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: Suicidal ideation/suicide attempt/hostage situation/explicit violence/gratuitous angst/dubious consent

"Do you know why Klaus is dead set on going to New Orleans?" she asks Tyler as they steal an hour together in his room.

He shrugs from where he is standing, pouring her a drink. At some point he had brought the two glasses down here, and if the glass he hands her still has her lip print on it from the last time, she doesn't mind.

"You said you passed through Louisiana on your way back," she prompts.

"Yeah, he thought the Loup Garou pack down there would be an easy addition to the fold."

Loup Garou. She files the name away for later. "And?"

"There were… complications. I dunno, we were only in New Orleans for like two days. He kept talking about a threat, or a plot or something." Tyler gestures widely. "You know how he is."

"Paranoid?"

"Ranting and raving and breaking things whenever he gets angry. It was hard to follow."

"But he said it was a threat."

Elena takes a long swallow from her glass and uses the motion to think. "But what could possibly be a threat to Klaus now?"

Whatever it is, it does not bear thinking upon.

"You're really going with him?" Tyler asks after a moment, a distant look in his eyes.

"Looks like it."

"I don't like it."

"I can take care of myself."

"I haven't forgotten my promise."

"What promise is that?"

"To hang together. No matter what. I'm going to keep that promise to you, Elena."

She doesn't see how, when it looks like they're going to be separated for the foreseeable future. She doesn't spoil their time together by telling him that, though.

Klaus does not return until dawn.

For the first few hours, she paces through the house.

Now that she is left to her own devices here, in yet another overly grand house, the walls start to close in on her. It's too much like the other house. Exploring the rooms and memorizing the layout can only distract her for so long.

Deep down, there is a niggling anxiety that she cannot ignore for much longer. Despite herself, she is actually a little worried.

The specter of that unnamed threat that Klaus wouldn't elaborate upon hangs over her. If Klaus isn't being paranoid, isn't hyperbolizing whatever is going on, then that means something momentous must be happening. Something terrifying.

It kills her not to know. She is so used to being at the center of all of these terrible events, that being outside of one just completely throws her for a loop.

Her anxiety only increases as the night grows older. What if Klaus never makes it back?

What if Klaus never makes it back, the pale, watery voice of freedom whispers.

If someone or something were trying to take Klaus down, would she dare do anything to impede that force?

Is there anything she could do to help it?

Elena marches up to her room. Everything in it is beautifully furnished, from the massive oak sleigh bed to the towering Louis-Philippe armoire and the Italian writing desk. At this hour, the silk drapes have been drawn, so no one passing by on the street can see what she is about.

Carefully, she pulls her emptied duffle bag out from the bottom of the armoire, slips her fingers into the lining and fishes out the sprig of vervain.

The wording of Klaus's compulsion tonight had been luck. If she starts taking this now, then she would at least have the option of whether or not to obey him in the future. It may prove useful to ignore him sometimes. To slip away.

The problem, of course, is that, in the end, it is only one single sprig of vervain. She doesn't know how long she is going to be here, or when the most strategic moment to begin ingesting it will be. Conservatively, she thinks she might have enough to last her about ten days if she starts mixing it with her water now. She could double that amount of time by taking it every other day instead, though she knows she will be less protected from compulsion on the second day, possibly without any protection at all depending on how fast her body metabolizes the herb. It would be a gamble, though. The possibility that Klaus might still compel her on a day where she skips her dosage looms over her.

She really, truly wishes that there were an easy way to wear it on her person without Klaus detecting it, but the chances of getting caught are just too high that way for her to risk it. She's not the only one who would pay if she were caught.

Every other day, then. It would have to be enough. And at least, this way, she could protect whoever had thought she might be deserving of the same.

Elena finally lets herself fall asleep when she hears Klaus return, the taste of vervain still on her tongue.

"What happened last night?" she asks him the next morning over breakfast. He's taken her out again, seems to be intent on her finishing every bite on her plate. She doesn't mind. Grillades and grits are very good, especially accompanied by a Bloody Mary.

"I thought we decided not to talk about that."

"You decided not to talk about that, but I never decided not to ask."

"Curiosity killed the cat."

"But satisfaction brought it back."

"Touché. I went to go see an old friend."

"And?"

