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
Exchanging truths between them is as easy in the small hours before dawn as the slow, lingering kisses they trade back and forth. The low, thoughtful way he speaks to her, like he's reading from the parts of himself he keeps hidden, sates and sustains her in a way she had not known she needed until she met him. Everything outside of the circle of his arms and the resonance of his voice ceases. In these timeless hours, Klaus speaks more honestly to her than he ever has before, and she lets go her pretenses, and in her eyes and her mouth and her hands and the quiet way she hears him, she bares to him for the first time (the only time) the contents of her untamed heart.
She should feel exposed, dressed in nothing but his discarded shirt which barely skims her thighs, but she doesn't. Instead she feels powerful and bold, beautiful in a divine and sensuous way that, for just this one night, makes her invulnerable, and therefore generous. It isn't hard at all to listen to him, like this, to reach out with all of the great reservoir of her kindness and compassion and to bestow it upon him. The way he nearly gentles under her touch is more than just her imagination. If they could just go on like this, outside of time, outside of themselves, then Elena thinks they could almost be happy.
"Tell me something honest," she implores him. "Tell me something real."
So he tells her.
He tells her about a boyhood, lost in his own head, lost in the shadow of his brothers' more dazzling spirits and braver deeds. How even in discovering that there was something inside of himself which set him apart, set him at last above the others, he had lost the right to call himself his father's son.
"You think you're alone," she says, sad because his believing it has made it so.
"I've been a wanderer for centuries, exiled from myself and a stranger to any place I might call home," he confesses into her bare skin, his words a brand upon her heart.
"But this is your home," she says, needlessly, needfully. She wants so badly to understand him fully at last. To gaze upon each little piece of him, good and bad, human and monstrous, and to see him for all that he is, even if she'll have to live with herself for wanting him anyway. She feels herself on the brink of it now, like the dawn rising on her discovery of him.
He looks at her for a long time, his eyes dark and liquid in the dim lamplight. "It was," he agrees at length, bringing her back to their conversation. "And it will be again." There is something ageless about him, both very old and very young. Meeting his intense stare should frighten her, but she's long ago lost the instinct to look away. He reaches out and begins a steady mapping of her features, fingers trailing over each plane of her face with infinite care as he tells her, voice strangely bereft of any fierceness, "I am myself at last, and I see no reason to put off my return any longer. I mean to raise myself a kingdom here, for myself, and for my family."
His family. But who does he mean? His definition is flexible even under the calmest of circumstances.
"Why now?" she asks him. "Why not last summer, when you first broke the curse?"
His finger traces her brow, sweeps over the fragile curve of her cheek. "Because I can no longer go on as I have." That lack of fierceness reveals itself for what it truly is, then: a surrender so sudden and profound that it knocks her breathless.
She sees then to the very edge of his profound loneliness, and, looking past it, recognizes in turn the part within herself that corresponds to the empty places around it.
Something in her face must alert him to her newfound understanding, because Klaus pauses, then, and looks at her as though he is as caught in her as she is in him.
Some feeling she cannot quite place flickers in his eyes.
Wordlessly, he dips his mouth to hers, taking a long, savoring taste of her. One of his hands wanders, past the hem of her shirt— his shirt, cloaking her body— to the juncture between her thighs, where he dabbles his fingers in her pooling wetness.
She undulates against him, at once rueful of the barriers of clothing between them and glad that they never finished stripping him earlier. If his pants had come off, if she had held him naked in her arms, she would not have been able to resist the temptation to have all of him.
Despite this madness (because what else can this irresistible pull between them be?), there is still enough of Elena Gilbert left to whisper that she is not ready for that. Not yet, when she still has so far to go.
Klaus's hands coast along her body, denying her any sort of release, any sort of escape. It is so like him, to spin her this beautiful cage and hope she does not notice. "You've given me clarity where before all was as mist and shadow," he murmurs in her ear. The low timbre of his voice rumbles through her chest. Makes her feel his words all through her body as much as she hears them. "I thought I just wanted to amass my armies, but I have seen in you the path of conquest." He pulls back so he can watch her face. "I want to set you beside me, and look upon you always."
