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.
No one comes to fetch him.
No phone calls, no in-person pleas for a savior.
Not a single word from Elena herself.
A day passes, then another.
He checks his phone, hangs around town, making himself conspicuous. Still, nothing.
He spies Caroline leaving a coffee shop and engineers an encounter.
"And where is dear Elena this afternoon?" He glances toward the dark interior of the shop as though he thinks she might be within, although he knows from the lack of screaming that she is not. Vampires dying from werewolf venom all inevitably spiral into bloodlust eventually as their bodies push them to heal from what cannot be healed.
Caroline studies him, head cocked like a bird. "Why do you ask?"
Klaus shrugs. Gives her a bright, flirtatious smile. "Just trying to make conversation, love. Can you blame me for trying?"
Caroline frowns at him, but blushes gratifyingly. "I haven't seen her. She was supposed to go on some big college trip 2.0 with Damon. You know, since the first one went so well," she ends with a huff, rolling her eyes.
He doesn't analyze the way her words seem to attach themselves to a string in his chest, that tugs on something there, something he cannot—must not must not— name or fathom.
Klaus gives the conversation a couple of more minutes so as not to draw any suspicion before making some excuse or another and hurrying away.
Against all better judgment, he dials Elena. Her phone rings and rings and rings, with no answer.
He waits thirty seconds, then tries again. Again.
When this proves obviously futile—and really, the pathetic creature's probably nearly dead by now, why would she answer her phone?—he does something which he is quite unwilling to analyze. He calls Damon Salvatore.
"What?"
"Is Elena with you?"
"Not that it's any of your business, but she bailed—"
He hangs up and tries to think. No one knows she's been bitten. If that's the case, she must have slipped away before she started showing any symptoms. Where would the noble Elena Gilbert have gone, having abandoned all companionship to presumably die some anonymous death?
Far away from anyone she might hurt, his mind supplies, a careful strand of insight he hadn't been aware he had.
Without any firm direction in mind, he takes off toward her house, rifling through all of those memories of all of those nights they had together. Surely, in all of that, she must have told him something of herself, must have revealed some secret place that meant something to her or to which she might gravitate in her hallucinations.
Obvious answers arise before him immediately.
The bridge where her parents died, where Stefan so succinctly pressured him into backing down last fall lest she face her mortality there again, where she ultimately did go to a watery grave. He searches over the bridge, under it, all around it, and can find no trace of her presence.
Next he visits the graveyard, aware of her old, morbid propensities, her habit of visiting her parents' gravesite and lying atop the wet grass there, arms spread out as though to embrace them through the soil, to join them. He'd seen her do this more than once when she'd still been living and he'd been keeping his careful watch over her, and though he has not caught her at this since, he cannot doubt that the venom burning through her body will have confused time and place and meaning for her.
Again, he has no luck.
She could be anywhere. Might have skipped town two nights ago, might be wasting away in the middle of the Mojave Desert for all he knows.
He checks his phone, but he has no missed calls.
How long can a vampire truly survive once bitten? Immune himself, he's never bothered to really pay attention.
She could be dead already.
The thought twists inside of him, vicious as the blade through the heart that slew the innocent boy he'd once been ten centuries prior.
No, she has to be somewhere. He tears through the woods on the outskirts of town, hopeful that she has simply wandered into the miles of familiar wilderness. The chances of finding her out here are slim, but he can't think clearly. He calls her name and pushes onward, circling forward and back, until the sun begins to dip below the horizon.
The first stars glimmer from behind a canopy of black, swift night clouds when he finds her in a fateful clearing he wishes he had thought to check earlier.
The power of his relief at finding her still alive hammers him like a sapling battered by hurricane winds.
He never would have guessed that she would return here, but he it is as he had said before. The venom can play strange tricks on the mind.
Elena kneels in the middle of a burnt out circle. Two other circles neighbor hers, their perimeters clearly visible, as all manner of green things have refused to grow in the past year. The scent of ash and primal magic lingers in the air here, even after all this time.
What this means, that she has returned to this their hallowed place, he does not dare speculate upon.
"Elena," he calls, voice soft as a night bird's call.
Instantly, she focuses in on him, her eyes glazed, feverish. She looks awful. The fever has taken her much farther than it did the last time she was so poisoned. Her skin has turned that waxen, tell-tale hue.
When he approaches her, she tries to stand, but her legs give out, and she would fall face first into the dirt and lingering soot if he did not catch her. She trembles in his arms like a wet calf.
Gently, he cups her cheek, and turns her face toward his.
