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
On the first morning, the house emanates a silence so deep that Elena almost swears she can hear it.
It's the silence Elena remembers from the last time Klaus left her here. A void, total and pure, cracked through only sometimes with Rebekah's wild laughter or the fuzzy romantic whine of the gramophone.
It's how she knows he's truly gone.
White clouds smother the sky, blotting out the light until the rolling grounds and surrounding fringe of forest are illuminated by only a cool gray. The sky is a sea of endless, endless white, that blankets everything and seems to reach out to the edges of forever, as limitless as her future here.
She wonders if Klaus is already in New Orleans. If he's already made contact with Marcel, and in turn, Davina. Whether Rebekah's heart remains so true to Stefan when faced with the ghost of her past love, which Elena imagines must inevitably hover between her and Marcel. If their relationship had been in truth anything like what the other girl had written about in her diary, then it must.
Her mind works restlessly over what must be happening in the Crescent City.
On the one hand, she is so far removed from everything there. An outsider to the action, a player swept off the board. That fact is harder for her to accept than she would have guessed.
On the other hand... She has learned too well how useful it can be to glean what she can of these intrigues and schemes. Part of her is certain she would never have survived the night of the solstice if she hadn't had more pieces of the puzzle than any of the rest of them.
And so, she hopes that Davina does not mind Elena suggesting her as a substitute for Gisette, whoever that unamenable witch had been. (Davina had been the obvious choice all along. It had been her coven who cursed the Crescent Pack in the first place, so the spellwork to reverse the curse should be intrinsically easier for Davina to perform than some other witch.) And she speculates, furiously turning over the possibilities, on how Klaus will move against the French Quarter Coven, exactly, and whose blood he might use as the catalyst to unbind the Crescent Pack.
You're the only lamb for me.
She shivers and hoists the blankets higher around her shoulders, burrowing into their warmth and softness.
He'd been…flirting with her, when he'd said that. Surely.
The clatter of her breakfast tray rolling into her room disturbs her ruminations. A moment later, the scent of bacon lures her out from under the covers. The comforting aroma of good strong coffee curls through her room.
For a moment, rationality slips, and she thinks it'll be Stefan coming in with her breakfast. She braces herself for a frosty encounter.
It's not Stefan.
Tyler freezes almost comically when he notices her watching him as he pushes a little cart into her room, his eyes gone big and wide.
She bites down hard on her lip. She's not sure what she expected when Klaus agreed to leave Tyler here in lieu of Rebekah and Stefan, but not… this.
"Klaus told me I had to make your meals," he tells her in a rush.
That's all it takes, she can't stand it anymore—the laugh escapes through her nose, a terribly indelicate snort that turns into deep belly laughs that bubble up into her lungs, tickling along her ribs until tears start to form in her eyes.
"I wish I had a camera," she gasps between breaths. "You look like a French waiter!"
She scoots out to the edge of the bed and looks down at the plate Tyler's made her. The bacon is only a little charred, but the eggs are unsalvageable. She pokes at the them with a fork while she chomps on a bacon strip.
"Do you want some?" she asks, patting the space on the bed next to her.
"I'm supposed to make sure you eat."
She rolls her eyes. "Then you probably need to learn how to cook. Didn't your mom ever teach you?"
"When would that have been? Before Founders' Council meetings, or after my father's fundraisers?"
"Point taken."
Despite his apparent orders to watch her, he keeps glancing over to the painting above her dresser.
So he can be distracted from Klaus's edicts. Interesting.
"How long has this been here?" he asks her. "I don't remember it."
"It's new. Christmas present from Klaus."
Tyler raises his eyebrow but doesn't comment as he steps up to it.
Despite how weird this is in and of itself, there's something nice about this. Watching Tyler admire art while she nurses her coffee, savoring the warmth between her fingers as she slowly sips.
She pushes her plate away once she finishes off the bacon.
