(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
"This is surreal."
They've been at the restaurant for perhaps fifteen minutes. It's a beautiful, charming gem hidden away in the mountains, just a handful of linen-clothed tables spaced acres apart, each of them with breathtaking views of the falls through dramatic floor to ceiling windows. A roaring fireplace dominates the entire wall opposite them, bathing the room in a warm glow as the waiters bob between tables, dancing attendance on the guests in their glittering refinery.
"Is this not what you requested?" Klaus asks her.
Elena stares blankly at the handwritten menu. "I thought you'd take me somewhere in town."
She can feel Klaus's frown even without glancing up at him. "Would you prefer something else?"
"No—I'm just—soaking this in. You. Me. Out for a date. No gore or pyrotechnics in sight."
The frown smooths into a barely suppressed smirk. "I promise to still keep things interesting for you."
"Not too interesting."
"I can play at being a man as long as you insist that that's what you want." The unsaid conclusion hangs between them: But I'll never be a man.
She doesn't know how it is that Klaus, who has intimately explored her body in dozens of ways, can still look at her and make her flush as though he is piercing her for the first time.
The blade cuts both ways, though. As he knows her, so, too, does she know him.
"You are a man, though. You're a monster, but you're also a man."
He tilts his head to study her. "Which did you fall in love with?" He asks as though her answer isn't vitally important to him. As though he doesn't hang on her words.
"I don't know," she tells him with complete honesty. "I've stopped losing sleep over it."
The waiter brings them a bottle of wine, which Klaus takes from him in order to pour her glass himself.
"I can't drink," Elena reminds him as she watches the rich purple wine tumble into the glass.
"I recall several notable evenings that directly contradict that."
"No, because of the baby."
Klaus blinks at her. "Since when can women in the family way not drink?"
"Since always?"
"No, women have always drunk wine throughout—"
"Please don't quote medical wisdom from prior centuries. You don't think humors are still a thing, right?"
"Of course not," Klaus refutes a bit too sharply. Almost as though maybe he had thought humors were still common medical knowledge. Klaus takes a breath. Regathers himself. "I am in point of fact referring to just this most recent century—"
"Well, women don't smoke during pregnancy either anymore."
Klaus completely deflates. Takes her wine glass and swirls the liquid pensively. "Perhaps there is literature on the topic," he allows after a moment. "I don't usually have to pay too much mind to the subtleties of medical innovations."
Elena supposes that medicine, in particular, would be largely irrelevant to someone whose primary involvement with healing usually involves dark blood magic.
And also. Klaus uses a stylus to text. It would probably be asking too from him to adjust his thinking more than every few decades.
"You're ridiculous, you know," she tells him fondly.
"A fact of which you've made me painfully aware."
The thing about Klaus is that, as ridiculous as he is, he has this way of luring her in with his jokes and his stories and his thorny commentary, always pitched low as though he is telling her a secret.
Elena loves secrets. Loves listening to him talk, loves the way he strokes his thumb along the back of her hand, just that tiny point of contact lighting her up. Loves the way his eyes track the bob of her throat as she takes her first bite of dinner, the way he insists on ordering four separate desserts because she can't make up her mind.
And why not? She deserves this.
Deserves to be happy, in whatever way is still open to her.
"And what do young women study in university these days?" Klaus asks her as she vacillates between a bite of mille-feuille and peach melba.
"Whatever they like. What did women study when you went?"
"Which time?"
Elena scrunches her nose at him. "The times after the Dark Ages."
"I was actually born after the Dark Ages, thanks ever so."
"So what did women study?"
"Mostly, they didn't. Not at university, at least."
"I can't imagine Rebekah took very kindly to that."
Klaus laughs. "No, she didn't. There's a nineteenth century stained glass window in a library somewhere or other that commemorates her earning her degree back in the thirteenth century, despite considerable acrimony from her fellow scholars." He spears the last peach off of her plate. "Naturally, she commissioned the window herself."
Elena snatches the peach back from his fork. "And where do I go to find your portrait?"
Klaus eyes her. "Which one?"
She smiles sweetly at him from across the table. "The one you'd prefer to keep secret."
Klaus returns her smile, somehow painfully earnest and wistful. "Don't you already have enough of my secrets?"
"I suppose what I should have asked you is: what do you intend to study at university?" he asks her as he helps her into her coat.
"I don't know. Literature? Astronomy? Maybe I'll go pre-med."
"I didn't know you had an interest."
"My father was a doctor."
Klaus takes her hand. Plays with her fingers. "You'd be a hell of a surgeon."
"Why do you say that?"
"You forget I've seen you with a blade."
You forget I've seen you with a blade.
The words run under her skin throughout the drive back into town, an electric current, making her feel all twisted up and restless inside. Like she could run for miles if only she were set loose.
Would set herself loose.
"Tell me about a time you didn't get what you wanted," Elena asks Klaus, eager to distract herself. She keeps her eyes glued to the black road outside as they zip along the deserted country highway. The night is so dark and so close around them that all she can see is that small bubble illuminated by the SUV's headlights. She and Klaus could be alone in all the world, sailing through the vast night sky. Could be submerged beneath the Wickery River, for all she can tell, swimming beneath its familiar currents.
Klaus's voice, low and intent, like the roll of thunder in the mountains, draws her from her reverie. "As a youth, I had ambitions to enter the monastery."
The admission startles her. "Why would you want to be a monk?" Try as she might, she just can't square her image of Klaus with a life of religious devotion. With a life of abstinence. He's never struck her as one to deny himself.
