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: Discussion/Implication of Non-Con/Hostage situation/explicit violence/gratuitous angst/extremely dubious consent/potential character death
Klaus's gift arrives by courier some two days later. A sheaf of carefully preserved pastel drawings, beautiful and faintly familiar, along with a deeply polished wooden box with a brass clasp. She sets it all aside on top of her dresser and doesn't look through any of it.
The first trip she takes back to the library is the hardest one. She lets weeks go by between her night with Klaus and her first attempt to reenter the room. There's a part of her that fears how she will respond to the site of the familiar surroundings, the leather sofa where she begged Klaus to take her, the same spot where she now knows he had violated her body and what fragile, simple trust she'd had in him.
And yet there is another part that does not want to let him shut her out of the world any more than he already has. Who refuses to cede another step to him.
Terrible things have happened in this room. Events that have sent tremors down to her very soul. But wonderful things have happened here as well.
It was in this library where she first found comfort and solitude. Peace from her tormentors. Through its books, she found a window to humanity that has enticed and engaged her passions and her curiosities and kept her mind alive through all of these months of ghastly isolation. Those books, this room, have been her salvation.
She returns to her library because she will not be afraid of Klaus. She will not let him push her into being something small, when she knows that she is something writ large across the cosmos.
The place inside of herself, that used to twist and writhe, penitent and heavy with longing for the last person whom she should want, has gone quiet. A fire banked so deeply that not an ember glimmers through the ashes.
Every now and then, she runs her hands through that ash, sifting it through her fingers.
There, at the bottom of it all, she finds a kernel. Small, and faintly glowing.
She smothers it again quickly.
She lives.
Not the life she wants, but a life nonetheless.
Joy of Cooking loses its novelty as winter draws to a close.
At this point, Elena feels like she's flipped through it a million times. Even if she and Tyler are nowhere near going through every recipe, let alone half, she's looked at all of them by now, and the flavors in the book are starting to wear on her the way that saltimbocca had last fall.
"No luck?" Tyler asks her from the door, where he pauses to stomp the ice crust from his boots.
An idea strikes her. "You're not just limited to buying groceries," she says, thinking of the charcoals and pads of paper he's brought for her, all the other little things Tyler's wanted and procured for himself. "Do you think you could find us a new cookbook?"
Tyler drifts over to the table. "Did you have something in mind?"
Elena pauses. Tries to think of any of the books her parents must have had in their kitchen, tries to summon the names of any of the celebrity chefs smiling their way through daytime cooking shows. Her mind comes up almost blank. "You know, Julia Child's the only name I can even think of."
"My mom liked to watch reruns of her show."
A soft smile plays at her mouth. "My dad did, too."
"So that's what you want, then? Julia Child's greatest hits, or whatever it's called?"
"Why not? It could be an adventure."
Tyler sizes her up. "And you look like you desperately need an adventure right now."
Weeks pass, and they don't hear anything new from any of the manor's former residents. Elena notices several books missing from the library's collection, the gaps in the rows of handsome leather bindings prominent. This discovery fills her with a distinct unease, and she wonders what else Klaus might have collected from behind closed doors during his brief visit. But whatever shadowy plans Klaus and Marcel have in play down in New Orleans, neither of them choose to share them with her or with Tyler.
"Do you still text Klaus every day?" she asks Tyler one afternoon. She's sprawled out on his bed, legs taking up the whole space, while he sits huddled at the foot, fussing over a broken zipper on his hoodie. They've only just recently started spending time in here again.
"Yeah," he tells her without looking up.
"Does he tell you anything?"
"No." The zipper tab snaps off the track in Tyler's hand. He bellows wordlessly at the broken zip and chucks the pieces at the wall. He tears the whole hoodie off and throws that, too, revealing arms so beautifully sculpted they could have belonged to a marble statue. "Push over, Gilbert," he tells her.
She makes room for him, and he settles in close against her. They are long past any kind of shyness. Sometimes she thinks that Tyler's touch is the only one she could stand. That he is the only one she feels for certain has not lied to her, even by omission.
Elena rests her head against his chest, listens to the rapidly beating heart beneath her ear. Still so quick to anger, her friend.
Restlessly, Tyler runs his fingers through her hair. She leans into the touch. The motion soothes them both.
It's nice, like this. To feel safe with Tyler. She cherishes it even more than she did before her horrid little epiphany.
They've fallen into a habit of closeness over the past couple of months, and she's not sure she'll know how to end it when the others return.
She can't tell him about any of it, but she finds she really doesn't have to.
Somehow, when it is just the two of them, alone in their cocoon, Elena thinks that everything will be alright.
Tyler makes it all alright for her.
Her novel unfurls within her. And once the ribbon of her truth unspools inside of her, she pours it out onto the page, page after page after page. And she finishes it. Gives it to Tyler to read and gets his feedback and wishes her mother were here to read it also. Each time he hands it back to her, she spends hours revising her sentences, bouncing synonyms and alternative dialogue off of him.
"Are you going to work on this forever?" he asks her. "Or just until you drive me crazy?"
"Ha. Ha."
But he humors her, despite the sarcasm, and offers her his level best advice—so she humors him when he asks her to pose for him to draw.
He works on a long series with her as the subject. Asks her to sit in different lights, reprimands her for fidgeting, tells her, very seriously, "Don't smile. This'll probably take a while, and I don't want you to hate me because you chose a pose that'll ache like a bitch after a few minutes."
