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

She finds a copy of The English Patient stuck between the couch cushions in one of the upstairs lounges. It had prodded into her hipbone while she tried to write. When she thrusts her hands between the cushions and pulls it free, the modernity of the paperback binding on the novel immediately strikes her as out of place. She thumbs through the pages, finds a copyright date of 1992. Almost all of the books in the library are much older. She gets the impression that everything in this house is much older, the furniture and décor from some fuzzy time when parlors and settees and cigars and brandies after dinner were in vogue. Elena strokes the smooth cover, turns the book over in her hands. It's nothing at all like the beautiful tomes Klaus collects, the well-worn first editions and leather spines with crisp gold leaf lettering.

Some insight, curled tight within her bones, whispers that this is Stefan's book. She almost returns it to the cushions, except—

The name Caravaggio catches her eye from the back summary. She has spent too much time with Tyler not to have her interest piqued.

"Are you ever going to put that book down?" Tyler asks her from where he stands at her bedside—his bedside, really. She'd followed him into bed without really thinking about it the night before.

"Don't count on it. I'll let you borrow it when I'm done, if you ask nicely."

"Push over." Tyler settles in next to her and loops an arm around her shoulder, making a show of peering down at the page. "You didn't tell me this was racy."

"It's not. It's romantic."

To her surprise, he doesn't say anything else for several minutes as she slowly turns through the pages. When did Tyler become content to sit so still, to let her inhabit his spaces and live so easily by his side?

Tyler's phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls away from her and sits on the edge of the bed, his back to her, while he responds to the text.

Elena tries not to ask, but the curiosity is too great. Months with almost no contact with the outside world, save those three, strange weeks, and here's Tyler, with a cell phone. She sits up and picks at a loose thread on her jeans. "Who's texting you?"

He could have called home any time, or let her.

"Klaus."

Elena starts. "Klaus?" She's not sure why it's such a surprise. Who else would he text?

"I'm supposed to check in with him daily. I forgot to check in earlier."

"You've been texting him every day?"

"Yeah, but it's no big deal. I just tell him you're fine and that's that."

Elena huffs and throws herself back against the pillows. "Of course. Of course I can't get away from him, even when he's probably on the other side of the continent."

"It's fine. Really."

The phone buzzes again.

"Is he mad?" she asks.

Tyler pauses. "No." He's hardly the world's most talented liar. That thread of honesty that runs so deeply within him is going to land him in trouble one of these days.

"Okay, we just have to make sure you don't miss the window again. Why'd you forget this morning?"

"I was distracted."

"By what?"

He doesn't respond.

She's in the library reading. Like on many nights, lately, she'd come in here after finding it too hard to sleep, having simply thrown a pullover sweater over her pajamas. The fireplace is cold, a layer of ashes covering the floor.

Her eyes retrace the same words again and again, without deriving any meaning.

She senses him before she sees him. That niggling awareness of him that she has developed is something she would rather not linger on. The golden thread.

When he sits down next to her and throws his arm over the back of the sofa, she finds herself too transfixed by him to protest his closeness.

"What game are you playing?" she asks him.

"You know, you're different than I anticipated."

She swallows. His eyes dart down, following the bob of her throat. Slowly, he reaches out and touches his hand to her knee. A phantom ache blooms higher, near the apex of her inner thigh.

"How?" she asks. Her voice sounds weak, even to her own ears.

"I never thought you would truly come to care for me." He draws the tip of his finger over her thigh as he speaks, the barest pressure against her skin, so light she could be imagining it.

"I don't."

"Don't you? You've seen the darkest, inmost parts of me, and you haven't turned away. And I have seen you."

