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/explicit sexual situations
Klaus tries to lead her up the cellar stairs, but she resists his efforts. Remarkably, he doesn't force her forward, but turns around to see what's turned her feet to lead.
"You killed them all," she murmurs. It's half a question, because there's a part of her that hopes, despite everything, that her hands are not as red as she has painted them.
Oh, God, as she knowingly, deliberately painted them.
"I did."
"I don't want to see it. I don't want to think about it."
He bends down to look more closely at her face. He studies her openly, with a soft, deep interest he's never shown her before. It should disturb her, but she's too distracted by the first stirrings of remorse. Later, when everything stops churning over, end over end, she'll come back to this and she'll be ready to think about what that expression on his face means—
"I could compel you to forget," he offers.
She shakes her head. "I'm tired of that."
Maybe looking at their gristly murders will be what she deserves. A penance for those death sentences that she doled out so callously—
They would have killed you, and they would have killed Davina, and none of them would have felt guilty in the least.
Even Sophie.
"Very well." He opens his arms to her. As though he means to shelter her. It's a more intimate gesture than any he's presented her before.
For once, Elena lets herself accept his offer of protection. She'll call herself a coward later, when she's back in her soft bed in her pale green bedroom, when the only sounds to rock her to sleep will be Klaus and Rebekah and Stefan's inevitable debauchery. It will feel right to do that then. Right now, she's too exhausted to fight.
She doesn't deserve this respite, but she takes it.
Klaus lets her wrap her arms around his neck and tuck her face against his shoulder, so she won't have to see a thing. He hooks his arm under her legs and carries her against his chest.
Pressed this close to him, she can sense things about him that aren't so obvious when they're just standing side by side. Things her mind has feverishly tried to detail in those wild, enthralling dreams. The exact shape and breadth of his shoulders under her hands, the scratch of his stubble against her cheek, the spicy tang of his aftershave, and the softness of his throat, exposed over his shirt collar.
No, this is her penance. To know these things about the person she should hate the most, and to crave to know more.
He carried her something like this once before.
She'd willingly stepped into his arms that time, too.
Just like now, part of her had even been relieved.
Yet how much simpler her life had been back then.
The fog has rolled in outside, swathing the streets in a white blanket and suffusing the yellow lamplight into a soft veil, suspended like a ghostly sheet in the night air. The night looks all the darker where it bleeds through the fog.
How different the city looks at this hour, just before dawn on a cold and humid Wednesday morning. Without the press of bodies, the tangle of musicians and performers and carriage drivers and adventurers filling it with noise and heat and confusion, the familiar streets strike her as alien, a landscape as foreign as the moon. The curling scent of beignets wafts up the street as they pass Jackson Square. A pair of arresting dark eyes and a slow, easy smile flash through her mind, followed immediately by a pang of regret.
(She wonders what will become of Marcel and Davina after tonight.)
Klaus had initially set her down once they were out of the witches' compound, before spotting her bare feet, scabbed over and muddy. He'd tsked her, and picked her right back up again to carry her as they made their way through the Quarter.
There are certain things one cannot hide from another person pressed as closely together as the two of them are. For one, he's tense. Anyone watching would for all the world see someone at their ease, but Elena can feel the way he's pulled taut, like a wire stretched back as far as it will go.
Elena understands why. He said himself that there are more witches than the ones he dispatched of earlier tonight. More threats hidden in the shadows.
His heartbeat thumps under her ear. When she looks down, she finds a tear in his shirt where someone had thrust the dagger up under his ribcage to find his heart. She fingers the edge of the once fine fabric, stained now with Klaus's blood. Inadvertently, her fingers slip, and she presses them to Klaus's bare skin underneath. She jerks her hand back as though she's touched fire.
The only sign he has noticed is the way his heart skips under her ear.
After that, the rest of the walk feels interminable.
These are her last few minutes in New Orleans, her last few chances to take in the world outside of that horrid compound, and all she can focus on is that memory of Klaus's smooth, warm skin sliding under her fingertips, and how his heart had stumbled when she'd done it.
They come to a stop outside of one of the 24 hour covered garages that litter the Quarter. In the flickering fluorescent lights, she can see quite clearly that both of them are absolutely covered in blood. The black suit jacket she wears hides the worst of it, even though it shines with a tell-tale dampness, but his white dress shirt is absolutely wrecked.
She waits for him to speak to the attendant, leaning back against the interior brick wall of the building and shutting her eyes. She can't imagine what Klaus must say to the poor guy working the desk to get his car keys back. Does he simply compel him not to notice? Or does he spin him some tale, something to entertain himself while he waits for his car?
The car comes around, a sleek black SUV that she's never seen before.
