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: R
Warnings: Hostage situation/explicit violence/gratuitous angst/dubious consent
The grey leather bag is there at the foot of her bed when she wakes up the morning of her departure. It looks innocent enough, but she eyes it like a viper before throwing the covers back and dashing over to it. Up close, she can see that there are actually two of them, a dress bag folded over an old-fashioned duffle.
Frowning, Elena unzips the dress bag and fingers the shimmering length of black silk-satin inside. The feel of it reminds her of her Miss Mystic Falls gown, the most luxurious dress she had ever owned. Nostalgia nearly settles over her like a cloak, but she throws it back.
Quickly, she rifles through the rest of the baggage. Some of the clothes inside are familiar, sweaters and jeans she's had since she came here, but the dress isn't the only new item she discovers. She sits back on her heels and glowers at the bags. If she had to bet, every new scrap of clothing in there will fit her like a glove, just like everything else she has been given.
And someone had had the nerve to come in here during the night and leave these bags. There is no doubt in her mind who that someone had been.
After nearly four months in Klaus's household, things like bags full of new clothing just appearing in her bedroom don't phase her as much as they used to. Still. The presumption irritates her, in ways she had thought she had grown past, had become too tired to feel. She empties out the duffel and repacks it with the clothes still remaining in her dresser. Something keeps her from doing the same thing to the dresses, but she dismisses any self-analysis there.
She lets herself run on auto-pilot while she repacks. It feels good to do something so normal, even while she doesn't let herself linger too long on what this trip will actually be like. Without even thinking about it, she crawls under her bed and fetches her diary out of its hiding spot. She's never gone anywhere without her diary, not since her mother first encouraged her to keep one. And besides. Bringing it with her seems right, the habit of writing in it already strong and second-nature and completely indispensable after only a little over a month with it.
Even as she looks for a discrete place to nestle her book in between pairs of jeans, she knows that she can't actually take it with her. True, there's nothing directly incriminating in the book— she's always been too worried about discovery to lay her deepest secrets down in writing—but the book itself would lead to too many questions. It still seems too risky for Klaus to know that someone other than him had shown her a kindness. Just the thought of him discovering what she and Stefan had been building before she broke it off is enough to freeze her blood.
Regretfully, she flips through the pages. There's no way she can bring it with her, but she doesn't know what she'll do with herself without it. It's a problem on the horizon that unfortunately draws nearer each time she writes in this journal, though. The pages are already halfway filled. She hasn't let herself think about what she will do when she runs out of space. Once that happens, she may never get another one. The creeping fear that that will be it, that her voice will be silenced forever once she fills the last line, lurks somewhere dim and murky in the back of her mind, but she does not let it become more than that. She's idly wondering if she'll have time for one last entry before she leaves when she finds it. Pressed innocently between two pages, a sprig of vervain.
Elena plucks the vervain out and stares.
A surge of hope flares bright in her chest, one that she ruthlessly quashes down. She cannot afford to speculate that Stefan is behind this, even as she realizes that that has to be the most likely scenario, since he is the only one who for certain knows about the book. But why give her the vervain?
No, she cannot afford to assume this comes from an ally.
Possibilities swamp her. Stefan could have been compelled to do it. Any hybrid could have been. Or Klaus or even Rebekah could have done it themselves. Knowing Klaus, this would be exactly the kind of mind-fuck he would enjoy—slip her some vervain, and then watch her incriminate herself with it. But that begs the question, would he bother? What was worse, the fact that someone had passed her the vervain, or the fact that someone knew where to leave it for her in the first place?
One thing that is for certain, she will never turn down a weapon once it is in her hand.
The door swings open without warning. The diary tumbles from her fingers, and she kicks it under the pile of discarded clothing on the floor the best that she can. Klaus saunters in, a wide smile on his face. The vervain is still clutched in her hand. She balls both hands into fists to try to hide it from him.
