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


She doesn't see him again until the night before the wedding.

He comes to her home, where she is spending the night alone so she and Collin can wait until the ceremony to see each other. Collin's a romantic like that. With him, she is too.

She lets Klaus in because there is no point in not.

It occurs to her that for all of their talk of ghosts when she last saw him, he has been hers for years now.

Of course his haunting would follow her.

They spend the evening passing a bottle of bourbon back and forth, the same brand that Alaric had favored and which Klaus has always abhorred. Tonight he drinks it without fuss.

"What will you do when he dies?" Klaus asks her when her eyes are slipping shut. Her feet are in his lap, somehow, though she doesn't recall granting him the liberty.

"Maybe I'll die first. Who knows. Maybe the Petrova line is predisposed to terminal brain cancer and we've just never known it because I'm the first one to make it over thirty."

"Be serious."

"I am."

"How can you be, when you're refusing to acknowledge your immortality?"

Elena squints one eye open at him. "Still human last I checked. Very much so mortal."

Klaus waves his hand. "In theory, but hardly in practice. We've discussed this already. The Fates have decreed that you can't die, not in any way that matters, any more than I can."

Elena rolls her eyes. "That's a big assumption. I'm going to die one day. Permanently."

She's too tired and too drunk on bourbon and nerves and Klaus's overwhelming presence to unpack the psychological implications of Klaus requiring her to be literally immortal—no, deathless— the way he is.

He never could bear the thought of being alone.

"I'll turn you before that ever has a chance of happening," he goes on.

"How are you going to accomplish that? I could have a deadly car accident tomorrow."

"I'd pull you back from the Other Side."

"Klaus—I'm really getting married tomorrow. I've moved on."

"You may marry as many men as you desire, I care not."

"Do you even hear yourself?"

"Yes, quite clearly. Do you?"

"Why did you come here tonight? I already told you that we're in the past."

"Because you wanted to see me."

"Nothing could be further from the truth."

Klaus smiles, sidles closer so he can cup her jaw. He rubs his thumb over her lips. "There's my liar," he murmurs with so much affection that it almost breaks her.

Elena pulls away. "I need to go to bed."

Klaus raises his brows.

"Alone," she clarifies. "I'm getting married tomorrow."

"As you say."

He kisses her goodbye for a long, long time, and, for some reason, she doesn't tell him to stop.


She does get married the next day.

And, to both her sharp relief and her bitter disappointment, Klaus does not try to stop the wedding, or show up to ruin her honeymoon. He disappears altogether, as is the way of him.

Elena tucks the memory of him deep inside of herself and gives her hand and her heart and her life, every day of it, to Collin.

Until death they do part.


For five years, they are very, very happy.

Collin gets a teaching position, and Elena spends her free days writing short stories which she even occasionally gets published in a few magazines, and the ones that don't make it she self-publishes anyway on her blog because after all this time, she's doing this for her. And they open up a pottery studio of their own, like the one they met in in Taos, and even though Elena is still lousy at actually making anything with her hands, running the studio and seeing all of the townies she knows so well from pouring them coffee for the past three years show up wreathed in smiles or in focused frowns with their tongues between their teeth is a rich satisfaction all on its own. And then one day without really planning it they find out they're pregnant, and they have a little girl Elena names Miranda Jenna but whom Collin calls MJ so doggedly that eventually that's all Elena calls her either. They take her to the preschool coop down the road with each of her hands grasped tight in one of theirs, and then later they take her home to their little two bedroom ranch house with the peeling blue floral wall paper in the kitchen and the cabinets they painted together, all three of them, last spring, bearing MJ's tiny hand prints in neon colors, and their bed that is never, ever cold or empty.


For five years, Elena keeps a secret.

Klaus never reappears to visit her, but she receives letters from him, randomly, haphazardly, throughout all of it. Sometimes she gets a whole stack of them, for days on end, and sometimes months will go by before she will get a note with a single line scrawled in a hurry, tucked away with an interesting stone he picked up in the Andes or an amulet for luck he hoped she would wear (but which of course she never does), or a handful of feathers tucked into a square of linen. Sometimes there are no notes at all, just the little odds and ends offered like stray thoughts.

He never tells her he's coming back for her, or references her life with Collin in any way, or so much as asks her for her blood. The closest he comes to acknowledging her day to day life is a flower arrangement of delicate water lilies floating in a shimmering seaglass bowl, left without a card, delivered to her bedside two days after MJ is born.


She never writes him back, but that never stops the letters from coming just the same.


She keeps them all, in a little box nestled inside of a purse she never uses, stored out of sight at the top of her closet.


And then, one day, Collin doesn't come home from work. She doesn't think anything of it at first. He's often late, helping students with their projects after hours, preparing materials for the next day's lessons, tinkering with the machinery in the workshop.

There is a moment though, fifteen minutes after he is due home, when she pauses to look out the window, and the sun goes behind a cloud, and the world goes very quiet, as though someone had hit the mute button on the entire neighborhood. She doesn't think anything of it when it happens, but later, when she gets the phone call, when she rushes in a blind haze to the scene of the accident and later as she stumbles to the morgue, she thinks back on that moment, that little insignificant moment that had passed so quickly she hardly even paid attention to it at the time, and she will think that must have been the moment when it happened.


Klaus slips his hand into hers at Collin's funeral, and she is so tired, like her skin is too tight and just the effort of standing strains her bones to breaking, that she leans on him and lets him be her pillar.