"I'm not interested in any more bloodshed."
He laughs, and the sound is intimate and indulgent "A shame, then, that you are so well suited to it."
She knows herself well enough now to agree with him. She captures his hand and links their fingers together. "You make me weaker than I should be. I keep forgiving you for unforgivable things," she admits, running her thumb over the back of the hand that drove the stake through her innocent aunt's heart. "But please don't push me," she warns. Beseeches. "If you touch anyone else I love, I'll burn you down."
He tucks her in against his side and sucks her fingers into his mouth. "Are you so dangerous as that?"
"Yes."
He smiles for her, and kisses her again. "You darling thing," he says, pulling her beneath him. "So sweet. You enchant me entirely."
He's a fool to underestimate what fearful twists her Petrova heart would dare.
It all feels like a dream when she awakens. Impossible that any of it should have happened, and yet inevitable.
How fitting.
Awakening in Klaus's empty bedroom, illuminated by a hazy late afternoon light that shines too bright on everything, she can't imagine they could have talked like that. How they could have passed through the walls of their mutual distrust and opposing motives and wound up together on the other side of the veil. She can no better piece together how it happened than she can conjure last night's reckless sweeping high that had felt like running out to greet an old lost love at the end of a long and endless road and being wonderfully, impossibly met in the middle distance.
It occurs to Elena, with an air of unhappy premonition, that she has been repressing her feelings for him for a long time now.
Those feelings, now that she has begun to honestly take note of them, are bound to cause her nothing but misery.
If she can just smother them a little bit longer, she may actually survive this.
Marcel himself comes to see her that afternoon, finding her just as she emerges from Klaus's bedroom.
She knows what she looks like, her hair a wild mane down her back, her mouth still swollen. Knows how she must reek of sex and blood to Marcel's predator's nose. There's nothing to do to save her dignity other than straighten her shoulders and meet his appraising gaze with her head held high.
How he sees her in this moment she cannot fathom, but, after staring her down for a heavy minute, he slowly asks her, "Are you still with us?"
"Nothing's changed."
He raises an eyebrow. "Hasn't it?"
Whatever period of grace had fallen between herself and Klaus the night before has evaporated with the morning dew. None of it feels quite real. Or—none of it feels any realer than the other fantasies she walked through all of last fall.
So she pushes all of the lingering emotions lingering over from last night down, and instead thinks of Hayley, soon to be Dead Hayley. Of this entire clan of werewolves Klaus plans to free from their decades old curse, only to chain them with a worser one. Of all the hybrids whose lives have been ruined by him and by her already—She takes a deep breath and refocuses, refusing to allow herself to brood over the things she cannot change. "No. What we're doing is for the best." For the best, before she has time to—
She cuts the thought off more viciously than the rest.
"Besides," she continues, raking her hands through her hair. "He'd kill us if I don't find it." Distantly, she wonders if she would have the nerve to do what must be done to prevent that. To try.
"Good to hear your head's still on straight." Marcel proffers a water bottle filled with vervain, a tacit sign that he still accepts her as his ally. The sight of it jars some errant thought, for just a moment, some anxiety, but it's there and gone in the time it takes for her to reach out and grasp the bottle.
"When do we leave?" she asks as she uncaps the bottle and takes a sip.
"Tonight," Marcel says, watching her drink. "Be ready at sundown to meet me by the carriage entrance."
She takes a long time in the shower, scrubbing the night off of her. Scrubbing Klaus off of her.
It's only when her fingers skim over her scabbed thigh that she freezes, like a clock stuck ticking the same second over and over as she remembers his kiss and his bite and the taste of vervain at the back of her throat and his teeth marking her and the damp cool taste of herbs seeped in water and the flavor of the magic as it wove its protections around her and the clean sharp slice of his fangs in her leg and the seeping of her blood onto his tongue and the release that had destroyed her, that had thrown her, exhausted, into the wilderness of her heart that loved and feared and hated too much, and the way he had kissed her afterwards, pressing her blood and her power and his ferocity into her mouth, into her soul, and never once had he questioned the vervain running through her blood.
