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: My hand slipped. Please enjoy a second update. If you just tuned in, make sure you read chapter 7, which was also posted today!
He spots her huddled up in a corner of the Grill with Damon Salvatore, voices pitched so low even he cannot pick up on the topic furrowing their brows.
They are totally absorbed with each other, their dark heads pressed together.
The knowledge that Damon Salvatore is still in love with her barrels through him all at once, a detail he has so often overlooked in the face of Stefan's more obvious pose as Elena's actual boyfriend.
As he watches them, unhappily observing that there is something so natural about the two of them together. An unexpected openness plays over Elena's features, and he realizes that he has been in error. Somehow, when his head had been turned, he had failed to notice Damon overtaking Stefan's place as his chief rival. Damon, whose blood had turned her.
Some formless suspicion teases at the edge of his thoughts.
Neither of them notice him until he steps right up to them. Sloppy. He could have Damon's heart in his fist before either of them looked up.
"If you're going to conspire, you might choose a less public venue," he drawls, leaning back against the bar, drink in hand.
Damon Salvatore offers him an infuriatingly pleasant smile. "Sorry, we haven't checked our comments box yet, but we'll be sure to take your feedback into consideration." He shifts forward, subtly, when he talks. Placing himself between the perceived threat and Elena. Klaus wishes he could see Damon's reaction if only the other vampire knew how many nights found Elena in his arms.
"What do you want?" Elena asks him bluntly, from behind Damon's shoulder. She doesn't bother to push the annoying obstacle out of the way.
I want you to choose me instead.
"The barkeep's covered in bandages," he tells her instead. He nods toward the blond teenager pouring pints behind the counter. "I assume that is the Matt." Elena's scent is all over him. "Mind he does a better job of covering the evidence of your activities in the future. It wouldn't do at all for anyone to start asking questions."
Damon frowns and raises his brows at Elena, silently communicating something to her which she obviously picks up on, because she gives a nearly imperceptible shake of her head no. Klaus does not like this interplay at all.
The far more irritating of the Salvatore brothers turns back to him. "Remind me again why you're even still here?"
He cannot help but glance to Elena.
"I could ask the same thing of you. Don't I recall hearing something about whichever of you boys she didn't choose was going to leave town forever? It seems to me that Elena's chosen the better brother."
That bland smile slides right off the other vampire's face. Damon stands, and Elena jumps to her feet with him. "Let's say goodbye, Elena."
Elena looks right at him. "Goodbye." She hurries out the door after Damon Salvatore.
Later, she storms back into the Grill and hauls him into the bathroom with her. She locks the door and shoves him back against the wall.
"The fuck was that?" she asks.
"Friendly advice. Your Matt's a walking advertisement for a vampire chew toy."
"Please."
He narrows his eyes and studies her. "So what's it to be? Is Damon Salvatore now to be one of your acolytes as well?"
Her fingers curl around the front of his shirt. "You're jealous."
"Of Damon Salvatore? Never."
"You want me and you're jealous and you can't stand it." Something unexpected sparks in her eyes. A glimmer of excitement, perhaps—he doesn't have time to analyze it, whatever it is, before she's pushing him further into the wall, pressing into him with her hands and her chest, her legs tangling with his, and her mouth cool and hungry against his own.
No, I can't stand it, he thinks as her clever fingers unfasten his belt. As she takes him, somehow, rather than the other way around, what should be the other way around, he thinks, muzzily, that he can't stand it at all.
"I thought you didn't want me to want you," he tells her as he rebuttons and rebuckles. There's a damp patch on his shirt from when she had bitten him, but the dark olive color of the fabric hides it well.
Elena has the nerve to look away. He notices the dark circles under her eyes, darker by the day. In the wan fluorescent light, she looks insubstantial as mist.
For a moment, he fears she really is going to unravel, the magic animating her starved by her stubborn diet. He's seen fledglings die like that before.
No, he thinks, he's feeding her. He's taking care of her. She will be fine.
"Sometimes I surprise even myself," she tells him, finally.
Elena leaves first—she always does—and so when he does make his way out to the bar, he finds a moment to corner this Matt during close-up.
The boy's not on vervain—how could he be, when he's Elena's sole source of sustenance?—and so it is shamefully easy to compel him.
Elena needs to feed more often, and he'll do what he must to be sure of it.
I like seeing that you're human, after all.
He can feel the weakness—the weakness—taking root in him, and if that is not human, he does not know what is.