The drawings stack up on the floor, some of them pushed under the sofas, others tacked up in his bedroom. She poses for him once or twice a day, and when Elena finally gathers them up one afternoon and flips through them, she realizes with misty gratitude that Tyler has captured more than just her face. He's captured not just the sadness that sometimes pulls at the corners of her mouth or the grief that causes her to withdraw into herself, but the sparkle of laughter in her eyes and the mischievous tilt to her head. He's brought those things out in her, her joy and her kindness and her gratitude—her heart—nourished it and kept it alive through all of this darkness.
More than that—
Tyler has watched her laugh and cry her way through this crazy life they're building together, and he has seen her.
She wants to see him, as clearly as he sees her.
She reads and reads during the long, lazy afternoons when the melting snow and subsequent mud season prevent her from spending as much time outside with Tyler as they had during the height of winter. She drinks in stories that fill her heart with an almost painful longing—for what, she isn't sure. For adventure, as Tyler had said. For the rush she'd felt whenever she would pull off some wild, desperate gambit. Or perhaps for love. Companionship. For someone to whom she could belong, who would belong to her in turn, and who would not hurt her.
It's a novel that puts the idea into her mind, but once it is there, it will not leave.
Elena Gilbert was born to be in love.
It's winter now, and everything is cold and dead.
(But inside of her, something bright is starting to burn.)
With the house so empty, she's taken to leaving her diary out on her dresser. (The gifts she has never opened have been shoved under the bed, where she can pretend they don't exist. She isn't sure why she doesn't have the heart to give the Toulouse-Lautrec painting the same treatment.)
It's nice, to feel like she can just pick the book up and jot down her thoughts and not have to worry about keeping so many secrets.
She starts to doodle a blue eye in the margin of her page. Her pen tears through the paper when she scratches it out.
Often, Tyler settles in at her side while she reads. They can go hours without talking, but that's okay. She finds the quiet is not so lonely when she's with him.
And then, one day, as they make their morning circuit through the gardens, Elena spots the first spring bloom, peeking through a crust of ice. A snowdrop, delicate and tender, its petals pure and white.
Tyler links his fingers through hers as they peer down at this first, small sign of awakening.
She returns to sleeping in the comfort of her one true friend's encircling arms.
Silvery light, cast by a full moon, filters into Tyler's bedroom from that solitary window set high into the wall. She had fallen asleep hours ago, but now she can sense that they are both awake, quiet.
For a long time, Elena watches the shadows of cloud and moonbeam skate over the walls. Tyler's fingers curl and uncurl in her hair. She keeps her ear over his heart, where she can hear its steady beat.
"You've never compelled me, right?" She presses the words into his breast, the cotton of his tee-shirt soft beneath her lips.
"Never." His hands do not pause for even a second. His answer eases a fear in her chest she had not recognized as such until it was gone. "I'd never do that to you."
He really believes that. She yearns to believe that.
Tyler had slipped his body's enslavement to the moon when he had died, only to unwittingly trade one set of shackles for another. She doesn't know how she can ever free him.
The moon watches over them, cool and constant.
There are days when she gazes up at that sunset flower in the Toulouse-Lautrec painting, and she can't remember what it is about it that had pained her so.
The whisper of spring hangs in the air, small and easily overlooked, until all at once it rushes over everything. The white blankets of snow and ice thaw, revealing young green shoots which burst up from the cold flower beds, warmed by a clear spring sun that strengthens with each passing day.
During the winter, this garden had felt like their own secret, hidden world, insulated and safe from all of the troubles outside of its walls.
Now, there is the feeling of the world opening up, creeping outward toward the horizon.
Change is in the air.
"What are you doing in here?" she asks Tyler from the library threshold.
He turns to face her from where he has been rummaging through one of the shelves at the back of the room. The golden afternoon light pours in from the Western facing windows, and sets Tyler's skin aglow.
He is beautiful in this light.
"I'm supposed to find a book…" He trails off, as he notices her looking at him.
They watch each other.
All it would take would be just one breath, one step forward, for her to see just how far she's come without really noticing.
His throat bobs, and he says her name.
She hurries from the room.
The diary lies amongst her rumpled bedding, half-obscured by the edge of her comforter. She'd fallen asleep writing in it last night, had slept soundly with the comforting weight of a book atop her chest, a pen loosely clasped between her fingers. Dark blue ink stains one corner of her bedsheets, and the familiarity of that ink blotch sends a pang of longing for the past right through her.
Her past, her self, Elena Gilbert Elena Gilbert Elena Gilbert.
Tyler's the one who remembers who she is. Who knows her. Who has helped her remember herself, and to know herself again.
She picks up the blue leather journal, the spine now soft and wrinkled from wear. When she flips through it, every journal entry she sees reminds her of him, of herself, of them. Even the space in February when she mostly did not write at all seems smaller, less important, next to those other entries.
There is one other person who knows her so well.
He'd gifted her this diary once.
She has not thought about him in a long time.
At first, the decision not to write about Stefan had been purposeful. Later, the idea simply had not occurred to her.
I won't ever be happy without you.
Despite everything she had once thought, she is.
She should be terrified, but she's not.
How could she be, with Tyler Lockwood by her side?
"Did you find that book?" she asks him later while they drowse by the fire.
"Hm." It's barely a response.
Later, she'll go back to the library and try to figure out which one.
But not right now.
She falls asleep with her head on his shoulder.
Elena poses for him again the next morning, taking a position by the window, her face turned into the clear morning light.
