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
Back in New Orleans, Klaus would have sauntered into her bedroom and enticed her out of bed with promises of the city in splendor, of hot chicory coffee and warm golden afternoon strolls with her hand pressed into the crook of his arm and the chirring sound of the river in her ears.
This morning, Elena awakens alone. For a long time, she lies in the bed and just stares at the ceiling, unsuccessfully willing herself not to think about the night before.
What would have happened, if she had let him kiss her?
(She doesn't want to find out what would happen if she damned herself so completely.)
(She can think of nothing else.)
When she finally ventures out of her rumpled bed, she finds the house quite empty.
After some minutes, Klaus materializes like a ghost from the shadowed entryway. He wears a black long sleeve shirt, the top buttons undone. Beneath it, she can see his white throat, strewn with silver chains and odd charms. Superstition rules him as it does few others.
They pack up the car with minimal words passed between them, nothing more than the most perfunctory question and answer.
They travel for a couple of hours, tracing the coast, heading deeper into Florida.
He's just driving, Elena realizes. Not really going anywhere at all.
In no place in particular, he pulls over onto the side of the highway and turns to face her. Behind them, a line of soft winter storms rolls down the highway.
"How long have you known?" he asks her, the first real words of any consequence he's spoken to her since last night.
"A little while."
"Yet still you came back for me."
Why he so stubbornly holds on to that detail, Elena cannot fathom. She wishes he wouldn't. It would be so much easier if he would forget the honesty she had given to him so senselessly.
"Do you think I should regret it?" she asks, unable to do anything but stare straight ahead at the brown-gray road juxtaposed against the wild green expanse of grass edging up to it. The first patter of rain hits the windshield.
Klaus pulls back and searches her face. She can feel the weight of his regard even without turning her head.
"Could you have really done it?" he asks her. "Left me there?"
"No." The words are true enough.
(She'd have died without his help.)
"None of this is fair. I don't want to live my life always wondering about you." She doesn't dare look at him when she tells him this.
She will, though. A small part of her knows that that is why she cannot stop thinking about him at all. She shoves it down as viciously as she can.
(Stefan had warned her about Klaus's games. He'd never warned her what could happen if she played one of her own.)
He touches her lightly under the chin, and makes her look at him.
"For the sake of the fidelity you showed me the night before last, this I will swear to you," he tells her formally, voice low and urgent. "No more will I haunt your dreams. I'll abstain from them completely, save I am invited."
She's dreamed of him speaking to her like this before. She's not sure this isn't a dream now. It could be. It feels like it. The car is so warm and dry, a cocoon from the gray, cold storm drumming against the windows.
If this is a dream, she might lean into the barely-there pressure of his finger on her jaw, might tilt her head and encourage that finger to stroke up the side of her face, and then down, over her pulse and collar.
Elena swallows, and marks the way his focus jumps to the working of her throat.
"Why would I invite you?"
"You may surprise yourself."
"Please." She can't keep the skepticism from her voice.
He throws the gear-shift into drive, shrugging.
"Oh, by the way, Elena?"
He so very rarely uses her name, but he says it now with a certain caress. She glances up and gets caught in his stare.
"She's still alive, then?"
Elena stumbles, but a pair of steady hands keeps her from tipping over sideways.
"You could try to sound a little more cheerful about it."
Abstracted, she watches as her own hand comes down, and her fingers splay against a cool mahogany bannister.
"I don't believe in doing anything difficult or tiresome."
She glances up, and finds herself in the front foyer of the dreadful compound, Klaus at her side. Cool morning light streams through the open front door. It had been mid-afternoon a minute ago.
Elena shakes Klaus off of her and has to cling to the bannister to fight the vertigo that slip-slides over her senses, knocking everything askew. Her legs tremble. She'd been sitting down, hadn't she?
Rebekah leans against the doorway by the front parlor, arms crossed under her breasts. "Really, now, Nick, couldn't you have put her to bed or something before you pulled her back around?"
