her close and safe against him, ignites her. Impels her. She feels the rushing tongue of cool air against her skin like an actual stroke against her body.
The touch of his mouth against her pulse shocks her to her core, even though it also feels so inevitable that waiting for him to fasten his teeth against her throat had become a sensation unto itself, at once smothering and keen. Her toes curl as dazzling lust careens through her, sharp and hungry and insistent.
Elena drops the journal and arches against him, reveling in the feeling of his desire, hard and eager against the swell of her ass. Reveling in the power she has over him. The power he gives her.
Klaus's fangs prick against her throat just as one of his hands slips between her thighs to torturously skim over her sex.
His teasing is more than she can bear. She tangles her hands in his hair and tugs him closer, simultaneously rolling her hips, pressing herself needfully against his hand. Klaus growls against her throat and yanks her tightly to him, an arm slipping across her chest to hold her just as he did the night of the sacrifice as that hand dabbling at her clit slides lower and plunges inside of her, the fingers scissoring. And it's good—it's amazing—this primal feeling rising up inside of her, this current sizzling between them as Klaus penetrates her with fangs and fingers. Maybe she should worry about Klaus drinking from her while she's pregnant, but she doesn't, because she trusts him to take care of her. Them. She can feel the leap of her blood into his mouth, matched by the rippling of her body as she clamps down hard on her lover's fingers. It's too much—too good, too right between them. She comes panting and clawing at his neck.
He kisses her afterwards, her blood still tangy on his lips. Rolls her onto her back and slides inside of her like coming home.
Maybe this is home, she thinks, staring up into Klaus's face as he works himself inside of her. Maybe home isn't a place, but a person.
It's a dangerous thought to pin on Klaus. And yet—
"Where are you, right now?" He breathes the question into her ear. Kisses the wound on her neck.
Elena wraps her arms around him. Tightens her legs, just a little bit, but not too much. It's so good just to lay here and let him love her. Let him have her, since he keeps insisting that he will.
"I'm with you," she replies.
He strokes back the baby fine hairs at her temple. "In body, perhaps."
"No." She takes his hand. Lays it over her heart. "Here."
Elena wipes the fog from the bathroom mirror and studies herself in the reflection. Fresh from the shower, her hair hangs in damp waves down her back and curls around her breasts. Speckles of water dapple her skin. There's a definite thickening to her belly that had not been detectable a week ago.
She examines her throat. The puncture marks are delicate and neat, just two little pinpricks, really. Unlikely to scar, unlike the horrific imprint Stefan had left on her in August.
She wonders how many lovers Klaus had practiced that move on, to be able to bite her so cleanly, with so little pain. How many others he had bitten in just that very manner.
She pushes the thought away. Here and now, it doesn't matter.
In the mirror, she watches Klaus step out of the shower and approach her, pressing his damp body against the line of her back. His hands slide down her shoulders, over her arms, leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake.
Helplessly, Elena leans back against him.
Stares at their reflection in the mirror. At the way that Klaus looks at her, like he wants to worship her, devour her, adore her.
That fear from yesterday, that they are moving way too fast, and she's not sure how to slow them down, shimmers at the back of her thoughts.
Klaus displaces it with his mouth against her nape. A moment later he finds that sensitive place behind her ear. Scents her deeply there.
Her legs tremble. She feels faint, pliant. Like she needs him again, right away.
"Does it bother you that I'm on vervain?" Elena asks, trying to distract herself. "When you drink from me? Does it affect you at all?"
She can feel Klaus smile against the back of her neck. "I hardly notice it next to your flavor." He plays with the damp ends of her hair. "There is a bite to your blood that is new from when I tasted you last spring," he allows after a moment.
Tasted. Strange how the understatement ruffles her.
"You mean when you drained me."
He flips her around and sets her atop the cold marble bathroom counter so fast she can't process the movement. She simply blinks, and she's no longer watching them in the mirror but staring up into his face instead.
Klaus pulls her mouth to his, his tongue dipping into her mouth to slide languorously against her own. "When I killed you," he confirms when they break apart.
The stark truth of those words batters against her self-control. Thrills her darkly. There it is, the very crux of their relationship. Their shared date with destiny, when Klaus had murdered her, and nothing had ever been the same since. The knowledge of it infuses her with a terrible need for him, to strive toward the kind of completion she had found in meeting her fate last spring.
