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/ Miscarriage / Hostage situation/explicit violence and torture/gratuitous angst/ potential character death
At first she thinks Klaus had only been trying to nettle her. To taunt her, to rattle her, to be cruel for the sake of being cruel.
Except, it's as though as soon as he puts words to her suspicions, she cannot unsee the way that Stefan and Rebekah behave around each other. The way Stefan always looks to her first when he finds something funny, the way that Rebekah asks for his advice, touches his arm. The way he always saves his best (most gruesome) ideas for her, presenting them like polished jewels on a velvet pillow to entertain Rebekah and draw out her smiles.
The worst of it is, it's been like this for some time, and she just hadn't noticed. Too wrapped up in her newfound love for Rebekah, in the passion and joy she had found with her when she had had Rebekah's complete attention.
How foolish of her, to assume that attention would last.
The sun may shine for a time, but eventually, the sun always sets. Always finds another to shine upon instead.
There is a reason her power is linked to the moon instead.
"I know what you're doing," she tells Stefan one afternoon, tearing the novel he'd been reading in the larger library from his hands and flinging it across the room.
Slowly, he sits up and stretches. Yawns. "I was just getting to the good part."
"Are you punishing me? Is that what this is?"
He leans back and watches her from behind hooded eyes. "Why should I punish you? For making me forget? I've already told you I don't want my memories back."
"Rebekah's the one who erased them, you know. If you're angry, you should be angry with her."
He laughs at her. "If you're trying to chase me away from your girl, you're doing a terrible job. Bex is a fantastic hate-fuck."
"So this is revenge."
"Rebekah was my girlfriend for longer than she's ever been yours. Maybe I just want her back."
She stares at him. He's not lying to her, exactly. The insight burns and freezes sickly through her.
"We love each other. You can't come between that."
"Rebekah and I used to love each other," he reminds her, oh so reasonably. "It's not a stretch to think she'll love me again one day."
Fury lances through her. "You don't get to do this. You don't get to wreck the one good thing I have because you're lashing out—"
He stands. Murmurs in her ear, "Awfully high and mighty for the girl who took my past from me." He brushes past her. "You should stop assuming everything's about you," he calls over his shoulder, leaving her alone with her jealousy and her impotent rage.
Despite all of her anxieties regarding Rebekah's increasing emotional and physical unavailability, Rebekah still frequents their bed, coming to Elena in the shadowy pre-dawn hours covered in a film of blood, snagging Elena around the waist at odd hours of the morning and afternoon and pulling her into the nearest empty room or an alcove for a desperate fuck.
There's something different about these liaisons than the lovemaking they had shared in the earliest weeks of their relationship. Something harder, more frantic and primal about the way that Rebekah kisses her, bites her, claims her. Something darker and more urgent and obsessive about the way that Elena needs Rebekah. It's as though she's boiling over at every instant, and the only relief from the fires Rebekah lights in her is Rebekah herself, even though being with her is a constant act of self-immolation.
And when Rebekah goes, dabbing her fingers at her bloody mouth and straightening her wrinkled dress so that she might rejoin her brothers, she always takes another piece of Elena with her.
They throw a magnificent party one night. Ostensibly it's a Christmas party—they're only two weeks out, now—but actually Elena suspects it's just another ploy to while away their immense boredom. It's like the more Originals there are in a single place, the more jaded and weary they all become. The only one of them who strikes her as impervious to this existential stall is Klaus, who plots and plays and rages and loves as brightly and cruelly as he ever has.
The chateau is full to bursting with a whole host of handsomely dressed people, elegantly coiffed, bedecked in dazzling jewels, swathed in glimmering lengths of silk and velvet, sequins and beads and gleaming brocade. There are more beautiful women in this room than Elena has ever seen before. Where they've all come from, she has no idea. The babble of at least half a dozen different languages fills the space, accenting the nine piece band situated in the ballroom.
She hadn't actually been aware that this party was to take place until the caterers and florists began arriving early this morning.
At some point, she'd cornered Rebekah to question her about it.
