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
Elena frowns at Marcel. "What do you mean they have the bloodstone? There is no bloodstone."
"All evidence to the contrary."
"I don't understand how that's possible—I saw it dissolve—"
"They definitely have it," Davina cuts in. "Sophie's been channeling the power of that stone—your blood—since the solstice. It's how she's gotten to be so powerful."
A sick reeling feeling rocks through her.
The bloodstone. The crystallization of all of that latent power coursing through her blood. The talisman of her betrayal.
Horror grips her by the throat. "Does Klaus know?"
Marcel shakes his head. "You think our hearts would still be in our chests if he did?"
"It's why we needed you here in New Orleans," Davina tells her. "We need you to find it."
Davina's turn of phrase snags her whirling thoughts. "You don't need me for that spell to take over your coven at all, do you?" She looks to Marcel. "It's always been about the bloodstone, hasn't it? That's why you had Rebekah convince Klaus to bring me here."
"You'll be just as dead as us if he finds out about the bloodstone's existence," Marcel says.
No, Klaus would do worse to me.
"I'm doing all of us a favor by giving us a chance to fix this before Klaus ever finds out about it," he continues. "And trust me. Every day that goes by is another day closer to that happening."
She holds up her hands. "I get it. But why do you need me? If you're so powerful, Davina, why can't you find it and take it?"
Davina shakes her head. "I've tried. They're weak, but they still have their tricks. It's cloaked beyond anything I can find with a locator spell. The one time we tried going over there, I couldn't get a read on it at all. It's probably hidden so that I wouldn't be able to see it even if it were right in front of me."
"I lost three guys on that mission," Marcel says. "Next time I go in, it won't be for nothing."
"If you can't find it, I don't see how I can be of any help." She says it all without any hope that her words are true. She can already see where this is going.
"You'll be able to sense it though," Davina says. "It's your blood. You're it's master. It'll hear you when you call."
Her legs feel like jelly. She braces herself against the wall and takes a few deep breaths. "So, what? You want me to go into the witch's lair and steal the stone back?"
"Basically, yeah."
"The last time I was there they almost slit my throat." Her instincts scream at her to put a stop to this. She would rather face her death at Klaus's hands again than allow the witches to kill her. If he would not exact his vengeance on everyone she had ever loved once he was done with her, she would refuse them.
"That won't happen this time," Marcel assures her. "You won't be going in alone."
"But it might be a good idea for you to tell us exactly what happened that night. We've pieced together what we could, but… there aren't exactly any witnesses to what happened after Agnes took you. Other than Sophie, of course."
Elena scrubs her hands through her hair. "They wanted to sacrifice me to give them a temporary power boost so they could recapture you. They had me locked in this windowless cell, with a door that only opened when a witch on the outside said the right spell. I was really sick when I woke up, and I threw everything up—I thought the stone dissolved—there was a lot of blood." She pauses. "Sophie was there when that happened. She wanted to know if we'd been doing blood magic."
"And you didn't notice the stone at all?" Marcel presses.
"No, but it was dark and confusing, and I was freaking out. I was so focused on trying to get out of there, that I might have missed it."
"If you were that disoriented, Sophie could have scooped it up when you weren't paying attention." Davina frowns.
"What are you going to do once you have it?" Elena asks. How do I know I should hand it over?
"First, I'm going to use it for my hostile takeover of the coven. Then, we're going to see what we can do about finishing what we started last winter."
Davina's words ring in the air between them.
They were going to take down Klaus. They were asking her to hand them the weapon of Klaus's destruction. The one she herself had made.
"Are you still with us?" Marcel asks.
Stefan's words twist in her mind.
You can't trust either of them.
"Of course."
She is either lying to Marcel or she is lying to herself.
It doesn't matter which.
If she cannot untangle the web she has spun, then Marcel certainly cannot.
He believes her.
If he didn't, she would be dead.
Marcel presses a water bottle into her hands before she goes.
"It's mixed with vervain," he tells her. "I'll make sure you get one every day when no one's looking."
"When do we go?"
"We'll go the night before the conjunction. If we time it right, we can get the bloodstone, take control of the coven, and put paid to Klaus before he knows what's happening."
This fervent desire Marcel has to destroy Klaus almost makes her a little sad.
Despite how dangerous Klaus is, she feels sorry for him. How would it feel for someone that close to her to betray her so finally?
The closest she can come to imagining it is when she ruminates on the sharp slice to her heart she has felt each time she has uncovered a new ugly truth about Klaus. Each new wound is deeper than the last. She doesn't want to recognize what that must mean.
By the time Klaus returns from whatever distraction Marcel had devised, Elena is already up in the study. She has an unobstructed view a few minutes later when Hayley twines her fingers around Klaus's neck and tilts her face up to his, practically begging for a kiss. She's wearing a loose white tank top that bears most of her back matched with a pair of skimpy shorts, like she's dressed for a date. Maybe this is a date for her.
Elena watches as Klaus's fingers run up her back, over the weirdly distinctive birthmark she's noticed on Hayley's back before. His hands trail up, over the nape of her neck, and around to her jaw. The way Klaus strokes her face is almost more erotic than actually watching them fucking would be.
She cannot stand the sight of his hands framing her face. She cannot look away.
He glances up, and notices her watching. It's only a small moment, barely longer than a heartbeat, before Elena jumps back from the window.
She spends the whole evening fidgeting, unable to focus on the little ink studies in front of her. Just as he had promised, Klaus had brought her bottles of India ink, brushes and thick, pebbled paper, so that she might entertain herself during the long and surprisingly monotonous days in the vampire stronghold. For the past few hours, she's been attempting to work from observation, albeit with little success. Her mind is elsewhere.