Which is unnerving, because when Klaus helps her into the passenger seat, she immediately spots one of her hair ribbons sitting in the cup holder. The ocean blue tie, of the same type as countless others which she had kept in her vanity drawer back home, had been one of the little purchases Stefan had made for her when she first arrived at that other house. The thoughtfulness of those little details, from the hair ribbons to the lavender body lotion she favored to the strawberry jam on her toast, had belied the sullen, sarcastic face he'd shown her, had whispered I love you to her over and over, even when he couldn't say it aloud.
She picks up the hair tie and turns it over in her hands. She's going to see Stefan again. Tomorrow, maybe, or the day after that.
"Did we drive here?" she asks Klaus absently.
He reaches over to buckle her in. He doesn't do the same for himself. "We didn't take the boat." A pause. "Would you like to take a boat, some day?"
She doesn't answer him.
For once, he doesn't push her.
Klaus pulls the car out of the garage, and then they are shooting out of the Quarter on the same path the town car driver had tried to take her on earlier in the day, down Esplanade and North Claiborne before careening onto the I-10.
They head east, out of the city.
The sun rises as they cross what must be Lake Pontchartrain, dark and endless as it stretches over the horizon. The sun plays on the surface of the water, turning it a fiery golden orange. In the distance, the sky bleeds into the water, atmosphere too heavy to distinguish between the two.
They must have driven in over this lake, she realizes.
"Why haven't you compelled me yet?"
Near half an hour has passed since they got on the road, and Klaus hasn't said a word to her.
"Should I?"
She turns back to the window, to stare out at that huge body of water.
The moon is still visible, far above, a pale white winter ghost, cradled by the morning sky. The sun burns so bright it stings her eyes.
Maybe there will always be a part of her that feels magnetized by water.
Or, she reflects abstractly, remembering wisps of the night before, perhaps there is a part of the water that is magnetized by her.
They take US-90 along the coast, rolling through the towns whose names she mouths to herself, enjoying the way they settle on her tongue. Biloxi. Pascagoula.
Klaus finds a radio station outside of Gulfport that plays old scratchy recordings from the 30s. He doesn't sing along, but his fingers tap out the beat on the steering wheel.
He doesn't try to talk to her, not even once. Which bothers her, because usually she can't get him to stop talking to her.
Sometimes he takes his phone out and texts while he drives. Caroline used to do that (Caroline does that, she reminds herself, correcting the tense in her head). She'd never liked that habit, even though she had become guilty of it herself in the past year, when everything started happening. Still, she opens her mouth to tell him to put it down before she realizes that this is Klaus she's about to rebuke.
Ella Fitzgerald comes on the radio, and they both reach over to turn the volume up at the same time.
Their fingers brush.
Elena remembers the way his heart had jumped when she touched his bare chest earlier, under his shirt, and wonders if there's some sort of reaction going on under the surface with him, right now.
Catches herself thinking it.
This road trip with Klaus is probably the weirdest thing that's ever happened to her.
It makes her uneasy, actually, that he's letting her see the direction he's taking her in. She's become so used to him simply dragging her along after him, no control over their destination, not even trusted enough to know its exact location. Three weeks ago Klaus had compelled her for the entire journey to New Orleans. He hadn't dared let her know anything about where he had been keeping her. Now…
"We're going back, right?"
There's a huge tunnel when they cross Mobile Bay.
Elena holds her breath, and makes a wish.
In Pensacola, Klaus pulls off the highway and navigates them over a bridge to a long line of cottages on the beach.
She hops out of the SUV after him. The asphalt sears through the soles of her bare feet. "Klaus?"
It's just after noon. The sun bounces off the white sand bright enough that she has to throw her hand up over her eyes to shade them.
Klaus grabs their luggage from the trunk of the car and goes around to the cottage's front door, where he fishes a key out of a black lockbox secured to the door latch. He swings the door open without responding.
Elena follows him inside. The cottage is airy and blessedly shady compared to the bright Florida sun. A wall of sliding glass doors on the south wall of the cottage opens to a raised wooden deck, painted sky blue, with the water visible beyond it.
"Are we stopping? When did you get our bags?"
Honestly, after the past five hours of silence, she doesn't expect an answer. Naturally, Klaus bucks her expectations.
"I think we deserve a vacation. What do you say? White sand, turquoise waters, no witches or werewolves—" He places a hand on his chest. "Other than yours truly, of course."
