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.
This is going well.
He pulls back from her mouth to study her, and she stares him down boldly. She's straddling his hips, has been since she tripped them over some minutes ago. His blood splatters her lips, her chin and fingers. Paired with that fierce vampire's gaze, it's altogether a thoroughly arresting sight. That talk he'd been after can wait. What he wants very much, right now, is to relieve her of her clothes and to have her like this, looking at him with a raw intensity like ball lightning on a moonless night.
She leans forward, swift as death, and recaptures his lower lip between her teeth. So far, these kisses that make him bleed are much the better of the one she gave him that night outside the Grill. This much of his blood in her system frenzies her— as well it should. It delights him. She writhes against him, twisting her hips in a way that he knows means she will need his help if she is to find any relief.
"There's my girl," he murmurs into her mouth as his hand slips up, under her shirt, to palm at her breast. His other hand maps the curve of her hips, and his thumb traces the burning, sensitive skin right at the waistband of her knickers. "There's my good girl."
This, of all things, is what pulls Elena back. Her fangs recede and her eyes clear and she stares at him like he's flaying her alive. She scrambles off of him, unnaturally clumsy for a vampire, and staggers to her feet.
"This is a mistake." She says it to herself, with a million-yard stare, like she's forgotten all about him. She actually has the nerve to sound ill. Guilt is its own cult, he supposes, and Elena must be one of its saints. "I have to find Caroline."
The maelstrom that has been spiraling out of control on the other side of the house has finally worn itself out. Caroline left some minutes ago, too upset to even remember Elena, but he does not bother to tell Elena that.
Klaus wipes the blood from his mouth and stands. It seems the time for the talk he'd wanted has arrived all on its own.
"It's hardly a mistake if it keeps happening," he observes.
She lifts her head from where she's been transfixed by her bloodied fingers and glares at him. "It only keeps happening because you keep foisting your blood on me!" She points at him accusingly. "You're—you're a foister!"
"And you'd have no trouble resisting if you simply took me up on my offer to teach you how to hunt properly."
"No."
"Come now, it will be fun."
"Was this supposed to be fun?"
He raises both eyebrows. Adjusts his rumpled clothes. "I thought it rather was. Or what else are the kids calling it these days?"
"What can you possibly get out of this? You hate me."
He scoffs. "Hardly." And here, he must tread carefully. Wisdom urges him to say no more, but there's another part that senses he may be able to turn Elena's course with the right words. He chooses not to analyze how very much his heart speeds when he tells her, "I actually find myself to be rather… fond of you. You have a certain… indefinable appeal, quite apart from your utility, from which I am not… immune."
This does not have the hoped for effect.
"You have a crush on me? You don't even have an ulterior motive?" Disgust drips from her voice. She starts to pace, and her arms gesture wildly, like startled birds, as she speaks. "God! I just assumed you were doing this to get back at Stefan for something, or to blackmail me down the line, or to maneuver me into doing something reprehensible. But no. Of course you're not doing this for normal reasons!"
Only a Petrova would list any of those things as normal.
Only he would agree.
But that's quite enough. He uses his superior speed to cut directly into her personal space and grab hold of her. Anything to stop that maddening circling 'round. She's deliciously warm under his fingers. "It takes two to tango, sweetheart. Why, pray tell, are you still here if the idea so repulses you?"
"Obviously because I hate myself."
He narrows his eyes at her. "No, that's not it at all."
"What about Caroline?" she asks him desperately.
"What about her?"
"I thought—I thought you had feelings for her."
"Irrelevant." It's not Caroline who haunts his every thought.
"I want to go." She holds out her hand for the key to the door.
"Are you really too much a coward to face yourself?"
Her mouth twists into a corpse's rictus of a smile. "Unlike you, I have a doppelganger to show me all of my worst flaws."
"There's something between us. You feel it too."
"All I feel is self-loathing. Disgust. I don't feel anything for you."
"You're a liar."
The smile slips, subsumed by something quieter, sadder, realer. "Not about this. I don't feel anything for you at all."
Some feeling flashes through him, a brief pressure in his chest, but he pushes it aside in favor of a nasty smile and a lingering once over of her body. "Thank you for clarifying. In that case, please do give Miss Forbes my regards, will you? No need to settle for a cheap copy when one's already sampled the best."
Elena's palms are oddly damp when he relinquishes the key, and her fingers tremble. She searches his face, with such intensity that he thinks she must see straight through every scrap of rage and viciousness with which he has armored himself this past millennium, into the sad, love-starved thing he'd been before. She looks at him like she sees him entirely. Knows him entirely. "Fuck you, Klaus," she says with soft deliberation.
That same feeling curls around his heart, as though he's taken a stake.
A/N: Aaaand we're back. Thank you for the many reviews I received on this, here and elsewhere!