His words unlock something inside of her. Some part that knows he is wrong, but yearns for him to be right—

He must see the way his words affect her—

"I find I am very interested in you, Elena." He is very close, so close she can see each golden lash distinctly, no matter the dark. His thumb brushes against the inside of her thigh. She cannot break away from that blue gaze. "Elena," he murmurs again. Her name, on his lips, lips she has kissed, lips that have devoured her. Honest lips, liar's lips—

There are a thousand warning bells ringing in her mind. A thousand reasons to say no, you don't understand—

She ignores them all. Compelled by that strange current between them. That irresistible pull toward destiny.

She touches his face, or he sinks his fingers into her hair, or something happens, something she misses because she is too caught up, too sucked under by the feeling that this isn't right, this isn't how this happened—

Whatever she'd been thinking, his mouth on hers wipes it clean out of her head. And then it's all lips, and teeth, and tongues, pressing, pulling, dancing against each other. She's in his lap, she realizes foggily, and those are her legs wrapped around his waist, and those are his hands still pressed to the inside of her thighs.

She breaks the kiss to tear her sweater off over her head. As soon as the sweater is gone, he pulls her down under again, to the frantic tide of his kisses and his touch and the feeling of his heart pounding against her own.

This time, when she wakes up, she finds, to some little horror, that she's not alone in her bedroom. No, she'd followed Tyler back to his room and now here she is, her body molded against his, her fingers curled in the front of his shirt and an uncomfortable urge to press herself against him, to do anything to get some friction, near overpowering her. She fidgets, just a little, and hears his sharp intake of breath. Oh God, he's awake—Her eyes flick up to meet his in the darkness. He looks completely mystified as he stares down at her, mouth parted, like he wants to say something, were it not for the suffocating weight of the air bearing down on them both.

She's never thought—

Tyler tenses beside her. "Car coming up the drive."

He's up and out of the bed, across the room, in less than a heartbeat. Prowls out into the hall and then wheels back and grabs her arm, dragging her out of the room and up the stairs. He checks his cell phone while he hauls her up the back flight of stairs.

"Tyler, you're freaking me out."

"It's probably nothing."

"Tyler—"

"But if it's a problem, I'll get you out. Just wait in your room." He pushes her in but doesn't shut the door. She watches him as he ducks into one of the rooms across the hall that overlooks the front drive. Even she can hear the sound of a car door slamming from where she waits in the doorway, hands balled into fists.

"It's Klaus," he reports from the window.

Her stomach drops. "Are Stefan and Rebekah with him?"

"No…" Tyler marches back to her and seizes her by the shoulders. Drags her close and takes a sharp, deep inhale through his nose—almost like he's—"Fuck, you smell—" He drops his hold on her and runs a shaking hand through his hair. He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't have to.

She smells like Tyler, because she's been sleeping in his bed, and she smells like want, sticky and pulsing and insistent, because she has had that dream about Klaus again, and because her body is, as always, a traitor.

"I'll take a shower."

"He's on the front steps."

"Go."

Elena shoves him from the room and doesn't dare to close the door, lest Klaus hear it and suspect Tyler has been in her room.

A moment later, she hears his voice, too soft for her to make out the conversation, but clear enough to send a shiver all through her. He's already talking to Tyler.

(Does Tyler smell like her? Would Klaus notice?)

(She can't worry about that. Not now.)

She has to make this good. She throws back the covers and rumples the sheets, as though she's just gotten out of bed. The bed will be cold, but she's counting on him not noticing. Not letting herself think too much about this, she dips two fingers between her legs and smears them on the sheet. Let him think she'd woken up all hot and bothered again, let him fill in why she'd get up to take a shower in the middle of the night.

She sprints for the bathroom, stripping as she goes, and slams on the cold tap, lathering and rinsing her whole body, scrubbing at her arms, her breasts, her hair, under her nails. She doesn't touch between her legs. Better to distract him.

Outside, in her bedroom, she can hear the door creak. Can sense the familiar presence, lingering in the doorway.

He's still waiting when she flounces out of the shower a moment later, wrapped from collarbone to knee in a scarlet towel. She freezes when she sees him, and she doesn't have to fake the way her heart stutters and speeds in her chest. Water slithers from her hair down her bare skin, little rivulets streaming down her bare calves to puddle on the floor.

