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
Writing again terrifies her.
For a long time, she sits on the floor of her room, a legal pad Tyler had found for her propped against her knees, the ballpoint pen gripped between her fingers hovering over the page. She waits. Takes a deep breath.
Because if she starts to write again, if she makes the first step toward doing this, then it's a sign. It's like she's really saying, This is it. This isn't temporary, this isn't just a fog that's washed over my life which will burn away under the morning sun's rays. This is my life. And I have to start living it.
Elena had never wanted to live this life.
It scares her that she's figuring out how to do it.
The pen's nib floats just over the stark white paper. Once she begins to write, she will be herself again. She will be herself, but here. Fulfilling her heart's deepest desire. Quenching the thirst that abides deep within her soul. Carving out a future on her own terms.
Would she be giving in, giving up, if she does this?
Tyler hadn't seemed to think so.
But then, giving up is not in Tyler Lockwood's nature. He'd been dealt a difficult hand as well, but unlike her, he'd taken an active hand in shaping his future. Found a reason to be here separate and apart from Klaus's agenda—found meaning in his chance to help the others like him, purpose in his role as the hybrids' leader. His prospects of ever escaping Klaus completely are only marginally better than hers. But he had been clear-eyed from the start, determined and not at all shy about letting her know it.
It's a kind of bravery she hadn't noticed as such until now. There are so many things about Tyler that she had somehow never noticed before, may never have noticed at all, save for this unlikely shared circumstances.
Pick up where you left off. Re-write it.
Said with such definitive assurance, such faith that she has the strength to do just that.
Elena takes a deep breath.
Surely, if Tyler can be brave, then she can too.
She starts to write.
Her days become very full.
Words pour out of her, a cresting wave of meaning and longing that hadn't existed within her before this time. It surprises her, catches her off-guard how different she is from the girl who first penned this story. How much more she really has to say, how desperate she is to get the words out, worried that she will forget them, or worse, that her chance to finish this rewrite will pass, and she will leave this world never having written anything at all.
"So, I get to read this when it's done, right?" Tyler asks her as he hands her a new writing pad, the third he's supplied her.
The thought makes Elena blush. "Maybe."
"'Cause I could always just dig it out from your hidey-hole under your bed."
She smacks him in the arm with the writing pad. "Not funny."
"Relax. You know I wouldn't really."
Elena bites her cheek and considers. "If I let you read some, would you give me your honest feedback?"
"On my honor." He pauses. "But you'll crit my artwork, too, right?"
She lets out a surprised huff of laughter. "You think I'll have any idea what I'm talking about?"
"You're Elena Gilbert. You always know what you're talking about."
When she's not holed up in her room writing, she spends her time with Tyler—still the center of her universe, the best parts of her day. The very fact that she feels she can leave him for a few hours to work on something for herself speaks to how easy she has become with him, how limitless she feels in this strange space that's opened up between them.
They play together in the snow, which waxes and wanes, becoming slippery and icy before fresh flurries drift down like powdered sugar from the sky.
Even after over a month of cooking together, neither of them are particularly talented in the kitchen. But it's an adventure, on a scale small enough to tuck into her heart, and she's diving headlong into it with her best friend at her side.
Writing again doesn't mean that she gives up drawing, either. If anything, finding the courage to reclaim her passion (her dream), to pour her words out on the page, urges her to churn away even more furiously at her artwork. To channel the darkness out, so she that when she writes, it is with nothing but light.
It doesn't take long for her needs to outgrow Tyler's tiny basement room. Piles of black charcoal powder, the remnant of her experiments, litter the floor, and when she breathes in there, it's like breathing through a fine, glimmering obsidian mist. She doesn't mind it, but Tyler starts to fuss over her, insisting she needs more fresh air, and she does feel a little bit bad about it all, come to that. It's clear she needs to bring her work elsewhere.
"I've wrecked your room," she says.
Tyler shrugs. "I've seen worse. You should see how I left my room back in Virginia."
"Would you mind if I brought the easel and everything upstairs? I think we need more space."
