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
"You can't trust him."
It's a conversation she and Stefan have had several times already since he learned yesterday that she is to be accompanying Klaus on this next trip.
"I don't."
"You underestimate him."
She rolls her eyes and plays with the edge of her gloves. "Hard to underestimate my murderer, Stefan."
"You think you know the rules. Know his game, and how he likes to play."
Of course she does. She's an expert.
"Don't fool yourself."
The house Klaus brings her too doesn't look like much from the exterior—a pale pink stucco front wall with a tall wooden door behind an iron gate that accounts for much of the width of it. For all appearances, it's going to be a narrow, cramped shoebox of a place. It therefore surprises her when she steps through, and the house is much bigger on the inside than that exterior wall could ever account for. French doors off the foyer lead to a narrow, walled courtyard, with what looks like a balcony overlooking it.
"This is your house?" she asks him as she peers into the night.
"At the moment. You could say I'm borrowing the place. Elijah maintains a plantation home half an hour outside of the city, but I preferred to stay in the city itself." Elena wonders if the real owners are still alive.
"Because you need to maintain a real presence here for whatever your business is."
"Hm." He tilts his head. "You're a sharp little thing, aren't you? With a head for intrigue, no doubt."
Elena shrugs. She's not comfortable with Klaus examining this line of thought too carefully.
The neighborhood around the property, tucked into the back of the Quarter, is quieter than Elena would ever have believed from the city's reputation. Klaus rattles off a list of who his neighbors were the last time he was in residence in this neighborhood, and who they are now. Some of those names make her eyebrows rise, but she smothers the reaction quickly. It wouldn't do to show too much interest.
From the must and the white cloths covering the antique furniture inside, protecting it from the thick layer of dust that coats everything, Elena suspects that it has been a very long time since anyone was here last. The entire house has the air of something that has been shut up too long. (It's an air she knows intimately.) Every room is like that the night they arrive, and she has to wait for a compelled staff to prepare a bedroom for her. Klaus waits with her, leaning against the door jamb and watching her.
She can feel the weight of his eyes on her, that ever present sensation.
"Why don't you have any staff back home?" The word slips out of her before she can help herself, and a dull horror creeps inside of her bones when she hears herself call that wretched, lonely place home.
Klaus quirks a smile at her. "What makes you think I don't? The hybrids are wonderful groundskeepers, once properly instructed," he tells her lightly.
He doesn't say a word about her slip up. Nothing to indicate what he thinks.
She clears her throat. "What's the agenda then?"
"No need to worry your pretty head about that. There'll be time for all things soon enough."
The file of servants finishes tidying the room and marches out, on to rest of the house.
Klaus leaves her. "Sleep well, my dear." He shuts her up in her room, alone. Dimly, she can hear the staff bustling through the house. It's comforting to know that there are other humans nearby.
She finds a bruise on her wrist the next morning. She thinks she must have gotten it the day before, during the hours she cannot remember.
For the very first time in a long, long time, Elena must venture out of bed if she wants anything for breakfast.
Right away, the change in routine invigorates her.
She wanders downstairs, trailing her fingers over plaster walls, cool and slightly damp to the touch, her fingers ghosting over the intricately millworked banister, the dark wood shining faintly in the morning light pouring through double-leaded windows.
The whole house resonates with a silence so contrary to last night's strange, ant-like hum and bustle as Klaus's compelled servants had cleared away what felt like decades of dust and disuse to transform the house into this soft, gleaming beauty that she cannot help but appreciate.
She had fallen asleep to the sound of those exertions last night, dampened to a low murmuring buzz by the solid cypress bedroom door. Apart from stray snatches of dreams that had seemed too real, a reoccurring tendency toward nightmares since her death, it had been the first real rest she had had in ages.
Silence had become her shroud while she languished trapped in that other house, pierced only by moments of horror sharp as broken glass. But then, in her isolation, she had belonged to the dead, and the dead had been her only companions.
The silence this morning is a different sort altogether. For the first time in a long, long time, the silence does not press in on her. With the sun fresh on her face, she feels the shroud shed from her shoulders.
