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 is the one who seeks him out after that. It's a heady feeling, to be the thing she cannot do without.
Night after night, for weeks that spread across the early spring, he has her in his bedroom, in the downstairs parlor spread out in front of the fireplace, on top of the dining room table. There is a memorable night at a town charity when she catches his eye across the room and, when he follows her out to the gardens, she pulls him into the flower beds. For the rest of the evening, he has the satisfaction of knowing the grass stains on the back of her dress are his doing.
Except, of course, it's Stefan with whom she leaves.
There's a frenetic quality to her kisses, to her caresses and her urgent, coaxing hips and lips and elegant long-fingered hands. She kisses him like she might combust if they slow down. Maybe she will.
Only when he is finally inside of her does she pause. Not so anyone would notice— but he is not anyone. It is an infinitesimal thing, that freezing, fleeting blink of an eye when she looks down at him and seems to remember him, remember herself. His heart leaps in his chest when their eyes lock, because like this, she is not quite the ghost nor the vampire, but very nearly the human girl who would never have climbed into his bed. When this happens, he gathers her in closer, kisses her until she forgets herself again. He wants her to forget and forget and forget, at least for just a little longer.
It works, and he revels in how fiercely her passion matches his own.
Afterwards, she clambers out of the bed and makes haste putting herself to rights.
She never stays, once she has gotten what she came for.
He watches her while she straightens her sweater and finger combs her hair, doing her feeble best to hide the evidence of their trysts.
He wonders if Stefan knows anyway.
Her hunger never fails to strike a thrill through him.
She kisses him in his second drawing room with such terrible famine, mouth like a maw, all teeth and barely suppressed lethal instinct, her fingers claws scraping bloody tracks against the back of his neck.
There's a growing part of him that yearns for this exact moment, when he can taste her need for him, primal and vast, a fathomless lake within her. He's never been needed in the way he senses that she needs him. It feeds something inside of him. Something small and thirsty for these stolen moments, for the small tastes of herself which she gives him.
Strange to think that he had judged her so harshly when first she kissed him. He can now see exactly how she could lead so many around by the collar, because that is exactly what she is doing with him.
Her simple kisses are the stuff of his nightmares.
Unsatisfied with such chaste, if deadly, delights for long, she soon moves from his mouth, along the edge of his jaw, to the juncture of shoulder and throat. She gives him a long, firm lick there, and he shivers in her arms. She feels his reaction to her, and just that, something so small, is enough to make her draw back. He cannot show the least bit of feeling for her, of true excitement, or she will run away.
"I have to go," she says.
He grabs hold of her wrist. "Don't."
"Tell me again why you're here," she says, urging him to lie to her, to spin some wicked tale that will ease her conscience.
"I want you," he tells her, with enough honesty to strip her flesh to the bone.
She shakes her head. "I wish that you didn't. It would be so much easier if you didn't." She slips free of him, or he lets her slip free, and wraps her arms around herself. Her movement sets her thin shoulder bones jutting out from beneath the skin. His blood stains the tips of her fingers.
"Would you really rather I were using you?"
"The way I'm using you? Yes."
"I'm hardly getting the short end of the bargain here, sweetheart."
"I don't think I should give you anything you want. I think anything you want must be bad."
He raises an eyebrow and observes her closely. "Why is that? I'm not planning anything particularly sinister just this moment." If she were better fed, she would be able to hear the Hunter rattling against his chains. But she is not. "Unless having my way with you counts." His eyes linger on her body in a way closer to an actual caress than a glance.
"I don't want to want you," she says. "I don't want you to want me." She tries to scrub her hands through her hair, notices instead the red residue on her fingers. She brings her fingers to her mouth like she cannot help herself, because she can't, and Klaus knows he has her then.
He takes hold of her hands and draws her to him, his touch as gentle and light as moonlight falling on fresh snow. He guides her mouth back to his neck, to where she had placed it so temptingly close to his jugular, and coaxes her to bite. "That's it," he murmurs, voice thick with passion, as she drinks from him.
He still doesn't understand why she's letting herself edge so close to the brink of starvation, but if it gives him an in with her, he will not question it too far. And it's not as though he hasn't enjoyed feeding her.
The Hunter has been chained up in his study-cum-dungeon for weeks now. His house guest is either quite a determined actor or really does know impressively little about his own lineage.
The thing of it is, the situation is coming to a head. He'll have to do away with him either way soon. He just has to decide how much he still desires what information the Hunter might yet conceal before he does.
She falls to her knees before him, a supplicant, a goddess, and blows him like a master. He cannot help but reflect on where an eighteen-year-old girl has learned her bedroom skills. Wonders if Stefan has been her tutor, or if she had come to his bed already versed in these arts.
He wonders who exactly has had her first.
It's not til much later that he catches himself thinking that he would like to have her last.
The next time she comes to him, he catches her in a wing of the house to which he has purposefully never brought her.
She stands with her back to him, sifting through a stack of finished paintings. The ones he thought turned out poorly, he realizes with a bolt of horror.
"Growing a bit presumptuous, are we?" he grinds out.
She turns to face him at the sound of his voice, not even bothering to pretend to be guilty. She does look surprised though. As though she had not heard him approach. Signs such as these, that prove how little she is sustaining herself on, always make him uneasy.
"I like these."
"Are you mocking me?" He's used to his siblings taunting him about his work, but he feels exposed and tender under her scrutiny.
"I like seeing that you're human, after all."
She is so very wrong. But he doesn't bother to correct her. He is cruel, but, apparently, even he has his limits.
He flourishes his bleeding wrist before her.
She looks up into his face with eyes like liquid night, huge and luminous with want.
As always, she takes what he offers her.
"What do you get out of this?"
"I just want to feel alive again. I feel that, when I drink from you."
"You're deader than most, it's true. But that's not the vampirism that's done that to you."
"No, it's not. But it doesn't help."
She always comes to him, but that does not mean that there are not nights when he passes by her pristine white house and pauses, for just a moment, to watch her without the smokescreen she prefers to throw up whenever she can think to do it.
Most of the time she is all quiet smiles, lecturing her brother to do his homework, cleaning dishes and texting and reading dreary English novels, her legs kicked up over the back of the living room sofa and her rich dark hair cascading over the arm, trailing on the floor.
When she is at home, as near as he can tell, she likes to pretend she has never fucked him senseless.
When she is at home, she likes to pretend that she is still a girl, human and sweet.
Self-delusion is a vice he could never tolerate easily.
But then, sometimes, she is alone, and he catches, for just a moment, a shadow sliding into her eyes.
Somewhere in that shadow is the real Elena Gilbert.
She's a star, falling in on herself. He cannot help but be drawn into her orbit.
A/N: This chapter got rather long, so I've cut it in half. Just a few more chapters to go until we hit the end of this. Thanks for reading and for reviewing!