Behind her, she can hear Klaus snipe back at his sister. "I wasn't aware you cared so much."
"I would prefer it if she didn't crack her head on my floor."
"Your floor?"
Rebekah sniffs. "Quite. I redecorated while you were away. I think that makes this place mine, don't you?"
They continue to verbally shove at each other while Elena shuts her eyes and breathes in slowly through her nose.
When she slants her eyes open, she can see that, indeed, Rebekah has redecorated. There's a brand new runner on the floor, a pretty Chinese silk pattern in pink and red and yellow. It would look gruesome if she fell and split her scalp and bled on it, she's sure, but then, she expects the rug to receive that treatment before long anyway. There'll be one hapless victim or another, sooner or later. There always is, here.
New art lines the wall, paintings and oil pastels bound in heavy gilt frames. After a month in close proximity to Klaus, Elena now knows enough to judge that, nearly a century ago, they must have been the height of avant garde fashion.
Standing in this house, the site of so many of her miseries, bickering with his sister, Klaus seems different to her than he had just last night. He'd been a threat to her in New Orleans, to be sure, but he had also been her lone companion, the closest thing she had had to a friend. She had fantasized about him, hungered for his body and his touch. Seeing him here is like a spike to the gut.
It had been these two monsters who had feasted on Zoe's heart's blood after cruelly playing with that girl's hopes and fears, as though she were a butterfly whose wings they reveled in tearing out. And just a few feet away, through those elegant parlor doors, Klaus had ordered Matt's death. Matt, who had bled out loving her, who had died because she loved him. No matter that she had saved him in the end. Klaus had still betrayed himself the monster. How she could forget who he was in so many ways while believing she was getting to really know him, she cannot say.
And he had promised to stay out of her dreams. She'd hoped that meant he might stay out of her head altogether.
She's an idiot, and she hates that about herself.
More than anything, she wants to withdraw from this room, to free herself from these deadly creatures with their rapacious appetites.
(No, more than anything, she yearns to free herself from herself.)
"Where's my duffel?" she asks Klaus.
He breaks away from whatever his conversation with Rebekah had devolved into. Rebekah cannot like that, the way she captures his attention so easily now.
They're more than just brother and sister, she reminds herself.
Oh, what a game she plays.
"Everything will be laid away in your room."
"Thank you." She squares her shoulders. "I'm feeling a little tired."
She forces herself to keep her stride steady and her breathing even as she climbs the stairs.
"This is a rather fine example," she can hear Klaus say a minute later, before she turns down the long familiar hall to her room. "I wasn't aware it was up for auction."
Rebekah laughs, the sound almost happy. "Oh, it wasn't."
The room looks just as she left it. The bed is made, the pillows piled high. The dresser hold her sweaters and jeans and camisoles and in the bathroom there is a fresh bar of rose soap, and brand new bottles of shampoos and lotions and face creams. Despite its many comforts, nothing about the room makes it feel like hers.
The only thing of import in this room lies hidden under the floorboard beneath her bed. The blue leather diary with the leaping waves tooled onto the cover had been her solace as fall crept inexorably toward winter.
Once she checks that it is still safe, Elena puts it back reluctantly. She's not sure how to write about the past three weeks. As a rule, she's always been careful to keep her entries situationally vague, writing instead about her feelings, so that if the day comes when the diary is found, nothing in it will incriminate anyone she cares about.
If she wrote down the things she feels now, she would definitely, definitely incriminate herself.
Klaus had told her that everything would be brought up to her room, but when she throws open the dresser drawers and double-checks under the bed, she doesn't find any of it.
Her mind circles round and round that bag, to the secret slash in the lining where for weeks she'd hidden her stash of vervain. She thought she'd gotten every flower, but what if she was wrong? What if some evidence remained? Some evidence that would implicate not only her, but her ally who had given it to her in the first place?
No, she wouldn't let that happen. She'd keep that secret, no matter what.