"That's all you're going to eat?" Tyler asks, attention immediately shifting back to her. Maybe he hadn't been so distracted, after all. So easy to forget, when it comes to Tyler, how keen his senses really are.
"Those eggs barely even deserve the name!"
He tosses her a totally indignant look. "They're scrambled eggs. You can't screw those up. They're fine!"
"They're gray, Tyler."
"C'mon, 'Lena, Klaus want you to eat. I have to make you something. Please?"
He has to.
Her heart softens for him. Of course.
"Okay," she says. "But we really need to find something else to make for breakfast." Standing up, she links arms with him. "Want to raid the fridge with me?"
They roll the cart out with ease, over to a dumbwaiter Elena hadn't actually known about. "That runs down to the kitchen?" she asks.
"Yeah. Kind of cool, right?"
They take the back stairs down to the kitchen together. With Tyler by her side, the silence doesn't feel so oppressive as it had the last time the house had emptied out. It makes her worry that they are not as alone as she had originally thought.
"Everyone else left?"
"Yeah, super early this morning."
"Even the hybrids?"
"Them too."
Relief slides through her. "So it really is just the two of us," she muses.
"What's that tone, Gilbert?" Amusement and wariness war for prominence in his voice.
"Oh, nothing. I was just thinking, with only the two of us here, we might actually have a nice time."
"Says you. I'm the one who has to cook for you!"
"Shut up. And besides, maybe I'll cook for you."
"You don't have to do that," he tells her too quickly.
She frowns at him. "What if I want to? Could you really say no to me?" She bats her eyelashes.
"I have my instructions."
That draws her up short. It hadn't occurred to her that he might have more than just the basics that she'd already guessed. "What are your instructions?"
"For one, I'm supposed to make sure you eat a good breakfast, no skimping. C'mon." He pulls her into the kitchen.
Elena lets the subject drop. She'll get the rest out of him, one way or another. Not that she doesn't trust Tyler, but it's always best to find out exactly what Klaus has told him, so she can plan around it.
A quick look through the pantry and refrigerator yields flour, baking powder, salt, eggs, milk, butter—in short, everything she needs to whip up a batch of pancakes.
Elena combines the ingredients in short order, while Tyler pulls a large frying pan from one of the cabinets and melts a generous pat of butter.
The delicious scent of lazy Saturdays fills the air. It tickles her nose, hinting at memories that feel warm and golden and a little unreal when she thinks of them now.
The pancake half-formed in her pan erupts in tiny bubbles, and it's golden-brown and crisp and perfect when she flips it. Tyler holds a plate out for her when it's ready, and she smiles while she starts another, and then another. The sheer normality of this moment knocks the breath from her.
It's a sharp, cold winter morning, but she's warm and cozy and making pancakes with her best friend.
—It could be winter break, and she could be in her family kitchen, safe and happy. It could be any time, any day of her life—
It isn't.
But it's as close as she's ever going to get, and she'll take it, dammit. She'll take this one, easy, perfect, and simple morning with her friend, and she'll laugh, and she'll smile, and later, when things get hard again, she'll live on the memory of this moment. She'll live on it forever if she has to.
And so Elena and Tyler have pancakes for breakfast.
They have pancakes for breakfast every day after that, too.
At first, neither of them really know how they should act around each other, now that they no longer must sneak in an add hour here or a few minutes there.
All Elena knows is that she wants to spend all of her time with Tyler. As much of it as she possibly can.
The thing of it is: she can.
So she does.
They fall into a pattern as easily and simply as breathing.
Meal times spent in the kitchen, testing their admittedly somewhat limited cooking skills to the limit. They find an ancient copy of Joy of Cooking stuck below the sink, the pages slightly mildewed and the binding loose, and Elena immediately recruits Tyler to chop and dice for her while she picks recipes from the book. It delights her to discover, when they run low on fresh ingredients in the fridge, that Tyler has been furnished with a phone number and an account so as to have fresh food delivered.
"I'm not allowed to leave you here alone," he explains as she writes out for him what she wants brought, a list which she carefully copies from the cookbook.