"I think it went well."

That night, Klaus compels her more strictly. "From now on, don't leave this house unless I am here to escort you."

It's a standing compulsion, and she can almost feel the magic of it attempting to fasten into her before sliding off like rain beading down a window.

She thinks this means the reunion did not go so well after all.

After that, he does not bother to compel her when he leaves.

He is always gone for hours at a time when he leaves. It's why she feels confident slipping out herself on the third night he leaves her alone, her fourth night in New Orleans.

She eases out into the cool, humid night air, feeling an immediate loosening of her skin, as though she has been caught in a net all this time and has only just now been freed.

(She's not stupid. She knows she's still caught in a net.)

She leaves the back door unlocked so she can slip back in before Klaus notices she is gone, and then she hurries down increasingly familiar streets, under the yellow glow of street lights and beneath dripping iron balconies that shade the sidewalks during the day, but at night cast ink dark shadows.

Her mother had always warned her against walking down dark streets, against walking by herself late at night. If only her mother had ever given her a warning that would have prepared her for what her life would really be.

None of that enters into her mind as she hurries toward the front of the Quarter.

As fast as she can, she hurries to Decatur Street, past Jackson Square and the delicious smells of Café Du Monde, over the train tracks and up onto the side of the levee, where she settles on a bench to watch the river stream by in the moonlight.

Her body thrums with excitement—just the taste of freedom, even if she knows it is a mirage—makes her body spark and flare.

This is the first time she has gone somewhere just because she wanted to.

It's late at night, so most of the shops on Decatur Street are closing up, though she can hear a trickle of music coming from Bourbon Street a few blocks over. Café Du Monde is open 24/7, though, and the prospect of it, of enjoying this little bit of normal tourism by herself, under her own power, is irresistible.

She gets up to wander over to the café, only to realize she has no money. Hasn't had any since August.

So it will have to be enough just to watch all of the perfectly ordinary people inside, enjoying their perfectly ordinary evenings. So many things have had to be enough, are not nearly as much as she had thought they would be.

Not for the first time, she contemplates whether she would have had an overall happier life if she had stayed dead last May.

None of that matters now. She'll just have to make do with what she has.

Without a clear destination in mind, she wanders by St. Louis Cathedral and sits down on one of the benches out front, facing the line of fortune tellers set up with folding chairs in the shadow of Jackson Square's black iron fence. One of them notices her watching them and gestures for her to come over.

In the flickering yellow light from the Cathedral, Elena cannot see the woman's face well, only the glint of her hard, steady stare, the way her dark hands flutter over her table like birds. The single candle, caught under a filmy glass dome, adds more ambiance than light.

"Care to learn your fortune?" the woman asks her, her voice like smoke on the changing wind.

"I don't have any money," Elena tells her.

The woman cocks her head, studying her. "I think I'll give you this one for free," she tells her slowly.

Nothing is ever truly free. Yet there is something here that intrigues her.

Only a little warily, Elena sits down in the empty chair across from the fortune teller. There's a stack of tarot cards on one edge of the table, but the woman ignores them in favor of taking Elena's hand and flipping her palm face-up. Her grasp is tight and firm, as though she is used to people letting her have her way here.

No sooner does the woman make contact with her skin than something strange happens—her eyes bulge, and her face blanches grey—her fingers spasm and Elena tries to pull free of her, but the woman only clutches her more tightly.

Those dark eyes pin her in place. "My dear, I don't think you gave me your name."

"No."

"Such a pretty girl." She twists Elena's palm toward the candle light. Her voice is light, and she wears a smile on her lips, but her eyes are narrowed, just a slight tightening of the eyelids that Elena might not have noticed if she weren't getting such a terrible feeling from this woman.

"Let me go."

"You must have all sorts of men chasing you," she continues.

Elena yanks at her hand, feels the bite of the woman's fingernails in her palm. "I said—"

"Is this woman bothering you?"

The fortune teller drops Elena's hand like it's a live flame.

Elena turns toward that smooth, pleasant voice and stares up into a smiling, handsome face that makes her heart pound. He's a tall, powerfully built man, brown of skin and black of eye, with a sort of natural charisma that rolls off of him like the wave of ash before an eruption. That smile is dazzling, she thinks as she stares into his eyes, all perfect straight white teeth, and yet, there is something distinctly unpleasant in that sleek black-eyed gaze. Even though he is dressed casually in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt, there is some element about his presence that names him king.