The door rattles when the AC kicks onto a new cycle, and she startles so badly that she spills her opened bottle of ink onto the rug. She watches the black stain soak into the material for several blank moments before jumping up to clean it.
Afterwards, she tries to read, but finds herself continuously glancing up at the door. She expects Klaus to appear at any moment with a fresh round of searching questions.
He doesn't come back that night at all.
Not that she thinks about the reason.
Because that would be ridiculous.
True to his word, Marcel has Diego bring her a water bottle laced with vervain the next morning.
Neither of them say anything to the other. She has the sense that Diego acts simply out of loyalty and duty. Motives seismically different from her own.
She contemplates the bottle when he leaves. Condensation slides under her fingers, making the bottle almost too slick to hold on to.
How different everything would be, if she had only had steady access to vervain from the beginning.
The path forward would be as obvious to her as she knows it should be.
It isn't.
Two days pass without a moment alone with him. Two days of spotting him across the courtyard, catching glimpses of him crossing the balcony, slipping through French doors, twining his fingers in Hayley's hair and murmuring in her ear. Two nights lying awake, flashing hot and cold in the narrow bed he had provided for her, straining for the sound of his return. Two days of waiting for him (wishing for him), even while she berates herself for doing it.
Tyler brushes past her on the stairwell. He is going up while she is going down. The heat from his arm soaks into her skin. His deft fingers press something into her damp palm.
She ducks into the alcove at the bottom of the stairs and unfurls the folded square of paper in her hand.
He's drawn her portrait again. His version of a love note.
She wishes she had something to give him in return.
All she has is herself, and, lately, she's less and less certain how much of that there is left to give.
She presses her kisses on him, desperately, when they steal away together in the afternoon. More than anything, she wishes she could give in to her yearning for Tyler's comfort. To the way time had lain down and was still for them in those dewy spring mornings, those golden afternoons and silver cool evenings.
But she doesn't dare.
Tyler's lips slip against her own, his warm, rough palms sliding under the cup of her bra to squeeze and kneed her breasts. Her mind wanders, and she wonders, absently, what Klaus is doing right now.
She's still thinking about Klaus when Tyler's fingers twist inside of her, his thumb gliding over her clit, thinking about that moment when he had touched Hayley's face, picturing him touching her face like that instead, as he has done before, when she comes, sharp and hard.
Later, she'll realize what she's done and she'll feel sick about it all, restlessly shame-ridden and dissatisfied with everything.
Right now, she leans her forehead against Tyler's chest, and takes deep, steadying breaths, until she can think clearly again.
"It's okay, if you're preoccupied," Tyler tells her softly, stroking the hair back from her forehead.
"It's not, though."
"You put up such a brave face for everyone else, 'Lena. I want to be the person you can be your real self with."
Stricken, she pulls back from his embrace to look him in the eyes. "You are, though."
His mouth tips up into fond half-smile. "I won't stop being your friend when you figure out that's not completely true."
"We always talk about me. What about you?"
"What about me?"
"What can I do for you?" She's asked him this question over and over again. He's never given her an answer that allows her to fill up the well of grateful confusion inside of her.
"You're the only one in my life right now who cares about me," he tells her finally. "Who has always cared about me. What more could I ever ask for?"
Her fingers curl around his. Despite all of the turmoil and chaos raging inside of her, the thoughts and feelings she is coming to realize that she may never be able to suppress, she still knows one thing to be true. "You're the most important thing in my life. I'd do anything for you."
Whatever peace she had been able to find at Tyler's side, that feeling quickly evaporates as soon as they go their separate ways, forcing Elena to contend with her agitation. The feeling has only grown stronger over the past several days. She feels it like a live animal pacing under her skin.
"I've been cooped up in here for days, Stefan. Don't you think we could go outside for just a minute?" Elena asks him the next day as they meander in a slow circuit around the leaf-strewn courtyard. It's like a dismal mockery of their old walks around the gardens. She wishes that the Abattoir courtyard weren't enclosed, though, she supposes the night walking vampires would find it inconvenient if it weren't.
She's not really asking because she wants to go out. What she really wants is an argument, something to soothe the agitated, sparking energy building up under her skin as the days of waiting take their toll. Her blood feels staticky in her veins, the way the air feels, heavy and tense, just before a thunderstorm rolls in.
"It's too risky right now," Stefan says, predictably enough.
"I went outside all the time when I was here last December."
"Then get Klaus to bring you out," he retorts. He pauses. "Actually, please don't."
"Afraid he'll say yes?"
"Say yes to what?" Klaus asks, appearing from thin air.
Elena stiffens. This is the first time she's actually been so close to him since Marcel stole her away for that clandestine meeting. If she weren't such a very accomplished liar, she would feel unbearably nervous right about now. As things stand, though, deceiving Klaus comes to her with the ease of long practice. "You startled me!" she says, clapping a hand over her heart, playing her initial response to his proximity into his expectations of what would be the normal human one.
(If there is another reason why her heart races and her breath trips, she refuses to put a name to it.)
Klaus doesn't even glance at her. Two days of nothing and now this. It has been such a very long time since she has proved incapable of instantly capturing his attention that this pointed inattention is almost enough to throw her acting. Almost.
Just barely, she restrains her eyes from narrowing in suspicion. It can't be anything other than deliberate.
"Elena's hoping you'll take her out on the town," Stefan informs him with a shrug, like it's totally inconsequential.
Klaus raises his brows. When he turns to finally acknowledge her directly, his mouth is twisted with acute displeasure. "Have we forgotten the hordes of witches eager to spill your blood as soon as they catch sight of you?" He shakes his head. "I need you hale and whole for the ritual."