He draws her an image she cannot help but complete—white sand, turquoise waters, and the two of them, swimming through those gorgeous clear waves; his hair, damp behind his ears, water droplets clinging to his chest and arms, his whole body exposed to her, and now that she knows these other things about him: the feeling of his stubble against her cheek and the shape of his clavicle under her fingers, and now that her mind can supply her with exactly what it would be like to kiss him out there in the ocean, with the water lapping up around their waists, can supply it in perfect detail, because not only has she dreamed about kissing him like she needs his touch to breathe, kissing him like she needs him to devour her, but there was once a time, not all that long ago, when he had kissed her, underneath a Japanese Maple, in a dreaming garden, and his kiss had electrified her and terrified her because it had been so right, which had been the very worst kind of wrong—
"I call first shower." She snatches her duffel bag from right out of his arms and scrambles for the bathroom, which she finds attached to the sole bedroom.
She locks the door behind her and throws the water on full blast.
"It's December anyway," she mutters to herself. "The water's freezing."
She lets Klaus's coat and her dress drop to the floor. A crimson flash in the mirror catches her eye. She turns back to the mirror and stares at herself in shock.
Everywhere the jacket had lain against her skin is covered in blood. There's so much of it on her arms and chest it looks like paint. It had seeped through the thin, clinging material of her dress and marked her from clavicle to thigh.
Elena clambers into the shower. The spray is hot, and scalds her skin. She ignores it and scrubs furiously at her arms, her legs, her chest and belly and breasts and thighs. After a while she can't tell what's tinged red from blood and what's red from the scouring heat. It doesn't matter. She scrubs harder.
After a while, there's really nothing more that she can do. The water runs clear, and no more red will slide off her skin.
They deserved this, she tells herself. It was me or them. Me or them.
She doesn't think she'll ever be completely clean again.
The water's gone cold by the time she takes a shaky step out of the shower. Cold rivulets of water stream down her back from her long wet hair, which she wraps up in a fluffy sea-foam green towel.
She stares at herself for a long time in the mirror.
Klaus pounds on the door.
"Some of us would also like to wash the gore out of our hair," he calls through to her.
"Hold your horses!" Hurriedly, she rifles through her things, finds a pair of yoga pants and a soft pullover sweater to throw on, and shoulders past Klaus, who crowds the doorway. Regrettably, there's nothing to do to salvage the black silk dress she had found so pretty. She throws it in the trash.
Clear winter sunshine pours in through a sliding glass door in the bedroom, a continuation of the wall of them in the other room. She moves the swinging blinds aside and stares out at what she supposes must be the Gulf of Mexico.
From the bathroom, she hears Klaus shout, "Did you use all the hot water?"
She'd like to look around the cottage, maybe go down to the beach. She doubts he was serious when he called it a vacation. More likely a layover.
(Or a timeout.)
Elena leaves the door open behind her and walks barefoot down to the beach. There's a set of stairs from the deck that lead directly to the sand, and it feels luxurious to dip her toes in the cold water, to soak up the salt sea air whipping at her face and to listen to the cry of the seagulls wheeling overhead.
For a little while, she follows a line of crab prints down the beach. She walks in the waveline and enjoys watching the water spring forward to erase her footsteps.
In her fantasy, she keeps walking on forever, her past erased, forgotten. She walks and walks and Klaus never comes after her.
It's a nice fantasy, for a while, but then the sun starts to sting her face and she knows it's time to head back inside.
Klaus watches her from the deck. She can see him when she draws nearer, a dark speck against the cheery yellow walls of the cottage.
"Did you enjoy yourself?" he asks her as she wanders past him, back into the cottage.
"Immensely."
He says something else to her, but she's not paying attention. There'll be time tomorrow to worry about it, and then more time the day after that, and the day after that.
Exhaustion swamps her. She crawls onto the bed, uncaring that her feet are wet with sand and brine.
She had come so far, braved so much, and none of it had mattered.
It had been her chance to matter, too. As something more than a pawn.
Her dreams are all gold and heat and blue and the feeling of soft skin and sharp teeth, and a wild yearning sucking her under, into the dark.
When she wakes up, the moon has chased the sun from the sky. It casts a silvery glow over the room.
She's sprawled out over the bed at an angle, effectively taking up the entire space. Good. There was a moment where she thought she might find Klaus in the bed with her.
Klaus.
In a flash, she remembers the dream.
Furious, she sits up, and squints suspiciously into the dark corners of the room, as though she'll catch him there lurking.
He's not there. Of course he's not there.
Elena scoots off the bed and steps lightly into the main room of the cottage. It has an open floor plan, with a galley kitchen replete with granite counters overlooking the spacious main room with the wall of glass.
She finds Klaus sitting on the upholstered sofa in the dark, feet propped on a glass coffee table, a glass of liquor in his hand. He's cranked the sliding glass doors open, so that the wind carries with it the salty ocean air and the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore. Klaus had been staring out at that black ocean beyond, but turns to watch her instead when she enters the room.
