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 sits huddled up in a window seat in an unused music room on the third floor, knees tucked under her chin. It's been about sixteen hours since Zoe's death. The window overlooks the garden below, and the long line of trees edging the perimeter of the property. The sun has long since begun to sink below the treetops, and shadows lengthen in the room. She doesn't bother to turn on a light. Right here, she could almost be sitting at her bedroom window again. How many nights last year had she sat in that very spot, thinking of Klaus?

Of course, she had never in her wildest imaginings thought of him like this.

Klaus's kiss comes back to her with so much more potency than it ever had in the week preceding Zoe's death. Perhaps it's a kind of guilty self-torture, her penance for being unable to save the girl in the end, but Elena cannot help but recall in perfect detail the way Klaus's lips slid against her own, warm and soft, and the pressure of his tongue stroking against hers, the way his hands held her in place so that he could claim her. The taste of him, like something familiar, bourbon and regret. It had been over so quickly, and yet she had catalogued it all.

It had been easy to ignore those sensations when the kiss had actually occurred last week. Sure, she had thought about it a lot since it had happened, but only ever in terms of Klaus's motivations—he had kissed her because she wasn't really a person to him, he had kissed her because of whom she looked like, he had kissed her because he thought it would be easy to use her, he had kissed her because he enjoyed toying with her and had nothing better to do. The closest she had come to even attaching any emotion to the… interaction… had been in consideration of Klaus's temper. Of his ego, crushed, or of his boredom, undiverted. That long absence had seemed so rife with possibilities, ways he might lash out at her, and yet somehow never had she considered what Klaus would actually do when met with an obstacle to his desires.

She feels like a fucking idiot for not seeing this coming, for not knowing exactly how he would respond to her rejection. She'd seen how cavalier he was about life and death on Senior Prank Night. If she drops her foot, Chad, I want you to beat her to death. He was a monster, not because of what he was but because of who he was.

And yet, she had not rejected him because of that. She wishes she'd had the larger, nobler reasons (righteousness, honor, morality, fidelity) in mind when she slapped him. She knows that it was the right thing to do, for everyone he had hurt, for Jenna and Stefan and Tyler and Isobel and John—but she had done it solely for herself, without anyone else, or anything else, ever even entering her mind. Because he'd hurt her pride (her vanity) when he treated her like an object or a lower-life form, without feelings or heart or inherent purpose. Ultimately, the reasoning behind her refusal had marked her out as every bit as selfish as she had accused him of being.

It's because of those reasons that she cannot summon the necessary disgust with Klaus when she replays their kiss. It's only herself she feels disgust toward—a girl who'd already kissed so many mouths that should have been stained red forever by the death on those lips, a girl who too easily moved past unspeakable horror after horror and didn't even have nightmares about it anymore. Honestly, what difference does it make if she kisses Klaus, at this point?

Her mother would be so ashamed of her.

Her mother wouldn't even recognize her.

Just like she'd thought last night, Zoe's body had already been moved by the time she woke up. It doesn't matter, really. In her mind's eye, she can still see the silhouette of that broken girl, dark under the moonlight.

Before last night, it had been almost easy to narrow the scope of her problems to herself, to doing whatever was expected of her to keep Tyler safe, to keep Stefan safe, to try to help him in whatever way she could.

How selfish that all seems now. How selfish that she intends to go on with it anyway.

Stefan cracks the door open, spots her, and settles back against the door jam, arms crossed over his chest. "Finished sulking?" he asks her.

"I'm not sulking."

He shrugs. "Brooding, then."

"Fine, you're the expert, Stefan. What do you care if I am?"

"I only care when you miss meals to do it."

She grinds her teeth but doesn't move from her spot on the windowsill. "I wasn't hungry for lunch today."

She can feel Stefan's eyes on her, studying her, but he doesn't say anything at first, just meanders into the room only to pause at the upright piano shoved into the corner, looking like it's been a few decades since anyone has touched it. He taps one of the high keys twice. The note comes out flat and weak.

Stefan flips open the lid on the piano and peers inside. "So what's up with the pity party anyway?"

"Do you know about last night?"

"The sorority girls?" He reaches his arm into the piano, up to the elbow. He's got a fixed look of concentration on his face, like he's half-here, half-wherever-his-work-is. It reminds her of afternoons at the Boarding House, Stefan on his back under his car while she sat and watched him work, talking about school, about Caroline and Bonnie and whatever was going on between them, late afternoon sun streaming in and making everything golden and warm and safe and normal.

"Sasha and Zoe."

"Alright then, Sasha and Zoe. What about them?"

"I was with them—Klaus and Rebekah—when they killed Zoe. They let her go, made her think she had a chance to escape, before they killed her. They were toying with her."

Whatever Stefan had thought to do under the hood of the piano, he gives up and comes over to sit by her. Almost like a confidante. "Sounds more like they were toying with you. Or Klaus was, anyway. Rebekah would rather get rid of you." He glances out the window at the setting sun, then, shifting beats, stands and holds his hand out to her. "C'mon, it's dinner time."

Trust Stefan to always bring the conversation back to his orders from Klaus. She is so sick of his orders. "I'm not hungry."

"Look, Elena, I let you sulk in here all day, but I can't let you miss another meal."