"Marcel," the woman starts, voice low… pleading? "She's just a tourist girl, wanted to have her palm read."

"Sure, Agnes. But I think it was the lady I asked." Marcel looks at her, still smiling that sharp-tip-toothed smile.

"I'm fine," she says, voice low and firm. She pushes up and away from the table and hurries out of the Square.

Behind her, remnants of their conversation carry on the dark night wind.

I'd hate to catch you out of bounds.

I follow the rules, Marcel. Your city, your rules.

Damn straight. And you know what happens to anyone who breaks the rules.

Marcel.

In the morning, Klaus suggests a trip down Esplanade. He does not show the slightest inkling that she had escaped.

She does not dare go out the next night.

One day Klaus takes her to Elijah's plantation outside of the city and leaves her there. It's a beautiful, grand old home framed by dramatic Ionic columns, with acres of green land and towering live oaks surrounding it, Spanish moss clinging romantically to their branches.

She can see why it would be inconvenient to stay here instead of in the Quarter, but she almost wishes that they had.

"Best to stay out of the way today, I think," Klaus tells her enigmatically before he leaves. "Don't leave the grounds, and try to avoid anything obviously dangerous, dueling pistols or the like." He pauses. "And don't touch anything that looks like it might be a Dark Object. I wouldn't fancy coming back to retrieve you and finding you hexed."

She agrees to everything and waves him away, eager to walk the grounds and explore.

While Klaus had instructed her in the other house never to open a closed door, here she is under no such injunction. Perhaps he has not thought of it, or perhaps he does not care, but the result is that she spends a lot of her alone time picking through the rooms of the house, examining knick-knacks left gathering dust for centuries on the side tables and shelves, rifling through towering chests of drawers and armoires. It strikes her that while the other house, where she had languished for so many months, is large, serviceable, and holds much of Klaus's personal collection, there is something altogether sterile about its character. Not so this house—no, this home.

She finds hand-painted playing cards in a drawer in the front parlor. An old trunk shoved into the butler's pantry reveals a pair of foil fencing blades, pitted with age, and the pair of dueling pistols Klaus had mentioned, badly in need of some oil. In one of the bedrooms, she toys with delicately carved hair combs, holds up a yellow crêpe silk dress edged in black lace at wrists and neck and examines herself in the tarnished mirror. She spreads the skirt out and twirls the material, imagines what it would be like to move in it, to dance in it.

All too clearly, she can imagine them, Klaus, and Rebekah, whiling away their centuries in the parlor, in the courtyard, in the bedroom with the four-post bed draped with delicate netting.

Questions surface and recede, pushed down before she can drive herself mad with them.

Was Stefan ever here with them? Did he like it? Was he happy? Were they happy?

Why did they leave?

In another room, she pulls out a silver locket, something a woman might wear around her throat. The clasp hasn't been worked in years, and she has to work her thumb nail under it before it springs open.

Inside, there's a grainy daguerreotype portrait, sienna and aged ivory. Elijah's gaze is as arresting here as it is in her memory.

She doesn't know where he went, after the sacrifice, but she thinks the fact that he has never shown up since his betrayal is a bad sign. In all probability, she will never see those eyes again in this lifetime.

What would have happened, if he had still been around when Klaus took her? Would he have stopped him? Or would he have gone along with it, content to be a family again, no matter the cost?

She tucks the locket into her pocket, to take it with her when she leaves. It is not the only thing she takes, but it is the only thing she takes for the sake of sentimentality.

She falls asleep quite by accident in what she imagines would be Rebekah's room if she were here.

She had found Rebekah's old diary, written in spidery thin flourishes of ink, desiccated petals pressed between the pages. Reading it had been slow going at first, as sometimes the lines slip into French, or some other language she doesn't recognize, but after a time she had stopped trying to gather each word and relaxed into a rhythm that had absorbed the words in a kind of hazy ardor.