"Go to hell," she mumbles incoherently. Tears track down her face, and, as déjà vu bolts through him, he wonders if she's trapped in memory of another night. It's been a long time since she's looked at him with so much naked feeling, and he cannot suppress his intrinsic response to her.
"I'll be elated to hear you tell me that when you're well again, sweetheart." When she is well, she will probably revert to her new persona. Probably pretend it meant nothing that she came here, of all places.
He understands now that he would rather she go on like that, ignoring him and freezing him out, than for her to not go on at all.
He wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her against his chest. He lifts his spare arm and bites into his wrist, leaving a deep gash that will take plenty of time to heal, that will not require the least bit of effort from her in order to receive the necessary curative quantity. He offers her his bleeding wrist—
And, incredibly, she turns her head away.
"I don't want you to save me," she rasps weakly, stubbornly.
"Then I'm relieved the decision is out of your hands."
She turns her face into his neck, and goes very, very still, a dead weight in his arms. He knows this weight, knows the feel of her limp corpse in his arms. For a wild moment, he thinks she's passed that swiftly.
A cloud skates over the moon, casting everything to a dimmer darkness.
But then Elena shifts against him in the dark, and bares her throat. His bite is a thing of horrors. It's festered, the skin bubbling and held together only by a loose viscous membrane, and spread up the side of her neck all the way to her ear and down under her collar.
"I don't want anyone else to die," she mumbles. Her focus slips, and she tumbles back into the past. "The bargain…"
The bargain he had broken once already, when he'd capriciously turned her aunt. He can't remember why he did that now.
"No one is going to die," he assures her. He presses his bloody wrist to her beautiful, obstinate mouth, still refusing this chance to save herself. Inspiration strikes him. "It's part of the ritual," he tells her, playing along with her delirium. "You have to drink or it won't work."
She frowns, either in consideration or because she can barely hold on to even this thread of reason.
He holds his breath while he waits for primal instinct to take over. When her fangs latch to his wrist and slice the half-healed mark back open, Klaus allows himself his first real smile since she walked away from him.
"That's it," he murmurs, rubbing slow circles against her back. Her color improves with every mouthful she takes from him, and her skin begins to warm. The pull between them strengthens as she feeds from him. He's not sure what he'll say to her when this is over—but he knows he will have to say something. Possibilities race through his mind, each with their potential slings and arrows.
Suddenly, Elena freezes mid-swallow and scrambles out of his arms.
He expects that she is well enough now to take account of her surroundings, of who her savior is.
The expression on her face as she wheels to face him is one of wretched disgust.
Klaus opens his mouth to cut her off, to say the first cruel word, when she turns around and vomits up the content of her stomach. An astonishing amount of blood and gore splashes onto the ground at her feet, and Elena continues to heave for several moments after the last of it has come up. Afterwards, she remains hunched over her knees, her fingers clawing trenches in the dirt and grass before her. It's all very melodramatic.
"What was that?" he asks, angrily. "Do I disgust you so much?"
Careful not to step in her mess, he edges closer to her and kneels down, ready to drag her to her feet for an argument. Except, when he touches her, he realizes something is wrong. Sweat pops from her pores, and her color rapidly deteriorates again.
Foreboding washes through him. He's misjudged the situation. She hasn't forced herself to throw up some of his blood in disgust. She's thrown up all of it.
"You've thrown up the cure, sweetheart," he tells her, needlessly. "We need to try again."
Elena looks up at him and shakes her head. "I can't take it anymore," she tells him pitifully. "I can't take it anymore. It's killing me." Fresh tears stream down her face, but she doesn't bother to wipe them away or do anything other than look at him.
She's said that before. Standing outside her house, in a scene of which he had been so jealous at the time.
It has an ominous, desperate ring to it that he had not taken seriously enough then, but takes terribly serious now.
He takes her back into his arms and moves her away from the mess. Away from the circles that compound his growing suspicions. She clings to him, burrows into his chest as though he is her sole refuge in all the world.
"Please, Klaus," she whispers. And then she begins to beg through her tears, her words so rapid and broken they are only barely intelligible. "Klaus, I want you to kill me. Please, please. Damon told me to be a vampire and I've been trying but I don't want to be this thing anymore, it's killing me. Please!"
He cannot bring himself to give her what she wants. Not like this.
"You don't have to be anything you don't want to be," he assures her. "Let me cure you, and we can talk about this after." Empty platitudes, but she seems to listen. He pets her hair and waits until she quietens. He can feel the fight draining from her as the venom respreads through her body.
This time, when he gives her his blood, she reluctantly accepts, only to gag and heave it back up immediately. It spills over their arms and onto their chests in a wet gush. Elena trembles violently against him.
