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: M as of this chapter
Warnings: Explicit but canon typical violence, explicit sexual situations, unhealthy relationships, hostage situations
They actually get away with it.
All through the next day, Elena expects Klaus to discover somehow that she and Stefan had spirited Matt away, alive and well. Deep in her gut, she knows that his vengeance upon them if he were to discover Stefan's betrayal would be a terrible thing to behold.
She had risked it anyway, though. She would risk anything for someone she loves.
Klaus never comes round to have it out with her, and at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Stefan arrives right on time with her meals. She raises her eyebrows when he comes in at the end of the day, asking silently, Anything?
He shakes his head no.
She cannot bring herself to speak to him about much of anything at all. Small-talk seems next to impossible after the charade they managed last night. She feels exhausted, like her bones will snap from the effort of holding her back straight and her head up high.
When Stefan leans over her to clear her dinner tray away, the back of his hand accidentally grazes the top of her thigh. The touch sends the sense memory of Klaus's hands on her shooting through her. She tamps down on the feeling that stirs in the pit of her stomach, tells herself it's because of Stefan's touch.
He pauses and locks eyes with her for a long moment, but doesn't say anything. They can't risk to explore those things—those feelings between them that stir right below the surface—where anyone could overhear.
As soon as Stefan leaves, she scrambles down from the bed and pulls her diary from its hiding spot. She does not dare put to page what really happened last night, lest anyone discover her secret, but she does write about how she is feeling. Sorting through her feelings by writing them down has always helped her achieve a clearer sense of herself… And yet, she finds that after last night, she is so muddled she cannot truly sort anything out. Should she be upset with Stefan for killing Matt, or is that forgiven because it is undone? Is it better, or worse, than when Damon killed Jeremy? (And oh, she had pressed her lips to Damon's anyway, mingled his tears with hers even after she had sworn to hate him forever.) Could she forgive Tyler for turning away from them, when she knows, logically, that staying behind would have been a deadly dangerous proposition for him? She firmly ignores the part of her mind that asks, And what about Klaus? What about how you responded when Stefan touched you like he had? For this problem, the problem that haunts her daily, she takes a page from Scarlett O'Hara: She will think about it tomorrow.
There will be time for all of that tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.
Her dreams that night are more vivid than any she can remember having since she came here.
At first, she dreams that she is back in the piano room with Stefan, pressed side to side, and he traces his fingers up the side of her leg, circling over the curve of her inner thigh as he kisses her, the echoes of their duet still ringing in her ears. But when she pulls back, it's not Stefan kissing her at all, it's Klaus, that red mouth too close to hers, full of sharp teeth that prick her when he kisses her, that consume her until all she can taste is her own blood in her mouth, and all she can feel are his fingers on her bare skin, tracing, tracing, burning, burning—
When she awakens, she could swear that there is someone standing at the foot of her bed, a bit of darkness deeper than all the rest.
Another day goes by before Tyler seeks her out.
She turns a corner, heading toward her room, and finds him hanging around by her door. The sight of him waiting for her sends her into a panic. What what what would she do if Klaus caught him here?
Immediately she runs up to him and grabs him by the arm, pulling him away from her room. "What are you doing here?" she hisses at him under her breath.
Tyler looks around them and then drags her behind a closed door, which he shuts firmly behind him. He's pulled her into another guest room. Dust motes float through a bar of white winter sunlight filtering through the window.
He takes one long look at her, at the accusation she can't keep out of her eyes, and breaks away from her so fast she sways off balance. Violently, he scrubs his hands through his hair. Digs the heels of his palms into his eyes and takes great, heaving breaths that rattle his whole body.
She realizes that he's crying.
It strikes her that he has no idea that Matt is alive.
How can she be angry at him now? She has never been able to endure others' grief well. Her resolve crumbles, and she goes to him, taking him into her arms and pulling him against her breast. She can feel his wet tears in the crook of her neck.
At the same time, the part of her that is a little cruel decides to let him cry it out before she tells him. A little revenge for his leaving her to go through all of that alone.
Some time passes before Tyler asks at last, "Where did you bury him?" His voice is so much quieter and steadier than she would have expected. She realizes that he has stopped crying ages ago, and that he now holds her as much as she holds him. At some point he's tucked her head under his chin, and clasped her tightly to him.
"Why did you leave last night?" she asks instead of answering his question. She can hear his heart beating sure and steady under her ear.
"I had to."
"Why didn't you come to me, afterward?"
"He made me stay away." In the rhythm of his heart and the timber of his voice she can hear everything left unspoken. The threat that must have hung implicit between the two wolves.