The thought (the hope) that she may be allowed well and truly out bubbles in her chest, a fizzy and light as pink champagne.
It is in this mood, feeling buoyed by her new surroundings, that Elena finds Klaus in the kitchen, studying a piece of paper.
"Good morning," she calls from the doorway.
Immediately, Klaus straightens, stuffing whatever it was he had been looking at into his jacket pocket.
"I trust you slept well?" he asks.
"Hm." Elena looks around her. Unlike the rest of the house, the kitchen has been updated sometime in the past century. The appliances are all modern, if a little old.
"Are you hungry?" He gestures vaguely to the refrigerator.
It occurs to her, suddenly, that when their conversations are not frankly bizarre and or terrifying, that Klaus struggles with the small talk.
She leans her elbows on the counter and dares to stare Klaus in the face for a moment. He stares back at her.
"I want to see the city." The desire floods her as she says it, a yearning to see someplace new and full of life and humanity so earnest and true that she knows something inside of her will crack and break if he does not grant it.
He raises an eyebrow at her. "And waylay my plans?"
"I've never been to New Orleans before. And you made it seem so—so—" She struggles for the word that will appeal to him here. "So singular."
Klaus's lips quirk. "Well, obviously."
"Won't you show me?" She resists batting her eyelashes, knows that very nearly flirting with Klaus just to escape the confines of four walls and a yard for the first time in months is likely a terrible idea. Nonetheless.
"I suppose that a day of sight-seeing won't harm anything."
The radiant smile she bestows on him isn't even feigned.
Nor bitter, nor loathing.
Later, she'll think back on this, the first time she really smiled for him, and the way he paused for just an infinitesimal moment when she did, but for now, she is too busy racing to grab her jacket to notice.
Elena follows Klaus out onto the uneven sidewalks of New Orleans, skipping over puddles of dark brown water collected in the dips, their surfaces reflecting the blue sky like mirrors.
All at once, the reality of this place hits her. There are people, people everywhere, disappearing through iron gates and into dark hole-in-the-wall shops, meandering up and down the sidewalks, spilling haphazardly across the streets with no regard for traffic laws. It has been so long since she has been among so many people, all of them just out and living their lives, none of them aware that the most dangerous beast of all walks amongst them. The sight of them fills her with a fierce joy that pushes down every other feeling within her, all of the despair and love and longing, into just the faintest pinpricks.
In the distance, she can hear the bells at St. Louis Cathedral tolling the hour.
They turn onto Royal Street in short order, the street name marked in white tile with blue lettering affixed to the side of a shop. Calle Real. By now, she has heard Klaus's sketch of the city, how it passed hands from the French to the Spanish to the French to the Americans. She sees pink plaster buildings with dramatic wrought iron balconies, listens to Klaus recollect the Great New Orleans Fire and the "lesser known" Fire of 1794. She should have known he would be unable to resist playing the tour guide.
"By then, of course, the Spanish had control of the city," he tells her. Casually, he lifts her over a particularly bad puddle. "Terrible luck. Most of the original buildings were made of cypress back then." And here, he looks abashed, which is an expression she has never seen on his face before.
"Why does that matter?"
"Cypress is a wonderful wood—the immortal wood, we call it, because it's water-tight and never succumbs to rot. And, of course, the swamps are full of it. But it's resin content means that it catches flame like a rag soaked in gasoline."
So far, his description makes it sound a lot like a vampire, she thinks. She almost tells him this, save for that note of regret in his voice. "So why do you look like that's your fault?"
Klaus glances down at her, from where he has been studying one of the buildings at the corner of Royal and Dumaine with more scrutiny than the rest. "Well, it sort of is. I encouraged the settlers to use it." He shrugs. "All of this," he gestures vaguely at the surrounding architecture, "All of this is just what the Spanish rebuilt after the heart of the Vieux Carré was destroyed." There's a note in his voice with which she is unfamiliar.
Elena blinks at him. Blinks past the morning sun in her face.
So strange, how he can feel so much for a city, and so little for any of the people he encounters, whose lives he tears apart like a child pulling grass from a field.
Elena clears her throat. "So, what you're telling me is that the French Quarter's architecture… is Spanish?"