Despite Klaus's belittling explanation, his presence soothes the irritation she's been feeling ever for days now. Longer. Here, finally is the source of all of her frustrations.
She's about to retort Is that all? when a drove of hybrids burst through the door. They move like hell itself is at their heels. She spots Tyler, a wide, dark stain glistening wetly around a slash in his shirt, just to the right of where his heart is, a beat before she registers that he's hauling one of the other hybrids in with him, half carrying and have dragging the snapping, screaming girl in his wake.
All the blood leeches from her face when she sees how close Tyler had come to meeting a final death, while she was here pestering Stefan. Klaus pushes her back into Stefan's arms before approaching the group, and she falls weak-kneed into his arms.
"I sent out twelve of you. Why have only eight returned?" Klaus demands.
"We were ambushed," Tyler says. His voice is steady and calm. "Sophie got there first."
A heavy silence overtakes the room as Klaus takes in Tyler's words, broken when the girl shrieks and lurches in Tyler's grasp, her shoulder giving a sickening crunch as it pops from the socket and groans back into an unnatural angle. There's a wild, animal gleam to her eyes, as though any remnant of the girl in her has been burnt away.
"Steady!" Tyler calls to the other hybrids, who jump in to restrain the girl. She snaps at one, all glistening white fangs, and takes a chunk of his nose off. Tyler holds on throughout, even when the girl starts retching black-streaked blood onto herself.
"Careful, don't touch that," Klaus warns as he examines the howling girl.
"What'll happen if I do?" Tyler asks, looking at the hybrid whose nose has healed over missing the cartilage. The skin looks green and roiling at the edges.
No sooner does Tyler speak than Klaus pulses forward, ripping the hearts clean out of the chests of both the girl and the guy she'd bitten, one in each hand. "Then I'd have to put you down too, lest you infect the rest."
Tyler curses and drops the girl's corpse. The rest of the hybrids back up, as little good as it would do them if Klaus decided to do the same to them.
"Nasty curse," Klaus explains, tossing the hearts onto the floor. "Reduces you to a sort of living death—much worse than the bargain you have now. The coven was excessively fond of it in the eighteenth century. It's where the rumors of New Orleans's living dead originated." He cocks his head thoughtfully. "I haven't seen it done in nearly two centuries, however. I wouldn't think this Sophie Deveraux would know how."
"You mean it's a zombie curse," Elena says. Her eyes stray to Tyler, to that gash on his shirt, to the bare skin on his hands that had almost been infected.
"Essentially. One of the many dark and inspired curses the coven used to specialize in, yes." He glances at his own hands, where the skin is starting to peel. "Stefan, be a help and bring Elena upstairs."
"Are you okay?" she asks Klaus, despite herself, when he comes upstairs hours later.
He pauses, and she can almost see the corners of his mouth curling into a smile. "Worried about me?"
"You got that blood on your hands," she points out.
He shrugs. "It itched, but it would take far more than that to destroy me."
She tracks him as he slips into the bathroom, which is surprisingly small but reasonably modern. A later addition to the building, she supposes. Klaus doesn't shut the door all the way and she catches a glimpse of him in the mirror when he tugs his shirt over his head, all broad shoulders and rippling muscles. It's too similar to things she has dreamed, or, maybe, seen and then misremembered. She ducks her head and fidgets. The shower stutters on, and steam wafts from the room. She feels like a coiled spring. Ready to explode, but impossible to say in which direction she will bolt.
She doesn't dare look up when Klaus emerges. Better not to give him any more ammunition against her than strictly necessary. And the way her face has colored and the way she shivers when a stray rivulet of sweat runs down her spine would be ammunition.
It's only when he walks back through and heads for the door without pausing to say anything to her that she calls out to him. "You're going?"
"Have a lady waiting for me."
"You mean Hayley."
He looks over his shoulder at her. "Jealous?"
"No." She stands up to leave.
He moves like liquid lightning into her path.
"There would be no need to feel ashamed if you were," he says, voice so reasonable and coaxing that she almost agrees with him.
She looks up into his face, into his heated blue eyes, sparkling with a sharp, mischievous satisfaction. This close, she can smell his skin, and the aftershave he must have just put on. She knows what it would be like to taste that skin. To bury her nose in his shoulder and breathe him in. She could reach her hand out to touch the roughness of his jaw, and he would let her. His hair curls damply at his collar. Her fingers itch to touch it. To touch him. God help her, she wants him more than she has ever wanted anyone in her life.
And he knows it.
She stumbles back and knocks against a side table. "Does Hayley know you're using her?" she asks, voice weak.
"Oh, I am? I'm rather fond of her company, I'll have you know."
"That's ridiculous."
"Is it so ridiculous? That I'd find a beautiful, fiery woman who knows her own mind intriguing? Perhaps I've grown weary of chasing less willing quarry."
Of course he would. Of course—
She shakes her head. Why should she care with whom Klaus chooses to spend his time? She'd actually prefer it if he moved his attentions elsewhere.
"You're right," she tells him.
Not so much as a flicker of an eyelash to hint at how Klaus takes this affirmation.
She changes topics quickly. "What did you have the hybrids out doing?"
"Why should I tell you?"
"I've agreed to help you, haven't I? Doesn't that earn me a little bit of honesty?"
"Honesty." He brushes over the word with profound amusement. She can imagine his fingers trailing over her skin in just the same way as his mouth caresses that word.
She shudders. "Yeah. I've seen them coming and going at all hours. Should I be worried?"
Klaus shakes his head. "Reconnaissance, mostly."
"That didn't look like reconnaissance earlier today."
"That was… a special case. I sent them to retrieve the bones of a very powerful witch. They weren't successful."