"It's a marvelous idea, isn't it? Nick thought it up. The three of us used to host a Yuletide ball each year, before."
It's always before with Rebekah now.
Elena wonders more and more about next.
(About whether Rebekah still thinks about the future, or if she's forgotten it in the haze of another time, the way a dream fades away upon waking.)
Now, Elena hunts through the crowd, searching out her absent lover amidst the teeming masses. Rebekah will be in the center of wherever the most guests are gathered. Entertaining them. Shining for them. She so loves the attention.
Elena feels far more uncertain than she would have anticipated. Somehow she has wound up on unsteady ground with Rebekah. Meanwhile, Stefan is still waspishly avoiding her, and she hasn't made any friends amongst the hybrids. Not to say a word of her precarious relationship with Klaus, or her tacit agreement with Elijah.
Really, even in this crush, she is quite alone.
The one thing she is certain of is that she is dressed the part for tonight. She's armored herself this evening in one of the gowns she had picked out with Rebekah the first night in New York, a daring blood red sheath of silk-satin that shimmers and gleams when she moves as though she really were dripping in wet blood. The dress covers her from collarbone to ankle, save for a daring plunge down the back—the only place on her body completely unblemished by any gruesome scars. A pair of antique earrings pulled from Rebekah's old jewelry box here at the chateau completes the ensemble.
She spies Rebekah on the other side of the ballroom, but is waylaid by Elijah, who steps smoothly into her path and offers her a glass of champagne. "Take a turn about the room with me," he says, holding his arm out for her.
She strains over Elijah's shoulder for another glimpse of Rebekah.
"I'll have you reunited with Rebekah soon enough," Elijah promises her, a small smile playing at his mouth.
Easily the most frustrating thing about him is how charming he manages to be. Being in on his secrets only makes him all the more so.
Elena smiles, only a little tightly, and takes his arm. "I would be delighted."
He leads her out of the ballroom, through other parlors and drawing rooms and conservatories and a smaller ballroom that has been opened especially for this evening.
"How go your efforts with my brother?" he asks at length
"Sorry, I've been… distracted."
"By Stefan Salvatore's attempts to entice my sister."
Elena's face superheats. "Yes. That."
"He's merely acting out."
"You shouldn't have told him about our past. It makes everything too complicated."
"Forgive me. I was surprised, and informed him before thinking of the consequences."
She frowns. "How long do you plan to stay?"
"Until I can wring a promise from my brother. I know my presence here has been unpleasant for you. With your help, I could shorten my residence substantially."
"There's something I've been wondering. Why not just compel me to help you? Why go through the effort of trying to persuade me?"
"Because I need you to be convincing to my brother. You can only do that if you really believe in your heart."
"I'll do just about anything for Rebekah."
"I know. It's what I'm counting on." He returns her to the large ballroom.
By now, Rebekah is nowhere in sight.
A stranger asks her to dance, and with no one else asking for her company, who is she to say no?
She dances and dances. Allows herself to be swept up by the teeming crowd. There are handsome men aplenty eager to take her hand. She doesn't remember the last time she had so much attention from so many. The last time so many eyes were all fixed so unerringly upon her.
The power of it makes her feel high, like she's soaring, like she could plummet at any moment but she doesn't care. She feels younger than she has in years. Lighter. When she catches her reflection in the floor to ceiling gilded mirrors that line the walls of the opulent ballroom, darting amidst the sea of swaying bodies, she sees herself as she had once been. Shining. Bright. The moon that bids the sun.
At some point, the current of the ballroom swings her into Stefan's arms.
They're both a little surprised by it.
His eyes gleam bright and dark. His lips are red and his cheeks rosy. Somewhere, she's certain there is a pile of dismembered limbs stuffed into a closet or a powder room or perhaps under the stairs.
He's always a little wilder when he's just fed. A little less controlled.
Elena looks away from him. After their last few conversations, there's nothing more they could possibly have to say to each other. At least—not until she figures out how to reach him again.
