(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
The air itself shrieks and screams, loud enough to stagger the three of them back like a physical blow—Damon and Stefan nearly buckle to their knees from the volume of that howl. Almost drag her down with them. She can't imagine what this must sound like to a vampire—can hardly account for the piercing needle of it in her brain with only her imperfect human hearing. Only sheer force of will keeps them all on their feet, shoving their way forward—
And then all at once Elena realizes she can see—that the cave they're in is filled to the brim with dazzling, blinding diamond light that shimmers in waves upon waves of white and blue and pink and lavender to eye-watering effect. The space is so assaultingly bright that her eyes ache from trying to keep them open, that her stomach swoops as she tries to make sense of her surroundings. For a moment, she has no sense of up or down. No sense of her body.
In the cacophony of that sensorial maelstrom, she almost fails to notice the man stalking straight up to them. Not a witch—she can tell in the way he moves that he's something else—a predator assured of his physical prowess.
If she had any questions as to who this stranger is, they are answered a moment later when he brandishes that deadly stake—the white oak one forged from Alaric's ring the night Esther had murdered him.
She screams as Connor lunges straight for Stefan's heart—
—Is ripped away from Stefan and Damon by a witch she's never seen before, who says something to her she cannot hear, cannot even attempt to lip read in the nauseating, trembling light. She thrashes out of her hold, managing to break free.
Before her, Stefan dodges Connor's strike, turning the stake away from his heart at the last moment. Incredibly, impossibly, Connor staves him off, moving faster than a human ever should—the way Klaus had warned her he would.
Another witch drags her further back, back, back—only for Elena to realize that the room has filled with witches while she'd been distracted and disoriented. She fights and claws and they drop her and hiss, but there is always another hand to pluck her up again. There are just so many of them—all of them closing in on her, their ranks oppressive, suffocating. They are an endless sea, and she is drowning.
Damon yanks her from the crowd and shoves her ahead. "Go!" he yells, his voice lost in the hellish wail still screaming all around them. He yanks out the heart of a witch who reaches for her, and then the heart of another.
Another witch behind Damon hurls a spell at him, but it rebounds oddly in the fractured light, and sends another witch nearby up in emerald flames. The dying witch's screams disappear into the void of the howling.
Stefan snaps the first witch's neck as she gapes at what she'd done, only for a group of them to descend upon him. Half of their spells seem to go haywire, but some of them come desperately close to landing true. Only Stefan's quick wits save him—though, he is playing a game he is bound to lose. Eventually, one of those witches will strike him down.
And in all of the chaos, Elena realizes that Connor has disappeared, her two vampires left unslain. A feat supposedly against every instinct ingrained in his very being.
Why why why would he do that?
Unless—
Unless, recognizing that they were staging a rescue attempt, Esther and Connor had set this space up not just as a trap, but as a distraction—
Damon screams something at her a second time before he turns back to help his brother.
The witches all turn their attention on the vampires in their midst.
And Elena realizes that Damon and Stefan are buying her time.
She won't waste a second of it.
Elena bolts for the back of the cave, to the tunnel entrance from which the witches had swarmed.
Another one slips into the room just as she hurtles past, but she doesn't give her the time to react before shoving her out of the way as hard as she can, not even checking her momentum in the slightest as she scrambles past her and races down the corridor.
Where to go where to go—
She sprints headlong down the corridor, her feet sliding over the slick ground, only her determination and desperation keeping her upright, careening forward. Each step forward carries her further and further into a thickening darkness through which she can barely see. Fire burns in her side. Her lungs. Her eyes ache and her ears ring, so badly that she nearly misses the first fork in the passageway, only discernible because one of those hallways appears just a smidge less dark than the other—
She barrels down that lighter corridor without letting herself question what will happen to her if she is wrong.
What will happen to Klaus. To Stefan and Damon and Caroline and Tyler.
The passageway ends in another spiderwebbing of possible turns—again she chooses the one that seems a bit brighter than the rest.
She repeats this process again— again—
Until, finally, she hears something, over the ringing in her ears—a low, vicious snarl that she recognizes all too well.
It's an inhuman sound. An animal sound.
Her monster's sound.
When she rounds the corner, she spies Connor, flipping the stake in his hand, as he slowly circles Klaus. She makes sure to keep to the shadows, out of Connor's line of sight.
After a second, she realizes that he's talking— Whatever he says, she cannot make it out over the ringing in her ears—but it elicits another one of those warning snarls from Klaus.
Klaus.
Her heart leaps at the sight of him, still alive.