Moonlight streams in through the cracks in the blinds, casting his face and body in shadow and silver light. A glimmer of a memory, or maybe a dream, reminds her of what those broad, powerful shoulders feel like under her fingers. The feel of that bare skin, blazing under her touch.

"You're back," she croaks. Good, good, her voice does a good job of selling the just woke up! pitch.

He turns his attention from her overturned bedlinens over to her, and inhales deeply.

She smothers the part of her that wants to respond to him. Focuses.

This is it. Say her piece, sell the half-lie, and get it over with.

But when he looks at her—eyes traveling ever so slowly from the crown of her head framed by hair dark and damp like seaweed, and down, lingering on her face, her scarred mouth and chin, her bare shoulders dappled with water droplets, and then further, over the curve of her breasts and hips, her pale legs and wet feet, before trailing back up, finally meeting her eyes— it's as though he actually trails his fingers over her, so intense is his regard. Those eyes, dark and unfathomable, keep her pinned as surely as his hands ever could.

"You look well," he says.

"It's the middle of the night. Why are you in my room?"

"I wanted to check in on you. I had to see you with my own eyes."

His voice, low, rough, intent, seeps into her. Unconsciously, she rubs her thighs together.

Something shifts in his face. He takes a step toward her. Instinct unlocks her frozen limbs, propels her backward into her dresser. The drawers rattle when she knocks into it.

She swallows thickly. She tries to speak, but her first attempt to form words dies in her throat.

Klaus considers her, and takes another step, slower this time, in her direction. Nothing about the deliberate movement makes him read as any less predatory.

Stupid, stupid, to deliver herself up like this, to make herself so vulnerable, just to distract him from Tyler. Too late now.

Gathering herself, Elena rolls back her shoulders. "You promised to stay out of my dreams."

Klaus pauses. A slow, satisfied smile stretches across that mouth which she has fixated upon so restlessly. "I did."

"Is it an Original thing? Long distance psychological manipulation?"

"I'm flattered to learn you regard me so highly." He shifts his weight just a little, like he wants very much so to come closer, but knows she would lash out at him if he did.

She narrows her eyes at him. "I'm serious, Klaus. I want the dreams to stop."

He takes another step toward her, as though he cannot help himself. "Why? Are they unpleasant?"

She glares at him. "I'll never trust you if they don't. Not completely."

This threat stops him dead.

Oh, how she has hit her mark.

"This isn't a game," he tells her.

"I thought everything's a game after a thousand years."

Klaus finally makes that move she's been dreading. He surges up into her personal space and grasps her face by the chin, forcing her to meet his eyes. "I haven't been in that darling head of yours since I vowed to stay out of it. Whatever it is you're dreaming up, you're doing it under your own power." He trails his fingers down the side of her face, over her neck and shoulder.

No no no no no—

"You are not a game to me," he whispers.

Something inside of her cracks.

"I don't believe you."

"How should I prove it to you?"

"Klaus…"

He drops to his knees before her. "Would you prefer I submit my professions from bended knee?" He traces a finger over her bare calf. "Shall I swear my oath anew? Seal it for iron truth with blood this time, perhaps? My lady, say but the word—"

She plucks at his shoulders. "Klaus, get up."

He stares up at her. "Name it, and I will do it."

Ice churns in her stomach. "You say I'm not a game, but you're toying with me now."

She doesn't listen to his protest.

It's not fair. It's not fair that she'd set all this up to play him, that she had played him, and this had still gotten turned around on her. All of this is Klaus's fault. It's not fair that that is what he does, turning everything sideways until she's not sure of which direction to leap. Even if she is dreaming of Klaus all by herself—even if he's just had to destroy yet another illusion—she would never have entertained these fantasies about him without his interference. And yet…

She hates him, because she wants so much to be able to believe him.