Elena nods. Feels within her a nearly limitless capacity for forgiveness. Tyler is many things, but perhaps Klaus is right, perhaps his courage sometimes fails him. It's a shortcoming she understands all too well.
She leans up on her tiptoes and brushes the words against the shell of his ear, too afraid to voice them aloud. Matt's alive.
Tyler pulls back and stares at her through narrowed eyes. What? he mouths.
Elena holds up her hand and taps her ring finger.
Understanding dawns in Tyler's eyes. A fierce joy shines in him.
Before she can stop him he's got his arms around her, picking her up in a swinging embrace and laughing like a lunatic, and then she's laughing too, laughing so hard she thinks she's going to be sick, spinning so fast she can almost imagine that she's carefree.
They sneak down to Tyler's room, and it's there that Elena uses Tyler's vine charcoal to hastily write out her explanation of that night's events. He brushes the paper off when he's finished reading, scattering the charcoal pigment like sand in the wind. Draws right over it so that no one could know the secrets on that page.
Later, Tyler pours her a drink, and after a while, she confides, "I still don't know how he knew."
"Hm?"
"Klaus. He brought Matt here because he was my first. I still don't know how he knew that." Elena glances up just in time to see Tyler freeze, an oh shit look on his face.
"He targeted Matt because he took your virginity?" Tyler asks, too casually.
Slowly, Elena places her glass on Tyler's desk and stands up. "What did you do?" she asks him quietly.
"Nothing!"
"Tyler, what did you tell him?"
"Nothing, I swear!"
"Tyler!" By now she's standing right in front of him, steel in her voice and her spine and a terrible knowing searing within her. But she has to hear the words from him, she can't let it go—
"Okay! I told him he was your first!"
She feels like the floor has fallen out from under her. Her upset at Tyler when he left the room that other terrible night is nothing compared to this. "I don't understand. Why would you tell him that? You have to have known he was planning something awful."
"He asked me, okay? I had to tell him."
She slaps him. "You traitor."
Tyler tries to reach out for her, but she shoves him away from her, as hard as she can. She darts for the door.
"Elena—"
She turns on him. "No, Tyler! Matt died because you stupidly, selfishly gave Klaus whatever he wanted to know! Did it never occur to you what he would do with that information?"
He flings his arms out. "I had to, Elena! I had to!"
"No, you don't have to do anything, Tyler. You just do." She storms out of the room, and doesn't look back.
It's a betrayal beyond what she had imagined Tyler was capable. And it hurts, like a gaping wound in her heart, to know that the one ally she was certain she had would so carelessly sell her—sell Matt— out.
Stefan senses her mood. She can't confide in him, and yet, they are a team again. He takes her for her walk in the damp cold garden, and although they cannot touch, and although they do not dare speak about anything important, for Rebekah and Klaus are always watching, Elena feels the connection between them, strong and sure and growing.
When Stefan doesn't show up with breakfast the next morning at the usual time, Elena gets a sinking feeling in her stomach. All of the possibilities start to swirl through her, imaginings of Klaus discovering, prying, knowing. What could he do to Stefan if he whimmed it? What would Rebekah do if she found out that Stefan had shown she, Elena, the smallest spark of loyalty?
She throws on her clothes and slips out of her room. At each hall, each staircase, she pauses and listens, trying to determine where everyone is. Finally, she finds them downstairs in that front parlor room she thinks she'll have nightmares about for the rest of her life.
The room is totally different than it had been three days ago. The satin window sashes have been thrown back, and the pale winter sun floods the room with white morning light. Blood still speckles the expensive fabric of the upholstery, but Matt's blood has been laboriously scrubbed from the floor boards, and the piano keys gleam a spotless ivory. Clearly, Klaus had had priorities when he instructed his hybrids to clean.
A different sort of horror is unfolding from the one of three nights previous. There's no swarm of writhing humans, no room full of hungry wolves waiting to satiate their hunger. It's just Klaus and Stefan, and some dark haired girl who's already half dead in Stefan's arms. Stefan's mouth is latched onto her throat; he hangs onto the girl like a leopard snarling over its prey, holding the jackals off. Klaus leans over him, whispering into his ear—ordering him to drink and drink until he kills the girl, no doubt. The hand on Stefan's shoulder is a promise and a threat if Stefan does not do exactly as Klaus wants.