It's unnerving, even now, months into this forced intimacy with him, to feel his attention on her. Klaus's gaze has the weight of a predator's, and it sets her heart hammering.
Aware of his eyes tracking her every movement, Elena pours herself a glass of bourbon and goes to sit in the arm chair across from Klaus. Some basic instinct tells her not to fumble, lest that set off an instinct in him she doesn't want to trigger.
They sit together for a long while. The alcohol dulls the pounding in her head left from the dream, and soothes her enough to forget about who she's sharing the silence with.
The night sky reflects the ocean and the ocean reflects the night sky. There are more stars between them than she could ever count.
"Where did you get the vervain?" Klaus asks her. The question is so gentle on his tongue.
"What?"
"The vervain. I compelled you to stay in the car for at least 200 miles, and yet out you got. That's a six hour drive. I wasn't daggered for more than four, so I know you didn't make it all the way to Jackson and back."
"I met someone at the party last night. She thought I should have some." She takes a sip from her drink to cover her shaky nerves. Master liar, she reminds herself. C'mon.
"You could have escaped."
"I know." She lets the weight of that settle between them.
"But you came back for me."
"I did."
He upends the rest of his drink and goes to the kitchen to pour himself another. "There was a story Stefan told me once, last summer, when I asked him what it was about you that inspired so much loyalty, even after your death. Why he grieved so for you." He swirls the drink around in his glass. "He told this story of a time when he had been captured by a group of vampires with a vendetta against him, who shackled and tortured him."
His words freeze her.
That had been so long ago.
A lifetime ago, before she'd ever heard the Petrova name.
It had been so easy to love Stefan then. To risk everything for him.
(She would still risk everything for him.)
Klaus returns to his spot across from her, and sets his drink down. "He told me that you came for him. Broke into the nest, snuck into the heart of their layer, and pulled him out. Despite the certainty of your death at their hands, you crept in after him to save him. Thus was your devotion."
She has nothing to say to this. Everything he's said is true. Everything but the connection he's drawing to last night.
He moves so fast to kneel in front of her that she cannot track the in-between.
"You didn't have to save me," he breathes.
Helplessly, she tells him the truth. "I wanted to."
That knowledge strips her bare.
He takes her glass from her fingers and places it on the floor. Tentatively, he reaches up to brush her hair behind her ear.
"Why are we here?" Her voice is so quiet, she might as well just be moving her lips.
He reads her anyway.
"I wanted to talk to you, before we returned. I wanted to talk to you alone."
Outside, the waves crash against the sand, a hypnotic rhythm.
When he touches his fingers to her bare wrist, she feels that connection between them pulse, but not so strongly as last night.
"Do you feel that too?" she whispers.
He glances up at her with night-dark eyes. He smooths his thumb up over her wrist again. His fingers stroke higher, up the side of her arm, under the sleeve of her sweater.
"I did not expect this," he murmurs. "When I carried you away, I did not suspect…" He trails off, unable to put whatever thought he's having into words.
Elena stares down at him.
Here is Klaus, on his knees before her, offering her his full regard. Looking at her like she might be the answer to something he's been looking for. She, Elena Gilbert. This is what she wanted. When he kissed her last fall, she pushed him away because he had not given her this.
She clasps her hand over his and leans forward. She can't help herself. That spark between them laps at her where they touch.
The moonlight plays upon his features, casting his hair and eyes to darkness. Shadows play against his face, and his skin glows silver in the moonlight.
He tilts his face up to hers, and she cannot help herself, she mirrors him, leaning further into his touch and tilting her face down towards his.
"I want you to stay out of my dreams."
The spell between them breaks.
Elena stands up and brushes past him, retreating back to the bedroom. She shuts the door behind her and leans against the door, heart slamming in her chest.
She had come so close to falling.
So very close.
She listens at the door for a long time.
In the other room, she cannot hear a thing.
They leave the next morning.
A/N: Oh man Klaus is in serious trouble.
Thank you, as always, for reading and sticking with me this far. Please send me a review, or you can message or anon me on tumblr at livlepretre
I know some people have been asking me when this is going to turn into "real klena" but I would argue that it already is. It's a slowburn. I really, really meant that. Probably has another 50-100k to go if we cover everything I intend to cover here. In my other major Klena fic, After the Fire, But Before the Flood, I had the scenario of, "What if Klaus and Elena were the only two survivors in a post-apocalyptic world?" which made it kind of easy for them to fall into each other's arms. Taking off from 3x05 takes a lot more work. But we're getting there! I promise.
In other news, if you haven't read it yet, I've just posted a new Klena fic, "Just a Glimpse." If you wish Elena and Klaus would just hook up already, then this is the fic for you :)