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
Despite his clear preference that she embrace her vampiric nature, Klaus is very careful the next time he takes her hunting. He never lets her hunt without his supervision, and never lets himself become distracted by his own prey while she feeds. He monitors her carefully, and talks her through it each time, so that she does not lose herself again to the seduction of the lazy pump of blood against her tongue.
"I didn't expect you to be so… helpful," she tells him one night after they've sent their dinners back to their campsite. It's the same every week, catch and release, taking just enough to sustain them until they find the next humans, and then compelling them at the end to keep everything quiet. Elena hasn't had much practice compelling anyone since that first encounter. Most of the humans they encounter don't speak English, so it's up to Klaus to speak to them. "I mean, you seemed so set against it when I told you I didn't want to harm anyone."
"No, I was set against you setting yourself up to fail. There is a difference." They stroll side by side between crumbling buildings and ink dark craters in the earth. In several of the buildings, they have spotted campfires.
"So what is this then?" Elena presses. "I thought you'd be trying to teach me to let go and give in to my predatory instincts or whatever." All too clearly she remembers severed hands in her lap, and talk of murdering whole little families hours before she first let him into her bed. Klaus is worse than the animal she's so afraid of becoming.
"I'm giving you the tools you need to survive. If you were a senseless predator, all instinct and no thought, you'd be prey to the mob, liable to be caught and killed before you finished out your first decade. Don't think that that's changed now. Six can be a mob with the right weapons." He catchers her up and links his fingers behind her neck, so she is caught in the bar of his arms. Yellow firelight stops just short of the shadow that they stand in. "I meant what I said before, about meaning for you to be my finest vampire," he tells her quietly. "That's a high bar, sweetheart. I intend for you to overcome it."
She notices a spot of blood at the corner of his mouth, where she could lick it up if she kissed him. It's a struggle to ignore it once she notices. "The last time you took a vampire under your wing, you did absolutely everything possible to turn him into a ripper." Stefan's name lingers between them, unsaid, but heard, just the same. "How can I trust you not to do the same to me, as soon as you think it's a good idea?"
His smile is slow and easy and delighted, all pointed teeth and red mouth. "Oh, but we both know that won't be for a long time yet," he tells her. "And it would be rather an obstacle to rebuilding the human population if you kept culling the herd," he continues. His tone is flip, casual and distant as he describes humanity—all that is left of it—as mere animals. It catches her like a needle in the flesh. She can see through him completely when he talks like this. His words, the way he says them, the careless cruelty he weaves into everything—it's all pretense. If she waits through his preamble, he'll tell her something more. He always does eventually. He can never truly resist. Klaus leans forward, so his blood-stained lips are just barely touching hers. His mouth flutters against her, an almost kiss, when he tells her, just as she knew he would, "And beside that… You seemed… so unhappy, afterwards. I wouldn't bring you through that again if I could avoid it."
"Thank you." She presses the words into his mouth.
She doesn't specify for what. There's too much between them to specify.
Klaus teaches her to hunt, but she knows how to run from instinct. And she's faster, sleeker than ever. The black and silver spangled sky, streaked through with streamers of violet and emerald and midnight blue, beckons her to run for the horizon, over the edge of it and into eternity.
In this new life, running is still what she likes to do best. She wishes there were more opportunity—Klaus is fast, but he does not like her to wander too far from his side, and the prey is slow, too slow for her to need more than an instant's stretch of her legs to catch it. And that's just the crux of it, the part she struggles with most: the catch is easy, the release impossible. Always, always it's a struggle to let go, and then to watch her prey, weak and blooded and confused, wander away. The urge to chase is always strong—
But Klaus's words always reverberate in her ears—she will be the finest, and she must have self-control to be that creature he envisages.
She wants so much to be that girl.
One night they stumble upon a gigantic building, low and sprawling, buried in a crater hundreds of feet deep in the earth. Except for around the periphery, the structure remains in tact, as though the earth had just swallowed the entire building whole. A large, circular skylight, a quarter of the windows smashed, glimmers in the moonlight.
"What do you think that is?" she asks him as they peer over the edge.
"Do you want to have a look?"
There was a time, once, when he took her up a skyscraper angled precariously toward the street, and she had almost fallen through a window. The trip down the side of this crater looks just as precarious as that climb up to his abandoned Manhattan apartment had been—
"Obviously."
They climb down the side of the crater, Klaus methodically picking his way toward the building while Elena scrambles behind him, rocks tumbling down to the pit in her wake.
When he makes it to the roof of the building, Klaus puts his hands around her waist and lifts her down to stand beside him. She fists his shirt in her hands and stands on tiptoes to look past his shoulder toward the skylight.