(She hasn't forgotten the silent promise she had made to him to remain his friend no matter what.)
Stefan whirls her through the pattern of the dance, spinning her out before pulling her back in. She can feel his eyes on her the whole while, unwavering in their intensity. She's uncertain what to make of it. He has always paid her special attention, but tonight there is a contemplative element to it which she has not experienced from him in a long, long time. It makes her heart hurt to think about that now.
"Did you love me back?" he asks her abruptly.
Elena stumbles and falls out of the pattern of the dance.
Stefan stands there, watching her.
When did I ever stop? she almost asks him.
Because that is the thing with Stefan. She has loved him since the moment she met him. Loved him enough to keep his secrets. To lie for him. To risk everything for him. She has loved him enough to stay true to him even when she thought she would never see him again, even when he loved another. Loved him enough to walk away from him. To beg the one person who might save him to erase her from his heart. Loved him so much that even now, when the memory of being in love with him is so dim and weathered that she can barely recall what it was like to be happy and carefree and secure in the certain knowledge that they were soulmates, she still cannot abandon him. Will never abandon him. He is still her soulmate in every way that matters. Her dearest friend. The one person she will never, ever forsake.
"You know I did," she tells him, and lets someone else take her up into the next dance.
The next time she sees Rebekah, she's dancing with Stefan. The two of them laugh the way only the wicked can.
Another turn, and they are both gone.
At midnight, there's a fireworks display. Elena goes out to the lawn with the rest of the guests and watches, shivering in the cold. The bright lights explode overheard, coloring the night sky in a metallic shower of gold and silver, pink and blue. The boom of the explosives rolls through the night like thunder, echoing off of the mountains.
She spots Elijah and Rebekah near the front of the crowd, set off to one side chatting. Elijah says something to her that causes her to positively beam. Rebekah never smiles like that for Klaus.
Elena pauses, a formless intuition snagging at her before she dismisses it.
She gathers her hemline off the grass and sets off in their direction, intent on joining them.
Klaus catches her in the dark.
It takes her eyes a moment to adjust well enough to see him between the fluttering bursts of light from overhead. His features are silvered and otherworldly in this lighting.
Memory dances over her. Her hand clenches around the hilt of a dagger that is no longer there.
"I've been hoping to catch you alone all evening," Klaus tells her.
"I hadn't noticed."
His mouth twists into something not quite a smile. "Dance with me awhile." He leads her back into the chateau, into the ballroom, still deafening with the crush of conversation, of blaring instruments, of clacking heels and chiming glassware.
She ends up in his arms without understanding how she got there.
She hasn't danced with Klaus in a very, very long time.
She tries, very hard, to suppress the way that being this close to him affects her. The way that her traitorous body responds to the smell of him, flooding her senses until she's lightheaded, lost in a dream of another time, another girl, a different life.
"You and Elijah seem to be on surprisingly amiable terms." He pulls her close for a measure, following the flow of the dance, before letting her step back again.
She doesn't know this dance. Must let him lead while she feels her way through it.
"What makes you say that?"
"Merely making an observation."
She considers that. Considers him. What Elijah has asked of her. What she has asked of herself, for Rebekah's sake.
"He thinks my opinion matters to you," she finally tells him, because she cannot help herself. Because she needs to know if it's true.
Klaus regards her. She feels the weight of that regard settle over her, old and familiar as the river waters back home had felt closing in over her head. "Yet you don't trust Elijah, do you?" he asks at length.
Elena blinks at him. He'd asked her something similar the night of the bonfire. Unlike that night, her wits are not fully with her. "Of course not." The words tumble out before she can stop them. Before she can think of a clever ambiguity that will let her slip Klaus's compulsion to always tell him the truth.
"Why? Do you think he's hiding something? Keeping secrets?"
It occurs to her that he has just answered her unspoken question. For some reason, he cares what she thinks.
In a roundabout way, he's sought her out to ask her advice.
Effortlessly, Klaus spins her, around and around. Her dress swishes at her ankles, the material whisper soft. Like a warning sighed directly into her ear.
