Love Bites
by adlyb
Pairing: Klaus/Elena
Rating: R
Spoilers: Through season 4 of TVD
Warnings: Explicit sex, excessive bloodplay, angst, more angst, depression, canon-typical violence
Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.
A/N: Just a short little holiday project. Daily small updates until finished.
The next time he sees Elena Gilbert, she's slumped over a table at the Grill. Her long, dark hair pools around her, obscuring her face from him. It matters not. He can read her as clearly as he could see the stars in the night sky as a boy. Defeat slumps her shoulders, surrender bows her head. Every line of her body whispers of these twin disasters. He's never known a Petrova to give up before, and it surprises him how much it disturbs him to see her this way.
Without quite consciously deciding to do it, he finds himself sliding into the booth bench across from her and saying, "Whatever it is that's gotten you so down, it cannot possibly be so devastating as all that."
Elena picks her forehead up from the table and stares at him. Apart from the other night, which hadn't really counted, this is the first close look he's really gotten of her since she turned. Without the venom-induced insanity distorting her features, he can see clearly what's changed. There's some essential spark missing from her eyes that had been there when she'd been mortal. Even the last time he saw her human, when she'd been tied-down and half-dead from blood loss, there'd been a palpable intensity to her, a fire that he could never quite douse. Death, it seems, has done the job for him.
"I nearly killed Matt tonight," she tells him miserably. "I wanted to kill him."
He drums his fingers against the tabletop. He has no idea who Matt is, exactly. He's not sure why he's here, in this booth, for that matter, or what response would pull Elena out of her doldrums, or even why he has the urge to do just that. "Did you want to kill him?" he finally ventures. "It might perk you up if you did."
In response, she throws the saltshaker at him.
He catches it neatly and rolls it under his hand, waiting. He doesn't know what for.
"How do you deal?" she asks him.
"I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific."
"With—with everything. The murder and the bloodshed and just—the existential horror of what we are."
He shrugs. Easy. "You're a vampire, sweetheart. There's no horror when the leopard devours the lamb. It's just what you are, now."
"I hate that." She sounds so hollow, her voice like a gust of wind over barren plains. When she looks at him, he gets the impression that she doesn't really see him at all.
He can't stand it. He would rather see her really dead than see her like this. Surely Katerina had never worn such cold and empty features?
"Why did you share your blood with me the other night?" she asks him abruptly. Her question derails him entirely.
"Well, you see, you were dying quite tragically from werewolf venom—"
"No,not—Don't you usually put it in a glass or something? Wasn't it kind of…"
"Intimate?"
"Yes." Something flickers in her eyes—there and then not. Something bright like the first moment upon awakening, when the night's dreams linger vivid as a jeweled bird flitting through a dappled patch of sunlight. There and then gone.
"Perhaps it did not occur to me."
He watches her watching him. It's as though he can feel the scales move as she weighs him.
"You're attracted to me," she states at last, a matter of hard fact, nothing more. Without letting him get a word in to deny it, she pushes herself to her feet and hurries off, casting one significant look over her shoulder before she exits the premises.
He cannot help but to follow her. At this point, the habit of chasing after Petrova women is too firmly engrained to ever resist the impulse.
Outside, she waits for him in the alley.
"Care to illuminate—"
She shoves him against the wall and mashes her mouth against his. He can't say he's exactly thrilled by this, but then again, he is. He cannot help but grapple her up tight against him and steal the lead in this dance from her. She's frightfully terrible at this anyway, and he cannot imagine she's led the Salvatores and his brother along on such a merry chase all year if she usually kisses like this.
The longer it goes on, the more he realizes that for all of Elena's enthusiastic response, her swarming mouth and churning hips and restless attempts to draw him impossibly closer, there's still something dissatisfying about her. Something dampened. It's like she's not even here, like she's not even kissing him. Like the whole thing is feigned.
He's about to end this when she drops to her knees and fumbles with his belt buckle. He watches her as she unbuttons his fly and reaches out to stroke him. Her hands do not shake at all. She's much better at this than she was at kissing, and when she leans forward to take him into her mouth, he has to close his eyes. He's unfortunately certain that if he actually saw those lips wrapped around his cock, he would come on the spot.