"So since you can't go into town, someone is coming here?" she asks him casually.
"Yes." He pauses. "I can't let you talk to them, either, though," he adds in regretfully.
"That's fine." She'll find somewhere discreet to spy when he accepts the delivery.
Every day, Tyler suggests they go for a walk. He always taps his fingers against whatever surface is nearest, the kitchen table or his desk or a sideboard in the hall, when he mentions it. The tick comes up whenever he rehashes something Klaus has ordered him to do.
No matter. They have a lovely time nonetheless.
The lawn and evergreen trees sparkle silver in the sunlight, dusted with frost that never quite melts. It makes the whole garden seem magical, like it's a whole hidden world made just for Tyler and herself, a fairyland for their happiness.
She knows it's an illusion, but she lets it bespell her anyway.
As she walks through the gardens, Elena can sense the life within it, curled and sleeping beneath the ground now, but with the promise of waking soon.
Slowly, joy begins to seep back into her life.
In the afternoons, they sit huddled up in one of the unused downstairs parlors, steaming mugs of hot chocolate warming their hands. The hot chocolate had been one of the first things she had given Tyler for her wish list. Tyler impresses her with how quickly he gets a fire going in the enormous fireplace, and after a couple of minutes, he offers her whiskey from a silver flask she's never seen before.
"It'll warm you better than cocoa," he tells her.
She rolls her eyes but holds her mug out for him and savors the warm floaty feeling that dissolves through her when she sips at it.
She feels like she's found her way back to her childhood, to the safe and happy time of cold winter days at the lake house and warm nights spent curled up in front of the fire. Tyler had spent plenty of weekends with her there, back in the days when their parents had all been alive.
She studies Tyler by the firelight as he pours the whiskey into his own mug. He hasn't changed a bit, she thinks.
They had loved looking at the stars together on those inky winter nights out at the lake, when the air was so crisp and so clear that they could see straight through to the other side of the universe.
He still likes to take her out to look at the stars. To dream of other places.
And in the evenings, the whole world seems quiet and small and it feels like they are the only two people who exist.
He always walks her back upstairs when the last crackling embers in front of the fire start to sputter.
"I promise I won't get lost going up two flights of stairs," she tells him.
"I just like knowing you're safe before I say goodnight."
It's ridiculous, he's ridiculous, but he says it so sincerely that it's all she can do to swallow around the lump in her throat.
Elena offers him a tremulous smile. "Then the least I can do is oblige you. See you tomorrow."
"Yeah, tomorrow."
They give each other answering smiles.
It's the best promise she has ever had to keep.
When she wakes in the blue-black stillness of her room, she sits straight up and stares into the deeper darkness at the foot of her bed.
The shadows never resolve themselves into a shape.
There's no one there.
He had promised to stay out of her dreams.
It had never occurred to her that the problem would persist nonetheless.
The first snow flurries arrive two weeks into January.
Elena spots them from the window set high into the kitchen wall. It's half past noon, according to the stove clock, and Tyler and she have just finished assembling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their lunch.
Impulsively, Elena grabs hold of Tyler's arm and pulls him out through the kitchen back door, onto the impossibly white carpet of fresh snow covering the lawn.
The whole world looks brand new and clean. The thin winter sun glints brightly off of the newly fallen snow crystals. The sight makes Elena's eyes water. She bends down and presses her fingers into the thin layer of white flakes sifting slowly but steadily down from the cloud cover overhead.
"Do you remember the last time it snowed back home?" she asks softly.
"Ninth grade, the last football game of the season."
"We were all freezing, and the whole squad wanted to call it quits on cheering that night, but Caroline wouldn't let us. You all were getting demolished out there and she said we needed to be the ones to cheer for you since no one else was." She draws a finger through the snow, tracing a long winding line like a river. "Do you think it's snowing back home?" Are we close enough to see the same skies?