"Because he has no honor," Elena replies, surprising herself with how eager she is to share her thoughts with Klaus. To warn him.
A frown furrows Klaus's brow. "Not many have ever accused Elijah of that particular charge."
"He betrayed me to my death, once. I know what kind of man he is."
His response is immediate. "I won't let him harm you. You needn't fear that."
As though he had not been the one to deliver her death himself all those years ago.
It seems, somehow, that they have scratched against the bedrock of the contract between them. Klaus will not let her die again. At least, not anytime soon. Not by the hands of the French Quarter Coven, nor his father's blade, nor even by Rebekah's ardent lover's bite. Certainly not by Elijah's doing. At the end, with everything else between them burnt to cinders, this final certainty of his implacable protection remains.
And then, perhaps because of the compulsion greasing her tongue, or perhaps because she has had too much to drink, or because she's lonely and uncertain, or worst of all, perhaps because she just wants to confide in someone, even—maybe especially—Klaus, she admits, "It's you I'm worried about."
(There, at the bottom of their shared history, lies this: she can no more bear for Klaus to come to harm than Klaus can bear for her to cross fully into death. It doesn't matter that their reasons are radically different—that Klaus cares about her as his asset first and foremost, and that she simply cares about him, for better or for worse.)
(For worse, for worse—)
The dance ends. He doesn't release her.
"What has he asked of you?" he presses her.
"How do you know he's asked me anything?"
"He always asks for something."
"I've been distracted. I'm not sure…" She notices a flash of blonde hair. Rebekah, watching her from across the room.
Klaus follows her line of sight. "Of course. How could I forget? Your lovers' quarrel with my sister."
We're not quarreling, she almost tells him.
Someone catches Rebekah's attention. She turns away and doesn't look back.
"She's upset with me," she admits instead.
"She's acting out."
"I don't know why though."
"Don't you?"
"You were the one who pointed out to me that I needed to watch out for Stefan."
The ghost of a smile plays at Klaus's mouth. "Merely a nicety."
"You're not nice though." She squints at him. "This is about Elijah." The moment she says it, she knows it to be true.
"I fail to see the connection between the two."
Elena backs away from him, and he lets her. "You wanted to make sure I felt jealous and isolated."
"Why would I bother?"
She shakes her head as her thoughts race. "You're the one arranging the nightly forays, aren't you? Winnowing me out."
"How absurd—"
Insight cuts through any remaining doubts, bright as a blade. "You did it to guarantee I'd tell you the truth when you asked me about what Elijah's really after. Because you know he's approached me, and you suspected that I'd choose Rebekah's interests over your own. So you wanted to plant that seed of doubt in me. To make me side with you."
Klaus catches her by the wrist. "I planted nothing. I merely pointed out the pleasure games my sister is playing right under your nose."
"You did it so you could play on all of my worst insecurities and get what you wanted from me. You tried to use me, again."
Klaus studies her narrowly. "You've warned me not to trust my brother. Would you have given me the same courtesy if I had merely asked you without artifice?"
Elena covers his hand clutching her wrist with her own. "I already told you I worry for you."
Abruptly, he releases her. She nearly stumbles.
He glances over her shoulder, across the ballroom. "You knew me better once," he tells her at last. "At least, I thought you did."
He leaves her then, his words a haunting between them.
The party lasts until dawn, and it's not until she's wandering up the stairs that Rebekah catches her about the waist from behind, her mouth immediately fastening to her shoulder.
"Retiring so soon?" Rebekah breathes into her ear. Her hands wander over Elena's body, one straying toward her breasts, the other to the damp heat between her thighs that has been lingering there uncomfortably for hours now. She pulls her back into a darkened alcove on the landing and hitches her against the length of her body. In an instant she's torn Elena's beautiful dress and sunk two fingers up to the knuckles inside of her body. The sear of her fangs burying themselves in her throat as those long, delicate fingers pull her toward oblivion is an exquisite sort of torture. A torture she puts on herself, every night now, as she endures the bitter hours between these rendezvouses.