Worse than that. If she doesn't convince him to go now, she may do something stupid. Something stupid, like letting her towel drop, or draping a leg over Klaus's shoulder, just to see what he'll do. Oh, she knows what he'll do. It all flashes through her mind's eye before she can help herself. Tempting beyond belief. She's got to get rid of him now.

Elena hitches her towel more securely under her breasts and looks away from him, toward the window.

"It's late, and I want to get dressed," she tells him finally. "Please, just… leave me alone."

Klaus rises in one fluid movement. Whatever had been open in his face closes over with her dismissal. The familiar, easy leer suits him so well, and yet it still stings her to see it. "I do believe I once offered to help you, should you ever need the assistance."

"I don't."

"Your loss, sweetheart." He shuts the door behind himself, and she sags against her dresser, her legs too weak to hold her.

It's not like she can sleep after that.

With the house so empty, she will not dare seek Tyler out.

It's the first time in what feels like ages she hasn't been able to go to him.

An hour before dawn finds Elena downstairs with her drawings. Charcoal coats her fingers, dots her wrists and face from when she had tugged her hair into a messy bun and then tried to tuck stray tendrils away from her face. There's a mug of cold black coffee from the day before sitting on the mantle, and every now and then she takes a sip before diving back into her work. It's a good distraction. A safer way to shut her thoughts out than writing or reading, less room for thought, the work more preoccupying for restless arms and shoulders and thighs that itch to move.

Tyler comes in with a breakfast tray, at some point. Eggs and toast—she had taught him how to scramble, fry, and poach with the best of them, these past few weeks. They share a long look between them. Tyler nods, once.

Slowly, Elena takes the tray from him and sets it on the table. She gives him a searching look, raises her eyebrows.

He shakes his head, points upstairs. Squeezes her wrist before he vanishes from the room.

The front door slams shut a moment later, the sound of it very final.

Elena picks at her breakfast, trying not to think about wherever it is Tyler must have gone off to, and studies her latest project.

The composition is an abstract mess, a frustrating attempt to breathe form into an idea that had been absolutely vivid and intrinsic as Davina's magic coursed through her and coaxed some latent spark of power in her blood to the surface. Something about the moon and sun, a sea, or maybe a flame, that was a mirror, reflecting it all back on her like an infinite star. Even thinking about it makes the impression of that insight flicker and fade, harder to grasp the more tightly she tries to hold it.

"This is new."

Elena turns to find Klaus taking in the mess she's made from the other side of the room.

"It's not what it looks like," she tells him too quickly as she scrambles to block him from looking at any of her work. "I was just bored."

Klaus raises his eyebrow, and saunters over. She tries to get in front of him, but he sidesteps her with ease and ducks down to flick through the finished pieces on the floor. If she expected him to make mention of the night before, then she is sorely disappointed.

It's a relief.

"This looks like more than filling an idle moment," he observes. "I didn't realize you had an interest in fine art."

She ducks down next to him and tries to snatch her drawings from him without tearing them. "What did you expect me to do, cooped up here day in and day out? I needed something."

"I kidnapped you and made sure that no one who loves you will ever see you again. I never said you couldn't have a hobby. Or a raison d'être, for that matter." He stands up and looks at her current work in progress. Tilts his head. "Have you tried any of the other media?"

"I've only been drawing a couple of weeks—I haven't thought too much about it." Everything about this conversation flusters her an undue amount. Somehow, it may actually be worse than their encounter last night.

"You have an affinity for light. It would carry over well into oils." He turns to face her. "I could teach you to paint, if you'd like." Everything about the offer is overly casual.

Elena stares at him. Making art has been a refuge from him, from every which way he's flipped her world upside down. There's a visceral part of her that doesn't want to involve him. That knows that doing so will destroy the emotional haven it has become. With anyone reasonable, she could explain that this is really something she doesn't want to share. But this is Klaus, and his offer puts her at a loss as to how to turn him down without inspiring a reaction. "Doesn't that take years to learn properly?" she finally asks him.

