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.
She keeps going back to Matt, taking only ever a very little, a trickle of blood to keep her going. Every time she reaches for more, the memory of that night behind the Grill with Klaus sobers her. Fills her with a different sort of driving hunger, chased with a potent shot of guilt. It's enough to sharpen her control, just barely enough, so she keeps feeding from Matt, keeps putting off Damon's offer to help her learn to hunt despite the sharpening pains in her belly, the burning in her throat.
Because if she learns to hunt, then there won't be any more denying it. She really will have transformed completely from girl to monster. And she can't live with that.
He spies her several days later from across the room at some annual party or another. Really, the entire year is riddled with them. He wonders how anyone on the Town Council has time to worry about vampires at all.
When he draws nearer to her, he sees what her polished appearance tries so hard to hide. She's on edge, a pale and shadowed thing lurking under her skin. He should chide her for being so obvious.
"You should at least make the attempt to appear human," he advises her.
Elena whips around and gapes up at him. Her mouth forms a soft pretty little oh that reminds him of what else she might do with it.
"I'm fine," she says, curt and direct. She moves to brush by him, as though he is nothing, no one.
He grabs hold of her arm and is startled by how cool she is to the touch.
"What?"
"Mind you don't let your mask slip tonight, sweetheart. It's one thing for the mayor to know what we are, another for the whole town mob to descend upon us."
"You mean on me."
"Yes. On you."
She breaks away and disappears back into the crowd.
There's small talk to make after that, Salvatores to torment and Lockwoods to either woo or threaten. He finds Caroline midway through and succeeds in whisking her away for a heated conversation over champagne cocktails, but he gets distracted by the sight of Elena prowling the edges of the party.
He doesn't know what's wrong with her. She's taken to being a vampire less well than she took to actually dying. Perhaps if he had been the one to change her, as he had been the one to kill her—
No use thinking that way. Done is done, and it's Damon Salvatore to have taken the lead there.
He watches as Elena takes a drink off of a passing waiter's tray and knocks it back. Makes a circuit of the room, finds another waiter, and downs another. Another. If she were still human, he'd wager she'd be drunk off her arse. But for a vampire, the signs are clear. She's using the alcohol to numb what must be truly astonishing hunger.
Someone stops her with a touch to her arm and he takes in the way she freezes, inhumanly still for just a microsecond, before that devastating smile unfolds on her face and she twinkles at whichever of the town's matrons it is stupid enough to have engaged a vampire so clearly on the cusp of losing control.
Idly, he wonders what would happen if she did snap and drain her conversation partner. He'd be interested to see Elena feed, to watch her face shift and those exquisite sharp gleaming teeth burst from her beautiful mouth. Except, then they really would be in a jam, because despite what he said to her earlier, he would step in to save her. He's had very promising reports out of Italy about a certain sword and he's feeling optimistic about returning her to the mortal coil.
Maybe that would fix her. Bring back the old, familiar Elena who he had not realized he rather liked, at least as far as these things go, until she had up and disappeared.
In the meantime, he excuses himself from his conversation with Caroline and surreptitiously makes his way toward Elena.
He takes hold of her elbow as soon as he reaches her and pulls her along with him, down a hall away from the mass of the party. "So sorry to interrupt, but I really must steal Miss Gilbert," he calls over his shoulder as he propels Elena along.
Elena waits until they are out of eyeshot before she swats at his hands. "What are you doing?" she hisses at him.
"Saving your ungrateful little afterlife," he tells her brightly before bundling her into the cramped powder room. He locks the door behind them.
Elena leans against the sink, crosses her arms over her breasts, and glares. "Let me out."
"You're about twelve seconds away from ripping into the nearest artery."
"I'm fine."
"Hardly." He touches her cold arm. "Have you been subsisting on the blood of animals? That's inadvisable for the newly turned. The magic animating you is still settling."
"How is drinking animal blood different from drinking human blood anyway? Humans are animals too."
He frowns at her. "The magic doesn't see it that way. Is it Stefan forcing you to this?"