No, that's not right. That's just Klaus in her head, twisting her thoughts around—
No, no, that's not right either. She'd felt this way before Klaus ever mentioned anything to her—
Rebekah flips her around, so she's pressed flush against the cold plaster wall, her face, breasts, belly, and thighs tight against the unforgiving expanse, as Rebekah swarms in close behind her, grinding her hips against her ass as she takes what she wants from her.
As Elena gives her what she wants—
Herself.
The knowledge is enough to center her back in her own body. To remind her that whatever else is going on with Rebekah, that it's her she craves. Her she loves.
She'd told her so.
And Rebekah always wears her heart on her sleeve.
Afterwards, Rebekah kisses her with bloodstained lips. Over and over again, as though she is trying to impress something vital upon her through her kiss alone.
Something not quite an apology, but as close as Rebekah will ever come.
Elena takes it. Twines her arms around Rebekah's neck and pulls her in closer. As though she could inhale her, devour her, take her inside herself forever.
The taste of her own blood—her own power—sizzles on her tongue. She laps it up from the corners of Rebekah's mouth like it's honey sweet. Cannot help but chase that other feeling the taste of it elicits within her, like a tiny electric shock each time her tongue traces Rebekah's lips. Like something familiar that shouldn't be there.
"Where were you headed?" Rebekah asks her as she smooths her hair back into place and resettles the straps of her gown over her shoulders properly.
There's no salvaging Elena's dress. She'll have to creep back to their rooms nearly naked.
She almost doesn't care.
Downstairs, the tail end of the party still staggers on. She expects there will be guests here for hours yet—if any of the stragglers survive that long, that is.
Elena looks up from fiddling with the ruined seam of her blood red silk gown.
"Up to bed. It's been a long night. Longer without you."
At this, Rebekah hums, clearly pleased rather than chastened, and gathers her close again to press reassuring kisses to her mouth. Even so, once she pulls away, her brow pressed against her own, she asks her, "I wonder why you took these stairs then? Too much champagne going to your head?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're headed toward the wrong wing."
The realization pours over her like cold water. It's not until Rebekah points it out that she even notices.
She hadn't been heading toward the suite she shares with Rebekah at all.
She'd been wandering toward the Water Garden Rooms. Blindly following that subconscious tether she has joining her to Klaus, who even now she knows with certainty is upstairs, in the rooms directly next to the suite he had initially assigned her.
She'd been seeking him out, and she's not even entirely sure why.
The days after the Christmas fête slip by in a pattern indistinguishable from the ones before it. Long hours to herself, wandering the chateau and the surrounding grounds, evenings full of empty company, empty conversation.
Twice, Elijah brings up the subject of his mother to Klaus. Twice, Klaus puts him off.
She doesn't open her mouth to intercede on Elijah's behalf, despite the pointed glance he spears her with the second time.
"I thought we were in agreement that you would lend your support to my plans," Elijah murmurs to her later that evening, once the others have already dispersed.
"It's not exactly helpful to your cause if it's blatantly obvious that I'm just backing you up. You know how suspicious he is. If he discovers you asked for my help, he'll refuse just to be contrary."
Elijah appraises her. "So you're just waiting for the time to be right."
"Of course."
He watches her for a long moment, openly studying her in that dispassionate way peculiar to older vampires. "Are you reneging on our agreement?" he asks her at last.
"Why would I?"
"For no reason I could fathom."
She's not sure if she can fathom her own reasons, either.
"You'll hold to what you promised me, right?"
"I have the best interests of both my sister and my brother at heart, yes."
"And me."
"You have my word on the matter."
If anything, she grows more reclusive, more pensive, as she churns over the situation she has found herself in.
The thing is, the more intently she scrutinizes Rebekah's actions, Stefan's actions, the more she understands that her loneliness is partially a creature of her imagination. Something she has dreamed up in response to the suspicions Klaus had given voice to after Elijah's arrival.
She's not wrong about him. About how he had played her.