"We have the time."

"Now?" she asks, stalling. "Is everything in New Orleans over with? Are the witches…?"

"Dead? No, not as yet."

"Oh. Then why are you back?"

"After assessing the situation, it seemed wise to increase my armies before engaging the Coven and their allies. I'm heading north, to acquire some new hybrids." How easily he explains all of this to her. She doubts he would have bothered before New Orleans.

"And you needed more blood?" she guesses. Hopes.

Klaus watches her. "No," he tells her at length. "No, I just wanted to see you. I'm here merely for the day before I return to the business of securing my crown."

Off put, Elena goes to sit on the sofa, so she can put some space between them. "Are the others still in New Orleans, then?"

"Hm. I left my sister in charge. She still prefers to avoid this war, so I may be reasonably certain that all will be as I left it when I return, if Marcellus does nothing to provoke the magical element. His distaste for them is honest enough, it seems."

"So that's it," she says. "You're going to recruit some more hybrids and then you're going to retake the city." She traces a circle in the arm of the leather sofa. "Did you figure out how to unbind the loup-garous from the curse?"

Klaus waves his hand dismissively. "The witch wishes to delay until a meteor shower later in the spring, but I don't care to wait that long." He resumes carding through her drawings.

It's not exactly an answer to her question.

"You've met the witch, then?"

"I have."

"What was she like?"

He holds an image of a circle engulfed with flame up to the light. "Why so interested?"

Elena shrugs. "We've got something significant in common, don't we? Teen sacrifices, and all?"

"I assure you, there the similarities end."

"What does that mean?"

"Davina Claire is a lovely girl, and she has Marcellus wrapped tighter around her finger than either of them would like me to realize." He puts her work down and wipes his fingers off on his shirt, leaving stripes of pigment behind. She wonders how many of his shirts have been stained thus. "I wouldn't mind taking her from him, mind."

This causes Elena to sit up a little straighter. "What, here, with us?"

Klaus smirks from over by the fireplace, where he kicks at the pile of cold ashes. "Jealous?"

"As if!"

"No, she'd take the whole building down, probably make all the hybrids' heads explode, literally, if I tried to contain her here. She'd make a useful contact though, for my purposes."

"She's already your contact. You don't need to do anything."

"Ta. But wouldn't it be interesting?"

"You mean, wouldn't it be a fun game to play? That's the problem with you. You treat people like they're just…"

He peers into her empty mug, glances at the crumbs on her breakfast tray, cast off onto one of the end tables, before sauntering over to come sit next to her. "Chess pieces? Wax figures? The analogy is apt enough, to be sure, though a bit cliché. But we've been through this already." He throws an arm over the back of the couch while he speaks, so she must either accept his touch, albeit through layers of winter fabric, or retreat from him.

Elena holds her ground. "So you're here for the day, and then you'll be gone again until this is… resolved. And then you'll come back."

"Never fear. I shan't forget about you."

"How could you? I've been on your mind for centuries."

"You really do look well," he tells her later, as he walks her around the garden. They step over the remains of a snow angel, over a track left from a sledding mishap.

"Low pressure without your sister or any witches around to stress me out. Tyler ordered whatever I wanted from the grocer. Lots of books to read. It was nice."

"And the company?'

She shrugs. "Tyler's friendly enough. Not really a gifted conversationalist, or very well read or anything… But it was fine."

"I thought the two of you were childhood friends."

"Sure," she tells him carefully. "But it's not like we ever hung out much one-on-one. We hadn't spoken in months before he triggered his curse last spring."

"And yet you begged me to leave him here as your caretaker."

"Yeah. Who else could I have requested? Some random hybrid? The fact that you're always complaining about their ineptitude does not inspire confidence."

"Touché."

"Where is Tyler, by the way?"

"Why, miss him already?"