She turns away from him.

"What?" Stefan asks, frustration keen in his voice. "You're not eating now? Klaus decides to pick on you so you just curl up and die?"

"I don't think what he did counts as picking on me, Stefan."

"You're being dramatic." She can hear his eyes roll.

"What about my life isn't fucking dramatic, Stefan? What? Please, inform me." By the end, she is shouting at him.

"Are you done?"

She purses her lips. Say she did have something planned. She wouldn't tell him. "For now." She pushes past him and starts the walk back to her bedroom.

Stefan follows behind her, a phantom at her shoulder, silent as only the truly deadly can be.

Back in her room, the tray is already set up, round silver lid keeping everything hot for her. Stefan plucks the lid off and the moist heat from the ossobuco underneath wafts up into her face. The air is sharp with spices. Her stomach twists in sudden hunger.

Elena's cutting the meat into little, savory pieces when Stefan speaks up. "I'm the one who taught Klaus to play with his food."

She pauses, fork poised at her lips. She puts the fork down. "He's like, eight-hundred years older than you. I doubt you've made that great of an impression in five months."

Stefan stuffs his hands in his pockets and hunches over her, the way he sometimes approached Damon or Katherine when he was trying to be casual and threatening all at once. "I didn't teach him this summer, Elena—I'm talking about before."

"You mean in the twenties." Carefully, she takes a bite. The veal nearly melts in her mouth.

"Yeah, the twenties. Middle of a blood binge, I met Klaus and Bex in Chicago. You see, before Klaus met me, he was more of a kill everyone you ever cared about kind of guy." Stefan's mouth twists. "What he liked so much about me was that I taught him how to have fun with it." He leans back against the wall, but he doesn't take his eyes off of her. "One night, we had a beautiful woman sit with us, so we could enjoy her over sidecars. Well, eventually her husband came looking for her, and he wasn't very happy with the state he found her in. He got real angry, threatened to call Chicago PD. So I thought, guy hardly knows us, he oughta at least have a drink with us before he makes a rash decision like that."

"Haha, very funny." Her knife scrapes against the plate.

"Klaus thought so."

"So what, you drained him right there?"

"Hardly."

Her stomach turns. It's obvious where this story is headed. She keeps eating.

"I invited the guy to sit down with us, and I had his wife sit down next to me, so I could use my switchblade to slit her wrist and fill a champagne glass with her blood. Then I told her husband to drink up."

I invited him to the party, love, he's the one dancing on the table.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"You live in a house of vampires, Elena. I thought it was time you took notice."

She scoffs. "Believe me, I notice."

"No, I don't think you do, else last night wouldn't have struck you so hard."

"I just… forgot, somehow, what he was like."

"The same way you "forget" what I'm like." He air-quotes the word forget, and just like that she does forget, because she's wondering why he's never come out of the nineties, and the fondness she feels for him seeps through her like sap in a tree. And God is it irritating to realize that Stefan is right. She does have a problem, and it starts and ends with her inability to keep her moral compass fixed and steady when she's around vampires. If only she were ever around anyone other than vampires, she might get her head straight.

She pushes her dinner away, only half consumed. "Damon makes this better."

There's a flicker in his eyes—annoyance, or—maybe— jealousy. "Anything else Damon does better than me?"

"Lots of things. We spent all summer together."

"Oh, I'm sure. Cozied up together in Mystic Falls?"

They stare at each other. The air thickens with tension, with the certainty that someone, at some point, is going to break.

She wishes—oh! she wishes!—that she could cut through the barriers that've flown up between them since he left last May.

It's you and me, Stefan.

And just like that, she takes the leap—and Stefan catches her. She throws herself into his arms, and he doesn't push her away, no, he wraps his arms around her and draws her close to him, so her head is tucked under his chin and she can hear his heart beating, the slow, eternal rhythm she will always rely upon.

"I almost thought I'd escaped him, too," she whispers. There's no need for her to say who she means. They're in this together, whether or nor Stefan will ever admit it aloud. "Last summer… I was miserable without you. But I was free, too."

Stefan's fingers catch at the bottom of her hair. Quietly, he tells her, "I pretended you were dead last summer. You were dead last summer. I wasn't ever going to see you again."

Tears burn in her eyes. When she looks up at Stefan, she can't see him clearly at all. His mouth is very close. She tilts her head, and Stefan is staring at her, and her mouth, and leaning toward her. Her pulse thuds in her ears.

He pulls away from her, so they are not touching at all. "Remember what I told you, Elena. We're monsters, all of us. It'll go better for you if you keep that in mind." He's gone before she can formulate a response.

She realizes her mouth is hanging open. Still waiting to be kissed.

It would have been nice, for Stefan to kiss her, to wipe out the memory of Klaus's kiss with something she could cherish instead.

A/N: Thank you to everyone who's reviewed/kept by during the hiatus, I really appreciate it, and loved hearing your thoughts. I'm well into the next few chapters for this, and am so excited for where FE is going!

And if you haven't seen, I've also started a sequel to my other Klena multi-chapter, After the Fire, But Before the Flood, called Symbiosis. Check it out if you haven't already!

Drop me a review here or hit me up on tumblr at livlepretre if you want to chat tvd/have questions! xx