But Klaus would still know she had lied to him, then, when she had told him that she got it at the party. What else might he then question?
And there was worse hidden in that bag.
The locket containing Elijah's photo— how would she explain that? Or Rebekah's diaries?
Her stomach clenches and knots when she thinks how Klaus would react.
She paces and paces the room. Twists the fleur de lis ring on her finger, spins the watch on her wrist round and around.
The bag never arrives.
Finally she cannot take it any longer.
Elena ducks out of her room and goes looking for her duffel. She's surreptitious, of course. Is careful not to linger too long in any one room, and to head in the opposite direction if she hears any of the resident hybrids heading her way. She assumes the rules are the same as when she left, so she doesn't open any closed doors. If the time comes for that…Well. That time is not yet here.
She's nearly retraced her steps back to her room when she runs into Stefan.
He freezes when he sees her.
The dear familiar features, the way his lips part, the curve of his dark lashes around those liquid green eyes— eyes she has looked into, poured her love into—all those viscerally familiar things about him hook into her, tear mercilessly at her heart.
If she could have avoided seeing him, just a little bit longer, she would have.
"It's true, then. You've come back." His words are like a sigh on the breeze.
"Did you ever think I wouldn't?"
"I wasn't sure." He stares at her intently, taking in the details of her. "What's wrong?"
He still knows her better than anyone.
Elena looks up and down the hall before pulling him into a sitting room overlooking the familiar garden lawns.
Stefan shuts the door behind them.
Elena wrings her hands, her gaze bouncing from Stefan to the door and back again. "It's… I lost the gift you gave me," she tells him carefully, hoping to avoid giving voice to anything that the many supernaturally gifted inhabitants of the house might overhear.
His brows draw down over his eyes. "The diary?" he mouths.
She shakes her head. No. Waits for the next, the only possible, answer.
He stands frozen, only the length of a room apart and yet at too far a distance for her to overleap.
He doesn't know.
"I have to go," she tells him.
He catches her elbow. "Let me help you, with whatever it is."
"It's nothing." She slips out of his grasp.
Outside that room, Elena braces herself against the wall. Her thoughts wheel and dance.
All this time, she had been so certain it had to be Stefan who had given her the vervain.
True, she had considered the possibility that either Rebekah or Klaus might have done it, back when she first found it, but the more time passed the more preposterous she had thought she was being. No way Klaus would give her such an easy way to escape his noose, and the scar on her lip is testament to the fact that Rebekah prefers a much more directapproach.
Except, of course, all of those careful conclusions seem about as substantial as the morning mist over the Quarter. The first rays of the sun would vaporize it.
If either Klaus or Rebekah had given her the sprig, then she is on much more dangerous ground than she had thought.
And that bag would be the final fault in the earth that would send her tumbling.
She misses the old dinner time that been the habit before New Orleans. Accustomed to the late evening meals Klaus prefers, she only realizes that she must've missed the appointment once that time has already come and gone.
What she expects to find upon entering her room is a tray left at her bedside, or maybe even Stefan himself, ready to question where she's been.
Instead, she finds the room empty.
She checks her watch. After nine o'clock.
She doesn't have to wonder long.
With only a proprietary knock, Klaus pushes her door open and leans against the jamb, one ankle crossed over the other. "You didn't want to freshen up?" he asks her.
Elena looks down and realizes that she's still wearing the same clothes she threw on…. yesterday morning? Damn. He's bound to wonder now what she's been doing instead.
"I didn't realize we were going out," she tells him, deadpan. Now that they have returned to this foreboding house, she doubts very much she'll ever leave it again. "Where's Stefan?"
Klaus shrugs. "Escorting my sister." He taps his fingers against the jamb, an idle, thoughtless movement. "I thought you could dine with me tonight."
"With you." She imagines Klaus filling Stefan's role, bringing her tray and her vitamins and watching her while she eats. She looks around her room, to the bed and the single chair and immediately she knows that if Klaus walks into this room, that there will not be enough space for her to breathe,let alone think.