The scab peels off under her fingers. Soapy runoff mixes with twin trails of blood, which ooze down her legs in shallow rivulets and turn the water at her feet pink.
Elena watches, numb with her own capacity for stupidity, as the blood pinkened suds swirl down the drain.
Vervain couldn't incapacitate an Original, and whether it would even cause the irritation it had caused Elijah when she threw that grenade in his face last spring is entirely debatable. Klaus no longer wears his daylight ring. Maybe he's no longer afflicted by any vampiric weaknesses, no matter how minute.
It's possible there would be no tell even if he had noticed.
Once there, the sinister thought refuses to leave.
Had the whole thing been just a ploy, to suss out any hint of betrayal on her part? An evidence gathering expedition? Their pre-dawn conversation whirls through her mind, abstract, slippery. She can barely remember what they talked about, the entire conversation overwhelmed by the momentous enormity of his mouth and body upon hers. It would be just like him, to gather all of the proof necessary to destroy her, and then keep it to himself, waiting until she would be at her most vulnerable to expose her and obliterate her.
No. No. He'd wanted her long before she'd ever carried the evidence of her treachery in her blood.
The possibility that he had been too distracted to notice occurs to her.
Either way, she can't afford to wait around and find out. She is, at the least, grateful to herself for not succumbing to Klaus's immense charms until the last possible moment. If she had gone to bed with him any sooner, she doesn't know how any of this would have played out. As it is, if she can live through tonight, she may just be able to make this work.
All she has are the cards she has been dealt.
(And the ways she has chosen to play them.)
Elena straightens her hair and prepares for battle.
Klaus steps into the bathroom and watches her coax the last few pieces into glimmering submission. He runs his fingers through her hair, still warm from the iron, while she works, and she tries hard not to drop the flat iron and singe her fingers. It's not just the fear of burning herself that makes her heart leap.
She had hoped not to see him again until this night's work was over.
Carefully, Elena unplugs the flat iron and sets it down on the counter to cool before turning to face—what? Her seducer? Her lover? Her fixation? An answer to a question she does not quite dare ask? She knows he is still her enemy, but it's something she reasons rather than feels.
"You're up late," he notes, skimming his fingers over her neck, the underside of her jaw. Tipping her face up to his.
"I couldn't sleep last night."
He huffs a laugh that ghosts over her mouth. "How very strange."
"Shouldn't you be busy today? Putting your plan in place?" Please go away. Please don't make this any harder than it has to be.
"I am. But I wanted to stop in and see you before my attentions were required elsewhere."
She studies him intently. "We never finished our conversation last night."
"I've already told you everything that matters," he replies, his honesty almost enough to strip her bare.
She purses her lips. Steadies herself. "Are you really going to—to—" She stumbles over the word kill. "—use Hayley like that?"
"Is that what's truly on your mind?"
No, what's on her mind is that last night she had kissed him and held him close to her heart and given him the full measure of herself, and now she can smell Hayley's perfume on his collar, and, beneath that, a loamy, lupine smell, like the forest at night after it's rained. Obviously he'd risen from her arms this morning and continued playing his cruel game with Hayley while she slept. She doesn't like the curl of jealousy low in her belly that these observations make her feel. She doesn't like that her charms are so paltry than he can move on from them with such rapid ease.
"It's a serious question," she says, holding his eyes. "I don't like what you're planning to do to her."
"You don't like my methods for achieving it, you mean."
She frowns at the hand tucking her hair behind her ear. "Obviously."
His other hand finds her hip. "You must admit it was effective on more than one front, though."
His thumb circles a spot just inside her iliac crest. Even through a thick layer of denim she can feel the intense heat of that lazy gesture.
Elena swallows thickly. "Yes." Her arms circle around his neck, drawing him closer, of their own accord.