"Ah, up already." Klaus glances at her open bags, at the pile of rumpled clothes that she has rejected. The smile widens. "Eager for our journey?"
Elena tosses her head. "What's with the dresses, Klaus?"
"You don't approve? Katerina always liked my gifts."
"I'm not Katherine."
A flicker of his eyelid, no more. "Perhaps, perhaps not." He leans back against the door jamb and gestures toward the dress bag. "Nevertheless, it's well that you didn't throw the garments out. The City that Care Forgot forgoes a good many of the usual rules, but its denizens still hold to certain outward formalities. It'll be easier if you're dressed for the part." She notices that he doesn't bother to say what part it is she will be playing.
Elena clenches her fist, crushing the vervain against her palm. Klaus just leans against the wall, looking at her. Always looking at her.
"Do you have a reason for coming in here?" she asks him finally.
"Oh, yes. Be ready in half an hour," he tells her. "Though, I'll still spirit you away, no matter if you're not ready." There's a strangely warm undertone in his voice as he tells her this, as though he had not done that very thing to her on two separate occasions. He's probably flirting with her.
As soon as Klaus is out the door Elena hurries into the bathroom and throws on the shower. The spray pounding against the bottom of the claw-foot tub helps to screen her movements from sensitive vampiric hearing.
The diary goes back into its hiding spot, of course, but the vervain is another matter. She can't just leave it, not when having it might be critical later, when she is alone with Klaus. Yet she also cannot afford to be caught with it.
And who had given it to her and what did it mean and how would Klaus react if he learned of it?
The tendril of fear that uncurls in her belly at the thought is quashed as ruthlessly as she has crushed every other fear Klaus has inspired in her over the past year.
A pair of nail clippers solves the issue—she's not been given any scissors or knives, but her nail clippers have a sharp little metal blade that swivels out from the joint, the kind meant for cleaning grime from beneath the nails. She uses it to tear a hole in the silk lining of her duffel, near the bottom of the bag where it won't be noticed by any casual observers. Working quickly, she slips the vervain into the space she's created between the lining and the bottom of the bag.
For a moment, she thinks about ingesting some right now, but some niggling doubt stops her. She doesn't know when having a lot of it later might be the difference between life and death. Not hers—Klaus taught her to stop caring about that last spring—but someone else's.
She's just finished showering and brushing out her long straight hair when Klaus reappears at her doorway. Her bags have disappeared while she was in the shower, doubtlessly carried away by one of the hybrids that Klaus seems to use as army, servants, and entourage all rolled into one.
"Shall we?" Klaus asks her. He holds out his hand to her. Her hand barely trembles as she takes it, and she doesn't flush at all when Klaus wraps his fingers around her wrist and—
"You haven't been in the library at all while I was away, have you?"
Elena glances up from her spot under the bare limbs of the Japanese Maple.
Klaus stands over her, dressed in a canvas jacket incongruously light for the cold early December weather. Elena's bundled up in her warm coat, but her bottom had gone numb from sitting on the nearly frozen ground half an hour ago.
"I didn't feel like it."
Klaus crouches down in front of her, fishes something out of his pocket and hands it to her—a pair of leather gloves so dark a brown they are nearly black. "To match your eyes," he murmurs.
Slowly, Elena pulls them from his hands and puts them on. She is very careful not to touch his skin.
Preparations have been underway for the last three days for their trip to New Orleans. They'll be leaving in another three, or maybe four, but certainly before the week is out. It seems that whatever business it is Klaus has there, he thinks it urgent.
He stands again and pulls her up with him. The cold has numbed her legs, and she stumbles a little bit in his arms, but he catches her easily against him. Even through her thick coat and leather gloves, she is all too aware of him. He radiates heat like a furnace. It's one of the things about him that had been clearest in her dreams, that wild sense that he was a living flame that she would gladly let consume her.
"Did my sister inhibit you from going?" he asks her mildly as he leads her back toward the house.