"Hm." He makes this tiny little noise, in the back of his throat, and she swears it's a sound she has heard in her dreams. "I've grown accustomed to your company, it would seem." He says it so lightly, so carelessly, that she knows it must be the truth.
Unable to look at him another moment, Elena turns away, to the empty gleaming surfaces and blank walls in her room. Her room in New Orleans had been beautiful, had felt like a home. At least for a little while.
"I wish we hadn't left," she admits to him. Her voice comes out unsteady.
"Perhaps I'll take you back. Once everything is settled."
Settled. Once the rest of the witches are dead? Or worse, Marcel and Davina? An ocean of blood through which she will have to swim for eternity.
All at once she feels too sick to stand, to think. Her bag is still missing and Klaus misses her.
"Let me change. I assume you'd like me to join you in the formal dining room?" she hears herself say. The words come out of her mouth, warm and a little arch, but it's like listening to another person speak.
Another person. That's who she's becoming, little by little.
Twenty or so minutes is not a lot of time to calm herself sufficiently so that her nerves won't show.
She's had less time under more stress before.
Surely she can make it through one dinner.
(and another, and another)
Klaus waits for her at the bottom of the front stairs. After weeks of lavish reveillon dinners, she feels underdressed in just her jeans and a flimsy blue button-down.
He leads her into the formal dining room, a room into which she has never actually set foot but which she has passed by on numerous occasions.
The long antique dining table glows softly under the faint light from the pair of crystal chandeliers overhead. Floor to ceiling rounded windows overlook an herb garden with a trickling fountain at its centerpiece. Her feet sink deliciously into a plush area rug set with morning stars and twining vines. It's not at all to Klaus's taste, but perhaps it is to Rebekah's.
Elena studies a painting hung above a buffet inlaid with amber and ivory. Something about the twisting oak branches, the shimmer of light on the rippling pond below it, captures her attention. "Did you paint this?" she finds herself asking as she draws up close to study it.
"I did. How did you know?"
"It looks like you." She doesn't know how else to put it, that indefinable element that has made her so sure.
Even from across the room, she can feel the weight of Klaus's satisfaction.
After a few more moments with the painting, Elena lets Klaus seat her at his elbow. There's already a carafe of red wine on aerating on the table, and the spicy sweet aroma of it permeates the air. He pours her a generous glass, but pauses before giving it to her.
"Are you quite alright? You seem troubled."
Her breath catches. This is it. This is Klaus bringing up the vervain and how he's discovered everything else—
"Do I?" she asks him as she reaches forward and takes the wine glass from Klaus with deliberate grace. He watches her, riveted, as she takes her first sip. His eyes linger on her fingers, wrapped lightly around the body of her glass, on her lips, and on her throat. He does not look at her eyes, and so she keeps his attention on her parted lips and bobbing throat, and takes the opportunity to study him. She drinks very slowly.
Nothing discernable has changed about him since they returned. If he had possession of her bag, he would have by now betrayed some hint of jealousy, or accused her of lying to him. She cannot imagine he would be sitting here, absorbing her so intently, if he thought she had played him false. She's overreacting. Reading too much into him.
Or maybe not. He could be playing with her, drawing out her torture. Another act completed in this his unending drama.
It's just another game, she tells herself. I can play as well as anyone.
She lifts her glass to take another sip, but finds it empty. She's finished the entire glass in one long draught.
Klaus reaches over and languidly pulls the glass from her fingers. His fingers brush so close to hers she can sense their heat, but he is careful not to touch her.
Her face warms under his scrutiny. She can feel her heart pounding in her chest.
"It's Christmas Eve," she tells him, somewhat stupidly, for lack of anything else to say while he refills her glass. He hasn't even touched his yet.
"Do you celebrate it? Christmas?"
"Yes. Maybe?" She makes a gesture that takes in the entire house, everything and everyone in it. "Probably not this year."
"Hm."