"How could I? You're taking up all of my attention." She holds out her gloved hands and lets him lift her over an icy patch. "He'll be back before you leave though, right?"

"Miss him that much?"

"This house gives me the creeps when it's empty. I'd rather not be left totally alone here."

"I gave him the day off. I'll give him a call when it's time to return."

"Such a magnanimous boss! I can't believe the Crescent Pack aren't chomping at the bit to work for you." She means to tease him, to distract him, but the words come out sharp and true instead.

"I'm not a boss."

"Sorry, right. Because you're a king?"

"You're the only one who would dare laugh at that."

"I'm sure Rebekah would."

"She doesn't. She understands what it means to be a part of this family."

"And what does it mean?"

He leads her inside, and helps her with her coat. "We all have our roles to play."

Welcome to the family

and

We all have our roles to play.

Klaus is the king, Rebekah is a princess, and Stefan is their courtier.

She wonders what role it is Klaus imagines for her.

(In her heart, she knows her true role already.)

He watches her while she skins and slices an apple, then an orange, and a plum. She perches on the kitchen counter while she eats, idly swinging her legs and kicking her heels against the kitchen counter. Juice runs down her chin between bites, and she swipes at it with the back of her wrists. He watches her the entire time.

Klaus lights a fire for her that night in the library.

"You like fires, don't you?" he asks her as he sets it.

She doesn't answer him, unwilling as she is to tell him anything concrete about herself beyond what he has wrested from her already.

He's been absent all afternoon, only joining her now, hours after sunset.

His attitude puts her ill at ease. It's the calm that belies the storm. And Klaus is a storm made flesh.

He watches her from the armchair across the coffee table while she reads, and she watches him while he thumbs through different books, none of them keeping his interest for very long. He refills his glass from the sideboard behind the sofa twice.

The fire dies down in the grate. A log breaks under the weight of its ash, shooting yellow-white sparks dancing into the air and setting the ruby embers deep within the fire's remnants to glowing.

"I've never seen you light one," he continues, as though hours haven't passed. "Not too keen at it?"

"Lighting fires? Sure I am. We had a house on the lake when I was growing up. I loved setting them."

"Hmm. So it's you, and not my hybrid, who's been laying cozy blazes downstairs?"

"I just told you. I like fires." She turns back to her book.

"Was it he, or you, then, who first suggested the romantic ambiance?"

She snaps her book shut. "If I ever found fires romantic, I certainly don't anymore. Not after what you did to me last April."

This draws a smile, however small, out of him. "I'm pleased to have left a lasting impression."

"I wish you hadn't. I don't like thinking about you."

Klaus crosses the room and braces his hands over the top of the sofa, to either side of her face. "You're lying to me."

"I'm not."

He gazes at her from beneath hooded eyes. "And yet you think of me often. Why else dream of me?"

She meets him stare for stare, doesn't back down an inch from him. "I don't get you."

"Don't you?"

"Why do you care? What is it you want?" The mystification in her voice is real.

He tenses, ever so slightly. His eyes rove her face. Looking for something.

"Elena." He breathes her name, leans forward to bury his face in her hair and breathes her in.

She can feel the scratch of his stubble against her cheek. Her heart pounds against her breast, and knowing that he can hear it too makes it fly all the faster.

Klaus twists a finger in her hair and gently tugs, urging her to turn her face to him. He's staring at her mouth, and the angle of his face makes his eyelashes look a mile long. Their breaths mingle. He leans forward, and for a second, so does she.

Elena pushes him away with both hands, accidentally striking him in the jaw, and ducks under his arm, off the couch. She's on the other side of the room in a heartbeat.

"What was that?" she demands.

He rubs absently at his jaw as he turns to face her. "I should think it was rather obvious."

"No. It was the opposite of obvious. You and I don't do—" She gestures wildly in his direction, "—that."

"We could. I wouldn't be adverse."

"But I would be!"