The contents of the diary do not really surprise her. A love story (what other kind of story will Rebekah ever tell?), touching on each minute detail of her lover, his many perfections, his tastes and talents, and his kindnesses toward her. It interests her to read about Elijah, whose presence surprises her, since he had made it seem like he and Klaus hadn't spoken in centuries and centuries and she can see now that that is not true, no, that their relationship is more like a tide, their love for each other waxing and waning with Klaus's desire for the moon, the two of them pulling away and leaping toward each other in the inexorable magnetism and repulsion of two elemental forces. The story ends, of course, like every story ends: Klaus, destroying all with his brutal impulse. Defeated by his jealousy, she understands now.

It is not the story Elena had hoped to find, when she snatched this out of the plantation. The likelihood of finding the evidence for the vaguely outlined puzzle pieces floating through her mind to snap together was low all along.

No one is ever good enough for me, Rebekah writes, and Elena can sense the bitter accusation in the words. J'accuse. How many other lovers had Klaus extinguished like a guttering flame? How lonely had Rebekah been?

Stefan, it seems, had been the one to break the streak.

She cannot hold it against Rebekah that she had been possessive of that love, when she had been so terribly, exquisitely alone, before that.

Between one page and the next, though, she falls asleep as the night grows long.

The sound of the front door slamming shut startles her awake, with a shiver that rolls up her spine.

Her feet are only clad in a thin pair of socks, and the cold of the wide floor boards sinks into the soles of her feet.

It had surprised her, when she arrived, how cold New Orleans could be in the winter. She had always thought of it as the tropics, warm and sunny. The winters here are humid, but the air is damp and heavy with a water that seeps into her bones and freezes her lungs.

At night, fog billows up from the river and rolls over the streets, obscuring everything in a ghoulish bank of perfect white.

The humidity, Klaus had said.

For Elena, though, it's nothing so mundane as a meteorological phenomenon; that white fog is the fog that covers her life, that creeps in unexpectedly and fuzzes everything out in blinding, infinite oblivion.

Slowly, she shuffles out of Rebekah's bedroom, a little wary of being caught out of place even though Klaus has never forbidden it outright.

This may be a mansion by the standards of the French Quarter, but it is not nearly so sprawling as that other house. There are only four bedrooms upstairs, and nowhere near the space to house an army of hybrids or to keep the kinds of secrets that everyone keeps from her elsewhere.

She's just ducking out from the doorway, darting down the hall toward her own room, when she spots Klaus through the half-open door to his bedroom. His back is to her, and he is in the motion of pulling his shirt over his head, shoulder muscles coiling as he pulls the cloth free, and she can't help but stop to watch him, in this one moment before he notices she's there, to study the way he looks when he's not performing for her and she can just admire the clean lines and lean strength of him.

It's not a moment that can last forever. Klaus gets the shirt over his head, turns, and sees her watching him.

They stand there, locked into a moment that becomes increasingly molten as it stretches, as it thickens rather than thins.

Elena thinks about how Klaus has been with her the last few days. Fun, really, showing her a place that he so clearly loves, that love etched deep into his face, sunk deep into the low rumble of his voice in her ear. He's always touching her, too, but where it bothers her so much usually, how careless he is about her, how much he treats her like an object, it's different, here. He's so focused on showing her the city, on watching her reactions, on delighting in her enjoyment, that for the first time it really feels like he's seeing her, treating her, like a person rather than as his most prized possession. As Elena rather than as his doppelganger. The touches are little things, his hand guiding her to the next stop, the next sight, the crook of his arm during the cold nights when they meander home. It's easy to imagine that this is something else, when he is like that— she imagines people on the street must think they are lovers, enjoying each other, enjoying this place together, enjoying each other in this place.

She had wanted to forget, and it seems like this city has cast its spell on her after all, because she finds, with him standing before her, beautiful and half-naked and staring at her so ravenously, she doesn't remember what her objections are at all. It's all a fuzz.

Who moves first is all unclear to her—it must have been her, she thinks, because she finds herself in his room, her hands ghosting over his chest, nearly touching but not quite the shape of his muscles, the outline of dark ink over his collarbone, a tattoo she hadn't even realized he had until today, and she wonders, what had been important enough about those birds that he had wanted to mark his immortal flesh with it? He lets her, lets her feel the heat radiating from his flesh, the electric current that passes just under her fingertips, a breadth between them narrower than a needle's tooth.