She comes to him and he takes her upstairs to his bedroom, where he has a fire laid, and he sets her down in front of it so that its heat might sink into her skin. She lets him tear off her shirt, splay his hands against her ribs, his fingers tucking into the too prominent hollows between each one, thumbs tracing the dip down to her hips. He touches with his mouth the whole length of her spine, her arms and her shoulders, belly and breasts and throat, and she basks in it, touching him and urging him on, until she sits up and tells him, as though in a dream, "I have to go."
Klaus's eyes cloud. "I think that's up to me." He presses an open mouthed kiss into her inner thigh, where her blood pumps idly through her femoral artery. She gasps under his touch.
"Klaus, this feels—" Her voice, high and feminine and soft, falters when he hitches her legs over his shoulders and tastes her fully. He doesn't care to listen to whatever it is she has to say. Cannot listen or think at all, when the flavor of her desire, fragrant and consuming, is thick on his tongue.
In the past, he never had a reputation as a particularly selfless lover. But in this, this slow art of opening this most secretive of girls with the simple act of yielding between her thighs, he finds he has patience enough.
Elena comes apart under his mouth, gasping his name, and he finds he is in no hurry to move on. He keeps on, for what seems an eternity, lost in her, his tongue pressing into her, savoring her, hands tracing her hips, her thighs, and then, as he wrings a second orgasm from her, his fingers intertwining with her own.
Her fingers play with the short, damp strands of hair at the nape of his neck. The leaping flames gild her skin, the sight so familiar it almost pains him. She feels almost warm like this. He rests his cheek against her damp thigh and breathes her in, the scent calming, familiar. An oasis.
She makes no effort to get up, which is to the good, because he is not finished with her yet anyway.
When he moves up her body, he pauses just on the brink of entering her, the head of his cock brushing against her slick folds.
Elena stares up at him with eyes wide open. There is something he thinks he might say to her, here, now, but he is at a loss for words.
She lifts and rolls her hips, helplessly, all the while not breaking eye contact, and it takes less than a thought to push inside of her.
There's something different about this night, something that has been insubstantial in the past but it being made real right now. He takes his time with her, moving slowly inside of her, angling his thrusts to rub insistently, torturously, against that spot inside of her that makes her eyelids flutter and her mouth part so prettily. She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him full on the mouth, her sweetness so unexpected that he falters. She does not let him go, but tugs him closer against her. He can feel the way she clenches around him, can feel the way her breath hitches in her chest. She opens her eyes and frowns at him, but not before he sees something foreign in her eyes, some naked emotion that he knows she sees reflected in his own. He cannot help himself, then, finally. He comes, and something about this feels different than it has before.
After, she turns her head away, so she can press her face into the curve of his shoulder. "Don't you think this is a huge mistake? I do."
"Stop saying that."
"This wasn't supposed to happen," she tells him without elaboration. She sounds terribly forlorn.
He gathers her up in his arms and strokes her hair. "There's no going back now, my darling girl."
She won't drink from him when he offers, but she does kiss him, and when he takes her again, this time in his bed, she doesn't look away from his face even once.
His words to her that night prove true.
Something has shifted between them, and try as he might, he cannot shift it back. Does not truly want to shift it back.
Except, she avoids him for almost a week after that. A week, in which time he argues with Bex and half-heartedly pursues Caroline and Tyler Lockwood's end, paints and broods and goes back and forth a dozen times or more on what precisely he shall do with the Hunter whose days are fast dwindling.
After weeks of sampling her near every night, the time without her drives him to an addict's fury. After that night beside the fire, he does not think that he shall ever get her out of his system.
Finally, he can stand it no longer.
He catches her on her doorstep and yanks her back before she can make it past the threshold.
She spins in his arms, almost warm to the touch. The wind shifts her hair, bringing with it the smell of Stefan Salvatore, and beneath that, a faint note of the other brother.
"You've been avoiding me," he says, voice low and flat.
"Yes."
He hauls her back, into the shadows that grow deep against the house. Pins her against an old oak tree with his body and tries to control the murderous jealousy that spits through his body as he imagines what she has been doing with them but not him. Pressed up against him, she molds to his body instantly. It infuriates him. He wants to bite her, mark her, make her his and his alone. But to bite her would be to kill her for true. He is still tempted.
His hands shake as he grabs hold of her face so that she must look at him—not as she had that night, but close enough.
She stares up at him unflinchingly, those black eyes of hers inhuman and haunted.
Something of his black thoughts must show on his face. She plucks them from his head with divining ease.
"I'm a problem you'd rather be done with." It's not a question when she says it like that.
Be done with. They both know how she really means it.
Dread curdles in his gut. She had sounded almost hopeful when she said that.
"Not as such, no," he tells her carefully, backing away.
"You don't like me, though. As much as you want me, you don't like me at all."