She shakes him off her arm and leans as far away from him as she can in the small space. "Stefan's not making me do anything. I've been feeding off Matt since I turned."
Matt, the one she'd almost killed, with such startling aftermath. Klaus pauses. A suspicion creeps in on him. "Only him?"
She nods, looks away.
"Dangerous arrangement. He must be as ensorcelled by you as all the rest."
She frowns at him. "No, he's just—we're just friends. He knows I don't want to hurt anyone, so he offered. As a thank you."
He doesn't really care what for. "You're cold to the touch. You're not getting enough to eat from just the one vein. You'll either kill him or kill yourself trying."
"It's the best I can manage."
"I could teach you."
"You'd turn me into a ripper just to amuse yourself."
"I wouldn't. Scout's honor."
"Does anyone fall for that?"
"What about bloodbags? Those are relatively simple to obtain."
She rolls her eyes at him.
"Of course, your compulsion's probably too weak to manage that. I'm surprised you can even think straight."
She glares at him meaningfully. "Clearly I can't. Are we done yet?" She tries to shove past him but he blocks her way.
"I really can't have you exposing yourself," he tells her lowly. He lifts his hand to his mouth and bites down into the flesh of his palm. Offers it to her. "Consider this a stopgap, just to get you through the party."
Elena's eyes grow unnaturally dark, and he sees, with some satisfaction, the veins begin to bubble under her eyes. "We can't." Her eyes don't leave the ruby blood pooling in his hand. "It's too much like cheating."
To a vampire, it's exactly like cheating. But she doesn't need to know that. "I won't tell Stefan," he promises. Coaxes. "It'll be our little secret."
Between her hunger and the memory of what his blood had tasted like, which he can see just swimming in her eyes, she doesn't stand a chance. Elena grabs hold of the offered hand and licks the blood from his palm with one long, slow stroke of her tongue. It's artless and sensuous and he's pleasantly surprised when she moans—just this quiet, private little thing deep in her throat, not at all for his benefit and yet entirely to his pleasure.
She laves at his palm again, only to find that the wound is already healed.
"Bite," he encourages.
She obeys beautifully, teeth seizing into the thin flesh of his hand, their sharp tips grazing against the many fine bones.
It's the most natural thing in the world to draw her closer as she finally succumbs to what her body needs and craves. She must agree, because Elena presses herself needfully against his body, hips and belly and breasts flush against him, her legs tangling with his own as she crowds him against the sink. He buries his face in her hair and sucks in deep lungfuls of her scent.
She smells almost just the same as she had last year. The temptation to flip this around and sink his fangs into her throat is nearly overpowering. He can remember so vividly the way her blood had rushed and roared, rife with that potent magic that rolled through her blood like smoke billowing over a pond. Were he to taste her again, would that magic still lurk somewhere in her blood? Dormant, perhaps, curled up small, a tadpole in its soft gelatinous egg, waiting for the blush of mortality to return?
Someone knocks on the door. Elena growls at his wrist and pushes him more sharply against the sink.
Forget what he had said about her before. She is stunning like this, scarlet-eyed and crimson-lipped, a slave to her passion and her appetites. He's stirred over the memories from when he had cured her countless times, and none of them can surpass the vision before him.
Unable to help himself, he pries her off of him and kisses her on the mouth. It's a deep, open mouthed kiss, frenzied and consuming. Her teeth tear into his lips and sink into his tongue, sluicing their mouths with more blood. He thrusts his tongue against her own and tastes himself in her mouth, along the seam of her lips and against the roof of her mouth. Elena scratches at his back, pulls on his hair. It takes less than half a thought to turn and lift her onto the edge of the sink. Everything after that hazes and pulses. At some point she wraps her legs around his waist, rucking her dress to her hips. Desperately, he tongues at her neck, her jaw, the waterfall of his blood cascading down into the line of her cleavage. She's hot and flushed beneath his hands and mouth, tempting beyond comprehension. He wants to inhale her. Devour her. Damn the consequences.
The knock raps against the door again.
Elena sways in his grasp.