"What? Why?"
"A relic such as a finger bone, or a rib, or a fragment of her skull would make a potent amulet. I thought it would make a striking gift for our Davina Claire."
Elena bristles. "You think she'd accept a gift from you?"
"Trust me. She would not have turned this down. Too bad Sophie's gotten to it first." He fixes her with a knowing look. "But if you would like a gift as well, Elena mine, you need only ask."
"You can't give me what I want."
"Perhaps I will do you one better."
"Wait!" she calls out.
He turns around and watches her steadily, expectantly.
"There is something I would like."
He waits, holding himself preternaturally still.
Elena gathers her courage. "I don't want Tyler being sent out on those sorts of missions anymore."
"Afraid your Mr. Lockwood will prove incapable?"
"Yes, okay? Yes. So, just— please, could you find something else for him to do?"
He considers her. "Would this make you happy, then?"
"No. But it would make me very unhappy if he were to die."
His eyes gather the light like an animal's when he asks, "Would you be very grateful, were I to acquiesce?"
She swallows. Her throat feels strangely tight. "You'd have to find out."
"Alright then. I'll keep your little friend safe from Sophie's wrath. For a price."
"That's not how a gift works!"
He shrugs. "This isn't really a gift, though, it's a favor."
"What is it you want?"
"I'll let you know."
He leaves her, then, alone with nothing but the phantom dread of what he might ask of her.
That night she dreams about Klaus and Hayley, intertwined on the sofa in their library back at the manor. The flames from the roaring fire in the grate paints their bare skin golden. Elena calls his name, shouts and hollers, but he doesn't hear her. When she tries to break them apart, her hands pass through them as though she is made of smoke. She has no choice but to watch.
She wakes up with tears trickling down her face, her heart pounding in a possessive rage.
As her mind clears, and her heart slows, she slowly understands that she has no one to blame for this dream but herself. She's been on vervain for days now, and Klaus could not plant these thoughts in her head if he wanted to.
She must accept them for hers and hers alone.
(What she feels for Tyler and what she feels for Klaus are galaxies apart.
When she's with Tyler, it's like the whole world could just stop moving and she wouldn't even notice. She can remember herself as she was before, in their time together, and it's like experiencing resurrection all over again.
When she's with Klaus, there is no world beyond the two of them. It comes to her in bursts and flashes, when she is with him, that she is not who she thought she was all of those years she spent in Mystic Falls, the realization slipping from her conscious thoughts before she can fully grasp it, and the after image of that self-knowledge burning behind her eyelids.)
She wants to be satisfied with who she was before.
(There's fire like a flaring star blazing all through her, and she cannot resist following its searing light through the abyssal dark.)
When she can't take it anymore, she gets up and makes her way over to Klaus's bedroom. The door is kept closed, and she's fought her curiosity well enough up until this point to never venture in there in all the long hours she has spent alone in this suite of rooms.
She knocks tentatively at the door. He'll hear her if he's in there.
She's not sure what will happen if he comes to the door. If she sees him now, in the quiet pre-dawn hours, the only time of day she ever feels the space to be herself as she really is. If he comes to her now, and he sees her as she truly is, and looks at her in that rare, unguarded way, then she might just surrender.
Whatever he wants from her, she could give it to him, in this hazy moment.
Several minutes pass. She knocks again. He never answers.
Once she realizes that he's not in there, she only hesitates a moment more before letting herself in.
It's the first time she's ever been in one of his bedrooms. She thinks. Hard to say for sure these days.
The thing that hits her first is the smell. The room is redolent Klaus, the scent like a dark and alluring promise teasing at the edge of her senses, describable in no other terms other than the way her body at once responds to it: alert and swimming in her sudden desire.
The four poster bed dominates the room. It's enormous and ancient, and looks hardly slept in. The sight of it arrests her, a symbol of everything she fears (fears, because she craves).
The temptation to lie down on it, to curl herself around his pillow and inhale the memory of him, nearly overrides her good sense.
The apprehension she should have been feeling from the start catches up to her. He'll know she was in here as soon as he steps inside.
Isn't that what I wanted?
She'd knocked on his door hoping to find him. To catch him in a moment when she could forgive herself for seeking him out.
Instead, she's discovered his room empty. It's obvious it hasn't been slept in for days. It's not hard to guess where he's been spending his nights instead. With whom.
That deduction clears her mind of whatever madness had possessed her to seek Klaus out like this.
If she is going to trespass on Klaus's privacy, and if she is inevitably going to get caught, then she may as well make the most of this transgression.
She takes a careful look around, and is quickly rewarded.
Who dares, wins.
Scattered throughout the room are several of the books she'd noticed missing from the library, in addition to some she's never seen before. She trails her fingers over them, flipping through the ones that seem promising.
One of the books has an illustration in it that freezes her breath.
"You seem distracted," Rebekah notes the next morning.
Tired of her perch up in Klaus's rooms, she's instead chosen today to hole herself up in one of the sitting rooms with a good view of the courtyard.
She wants to be able to observe the dynamics going on around her with fresh eyes.
"Are you so bored you've come to pester me, or is there some reason in particular?" Elena asks.
Rebekah shrugs, and inspects the teapot Stefan had brought in for her earlier. "I see Marcel still has my china," she observes. She glances at the cup at Elena's elbow. "Mind you don't chip it. They don't make this pattern anymore."
In the courtyard, Tyler instructs a group of hybrids in hand to hand combat. Surprisingly, a few of Marcel's vampires help out as well.
Hayley watches the goings-on from atop the dining table on the far edge of the space, her boots propped against the rungs of a ladder backed chair.