When he grips her, finally, finally, his fingers crush into her arms, and she can feel each bruise forming as he drags her to him.

Her heart slams against her ribs, a painful, painful thud as she waits for—something—a kiss or a bite, she doesn't know—but what she gets is his nose, dragging across the line of her neck, to the hinge of her jaw, the whisper of his breath against her neck as he scents her, and then his lips are moving, very lightly, almost not there at all, as he mouths at the spot on her neck where he had kissed—no, bitten her—last spring.

Elena wilts in his grasp, one of those vivid pink flowers dead in his hands.

"Elena."

The hand on her shoulder grows firmer, more insistent, almost like he's shaking her—

She opens her eyes and blinks up into Klaus's face hovering over her. There's a curl to the corner of his mouth, like he's almost smiling, but it's gone between one blink and the next.

Elena sits up, leaning hard on her hands, and feels a paper tear under her palm. She's still in the third bedroom, the diary under her hand.

Klaus raises his eyebrows. There's a smear of blood behind his ear, but he doesn't seem to realize it.

She shifts, and feels a throb between her legs that she covers with a cough.

Klaus passes her a glass of water, and it should be creepy, that he's bringing her water, or maybe it's weirdly sweet, she's starting to lose track. Dreams are starting to bleed into reality. She just can't keep the two straight anymore.

"I came to check in on you, but you weren't in your boudoir," he offers by way of explanation. Leaves it on the table for her to pick up and explain.

"It's dull here by myself every night."

"I doubt Bex will appreciate you pawing through her personal items."

"Then I'm lucky that you won't tell her. Since we agree she's a psychopathic toddler."

"I don't believe I did agree to that." He says that, but he's laughing. Amused by her audacity, she would wager.

She makes a lot of wagers these days.

"It was implicit."

"Then we're in agreement that neither of us will mention this to my dear sister. Best not to provoke her more than is inevitable."

Truthfully, even though she knows it's inevitable, Elena doesn't like reminders that they're going to return to that other house where she has no escape from her past or her heart. The idea of facing Stefan again, of Stefan with Rebekah, feels like too much to bear.

"Why is it inevitable?" she asks him, because she needs to distract herself.

"Because I would never have any fun if I never provoked her. Rebekah's ambitions can be frightfully prosaic if she's left to have her way."

"Prosaic in what way?"

Klaus leads her back toward her bedroom. Watches as she pulls her socks off, slinks into a pull over sweater.

"She's always wanting to play at being ordinary."

"Ordinary doesn't sound so bad."

He eyes her. "You're right, it doesn't sound bad, it sounds downright abysmal."

"Why do you feel such a strong need to be extraordinary?" she asks suddenly.

He opens his mouth, but no answer comes to him right away. Finally, he tells her, "Because I am. And it's satisfying to let others know it, those who sought to deny it, to deny me, to destroy me." He turns toward the door. "Sleep well."

Living with Klaus is surprisingly easy. He's charming and fun and interesting and they don't talk too much about difficult topics. Elena pretends they are different people, spends her time with him imagining who they might be instead of who they are. Often, she finds herself slipping into those roles unconsciously, the girlfriend, the socialite, the tourist, as though she really were any of those women she daydreams about being instead of who she is. Sometimes, she goes whole hours without remembering.

The dreams are probably the most difficult part for her to deal with. They've been a persistent problem, for months now.

The night after she had fallen asleep in Rebekah's room, she really does pass by Klaus changing with the door to his bedroom left just slightly ajar. She stands there, transfixed by the sight of him, until he looks up and catches her watching. The full-body blush that rips through her is probably detectable for him, something his predator's senses can pick up at such a short distance, and the thought that it's not just embarrassment making her flush only makes it worse.

Klaus is kind enough not to mention it to her though, which frankly surprises her. She is often surprised by him, these days.

They continue like this for two weeks.

Klaus takes her to Preservation Hall to see the live jazz band, to dinner on the decks of a steamboat so they can watch the twinkling lights of the city from the river, and for a ride on the St. Charles street car line into the Garden District with its towering live oaks shading the streets. When they visit the Louisiana State Museum at the Cabildo, he spends the afternoon murmuring his revisions and annotations to the city's history in her ear. The rasp of his voice so close behind her sends a shiver up her spine that she just barely represses.