She doesn't even doubt that she probably should help Elijah, now that Rebekah has made it clear to her that there is no going back to that brief moment of time when she'd imagined what it could be like, just her and her three vampires, striking that delicate peace. Now that Elijah has wrecked the balance she had achieved with Stefan so badly that she doubts they'll ever return to the ease they had found around each other. Now that Klaus has his defenses back up against the perceived threat of his brother and has placed all of his focus upon him.
No, the true issue is that now that her loneliness has crept back in, she cannot ignore it. It doesn't matter whether she only feels this way because Klaus suggested that she should, or if it's all in her head, or if her alienation is entirely too real.
In giving it shape, she has made it come alive within her. She cannot help but to feed it. To keep herself apart from the others, avoid them even, when she can.
More and more, she realizes that to hold herself apart from them is to hold on to the thing which makes her human.
Because she is slipping—day by day, she can feel herself looking out the fogged glass windows at the four of them, beautiful and shining and clever (and very nearly almost hers), and she can feel herself longing to join them. To become one of them.
A little solitude isn't a good enough reason to throw her humanity away.
Especially when she isn't sure what she would be throwing it away for.
It's entirely possible that completing the turn would only make things worse. That Rebekah will tire of her and return to Stefan. That Klaus will never forgive her for haunting his steps forever. For destroying that final link between them, so flimsily predicated on her staying human.
It's possible that she would never forgive herself.
And so she avoids the others. Takes special pains to stay out of their way, a ghost rather than a girl most of the time.
The bracelet makes that possible—gives her the only possible freedom she could ever wrest from their pursuit of her. With that little article wrapped around her wrist, she can sit and be quiet and when they call her name, she can choose whether or not to answer.
She's learned a lot about the art of not answering over the years. About filling emptiness with silence.
Klaus doesn't make any other attempts to speak to her about the matter with his brother.
In fact, he doesn't speak to her much at all.
The landscape here is so much harsher and unforgiving than the forests around her manor had been, and yet there is still something about the lash of the winter winds against her cheeks, the low gray solstice light of December, which plucks at that old urge to explore through shape and color and touch. To connect with this place, maybe in the one way she really feels able to connect to anything right now.
It's been months now since she's felt the stirrings of this desire—not since she burned every painting she ever made to the ground.
And yet, now that it's occurred to her, she can't shake the impulse.
For a bit, she tries working on her novel at the desk overlooking the slumbering gardens, and when that fails to distract her, she even tries drawing in one of her journals salvaged from New York. But the spare lines and scribbled pictorial metaphors on the page can't match the tactile immediacy of paint, can't quite grasp at the sensation of reaching out and touching—of reaching out and knowing—a place through the act of painting.
She's not about to seek out Rebekah or Stefan so she can ask them for paint.
So, really, there is only one thing to do.
She's going to have to steal from Klaus.
Sneaking into Klaus's rooms is actually quite simple. All she has to do to be certain that he's nowhere nearby is to close her eyes and reach for him. Over the past few months in close proximity to him, she's become alarmingly proficient at tuning out the constant hum of his presence, so that it fades into the background of her thoughts. But just like her heartbeat or the pulse of her breaths, as soon as she thinks to pay attention, she can attune herself to him.
At once it's obvious to her he's nowhere nearby—she doesn't even think he's on the grounds anywhere.
She wonders if anyone else is out with him, or if he's alone. She's uncertain. She stopped paying attention to the comings and goings of the others days and days ago.
Elena slinks into Klaus's private rooms with the ease of a long time thief, an empty canvas bag from that book store she'd liked in New York looped over her shoulder, intent on snatching up whatever supplies she's certain Klaus has scattered throughout his domain.
Right away she finds his palette table, mucky with caked pigments, redolent of thinners that make her head swim in the close unaired confines of the room, tucked into what must have once been a private study before Klaus transformed it into his studio, undoubtedly for the quality of the pale light streaming in through the double leaded glass windows. She sweeps the crinkled up paint tubes left sprawled all over the table into her bag, as well as a tin tray she thinks will be useful for a palette and a somewhat leaky jar of what she strongly suspects to be turpentine that soaks an oily gray stain into her pristine bag. The stack of finished and drying paintings pass before her eyes in a blur of indistinct colors and shapes as she hunts through them, searching for some prepped surfaces she could commandeer.