He looks up at her and sees that, at some point, the bloodlust has faded, settled back into human features. There's a sharpness in her gaze that hadn't been there before, a brightness that calls out to him, enthralls him. Ensnares him.
All at once, Elena's face drains of color, and she lurches out of his embrace. She throws the lock off the door and darts from the room, gone before he has time to react.
Slowly, Klaus straightens his jacket and takes stock of himself in the mirror. There's smeared blood dribbling down his chin and flecking the collar and cuffs of his white dress shirt. Not too much on the sink or floor, though. He pokes his head outside the powder room and finds the same matron Elena had been speaking to earlier waiting to get in. In her haste to retreat, Elena'd knocked the woman flat against the wall, and Klaus finds her only just now straightening herself back up.
The woman's eyebrows climb to her hairline. "I'm astonished by what I've just seen," she begins.
Klaus narrows his eyes at her. If she hadn't interrupted, Elena might not have left in such a hurry. He regrets saving her sorry neck and instead wishes fervently that he'd allowed Elena to do her in. Hell. He probably would have enjoyed watching—that is, before the madhouse descended upon them.
This woman's not his usual preference for a meal, but he's not opposed to breaking her neck to blow off a little steam.
Except, Elena would inevitably hear about it, and that would be awkward.
He settles for compelling her to walk in front of a car in two days time.
She barely makes it outside before she has to hurl her guts up into the shrubbery in a dark corner of the yard. She retches and retches, and it feels like gallons of blood must come up, a never ending humiliating wave that she deserves, deserves, deserves. She's kept this blood down barely any longer than she kept Klaus's blood down the night he saved her from the werewolf venom. It had been a miracle that she'd held down enough that night for the cure to take at all.
After, she lies down with her face pressed against the cool damp grass and breathes in the smell of living, growing things. Like this, she can hear the shift and tumble of the earth below her ears, the sounds of worms and insects burrowing through the soil, the stretching of thirsty roots. Night birds cry and rustle in the trees, and in the distance, cars zip over the highway. The stars wheel above her, so many more visible to her eyes now than there ever were before. It's an entirely new, alien world. She is alien. Dead and yet not dead. Her body unnaturally frozen, so much so that when she finally does die, she will never decompose, never be welcomed back into the embrace of the earth. So much for ashes to ashes and dust to dust. She wonders if this means that she'll never see her mother and father again, after all.
The coldness of the winter earth seeps into her flesh, whatever warmth Klaus had leant her leeched out of her entirely.
She'd been boiling over just a few minutes ago, electrified by the taste of his blood, the feel of his mouth. Swept up so completely in that frenzied tide that she'd forgotten everything, completely and utterly. And for those precious few minutes, she'd felt alive again, careless and wild and in possession of herself. There had been that precipice again, and again she had not recognized it as such.
The knock on the door had saved her. One moment she had been impatiently encouraging Klaus and the next she had been hit with a bolt of stomach-churning nausea. The heat which had been so delicious only seconds before turned to the kind of feverish flashes that coated her in such a sheen of clammy sweat that it had been a miracle she had escaped before Klaus noticed.
The question of what would have happened if they hadn't been interrupted hunts her.
Now, it's obvious that it had all been a huge mistake from the very beginning. A confusion and a penance gone terribly wrong. What had Klaus been thinking, offering her his blood like that?
Maybe if she lies here long enough, she could sink back into the earth. It wouldn't be a true death if she let herself desiccate until the plants overgrew on top of her, their roots and vines holding her close, hiding her. But it's the closest she thinks she can come.
He can't get her off his mind after that.
And he tries—he really, really does. He concerns himself with exposing Tyler Lockwood's infidelities to Caroline, he toys with the wolf girl, he assigns hybrids to this task or to that and he pours out his frustrations on the Hunter who proves to be a gallingly useless source of information.
None of it does a bit of good.
When he closes his eyes, he sees the way she had looked at him, for that infinitesimal flicker of time, and he burns to have her look at him like that again.
A/N: Thanks for reading, and reviewing!