Christmas lights start going up around town. She learns about reveillon dinners, about the decadent Christmas meals enjoyed late into the night.

Sometimes he brings her back early, at two or three in the afternoon, and returns some hours later, to ask her if she would like to venture out again. Other times he is out all night.

On the thirteenth night he says, "Why don't you wear one of those dresses I had made for you?"

And so it is that Elena finds herself bedecked in a glimmering midnight blue cocktail dress, crystals hand sewn into the gossamer thin layers of the skirt.

Klaus, of course, looks distractingly handsome in a dark suit and tie. He offers her his arm, and, after two weeks of sight-seeing with him, she barely hesitates to take it.

The restaurant he takes her to turns out to be one of the old line grande dames, as Klaus puts it, tucked away on Bourbon Street where it could almost go unnoticed between the bars and the strip clubs.

But once Elena steps inside, it's a little bit like what she imagines stepping into another century must be like. White lace curtains block out the sights and sounds of Bourbon Street. Instead, the enormous rectangular room, green papered walls lined with mirrors all around, reverberates with the chatter and laughter from a veritable sea of tables. From one end of the room, a large grandfather clock tolls the hour. The lazy swoop of the ceiling fans provides only a faint circulation, and the white octagonal floor tiles are slick under her heals.

The waiter leads them to a table alongside one of those mirrored walls, where Elena has the opportunity to watch everyone around her as they leave their tables to visit other groups, as though they may all know each other. She wonders if maybe they do, and if the mirrors were put in for just this purpose. Klaus has always been fond of playing who's who.

It's almost impossible to hear anything clearly over the clamor of voices, but there is a general spirit of hilarity that Elena finds impossible to fight against.

"What do we drink here?" she asks Klaus once they settle.

"Oh, I think a Sazerac will do, don't you?"

It's a drink they've ordered before—he'd taken her to the Roosevelt Hotel two days ago for just that purpose. It still astonishes her how many places she has gone to just for a sip or a taste of a specific specialty.

The three fingers of whiskey warms every part of her when she swallows, makes her feel like flames are licking at the inside of her chest, down the soft insides of her arms.

The waiter never brings them a menu, but it doesn't matter because Klaus orders for her without asking what she might like, as is his habit, and she has to admit that she has grown accustomed to trusting his recommendations. Delicately fried oysters wrapped in bacon, creamy shrimp remoulade, lump crabmeat, and soufflé potatoes arrive with piping hot French bread that Klaus insists comes from a bakery in the alley behind the restaurant. Another round of Sazeracs replaces the first, and then another round sometime after that, and the grandfather clock continues to toll. A waiter clinks a spoon against a water glass at the front of the room, and before Elena realizes what is happening, the entire restaurant belts a raucous rendition of Happy Birthday. This happens four more times before the main course makes it onto the table, and by that time, Elena has started to laugh and make exaggerated, grimacing faces as she serenades. Klaus watches her, sings along in good humor, and by the time they have finished their fish, and Klaus has murmured some sort of dessert instructions to their waiter, Elena slumps forward on her elbows, one of her shoes slightly kicked off, the pump just barely hanging onto the tips of her toes. She's not sure how many hours they have been here, because time has lost its meaning in this mirrored room.

It's so easy to be happy here, in this eternally momentary life. So easy to just enjoy herself, to push all of the angst and the ennui she had felt so sharply before they came here down down down inside of herself, so deep she doesn't know if she can even access it. It's easy here, to forget who she is, who Klaus is, and to just focus on how handsome he looks, the way his mouth crooks and the dimple on his cheek jumps when he talks to her. She wonders if he forgets too, the way he treats her like his companion, not his hostage or worse, his tool.

Idly, she wonders what it would be like to kiss him again.

"It's good to see your spirits are improving."

"Hm?"

"I'm glad to see you looking so much better than you did a few short weeks ago."

She shrugs at him. "I like it better here than I did there."

"That's because you've proven to have impeccable taste, my dear." Even the way he says that sounds different to her ears.

"Did you bring me here because you thought I'd like it?" The idea makes her feel warm, the way her Sazerac had on the first swallow.