"Damnit, stop fighting me, Elena!"
"I'm not," she gasps. She screws her eyes shut and swallows thickly. "I can't keep it down," she admits.
"It's psychosomatic. You just have to fight the nausea until your body has time to heal enough for it to pass."
"You don't understand."
"What can I possibly not understand?" he snaps. No sooner does he say the words than terrible insight flashes through him. He thinks about her wasting away before his very eyes, all those times he wondered and wondered and never really considered why Elena had been left to nearly starve to death. Why it had been allowed to get to a point where her bloodlust would trip her into his arms.
This time, he takes it very slowly with her. Gives her just the smallest trickle from the palm of his hand, and waits with her while she fights to hold it down. She sinks to her knees and he whispers in her ear, encouraging her, determined for her to beat this. They go through this process several times, until her color starts to improve, and, when he is finally satisfied, he asks her, deathly quiet, "How long has this been going on?" They are sprawled together on the rocky ground, in an almost intimate embrace.
Elena takes her time to answer. Now that she is lucid again, she is much less forthcoming with him. He can literally see her scrambling to put that stone wall up between them again. Trying—and not quite having the energy to succeed. For a moment, she tenses, and he thinks she intends to leave without answering. Eventually, though, she settles back against him, her back to his chest, and looks out over the clearing where a year ago he had claimed her life. A pale spring moon suffuses everything in silvery light. "Always. Since I turned," she admits at last.
He frowns down at her. "Surely you must be able to keep some blood down—"
"Only human blood directly from the vein," she tells him with a factuality that lets him know she is sick with misery about it.
"What about bloodbags?"
"I already told you. It has to be from the vein. Everything else—" She makes a brief, illustrative gesture.
He appraises her sharply. "But that would mean you can't keep my blood down, either."
"I can't."
The news shouldn't hit him so very hard, but it does nonetheless. So much for taking care of her. "Then why come to me at all?"
"I wasn't coming to you for the blood. Or—it wasn't because I was hungry."
"Then why?"
"Complicated reasons. Reasons that don't apply anymore."
"You're not very fair to me."
"Since when did equity ever enter into this?"
"Ah. Then I suppose…all is fair in love and war."
The words hang between them, invisible and yet oh, so heavy.
"Exactly," Elena says, before pushing him away. "I meant what I said, earlier," she tells him, gravely, once she is on her feet. "I want to die."
"I won't allow it," he tells her, pouring every ounce of menace he feels in his ancient bones into those words as he shoots to his feet to tower over her.
Elena looks up into his face. "You can't stop me from seeking death where I will, Klaus. Not really."
"I can."
She pins him with a pitying look. "You are truly immortal, but I am not."
I mean to go where you can never follow.
And she has been trying. Chasing down death, pushing away first him and then Stefan, hunting in public, daring someone to catch her out and stake her, setting out into the woods to purposefully succumb to his bite when all she ever had to do to save herself was to ask for his help.
He grabs hold of her shoulders, desperately afraid, of a sudden, that if he lets her leave now then she will just find some other way to die and leave him forever. To go where he truly will never be able to follow her. He knows now that in so doing she would curse him as truly as his own mother had once done. Worse. For there would never be a way to break her curse of a world without her in it.
"I don't understand where all of this is coming from," he tells her desperately.
This ignites her. "Damon said to be a vampire and so I am, and that means hurting people, and always just barely pulling back before I really kill someone—I told him it would destroy me and it is! It's tearing my heart out to do this."
"What does Damon Salvatore have to do with this?" he asks her slowly.
She blinks up at him, perplexed. "What?"
"Damon Salvatore. You said you've thrown yourself into this abyss on his advice. Why?"
She frowns. "He wants what's best for me."
"What else does Damon say?"
"What do you mean?"
"Does he have any other words of wisdom? Tell me, what is his philosophy on feeding?"
Elena's mouth falls open. Slowly, she tells him, as though trying to piece it together herself, "He thinks I need human blood to survive. He was against the bunny diet from the start."
"He told you this?"
She nods.
"And let me guess—he suggests feeding solely from a live victim, yes?"
"So?"
Fury lances through him. It's been a night for revelations, but this latest takes the prize. "Oh, you see, you would be sired to him." It's terribly funny, really. He would make a fool of himself over a girl ensnared to another's whims. His sister had always told him he would get his just desserts over the sired hybrids.
Elena dismisses this immediately. "That's ridiculous." It's not. Not at all.
He's going to tear Damon Salvatore's still beating heart from his chest the next time he sees him.
