Fairytale Ending

by adlyb

Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.

Summary: Klaus takes his girl and his hybrid and gets out of that one pony town.

Spoilers: Through 3x05, The Reckoning

Rating: T for now, but will become R in later chapters

Warnings: I'll be adding more warnings as I update, but for now, hostage situation/explicit violence/gratuitous angst

Elena does not have a calendar to mark her days. No cell phone, no newspapers or magazines, or television. Instead, she relies on the routines she's fallen into with Stefan, the rhythms of the sun, the moon, and her body, to mark the passing time.

Orange juice and eggs and grits for breakfast, and very often Italian for dinner. Afternoons spent soaking up golden hour sunshine through the westward facing windows in the library, and midnight walks through the house, peering into rooms and chasing ghosts down the corridors. And each morning, a walk with Stefan, and a chance to pick at the confused knot of feelings and apprehensions that Rebekah has set her.

He usually takes her out early, when the damp chill is still settled over the lawn, and the sun is low. She feels a creeping in the earth, as plants unfurl and grow, the days shorten and the sun stays lower, and little chirruping bugs stalk through the grass, live, eat, shrivel up, and die.

Her body is adjusting to this rhythm too—she's learning to tell time by the heat of the sun on her shoulder, and to measure all things out in the sameness of each day.

She shouldn't be surprised that Klaus is the one to break this rhythm, even though he's the one who set it for her in the first place.

After breakfast, Stefan leads her out for their walk. She threads her arm through his by habit now, and he no longer protests. Except while normally they go out through the back door unimpeded—every single day, in fact, once they had started this ritual—this time, Klaus is waiting for them.

"Ah, Stefan." He stands with his hands clasped together. "I thought today I'd relieve you of your duties, take Elena out myself." He offers her a dimpled smile and holds out his arm, like he just expects her to take it.

Stefan tries to acquiesce and move aside for Klaus, but Elena doesn't let go of his arm.

"I want to go with Stefan."

Both of Klaus's eyebrows shoot up, in that expression of mild, amused surprise he has. "My, we're stubborn… Stefan, do go find Rebekah. And that is an order."

"Elena," Stefan murmurs, so quiet she can barely hear. "Elena, don't push this. Go with Klaus."

He tries to take her hand away, but she clutches him so tightly that he'll only hurt her if he forces it. And he can't hurt her, no, he can't do a thing if it would cause her physical harm. She pushes his hand away from where he's trying to disengage her and addresses herself to Klaus.

"Why can't Stefan take me? I prefer his company."

"Because Stefan has an obligation to my sister and because I'm desirous of your company this morning." He nods at Stefan. "I won't ask again."

Stefan finally succeeds in prying her hand away and Klaus immediately takes it. He wraps his fingers around hers and reels her in.

She looks behind her at Stefan, but he's already backing away.

"Are you ready, my dear?"

The words send a shiver down her spine.

She doesn't respond as he opens the door and leads her out. He tucks her hand into the crook of his arm and rests his free hand over her fingers, so she is doubly locked-down by him.

"Beautiful fall weather," he remarks. "Though, perhaps a bit sunny for you. You're looking a bit sallow under that olive complexion." He leans into her, so his mouth is near the juncture of her neck and shoulder, and inhales. Her whole body tenses up with his mouth at her neck. "You smell healthy, at least..." He is so close she can feel his mouth quirk against her skin. "A bit revved up, though." He presses his lips to her neck, just over her scar, and speaks against her throat. "Mmm, Elena? I can feel your pulse fluttering like a hummingbird in your throat, and I can smell all of that adrenaline, pumping away… Why so jittery?"

"You're very close."

"Ah, but we've danced this number before, now, haven't we, sweetheart? By the light of the moon?"

"That's why I'm uncomfortable."

"No need to be. Haven't I already told you? I won't harm a hair on your lovely head."

"How can I believe you? You killed me."

He pulls away, finally. His fingers brush her hair over her shoulder, so the scar is obscured again. "If you'll recall, that was really more by necessity. I didn't have anything against you."

"Except my face."

"Well, yes, there was that. But some things can't be helped."