Birds call to each other from the trees. Fat, sleepy bumble bees hover between the new spring flowers that grow more fragrant every day.
It's easy to lose track of time while she gazes out the window, out into the great wide world just over that little distance. Easy to pretend she cannot feel Tyler's eyes as he takes in every bit of her.
"Done," Tyler eventually calls to her from where he's been working at the glass coffee table.
He makes to push the drawing between the pages of his sketch pad, but something compels her to stop him. "I want to see," she tells him softly, coming over and leaning down to peer over his shoulder at the charcoal portrait.
She gasps. It is herself as she has never been. Eyes clear, a challenge to the future in the upturned curve of her face. Hope, shining in every line of her. She looks at this radiant portrait of herself, in which she's not just looking out the window—she's looking to a better life. She blinks away tears as she drinks in what Tyler has done. What he has seen in her.
When she tries to pull away, overcome by this, by him, he grasps her wrist, keeps her rooted to the spot. "Elena," he says, her name like some kind of plea—for what, she does not know. Slowly, oh so slowly, he reaches up and wipes the tears from her cheeks. His gentle touch scalds her.
She leans forward, into his touch, without thought, without reservation, and Tyler draws her forward, into his arms, until she is settled in his lap. It's impossible for her to recall, later, how exactly it comes about. But it is not a surprise, not in the least, when Tyler kisses her upon her mouth (for maybe it is the other way around—maybe she is the one who catches his face between her hands and tilts her jaw so that their lips and breaths and thoughts align). His lips brush over hers, slow and sure, and when he pulls back, the smile that spreads over his face could light her soul for the rest of her life.
That brilliant smile kindles an irresistible urge within her to answer back with one of her own.
He kisses her again, and she lets him.
And it is so, so different from what kissing Klaus had been (madness, sheer and perfect and impossible).
This is like coming home. Like finding out that maybe what she needs and what she wants have been here, waiting for her, if only she had known it.
Words can't exist between them in this moment, only understanding, true and enduring, as her friend—her best friend—unbuttons her shirt and she unbuckles his belt and unzips his fly, as she shimmies out of her jeans and underwear, his hands on her hips keeping her balanced as she rises over him. He's inside of her before she can stop to process what they're doing.
Surprise flickers across Tyler's face when she shifts her hips, waiting for her body to accommodate him. As though he, too, hadn't been thinking. Hadn't expected for them to end up here.
They've gone too fast, and she's not nearly wet enough. And yet here he is, pressed tightly inside of her, her pubic bone grinding into the cotton boxers they didn't bother to remove. The resolution with which she had started this sputters.
It's too soon, part of her thinks. I'm not ready.
Elena stares down into Tyler's eyes, the pupils blown wide, indistinguishable from the liquid black of his irises. They stare at each other for a long moment. She's not sure what to say to him. How to explain herself.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
"Am I okay?"
Not really. This could be a huge mistake. A huge, terrible mistake, sure to hurt both herself and Tyler in the long-run. She doesn't even know what's happened to her, what exactly occurred with Klaus, only that she's been used.
"Is this what you want?" he asks with infinite kindness, infinite sincerity.
What she wants.
She considers the question, considers Tyler. Faces the truth inside of her. That she hungers for what Tyler offers her. For the chance to decide, unequivocally and unambiguously on her own terms, whom she fucks. Whom she lets into her body, and how.
Elena rolls her hips experimentally, feels the ridge of his cock, the subtly flared head, drag against her inner walls.
Her body feels no different than it ever did.
It is still hers.
That thought strikes the parched tender in her heart. Sets her aflame as she wraps her arms around Tyler's neck and throws herself into this.
"I do want this," she tells him. There's more she could say, maybe, but she can't think of the words. Can't think of anything beyond the pounding of her heart, the drum that beats through her blood: This is yours, This is yours, This is yours. This body is yours. And Tyler is the one she trusts.
This time, she is not the only one to move. Tyler's fingers dig into her waist as he rocks up into her, setting a steady, intense rhythm that urges a surprised moan from her. Her fingers wander toward her clit, rubbing herself in slow, deep circles.
"Let me try," Tyler pants into her ear.
His fingers fumble a bit, and she's forcefully reminded, just for a second, that despite everything, Tyler is still a teenaged boy and not a centuries old immortal. She shakes her head, brushing off the thought as well. Braces one hand against the back of the sofa and guides Tyler's other hand, teaching him how to touch her.
He focuses in on their stroking fingers, his hips stuttering, losing pace, as his fingers slide over her clit. Elena bucks against him, searching for that friction, for that perfect angle that will allow him deeper inside of her body. She feels wild, free, like anything at all might happen.
Tyler's hand seizes against her, and his hips jerk. He comes inside of her, hot and slick, and she shifts against him, chasing the feeling of his cock pulsing within her. He collapses into her, his face pressed to her collarbone, sweaty arms tangled around her waist. She feels hot and moist and heavy.
"You didn't come," Tyler notes when he catches his breath.
"That's okay."
"Lean back."
It's one thing for them to fuck like this, Elena's half undone button-down still covering most of her, another thing to expose herself so fully before him.
"Let me get you off," he says. "Please."
"Okay."
She does lean back then, head resting on the arm of the sofa, one bare foot on the floor as Tyler crawls down her body, hitching one leg over his shoulder as he spreads her open between his hands.