"I've told you before that that's not so."
"How can you, when I treat you like this?"
"Like your plaything? Like your bit of fluff on the side?"
"Like my gravest sin."
He recovers quickly. "How long are you going to lead dear old Stefan on? The truth will out, you know."
She stares at him as she pushes herself away from him. "I thought this was the answer. The thing that might make me feel better. I don't think it does." She tries to move past him, but he won't let her this time. Not yet. Her pulse is a little stronger than usual under his fingers. His instructions to the Donovan boy must have taken effect.
"What are you really saying, sweetheart?"
Finally, she looks away from him. "I think we should end this."
"You've said that before."
"This has gone too far."
He draws her against him and folds her up into his arms. She sighs and collapses against his chest, unable to resist this any more than he is. He can feel her giving in to him, and when she finally lets down her guard, he bends to murmur in her ear, "We haven't gone nearly far enough."
For a little while longer, they walk this tight rope together.
And then, one night, Matt Donovan is rushed to the E.R. with a torn-out throat.
That night he glimpses her through her bedroom window. He has the impression that she has been sitting for long hours at the vanity, staring sightlessly into the mirror. There is dried blood on her chin.
He arrives in time to catch the tail-end of the Salvatore brothers' argument, throwing blame in each other's faces for the day everyone knew must come eventually. They leave, first Damon, in a storm, and then Stefan, looking resigned and suffering.
No sooner are they out of the way than he rings the bell, thrice. The younger Gilbert answers the door.
Elena's brother quirks his brow at him. "Uh, is there a reason you're here?"
"Invite me in."
"Does that actually work?"
He's distracted from making a convincing threat by Elena appearing at the top of the stairs. She looks like hell, worse now that he can see her properly. A shade just barely clinging to this side of the afterlife.
"Invite him in, Jer." Her voice, thin yet firm, brooks no countermand.
Jeremy Gilbert looks at her like she's grown three heads, but he follows her direction well enough.
Finally, after a year of thwarted attempts, Klaus steps over the threshold into Elena Gilbert's home.
He tosses what he thinks might pass for a friendly smile at Elena's brother and offers no explanations as he follows Elena up to the top of the stairs. Thankfully, her brother displays astonishingly little curiosity toward him.
"Leave Jeremy out of whatever theatrics you're no doubt here for and I'll let you stay," she tells him as soon as they set foot in her room.
He shuts the door behind them. Watches as she collapses onto her bed and fixes her blank gaze onto the ceiling.
He settles down next to her. She radiates heat in a way he associates with the most intimate, carnal embrace of her body.
"What grieves you?" he asks.
"I nearly killed Matt tonight," she tells him, in an echo of another conversation, another lifetime.
He does not confess that he compelled the boy to do what he must to tempt her to feed.
"Yet you did not."
"He'll never look at me the same way again."
"You could always compel him to forget about it."
"I'm a monster," she whispers. She sounds so lost. Too miserable to even cry—or, perhaps, too abstracted from her humanity. And yet, he feels certain that she has not turned her humanity off. No, it's something more far-reaching, some draining away of her vitality by bits and trickles.
This girl was never meant to be a vampire. At least, not yet, not like this. She's rejected the change, rejected the necessity by which she must feed to survive, and she is paying the terrible price.
Bitter acid, toward Stefan and toward his sister, rises up in him. He hates to see her so diminished, hates it with an intensity he had not anticipated.
"Leave Stefan. Come away with me."
This catches her off-guard. "It's not that simple," she tells him, voice small and pleading. Not with him, he thinks. With the universe.
"Why not?"
She opens her mouth to respond. He doesn't want her to voice whatever reasons she might have. Speaking them aloud might make them more real in her mind, might make them well-nigh impossible for him to overcome.
"It's very simple, my dear one," he cuts in, petting her hair away from her face. "Forget about this, and come away with me. We could leave tonight, if you wanted."
"I couldn't."
"I want you, and I know you want me."
"Don't you see that that's the problem? It's tearing me apart."
"Then let me take care of you."
Elena looks so very, very tired. "I am so lost. I don't know how I'll ever find the way." She tells him this like it's her deepest confession.
I'm a problem you'd rather be done with.
He wonders how long she's been thinking that way. Wonders if their entire affair has been a slow-acting poison for her, a kind of suicide of which he had not realized he was a part.
She does not tell him yes or no. But she allows him to kiss the blood from the corners of her mouth. And after a while, she kisses him back, her lips moving very slowly and intently against his own.
A/N: Thanks for reading! And please be sure not to skip chapter 7 (also posted today) if you are just checking the update!