The only thing she can't seem to locate are clean brushes.
She rummages through Klaus's entire studio searching for them, knowing they must be here somewhere.
When the studio search proves fruitless, she realizes he'd probably left them to dry by a sink—maybe in his bathroom.
The search pulls her out of the studio, into the heart of Klaus's space. The rooms are more expansive than the ones she shares with Rebekah. Dark and imposing with inlaid stone fireplaces and towering ebony bookshelves dominating each room. More than that, there's a strange still air to them that makes her wonder how much time Klaus has even spent in here since they settled in this place. She doesn't contemplate where else he must be spending his time.
She passes through a dining room, a personal library, another study, and a room so covered in dust she doesn't think Klaus has even ventured inside in at least half a century, before finding what can only be his bedroom. Beyond, a splash of light from a cracked open door dimly illuminates the darkness that blankets the entire room, revealing a sliver of a bathroom sink and mirror. Bingo.
Quickly, Elena crosses the room and slips into the bathroom to root around Klaus's sink. Her hands pass over bottles of aftershave and hair gel, a razor and a tortoise shell comb, but no brushes anywhere.
If Klaus is out painting right now with all of his brushes she's going to have a fit.
Frustrated, Elena returns to the bedroom and throws open the heavy drapes to flood the room with light. The brushes have got to be in here somewhere—here, or in one of the other rooms—
She rifles fruitlessly through his armoire and the secretary hutch by the window before finally turning her attention to the bedside table and the boxes under his bed, which she looks through one by one before discarding them only to pull out another, another.
It's in one of these boxes that she discovers a blue leather journal, the cover tooled with bounding waves.
Elena sits on the floor and stares at that journal for a long, long time before she can finally bring herself to pick it up.
Her hands are steady when she flips it open, but begin to tremble as she reads the thoughts and feelings of a version of herself so foreign and lost to her that she can hardly even recognize her.
And yet. They are her words. Her story. Her life.
Herself.
She does not remember the pages being this foxed, or the leather this supple and creased. It's as though someone has read through it, again and again.
(Someone. Her someone.)
When she lifts the book to her nose, she can smell his aftershave in the pages. As though he might have fallen asleep while reading, his face pressed to the pages.
Carefully, she sets the book aside and paws through the remaining contents of this box. Finds her first two novels, the second manuscript still unfinished. The drawings from that first winter, when she had purged herself of so much venom and tar and allowed herself to be reborn in the feeling of a stick of charcoal between her fingers, in the warmth of a fire shared with a real, true friend.
And at the bottom of the box—the novel she had given to Rafaela over a year ago. The pages are annotated in Klaus's meandering script. A whole dialogue between them that she'd never known existed.
Stunned, Elena drops it all back into the box. Her mind tries to grapple with this discovery, but it's like trying to read a map with no landmarks.
She'd known, of course, that Klaus must have taken these things from her. But she'd always assumed with a pang of regret that he must have destroyed them in that same fit of rage that had totaled the library. She'd never imagined that he might have these things, her most intimate possessions, with him even now. That he would have spent hours reading them, looking through them, thinking of her in those years apart. That he had somehow gotten a hold of that manuscript from last year.
I found you. Your words. A whole inner life you'd kept hidden away.
For years she has been so certain of what he meant by that.
That it had been a rejection. A repudiation.
Behind her, the pressure drops. The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
She doesn't even have to turn around to know that Klaus is standing just a few feet behind her. That she had gotten so distracted by her discovery that she had failed to notice his return.
She turns to face him, her novel from just last year still clutched in her hands. Still standing within the pool of wintery gray light from the windows, everything directly around her appears over-saturated and bright—blinding. She cannot see into the dimness of the rest of the room well enough to read Klaus's expression.