She thinks of all of the years and years of self-sacrifice and inhuman effort Stefan had put into controlling his bloodlust, how gentle and naturally empathetic he had been to others. How this monster in front of her had sought out to destroy all of that in Stefan, to obliterate it for his own capricious entertainment. The rage and disgust boil up in her, making her skin flush in fury.
Without thinking of it, Elena starts forward into the room. She's only made it a step before a strong hand catches her by the shoulder.
Rebekah leans forward to murmur in her ear, voice low and clear as a bell, "Best not to interrupt them when they're involved like this. They get terribly wrapped up."
Elena pauses to glare over her shoulder at Rebekah. She tries to twist free of her, but that beautifully manicured hand's grip is unrelenting. She could sooner break free of an iron manacle with her bare fingers than throw Rebekah off of her.
She looks back in time to see the girl's head fall and roll away from the body still clasped in Stefan's arms. Her gorge rises as the head rolls toward the fireplace before thumping dully against the mantle and coming to a rest.
Klaus finally looks up and raises his brows when he spots Elena. "Didn't expect to see you down so early, sweetheart."
"I wasn't aware I had to keep curfew hours."
Klaus shrugs and turns back to Stefan. Whatever he says to him is too soft for her to hear, but she feels like she gets the gist of it from the simmering look Stefan gives Klaus, the curl of his lip. It's the monster in Stefan that Klaus likes best, the very part of himself that Stefan likes least. How many scenarios just like this have played out when she wasn't around? An image of Damon's secret research, trailing Stefan and Klaus through the states, flits through her mind. How many people has Klaus forced Stefan to murder, in just this manner? How much must that have torn him apart before he switched his humanity off?
She looks back at Rebekah. "Klaus?" she calls, voice steady and calm. "Will you ask your sister to unhand me? She's pinching a nerve in my neck."
Just like that, she has Klaus's attention. He strides over to them and doesn't even need to speak for Rebekah to follow his order and release her. Rebekah does this with an audible huff and a roll of her eyes—Rebekah never likes to follow anyone's instructions at all without making it clear that she doesn't want to—but she does it just the same.
Elena slips out the door as soon as she is free. She can feel three pairs of eyes on her as she marches back up the stairs, slowly and deliberately, but she doesn't turn back, and she doesn't let them see how they affect her.
She's in the library reading. She'd come in here after finding it too hard to sleep, having simply thrown a pullover sweater over her pajamas. The fireplace had been lit when she arrived, the flames dancing yellow-orange in the grate, and she is having remarkable trouble focusing. Her eyes retrace the same words again and again, without deriving any meaning.
She senses him before she sees him. That niggling awareness of him that she has developed is something she would rather not linger on. All too easily he has become the center of her universe, the golden thread she follows to find her way out of the labyrinth he has placed her in.
The firelight catches the gold in his hair, the perpetually raging storm in his blue eyes. When he sits down next to her and throws his arm over the back of the sofa behind her head, she finds herself too transfixed by him to protest his closeness.
"What game are you playing?" she asks him, somewhat recklessly.
He's tipped his head back and closed his eyes, exposing his throat to her. Only his lips move when he tells her, "Everything's a game after a thousand years, dearheart. You'll have to be more specific." He could be a statue, she thinks. Only something truly dead could hold so still.
"With Stefan, then. Let's start there. Why make him murder all of those people? You're torturing him."
"You're mixed up. I'm not torturing him, I'm taking care of him. A vampire has very particular needs. Stefan has a habit of denying himself those needs, so I make a habit of intervening on his behalf." Klaus says it all so reasonably, so definitively, that she's tempted to just let it be.
"You're forcing him."
"I'm encouraging him. It's very different. I haven't asked Stefan to do anything he doesn't want to do."
"What about me, then?"
Klaus cracks open his eyes. "What about you?" His voice is very low. It's almost lost in the crackle and hiss of the fire.
"What was that the other night? With Matt? Was it just to hurt me?"
Klaus turns to her. "I was curious."
"About why I slept with Matt?"
"Surely. But also, I wanted to know where Stefan's loyalty ultimately runs—with you or with me. And, perhaps, I wanted to know exactly what you would be willing to do to save your first love. Not very much, as it turned out. You hardly put up a fight. I would have expected at least a counter-offer from you."
Elena's mouth hangs open. It's true, she hadn't offered him anything. She had seen the ring early, and from then on, she had done her best just to make sure Klaus did not see the ace up her sleeve, and to communicate to Stefan what charade they had to play and hope like hell everyone would play their parts without giving up the ruse. It had never occurred to her until now that maybe she had been selfish playing it like that. For not working harder to find another solution, even if it meant…
All at once she realizes that Klaus is staring at her. He's always staring at her, it seems, ever since the beginning. Weighing her, studying her, working so, so hard to decipher her. To know her.