"You want to screw that parlor up?" He doesn't say the rest, but she hears it anyway—Don't you think Klaus and Rebekah will mind?
Elena purses her lips. "With all the bloodshed that happens on a daily basis here, I don't see how they can complain."
So she helps him straighten his room, and then they drag the easel, her boxes of charcoal, and erasers, and drawing boards, and papers upstairs, into the second parlor they had been enjoying so very much.
When she had first dragged Tyler in here, the furniture had all been covered in white dust-cloths, the drapes drawn tight against the sun. It reminds her of how this house had looked when she first arrived, everything covered up like Klaus and his sister had not been here for a very long time. Many of the rooms have since been aired out and newly redecorated, but this one had yet to be repurposed.
Hoisting open the drapes, Elena had been able to see why. The views, usually so spectacular in any of the other rooms, were decidedly subpar. A corner of the garden mostly obscured by box hedges, and an unobstructed view of one of the kitchen walls. The very opposite of a dramatic vista. No wonder neither Klaus nor Rebekah had favored it.
At first, she sets up in just one corner of the room, by the floor to ceiling windows that provide such poor views, mindful of the natural light they nonetheless let in. Yet by the end of the first week, her drawings have spread out, onto the rest of the floor, taped up to the walls.
Tyler only laughs at her, his own drawings confined to a thick drawing pad he works in from the sofa, steadfast and constant as they work to together to keep their loneliness at bay.
"Careful, or you'll set the house on fire," Tyler warns her when she carelessly crumples up and tosses a frankly embarrassing attempt at a portrait of him too close to the crackling fire.
She sticks her tongue out at him. "It'll serve Klaus right for keeping me cooped up in here."
He studies her for a long time. "Don't make the mistake of thinking this is as bad as things can be," he finally tells her.
How could this be as bad as things could be? How, when every day, every moment, finally feels right? Feels like her own?
Critiquing each other's work is hard-going, at first. Neither of them really know how to go about it, how to ask their questions or frame their answers in productive ways.
Predictably, then, Tyler pulls out the bourbon, and the thing is, it does help.
After a while they settle over on Tyler's bed, Elena leaning against the headboard with her feet in Tyler's lap. Idly, Tyler traces his finger over her ankle bone. She kicks him, playfully, when it tickles too much.
It doesn't take long for the topic to stray, for the talk to turn hypothetical. Questions like, "Where would you go, if you could go anywhere in the world?" or "If you got a tattoo, what would it be?" Things that don't matter, but that really do. It's their favorite line to walk.
And then Tyler asks her, "If you could bring back just one person who's died, who would it be?"
Instantly, her mind flashes to Jenna.
"My mom," she lies. "I really miss my mom." She forges ahead, afraid of why she would bring Jenna back, disgusted with the part of herself that knows why. "What about you? Would you bring your dad back?"
"No." He leans across her body, to reach for the bottle on the floor. His chest presses into her shoulders while his fingers fumble for the bottle's neck. He rolls away from her and twists the bottle between his palms, eyes riveting to the swirling dark amber liquid within.
She doesn't think he's going to answer her, and that's fine. Except, he does.
"Sarah," he confesses. "It'd be Sarah."
She's not sure what to say to that. Elena does the only thing she can. She holds his hand.
By some unspoken agreement between the two of them, the library remains Elena's space and hers alone. There's something dangerous, about the idea of bringing Tyler into this place, this sanctuary Klaus has gifted her. Her instincts whisper that that ancient beast would take another's uninvited presence here as a trespass, and a grave one at that.
Despite this, she is not jealous with her access to the trove of beauties housed within. Whenever she finds something she thinks Tyler would enjoy, a wispy silk scroll, delicately painted, or an intaglio print, she faithfully brings it to him.
She wishes she could take the world to Tyler Lockwood. She would lay it at his feet, if she could.
He has already given her so much. The world and everything in it doesn't seem like all that much by comparison.