Something cold and wet smacks against the back of her neck. Ice water runs down the collar of her shirt and settles into the waistband of her jeans.
Elena jumps to her feet and spins, only to get hit in the chest with another snowball. The powder explodes against her sweater, icy flecks clinging to her exposed throat and collarbone.
"Tyler Lockwood, you are such a twerp!" she screams, even as she gathers up snow for her payback. It stings her fingers as she charges forward, but it feels so good when she pelts it at him as hard as she can.
He dodges it without even looking, and has another one lobbed in her direction in the same heartbeat.
"You're going to have to move a lot faster if you're going to actually hit me, Gilbert!"
She grits her teeth, a fresh snowball crunched between her fingers.
Her fingers.
"Oh my God," she whispers, dropping the snowball and twisting her hand so she can see the back of it. "My ring!"
"What?"
"My ring's gone! I must've dropped it!" She spins and looks out at the snowy grounds. The snow's falling so fast and so thick around them now that she feels like she's in one of Monet's winter paintings. Everything is just a dim blue-white blur.
She drops down and frantically starts brushing snow out of the way. Immediately, Tyler ducks down at her side and helps her look.
"What color is it?" he asks her, eyes intent on their work.
She smashes a handful of snow against the side of his face and leaps back.
"Ha! Got you!" she laughs, dancing back from foot to foot.
Tyler stares at her, mouth open. He shakes his head once, abruptly, almost like a dog. The snow melts right off of him, a reminder of how much hotter he runs than she does. "Dirty trick, 'Lena. You're going to regret that."
And then he's on her, pushing her back into the snow, pinning her by her shoulders and rubbing snow onto her face.
She gasps and laughs under him, trying to knock him off like she might have done back in middle school. Her shirt rides up under her, exposing her bare skin to the snow, and her whole back break out in pins and needles.
"No way!" she gasps. "Tyler, get off of me!"
"Say you're sorry!"
"Only sorry I was caught!" She twists, and, miraculously, manages to shift him off balance.
His full weight lands atop her, pressing her forcefully back into the cold of the earth, into the blazing heat of his body. Her breath whooshes from her chest. Instantly, he rolls off of her. For a few quiet seconds, they lie side by side, taking deep, gasping breaths, the snow falling onto their faces. It feels like oblivion.
After a few seconds, Tyler stands up and offers her a hand. "You're soaked head to toe. Let's go get you warmed up."
The snow keeps up for days.
They play outside like children, spending long afternoons chasing each other through the glittering gardens and making snow angels in the soft white mounds. It's like Christmas morning every day. Her cheeks have a perpetual flush to them, her eyes a mischievous sparkle that makes her look years younger when she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She looks like a girl again.
Her journal becomes a reflection of her deep preoccupation. Little phrases, flicker flame and whiskey warming me, chess pie a gooey disaster, snow melting in his hair, tomorrow and today, trip through the pages.
She never writes about Stefan.
Eventually, there comes a day when the temperature plummets and the wind howls through the trees, rattling the windows in their panes. It gets so cold that it stops snowing altogether.
"I'm not supposed to let you out when the weather's this bad," Tyler announces that morning as he settles down next to her in their snug little kitchen. He snags a slice of orange from her plate and she passes him a mug of black coffee.
Reluctantly, Elena agrees with him that the cold has rendered any trips outside out of the question. It's the first time their routine has been broken, and it leaves her feeling unexpectedly anguished.
Today is the first day that the happy routine had been broken.
Vaguely, she wonders how else they could spend their time together, if she should let him into her library or if that would be crossing a line. Just for today. They'll be back to carefree days again tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, or the day after that—
It'll never be.
Elena knows this.
All at once she feels like she's falling, her stomach in her throat. She clutches at the table, fingers sliding over the edges, unable to find a purchase.