The first touch of his tongue makes her hips jump, but that is soon followed by the second, experimental swipe of his tongue along the seam of her and over her clit, where he pauses to suck. He takes in every detail of her, what makes her toes curl into his back and what pulls artless moans from her mouth. It does not take long for her stomach to clench, for that familiar, all-encompassing pulse to trace from her clit into her core, to reverberate back on itself, until she is clawing at the leather sofa, frantically grinding her hips to meet Tyler's mouth.
Coming under Tyler's mouth and hands resets something inside of her. Some fundamental easiness that has been absent since she fell into Wickery Creek.
Elena tugs at Tyler's shoulders, pulls him up so that he is covering her, wraps her arms around his chest and hugs him tightly to her. He turns his face and then they are kissing, soft, tentative little brushes of her mouth against his, the flavor of her pleasure pressed back to her with each pass. She can feel Tyler growing hard again against her belly. A vampire's stamina.
They get his pants off, this time. Half a thought and he is inside her again, on top of her, this time, his weight braced on his elbows. She's still soaked from coming just a few minutes ago. From him coming inside of her. Their combined exertions slide down her thighs, even as she grips them around Tyler's waist. His cock glides inside of her. It feels perfect, absolutely, sinfully perfect, to feel him move within her, her body unconsciously clenching and tightening around him with each thrust.
She's always been a girl who liked sex. Ever since she lost her virginity to Matt in the blanket-lined bed of his truck, she has felt especially attuned to this carnal aspect of herself. There had been a power to this, to what she could do for herself, and for her lover, that had enlivened and enthralled her.
Upon Tyler's first entry, her body had felt strangely tight and unaccustomed. As though it truly had been nearly a year since it had accommodated anything other than her fingers.
But now, she feels like she's waking up. Every thrust feels deeper, more full. She kisses Tyler again, searching for the taste of her release, her freedom. She finds it, and comes hard around his cock. Her pleasure wrings another orgasm from Tyler, who seems to fall into it without realizing he was so close.
They hold onto each other, afterwards, their legs tangled together, the air humid with their breaths, musky with the smell of their sex.
"What are we doing?" she asks him. She doesn't dare look at him. Finds herself fixated on the discarded portrait on the floor instead.
"We're surviving. Together."
"What about Caroline, though? You love her." They've rolled over, Tyler spooning her, his strong arms wrapped around her chest, as though he could protect her.
Tyler shifts, his hands trailing down her ribcage, over the hollow of her waist, along the curve of her hips. His fingers pause at her sex, as though waiting for permission. She opens her thighs for him, and he dips two fingers into her, briefly, before using her wetness to circle her clit, never quite touching it.
"You love Stefan, don't you?"
She groans, throws her head back against his shoulder. "That doesn't matter though," she finally tells him. "All of that is over with."
Tyler's slick fingers slip lower, play along her labia. "Exactly. Everything's over with Caroline and me, for now. But you and me, 'Lena, we're together. Right now, we're together."
"Is that enough of a reason?"
He bows his head against the back of her neck. His fingers still against her. "You're my whole world, Elena." Delivered with heart-wrenching, raw honesty.
"And you're mine," she whispers, to the room, to herself, to the only person left who matters.
She pulls out of his embrace, and rolls him over, so she can look at him.
Tyler gazes up at her, his face open, the portrait of earnest, dewy youth. He means this, means everything he has ever told her, because that is Tyler's nature. He would never lie to her. He hasn't told her he's in love with her, just like she hasn't told him she's in love with him. She senses that it's not going to be like that with them, that what they've embarked upon this afternoon would never have happened were their circumstances any different. But they're not different, they're what they are. And what they had said to each other just moments ago is true. When she gets right down to it, they are each other's entire world. And she loves him—she loves him so much, the way that she has always loved Tyler, only more now than ever.
This time, when Elena sinks down onto Tyler, astride him so that she can look at him (claim him), she doesn't do it so that they can fuck. And as their hips find a rhythm, and Tyler's eyes refuse to leave hers, even as his hands rove her body, touching and kneading and circling, it becomes very clear that the same thought is in his head. That this time, they are making love.
Elena and Tyler spend long, lazy days holed up in his room. She loses track of the hours, whether it is day or night, as she gives herself over to rippling pleasure.
All of their other habits are put on hold while they succumb to the much more pressing need to learn each other's bodies. The gardens remain empty, the fireplace upstairs cold, and the kitchen quiet. She supposes, as Tyler rolls her and they land on the floor in a pile of blankets and pillows, both of them laughing, giddy with this bright new thing between them, that she has found her adventure after all.
It's bizarre, honestly, doing this with Tyler.
The thought flits through her head as she takes him into her mouth, her tongue swirling around his cockhead and her cheeks hollowing as she sucks. They're splayed out on the mattress, Elena holding Tyler down beneath her with a hand on the firm muscles below his navel.
The taste and shape of him brings her back, suddenly, to a half-forgotten night out at the Falls. October of their Freshman year—Elena can't remember the occasion for the party, only how strangely light she had felt, the beer going straight to her head, hormones doing the rest when Tyler Lockwood had slunk over and wrapped his hands around her waist. They'd snuck off into the woods, where his pickup truck was parked, and he'd pressed her against the cold metal side of the truck while they'd made out. She'd gathered her courage, after a while, or maybe the beer had gathered it for her, because the night had ended with her kneeling in the mulch before him, sucking him off in the cold woods. It had been the first blowjob she'd ever given, the only one until she started dating Matt the next May. The whole thing had been over in only a couple of minutes. He'd startled badly when he came, and, apologetic, had blushed like a child. They'd never talked about it afterward.