He sighs, as though he is very tired of this conversation, and stands up. "But wherefore? What is your purpose in denying me? You're hardly opposed, if recent indications are to be believed."

"We've been over this. I'm not… interested."

His jaw clenches, and he smiles—a dangerous smile. One she's seen before.

"Oh, of course. Tell me, dearheart, is it because I lack that indefinable element that makes you fall into a man's bed?"

"You're not a man."

"Neither is Stefan. And yet, you profess to love him with no ill effect to your conscience."

She does her best to draw his attention away from Stefan. "You're not serious about me. You're just—" She makes a vague gesture in his direction. "Doing whatever it is you do. I don't want to be used like that. I can't—I can't let you use me like that."

"I swore to you last night this wasn't a game to me. That you are not a game to me."

"I don't believe you."

Klaus prowls toward her. "But why not? I've never lied to you before."

Hasn't he? She thinks of I won't harm a hair on his head and the sick, swimming feeling that had nearly sucked her under when he revealed his plans for her to continue the doppelganger line. That moment, kneeling in the dirt inside a ring of fire, when she had finally understood that going to her death willingly would do nothing to save her family. He had never lied to her, and yet, each betrayal had sliced her open. She doesn't think she could take another.

She looks away from him. "I don't understand why we're even still talking about this."

"Is it my total honesty you desire? Would you leave me so exposed?"

"I'm going to bed." She tries to dart past him.

He blocks her way. "Perhaps I find you interesting."

"Beyond my face and my blood? You can't possibly. You hardly know me."

"Then let me get to know you."

She glances up at him, ready to snap something dismissive, but the vulnerability in his face disarms her.

His words sink into her. Fill her with a kind of mist. She finds the other sofa and sinks into the leather cushions without feeling her body.

He kneels at her feet and looks up into her face. "Elena. Let me get to know you," he coaxes. Her name. He never says her name— He takes her hand, warm fingers pressed to her bare palms, and though she expects to feel that shock between them, she does not. She frowns as he turns her hand over, but he distracts her. "I cannot stop thinking of you. You tempt me beyond reason."

"Because of my face," she tries, one last time.

"No. More than that." He thumbs at the scar over her lip, the mark that makes her different from the others. Drops his hand. "I think of you and feel this… pang, here in my chest." He clenches his fingers over his breast, as though it pains him even now. "I came back because I could not stay away any longer. I had to see you."

"Why me?"

"I cannot stop thinking of the way you looked that last night in New Orleans. The expression in your eyes. You thought I was worth saving."

The man kneeling before her is not the man she thought he was. He's shed another layer when she wasn't paying attention, and now she's faced with a regard from him stranger than any he's shown her in this past half-year.

"I don't know how to save you," she confesses. It's the first time she's ever admitted, even to herself, that she wants to. And as she looks down at him, at this beautiful, deadly, singular creature who was once a man, she yearns to save him with her whole heart.

He cups her hands between his, so very gently. "You already have."

There's a spell being woven between them. Who can say which of them is the one doing the weaving?

The web pulls tight around them. Elena cannot resist or run any longer. She threads her fingers through his, and leans forward to brush her lips against his. He inhales sharply on first contact. It's enough for her to remember who she is and who he is, and to try to pull away, but then Klaus rises to meet her, his mouth a swarm over hers, his hands on her face and in her hair and stroking along the side of her neck. He kisses her thoroughly, and without reservation. Elena Gilbert kisses him like she's dying, kisses him like she's being reborn in the blaze of his touch. Every cell in her body sings. Her blood fizzes like champagne.

It's like falling, and the fall lasts forever.

It's nothing like anything she ever dreamed.

A/N: I promise that this isn't a dream. IT'S FINALLY HAPPENED.

Thank you so much for reading. Reviews are always gold, or, if you're shy, drop me an anon on my tumblr, livlepretre.

In other news, I'm going to be posting the official playlist for this fic to my tumblr this week.