She deceived herself like this once before, when she allowed herself to imagine Klaus her friend, or perhaps something more. He had so cavalierly dashed all of that to pieces—
And here she is, doing the same thing again. Permitting herself to live in this day to day sort of happiness, to imagine a future with Tyler the only one by her side, where she could go on making pancakes and snowmen and pretending that none of her problems actually were real, that nothing mattered beyond their four walls and no one existed but them.
Except, Klaus existed. Klaus would be back, and he would tear all of this apart.
"Elena. Elena, are you listening to me?"
She blinks, and realizes that Tyler has come around to her side. His hand squeezes her shoulder.
"I—" Her voice is thick with tears. When did she start crying? She opens her mouth again, but no words come out.
"What's wrong?"
If anything, his words only make her sob all the harder.
Tyler does what no one else has done for her since she left home. He gathers her up in his arms and holds on to her. Allows her to bury her face in his neck and shed the tears for herself, for everything that's just gone now, that she's been doing her best to hold in since she woke up with a gauze bandage taped to her neck. He rocks her in his arms, and whispers her name, soothing fingers combing through her hair, and she loves him so much right at this moment. It hurts to think of ever having to give this up.
They stay together like that for a long while. If he were anyone else, she would feel embarrassed. He's holding her like a child, speaking to her like a spooked animal, and she's letting him. At some point, she must have crawled into his lap, because, as her thoughts begin to straighten out, she realizes that they have ended up in a heap together on the kitchen floor.
His arms around her are strong. When she dares to meet his eyes, he looks at her with nothing but bone-deep tenderness.
"I have an idea," he murmurs. "Do you want to come with me, or do you want to stay here?"
Her fingers twist in the cotton of his shirt. "I want to come with you."
Elena follows him down the stairs by the kitchen down into the basement level, where his room is. Still feeling out of sorts, and far too fragile for her liking, she sits down on his bed and waits for him to rifle through whatever he has crammed under the bed.
He comes up moments later with a box of charcoals, some paper, and a French easel.
Cautious curiosity slinks through her. "Are you going to draw now?"
He shifts his grip on the art supplies, looking a little nervous all of a sudden. "I thought you might like to draw, you know, together." His voice is so gentle when he speaks.
"I'm terrible. I barely know how to hold a pencil."
"First off, we'd be using charcoal, and second off, I could teach you."
Elena pauses, unsure where the offer is coming from. "You'd really do that?"
"I think it'd be good for you. Cathartic."
"Cathartic?"
"You've been through the ringer, Elena. You need to work that out somehow," he says, ignoring her defensive skepticism completely. "When are you going to have a better chance? It's just you and me here. You're safe."
"I'm never safe. There's no such thing." She wipes away another tear, angry at herself for starting to cry anew.
"So reinvent the meaning. Right now, with me, you're safe."
She weighs his words. He says it all so simply.
Right now.
But it's so dangerous to think like that.
It'll only lead to heartbreak.
Reinvent the meaning.
What means anything to her, anymore?
"What do you have to lose, Elena?" he asks her, voice soft as the nighttime breeze. He holds in his hands the best way he knows how to help, to heal. All at once she realizes that she's not the only one feeling defenseless and trapped. No, he's revealing something about himself to her through his offer, something important. The boy who never willingly lets down his shields is letting them down for her.
And the thing of it is—
Tyler means something.
Hell, he means everything.
"Okay," she agrees. "Teach me."
There's not a ton of space in Tyler's room, but they make it work. He sets her up on the easel, which he puts together with practiced ease, and he works at his desk.
At first, she has no idea what to draw.
When she closes her eyes, she doesn't see anything. Just black, black, black. She fills an entire page with it, then another, scribbling out every bit of off-white paper that she can with charcoal dust.
The vine charcoal snaps in her hands, and no matter how hard she presses, she can't get the color to go down as anything darker than a soft gray that scatters from the paper whenever she tries to rub the pigment in with her thumb.
To her relief, Tyler does not criticize or comment on her decided lack of drawing. Instead, he pulls out a tray with a plastic lid from inside his desk and hands it over to her.
