Full Circle
by adlyb
Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.
Summary: After losing everything, Elena figures out how to live again. Klaus tries to emulate her.
Spoilers: Season 3ish?
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: character death, and a lot of angst
"Why did you give in?"
"I realized that you can only fight the inevitable for so long."
As far as reasons go, Klaus's explanation for why he's helping them take down their latest enemy is vague at best, but with all of their lives on the line, it's good enough. Pissed off blood thirsty interdimensional primordial beings with eldritch powers just aren't worth questioning motives over.
Except, later, when she peels away from Bonnie and Damon and the rest of them colluding with Klaus over how, exactly, to save their necks to try to find some sleep, his words won't leave her alone.
You can only fight the inevitable for so long.
She'd thought something similar, once, about him.
That's why she'd gone to her death.
Of course, it's everyone else who ends up going to their deaths.
Everyone but her, and him.
"I can't die," he tells her, after. Considers her. "It seems neither can you."
"I can die," she corrects him. She's in shock. Must be, because her voice is steady as the horizon. She's familiar enough with grief to recognize these symptoms in herself. "You know that."
He shrugs. "Can you stay dead though?"
She pauses. She's not sure. Her hands grasp at the gray, smoldering remains of Damon's body. There's only bits and parts of him left. He's the only one she was able to find, after.
"Can you really call it dying then?" he presses.
"I have to call it that. Death is all I know." The idea that she could be wrong about this, about herself, makes her feel small and afraid in a way she hasn't felt in years.
Klaus doesn't correct her, but she can tell from the look he flicks her way that he thinks she's a fool.
Maybe she is.
She'd been the one to suggest they go to him for help.
Look at all the good that had done them.
Somehow she lets him carry her away from that smoldering battle field. Lets him take her home with him, his little stray he'd found by the side of the road. Lets him feed her and tuck her into a warm bed that cannot touch the chill she feels settling into her bones. A chill she knows will soon reach her heart.
Let it, she thinks. It would be a relief, if her heart could turn to ice. If she could forget, the way she has always managed in the past.
She hardly even sees him in those bleary days after The End. Isn't really sure why he bothered to salvage her from the wreckage at all, save for his desire for her blood.
Except, there are times, late at night, when she wanders through his gaudy mansion, the vast, empty halls echoing her footsteps back at her like a heartbeat, that she stumbles upon him, quite alone.
He looks sad, sometimes. For Caroline, maybe, though he's never said.
She likes to sit with him during those times.
Misery loves company.
Later, she finds out that he'd gone back, searching in vain for Caroline's remains.
The others- even Stefan- he'd been content to let molder, but Caroline he had wanted to lay to rest.
But that's later.
"You don't have the right to be so sad," she tells him one blue dawn.
"I loved her."
"You hardly knew her."
"If you think that so, then you are the one who hardly knew her."
She wants to snap that she hates him, but really, she doesn't. The quiet knowledge of that fills her with exhausted resignation.
"When will it stop?" she asks him instead of bothering to lie to him.
He stares and stares and stares at her. "I don't know. I've never lost someone I've loved before."
She should pity him, this grasping, starving creature, drowning in perhaps the first pure feeling he's ever had.
She doesn't. The place inside of her that used to overflow with love and pity and compassion for beautiful monsters with teary human eyes and soft, trembling mouths has gone dry inside of her.
"I thought you might tell me your secret," he ventures at last.
It finally occurs to her the real reason why he took her in. To teach him how to mourn.
All Elena knows is how to be alone.
That, she is more than happy to teach him.
She leaves, without note or notice.
There's no point in staying in Virginia without her family, her friends.
Wanders through part time jobs in coffee shops and bookstores, rents rooms from little old ladies and sleeps in hostiles and camps under the stars in a beat up old pick up truck that reminds her of the one Matt used to drive. One year she hikes the entire Appalachian trail, proud of herself for returning to Virginia for the first time since she made the decision to leave.
She starts over again and again, taking lovers and making friends she can laugh with over wine and cigarettes, but she never falls in love and she never shares her secrets with anyone.
The years pass.
And through all of the years, all of the places she haunts and shapes she inhabits, Klaus is there, lingering on the edges of her thoughts whenever she is just at the edge of sleep. The last remaining tether to her past.
He tracks her down the first time sixteen months after her departure from Mystic Falls.
"You're not angry with me?" she asks him in disbelief as he meticulously stacks vintage Lost Generation novels onto the counter for her to ring up. They're in San Francisco, where the blanketing fog outside has the power to meld with and obliterate the fog in her heart.
"Should I be?"
"I ran away."
"That's what your kind does." He pays with cash. Examines her closely. "I can hardly hold it against you."
He takes her out to lunch after her shift, and, somehow, she finds herself going with him.