Stefan comes in through the front door, carrying something indistinctly wrapped in cloth in both arms. He slows for a moment when he spies her and Rebekah sitting together, but someone must call out for him, because his attention snaps back to the upper galleries and he hurries on without stopping to check in on them like she thought he might.
"I'm surprised he didn't rush in here like he'd found the fox in the hen house," Rebekah says, echoing Elena's thoughts.
Compassion moves her, painful and insistent. "I'm sorry," Elena says, surprising herself with the depth of her sincerity. How much she really does regret how they got to this place. "I'm sorry that it's like this, and Stefan can't just cut me out the way you want him to."
Rebekah takes a seat on the sofa across from Elena. They regard each other in steady silence for several minutes. "Do you mean that?" Rebekah asks at length, carefully watching her face for any hint of derision. Whatever it was she had come in here to say to her, it seems forgotten in the wake of this rare moment of surrender between them.
"Yes. He loves you. Really, deeply loves you. If you can make him happy, then I don't want to come between you." The words pour out of her like water through a broken vase. Once she starts, she cannot stop.
"But you do."
"I'm his friend," she says, firmly. "That won't change—but that's all we are. All we're ever going to be, at this point." The honesty that has grown between them has left no room for impossible, useless hoping and wishing.
"So long as you're in his heart at all, I don't see how there's room for me."
"You and Stefan are both so stubbornly uncompromising. Isn't Marcel in your heart?"
Rebekah shoots her a dangerous look.
Elena throws her hands up. "Don't answer me! I'm not blind. I know there's history there. The past is never dead. It's not even past," she quotes.
Rebekah frowns and looks at her like she's just said the most profound thing she's ever heard. Elena guesses she must not have had time to catch up on William Faulkner since her brother undaggered her last year.
The other girl mulls the words over for several minutes. "So how do I go forward then? If everything is so impossibly complicated?" she finally asks. The raw vulnerability in her voice staggers her. For the first time, Elena truly reflects on who Rebekah might have to confide in.
No one.
If anyone had told her last fall, when Rebekah was delighting in plaguing her, that come May she would be trying her best to encourage and support her, she would have laughed in their face.
That time when Rebekah had represented everything she had lost and couldn't hope to regain feels like another lifetime ago.
"It's easy though," Elena responds. "Don't you love Stefan back?" It's a rhetorical question. She's no longer blind to what lies between Stefan and Rebekah beneath all of the warped veneer. "Can't you allow him the same history with me that you allow for yourself with Marcel?" Suddenly remembering her earlier suspicions about Marcel and Rebekah's potential liaisons, she hurries on. "I'm just his friend, Rebekah. That's nothing compared to the girl he loves."
"Is it though?" Rebekah questions softly, almost to herself.
Outside, Tyler demonstrates how to block for one of the younger looking girls in the group, who doesn't seem more than fifteen. She pities the ones who are so young. The sight distracts her for a moment, drawing her thoughts away from her present conversation. It's not very often that she gets to see Tyler interacting with the hybrids, but when she does, she understands why he says he has to stay. Why he has to be the one to give that poor girl a smile and lend her his patience as he teaches her how to defend herself. How to survive in this new world order.
It's her blood that's caused the problem, but it's Tyler who's doing his best to fix it.
Rebekah notices her looking. For a while, they both watch in contemplative silence.
"You'll want to watch out for my brother," Rebekah murmurs at last.
Elena's eyes snap over to the other girl. "What do you mean by that?"
"I don't know how you did it, but you've turned his head. That makes you the first one to accomplish that since he was a man alive."
Elena shakes her head. "You're mistaken. He only likes toying with my head."
"He hardly bothers with anyone else's."
"He's been ignoring me for days."
Rebekah laughs, but there is no humor in it. "And you believe that pretense? No, I know my brother, and you've shaken him up. At first, I wondered if I should be worried. When he stopped visiting my bed, I thought it was only a matter of time until he grew tired of me and boxed me up again—but now I realize it might be an opportunity, to live my life on my own terms." It all comes out in a long, pensive rush, as though now that Rebekah has found a willing ear, she cannot help divulging all of her secret thoughts.
Elena realizes her mouth is agape. She closes it, but Rebekah's words still whir in her mind. When he stopped visiting my bed, when he stopped visiting my bed, when he stopped visiting my bed.
She tries to reach for an intelligent response, and instead blurts out, "So has he stopped sleeping with Stefan, then, too?"
Rebekah raises her brows, in an expression eerily similar to Klaus's. "What do you think?"
"How long has this been going on?"
"When did he lose interest?" She trails off, without answering, her gaze somewhere very far away. When her eyes slide back to land on Elena, there is something terribly keen in her expression, as though she can see inside of her down to her smallest molecule. "We're in unchartered territory, now, darling."
"What does that mean?"
Rebekah looks meaningfully to Tyler. "Tyler Lockwood is your friend too, isn't he? Tyler and Stefan. And all of the loved ones you left behind." She turns back to Elena. "I can't say what Nick will do now that you've earned his interest, but I do know this. You're in the boat, now, sweet girl, sweet girl, so it's best you don't rock it."
"Are you speaking from personal experience?"
"Yes."
It ruffles her for Rebekah to seem so in earnest.
"Why are you telling me any of this?"
"Believe it or not, I too am capable of kindness, especially when it's been shown to me. It seems I must speak to Stefan." She stands up to leave.
"And do you follow your own advice?"
Rebekah smiles, a little sadly, a little wistfully. "Not nearly so much as I should. Have a care, Elena, or you'll end up just like me."