"Compressed charcoal," he explains. "Should work a lot better."
It does.
The drawings she produces aren't really drawings at all. Just voids of a satisfying, perfect black.
Her hands come away sooty, and she finds dark spots on her face, in her clothes. When she blows her nose, charcoal comes out with the mucus.
It feels like she's purging herself of a poison that she hadn't even realized had been spreading toward her heart.
She goes through the entire box of charcoal, and then another, and then another. Piles of shimmering black powder coat Tyler's floor, but he doesn't complain.
No, he never complains, not once. But he is there, with whatever it is she needs, a box of charcoal or a glass of bourbon or a hug, every time she needs him.
The first time she tries to draw something specific, it turns out as terribly as she had feared.
She squints over her shoulder at the drawing Tyler's working on. All she can see between his fingers is the outline of a smile, but she recognizes Caroline in it nonetheless.
"How do you get what you see in your head to actually… look like that when you put it down on paper?" she asks him.
Her question startles him. He flips the page over as soon as he realizes she's looking at it. Whatever he feels about her looking over his shoulder, none of it is on his face when he turns around in his desk chair to face her.
"It's like writing—draw what you know."
She shows him a sucky drawing of a bridge.
His mouth twists a little, when he sees what she's drawing, but he gets up to stand behind her. "You're using your wrist too much," he says. He puts one hand on her shoulder, the other on her wrist. "When you draw from your wrist, you don't really have any control." He rotates her shoulder under his hand in wide, loose arcs. "Draw with your shoulder, though, and you'll get a smooth, strong line." He guides her hand over the paper, making long, firm lines, as opposed to the shorter scritch-scratches she had been making.
Tyler had been serious about his offer to teach her; he doesn't crowd her, but he does correct her posture, and give her as much advice as he knows to give.
Her bridge doesn't improve too much, but, with time, her drawings become a lot more confident.
The thing is, Tyler had been right. Drawing is cathartic. A chance to put down on paper all of the thoughts, all of the memories of her beloved dead which hound her day and night, all of her grief… and the chance to create. The chance to feel the world opening up at her finger tips once again.
She finds that she's not like Tyler. She can't think of something and just put it down on the paper. No matter how hard she closes her eyes and pictures her mother's face, she knows as soon as she draws it that she's gotten it wrong, she doesn't really remember what her mother looked like after all.
So she gives that up.
It's later, when she steps on one of her black drawings and notices the way her shoe prints the paper, that she gets the idea to work back into those.
For days on end, she had funneled all of her darkness into these voids, layering so much charcoal onto them that they became stiff and iridescent with carbon.
Now, she works with her fingers and erasers and an old white t-shirt Tyler gives her to lift away some of that black. To find some form in the darkness.
Tyler comes and goes while she works. She's not sure, isn't really paying attention.
The door swings open sometime late in the afternoon, with Tyler balancing a tray in his hands.
"You left me to my own devices," he warns her as he sets the tray on his desk. "So I present to you: grilled cheese and condensed soup."
"That's heavenly. You're a genius."
He grins at her. "Glad you've caught on. I've been saying that for years."
She goes to wash the soot from her hands, and when she comes back, she finds Tyler studying her work.
"These are really good," he tells her.
"They're not."
"No, seriously—these are real. You sure you want to be a writer? 'Cause you look like an art major to me."
"Here I was, just starting to maybe consider an art history major," she tells him lightly as she settles onto the edge of his desk with her sandwich, "and now you're already trying to get me to switch majors again?"
He shrugs and steals a bite from her sandwich. "I call 'em like I see 'em."
She snatches it back and shoves at him.
They eat in cheerful, companionable silence.
Later, she leans over and touches his arm.
"Seriously though, Tyler. Thank you."
There are a couple of nights when she falls asleep in his room, too tired to trudge up three flights of stairs to her own bed.
Tyler's nice about it, letting her take over his space. Maybe he senses how much she just needs to be around him, needs to feel like this life they're building is real and secure and won't just disappear on her.