"A gold star for my lady." He points to the abundance of fantastical iron wrought balconies lining the street in every direction. "The Spanish had an eye for dramatic flourishes."
"Which you like, of course."
He doesn't respond, but he doesn't deny it, either.
They pass a hotel with an iron fence whimsically worked to resemble a line of cornstalks. She touches the cool metal lightly. "Is this Spanish?"
"No." He pauses, then allows. "But it is an excellent hotel. Bit of a ghost problem though." And with that he pulls her down the street, into a corridor of art galleries.
"We've left the residential side of Royal now," he continues. "Most of the galleries in the Quarter are here, though it's a bit of a mixed bag." He brings her over to one window, the better to show her the huge, bright acrylic paintings on display. At this early hour, most of the galleries have not yet opened. He points across the street, where nearly identical paintings hang in the window.
"I can't tell them apart."
"Exactly! All rubbish." There's a certain dismissiveness in his voice, a cattiness, that makes her remember those stacks of drawings she had found in his library. She wonders.
Klaus takes her hand and leads her to still another gallery, catty-corner to the last one. In the window, a single, tiny painting, perhaps about 6"x10", has been given center focus.
"And then we have paintings like these. Toulouse-Lautrec." He breathes the name like a prayer. The painting itself is unassuming. A grey little room, the suggestion of a man in a chair, and spray of sunset pink flowers sitting on a table.
After a moment, Elena stops looking at the painting and starts to look at Klaus as he stares down at it. What is at work there, what thoughts are spinning through that mind? She returns her attention to the painting, tries to see it as Klaus does, lets herself fall into this whole little world of delicate brush strokes and tender rushes of color and surreptitious texture, until a feeling starts to blossom within her as she stares at the ghost of a man alone in his chair, a sort of fixed melancholy blended into something that almost feels like love.
"The subject matter here is unusual for Toulouse-Lautrec," Klaus murmurs in her ear. "He was fond of the night life, the sorts of subject matter that made everyone blush in public but fascinated them in private."
The painting starts to pain her to look at it. The flowers are starting to seem that they may be on the cusp of death to her, a bright burst of life and color before they inevitably wither and die.
"Come away, now, sweetheart. There's a good girl." He still has a hold of her hand. It's easy for him to bring her away from that window, but she stares behind her, at the painting, until all she sees is a fleck of color, and then nothing.
They wander, a little longer, but Elena is no longer paying very much attention. Her stomach grumbles, and, knowingly, Klaus directs them to a restaurant. Jazz music filters over to them as soon as Klaus opens the door.
(If the familiarity of the music reminds her of anything, she does not let the affect show on her face.)
They're ushered through to a brick courtyard in the back, the red brick walls surrounding it covered in climbing jasmine, and potted plants and trees making a tropical forest of the space. Water droplets drip from the wide green fronds and catch in rivulets on the ground. Elena thinks it must have rained, sometime during the night.
It should be too cold to sit outside, except the restaurant has set up braziers in the corners, and the sky is so bright and beautiful, the sunshine so inviting, that she is glad just to look up at it. By the placement of the sun, she thinks it must be approaching eleven o'clock.
"So what do I order here?" she asks him.
"Anything you like."
"But it's my first meal in New Orleans. What's best?"
"Everything is best."
But there is so much of everything. Brandy milk punch eye-openers and chicory coffee. Turtle soup and egg yolk carpaccio, Eggs Sardou and baked apples crusted with pecans and brown sugar. Klaus orders her everything she shows the slightest inclination toward, and watches her eat with rapt attention. She would be embarrassed, except that this is the first taste of something different that she has had in months.
Shockingly, an actual jazz ensemble marches out onto the courtyard midway through the meal. She had assumed the music was a recording. They come over to the table, and ask, "What would the lady like to hear?"
"La Vie en Rose," she blurts out, without thinking. As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she regrets them.
The musicians start up without a hitch, of course, and the romantic, lilting quality of the song makes her blush furiously. She cannot believe she did this with Klaus sitting right across from her.
"Louis Armstrong is a classic," he tells her approvingly.
"It was a favorite of my mother's. She used to always request it."
There's a long pause.