This is a problem, she thinks, as he lowers his mouth to her neck and licks a hot, wet stripe over the mess of scars left by other vampires. She shudders, breathless, when his mouth clamps over her neck, sucking gently at the sensitive skin. His teeth graze over her flesh, but the feeling of his fangs so close to her life's blood does not scare her the way that it should. Maybe once you've died that way, you can never feel fear for it again, only fascination. A yearning, profound and shapeless and insatiable, akin to a longing for home. Maybe that is why deep, restless water beckons to her still.
At some point, she hops up onto the bathroom counter, or he lifts her up, his hands sliding from her hips to curve around her ass, drawing her forward, flush against his body. Whatever scruples had been plaguing her ten minutes ago, she cannot remember what they are now. The feeling of his mouth against her throat has obliterated them completely. Helplessly, Elena arches against him. Her chest presses against his, and everywhere her body meets his feels like it's on fire. Desperately, she fists her hands in his hair and yanks his mouth up to hers, taking feverish kisses from his mouth that drive out reason and leave only this all-consuming black star of passion between them. This hellish desire that sometimes takes on the dimensions of her salvation in her deepest moments of confused dreaming.
Klaus pushes her back, so that her spine is pressed against the mirror, and, faintly, she thinks of the two of them, redoubled—except that is not right—because it is only herself who plays the mirror, reflecting herself and herself and herself against him time and time and now time again—
She keens into his mouth and eagerly parts her thighs for him, and it's only the ache that blooms there when he steps between them that jolts her from the thrall Klaus so easily casts over her.
"You're distracting me," she mumbles into his mouth.
He either doesn't hear her, or pretends that he doesn't, and it takes several more minutes for Elena to gather herself enough against his urgent mouth and his deadly roving hands that almost make her crave to submit to his possession.
With a ruthless force of will, Elena tears herself away and braces her palms against his chest to give herself some space to breathe. He lets her, though it's not in his nature to halt pursuit in the middle of the chase. She's painfully aware of how unable she would be to push him away if he did not allow it. How quickly she would succumb to his terrifying temptations if he pressed her in the slightest.
"I know I can't talk you out of using Hayley in the sacrifice," she says, unable to meet Klaus's eyes. Instead, she looks to a spot on the wall over his shoulder. "But if you're going to kill her, then I want you to at least turn her." Just in case everything falls apart tonight, and she finds herself going through with Klaus's plan tomorrow.
"You'd be more convincing if I couldn't hear your teeth grinding while you asked."
"I'm serious."
He plays with the hem of her shirt. "You've grown demanding."
"You keep encouraging me to speak my mind." She pushes his hand down before he can touch his fingertips to the bare skin of her abdomen. "I don't want anyone else to die on my watch. I'm sick of it."
"This again?" Tenderly, he cups her face, and makes her look him in the eye. "Death is inevitable, for nearly everyone."
She knows that. Understands it in a deep, soul-altering way that this immortal creature, surrounded by his everlasting family and night-eternal company, can never truly grasp. Elena Gilbert knows what it is to look so long and so deeply into death that the shadow passes into herself. To be so surrounded by it that she has learned to make her home in it. Death is a country and sometimes she feels like its only citizen.
Surely she would never welcome this shade into her arms were she not so well inured.
"Have you even asked Hayley her opinion on the matter?" Klaus asks her. "For all of her devotion to me, she pities the other hybrids. I do not think she should like to join their numbers."
"What if there were another way to break the curse? Would you still do it this way?"
"Do you know of one?" he asks her closely, something sharp and curious in his tone, as though he thinks she might.
"No. It's just a hypothetical question."
He studies her narrowly for a long time, the hand not holding her face stroking absently along her thigh. She wonders if its deliberate. If he's thinking of the vervain he must have tasted in her and is devising some twisted torture for her as they speak. Could she risk asking him directly?
"Well? Would you?" she presses him, nervously turning over her options in her mind.
"How interesting," he says, the light of epiphany shining in his eyes.
She pulls back warily. "What?"
His next words drive out everything from her thoughts.
"You truly are more nettled by my sacrificing the girl than you are by my plans to kill her or by my stringing her along."
Her mouth gapes. "I am not!" she insists, a moment too late. It is no matter. He hears the truth in her protestation that she already knows in her heart. He is completely right.