Nonetheless, after only a few minutes, she does something tricky with her tongue that distracts him into looking down at her. It's as sweet a sight as he can remember—as sweet, maybe, as the moment just before he tasted her that first time when she looked into his eyes and told him to go to hell. She'd been at the height of her beauty then, more beautiful by far than she is now. And yet the sight of saintly Elena Gilbert on her knees for him makes up for that. She glances up from beneath her long sooty lashes and their eyes lock. She is here, she is here with him. Her fingers clench against his thighs, and she takes him in deep, until he bottoms out against the back of her throat. They're still looking into each other's eyes when he comes. She swallows without pausing what she is doing, her tongue and her clever fingers milking every drop from him, and he wonders, abstractly, if she's doing it out of habit or if it's deliberate.
Afterwards, Elena brushes her hand across the back of her mouth and stands. He doesn't help her, although he wonders if he should have once she's on her feet. Unsure of himself, he reaches out to touch her, to say something, but she bats him away. There's no real feeling in the movement, just a reflex. Already he thinks he must have seen wrong when their eyes had met. A trick of the light, of the flesh. Because whoever this is standing in front of him, she's not really Elena Gilbert at all. It occurs to him that the problem with her is that she's become insubstantial. A ghost wearing a vampire's skin. It's not supposed to work like that. And it can't be her strange doppelganger nature that's mucked this up—Katerina had turned out fine—it must be something about the girl herself.
Just then, Elena turns those huge, dark eyes on him, and for a moment, she is real again. "Don't tell Stefan."
"Why would I? It was hardly worth writing home about."
She nods. The words don't seem to pierce her at all.
He watches her turn away, out into the brightly lit streets of wholesome Mystic Falls.
She doesn't look back once.
Much as he is loath to admit this, even to himself, it is she who pierces him.
Several blocks away, where she is certain no one can see her, Elena leans against the side of a brick building, deep in the shadow of its awning, and takes huge, gulping breaths. She sucks her lower lip into her mouth and runs her tongue over her teeth. She can still taste Klaus's spunk in the corners of her mouth, the back of her throat. Her heart can't really race anymore; she's not had enough human blood to create such a close illusion to life. But she feels like it would if it could.
It's only been a couple of weeks since she turned, and the entire experience has been one horror after another. She can't cope.
More than anything, she wants to punish herself for her instincts that had cheerfully urged her to rip Matt's arm off so she could suck the marrow from his bones. That had played through her mind, she'd been about to actually do it, when Damon had intervened.
She has no idea what she's doing, only that when she had seen the terror in Matt's eyes, it had made her mouth water and her head pound, and it was only later, when she had come back to herself, that she had felt likethe monster she had always most feared becoming. That had been the most horrifying thing of all—to have been so close to toppling over the edge into inhumanity, and to have been unable to sense the impending fall until afterwards.
She hates herself, hates this body, hates this sick out of control feeling that gets stronger every day as her hunger, never really sated, gets worse and worse.
Tonight, as she'd sat at the Grill, head down against the cool sealed-wood surface, she'd wanted to punish herself. Wanted to make herself feel as awful as possible. Debasing herself with Klaus had seemed like just the ticket.
Now, legs trembling from disgusting waves of lust, she knows she's accomplished that and more. If she were to touch herself, she knows she'd find herself heavy and slick with desire. Ew ew ew.
That's the worst part. That, while it was happening, it wasn't just a self-loathing punishment, because she was into it. She'd totally forgotten what the point of this exercise was supposed to be. She'd gladly let Klaus open her mouth wide wide wide and plunder her with his tongue the way that she was sure he'd plunder her elsewhere. He'd run his hands all over her body and she'd started it, she'd asked for it. She'd enjoyed it.
Elena has always needed a cross to bear. Maybe this will be it. Her filthy, guilty secret. That one time she hated herself so much that she willingly dropped down on her knees to service the one person she should hate the very most.
And had gotten off on it.
A/N: Thanks for reading!