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.
He slips out of her bed at dawn. She sits up when he goes, and watches him set his clothing to straights. Impulsively, he ducks down to capture her lips in one last kiss before he goes.
In the end, it's Elena who finally settles the issue over the Hunter for him. She cannot go on like this, living this unnatural half-life, unwilling to embrace her afterlife. That, and a stray comment that the Hunter finally lets slip.
Now that he is decided on a proper course, the necessary schemes to ensure the fruition of his goals spring fully formed into his thoughts. All of his intelligence gathering in Italy has come to naught, and he's realized that a new approach will be necessary to yield the proper results. It takes almost nothing at all to start the wheels spinning, to goad his sister in certain hope that she will reveal some lost kernel of vital knowledge.
Is it folly to think that Elena would come to him that night? Perhaps, but he looks for her all the same.
Stefan is the one so kind so as to inform him that Elena has left on a college tour trip with the Bennett witch. She's expected to be gone several days. Senior year in high school, and all of that.
She hadn't said anything to him about this trip that whole night they'd spent together in her bed. He wonders if she would have, were she not so distressed.
The question brings up another line of speculation—of what Elena will do with herself once he restores her mortality to her. He cannot imagine himself her lover last fall, before she turned. Too much of what they are has been a primal response to each other's essential vampiric natures. A human girl would want something mundane—a boyfriend, which he could never be. And yet, he does not want to give her up once he cures her. Perhaps he could convince her to put off college for a while yet, or to choose somewhere interesting abroad to study. All she'd have to do is say the word and he would get her in.
"I know there's something going on between you and Elena," Stefan tells him, apropos of absolutely nothing, after ambushing him in the study where he keeps the Hunter.
"Oh good, Stefan. Lovely of you to pop by. Do you like what I've done with the place?" He gestures to the rack that now dominates the space where his desk usually resides. "Spanish Inquisition, you know. Good craftsmanship is so hard to come by these days."
Stefan shoots him a predictably annoyed look and tries again. "I'm not blind, Klaus."
"Then by all means, we might as well hear what it is you think you've seen." Klaus ushers him out into the hall and shuts the double doors behind him. Some conversations just aren't suitable for a prisoner's ears.
Stefan rounds on him as soon as they are in the hall.
"What's your motive with Elena?"
"What motive could I possibly have? She's a vampire now. Hardly useful anymore."
"Exactly. Which is why I don't get why you cured her in the first place. Why go to the effort? And why continue meeting with her, pulling her aside at every town function?"
"Steady. You almost sound like you're accusing me of something."
"Oh, no, don't get the wrong idea. I am accusing you of something. I know you've been fucking my girlfriend. And it turns out, I've got a free day, so I think the time's come for you to tell me why. So," and here, Stefan throws himself into a stuffed leather arm chair and drums his fingers against the arms with a touch of that old, manic, familiar energy, the sort that could affably tear a lung out, "Enlighten me." Everyone always forgets that it was Stefan Salvatore who taught him how to dance on the tables, and not the other way around.
"You're awfully calm for someone who's discovered his love hasn't been true to him."
"Elena's in a vulnerable state. You're manipulating her."
Klaus shrugs and pours himself a drink. "Perhaps I've taken a liking to her."
"Let's not play games. What do you get out of this?"
Klaus sits down across from him and leans forward. "You're right, of course. I do have an ulterior motive. And, I think, the answer to all of your prayers."
And thus, Stefan becomes the final, unwitting player in the next act of his production.
He and Rebekah reconcile. They have dinner, tell some old stories, procure Jeremy Gilbert's aid, and snipe at each other as Stefan offers choice sardonic commentary. It's like old times, really, and for a moment, Klaus regrets bringing his plans to dramatic climax.
A year ago, this very thing was all for which he had hoped.
But for Elena Gilbert he finds he often does things he could never have foreseen.
He gets his answers, extracted along with an oath from Stefan over his sister's desiccated body never to reveal their quest.
None of it matters. Elena Gilbert returns from her trip a different creature entirely.
Leaving Jeremy Gilbert's safe return and subsequent memory-wiping seems to Stefan seems like a sure way to get caught absconding with the boy by Elena, so Klaus personally oversees the process of putting everything back where he found it.
It's because of this that he happens to overhear Elena with Damon Salvatore as she returns home from her trip, days early. He waits just inside the front door, listening like a thief in the night.
"When you tell me what it is a vampire's supposed to be… I agree with you, Damon," she tells him. Distress saturates her voice.
What Damon tells her a vampire should be. She's never once told him, not in all their many nights together, that she agrees with his own perspective. Which one really would think she would, since he quite literally has more experience on the subject than anyone else walking the earth.
"So what's the problem?" Damon asks.
"It's killing me."
"Why? Be a vampire, Elena. It's that simple."
She takes a deep, audible breath. "Okay."
Then—"What am I going to tell Stefan?"
"Do you need to tell him anything?"
She shows not a flicker of surprise to find him waiting for her when she gets inside.
"Why are you here?" she asks him as she throws her keys on the front table and hangs her coat up in the hall closet.
"You never mentioned you were leaving town."
"Was I supposed to?" Her voice floats down the length of the entry hall from where she rummages around in that closet.
He prowls up behind her and spins her so she's forced to look at him. He recoils. Her arm is hot to the touch.
"You've been feeding."
And now that he looks at her, it's so obvious that he feels shamed that he had not noticed it before. Fresh blood in her system has put roses in her cheeks and a dark, sharp sparkle back into her eyes. He is not used to her appearing thus without his blood or his body inside of her.
"Damon taught me to feed without hurting anyone," she says.
He instantly resents her for choosing to let this lesser vampire persuade her to feed when he himself has not been able.
"Did I not offer you the same?"
She leans her head back and looks at him from under hooded eyes. He realizes, suddenly, how very close their bodies are to each other.
"You know that was never what you were offering me," she tells him. Their bodies may be pressed intimately together, and yet, Elena Gilbert has never been further away than she is now. She's not wearing the mask he's seen her put on for her brother and her friends, nor the armor she so often dons for him, the armor whose chinks he has so relished slipping his arrows past to bury in her weak spots. This is some other distance that she has thrown up between them, some other camouflage, and he does not yet know how to slip around it.
He wants very much to kiss her, to wipe that foreboding, glacial patience from her face. She has never, not once, been able to hold herself apart from him during their passion plays. Inside, she is fire, and he need only stoke it.
Tenderly, he strokes her hair, slightly tacky with dried blood, out of her face.
"I'd offer you anything," he replies, finally.
"What I want isn't yours to offer. Not anymore." She slips under his arm, and, for the first time he can ever recall, escapes him. He lets her, because, somehow, he does not think that he could stop her.
She doesn't seek him out the next night, or the one after that, or the one after that.
A/N: Please let me know if you'e enjoying—thanks for reading!