Maybe she'd gotten Klaus all wrong. Maybe, if he'd truly stopped sleeping with Rebekah, sleeping with Stefan, her earlier, morbid musings that she would never be more than a pet to him were all way off base. Maybe he does want her, exclusively. Maybe he feels whatever it is between them as strongly as she does. The idea of that he might want a relationship still feels hilariously impossible. No, he would never want that. But now the idea that he would be her lover, only her lover, plucks at her.
Maybe she has been the one in the wrong, jumping into this affair with Tyler without even having taken the time to talk to him first—
No, what she and Tyler had could never be wrong.
What was wrong was how easily just the barest notion that Klaus really did, somehow, care about her has her slipping back into old, dangerous thought patterns, tripping all over the place hoping to find some angle that would ease her conscience and let her accept him back.
But if he isn't sleeping with Rebekah, and isn't sleeping with Stefan, then doesn't that imply—
Nothing. It all implies nothing.
It all depends on what she finds out today.
She has to push all thoughts of Rebekah's revelations out of her mind as she settles in to wait, eager, despite the confusion Rebekah has stirred up inside of her, to confirm her suspicions.
The tea grows cold while she waits.
Her patience pays off.
She has a front row seat when Klaus finally appears in the courtyard later that afternoon. It's certainly convenient, for the layout of the Abattoir to demand so many comings and goings pass through this central location, with the long sweeps of rooms and galleries overlooking it. It certainly elevates the already vast potential for drama, with so many supernatural creatures all confined to one relatively small space being constantly forced to cross each other. That would be like Klaus, to design his home like a grand stage.
Just as she expected, he swoops in on Hayley, who's been making unlikely friends with Klaus's hybrids. Elena still doesn't know any of their names, despite how integral she has been to their unnatural existences. Maybe that's for the best. That way, she won't be too upset when they die.
When he kisses Hayley on the mouth, Elena takes pains to take in the little details. To notice every little thing she had been too—God help her— jealous to take in before. The way he holds her head, the angle of his mouth, the set of his shoulders. Elena has first-hand experience of what Klaus is really like when passion rules him, and, now that she knows what she's looking for, she feels quite certain that this isn't it.
No, it's something else again.
It's a seduction. Coldly calculated and executed with precision and care.
A furious triumph envelops her. He can fool the world, but he can't fool her.
She's waiting for him when he walks into his bedroom that night.
He pauses in the middle of taking off his jacket to absorb the sight of her, sitting calmly at the foot of his bed.
"Make yourself at home then, sweetheart," he says, amusement battling annoyance in his voice.
She would be lying if she said she does not enjoy surprising him.
"I know what you're using Hayley for," she says, cutting to the chase. She indicates the books left open on the side table. "I found an illustration that matched Hayley's birthmark, and decided to do a little extra research. Turns out she's not just a normal werewolf. That got me thinking, and now I only have one question left: Does she know what you're going to do to her?"
Klaus drags a chair over and straddles the back of it, folding his arms over the top to study her. "Does she know her blood is the key ingredient that will unbind the Crescent Wolf Clan? Yes. She's eager to meet her kinsmen."
"These spells never require just a little. This'll kill her."
"Yes, it will. It is as Davina said, though. Our witch was not present when the curse was laid, and thus, we shall have to break it in the ways of old. Blood sacrifice."
"You'd use her, just because she's from the right bloodline?"
He regards her steadily. Her own death is answer enough.
"Does Hayley realize that this is a one-way ticket?"
"Hayley is half-in love with me at least. Lust is a powerful ally when you don't want someone asking too many questions."
A fierce, unexpected pity swamps her. Hayley could so easily have been her, once upon a time.
"Of course," Elena says, bitterly. "That's why you seduced her. Don't you have any other ways to get what you want?"
"It's an effective strategy."
"I can't believe Davina would go along with this."
"You must think very highly of her."
Elena glares at him. "You've tricked her somehow. That's it, isn't it?" She thinks hard. "Does she think you're going to turn Hayley? Are you going to turn Hayley?" If Davina would be fine, in theory, with giving Klaus the entire pack to turn into hybrids, she would be fine with doing it to just the one wolf. The thought shakes her perception of who Davina is right down to the foundations.
But of course, Davina does not intend to let him get that far at all. The conjunction is only two days away. They'll have the bloodstone by tomorrow night.
"That depends," Klaus answers, drawing her out of her racing thoughts. "Would you ask Stefan to rip her heart out for you at the first opportunity if I took her home with us?"
"I would never," she retorts, before she realizes Klaus is teasing her. He's enjoying this conversation way too much. She gathers herself, tries to think of how she could wipe the smile off his face. "You can't use her like that," she says. "I won't let you."
"I'll use whomsoever I choose howsoever I choose," he tells her matter-of-factly.
She launches herself off the bed and paces. "That's the entire problem" she says. "You use people. You use me." She can't stand that here is yet another girl he intends to drain dry just the way he had done to her.
"Not anymore."
"What do you mean, not anymore? It's the entire reason I'm here in New Orleans! You called, and I had to answer."
"Are we back to this again?"
"I was crazy to ever have feelings for you." All he would ever see her as would be as his doppelganger with the magic blood, his slave with the pretty face.
"And yet, you keep talking about them."
She closes her eyes. Wishes, fervently, to escape all of this. Not just this room, or her physical captivity, or even this particular conversation, but to escape in a broader, more profound sense.
As far or as fast as she might run, though, she recognizes now that she would never escape what is inside of herself. What has seeped in like poison and now runs rampant in her blood.
No matter what she does—no matter if she helps Marcel and Davina to succeed, no matter if all she had hoped for last fall and winter were to come to pass, she begins to understand that there will never come a time when she can leave Klaus behind altogether. He will be with her always.