She wonders if Tyler remembers that night, or if that particular episode has blended into the long line of conquests he'd made that year.
The thought makes her laugh a little while she sucks him off. How far they've come!
"Fuck, 'Lena." Her name, said in just that breathless, ragged way, may be the most expressive compliment she has ever received.
Pleased, she hums and takes him deeper into her throat.
His hips jerk under her hands and he tries to rise, but she presses him back into the mattress. She can hear his exhalation, half annoyed and totally aroused, as he hits the mattress.
He runs his fingers through her hair when he comes, and the bitter, salty flavor of him pushes her a little further into the reality of this, the reality of herself, for once being who she wants to be.
Buried far underneath the stack of drawings Tyler has made of her, there is a study of Caroline, rendered in loose graphite, which Tyler made from memory.
She finds it when Tyler is upstairs, fetching her something to eat.
It's a drawing she saw once before, months ago. At the time, the aura of flawless inner beauty unique to Caroline had rendered her near speechless. Now, the same drawing dredges up very mixed feelings.
It's not like she wants to be the type of person who steals her friend's boyfriend.
It's just that Tyler had been right. Everything before this time does not have the same weight of reality to it as everything happening here, now.
Tyler and Caroline had loved each other, in the way of high school sweethearts.
What lies between Elena and Tyler is much more complicated than that, and is, in its own way, much more vital.
When all of this is over, and Tyler and Caroline are reunited at last, she still hopes that they can pick up where they left off.
She just hopes she can keep this little piece of Tyler for herself, for as long as she can.
They do, eventually, make it upstairs again.
And when they do, they resume all of their old activities, except with an added dimension. Now, when Elena and Tyler go on their daily romps through the gardens, she cannot resist pulling him into the bed of newly emerging daffodils.
"We're going to ruin the flowers," Tyler grouses, worrying over each bent stalk.
"C'mon, Lockwood, I need the exercise." With that, she yanks him down by his tee-shirt, and makes him forget about everything else altogether.
It's the same everywhere they go.
She throws chocolate cake batter at him in the kitchen, so he smears some down her face. Within moments they're both covered in the stuff, the same roughhousing they've enjoyed all their lives together quickly turning into something else entirely.
Tyler snatches ahold of her wrists and pins her against the kitchen table. "You're absolutely filthy, Gilbert. Guess I'll have to clean you up."
The overwrought innuendo makes her snicker, but soon Tyler has her stripped, his tongue laving a path from her neck to her breasts. The sinful flicker of that tongue sets her moaning as he makes sure to taste each and every inch of her skin.
That tongue makes torturous progress down her body, until Tyler kneels at her feet.
"Hop up on the table," he breathes into her belly.
Elena complies without hesitation, every instinct primed and begging her for next dose of pleasure.
Tyler takes exquisite relish in tugging her pants off and, when she is bare, opening her up before him.
He's learned her over the past few days, the way that she has learned him. She comes twice under his mouth, the first time light, like skating over smooth ice, the second sharp and deep and devastating.
When she can think again, she realizes that she's on her back, staring up at the kitchen ceiling. Her legs are hooked over Tyler's shoulders, heels digging into his back. He kneels between her legs, mouth shiny with her spending.
She rises up on her elbows to study him.
"I don't understand how we got here," she tells him. "I don't understand this at all."
He assesses her with those piercing black eyes. How could she ever have thought him stupid or slow? Those eyes see everything.
"I'll never leave you, Elena."
He makes love to her on the kitchen table. The legs groan ominously, but the structure holds.
Afterwards, she wraps her legs around him and holds him inside of her. She likes this part best of all, sometimes—Just afterwards, before Tyler pulls out, when she can feel the slick heat of his cum inside of her, mingling with her own slippery desire.
"Did you think this is where we would end up, though?" she presses afterwards.
"What's so unlikely about the two of us?"
"It's just that it never happened. It seems like it would have happened back home, if it were going to."
"The time was just never right for you and me."
"Is it, then, right now?"
"What else is there, other than right now?"
That conversation sparks a million daydreams.
She likes to imagine that maybe she and Tyler have been hurtling down this path toward each other, toward being together, for a long time, and simply hadn't known it.
Perhaps they would have wound up here anyway. Maybe, after a lifetime of friendship, of knowing each other in the ways that only someone who has seen you at your lowest could ever fathom, maybe then they would have found their way to each other.
If Stefan had never come back, she might have realized that her nameless something with Damon would never lead anywhere. Caroline and Tyler might have burnt out despite everything. And then…
Or maybe if the vampires had never come to Mystic Falls.
No— If her parents had never died. If everything had kept on as it had been her whole life before that night. Trudging through history and math classes, going to parties just so that everyone saw her face there, cheering on the football team every Friday night. Their parents had been such close friends. Town Council leaders. They would have been thrilled that their children were dating.
Take it a step further.
She might have been Elena Lockwood. Might have gotten married and settled down with this boy she's come to realize is so, so special.
None of that is going to happen one way or another.
What she has is this.
And the knowledge that they have found their way to each other anyway.
Elena has always adored sex, needed sex, and she doesn't realize how closed off and deadened that part of herself had become until Tyler shows her how it feels to come alive again.
It must be a form of craziness, this desire. It's like they just can't ever get enough of each other.
His kisses make her drunk, fizzy with laughter, punctuated only by the way he makes her gasp and arch when he's inside of her.