Somehow, that Klaus returns to her in the cataclysm of her grief does not surprise her.

She had told him once, years ago, at the end of one lifetime and the beginning of another, that he would never kill Collin because he would never dare give her a grief he could not share.

She had been wrong. She learns, in those days and then weeks following Collin's death, that Klaus could share her grief after all, as he stays by her, quiet and grave as she needs him to be, while she figures out how to put together a new life for herself and her daughter, and what it means that he has slotted so neatly into whatever it is that she is building.


"You must have wished for this," she tells him one night after she's put MJ to bed. Her hours have been all over the place ever since the accident. Sometimes the little girl goes to bed at dawn and sometimes at noon. Most of the time, she refuses to sleep at all unless Elena agrees to let her into her cold and empty bed. Tonight, she is lucky to have her to bed only a little after sunset, and in her own room, at that.

"I never wanted to see you in pain," Klaus murmurs.

"But you wanted Collin dead."

For response, he sweeps her up into an embrace that she can't help but meld into, even if she feels wretched about it at the same time. The whole town is gossiping about them, wondering. She'd told MJ that Klaus is an old family friend come to help them, like an uncle, but her neighbors and friends aren't so readily accepting of this explanation. It's exhausting.

"I did, and I did not," Klaus answers her, stroking her hair like she's the small child in need of reassurance. "I always knew you would outlive him, that your marriage to him would be transitory… and yet I would never wish for your heart to be broken again by death."

Elena pulls away. "You really mean that. How? He was your rival, and you lost."

Klaus looks truly surprised by her questioning. "I love you," he says. "Your grief is mine."


That's the crux of it, between them. They've shared their grief, and so they've shared their hearts.


Part of her worries, late at night, that Klaus had somehow had a hand in the mundane street accident that had taken Collin's life—that she is responsible, deep down.

But she can't let herself go down that road to certain madness. Not with MJ depending on her.

So every morning, she tucks the fear away, and gets on with her day.


"I need time," she finally tells Klaus three weeks after the funeral.

"As it stands, I have an abundance of that very thing."

"No. I need—space, and time, and a chance to figure out what my life is now, and what to do for MJ, and whether we should stay or start over elsewhere—what would be better for her. I need you to go, and to give me that chance."

He looks at her for a long time. Sighs, as though it hasn't been long enough. "Alright."


He's gone the next morning, and Elena is surprised by MJ's disappointment that he left without saying goodbye.


Years pass, and Elena raises her daughter. She takes her back to Virginia, to Mystic Falls, without really ever making the decision to do so. Buys a new house, smaller than the one she grew up in, and somehow settles back into a life she has assumed impossibly lost to her for nearly twenty years.

There's something miraculous about discovering how wrong she was.

About the way the old ladies in the Historical Society smile when MJ introduces herself as Miranda Jenna. And if they coo that MJ has her grandmother's impish smile—well, they're wrong, of course, but they're also right, aren't they?

About the old familiar circuit of Founder's balls and awkward fundraising auctions and charity events over the holidays creating a shape to the year. About the taste of the fries at the Grill, which MJ can never seem to get enough of, or the way the light hits the walls in her house just so, the particularity of its quality evoking memories of cool Christmas mornings and warm May evenings from the course of her childhood.

About how even though the people she loved the most in that other life are all gone, even though Collin is gone, she still has the person she loves the most in this life, and raising her here, not amongst their ghosts but amongst their memories, gives her the strength she needs to live.

That realization stumbles through her thoughts one afternoon while she is stuffing envelopes for what had been one of her mother's impassioned charities. In the background, the kettle starts to whistle while Elena slumps back in her chair, her hands flat on the table, envelopes dropped aside, her fingers clenching and unclenching.

She had told Klaus she could not die, but now she has found the true secret: how to live.


In a little while, it will be time to pick MJ up from school. They'll talk about her day, and make plans for the weekend, and Elena will most likely succumb to her daughter's wheedling and bring her for ice cream after dinner.

But right now, she takes her phone out of her pocket, and very carefully makes a phone call she realizes has been years in the making.


Klaus comes for her, of course.


Much, much later, on a wispy July evening, Elena stands on a balcony overlooking the sea, frowning at the waves and thinking about a river that coils in her blood.

Strong arms encircle and enfold her, and a familiar chest presses against her back.

Like this, they are something more than a memory of another night together.

Like this, she is once again reminded that there is fire in her blood, too.

Klaus kisses the side of her neck, his mouth slow and dangerous over her pulse point, and Elena leans into him.

They're on something of a holiday. MJ is away at summer camp for the next five weeks, and Klaus has stolen her away the way he always wanted to so that they can relearn each other.

It's a little unnerving how easy it has been to fit right back into place with him. Unnerving how rapidly her love for him has swamped over her senses again, overtaking her reservations and papering over all of the difficult life decisions they will have to make if they really have any shot at a future together.

But for now, Elena relishes his closeness. Relishes his love, and the unlikely security she finds in it.

"Why did you give in?" Klaus asks her after a time, his fingers tracing the so-faint-you-can-hardly-see-it scar on her throat.

The question throws Elena back in time. Makes her smile. It's with that smile on her lips that she turns in his arms, kisses him soundly—so soundly, that he doesn't seem to remember his question when she finally replies, "I realized that you can only fight the inevitable for so long."


A/N: Thank you so much for reading and for commenting, and for indulging me on this project.

For my FE readers— update coming this month. It's go time.