Klaus brings her over to the Japanese Maple, whose leaves are turning a brilliant scarlet. From this angle, she can see that Stefan and Rebekah have come outside. They're having some sort of argument, but their voices do not carry.

"But is your face such a terrible burden to bear?" he asks, continuing the thread of their conversation.

"You're kidding."

"No, not at all." Klaus guides her over to the iron lawn chair, and draws her down to sit with him. "Perhaps last spring it may have seemed like more of a curse than a blessing—as you so aptly pointed out, a death-sentence would be a bit of a bother, though it was in service to something much greater than yourself, which should have been a comfort—but what about now? Surely you must see that being my doppelganger has its benefits."

"What do you mean, 'what about now'? What benefits?" she asks him as she stares across the lawn at the only man she's ever loved, embroiled in a lover's spat with another woman. "My face is still the reason I'm imprisoned here." It's still the reason I've lost Stefan. Lost everything.

"You call it imprisonment, I call it position."

She opens her mouth to respond, but nothing comes. It's very hard to think, let alone follow the maze of Klaus's mind, when her eyes keep getting dragged back to the couple across the lawn. "I don't understand…"

Rebekah has just shoved Stefan into the side of the house. Stefan points at himself, at Rebekah, back and forth and back and forth.

Klaus flips her hand over and draws little designs over her palm. The skin is very sensitive there, and she shudders a little bit when his nail scratches the inside of her wrist. "Come now, Elena. Surely the preoccupations of young girls haven't changed so much?"

She swallows thickly, her eyes darting between Klaus right in front of her, and Stefan in the distance. It's an effort, to drag her attention back to Klaus. "Apparently, they have, so you're going to have to clue me in on what you mean."

"I'm talking about position, dear heart, about social-standing… about matches." Klaus continues tracing the bluish veins on the inside of her arm. With each passing swipe of his finger, she's getting pulled further into him. She thinks she understand how the fly feels, caught in the spider's silk web. She's horrified to be here, but the trap feels wonderful all the same. "You see, not so very long ago, every woman's prime objective was to launch herself into the company of the most eligible men—eligible usually defined as powerful, in one way or another—and to cast her nets to capture the very best one possible." He takes hold of her chin with his free hand and turns her face toward him. His fingers caress her jaw, so lightly the pressure is just a faint tickle in the breeze. "With your face comes access—to the very best, the very apex, the very most powerful of them all—to me. Women used to literally kill for that kind of opportunity."

He talks and talks and talks, and she gets lost, listening to what he's saying. This isn't the script she thought they were following, but now that she's here, she can see all those little warning signs that she just ignored like a fool. She feels a sick upside down feeling, like she might throw up.

"You're not asking me to marry you." She says it definitively, hoping that if she slams the door shut on this bizarre topic now, it'll never reappear.

He laughs, the sound clear and bright. "No, of course not." He leans in very close, so close she can see each individual dark blond eyelash, so close she can nearly taste his mouth, and the only place for her to look is into his blue eyes. "But do you remember," he murmurs, voice low and velvety, "that night you burst into my library uninvited? You told me that you weren't my pet. But really, you are— and is that such a bad thing? To belong to me, my doppelganger…" His fingers stroke her face as he speaks. He draws her in with his touch and his voice, and she's too muddled by it all to pull away.

It takes nothing for him to close the distance between them. His kiss is like his bite—possessive and all-consuming. It terrifies her.

She rears back and slaps him.

For his part, Klaus actually looks surprised by her reaction. He reaches up and touches the spot on his face where she struck him. Her hand and wrist are already throbbing—no doubt, she did more damage to herself than to him.

"I don't belong to you, Klaus," she snaps. "I'm not your pet."

He narrows his eyes at her. "All evidence to the contrary, sweetheart."

She surges to her feet, and he doesn't stop her. "You don't get it, and you never will. You might have control of my body, but you can't control me. You can't control what I think, or what I feel. In all the ways that matter, you can't even touch me."

She stomps away from him without waiting for an answer. That same instinct that lets her know when a predator is watching her also warns her that his eyes are trained unwaveringly on her back as she stalks off across the lawn. Vaguely, she notices Stefan and Rebekah have stopped fighting, and are both looking at her in that eerie frozen way peculiar to vampires.

She goes back to her room and slams the door.