"Do you think anyone's down there?" she asks.
He shrugs. "Only the one way to find out." He pulls her after him to the broken skylight, where they teeter on the edge. "Are you ready, my dear?"
Elena wraps her arms tighter around his neck. "Yes."
He takes the step over the ledge, into thin air, and pulls her down with him.
Glass crunches under their feet when they land. The moon filters in, illuminating a rough circle around them. Once, she would have been blind in this light. Now, even the dust motes in the air reflect back a kind of light by which she can see.
They've landed in a wide, arced atrium. Long, deep halls extend in four points from where they stand—north, south, east, west, she is sure. Other skylights break the darkness at periodic intervals.
Elena wanders away from where they landed, toward the edge of the wide atrium, where a large painted metal sign details the building. She traces her fingers over the letters printed onto the sign. Some names, she recognizes. "It's a mall," she says, almost to herself.
"Hmm." Klaus steps up beside her to read over her shoulder. "It doesn't look as though anyone's been here of late." He fingers the fraying cloth at the hem of her shirt. "Care to shop a bit?"
They've done this before. Find a store turned topsy-turvy, so Elena can hunt through it all until she finds something she likes. Tonight's no different—they veer into luxury department stores, hop over fallen stone columns to paw through racks and racks of untouched clothing, still neat and pristine on the hangers. She holds up skirts and necklaces for Klaus's opinion, models dresses and hats and high-heeled shoes. She tries to talk him into a leather jacket, and laughs at the look on his face when she walks out wearing a particularly well-cut sequined dress.
When she gets bored, she wanders over to the front glass display case, where Klaus is examining the hair pins and jewelry. He pulls two wooden hair combs, carved with thorns and roses, from the case and arranges them in her long curling hair. Gently, he unties the sash behind her back, unbuttons and unzips and lets her dress slide in a pool around her ankles. She's wearing nothing underneath. He cups her shoulders, his large hands warm and firm on her bare skin, and turns her to face the long tall mirror by the front of the store.
"Look at yourself, Elena. What do you see?"
Her reflection startles her. Some things she notices immediately—the curling hair, without a flat iron for months now, the face only now beginning to regain the vitality she had lost while she starved.
The face that looks back at her is twenty-two years old. Older by far than her face has ever been, but strange, still, to look upon. And not just that.
Her skin is paler than it's ever been, the inside of her wrist like the side of the moon. She can see each scar Klaus has left her, jagged and silver in the night. She turns and watches the scars, roped around her neck and thighs and arms, flash and shimmer in the low light. She touches her wrists, her breasts. What need for jewelry when she has these?
And there's something else there. A certain hunger.
She's becoming a night time creature.
She's becoming a wild thing.
There are certain delights to be had in that.
They look together at their reflection, his arms entwined around her, his mouth a mere inch from the flesh of her throat, his scars on her body. But nonetheless, hard to say who owned whom.
After, Klaus sets her up on the countertop and kisses her for a long, long time.
The light changes to a deep gray, nearly indistinguishable from the black of midnight, but it is enough for Klaus to draw back and look toward the exit.
"Come, now. Dawn is coming."
She doesn't remember the last time she saw the light.
When they do choose a house to spend the day, Klaus always takes an exorbitant amount of time to check it over.
"Did I not once promise to shelter you from the 'cataracts and hurricanoes' and the 'sulph'rous and thought-executing fires'?" he asks her at dawn, one morning, when she is rolling her eyes at the way he insists on pushing the bed into the corner furthest from the windows.
"I don't think this counts." Elena grabs a pillow off the old bed and fluffs it. Goose feathers spray from the seams.
"You'll say differently if you catch aflame. It's not pleasant."
"Please. Even if I did, I'd heal in like, fifteen seconds."
He pauses in his rearrangements, suddenly serious with her. "You're a rare jewel, Elena. The most precious, rarest of jewels. I won't let anything happen to you."
She doesn't know what to say to him, so she tosses the pillow at him, jumps on the bed while his attention is diverted and pulls him on with her.
All the while, she wonders. When did he become so sentimental… so vulnerable? It's like the dam has broken, and he cannot keep anything in anymore.
It frightens her, more than anything he's done in the years she has known him. She feels sometimes that he is like a stranger, open when she expects him to be closed, warm when she expects him to be cool. He is still cruel and quick to anger, to be sure, but somehow that seems less a part of him than it used to be. But how long can that last?
A/N: Please read and review! Seriously, it is always a GREAT motivator for me to update more quickly. Also, you can find me over at tumblr over at livlepretre . My askbox is always open to talk tvd :)