Every part of him strikes a chord in her. Moves her to sweeps of passion and dedication, frightening in their sincerity, their power to sway her.
There's not a single part of him that is not transformed in her mind. That angry, lonely boy with a father who never loved him and a talent for hurting everyone around him with his selfishness has been erased, replaced instead with this thoughtful, steady friend, who tries so hard to save her, who is loyal and true and constant as the stars above. Those liquid eyes framed by long sooty lashes, those high cheekbones and soft, full lips all earn her intense adoration. She loves running her fingers through that thick black hair and lightly scratching her nails along his scalp. The long, graceful fingers, capable of creating so much joy and light in the world through his art, the tense line of his compact athlete's body, the way he moves when he prowls toward her, all desire and intent, captivates her, renders her helpless to her tender fascination.
Am I in love?
She scrawls the question across the bottom of her diary. Leaves it unanswered.
Every part of her lights up in those carefree days. She feels like a veritable garden, her body ripe and humming. Weeks pass in a tangle of limbs and mouths and bubbling orgasms that wash away the winter like a bad dream. It gets to the point where all it takes is one dark glance from Tyler, and her stomach swoops. Slickness pools and dribbles down her thighs, her body in a state of constant, trembling neediness. A thrumming eagerness for Tyler to take her. She stops wearing underwear altogether.
They make love all over the house. Once awakened, her desire for him yawns inside of her, limitless in its breadth and shape.
He takes her repeatedly on the edge of the kitchen table, her long legs wrapped around his waist as he pumps into her.
Color returns to her face and figure, the afternoon sunshine gilding her arms and breasts and belly. She loves doing this outside with him most of all, loves looking up at the blue sky and the young green buds bristling from the tree limbs overhead, right on the cusp of bursting forth.
She laughs like she's high, whispers, "I can hear the Earth turning, like this."
It's absolute craziness, this wanting.
They spill water all over the bathroom floor when she pushes him into the steaming tub and jumps in after him fully clothed, their kisses sloppy as they try to peel their waterlogged clothing off without breaking apart.
Tyler's phone, abandoned on her dresser, buzzes unanswered in the other room.
A new story starts to take form on the edges of her mind. It comes to her when she's just about to fall asleep, the shape of it fluttering before her eyelids, insubstantial as mist and yet possessed of an irrepressible life of its own.
She rises from her lover's bed with the dawn and sets to writing straight away.
An hour passes before she hears Tyler stir, the sheets whispering as he wakes and sits up.
Quiet, full minutes pass. She can feel Tyler watching her, but it doesn't distract her from her work. Instead, his attention settles on her like a blanket, making her feel safe, adored. Later, she'll marvel that he would be so fully capable of letting her work, content merely to watch her in her element. That he would know her so well.
Elena gets a few more pages written and sets everything aside. They go upstairs hand in hand, Tyler pausing to kiss her at the landing, and make pancakes together.
"What were you working on this morning?" he asks her over coffee.
"New novel, I think."
"You're finished with the old one?" he asks her skeptically.
"No. But I think it's time for a new kind of story."
After breakfast, Elena fetches her ream of paper and resumes work in their parlor.
Tyler keeps her company, warming her through and through with his surefast steadiness.
Her favorite dream: That this is how they'll live a life together.
Sometimes, when they're making out in her bedroom, everything feels so intensely normal and right that she can't quite place herself.
"What are these?" Tyler asks her, later. He reaches under her bed and pulls out the sheaf of drawings Klaus had sent her last month.
Elena watches him from the safety of the bed as he opens them up. She's forgotten all about them until just now.
"Holy fuck," he swears, softly, reverently. Carefully, he flips through the drawings. "I think these are real. Why are you keeping these under your bed?"
"What are they?" she asks, wary.
Tyler tries handing them to her. Frowns at her when she won't take them. "They're Degas's pastels. Look."
He holds them up for her, and sure enough, now that Tyler has named the artist, the style is imminently familiar to her. As he shuffles through the pastels, of which there must be at least twenty—no, more— she realizes why the images had looked so familiar when she'd first opened this gift. Familiar New Orleans sites wend their way through these drawings, the misty images soft as a summer morning.
Klaus had promised her an extravagant gift.
Tyler pauses on the last one. "This one has a note on the back." He puts it in her hands before she can dodge it. There is nothing for it, then, but to read what she recognizes as Klaus's hand. The words are written in soft pencil directly onto the back of the drawing.
May these remind you of me, as this place now forever reminds me of you.
"Put these back under the bed," she says.
Tyler's very good to her. He doesn't ask her what all of that had been about, or why she wants to hide artwork that would be the gem in anyone else's collection in the dustiest corner of her room.
"Can you please get me a glass of water?" she asks, once the drawings are out of sight.
As soon as he is out of the room she dives under the bed and drags out the beautiful wooden box. When she flips it open, she finds row after row of expensive pastels, the pigments rich and creamy. The next best thing to painting, she thinks resentfully.
By the time Tyler returns with her glass, everything has been pushed back under the bed.
Out of mind, out of sight.
That night, she dreams about that awful night that Klaus had brought Matt into all of this. Except, it's not Matt he forces into the parlor, but Tyler. And after Klaus questions him, he doesn't have Stefan do the killing. No, he takes special relish in executing Tyler himself.
No, she won't let Klaus take this happiness from her. She won't let him decide who she is, who she—
"Did you sleep alright?" Tyler asks her in the morning, mouth nuzzling against her throat.