"You're right," she says, opening her eyes again. "I do keep bringing them up. How foolish of me."
"Kiss me."
She pulls back. "What?"
Klaus gets up, and comes to loom over her. "My price. I'm collecting it now. Kiss me."
"Is this just another ploy, like with Hayley?" she asks him quietly. The words sound like breath in her ears.
"No. This is something different."
Oh God, the way he's looking at her.
He doesn't touch her, but presses so close into her personal space that she can feel the heat from his body.
Unfortunately, she wants him. With every grasping, yearning element of herself, she wants him.
Her hand shakes as she presses her palm against the rough side of his jaw. He's just as hot under her fingers as she thought he would be. He leans into her touch, and she has the wild, harrowing thought that her blood is in his veins, that somehow maybe she has shaped him as much as he has shaped her. For he has shaped her. Nothing else could explain how desperately close she is to doing just as he's bid her to do.
"Kiss me, Elena." The words press into her, dripping over her senses, occluding everything else but the desire he's planted in her.
He is, she realizes, waiting for her to bridge that final space between them.
"I want to, but I'm afraid."
"There is no need to be."
"I never said you were the one I was afraid of."
His mouth curls, and she can feel the edge of one razored fang scrape across her flesh. "Are you so formidable as all of that?" The timbre of his voice draws her in, honey in the trap.
Unwittingly, she shifts closer to him. She can feel his eyelashes fluttering against her fingertips, the feeling deceptively gentle.
His mouth, his kiss, might be death, but she has never been afraid of dying.
When she pulls his beautiful mouth down to hers, it's like something tectonic shifts into place. She drinks him in, drinks his death and his violence and his fire like cold moonlight, and thinks, This is right.
And oh, she is a terrible thing to behold.
Who is she, that she would throw away the love and friendship of a good man for just this kiss? This moment of surrender?
Who is she, that she could so quickly forgive him for all of the lives he has taken, all of the pain and suffering he has caused, simply because all of that violence was not wrought upon her? That she could brush over Matt's horrific death, simply because it had been undone? That she feels less and less consumed by the initial feelings of anger and revulsion and betrayal over what he has done to her memories as the days go by because she recognizes, more and more, the gradual but inevitable slide that has become a freefall, the fall from grace which has led her to this point? She cannot bring herself to hate him anymore for hurrying her along. She'll probably never know what exactly happened between them in those times she can no longer remember and she finds with startling clarity that she no longer really cares.
There is, it seems, only one thing she cannot bring herself to forgive him for.
One reason why, no matter how right this feels, it's still impossible for her to give herself away to him. No matter how badly she wishes she could.
She drops away from him and dashes an embarrassing scald of tears out of her eyes.
Instantly, Klaus's hands wrap around her shoulders and drag her back against him, his mouth searching to resume their kiss, but she turns her face away, into his shoulder.
"I can't." She mouths the words, silently, against his shirt, but he seems to hear her anyway.
"You can," he replies, like it would be the easiest thing she's ever done.
Under her ear, she can hear his heart hammering against his chest. The sound that got her in to so much trouble to begin with.
"I wish it were so easy."
His grip on her tightens. "Elena—"
"I want to be able to—" She stumbles, unable to speak aloud the emotion clouding over her reason, before plunging forward, "—care for you, but I can't let myself. You could burn the whole world down and I wouldn't care, but—you murdered my Aunt Jenna, and I can't move past that."
Klaus drops his hold on her. Watches her while she wipes at the tears that continue to stream down her face.
"I wish that I hadn't," he tells her simply.
"You don't mean that though."
"But I do." This time, when he takes her into his arms, it is with a strange, uncertain tenderness. She lets him, too tired and sick of this unending labyrinth to fight him off again. He tips her chin up, so that she must look at him, and she finds she cannot bear to look away from those painfully serious blue eyes. "If I had ever thought—If I had ever suspected what you would be to me, I never would have chosen her for the sacrifice."
"I went willingly. You hurt her anyway."
"I know."
"How does that make up for any of it? Jenna's still dead."
"So are many millions before her." He says it so gently that she cannot be upset with him. "I was angry, and you paid the price of it."
"I don't understand. You had everything you wanted."
"I did, and I did not. You were so very beautiful, and so very brave, and I had no understanding of how fortunate I was that you rose from your pyre until I saw you again in that school hallway. It keeps me up at night, thinking of how I almost lost you before I ever knew you." He wears that soft, open expression on his face when he confesses this to her, and she knows then that whatever defenses she may have against him, they will certainly crumble.
She is so very tired of carrying the weight of her feelings with her everywhere she goes.
"How can I ever trust you not to do that again?" She asks the question out of one, final attempt to defend herself from him.
His thumb traces over her mouth. "Do you wish to trust me?"
Elena shivers in his arms. Makes what feels like an inevitable decision.
"…Yes."
She can see the spell that simple word weaves on him.
"I would see it done that no harm ever befell you again, by my hand or another," he swears to her, urgently, his words casting an enchantment of their own. He slides his hands up her jaw to cup her face, and, the moment feeling slow and suspended, seals his promise to her by licking the tears from her cheeks, the gesture at once wolfish and intimate.
When he seeks her mouth out, finally, to lap the salt from her lips, she opens herself to him. Parts her lips, so that he may press that cruel tongue into her mouth, so that those wicked fangs may pull at her lips until the tender flesh is dotted with blood. He tastes like her tears, like blood, like power. He tastes like everything she has achingly remembered and fought so hard to forget during her endless nights of longing and regret. Klaus had once called this The City That Care Forgot and she wants to forget about everything except for the feel of him, the smell and taste and sound of him, right now.