It's only a moment later, when her eyes adjust to the watery, shifting light, that she realizes that he is bound at the wrists by some sort of strange, milky blue stone, fashioned into a pair of manacles and chains. A circle of shimmering scarlet powder surrounds the point of his imprisonment. She has no doubt the manacles must be supernatural, so as to hold him. That the circle must as well.
He looks like absolute hell. Blood pours from his eyes, his nose, his ears. His skin has taken on a ghastly, bluish hue, and he slumps in his shackles, his knees dragging in a puddle of his own blood. Even with his eyes turned gold and feral, and his mouth full of wicked fangs, he looks more like a trapped wolf than the savage, primordial god her soul knows him to be.
The fact that he does not seem to see, smell, or hear her disturbs her most of all.
Seeing Klaus brought so low tears at her heart. She can't accept this.
That fierce, dark wave of protective fury swells within her breast.
The thing is: she doesn't have to accept this.
Elena swallows, her hands fisting around the length of cold metal tucked into her coat. She'll have to move soon—will have to risk everything— She's only going to have one shot, so she'll have to make it worth it.
As she gathers her courage, her ears begin to adjust as well.
"Esther wanted me to wait until she arrived, but I think this dance is just about over," Connor confides in Klaus, still circling him. He pauses with his back turned to Elena. Holds his hand up to the edge of that scarlet circle, only to pull back with a grunt as though shocked.
With Connor distracted, Elena edges into the room. Carefully. Carefully.
If she screws this up, it will be over.
Only a couple of yards in front of her, still looking away from her, Connor sets his shoulders and tries again, this time passing through the circle. "Not much of a deterrent for a supernatural human," he mutters, the barrier snapping at his skin like static electricity.
She takes another step. Does not even dare to breathe. Prepares herself to strike, just the way Alaric had taught her.
Finally, Klaus notices her. Their eyes lock. He shakes his head, as though he could deny her presence here.
Connor raises his stake—
And Elena throws herself onto him, the hunting blade in her hand skewering up and into his kidney. Blood spills over her hands in a wave when she drags the blade free. He drops like a stone, just like Damon had insisted he would.
It's a cowardly, dishonorable way to kill. And yet, she feels not a ripple of guilt as she watches him drop. She knows that she should. Knows that compassion and empathy and even decency and mercy were once traits she possessed. Her soul is utterly quiet as she takes in her fallen enemy.
She's gotten so terribly, terribly good at stabbing people in the back.
On the ground, Connor reaches for her, but she doesn't have time for that. She rips the stake from his slackening grip and pockets both it and the knife before approaching that barrier. Her feet track through the spreading pool of Connor's blood.
Klaus stares up at her like she's the only star in the night sky.
Like the very sight of her, here to save him, covered in their enemy's blood, just wrecks him.
Good. He could do a little wrecking. So long as it's by her own hand, and no one else's.
(He's already wrecked her, after all.)
"You came," he breathes, like he cannot believe the evidence of his eyes.
"Of course I came for you," she tells him. "I will always come for you. You're on my list."
Without waiting for a response from him, she lays her hand flat against the barrier. Just as she had suspected from watching Connor, it emits more of a startling shock than anything else. She pushes through it without letting herself double-guess herself, ignoring the way her body flares with heat as she passes through that invisible membrane.
"Would my death not have made your life much simpler?" he asks her when she is mere inches from him.
"Of course it would have," she tells him honestly. The temptation to reach out, to touch the side of his face, to reassure herself that he is here, he is real, is nearly overwhelming. But if she gives in now—if she touches him—then she'll never get them out of here. Time is everything. So, instead, she fights the urge down and examines the manacles binding him. "How do I free you?"
"You can't," he tells her, his eyes drinking her in all the while. "Not without a witch."
"I brought one," she mutters as she takes a closer look at his wrists. Curses when she discovers the skin around those manacles is completely blackened, the bone gleaming white as the moon in some places where the skin has completely charred away.
"How are you here?" he asks her. There is some desperate emotion shining in his eyes. Something she's never quite seen in him before.
"Haven't I ever told you not to underestimate me?"
If not, let this be a lesson—
A smile curls at the corner of Klaus's mouth. He watches her with fixed devotion, in that drowning, desperate way that has so frightened and excited her. Yet whatever Klaus might have said, he never gets the chance.
"You'll find that even should you free my son, that attempting to drag him across that circle will prove impossible."
Elena whirls to confront Esther, cool and collected as she observes them from the threshold of the entrance.
A/N: Thank you for reading! Getting so close to this finale!