"You know, you're different than I anticipated," he tells her softly.
She swallows. His eyes dart down, following the bob of her throat. Slowly, he reaches out and touches his hand to her knee, inching the finger upward, to the place on her thigh he had touched her before.
"How?" she asks. Her voice sounds weak, even to her own ears.
"I thought you'd be Katerina come-again, but you're something else." He draws the tip of his finger over her thigh as he speaks, the barest pressure against her skin, so light she could be imagining it.
His words unlock something inside of her. Some distant, yearning part of her that has always wanted to be seen for only herself, ever since the day she discovered that her face belonged to another. (Another who, somehow, was more beautiful than her, who was smarter and more graceful and more more more.)
He must see the way his words affect her—surely there must be some opening in her expression, some sign that yes, she is listening, and she is interested—
"I find I am very interested in you, Elena." He is very close, so close she can see each golden lash distinctly. His thumb brushes against the inside of her thigh. She cannot break away from that blue gaze. "Elena," he murmurs again. Her name, not sweetheart or darling or Petrova this or doppelganger that. Just Elena.
There are a thousand warning bells ringing in her mind. A thousand reasons to say no, to pull back and run, run far away.
She ignores them all. It's like she's magnetized, drawn into him and unable to break free from this current running between them. Her hand trembles when she reaches for him. His stubble scratches against the inside of her palm. She shivers as she imagines it rubbing against other places.
Her touch galvanizes him. In a heartbeat his free hand is buried in her hair, drawing her forward. Instantaneously she is grasping him by the shoulders, dragging him forward and against her with all of her strength. They meet in the middle, lips and teeth and tongues pressing, pulling, dancing against each other. She's in his lap, legs wrapped around his waist, without quite knowing how she got there. Klaus's hand is still pressed to the inside of her thigh, where he's stroking over the sensitive flesh there. A deep throb pulses between her legs, hot and electric. Mindlessly, she grinds against him, not at all stopping to think about the repercussions of doing this with Klaus.
She breaks the kiss to tear her sweater off over her head. As soon as the sweater is gone Klaus pulls her down closer against him, to where he can access the newly exposed flesh at the top of her breasts.
Neither of them speak, as though they both know that to speak now would be to burst this strange thing between them.
Whatever this is, she doesn't think she can stop it now that she's begun it. Everything else is fuzzy, like she can't think or move or breathe except to touch, to taste, and if she has regrets or second-thoughts she'll have to worry about them later.
Klaus's fingers slide up her leg to the apex of her thigh. He presses a finger over her underwear, against the wet line of her sex—It's almost unbearable how much she wants him in that moment, how much she needs him inside of her.
This is crazy, but she finds that she can't stop now that she's started.
She moans, a sound that is half satisfaction and half beg, and writhes against him. She can feel him smile against the top of her breast, where he has been sucking and kissing her since she lost the sweater.
Elena buries her fingers in the hair at the back of his neck and tugs back, so that he is forced to look at her. He obliges her, and meets her eyes with pure fire in his gaze.
"What do you want, Elena?" he asks, voice huskier and lower than she's ever heard it.
"You. I want you."
The smile he gives her is victorious, deadly, and God, the sexiest thing she's ever seen.
When he pulls aside the edge of her underwear and slides a finger into her, he finds her already slick for him. He adds a second finger, and uses his thumb to circle her clit. It's instinct for her from there, to move against him, to draw him closer for another mind-boggling kiss. The throbbing between her legs is building, the waves of pleasure coming faster and faster, like a storm coming in pushing breakers onto the beach. And when he nips at her lips and kisses his way down from her mouth to her chin to her neck, it's natural to let him. Natural to tilt her chin back and allow him to sink his teeth into her throat, to bite, to kiss, in this most familiar and intimate of ways, to ride it out while the storm comes in.
A/N: Interested in seeing what happens next? Send me a review and let me know your thoughts! And because, also, you are what keeps me writing, and working hard on this. And my inbox is always open on tumblr at livlepretre.
Thank you thank you to all of my reviewers. I've sent back responses to everyone who's left a signed review, but I wanted to give a shout out to kristen who always leaves lovely reviews (and I'm sorry, I can't do a Klaus POV because it'll reveal too much!), to lana, and to my wonderful guest reviewers. I know some of you think Klaus is pretty irredeemable after the last chapter, but I think that's half the fun!