The first night she falls asleep in his room is entirely by accident. She'd sat down on the side of his bed, and just shut her eyes for one minute. When she'd opened them, it had been well into evening, and she'd found Tyler restlessly trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in the desk chair.
"Ty?" She whispers his name, like speaking aloud will break something, some nameless weight she feels cloaking the room.
"Yeah?"
"Do you want to come lie down on the bed?"
"I'm okay in the chair."
"It's my fault. I fell asleep by accident. Please?"
He pauses for a moment at the edge of the bed, while she scoots all the way over to the side lined up against the wall. It's a twin mattress, hardly big enough for one grown person, let alone two. The whole lengths of their bodies press together, side by side, when he joins her in the bed.
It makes her feel very safe, to feel him there next to her.
The wind rattles the lone little window, set high near the ceiling.
"Sometimes I think this house is haunted," she murmurs sleepily.
"Why?"
They're so quiet, she's not sure whether they're really saying anything or whether she is dreaming this. She would never admit to any of this in the light of day.
"It's scary, sometimes, being the only human here."
"You know I'll always protect you."
"You're not always around though."
"I have my orders, if things go south."
"What does that mean?"
"There's a safe house I'm supposed to bring you to, as a last resort."
"Where?"
"I don't know. Klaus compelled me only to remember when and if I needed to get you out."
She mulls that over. "So you'd come with me."
"I'd get you out, no matter what. So rest easy, Elena."
In the morning, she's not sure whether she made the whole conversation up in her head.
Eventually, the temperature rises, and they leave their little shut-in for the irresistible lure of the outdoors. It's not quite the same as those first few days of snow; the winds have whipped much of the powder away, and hardened the remaining snow into an icy crust. Tyler has to keep a steadying hand on Elena to keep her from slipping.
"Hey. If we bring the big baking sheet out, I bet it could make a good sled."
"It's metal. You'll freeze your ass off."
"C'mon! Just give me one good push. Please?"
He bites his lip and taps his fingers against his thigh, thinking. "It's too dangerous. What if you crash? Or your ass really does get frostbite? Who's going to explain that to Klaus?"
She grabs his hand and yanks him toward the kitchen. "How could I crash when you'd be there to catch me right away?"
"Elena—"
"And I'm not going to get frostbite, don't be ridiculous."
"Elena—"
"And! I'll push you next. Even though you weigh a ton. What are you, like, solid muscle?"
"Okay! Okay. But I pick the spot, got it?"
Looking particularly harassed, Tyler retrieves the sturdiest baking sheet in the kitchen and marches around from one end of the yard to the other, studying the dip of the earth and experimentally stomping on the ground, presumably evaluating each spot for the potential for icy treachery.
"Are we set?" she asks, bounding up to him. She's long since gotten used to walking on the slick ground cover.
Tyler holds her steady while she positions herself on the impromptu sled. Her fingers, encased in her deep brown leather gloves, wrap around the edges of the baking sheet.
"Hold on tight," Tyler murmurs in her ear.
He takes off like a deer, faster than any human could hope to push her, and when he lets her go, she flies. The sled skates over the ice, whip-snap fast over the gentle undulation of the earth, and she laughs, giddy on how impossibly wild she feels, how unreservedly free.
The sled catches on a rock, or maybe she runs over a root, but the result is the same. She does crash. The impact would have been dreadful. Except, she never falls.
As she had predicted, as she had hoped, as she had known, Tyler is right there to catch her.
"When did we get so old?" Elena asks later, in front of the fire in the second parlor.
One of the main reasons she likes this room so much is how clearly unused it had been when compared with the other parlor. Though she had found the room clean and ready for use when she and Tyler first stumbled into it, it lacks the grandeur of the front parlor, the size, the elegance, and the marvelous views.
She also doesn't think she'll ever associate this room with a severed head rolling across the floor like a bowling ball, or with Matt's blood spraying from his neck like a fountain.