"The vampire?"
"No, my real mother. The one who raised me." Elena fiddles with her silverware. "She died, about a year and a half ago. Both of my parents did."
"What happened?" It's a vague interest, but nevertheless, Elena cannot not tell this story.
"We were in a car accident. The car went over the bridge."
"You were in the car with them?" Klaus voices this question very slowly, and deliberately.
Elena nods. "Stefan pulled me out. It's how we met. I'm surprised he hasn't told you this before." But also, not at all surprised. She only actually matters to Klaus in the abstract, she thinks. Her face, her blood, sure. But not her, not really. He would never have asked Stefan about her specifically enough to learn about the accident. Even if today has been fun, he's just amusing himself. She could be anyone, and he would still enjoy showing off this place he clearly loves.
"You very nearly died, before I ever knew you even existed."
What a pity it would have been if he had never been able to complete the sacrifice, she thinks acidly.
The dark whirlwind within her swamps her like a wave, washing away the semblance of happiness she had felt for a few forgetful hours.
She purses her lips, voices the thought that has been just under the surface of her skin ever since it happened. "I should have drowned with them. I think I was supposed to."
Klaus scoffs. "Clearly not."
"What do you mean, clearly not?"
"Your destiny is with me. That is obvious."
"I wish that it weren't."
"Ah, but that's the fine thing about destiny. What you wish is irrelevant. So, since you cannot change your fate, why not enjoy yourself?"
She ignores his question. Klaus thinks he's wonderful company, and even if a tiny part of her knows that that is sometimes true, that knowledge only makes it worse that he instead chooses to be a monster most of the time. "I don't see you following your own advice," she tells him instead. "You go out of your way take your fate into your own hands."
"On the contrary. My fate happens to coincide with my wishes. I wished to break the curse, and it was my destiny that I should do so. It just required some effort, as all thing truly worthwhile do."
There are a lot of things she could do, with a little effort.
After brunch, they continue winding their way through the Quarter. Elena doesn't quite regain the thrill she had felt this morning, but she musters enough enthusiasm to enjoy the time while she has it. She wrinkles her nose at Bourbon Street, and is relieved when a detour down St. Ann Street spills them out onto Jackson Square. When she sees it, she laughs with pleasure. It's like a close up to the thrumming vein of the city she had glimpsed from aboard the boat the night before. The square itself is lined with artists, musicians, fortune tellers, and performers of every kind gathered right there. Part of her would like to have her tarot cards read, but Klaus steers her away toward a saxophonist before she can broach the question.
The sweet smell of beignets wafts over from Café Du Monde, and if she wasn't so full, and Klaus were not so insistent that some things were better in the still of the evening, she would have been tempted.
Instead, they stroll through the French Market. She fiddles with a silver ring, engraved with a fleur de lis while Klaus picks through a collection of old post cards.
"Do you like it?" Klaus asks her after a moment.
"Yes."
He surprises her by buying it for her. It's the first thing she's had since Mystic Falls that she has picked out herself.
She watches the winter sun sink into the horizon while overlooking the Mississippi. The water is a famously deep brown, true, but the sun glints off the swift current like diamonds, and to Elena, this sweeping view borders on the sublime. She hovers as near to the edge as she dares.
As the sun gets close to the water, Klaus takes her by the hand and leads her back toward the house.
"Why are we going back so early?" she asks. "Isn't New Orleans famous for its nightlife?"
"It'll have to wait, I think. Best to be in before sunset for now."
He doesn't say why, but there's only one thing that haunts the streets by moonlight that might concern Klaus.
"Why did we come to New Orleans?" she asks him when they are back in the house, as she pulls her jacket off.
"I see you're finished with your sight-seeing, then."
"Klaus—"
"No need to fret." He grabs her by the shoulders and forces her to look into his eyes. "Stay inside until I return." The compulsion settles over her uneasily. It is always an uncomfortable thing, being conscious of the compulsion as it occurs.
And with that, he leaves, locking the door behind him.
A/N: Behold, the promised K/E arc—and just in time for Christmas in New Orleans. Thank you everyone for your patience while I worked out some plot details. Any guesses on where this is going?
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