When they come inside after a long, blustery morning spent romping through the grounds, Tyler helps her with her coat. He unwraps her long, soft blue scarf from around her throat, and brushes a droplet of melting snow from her cheek.
What Tyler does not know about are the nights after he has bid her goodnight outside her second floor bedroom and has returned to the basement, when she slips out to the library. Were this not a necessity, she would probably sleep in his room every night. But it is a necessity. An absolute one.
It's not that she doesn't trust Tyler; it's that for some things, she cannot trust Tyler. Not while Klaus holds such sway over him.
For that reason, she is very, very quiet as she prowls through the room, marking out which books Klaus had pulled out for his research before he left. He hadn't taken any with him. She knows, because she had counted the number of volumes that horrid afternoon spent curled up at the foot of the sofa while Stefan and Klaus discussed strategy.
She handles each of these books with extra care, mindful that some may be dangerous objects in and of themselves.
Several make her fingers tingle when she touches them. One actually shocks her, and her whole hand goes numb. Her pulse hammers in her ears while she huddles on the couch and waits for the feeling in her hand to return. She takes slow, even breaths and wills herself to relax, to wait. After nearly three minutes, she is able to curl her fingers normally.
She makes an effort to be more careful afterwards.
By the light of a single lamp, Elena methodically works her way through the books which had demonstrated no tactile response to her touch. She turns through each page achingly slowly, deciphering what she can and jotting notes down onto the pages ripped with painstaking precision from the back of her writing pads.
For the books that did respond to her touch…
She grits her teeth while handling the ones that merely make the blood in her hands feel fizzy and sharp.
As for the more serious volumes, some improvisation is in order. It takes a few days before she finds a letter opener in a side table drawer with a slim enough blade that she can flick through the pages, thin and delicate as onion skin. She wears her leather gloves as an extra precaution, and doesn't dare to even breathe too deeply as she makes her study.
Part of her thinks these lengths to obtain information that probably won't end up mattering to her are stupid, that she would be better off getting more sleep.
That's the Elena Gilbert she knows she has to bury.
She's been shoveling dirt over her grave for more than a year already.
The late afternoon sun streams down in sheets of yellow and gold as Klaus slowly leads her through the mouth of the Richard Serra sculpture, and then down into a shadowed, muddy lane that passes between its walls. The piece is massive, a tunnel with only a crack of light at the top, that demands its visitors walk through the abyss before reemerging on the other side, some sixty feet away.
"It's hardly the best example," he murmurs in her ear. "Were I to take you to the Dia, you'd feel the very weight of the steel walls pressing in on you as you wound your way through the labyrinth to the center. You'd see the shadow of the Minotaur lingering on the edge, just out of sight, and hear your heart reverberate 'gainst the walls."
Elena glances down the shadowy path ahead of her, and back, to the dark path she's already walked with Klaus beside her.
They have stopped right in the middle. Elena doesn't know how to move forward, or how to return.
He had been so beautiful, before, with the sun in his hair and a rare light in his eyes. Marvel, that was it. That was what had been in his eyes. The way he marveled at those paintings had animated him in a way that transformed him completely. The effect had devastated her.
All of that is gone now, leeched out by the faint blue light dancing off the sculpture walls and by the hunger with which he fixates upon her.
Tentatively, she reaches out to touch the tips of her fingers to his jaw. Only a veil of flesh separates her from those teeth which had torn into her with such delicate, possessive reverence last spring. Only a veil of illusion exists between this man and that monster.
Almost as though he cannot help himself, Klaus turns his face into her palm. He does not take his eyes off of her.
"Maybe you should stop lingering, then," she tells him. Dares him. She may have merely thought the words, they are so soft. She cannot be certain. Her voice is barely more than a whisper, a sigh.
He hears her. He always hears her. Sees her, looks upon her, notices her above all others.
"You're afraid of what will happen when I catch you."
"You're afraid that you can't catch me at all."
The words don't sit well with him.
All too fast, he has her pressed up against the side of the sculpture. The metal groans, and she knows there will be rust stains on her pretty winter dress when this is over.