"What? Weren't you just giggling like a toddler in the garden like half an hour ago?"
"Yeah, and I'm exhausted."
"You're only eighteen, Elena. It's the stress, not your age, that's got you tired."
"Do you ever get tired?"
Tyler fiddles with his glass, avoiding her eyes when he answers. "Not since I triggered the curse."
"That feels like so long ago."
"Maybe you're right. Maybe it's actually been a hundred years since then, we just haven't noticed."
"Do you think you and Caroline would still be together if we'd finished the year?" Her head's tipped back against the back of the couch, so she can look at the ceiling while she waits for his answer. Faint shadows cast from the fire writhe against the eggshell expanse.
They've talked about this before. He's always been vague, but optimistic. One day and I've got forever, I'll see them again. It always makes her feel better to talk to Tyler about his future. To remind herself that the people she loves the most really will make it to their happily ever afters, eventually.
"Care was that big, crazy kind of love you never think will happen until it does," he tells her softly.
She turns to look at him. This is the most he's said about her since they left Mystic Falls.
"So yeah," he continues. "I like to think we'd still be together if I was still around."
"You haven't… tried to reach out or anything, have you?"
"And let her get caught up in Klaus's cross-fire? No way."
She turns back to staring at the ceiling. "Sometimes I think about what would happen if I did," she admits. "Reach out, I mean. Get a note to Bonnie somehow. Let Jeremy know I'm okay."
"If they knew you were alive, they'd come for you." It's a warning. Better to keep everyone ignorant, so no one has to die for her.
"They'd come for you too."
"Maybe. But I know I'm not the one who inspires the troops."
"You inspire me." Impulsively she grabs hold of his hand and threads her fingers with his.
"That's just because I'm the only one here."
"Hey. Don't go getting drunk and melancholy on me. It has nothing to do with you being the only one here, and everything to do with it being you here. I've always been able to count on you. Always."
"You never told me about any of the vampire stuff."
"That wasn't deliberate. I didn't tell anyone."
"But you could have told me."
"What can I tell you now, instead?"
He squints one eye closed and studies her. "Tell me… what your first novel would have been about."
"Ouch! As though I'm not still going to write it." It's morbid, but she likes this pretending with him. It's nice, to imagine the future she should have had.
"So far I've seen a lot of doodling in journals and not a lot of actual writing, Gilbert."
"Most authors don't write their first novel until at least their thirties."
"Sounds a lot like excuses to me."
"I wanted to write adventure fiction. Books about exotic places, and mysteries, and long-lost loves."
"And here I thought you were ambitious."
"Ha ha." She resettles herself so she's facing him fully now. "I did have this one draft, hidden under my window seat back home."
"What, you actually wrote a book?"
"I wrote a draft. I hadn't touched it in a while though. Too much other stuff going on."
"So. Pick up where you left off."
"It's not that easy! I don't have any of it with me."
"So re-write it. It could be great. You'll remember the best parts, and anything you don't remember probably isn't worth putting in your debut novel."
It's a foolish idea. Write? She's beyond out of practice, and she's so cut off from the world, she's not sure what she would even write about, and it's not as though she'd ever even be able to get anything published…
All of that tumbles through her head, and yet…
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all
A/N: Thank you so much for everyone who's read, and everyone who's left me a review. Your kind words keep this story going, and really do help me see this behemoth through to the end.
I didn't get through nearly all of the slated Tyler/Elena stuff, but I suppose that is what future chapters are for.
Shout out again to brokenbell for the freaking gorgeous Fairytale Ending moodboards she made me—a fantastically sinister and romantic Rebekah/Stefan board and a just stunning (and chapter appropriate!) Tyler&Elena board.
If you're so inclined, come find me on tumblr at livlepretre for fic updates, previews, moodboards, etc.
On a more serious note, if you have been wondering how to help those impacted by Hurricane Florence, the New York times has a list of charities accepting aid, if you google: Tropical Depression Florence: How to Help