"What about you?"
He shrugs, and finally takes his first sip of wine. "I was rather fond of Twelfth Night, once. My sister always adored Christmas, though. She adores any holiday, any excuse for a fine dress and merry-making."
Rebekah, merry. She can't imagine it.
He sounds so fond.
After a while, a pair of hybrids bring in silver platters laden with paper thin slices of roast beef, buttery filets of trout sprinkled with almonds, creamy spinach richly redolent of onion and garlic, dishes of sauces sweet and savory and sharp, and loaves of toasted French bread.
"This is elaborate," she tells him, struggling to keep her eyebrows from climbing her face. "Who prepared all of this?"
"I thought perhaps you might find dear Stefan's cooking unpalatable after sampling the Crescent City's best for nearly a full moon's turn."
As Klaus fills her plate and replenishes her drink, Elena contemplates what would be more difficult to bear: seeing Stefan every night, or seeing Klaus.
He leans back and watches her eat, without touching his plate. She's had dinner with him nearly every night for the entire month of December, and never once has he behaved like this.
What do you know?
"What is it you want, Elena?" he asks her abruptly.
The question startles her. "What do you mean?"
"What do you want? What would make you smile?"
She leans away from him. "Is this a trick? Tell you what I want so you can use it against me?" Deep down, she knows that's not why he's asking and the knowledge profoundly unsettles her.
"No trick. Honest."
"Why then?"
"You smiled at me often enough in New Orleans. I just didn't appreciate it properly at the time."
So many of those smiles had been contrivances, clever masks to keep him from looking too deeply beneath the surface. He hadn't been able to tell the difference.
Would he be able to tell the difference now?
She dares to look up at him from under her lashes.
Again, her mind circles back to that dark evening at the beach. Klaus kneeling at her feet, placing so much weight and hope and desire into her actions. The fog that had hung over everything in New Orleans, shrouded her thoughts, her actions, her heart. Everything smothered by a cool mist of forgetfulness, lulled by the whisper of the river and the way he had smiled just for her.
A terrible mistake, she concludes. All of it, from start to finish, had been a terrible mistake.
"Oh, did we overlook the invitation to Christmas dinner?" Rebekah asks from the doorway. "I do so love a family get-together."
Elena turns and watches the other girl meander into the room. Her silver gown shimmers over her body when she moves. She looks like a fallen star. Stefan hangs back, clearly desiring not to join them.
Rebekah plucks Elena's glass from her hand and fills herself a glass before seating herself at Klaus's other elbow. "Don't mind me, do carry on. I believe you were discussing what would make our dear Elena here happy? Well, Elena, what will it be? Dresses? Jewelry? Your one true love's heart and soul?"
Klaus lays a hand on Rebekah's slender wrist. "Bex," he calls, voice hushed and low. His fingers stroke her wrist.
Rebekah soothes under his touch. Everything harsh and sharp about her melts away, until she could almost be just a girl, soft and lovely.
That touch between them arrests her. She cannot look away from it, that touch that should be innocent and yet cannot be, cannot possibly be, not when they are—
She throws her chair back and knocks against the table when she jumps to her feet, clattering the flatware. She's out the door a second later, shoving past Stefan, who raises his hand to stop her just a moment too late to catch her. Behind her, she can hear Klaus call her name.
She's halfway up the stairs when Klaus catches hold of her arm and spins her around to face him.
"What's this about, then?"
"Let go of me."
"Will you rejoin us?"
"I don't want to."
"I didn't realize your table manners were so appalling."
Her mouth drops open, and a dozen possible responses spring to mind. None of them leave her mouth, though. Instead, all she can manage is to quietly implore him, hoping he will for once listen to her, that whatever this thing is between them will move him to spare her his sister's company, spare her Stefan's company.
"Please, Klaus."
For a long moment, as Klaus looks down at her, some nameless expression on his face, she thinks he will let her go. But that moment ends, and Klaus pulls her along with him back into the dining room and, hands at her waist, and then her shoulders, guides her to the chair she had so recently vacated.