"You're already caught," Klaus tells her. There's enough arrogance in the statement to fool the world.
"Am I? Just because you hold my body captive, that's enough to sate you?"
He snarls, then, and leans in close, aligning the edges of his too-sharp teeth against the scar he'd left her. "You're mine."
She shivers in his grasp. "I am my own."
His right hand trails up over her hip, her ribs, her breast and collarbone, and settles against the pulse point on the left side of her neck. "Are you?" He strokes his fingers against the side of her throat and growls into her skin, his breath hot against her ear, "It's a good thing for them both that my sister and Stefan bite to the right. I should be incensed if anyone were to bite over this mark." It's his only warning before he sinks his teeth into her throat, exactly where he had touched her before.
Liquid fire arcs through her, and she clutches onto his shoulders and drags him closer as he shifts the angle of his bite and laves at the wound. Klaus uses his teeth and tongue to lay savage claim to her, and after all these months of fighting a battle she knows is already lost, surrendering to him feels like anything but defeat. Caught in his furious embrace, Elena feels like victory incarnate, a queen, a huntress, who has caught her prey with the dark lure of her siren's blood. Washed him under with her power, the power she has over him,the echo that makes her blood sing and her body throb and burn wherever he touches her.
It's the heavy, pulsing feeling that awakens her, the overly familiar physiological symptoms of waking up from a Klaus-fueled sex dream. Except, Elena thinks as she rolls over and glares at her ceiling, Klaus isn't here to plant these visions in her head.
The dream itself unsettles her. There hadn't been a Richard Serra sculpture that day in New Orleans at the sculpture garden. She'd only ever seen a photograph in one of the library's books. Had Klaus mentioned the artist to her that sun-drenched afternoon? She cannot recall. She'd hardly been listening to him that day, so caught up in her own inner turmoil.
Could Klaus be sending her dreams all the way from across the country? Damon had always had to be in the room with someone, but who knows how powerful an Original vampire really is?
He had promised to stop.
She'd be a fool to expect him to keep his word.
This suspicion should frighten her, or make her feel sick, or something, but instead, all it really does is just annoy and perturb her, which irritates her to no end. There's something unnatural about her response, but she cannot say what.
With that disconcerting train of thought in mind, Elena pads down to the kitchen for a glass of water. Anything to distract herself from the temptation to burrow under her blankets and to let her mind wander over where that dream was headed while her hands wandered in other ways.
Absently she rubs at the scar Klaus had left her last spring, before hastily stuffing her hands under her armpits.
The kitchen isn't empty when she arrives. The moon casts cool white pools of white against the floor tiles, suffusing the room in a pale milky glow. Tyler leans against the counter, blood bag raised halfway to his chin.
Elena pauses in the doorway. "I've never seen you drink blood before," she says.
Tyler swallows, hard. "I hadn't wanted you to."
"Why?"
"Because I know what this is like for you. I didn't want you to see me as one of them."
She sits down at the table. "Drinking blood doesn't make you one of them."
"It doesn't make me like you, either, though."
"You're exactly like me in all the ways that matter. Here," she says, placing her hand over her heart. "In here, we're the same."
An emotion that will be sure to embarrass him later sweeps over his face, so Elena saves him from it, and gestures at the blood bag forgotten in his hand. "Drink up, I don't want you wilting on me."
"As if, Gilbert."
"Have you ever seen a desiccated vampire? It's gross."
He finishes the blood bag, and she makes them both coffee, and she forgets about the dream, and about everything else.
Later, she follows him back to his room, and they fall asleep arguing about Inception.
The house is big and empty and silent.
For the first time in months, no one watches her.
She can go wherever she wishes, whenever she wishes.
The only sound to disturb the quiet is the ringing peel of Elena's laughter.
It is perfect.
A/N: Okay, first thing's first, thanks for reading. Y'all are the best and you keep me writing.
Second, and the much more exciting announcement: This is actually only the first half of what I have written. You're going to get another, longer update this weekend. That's right. And the next chapter is a bombshell. Send me luck while I polish out the final details!