"Never better," she tells him brightly.
Nothing changes. Everything is fine.
Every day she writes, and Tyler draws. Sometimes she works with him, her fingers tarry from the compressed charcoals she favors. The process is hard work, as she blackens her paper to an infinite pitch, only to spend long hours dragging her kneaded eraser through the darkness, painstakingly dragging it back to light.
The temptation to touch him during those hours, to mark him as hers with her fingertips, proves difficult to resist. She loves running her hands over his face, his shoulders, seeing those trailing lines of black. A kind of ownership over what they are doing, a statement that he is hers. As the matching marks on her body that he traces declare that she is his in turn.
He leaves a smattering of black fingerprints all over her naked hips while they fuck. She rises over him, knees braced against the couch cushions. His fingers clench against her hipbones as she rises and sinks, taking him in a wickedly slow and deliberate pace. It drives him crazy when she does this, so, in consequence, she loves to do this. Tyler doesn't force her along, merely holding on to her to keep her balanced while she drives this. He does nothing to overtly encourage her, simply stares up at her, gaze unfixed, head tipped back against the back of the couch. It doesn't matter. The deep-throated moans that tumble from his parted lips are more than enough to urge her on.
Across the room, where Tyler's pants had been hastily discarded fifteen minutes ago, his phone rings.
Elena freezes, Tyler still half-buried inside of her.
The phone keeps ringing.
Everything inside of her goes cold.
"Is that Klaus?" she asks.
Tyler grinds his teeth together and squeezes his eyes shut. "I have to get that," he tells her somewhat desperately. In a second he's lifted her off of him and gently deposited her on the couch.
Goosepimples erupt over her bare shoulders and thighs. She draws her knees up to her chest and huddles in on herself while she listens to Tyler answer the phone. There's a very long pause, before a long series of yeses and nos and got its.
Tyler hands the phone to Elena. "He wants to speak with you."
Bright alarm writhes within her. Irrationally, she just knows with a feeling of sinking doom that Klaus will guess at what she's been doing. She takes a deep breath.
"Hello?" she ventures into the telephone. Not an ounce of panic colors her voice.
"There's my girl." Satisfaction ripples through that old familiar voice, nearly forgotten in the face of her quiet joys. And yet— Everything comes rushing back in on her the moment she hears him speak. The instant she hears him, so close and yet so far from her, the entire life she has built, piece by aching piece, renders itself irrelevant. Distant.
"Why are you calling me?" She tries to make the question sound less bewildered than it is. Like the world isn't rocking on its axis, shaking so violently she's likely to slip and fall, fall, fall—
She can't do this, she can't talk to him, she can't she can't she can't—
"I wanted to see how you liked my gifts."
"It's been over a month since your last phone call."
"Are you very distraught? I promise you have not been forgotten."
No, not if he now associated his favorite place in all the world with me, she thinks with an edge of hysteria.
And yet, she had very nearly forgotten him. As best as she could, she had. She had.
"Are you quite well? I hope you're not wasting away for want of me," he continues, a weird teasing note in his tone. Weird, because of how natural he sounds when he talks to her like this. How can he manage it, she wonders, after everything he has done to her?
"I'm fine."
"You said that the last time. And yet I do not quite believe you, today."
"It's strange to talk to you like this," she admits.
Why, why does she have to talk to him at all? Why is this her fate, to face her unravelling again and again and again? One day, maybe soon, there won't be anything left—
"Would you prefer a face-to-face audience? That could be arranged."
"Is it over then? Is it all finally done with?"
She dreads the answer.
She must know.
"Soon."
From the other end of the line, she can hear some sort of commotion, and then a deep silence, filled finally by the rumble of Marcel's smooth, distinctive baritone.
"I have to go now, sweetheart." He pauses, as if considering. "But I meant what I said, before. You are with me, ceaselessly."
The phone disconnects.
Tyler strides over from the other side of the room.
"Everything cool?"
"Weren't you listening?" she asks him, unable to meet his eyes. He must have some idea that things with Klaus are not quite what they were when this all started. That she has been playing him poorly, inviting him into her bed and into her body (and her heart, oh, her heart—) when there is already someone who might fight for his place there.
Perhaps Tyler has known all along, and this affair is part of his rebellion, the way the vervain had been.
"Klaus asked me not to listen in, so I didn't," Tyler tells her. As simple as that. As though what he's just told her is totally normal, not at all round the bend.
She wants to laugh and she wants to cry, but she can't really do either, not right now.
"Everything's cool," she tells him.
In her dreams, she hears Tyler's neck snap, echoing, echoing, echoing on forever.
Unacceptable.
The next afternoon, she gathers her courage.
She waits until after lunch, when Tyler is drowsy from their meal and the increasingly strong rays of the golden afternoon sun.
"I need you to help me pull a book down," she tells him, by way of getting him into the library.
He follows her up, utterly obedient.
Without letting herself think about it, she spins around to face him and pushes him down onto one of the sofas. The same sofa where she spent hours and hours exchanging kisses as necessary as breath with Klaus.
She jumps him, then, tearing her shirt over her head and forging a path with her lips from the corner of his jaw and down his throat, to his collarbones, before he quite processes what she's doing.
Tyler's hands circle, and then spasm against, her waist. "Wait, Elena, stop."