"No. She didn't really care what I did." So long as it wasn't with Stefan. "I just didn't go." Heat suffuses her when she thinks on the dreams that had truly kept her out. Hopefully, Klaus will just think it's the cold making her face glow rosy.
"Strange. You were there every day before that. I feared it would become more your refuge than mine."
She frowns. "Hard to be a refuge when it's full of dead bodies."
He laughs. "You climbed over them just fine, as I recall."
Elena stares straight ahead.
You're so cruel.
It's in my nature. And in yours.
"How did you know I hadn't been in?" she asks him as he helps her take her coat off at the door.
He is quiet for a long time before he answers. "The room no longer felt so alive. I found I rather preferred it as it had been before."
—she blinks at the slow roll of black water beneath her feet. Straight ahead, a city glitters along the serpentine bank of the river, lights twinkling softly against the dark night sky.
Shakily, Elena puts her hand to the boat railing ahead of her and braces herself against the rolling heave of the river current.
I was in my bedroom.
"This is near exactly the first view I ever had of the city," Klaus tells her lowly, from just behind her. "Of course, that was long before the electric light changed everything, but…" He points to a towering white building capped with three grey spires, the focal point of everything around it. "Some things change, yet also remain the same. The Cathedral there, for instance. A different building than the one I first clapped eyes on, yet the same as when I left here last."
She thinks of those books she had found, months ago now. At the time, she'd been too hesitant to pry further into Klaus's apparent interest in the city, but now that they are here…
"You sound like you have a history here."
She can feel Klaus's smile, even though she cannot see it. Something in his air changes infinitesimally with the expression. "Oh, I do. You might say I'm practically a founding father."
I was in my bedroom.
Elena shakes her head, trying to clear thoughts that seem clouded and sluggish. "When did we get on this boat?" she asks aloud.
"Some little while ago."
"I don't remember…"
"Oh, I compelled you for the journey here not to remember a single detail until I said so." He moves to stand beside her at the railing, eyes gathering and reflecting the light of the moon. "Isn't it marvelous for your first proper glimpse of the city to be from the river, as it should be?" There's another light in his eyes, too. Excitement. Never a good thing when Klaus gets excited.
"Did you compel me so I wouldn't know where you're keeping me, or so that I could have this exact view when I came to?"
"Well, of course it would never do for you to know where you're being held. But it would have been a shame to ruin your first view of New Orleans with how one must approach the city these days." From his tone, there is no doubt which of the two was the more important.
And he had the gall to claim he didn't have a flair for the dramatic.
She should be very angry with him. Should be feeling something, even the irritation she had felt earlier when he'd packed her bag for her. It's just that she is so, so tired.
He's right though. The view of the city from the water isa dramatic one.
As they draw closer to the shore, sound begins to drift in over the water. The blare of traffic horns, the gabble of voices, singing, laughing, crying—all the normal sounds of a city—but underneath that—Someone is playing the saxophone nearby. A full, moody note that hangs in the air. And beneath that, the clop-clop of hooves on the street and trundle of a carriage going past.
The river itself is a melody that nearly lulls her, the way that water always does, the soft suck of the current against the side of the boat, and in the distance, the wail from another ship passing down the river.
The river sings her the siren call of deep dark water.
For the first time in a very, very long time, she feels a thrill course through her.
Klaus had called it the city that care forgot. She feels ready to forget. For just a little while, she thinks, she would like very much to forget who Klaus is. Perhaps even to forget herself.
A/N: Thank you to all of my lovely reviewers, I am so thrilled by the response this has been getting! I know you are all clamoring to find out what Klaus plans for Elena, and what he is thinking/feeling—but it'll be twice as fun to find out when Elena does, so be patient! There is going to be lots of K/E interaction in the next few chapters, and lots of drama in New Orleans.
Thoughts? Comments? Desire to discuss tvd meta? Leave a review or drop by my ask box on tumblr at livlepretre