Symbiosis

by adlyb

Disclaimer: I own nothing, except these words.

Pairing: Klaus/Elena

Warnings: Unhealthy relationships/power dynamics, explicit violence, sexual content, bloodplay, basic vampire stuff

Rating: M


She is very, very hungry when they leave Bulgaria. Klaus leads her south, searching out their first humans. He won't do a thing to find them for her, though. No, he wants her to look, to find, to hone the new abilities that she has.

It turns out that there is so much to learn about becoming a vampire. Elena feels like there shouldn't be—she's been living with one since she was eighteen, feeding him and caring for him and keeping him strong. And yet there is, an endless stream of mystifying new information that she cannot find the language to express, coming at her from every possible angle. Klaus is eager to teach her, unrelenting in the discipline he forces upon her while she relearns the world in each new way.

"You may be the last vampire I ever make, Elena," he tells her the first evening when she can hardly focus for the burning pain in her throat and the searing ache in her teeth. "You may be the last, but I also intend for you to be the finest."

It's entirely frustrating.

And yet… and yet… with each turn of the moon, her mind is a little clearer, and the throbbing ache leaves her mouth, and settles in her heart instead. She begins to learn.

For three nights, they wander south and west, following her lead. For three days, they see no one else at all.

Much to her delight, she never tires. She could walk forever, and her feet would never tire. The backpack she still carries over her shoulder, filled with diaries and maps and vervain darts and the only change of clothes she has left, weighs nothing at all.

He makes her stop, every now and then, to close her eyes and strain her senses and tell him what she senses. Smells, and what they are, and where they come from. The taste of water in the air, or of fire, or the feeling like a thousand centipedes crawling over her skin that means lightening. Sometimes she has no idea what it is she senses.

Klaus crowds her, pressed up behind her, chin hooked over her shoulder, to murmur in her ear while she does her best to focus on her newly heightened senses. It's terribly distracting. How can she worry about all the new ways she's perceiving her surroundings, when there are also new things she notices about him? He laughs when she tells him she has no idea, she can't focus on a thing. The sounds rolls all through her body, making her quiver.

What she wants is to pull him down, to make love to him under the moonlight, but she knows Klaus will not allow it until she's fed. He pushes her onward, gently but firmly. "After," he promises. "You need to keep your strength. It goes so quickly in the beginning. After."

They're just cresting a hill, covered in dead, yellow grass, when the wind shifts and Elena freezes.

The air tastes different here than it did in the Petrova ancestral town. When she sticks her tongue out, she can taste salt on the tangy warm air. And she can hear a rush and roar, too, when she listens, and beneath that, a low whip—Elena grasps and fumbles at these sensations, before finally, she realizes—"There's water nearby."

Klaus nods. "A few miles off, still, I think, but yes." He pauses. "The water is sending all sorts of different smells, do you notice that?"

She nods. "I think—I can smell the dirt in the water, and there are plants there, and fish, and I can hear the rocks rattling in the riverbed, and I can feel the pulse of the current and there's something else, something…" Her mouth waters. "Something delicious."

"That would be the people, love." He cocks his head, listening. Even now, his senses are so much sharper than hers. "They're following the river."

She inhales, pulling in as much air as her lungs will hold. "Do they always smell so…?" She gestures vaguely as she trails off.

"Tantalizing?"

She swallows, and her throat is too tight with hunger for her to speak.

"That's the hunger making them smell so tempting." He smiles, just the barest upturned corner of his mouth. It's a small, private smile, like he is enjoying this very much. "You're still so new. Your body's pushing you to feed, as often as possible, and the scarcity of adequate prey is making the hunger worse than it should be."

A hot gust of wind brings the scent of the humans nearby even more strongly into her awareness. She tenses, ready to follow her instinct and race forward, but he grasps hold of her hand, gently, but firmly enough that she can't break free without his consent.

"It wouldn't do for you to lose your mind to the bloodlust the moment you glimpse your quarry," he chides her. "I'll never have the opportunity to teach you anything if you lose your head, and there just aren't enough humans about for you to develop into a ripper, amusing though that might be. No time like the present to learn some self-control."

She tugs at his arm, only half listening.

He makes her walk, rather than run, down the hill, their hands linked like lovers taking a stroll under the moonlight. Only they know what else they are. Wolves in the night.

They make it over the next hill, and find a finger of a river splitting off from the rest, streaming over a broken cliff into a phosphorescent sea that shines like a black opal in the moonlight.