Klaus's hands clench around the steering wheel. "I wanted more than a life tending my father's lands could provide. I was hungry for knowledge. A monastic life would have given me the opportunity to immerse myself in study. And—it would have given me the chance to paint. More than anything, I dearly wanted to paint." He breathes the last of this like a confession.
"Why didn't it work out?"
"My father refused to pay my entrance fee. He claimed the price was too dear."
"Were you very disappointed?"
"For a time." Klaus glances at her. "Not six months later, Tatia Petrova took up tenancy in one of the cottages on my father's estate. None of us knew it at the time, but she sealed my fate the moment I first laid eyes upon her."
Wet flecks of snow begin to spatter against the windshield. The view out the window grows even hazier.
"Did you love her?"
"I thought I did."
"What does that mean?"
"You know what it means."
"Klaus, pull over."
He obeys her with the placid solicitude of one who almost never feels the need to rush. As though time merely rolls over him.
Because it does, she thinks wildly as he parks the car.
But not her. She feels every second.
She doesn't think she'll ever live to be so old. And she doesn't want to look back on anything with regret when all is said and done.
When she is done.
She takes her seatbelt off and climbs into his lap, her knees tight against his hips. Her satin dress slips against her thighs, a cool caress that presages her desires. She links her arms around his neck and kisses him once, twice. Gentle kisses steeped in possession. Her possession of him. She leans her forehead against his, and tries very hard to articulate what she's feeling. "If you'd joined the monastery, you might have been far away when your parents laid the curse. They might have left you mortal."
"I used to think of that often."
"We never would have met."
"Your life would have been a much happier one."
She can't deny it.
Instead, she loosens his tie. Nips at the sensitive flesh beneath his ear. His arms tighten around her, encouraging her as she shifts more firmly against him. "Make it up to me," she commands him.
His hand traces her hip. "I thought you wanted to wait until the third date."
"You've met me, right? Since when is there a rule I haven't been willing to break?" Boldly, she grips his hand and guides it lower, to the center of her need for him. The green satin parts easily under his touch, revealing lacy underwear and thigh high stockings.
He shoots her a heated look from under his lashes.
She bites him on the mouth hard enough to draw blood before he can voice the comment she can already sense pooling on his venomous tongue. Swallows his groan and gratefully sinks into his worshipful touch.
At some point her underwear gets shredded—which, damn, she only has three matched sets like this, now down to two—but she hardly cares when Klaus scissors his fingers inside of her just like that, when it's all she can do to clutch at his shoulders and stare into his ocean dark eyes as he leads her through the swell of her pleasure.
They kiss for a long time, then, the taste of him bright and coppery and something more—something dark and electric lurking in the current of his blood. Everything is slow and languorous between them, like they have all the time in the world as he tastes himself in the corners of her mouth, his tongue stroking along her own as searches out the flavor of his blood on her skin.
She feels like she's sleepwalking, like every breath she takes he exhales. Like all she has to do is think it, and then his hands are obeying her desires, working free his belt clasp and parting his fly and thrusting home inside of her. The reality of that moment, the physicality of rising and falling against him, feeling the aching slide of him within her, makes her breath hitch. Feels like waking up.
"I'm glad you didn't get your way," she admits to him, her voice catching over the words as a spike of pleasure bolts through her. "I'm glad you're here now. I need you here now." It's an awful thing to say. She still hasn't entirely gotten over her horror at having fallen so in love with him. But she's also unable to lie about it anymore. And with self-deception no longer an option, all she can do is accept and move forward.
Fervently, Klaus pulls her mouth down for another kiss. "I lied earlier," he breathes against her mouth. "It wasn't laying eyes on Tatia that sealed my fate. It was the first time I ever saw you."
"And what fate is that?" she asks him with a devilish roll of her hips.
Klaus's grip on her stutters as he loses control of himself for that fraction of a second, his touch tight enough to make her groan, and she knows she will find fresh bruises on herself the next morning.
(It's a dangerous thing, taking him to her bed. She has to trust him, always.)
(Trusting him here, like this, has never been the issue.)
The question never gets answered. Maybe doesn't need to be.
He takes her home and for the second night she invites him into her bed.
In the young, still hours of the morning, he lies with his head pressed to her belly as Elena drifts on the edge of sleep in the dark cocoon of her childhood bedroom. Idly, she runs her fingers through Klaus's hair.
"Can you hear the heartbeat like that?" she asks him.
"Yes. Though I always hear her."
"Bonnie wants to do the cloaking spell tomorrow. Today."
Klaus shifts, so that he is propped up on his elbow to look at her. "Pardon?"
It's too dark for her to see him clearly, but she knows he can see her perfectly well.
"The cloaking spell. So your creepy aunt doesn't try to kidnap the baby."
"I haven't the faintest idea what you're on about," he tells her, bemusement thick in his voice.
Elena frowns at him. "I guess you missed the backstory." As best as she can, fighting a huge yawn, she fills him in on what his mother had told her.
"Are you certain Bonnie's up to a spell such as this, with so little preparation?"
"If she says she is, she is."
Klaus settles again against her stomach, his hand draped possessively over the barely visible curve. "I'm coming with you."
"Of course you are." She rests her hand atop his. "It's going to be fine."
Neither of them say anything more for a long time. Her exhaustion tugs at her, pulling her under.
She's barely awake, but she still hears Klaus when he murmurs, low, as though expelling a terrible secret, "I've never truly had to worry for anyone's safety before. I don't know what I would do if anything should ever happen to either of you."
A/N: Thank you for reading! Please let me know your thoughts and feedback. And if you'd like, my inbox is always open on tumblr, where I post writing updates, playlists, moodboards, meta, etc. My handle is livlepretre