She resumes trying to twist out from under his grasp, out into the night, out into the abyss. He will not let her.
A new thought strikes him. "Was Damon Salvatore the one who told you to stop seeing me?"
Elena, to this point struggling ineffectually against his hold on her, pauses. "What? No. He doesn't know about that."
Klaus resists informing her that Stefan definitely did. "Then why?"
"Because you were in love with me, okay?"
Once the words are said, there is no taking them back. "And that was so repulsive to you."
Elena squeezes her eyes shut. "No. It wasn't. That was the problem." She tries again to free herself, and this time he lets her. She doesn't run away like he assumed she would, instead pacing and running her hands through her hair. "Look, Klaus, I was in a really bad place when that whatever-it-was between us started. I was looking for a way out." Poisoning herself with him, just as he had feared. "And then… And then before I knew it, I realized that things had changed. I cared about you, and I didn't want you involved. Because I had decided I needed to find a different way out." To die, she means, since it had apparently become clear to her that he wouldn't do the job for her, not anymore, but he can't bring himself to correct her. "So, I'm sorry. I really am." She turns to go.
When she leaves, this will truly be the end. Now that she's tasted death so near, he knows she will not stop searching for it until she attains it for true.
He has one final card to offer.
"Come to Italy with me."
She doesn't look back when she responds, "You've already offered me that. I can't."
"If you do, I'll make you human again."
She pauses. "We tried that when I was in transition," she tells him without turning around to face him. He can hear the dull glimmer of longing in her voice.
"No, not whatever dark magic your friend might have tried. I'm saying that there's a cure. I'll find it for you."
"Why?"
"Because you're not made out for this. I've been searching for it all spring. I wanted to spare you this pain, as much as I seem to have failed utterly."
Stubbornly, she shakes her head. "I can't. That's not a solution. I have to be a vampire."
Frustration roils through his veins. "That's the sire bond talking! Take the cure, you'll be freed from the damned bond, and you can return to your merry little life."
"You mean, take the cure, and I'll be human and you'll be able to make hybrids again."
"Are you really going to get stuck on that little detail?"
"I'll still have done all of the terrible things that I've done as a vampire. You can't just undo that."
"Did anyone die? Was any of the damage permanent?"
He takes her lack of response to mean no to both of his questions.
"Come to Italy with me."
Finally, she turns around to face him. There's an expression on her face he's never seen before. Hope. But also, something else—the shadow. "I'm afraid," she says.
"Don't be. You're going to be alright. I swear it."
He's a moonstruck fool for saying it. He expects her to rebuff him as she has so easily as of late, but instead, the words seem to sink beneath her skin.
"Say I did take the cure. What would that mean?"
"Anything you wanted it to. You could go to college, perhaps, or I could take you to Mozambique and you could work on your tan and swim under the full moon."
Elena dances on the edge of indecision. "You make it sound so easy." She wants to give in to him, just as she wants to escape into oblivion.
He dares to reach for her, before she can pull away again. "It is so easy," he says, and spools her back into his embrace.
Tentatively, Elena leans her head against his chest and wraps her arms around his waist.
"I don't know what to do about you," she says. "I've already tried turning you out, but you keep coming back to me."
"Haven't you heard? I'm persistent as the Devil."
"It would be different, though, if I were human. I don't think you'll want a mortal girlfriend."
"I'll want you howsoever you are. And, if in a few years' time, should you decide that mortal life is not for you after all… I'll turn you. Properly." He rather likes this idea, actually. And if her feelings for him result in a second sire bond… Then they will cross that bridge when they come to it.
She shakes her head. "This is all a moot point. I have to be a vampire. I can't take the cure." She's going round in circles, unable to quit her fixation on Damon Salvatore's flippant instructions.
"Fine, then be a vampire. Come away to Italy and be a vampire with me. I'll look after you, and make sure you don't harm anyone. Does that sound like a deal?" She'll thank him for bundling her off once he finds the cure for her.
"You're asking me to be very selfish."
"I am."
"To leave behind everyone who depends on me."
"Only for a little while. While you get your head together."
He lets her think it out, and together they watch the stars blaze over their clearing.
"Okay," she tells him at last.
"Okay?"
Elena looks up at him, with those dark, serious eyes that could drown a man. "It would be better for you if you didn't love me. I'm only going to lead you to more pain and misery."
"But you love me back."
She doesn't deny it. "I think that's pain and misery enough for both of us, then."
He does not deny that, either.
A/N: Thank you to everyone who's read and commented! I appreciate you all!
I'll be back soon with a few more entries for Power Plays and then the next installment for Fairytale Ending.