She can still feel Klaus's kiss.

She falls asleep and dreams of fire.

Elena doesn't lay eyes on Klaus again for six days after that. Stefan says he's around, but she never actually sees him.

She hadn't realized how used to him she was until he was gone. She expects him to turn up in the library at every moment, and is so distracted, glancing up constantly at the door, like looking will make him appear, that she can hardly read.

It's different from the last time, when he stopped visiting. There had been nothing behind that, simply a lack of regard. This time, she feels a definitive tension in the air.

He's very angry with her. She's sure of it. She cannot imagine how a man with an ego like his can reconcile being so summarily rejected.

She finds a copy of Jane Eyre with Rebekah's name scribbled on the frontispiece. She traces the script letters with her fingertips.

Assuming no one had thrown it away, she has a copy of the same book sitting on the bookshelf in her bedroom back home in Mystic Falls. It had been on the syllabus for her AP English class.

She gets to the part where Jane Eyre confronts Mr. Rochester in his garden, and feels a kind of fierce kinship with Jane's sentiments.

"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you, — and full as much heart!"

But when she reads the next part, she shuts the book, and finds she has no interest in going on with it.

She wishes he would show up just so they can get past the inevitable argument, and go back to the cease-fire they'd had before.

A thump followed by a scream awakens her on the sixth night.

She lies completely still under her blankets, frozen by fear and indecision.

Someone thunders up the stairs at the end of the hallway, then barrels past her door.

Silence follows.

She's been in too many situations like this before to let uncertainty of whatever is going on outside to stop her from investigating. She creeps along the hall, pausing at each door. She doesn't know what she's looking for, but she doesn't want to miss it when she finds it.

From the doorway of the last bedroom on her hall, she can hear someone breathing. Whoever it is is trying very hard too stay silent, but is whimpering between breaths too much to succeed.

She finds a stranger—a girl, maybe a little older than herself, with wild dark hair and mascara streaks running down her face—huddled up in a closet, her hands clamped over her mouth. Her eyes roll wildly in their sockets, like a spooked horse, when she spots Elena. The girl tries to scramble away when Elena squats down level with her, but her back is already to a wall.

Elena could never turn her back on someone in need.

"I'm not going to harm you," Elena whispers. There's something dark staining the girl's shirt. "Are you hurt?"

The girl nods, and touches her fingers to her ribs.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

Fresh tears ooze down the girl's face. "I was at a party—My friend Sasha and I left with a guy, and he brought us here. He was so funny and nice, and I thought it was fine, because Sasha seemed to know him—" She grabs Elena's arm. There's a look on her face that Elena recognizes, the stunned look that always follows the discovery that nightmares are real. "But he wasn't a guy. He was… he was…" She trails off, an hysteric note in her voice.

"He was a monster," Elena supplies.

"Yes!"

Elena takes the girl's hand and pulls her to stand. She speaks to her very gently. "My name's Elena. What's yours?"

"Zoe."

"Listen to me, Zoe. I'm going to get you out of here. You need to be quiet, and stay close behind me. Got it?"

"What about Sasha?"

"We'll look for her too, but the priority has to be getting you out."

Zoe pauses. "You're not… like him, are you?"

Elena shakes her head. "I'm just like you. Normal." It's a lie, but it's a comforting one.

She's not sure who it was who brought Zoe here—a hybrid, probably, one of the new ones who prefers live prey to blood bags. Some of them look like college boys. It would be easy for one of them to slip into a party and bring one of the girls back for a meal. If that's the case, then her presence might provide Zoe with enough protection to get her out the door.

There's a back door off the kitchen, down on the first floor. If Elena can get Zoe through that door, she might be able to get her to the edge of the property.

Elena leads Zoe back out into the hall, down the stairs. They are very, very quiet. The moon is their only light.

There are no windows in the staircase, so they must navigate by touch as they make their way down in total darkness. At the bottom of the staircase, Elena trips on something large and lukewarm. She throws her hands out to catch her fall, and her fingers snag in strands of something long and smooth. Everything around her is wet.

"Elena?" Zoe calls. "Are you okay?"

Elena pulls her hand out of the thicket of human hair. Her knees are dripping in blood, but none of it is her own. She's found Sasha.