(She had dreamt of nothing else that whole endless summer afterwards.)
Desperately, Elena spreads her thighs for him and urges him inside of her. She leans back, the cold of the marble pressing into her ass, the slick cool of the mirror against her shoulders. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see herself and Klaus doubled in the mirror.
"Would you do it again?" she asks him when he is buried inside of her to the hilt. She wraps her legs around his waist tight and pulls him to her. "If you could go back, knowing me like you do now, would you still put me through that?"
Klaus pulses inside of her. She can feel the way the question intrigues and ignites him. The way that the fantasy enthralls him. He's harder and hotter for her in that moment than she can recall him ever being.
"Yes," he swears to her. He braces a hand against the mirror behind her and uses the other to shift her hips to a new angle and hitch her closer. "In any life, under any circumstance, I would mark you out and I would bind you to me."
His answer both fascinates and repels her. She wants to escape him and she wants to crawl inside his skin. She hopes he never lets her go, even as the instinct to run makes her legs quake.
"I can hear your heart fly. Does that frighten you?" he asks. He leans forward, and nips at her earlobe. "Or does that excite you?"
Her stomach flips. "Both."
She hears a sharp crack just behind her, and realizes that Klaus must have broken the mirror with his fist. When she glances over her shoulder, she can no longer make out their faces in the glass.
He guides her face back to look at him instead. Kisses her until she forgets.
"Your life would be so much easier if you simply moved in here with me," Klaus sighs as she hunts through the bedroom for her missing boot.
"Normal people offer a drawer before asking their girlfriends to move in with them." The label slips out of her mouth before she has time to think about it.
"I'm not a person," he points out. "And you're not merely my girlfriend."
"We've never talked about labels before," Elena hedges. She finds the missing boot kicked halfway under the bed.
"I thought declaring my literally undying love and devotion to you and offering to raise your child with you would be sufficient. Perhaps I was mistaken."
Elena crawls out from under the bed and tugs on the boot. "I'm only eighteen," Elena says without looking at him. "There's just—there's a lot happening really fast for me, between the baby and everything going on with my friends and—well. And us."
"And yet I'm well over a thousand, and I can avow that what we have between us is something rare. Something extraordinary. Whether you're eighteen or thirty doesn't change that."
"Do you plan on letting me reach thirty?"
Klaus pauses. "Obviously."
"As a human?"
He doesn't answer her right away, which is answer enough of what fantasies have been unspooling in his head these past few weeks while she's been indulging herself with frankly spectacular sex and romantic daydreams.
"I have to go," she murmurs, gathering up Bonnie's book and Shane's journal into her arms. "I want to compare notes from yesterday with Caroline."
Klaus catches her arm. "Elena. We don't have to have this conversation now, but we will need to have it eventually."
"I know." She leans into his touch, just slightly. "Just not right now, okay?"
Klaus pulls her close. "You're the one for me," he tells her. "There can be no one else."
His words make her eyes sting. She glances down at the books in her arms. Thinks about the threats against him which she had discovered only yesterday. She doesn't know what she'll do if she loess him.
Doesn't like thinking about how she's losing herself in him.
She presses a kiss to the pulse point in his throat. "I'll see you later."
She begins typing out a text to Caroline on the way home, asking her to come to her house that afternoon to discuss their findings from the previous day, before changing her mind and sending the invitation to the entire gang instead—Bonnie included.
Until they all start to work together and keep each other in the loop, all they'll ever be is easy targets.
Elena lets herself into the house for the first time in nearly a week. The Christmas tree which she had so relished looks sad and deflated after all that time with no water. A layer of colored glass shards from when Bonnie had blown out all the lights coats the floor, and the scent of burnt plastic and tired evergreen still mingle faintly in the air.
She's just placed the books down on the coffee table by the tree and taken her first step toward the kitchen to grab the broom and dust pan when a flash of movement catches her attention.
She glances up, straight into Damon's blue eyes as he emerges from the back of the house. Stefan shadows him a moment later, as though the two of them are ghosts drifting in from her past.
A/N: Brain said write Salvatore reunion scene, soul cried out to write smut. So, here we are.
Thanks for reading, now on to that great big Salvatore reunion in the next chapter!
Please let me know your thoughts!