By now, Stefan has taken a seat next to Rebekah, so that Elena sits facing them both. The table has been set to accommodate the two additional diners, and a fresh wine glass has been set out for Elena. Klaus fills it with a flourish and waits until she takes a sip.
Rebekah watches them both, her gaze shifting from Klaus and back to her. She has not missed a single detail in the way that Klaus touches her, and the way that she, Elena, allows it.
Nor has Stefan. He stares at her the hardest of all.
(He knows her better than anyone. Of course he knows what's gotten under her skin.)
"And they all say that I love to create a scene," Rebekah drawls, effectively shattering the silence.
"Bex," Klaus warns.
Rebekah raises her perfectly arched eyebrow. "Oh, never mind, she's a dull topic anyway." She leans back in her chair and pets Stefan's arm, all the while never taking her eyes off of her brother. "You know, you haven't asked us a thing about how we got on while you were away."
"I thought that was obvious. You redecorated."
"As if that would fill all of our time! It was awfully quiet here without you, brother." And here, Rebekah turns to look at Stefan. "Though, we found ways to entertain ourselves. Didn't we, my love?"
Stefan clears his throat. "You haven't told us yet about your trip. Was it a success?" It's reassuring, almost, how familiar his demeanor is. Whether it's Rebekah or Damon, it seems as though Stefan always has a wild card to undercut.
"In some ways," Klaus tells them. "Marcellus, as it turns out, is not the one plotting against me, but rather the French Quarter witches."
"Marcel! So he is alive," Rebekah breathes. Then, in a sharper tone, "How is this the first I'm hearing about it?"
"Who's Marcel?" Stefan asks.
"Did he mention me?"
"You may have come up."
"Who's Marcel?"
Elena leans forward and answers Stefan. "He's Rebekah's ex."
It's satisfying, to see the way Rebekah's mouth gapes open.
Less satisfying is the look that flashes through Stefan's eyes. She recognizes it, has spotted it whenever Damon got too close to her.
Jealousy.
Stefan turns toward Rebekah. "Why do you care so much about this guy?"
Rebekah switches her focus to Stefan and cups his face in the palm of her hand. "It's not like that," she reassures him. "It's just a shock, knowing he's alive."
Elena watches them while Klaus leans over and murmurs in her ear, "Be careful where you flex your claws. My sister won't have liked you revealing so much about her."
It's true enough. They get through only a few more minutes of dinner before Rebekah asks her, "So, Elena, how, pray tell, did you pass the time on your sojourn? Did you do much sightseeing? Did you find the city much to your liking?"
The sense-memory of magic pulses through her body.
"I did."
"Such a descriptive girl you have here, Niklaus." She returns her attention to Elena. "I assume you met Marcel. Any other new acquaintances of whom we should be aware?"
"She met several members of the French Quarter Coven," Klaus cuts in, "but as I mentioned to you earlier, they're all dead. Soon, I might add, to be joined by the rest." He finishes the pronouncement with a smile.
"The French Quarter Coven," Rebekah repeats, rolling the words around in her mouth. "Are they still a threat, if you killed so many of them?"
Klaus looks over to Elena. The other two follow his gaze, until all three are looking at her. It makes her skin crawl.
"Yes." Klaus is definitive.
"Oh, no way," Rebekah begins. "We are not picking a fight with that coven over her."
"In point of fact, I already have. Besides, as I said before, they were already plotting against me. Their attempts to steal my doppelganger from me only sealed their fate."
"Nik, be reasonable. You already have the girl right here, safe and sound. There's no need to risk going after them."
Klaus's jaw clenches. "There's every need, I assure you."
"You're a fool," Rebekah balls up her napkin and throws it on the table. "And I won't be a party to it," she announces, before storming out of the room.
A tense minute passes once Rebekah leaves. Klaus looks at her and Stefan looks at the two of them, and she stares down at her reflection in her cut-crystal glass. The grandfather clock in the front parlor chimes midnight.