"Zoe, take my hand. You need to jump past the final step, okay?"

"Why? Is there something…?"

"It's not important right now. Jump."

Zoe follows her directions and lands just past her dead friend's body. They make it to the back door, then out, onto the lawn.

The moon is bright tonight, and shines silver over the wet grass.

It all happens very fast.

She sees Rebekah, mouth ringed in red and gore dripping down between her breasts, at the same time as she feels Zoe ripped from her grip. She turns.

Klaus has finally made an appearance.

He stands behind Zoe, holding her loosely by the throat. He doesn't look like other vampires when the change comes upon his face. Elena's never seen anything like it. His eyes are an unnatural black that reflect no light, save for the yellow wolf irises burning through the dark. And his fangs are different too, larger and double-rowed, and twice as deadly. She stands transfixed in horror, looking at the thing her blood has made.

She closes her eyes. She had known, of course, that this was a possibility. When she opens them, Klaus is leering at her.

"Lovely of you to join us, Elena."

She stumbles forward. "Let her go."

Klaus turns to his sister. "What do you think, Bex? Should we let our guest leave the party?"

Rebekah rolls her eyes. "Oh, don't be a spoil sport, Elena, Nick and I are not nearly finished. Our new friend can't possibly leave yet." She slinks over to Zoe, and, taking Zoe's hand, plucks the rhinestone ring off the girl's finger and slides it onto her own. Rebekah holds her hand up to the light to examine the effect. "What do you think, Zoe, does this suit me?"

The girl nods mutely.

"Please," Elena calls, addressing herself to them both. "Please, just let her go." Tears prick at her eyes. She doesn't bother to wipe them away.

Zoe stares at her, unblinking, but her whole body shivers and quakes under Klaus's grasp.

Amazingly, Klaus lets her go.

Zoe bolts across the field.

Klaus and Elena stare at each other, only two feet apart. She thinks he might grab her next.

Then the moon disappears behind a cloud. The wind shifts. Klaus and Rebekah share a look, and then, as if some silent signal had been sent, they disappear, streaking across the field like lightening.

The girl runs as fast as her legs can carry her. It's not fast enough.

Elena is at some distance, so she cannot be sure who did it in the end, but the sound of Zoe's neck snapping reverberates through the empty night.

They come back a few minutes later, somewhat bloodier than when they disappeared. Rebekah is looking at her new ring. They each wear smiles on their faces, like they've just shared a joke.

In the distance, Zoe's body has been abandoned on the ground. A hybrid will be tasked with disposing of it tomorrow, or perhaps wolves will scavenge it.

"Come inside, now, sweetheart, or you'll catch cold." Klaus lays a hand on her shoulder and steers her toward the house. His flesh is feverishly hot.

"You're so cruel," she mumbles.

He hears her perfectly well. "It's in my nature," he tells her. "And in yours."

When she looks in the mirror upon returning to her room, she notices that Klaus has left a bloody handprint on her shoulder.

The next morning, she pushes food around on her plate while Stefan watches her eat.

"Say I did have something planned," she begins quietly. "What would happen?"

Stefan turns to face the window. He looks so much older than seventeen. He looks like he's not quite certain how best to phrase things. "Klaus is unpredictable at the best of times," he tells her slowly. "He has an explosive temper, and poor control over himself once it's engaged. You've seen how his rage rules him sometimes." He turns back to her, and kneels beside her bedside, so he is looking up into her face. "If you were to plot against him, that temper would be unleashed on you, and on everyone you love. Are you prepared for that?"

"No."

"Then leave it, Elena." He stands and returns to looking out the window.

A few more minutes pass, with only the sound of her silverware scraping against her plate to break it.

"Do you think it's the wolf in him, that makes him so volatile?" she asks at length.

"The wolf, or the man."

A/N: Thank you for all of the amazing reviews you all have been leaving—you all rock.

To celebrate getting over 30 reviews on this + the amazingness that is spring break, I'll be taking tvd prompts on my tumblr through March 31st. Anyone who is interested can drop me a prompt in my tumblr inbox, .com , and I will write you a ficlet, to be published here on ffn and on tumblr. Any prompt, any pairing, so long as it's tvd.