Her arms wrap around his neck and he chooses that moment to hoist her up, guiding her legs around his waist as he carries her over to the bed. He never stops kissing her as they move, and she doesn't fully register that they've crossed the room until she feels the softness of the mattress under her back.
She only has a moment to look up at Klaus, to appreciate his beauty as he looms over her, before he covers her with his body and recaptures her mouth with his. Her legs part for him automatically, and a vicious bolt of lust lances through her when he settles between her thighs.
This is madness, she thinks as Klaus trails his hand up her ribcage, peeling her shirt off in its wake. The shirt comes off, and then her bra, leaving her bare from the waist up. He stares down at her for a long time, tracing the undersides of her breasts, the shape of her collarbone, the circumference of her ribs. The uneasy realization that he has probably already seen her chest before flits through her mind, but that thought is quickly pushed aside when he cups her breast fully in the palm of his hand and traces a thumb over the center. The nipple stiffens under his touch.
"Beautiful," he breathes. He gazes upon her with such raw captivation that she is forced to conclude that maybe it doesn't matter if he has seen her naked body before. This is the first time that counts.
His hands stroke over her sides, coaxing the tide of suffusive pleasure building inside of her. Only when his fingers catch at the button to her jeans does she grasp his wrist to pause him.
"I can't do this if this doesn't mean anything to you," she warns him.
Klaus shifts the angle of their hands, reversing things so that he is the one curling his fingers around her hand. He lifts her palm to his mouth and presses a kiss there, in the center. "Allow me to convince you of my devotion."
And then he's flicking open the buttons on her jeans, tugging them down her hips. Her underwear follows a moment later. By the time it occurs to her that they are moving too fast, she's is completely bare to his ardent inspection. She spends what feels like hours like that, held fast by the intensity of his enraptured scrutiny, aware of every breath in her body, every twitch of her thighs and shifting of her hips.
She's not ready for it when he lays his palm flat against her hip and grazes the seam of her slit with the tip of his thumb. Her hips buck, like she's been shocked, but Klaus holds her steady. A slick of moisture trails away with his hand, and she would be mortified by how wet she already is for him, how blatant her craving for him really is, were she not completely distracted by him. Holding her with his hypnotic blue gaze, he slowly, deliberately lifts the thumb slick with her lust to his mouth and tastes her.
Her mouth falls open and her body pulses, sharp and tight and needy, as she watches him sample her.
It all happens very quickly after that.
Klaus descends on her, yanking her forward by the hips so that he can bury his face against the lush lap of her desire.
Every sense in her body narrows down to the feel of his lips, moving over her like streaming water, to her body, opening under him like a flower ripening to the sun. The surreality of Klaus's tongue swirling over her clit washes over her, through her. Ignites her, until she thinks it is too much to bear. His hands hold her pinned beneath him, unable to shift away from his attentions, unable to so much as buck against him as he presses his devotion into her. Her body pulses in a dark wave, her nerves dancing along the razor's edge that Klaus has drawn her out onto. This is her most forbidden fantasy come to vivid life.
She comes panting his name, a mantra, a charm, a ward against evil. She can feel him smiling against her thigh as she lies there on his bed, riding out the aftershocks of an orgasm that has tipped her entire world irrevocably onto its side. Sweat trickles down between her breasts, along her ribs, between her thighs.
When Klaus rears up to look down at her, she can see the moisture of her spending shine against his mouth and jaw.
A pang of longing courses through her. She reaches for him, and he pulls her up onto her knees, flush against him. His hands tangle in her hair and he kisses her deeply, intently, passing her flavor back to her on his tongue. His thigh brushes against her slick, throbbing clit, and she quivers against him.
In a moment he tears his shirt off, exposing all of those tempting miles of fever hot skin to her searching fingers.
She hardly has a chance to explore the shapes and planes of his body before he's flipped her again onto her back. This time, he throws her legs over his shoulders before returning to her sopping core.
The shock of skin on skin contact, of her thigh pressed to his shoulder and her heels digging into his back, makes the experience even more intense. She peaks twice more, in sharp, shattering succession.
When she thinks she cannot possibly take anymore, he lays his cheek against her pubic bone and lazily traces his tongue over the delicate bone at the crease of her inner thigh. His hands trail over her thighs and calves, slow, the way a storm brewing out at sea is slow. She watches in a haze as his nose skims over the soft skin of her leg, and he lays an open mouthed kiss against her femoral artery. His teeth sink into her so cleanly that she doesn't even realize that he's bitten her until his thumb gliding against her over-sensitive clit makes her jump under his hand. Klaus growls against her open leg, and holds her down as he takes her there.
The sight of him with her blood in his mouth does something to her. One moment she thinks she's too tired to go on and the next she is coasting, up, up into a high, thin, adrenaline fueled orgasm that splits through her in crazy, jagged waves that leave her trembling.
After, he crawls up her body and kisses her again. She strokes her hand through his hair, watching him from beneath her lashes while they kiss, considering him. Trying to figure out where they go next. She feels muzzy, stoned, like she can't wrap her head around what's just happened. Her thigh aches, and her body throbs all over.
She kisses him until dawn, and it's like the night they would have had last winter, if things had gone just a little bit differently.
Elena falls asleep in his bed, and wakes up alone.
The weak light filtering in from the windows overlooking the courtyard tell her it's already late in the afternoon.
In just a few short hours, when the sun sets, she'll go with Marcel, and retrieve the bloodstone.
A/N: Y'ALL. This chapter just about killed me. And, you know, Elena, but in other ways.
Thank you everyone for reading.
Please let me know if you're reading and enjoying this fic. More to come soon!
And as always, my ask box is always open on my tumblr over at livlepretre !