She ignores him, deftly unbuttoning his shirt and sliding it off his shoulders. She twists against him, smiling grimly in satisfaction into his warm skin when he cannot help but rock up against her, the evidence of his growing desire deliciously impossible to miss. She tweaks one of his nipples, the way she has learned shoots strait to his groin, and nips at the deceptively delicate flesh of his throat.
"Elena, slow down." With demonstrable effort, he pushes her away, to hold her at arm's length. His grip on her does not slacken though, and when she rolls her hips, she can see stark passion sweep across his face.
"What's wrong?" She tries to reach for him, but he dodges back.
"I should be asking you that."
She slumps in his arms. "I don't get it. You've never turned me down."
"I don't think we should be doing this… here."
"I think this is exactly where we should be doing this."
"This is Klaus's room, though. His space. It wouldn't be…" He trails off as he sees something at play in her expression.
"It's not Klaus's room, though," she says. "It's my room. My fortress. And… I want to let you in."
"It just doesn't feel right," he presses. "It's almost like having sex in his bedroom."
She digs her nails into his wrists and leans in, so that their mouths are very nearly touching. Very nearly. "This has nothing to do with Klaus. This," and here, she grazes her mouth against his, as sweetly as she can, "is about us. It's you and me, Tyler. No matter what, at the end of the day, it's you and it's me, and that's it."
Her words work their magic.
Tyler nods, gravely, and reels her in to him.
The atmosphere of the afternoon changes after that. Elena's wildcat suit becomes a slow appraisal, a resetting of the equilibrium between them. They make unhurried, thorough investigation of each other, tasting out each other's bodies, each other's vulnerabilities.
Tyler is different than he has ever been before. Demanding, in a way that gives more than it receives, and yet refuses to settle for anything less than Elena's total surrender to being here, with him on this couch.
She gives herself to him as completely as she can.
When he finally plunges into her, swims in the slippery paradise of her body, she feels of two minds, two bodies. There is a part of her that yields. That cannot shake this boy that is her home.
There is another part of her that knows that this evening has been the first true falsehood between them. For she had lied when she told him that this had nothing to do with anyone but themselves.
But Elena Gilbert is not just any liar.
At eighteen she is a rare master of the craft.
The real genius in her skill is not her ability to lie to others, to whisper words that taste like truth into her lover's ear, her enemy's heart. It's her ability to lie to herself.
And so it comes to pass that she forgets her truth in truth, submerges it under the turbulent currents of her heart.
Tyler's intensity does not let up with time, and she lets this strange tide between them sweep her up. Take her apart and forge her anew, into a girl without a thought for any other in her head. Everything feels malleable when she looks into Tyler's hungry eyes, and it is easy to believe that about herself. And it does not feel like such a very large thing to make a promise to herself, that from here on out, she will forget about the rest of it. Forget, and be happy.
It's a sharp, sweet happiness that takes root in her.
"April showers bring May flowers," she singsongs, only half-paying attention as she whirls through the garden, bursting with yellow and pink and white and blue and green, green, green. Spring in full, fragrant glory.
She forgets, she forgets, she never knew. Nothing is real before this time.
And then, one day, Elena emerges from the shower, the steam curling her hair around her shoulders, and finds Tyler sitting on the edge of her bed. Neither of them speak as he watches her dress, but she has the sense that he is waiting to say something.
"Do you trust me?" he asks her abruptly as she combs out her hair, preparing to blow dry it.
Elena turns to him and puts her comb down. "Yes."
Tyler steps up to her and takes her hand. "Good. I need you to remember that, okay? I need you to trust me."
"What's going on?"
"Elena—" He tilts his head and snags her in his gaze. "I need you to listen to me carefully."
"Open your eyes."
That's Tyler's voice.
A warm spring breeze brushes against her face and arms, hotter and moister than the air back at the compound.
Frowning, Elena obeys and finds herself standing in the familiar glassed-in courtyard of the Abattoir, caught in the cross-breeze between the grand double doors flung open to catch what cooler air there may be.
When she spots Tyler, standing by the fountain, she cannot help the smile that spreads across her face. She takes a step toward him, but he shakes his head, a warning—
"Ah, just the girl I wanted to see."
Elena spins, just in time to catch Klaus as he moves inhumanly fast into her space. He grins down at her, eyes crinkled with warmth. Behind him, Rebekah stands with Marcel off to one side, Stefan some distance away from the others, arms crossed over his chest. They all watch her, but she doesn't have time to analyze them any further. All of her attention must stay on the creature directly in front of her, lest she falter.
"Why am I in New Orleans?" she asks.
"I thought it time to make good on my promises and to arrange an audience in the flesh." Something about his smile turns truly wicked then. "And besides, my dear one, don't you care to know what havoc I've wrought since last we parted? But never fear. I have a starring role for you."
A/N: Honestly such a relief to write Elena in a healthy, consenting relationship. I hope you all feel that too, and feel the necessity of this for her.
For my K/E shippers out there… Never fear. Our course hasn't wavered, and this element has always been part of the plan from the very beginning. The thing is, Elena really, really needs to have this consensual and trusting relationship if she's ever going to have any other romantic connections at all. And Klaus cannot have her so easily after everything that he's done. It's just so, so important for her to make decisions like this on her own terms.
Thank you for all of your amazing feedback. You all are the best.
Look out in the near future on my tumblr (if it doesn't get deleted) for the Tyler and Elena playlist, "Let's Hang Out (Or Surely We'll Both Die)"
Finally, I'm planning to publish a separate stand-alone Klena fic between now and Christmas—hope you all will read and enjoy!