He hums noncommittally, swirls his drink around in his glass, the ice clinking against the sides. "A bit of a restorative seemed in order. You looked… not yourself, when I returned. I don't usually like that, finding things different from how I left them." He takes a slow sip of his drink before he continues, his eyes never leaving hers. "I must admit I am curious though….Just between us girls… What precisely happened while I was away? To have cast your spirits so low?"

A lick of ice slides down her chest. She frowns at him. "What does that matter?"

"It doesn't, really, but indulge me."

Does it hurt, that he asks for her to reveal this wound to him, not quite healed, as though none of it is of any consequence whatsoever? It does. Of course it does.

"I know about you and Stefan and Rebekah, you know," she tells him.

Klaus raises his eyebrows. "What of us?" His voice oozes boredom, but his eyes, intense as blue flames, never leave hers. Oh, he cares.

"So, I know. And when you were gone, and it was just Stefan and Rebekah and me in the house, I had a lot of time to think about it, and I realized that I couldn't keep on like I was. I couldn't keep trying to hold on to Stefan, because if it comes down to a tug-of-war for him between us, I won't win." That's only half a truth. The reality is that she wouldn't lose, either; it would just be Stefan, torn apart in the middle of it all. "I realized that it's really over between Stefan and me. That it's been over for a long time."

"That's all? A little heartache?"

"It wasn't a little," she snaps. Then, more quietly, "Rebekah hardly made it easy, either." She licks at her lips, feels the dimpled scar over her lip.

"Yet New Orleans has been good for you. You seem to have gotten over it." He gestures at her. "You're eating again, regaining your health."

She nods, because all of that, all of those feelings, belong to another place, to whom sometimes through the fog of her daydreaming and internal role-playing seems another girl. Yet something Klaus says catches her up, a hairline tripwire that she cannot quite ignore.

"What do you mean, regaining my health? I never lost it."

He tsks her. "Sure you did. I left you hale and whole, and when I came back you'd grown too thin, and had that horrid mark on your face. Not to mention you skipped your cycle this month. Not a good sign, that. Much too thin."

Elena's mouth gapes open. "What do you mean, I missed my cycle this month? Are you keeping track?"

"Obviously."

"No, not obviously!"

"It's hardly difficult." He taps his nose. "Oh, come on now, don't act so affronted, sweetheart, it's the same with all human women. Any vampire would be aware."

God, is she mortified. She smothers the part of her just dying inside from embarrassment at the idea that Stefan and Damon had been inadvertently privy to all of those details.

"Wait, why do you even care though?" she presses through this onslaught of seriously unwanted information.

"I need to keep track, to make sure you are healthy enough."

Oh. That kind of made sense. Part of his obsession with making sure she was fit and healthy and would go on to live a long life as his personal blood bank.

Except. Too thin, he had said.

"Healthy enough for what?" she asks him blankly.

At that moment the waiter returns with an assistant in tow. The assistant waiter carries an enormous silver punch bowl, which he sets down on the edge of the table. Elena is half distracted by him, watching him as he lights afire the thick brown liquid inside the bowl, filled with orange and lemon peel, and what smells like cloves and cinnamon. The whole contents erupt into blue flame as Klaus gives his answer. She sees him through the flames as he speaks. She is always seeing him through the flames.

"Oh, to have your child, of course. You'll need to continue the Petrova line, and I'd rather get that part over and done with sooner rather than later, don't you think? Best not to leave these things to chance. Would be a terrible shame if something were to happen to you beforetime, and no heir yet born."

Elena feels a terrible lurching sensation, that starts at the pit of her stomach and radiates outward. Suddenly, her time in New Orleans is illuminated in painfully sinister light.

She had been so eager to forget herself that she had forgotten who Klaus is, and that is always very, very dangerous.

The waiter stirs the flames, which leap ever higher with each pass of the silver punch ladle. Vaguely, she wonders if Klaus has compelled him to ignore their conversation, or if he is just very discreet, because he does not respond to their bizarre topic at all.

"Is that what this is about? The food, the entertainments, this entire trip?"

"Strictly speaking, this is a business trip. But as you may recall, I did tell you that I would be bringing you along because you were too thin and too pale. When I first let you know."

She had been daydreaming about kissing him while he calculated yet another way to use her.