"What are you doing in here?" Klaus asks, almost too mildly.
They aren't so close anymore that he should tolerate her invading his privacy like this.
Wordlessly, she holds her novel out to Klaus, so he may see what she's discovered.
He takes it without offering any explanation, any defense.
There is none that he could offer.
Only… Only she wants him to tell her something. Something that will make this make sense.
When it becomes clear that he will not even offer her that, the dam within her bursts. "Why do you have my novels? My journal? Why hold onto them all these years? Why not burn them?" He'd have had to pack them each time he moved. Rebekah had told her how often they'd had to beat a hasty retreat in those three years of silence between them—how often he had had to flee the mob, his father. Himself. And yet, apparently, there had been a part of him that had never fled her. That had made the deliberate choice to keep her close—
"To remind myself."
Elena shuts her eyes. Of course.
To remind himself of how he had been fool enough to imagine himself devoted to her, and how she had betrayed him. To remind himself of why he would never want her again. Why he had never truly wanted her in the first place. All he had cared about was the fantasy she had spun for him by the light of the solstice moon.
Even with her eyes closed, she can feel Klaus stepping closer. Into her orbit.
"I am not unmoved by you, Elena," he murmurs, the reserve of his statement at odds with the burr of his voice, low and intimate, almost the way it used to be when he would whisper his secrets into her ear, and she would have to hold her breath lest the moment slip away in the dark.
She holds her breath now.
Cannot think what he must mean by this admission—her thoughts whirl and dance as she scrambles for his meaning, for the cruel twist that must lie underneath that guarded confession. Perhaps he means that he appreciates her art—that he can see her as a person worthy of his regard and even admiration in this facet, at least, if no longer as a confidante or as a lover—
His mouth brushes against her own.
She startles badly, gasping against his mouth as her eyes fly open. She stumbles, but Klaus matches her step for step, deeper into that pool of blinding winter light, until he is so close to her she can feel the heat from his body, can sense the drumming of his heart so close to her own. He stops just short of pressing himself against her, a mere sliver of space between them.
The only place he touches her is her mouth, followed, a moment later, by the sides of her face, where his hands cup her jaw and hold her still so he can guide her mouth to open against his own.
The kiss is as familiar as coming home. As heart-wrenching.
As impossible.
She doesn't care.
There's a distended bubble of time when Elena lets herself fall into that kiss. Lets herself go home to him.
To be called by him the way she has always, always failed to call to him.
All of the details she had forced herself to forget about him come rushing back in the flavor of his mouth, the smell of his skin, in the way he possesses her with so little effort.
His possession is an illusion though.
In the long years without him, he had taught her to possess herself.
And in these weeks wandering the craggy, windswept wilderness around the chateau, isolated in her mortality as she has been, she has learned that she need only answer when she desires to do so.
With almost painful ease, Elena breaks the spell between them, her hands firm over Klaus's as she pulls them away from her. As she releases him and steps back, against the window's chilled glass panes.
Gathering her breath, she tries to understand him. Tries to fix on any sign that will tell her what he had meant by that kiss.
Klaus stands before her, empty handed, his expression nearly blank, except for a certain current in his gaze, deep and dark the way the ocean is late at night, when the stars do not even reflect upon the waves.
"You don't need to manipulate me to get me to help you," she tells him at last, striking upon the one explanation she can come up with for why Klaus would deign to touch her like that. The one explanation that will keep her old scars firmly sealed.
"Mustn't I?" He asks the question so softly. She could almost imagine him wistful in that moment.
"I'm taking my things back," she tells him, instead of answering him.
He lets her.
Part of her had hoped he wouldn't.
(She weaves illusions for herself as convincingly as she weaves them for others. She knows that. Oh, how she knows that.)
When she glances back at him one last time from his bedroom doorway, his attention is fixed out the window, to some place in the distance she cannot see.
A/N: Thank you to everyone who has sent me so much encouragement and support over the past few months. You help me keep coming back to this story, and staying the course until it's complete.