The truth of it sears her. And oh, God, she cannot stand the idea that anyone else would forge a connection with him anything like the one they share. Cannot countenance the idea of releasing him from the one way in which she knows that she alone holds him to another.
Klaus reads the anguish roiling inside of her, beneath the surface, with unnerving ease.
Lowering her guard with him last night had been a dire mistake.
Gently, he cups both hands around her face and strokes his thumbs over her cheeks. "It won't be anything like it was between you and me last year," he says, something odd in his voice. It takes her a moment to realize that he is trying to reassure her. Klaus, who had robbed her of her life and her future and couldn't understand why those facts upset her, who had thought nothing of pursuing her while flagrantly sleeping with both his sister and Stefan, who has, on more than one occasion, demonstrated with spectacular violence just how very inhuman and other the predator under his beautiful skin really is, understands her well enough in this one, vital aspect to fold her up in his arms and reassure her.
She starves for him.
"I won't be the one wielding the knife," he continues. "I will merely be there as a witness, and to ensure that all goes aright."
In just a little while, she's going to slip past his guards and she's going to go find the bloodstone, so she can put a stop to all of this bloodshed. As much as the idea of reforging the chains on his soul twists something in her chest she hadn't even realized was there until last night.
He'll be devastated when he discovers the role she's had in razing the dream of his kingdom to the ground. He'll never forgive her.
And, she realizes, recalling with sudden clarity the elemental magnetism she used to sense between them, the feeling of like calling to like, they will no longer be bound together. It will be as though she has untwined her fate from his.
Last year, she had wanted nothing more. Now, the thought of it, inevitable and necessary though it is, fills her with a strange new sadness, as though she has just discovered a well within her heart, small enough in diameter that she had never noticed it before, but so deep she would drown if she ever tried to dive down to the bottom of it.
Tentatively, Elena reaches out and touches Klaus's face, her gesture a mirror of his own.
Gathering her courage, Elena admits to him the one truth she can afford to let him have. Allows herself to selfishly say it just this once. "Deep down, I can't shake this feeling that I'm supposed to be with you."
His face softens, just this slight lessoning of tension in him, and he gives her that look again, the one she does not want to name, because if she names it then she doesn't know if she'll be able to do what she must.
"Elena." He breathes her name like a prayer. "I want you more than I've ever wanted anything in my very long life."
Weakly, she tells him, "That's not true. You wanted to break the curse."
"That was part of having you. Now there are other things that I want from you."
"I don't know what to do about this. I can't hold the idea of you and me in my head."
"Then we're fortunate that I've imagination enough for the both of us."
The afternoon slips by, the sun sinking low on the horizon.
She wants him to leave, as soon as possible. Cannot bear to be alone with him.
She never wants him leave. Would love to pretend again, like she had last night, when she had pretended so hard that the fantasy had become an unlikely reality.
Elena Gilbert has been at war with herself for years now.
The part of herself that is just and right and self-sacrificing can only fight bravely on for so much longer before she needs to rest. And so, that part of herself makes a strategic retreat, allowing the part of her that grasps and yearns and hopelessly wants to guide her.
For just a little while longer, she lets this happen. Just in case everything is different tomorrow.
Klaus leaves at dusk after a flurry of text messages capture his attention. Marcel's doing, perhaps. It's later than her appointed meeting time with Marcel, but she figures he must know that she can't exactly slip out with Klaus right there. She doesn't think he would leave without her.
"I'll see you in a few hours," he murmurs against her mouth as he kisses her goodbye.
After he leaves, she waits by the window, hoping he'll cross below and leave the Abattoir. When a few minutes pass and she doesn't see him, she realizes he must be somewhere in the building. It will be up to her to sneak out, and hope he doesn't spot her.
"I can do that," she whispers to herself. No one's ever told her she couldn't move about here of her own free will. Nothing's stopping her. Just a quick jaunt down the hall, then three turns to get down the back staircase, and then all she has to do is navigate the labyrinthine rooms in the back of the building to get to the carriage door. Easy.