Numbly, Elena accepts a small coffee cup from the waiter and, at Klaus's urging, takes a sip. Brandy and coffee and spices explode on her tongue. Carefully, she sets the cup down, watches Klaus take his first sip.

"Café Brûlot. A house specialty. Drink up, it's best while it's hot."

It's best while it's hot. Your hands are ice cold.

She takes another sip, but the cup clatters in the saucer when she tries to put it back down. "I don't want to have a baby," she tells him, somewhat stupidly. She feels stupid, like she can't piece any two thoughts together.

"Be that as it may, you're going to." Klaus tilts his head, studies her. "Would it truly be that bad?" He gestures around the room, seems to focus in on a handsome blond college student two tables over, who looks lean and tall. "You could take him to bed, for example, or perhaps that fellow over there," he points out a different blond boy in a green wool jacket, this one slightly more filled out than the last, eyes a shade bluer, but similar over all in appearance. "It doesn't really matter who fathers the next Petrova. You could have your pick of the lads." Every potential prospect Klaus points out fits the same physical mold. "You may even enjoy yourself," Klaus continues.

Distantly, she wonders why Klaus wants to do this the old-fashioned way when surely it would be easier to do this with a donor. There's something to that which she's not ready to face. The thought is distant, though, the kind of white noise that underlies a rising panic.

She knows why he is pointing those particular men out.

"I'm too young."

He rolls his eyes. "A moot point. Tatia and Katerina were younger both when they had theirs."

"I don't want—"

"Just one child. And it's not as though you would raise it."

This child she doesn't even want to have would be ripped away from her as soon as she drew her first breath. Klaus wouldn't want an infant around. He just needed that infant to be born.

In her mind's eye, she can see it, this ill-favored child she would bear in blood and pain and loneliness, this child she would never hold, never love, who would be whisked away from her and raised by strangers. Just like Katerina.

And then, five hundred years from now, there would be another doppelganger. Another girl whose life would be ruined, taken from her, destroyed by this cursed face, and it would be all her fault.

She licks her lips and realizes that Klaus is still passing men by her.

"I prefer brunettes," she tells Klaus, just to get him to shut up.

It works, beautifully, and his silence allows her to finish her café brûlot with enough space to think.

He pays soon after, the hilarity and spirit of the evening quashed by Klaus's revelations. When he offers his arm to her for the walk back home, she takes it knowing that it is just an empty habit, the same eerily polite gesture from days gone by that really means nothing. And when he cannot help himself, has to tell her about what Marie Laveau had really been like as they pass some spot or another, she listens, and asks him questions, and knows that he would tell anyone this, that he's not telling her anything because he wants to tell her, Elena specifically, but that he is just trying to raise her spirits enough so she'll eat and sleep and rest and gain enough weight back in order to carry a viable pregnancy.

How terribly she had misread him. How terribly she had let herself be deceived.

They're only home for a few minutes, long enough for him to change, before he slips out again into the night, telling her not to wait up for him.

Elena paces the halls for twenty minutes, before she, too, slinks out into the night.

Without even paying very much attention she ends up where she had gone a few nights before. Elena stands on the edge of the levee, looking down the long drop to the glittering black waters of the Mississippi. They call it the Lazy Mississippi, but Elena knows better. She can sense the power of this river from where she stands, a swift churning current that will suck her under in a heartbeat.

She thinks about that child she does not want to have. Will not have. Of that distant descendent whose fate she will seal.

(It is one thing to damn herself to this life. Another thing entirely to damn another.)

She thinks about herself, too. About all of the things she used to hope and dream for, all of the things she was going to do, going to be, and knows, really knows, that she never will.

You've always been so clever about finding a loophole—or tearing everything apart to make one, if you have to.

She cannot think of Stefan right now.

Only the dark suction of the water, that temptation of black cold water that she cannot ignore forever, that has been in her, lapping against her soul, ever since her parents died and she didn't, only that fills her, with a cool, clear certainty that tastes nearly like joy, like utter despair.

Elena throws herself from the edge.

A/N: Thank you for all of your reviews. It is so lovely to hear from all of you!

Also, side note, so surprised that this fic has now surpassed After the Fire, But Before the Flood in length. And guys. We still have such a way to go. How did I ever think this was going to be a 20k fic?!

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