Six people have made their camp near the bank of the river, well away from the edge of the cliff. Her eyes pick them out easily, man and woman, big and small, fair and dark. She lifts her nose into the wind, and she can smell how tired they are, how they have only just washed for the first time in weeks. A deeper inhale, and she knows which of them has been sick only recently, which are close blood relatives, and which are sleeping with which.

Two of the women wander away from the rest. Elena can barely detect the scent of something hanging between them—emotions or hormones, the little invisible things that could tell her so much more about the relationship between the two if she were only experienced enough to decipher the information. She stares after them for a moment before turning her attention back to the rest of the group.

A man still down in the camp cuts himself. The winds carries the tang of blood, and Elena streaks forward before she can even think.

Klaus stops her with a hand on her shoulder a mere five yards from where she started. She tries to twist out of his hands and launch herself toward the bleeding man, but Klaus's grip is like iron.

He cups her jaw and physically redirects her attention to two of the women who have just wandered away from the rest.

"A predator will always stalk the prey that's separated from the herd," he tells her.

"You don't know what the humans down there will do when confronted with a vampire, and it takes only one sure hand to fell you."

"What if the prey stay together?" she asks as her eyes trail the two women. She can hear them speaking to each other, a low murmur in the night. She's surprised they speak English.

"Then the predator finds a way to separate them." He pushes her toward the women. "But tonight, it seems, we won't have to. Come."

They wait until the women are well away from the rest of their group before revealing themselves. Elena's fast to snatch up the smaller, pinning her bird-like wrist behind her back and smothering her startled shriek with a palm pressed over her mouth.

Klaus has no need for force. He simply compels the other woman, as easily and thoughtlessly as breathing. "You're alright," he tells his captive quietly. "Be calm, and don't make a sound, for me, hmm?"

The woman visibly relaxes. Any fight there might have been in his captive leaks out of her.

Elena knows what it's like to be caught in that hard blue stare, to feel thought and desire leech out of her bones. She notes, now that she is trying to see how it's done, the quiet, sure voice Klaus uses when he gives his commands—the will and intent behind it, swallowing those of the woman he compels.

She turns her own captive to face her, and feels it the moment she locks the other woman's gaze with her own. "Don't scream." She musters all of the authority she can, and to her surprise, she can actually feel the magic working. Her hands shake when she draws the dark hair away from her captive's—her prey's—neck. Half of her is afraid that the woman will break through the compulsion; half of her is afraid because she knows that she will not.

Her fangs slice through the woman's neck like a knife cutting through egg yolk—for just a moment, there is the barest hint of resistance, and then it is gone. The film bursts, and hot blood spurts into her mouth.

And it's glorious. Absolutely, electrifyingly glorious.

Elena realizes as the blood gushes down her throat that she's been hungry for years. For her whole life. She's been starving, worse than she ever even knew, and this is the first true taste of satiation, oozing in a pulsing wave over her tongue, down her throat, coating and slicking her teeth and lips and tongue like an overripe strawberry bursting in the heat, like a slow, slow trickle of life, time stretching like honey between the lap of each wave—

Klaus tears her away from the woman's throat. Elena growls, and reaches for the woman again, but Klaus will not let her go. Without Elena to hold her up, her knees buckle, and she collapses onto the grass with a soft crunch.

He turns to the other woman, the one he had drank from. She stands with a hand clamped over her neck, her stare wide and distant. Still compelled.

"Tell the others this one is injured," he orders her. "Tell them an animal attacked her. Go, now. Before she bleeds out."

He grabs Elena and takes her away. He is so much stronger, so much older and faster, that she cannot resist him, even though she wishes that she could. The smell from the blood still swims in her head, and she wants to tear herself away and chase after it more than anything.

When he stops, they are miles and miles away. No trace of that group of wanderers lingers in the air, and she is not certain she could find them again this night. Without the scent of them, her heads clears. The fire leaves her limbs, and her gums ache.

It occurs to her that she nearly killed that woman. If Klaus hadn't interfered when he had, there would have been nothing left of her but a husk. She hears the echo of her body hitting the grounding, crunching the grass, crunching like broken bones, broken glass, ringing in her ears. She's done a lot of terrible things, since her parents died. Worse things still since the world ended. But she'd never done something like this.

She's never forgotten herself before, not even for a moment. She's never been just a monster.

She falls to her knees and vomits up everything she's just consumed. Her eyes water as she wretches, and she doesn't know if she's crying from shame or fear or if the tears are just the ones she never let herself cry when she was just a sad, angry girl who lived with death so long it became a comfort.

Klaus reaches out and brushes her hair from her face.

She used to picture him when she thought of death.

His touch is a comfort, now, too.


A/N: Drop me a review to let me know what you think, or find me on tumblr over at livlepretre