Holding her breath, she creeps out of Klaus's suite of rooms and makes her way down the hall to the servant's stairs in the back—which will forever in her mind bear the imprint of Klaus wild-eyed fear, his hands, dripping with blood, hot on her arms as he searched her over for injuries.
Just past the bottom of the stairs, she has to ease past an archway that leads out into the courtyard. Through the opening, she can see Tyler training with the hybrids again, just like the day before, and Hayley lurking around the edges of things. Drawn to the wolves around her despite whatever misgivings she may have against them. The urge to go out there and warn her of what Klaus has planned for her clamors against the necessity of getting to her rendezvous point as swiftly as she can.
She keeps going. Has to keep going.
A hand closes around her elbow at the next corridor crossing. She spins around to find Tyler Lockwood holding on to her arm.
"I saw you pass by a minute ago," he explains. "You look worried."
Not so stealthy as she had hoped, then.
"I can't talk right now."
He looks around them. "Are you okay?" he mouths.
She nods, slipping out of his grasp. Steals a moment to really take him in. There is so much she needs to say to him. So much she needs to figure out. She doesn't want to hurt him, but she also doesn't know where her future lies.
Impulsively, she throws her arms around him and gives him a brief, fierce hug. "I'll find you later," she tells him. "We'll talk then. Go back to the others."
He nods, and, as trusting and loyal as any friend she has ever had or hoped to have, lets her go.
She doesn't deserve him.
Feeling suddenly like she might cry and ruin any pretense of composure she desperately needs if she's really going to go through with yet another reckless, life or death scheme, she hurries through the remaining corridors, dashing her tears away with the back of her hands.
At the final crossing, a small informal foyer with the carriage door in sight, Stefan blocks her way.
"Going somewhere?"
Elena stares him down. A mere ten feet separate them, but in that moment, it feels like an ocean.
She doesn't know what to say to him that will convince him to let her through. Marcel must be waiting for her, just a little beyond that door. If she calls out, he'll probably come through to extract her.
Except she doesn't want him to fight Stefan. Not when she can't say who would win or how far Marcel would take it if it did come to blows. She can imagine the lessons Klaus must have taught him. The only silent witness is a dead witness.
She can't call out for help. Nothing is worth risking Stefan.
She still has to get through.
Taking a deep breath, she crosses the final distance to him and looks up, locking her eyes with his. "Let me through, Stefan." She pours every ounce of her formidable persuasive skill into her words, willing him to listen to her.
"Where are you going, Elena?"
"I have something I have to do. It's life or death."
"I know Marcel's out there, waiting for you. Did he get you into some kind of trouble?"
She shakes her head, but he presses her.
"Tell me what's wrong, Elena," he pleads with her, voice gone raw and quiet. "Let me help you."
Everyone keeps saying that, as though anyone other than her can fix these problems she's created.
"Last time I was here I did something I shouldn't have. Klaus will kill me if he finds out. I have to fix it before that happens, and I need Marcel's help to do it. Please, Stefan."
"I'll come with you." He says the words like he's swearing an oath. In a way, he is. If he lets her leave, he's siding with her once and for all.
"You can't. Everything is too precarious as it is."
He holds her gaze for a long moment, his green eyes gone black and eerie in the half-dark as he weighs her words.
He steps aside for her.
"I'll keep Klaus distracted for you." He catches her arm as she darts for the door, and when she turns around to face him, his face is grave. "Remember what I said about him. Watch your back."
"I will."
He lets her go, and she slips out into the warm night air.
Marcel steps out from the shadows across the carriageway. "Ready?"
"Ready to go ambush some witches and steal a dark mystical artifact out from under their noses?" She takes a deep breath. "Sure. When am I ever not."
"Good. Follow me."
A/N: Up next: Witch drama. A lot of witch drama.
Thanks for reading, and to everyone who left me such lovely reviews on the last chapter! You are all MAGIC.
Also want to put out a special shout out to mercurialobsession who makes the most AMAZING FE fanart and playlists over on tumblr. Seriously I am over the moon in love with them.