"Tell me your secret," he coaxes her as she swirls her spoon through a cup of coffee, watching sugar dissolve into the black.
Elena cups her hands around the mug, letting its warmth seep into her chill fingers. "What secret."
"Tell me how you live." After death hangs in the air between them, unspoken but heard clearly just the same.
Elena ignores this. "I thought we already covered this. Same as you, apparently. I can't die."
It's not literally true, of course. She can die. One day she will. It's just that somehow she always seems to avoid it.
Klaus seems to take some meaning from her words she hadn't intended.
"I'd not thought of that."
After dinner, he walks her home, and she's not the least bit surprised that he knows where she lives without having to be told.
He tells her goodbye like he's merely saying goodnight.
She gets on a bus out of state that very night.
In Chicago he sits down next to her on the beach and contemplates the lake with her.
"There's something that always disappoints me about lakes," she tells him, because there is no one else to express this to without sounding insane.
"What in particular?"
She opens her mouth, about to say something about currents and rivers and her longing for one creek in particular, for one death in particular, but thinks better of it. She's too afraid that he'll actually understand what she would be trying to tell him.
"Are you here for my blood, then?" It's been over two years since her last donation.
"Should I be?"
"If you're not, I'd rather you leave me alone, if it's all the same."
He tilts his head. "Yet it took vanishingly little effort to find you this time. I wonder why."
"I wasn't hoping you would find me, if that's what you're thinking."
He smiles. "Perhaps not consciously."
It's annoying, because she thinks he might be right.
She's never been very good at letting go of the past, and her past is contained now in a single person.
He finds her again and again, wherever she goes.
Somehow she's never surprised to see him.
"What are you doing, if you're not making hybrids and you're not scheming away your hours?"
"I'm following your advice."
She ponders that. "Is it working?"
His eyes skim over her from head to toe. "You tell me."
Eventually, her resignation to his visits becomes a sort of expectation.
"Why won't you leave me alone?" she asks him in Portland. She wipes rain out of her face, annoyed that it's probably ruining the exact tone of exasperation she wishes to communicate.
"Because I don't want to forget. Seeing you makes it impossible to forget."
The admission softens a place inside of her that has been stone for years.
The next time is in Taos. She's been drifting from town to town out here, enjoying how the high thin air turns her thoughts insubstantial and her body light, like it doesn't even belong to her.
She's been earning her keep sweeping up at a pottery studio and learning how to throw on quiet nights when the stars are out, millions more than she's ever seen before, and the sky is huge and black and endless in a way that makes her feel small, the way she thinks she would have been if she'd been born with any other face at all. The way she thinks she might be again, right now, with mud caking her hands and another vase collapsing in on itself as she tries to take it off the wheel.
Somehow she's not at all surprised when a familiar pair of hands close around hers to guide her through the necessary motions.
Neither of them say anything as Klaus helps her with lumpy vase after lumpy vase, until she has a line of misshapen empty vessels waiting to be fired.
Maybe it's the thinness of the air here, where reality seems to stretch and stretch until she can see the space between each moment. Maybe it's the fact that he didn't say anything, and so she can interpret him however she wishes.
Whatever it is, afterwards, she washes and dries her hands, and then turns and catches his mouth against her own.
The kiss isn't about passion, or desire, or even hunger, though she feels a yearning for all of those things simmering in the deep and lonely parts of her.
It's about recognition. About reaching out to the only person who knows her at all anymore, the only one who is even a little bit real to her. The only other person in the entire world who lives with the exact same grief as her.
Once, she'd tried to deny him that grief. Tried to deny him the means to live with it.
Now, she pours her tenderness into him, because she has no one else she cares for, in even this one little way that is the only way that matters to her at all anymore.
They meander through the dark together, pausing to kiss in the light of the solitary flickering light as moths careen above their heads. His hands skim her body as she fists the material of his jacket, reeling him in, inhaling him now after years and years of abstaining from him the best that she could. All the while neither of them speak.
Eventually they make it back to her truck, to the flannel blankets she keeps spread out over the truck bed, so she can sleep under the stars.
It's so dark that she can't see him at all when he enters her, but that doesn't matter to her, when she can feel him, taste him, hear him, smell him. When the fullness in her body begins to blur with a fullness in her soul that's been missing with all of the others she's taken to just this very place. Somehow, they had all touched her more or less just like this, and yet, none of them had touched her like this at all.
He's gone when the rising sun wakes her, which is fine.
He always comes back.
A/N: Part 1 of 2.
Thank you to everyone reading and commenting on my other fics, especially my WIP Fairytale Ending. I've just had a baby who rarely sleeps, so while I'm a bit too scatter-brained right now to work on FE, I thought it would be nice to publish some quick fics to tide everyone over in the mean time. Part 2 coming soon! xoxo