Stefan raises his glass. "Merry Christmas." If his grin is a touch sardonic, no one mentions it.
Surreally, she finds herself raising her glass with Klaus and rejoining the well-wish.
Klaus says something to Stefan, then, and she's sure that Stefan must reply somehow, but Elena doesn't really listen after that.
This is her life now. Christmas dinners with Klaus and his sister and what may as well be an ocean between herself and Stefan.
After some time, Klaus leads her upstairs and drops her back at her room. She doesn't pay attention to whether he and Stefan disappear together or apart.
She tries to sleep but, after a few hours, gives up on it.
Throwing on a sweater and a pair of warm shoes, she sneaks down to the basement level. At each turn, she expects for Klaus or Rebekah or one of the hybrids to intercept her, but no one does. It reminds her of those times early in her captivity, when there were fewer hybrids and she used to spend her nights exploring the house. It worries her that no one's around. It means they are out in the night, and that is never good.
Tyler takes only a moment to answer when she knocks on his door.
The basement is poorly lit, and the bedrooms in which the hybrids are quartered are illuminated by a sole rectangular window set near the ceiling, if they are lucky enough to have a window at all. Tyler's room is one such room, and the thin trickle of light is just enough to make out his sharp, familiar features.
She crushes him in a huge hug as soon as she sees him. A half a beat later his arms come up to wrap around her shoulders and return her embrace.
"What are you doing down here?" he whispers in her ear. He still hasn't let go of her.
"I needed to see you," she whispers back.
"I wanted to come earlier, but Klaus had me out on assignment today, running drills."
Elena pulls back and play punches him in the shoulder. "Look at you, Drill Sergeant Lockwood."
"Hardly. More like trying-to-keep-as-many-of-them-alive-as-possible-Lockwood."
He draws her into his room and shuts the door behind him. He looks her up and down and gives her a grin. "You have no idea what a relief it is to see you back in one piece. It was okay?"
Elena nods, considering. "It was okay." She scuffs her shoe against the floor and then sits down on the edge of his bed. She scrubs her hands through her hair, exhausted. "It was okay," she repeats, "but there's a hiccup now and I don't know who else to talk to about it."
Tyler draws his desk chair over and sits across from her. He's acquired it since the last time she was here. "So talk to me about it."
Elena glances at him. In many ways, Tyler Lockwood has been difficult to deal with for as long as she's known him. But in this, his straight-forward demeanor, his willingness to help her handle the hard part, he has remained easy and solid and real. More real, even, than anything else in her life.
"The thing is, I had this duffel bag with me when I was in New Orleans. And now it's missing, and I can't find it anywhere. I can't tell you why, but it's really, really important that I find it. Klaus said that he would have one of the hybrids bring it up to my room, so I was hoping you could help me find it."
Tyler takes her hands. "Is that where you stashed the vervain?"
This draws her up short. "It was you?"
"I told you I would have your back, didn't I? Benjamin Franklin and all that? I didn't see how else to do it, with Klaus taking you away."
"But how did you know to put it in my diary? How did you even know I had a diary?"
"Oh please. Since when have you ever not had a diary? And hiding it under your floorboards, Elena? Classic Lockwood move."
She laughs. She can't help herself. After everything, she's almost forgotten what it's like to have a friend whose motives are just that: friendship.
The laughter proves infectious. Tyler laughs with her, wheezing between breaths, "Your face just now, 'Lena!"
It can't last long, though. There is still the bag to be found.
"I'm really worried about it," she admits. "I thought I got all of the vervain out of it, but what if I missed some?"
"Go back to bed. I'll find it for you."
When Tyler Lockwood says it like that, it's somehow the most reassuring thing in the world.
The morning dawns overcast, the clouds heavy with what could be snow if the temperature dropped just a few more degrees.
Stefan comes in with her breakfast and leans against the wall, looking out the window.
Elena pushes the food around on her plate. She doesn't think she'll be able to eat a bite until she hears from Tyler.
"You and Klaus looked cozy last night," he tells her without looking up.
"Well, we weren't."
"Does he know that?"
She doesn't answer him.
"I warned you to be careful around him."
She tips her coffee mug over and spills it all over her breakfast tray. "Yeah, well, I'm winging it the best that I can," she huffs as she mops up what she can with her now soggy toast.
"I'm sorry," Stefan tells her.
Elena drops what she's doing and leans back against her headboard, shutting her eyes. "I'm sorry, too."
For a long time, she goes outside and soaks in what meager sun there is.
No one interrupts her all day.
This is what Christmas will be like from now on, she tells herself. This will be what a good Christmas will be like. No one screaming, no one dying, no one asking her for anything, her love or her forgiveness or her blood or her face. Just endless, endless solitude.
Klaus asks her for dinner again.
It's Christmas, after all, and the four of them are having Christmas dinner.
It goes better than it did the night before, mostly because Rebekah insists on keeping the conversation in Italian, so Elena does not have to contribute much. Klaus rolls his eyes, but indulges his sister, only murmuring the occasional aside to Elena. She cannot help but admire the fluid way his tongue rolls over the language, the way he trails over his vowels and lingers over his syllables. The soft burr of his voice is very beautiful, when she cannot fathom what he's saying.
Whatever mood has hung over Klaus since they left the French Quarter, whatever seriousness, it seems to have passed now that he is surrounded by his inner circle.
Rebekah laughs a lot, casting wide smiles at both Stefan and Klaus. When Rebekah laughs, every candle seems to burn brighter.
For the first half an hour or so, Stefan keeps casting Elena looks over the stemware. Whatever he is feeling, it doesn't stop him from carrying on a lively portion of the conversation, or laughing, suddenly, when Klaus tells him—something. She has no idea what it is that has made him light up like that.
After dinner, Klaus leads her back to the bottom of the front stairs. She mounts the first couple of steps, but Klaus stops her from going any further with the press of his fingers to her wrist. When she turns back around to face him, she stands several inches taller than he.
"This is where we part, I'm afraid. Rebekah wants to go caroling."
"Is that a euphemism?
"You shock me."
She purses her lips and stares down into that face that has become so well-known to her. He's going to go out tonight and sate his ghoulish appetites. He, and his sister, and poor Stefan, who she's sure will never completely recover from this when he eventually regains his humanity.
"Goodnight," she tells him quietly.
It's a quarter to midnight when she hears the knock on her door.
Ever since the others left, she's been curled up in her chair, trying to see the stars through the night clouds. The knock startles her, but before she can second-guess herself, she throws the door open.
Standing right in the threshold, a huge, triumphant smile on his face, is Tyler Lockwood, her gray leather duffel clutched in his hands.
"You found it," she breathes, ushering him in.
"Yeah. Lonnie was supposed to take your dresses out for dry cleaning, but he's lazy as hell, so he still had it in his room."
She hugs the bag to her chest.
"You really came through for me. You have no idea."
"It was nothing."
"No—Tyler, having you for my friend—it's everything."
He looks down at his feet and stuffs his hands in his pockets, like he's too embarrassed to look up at her. "You know I feel the same way," he tells her seriously.
"Thank you. I mean it."
"Any time. Just get that back to me first thing tomorrow, okay?" He opens the door, but then pauses and turns back. "Oh, and I almost forgot." He offers her a lopsided smile, and it's the best thing she's seen in ages. "Merry Christmas, Elena."
A/N: Well, Christmas in August, so it sometimes goes. Thank you so much for reading, I sort of can't believe we've made it this far! Please drop me a review or come find me on my tumblr, livlepretre .
Fun fact about the next chapter: It's going to feature several of the earliest scenes I wrote for this fic. Like, the original content that got this fic off the ground. I'm reeaallllly excited to finally share it!
Until next time~