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
She was never supposed to see any of them again.
That is the bargain that she has made with herself, again and again over the past nine months, each time she has resigned herself to staying with Klaus. Everything she has done has only felt possible because her past had been closed to her.
So closed that she had thought she might have finally gotten over her desire to run.
Seeing them all again feels like that time she rammed a knife into her belly. The sight of them spears through her, a physical lance of pain in her chest, that shocks her again and again with each breath.
One look at them, and she could almost forget the past year had ever happened. She wants, more than anything, to fly to them.
There's only one thing preventing her.
And oh, how he stops her.
Klaus laughs in his father's face. "One witch, a couple of ordinary vampires, and some humans? I'm quivering in fear!" He shifts how he stands, further blocking the sight of her from any of the intruders—from her intruders.
Despite the venom Klaus injects into his words, she knows him well enough to hear the tremor of uncertainty in his voice. Only two nights ago, he had lain in her arms and confided to her, with a horribly false smile, what it had been like to grow up as the least of this man's sons. How he had yearned for his approval. For one clear moment, she had been able to see through the mists of time, into the heart of the boy he had been, before death had changed him. She'd thought she understood.
None of that prepares her for the pure, undiluted malice that Mikael directs solely in Klaus's direction. Her stomach swoops at the sight of that man's face. Ice fills her veins. She'd believed she'd grown used to vampires. To Originals. One look into Mikael's colorless, implacably hate-filled eyes teaches her how wrong she had been.
What could her friends have possibly been thinking, to team up with him?
How desperate had they been?
Damon's sharp expression, dangerously empty of human compassion, billows up in her mind's eye. And not a single one of her friends has said a word about rescuing her, instead allowing Mikael to do the talking.
Stark realization slices through her. They're not here for her. No, they're here for revenge.
The implication of how her friends must have actually spent their year apart dizzies her.
She and Tyler had been so wrong.
She tries to sneak a furtive peek at them over Klaus's shoulder, to confirm her suspicions—just one glimpse, her hungry heart pleads— but he keeps her pinned and concealed behind him with an iron grip on her arm. She can't see a thing of what's happening by the doors. The way he has his arm twisted behind his back to keep her in place must make it completely obvious that he's hiding someone behind him, but no one comments on the oddity. That lack of response drills in the truth to her even further: No one even realizes she's here.
And she can't let them realize it.
If they do, they'll only set their minds on rescuing her. If they don't die tonight, now, they'll die on the next attempt, or the one after that.
There has to be a way to turn them back, tonight, before it's too late.
(Just the thought of any of them here, now, after she's sacrificed so much to keep them out of this, drives her a little mad.)
(The thought that they are here, now, and she can't even let them know that she's here, that she's survived—that she can't touch them or hold them or tell them she loves them—that does worse to her.)
Around them, the hybrids shift, forming a defensive barrier around Klaus—and making it that much harder to see through the masses. Rebekah and Stefan square off together on the far side of the room, near the threshold leading to the back hallways and interior rooms of the Abattoir. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots Tyler cutting through the hybrids towards her.
Davina sidles up to Elena and Klaus, a frown pinching her brows. "Klaus, I don't think—"
A fireball rockets directly into the file of hybrids. It catches three of them in its blaze, instantly incinerating them. When the smoke clears, a dozen more witches—the final survivors of the French Quarter Coven, Elena supposes, or maybe their allies—have lined up behind her friends. It's Bonnie's hand, though, that shines with lingering magic. Who threw that fireball.
All hell breaks loose.
It's like a pin has been pulled on a grenade. Everything happens all at once, each moment like a flickering snapshot seared into Elena's brain.
Pyrotechnic magic explodes across the courtyard, only to smash against a barrier spell raised in haste by Davina around the center of the room, enfolding the three of them and most of the daywalkers who'd accompanied Davina behind its walls. The shockwave of the collision reverberates throughout the room. A few of the witches clutch at their heads on impact, and blood runs down their noses. Strikingly, Davina makes no move to harm the witches—maybe hoping to avoid wiping out the remnants of her coven on the very day she took control.
The hybrids surge forward. They move with surprising coordination, sweeping in together in teams with deadly efficiency.
Her heart careens up into her throat as she watches one launch herself at Jeremy. He pivots and stakes her cleanly through the heart, which drops her on the spot, although it doesn't actually kill her—can't kill her— only for a second hybrid to jump him while his back is turned. Elena cries out desperately, throwing all caution thrown to the wind, and wrenches at Klaus's hold on her, tearing at him with her nails and thrashing as hard as she can to get to her brother. She doesn't care who sees her— What it might mean—Can't even remember what was so important about staying out of sight. All she cares about is Jeremy.
It's to no avail. Klaus won't let her go.
All she can do is watch as Jeremy turns, somehow faster than she remembers him ever moving before, and miraculously blocks the hybrid from tearing his throat out. His arms shake under the strain of keeping the hybrid's jaws away from his throat, and Elena is forced to watch as his arms start to buckle. Damon rips the hybrid's heart out and moves on without stopping to even check if Jeremy is okay.
Relief rockets through her, only to be viciously trampled by the next sight of a friend in mortal peril.
And she has so many loved ones, all here in this room, and all of them fighting for their lives, and there is no sacrifice she can make big enough to protect them all—
There are so many bodies churning rapidly through the chaos that Elena has trouble making anything out—she spots Caroline flitting through the mass of struggling bodies, and, a moment later, catches a glimpse of Alaric and Matt as they battle their way forward. Each time she lays eyes on one of her friends, though, she loses them just as quickly in the mayhem. She loses track of Tyler in the crush. He could be dead already, caught in the crossfire of one of those gruesome spells, or behind enemy lines, or—
Her eyes snag on familiar brown curls as their owner dodges and strikes at a pair of hybrids. Her breath stutters in her lungs as she stares and stares and stares, unable to look away, unable to even believe what her eyes are telling her, as Katherine slides through the carnage like a water dancer. Her whole body resonates like a struck gong at the sight of her doppelganger, of her not-quite-mirror-image. The moment ends as abruptly as it began as she, too, gets swallowed up in the maelstrom.
Elena and Klaus remain unscathed behind Davina's shield, able to watch on, impervious to the terrible magicks and violence meted out right in front of them. The experience makes her feel wretched, sick and twisted up inside. It's like last May all over again, when everyone had been so determined to save her, so willing to die for her, and none of them had been able to see that her dying by Klaus's hand had been inescapable, that it had been better for her to fulfill her fate than for them to die trying to stop the inevitable. It's like that, only this time, it's so much worse because they don't even know she's alive. They're doing this just for the idea of her. It's the last thing she wants.
Klaus makes no move to join his army, nor does he let up on his grip on her at all. It's as though he's frozen to the spot, completely fixed upon the whirlwind of his father's approach. If only he would do something, maybe this wouldn't be so intolerable.
She spots Stefan, sans Rebekah, engaged in a heated brawl with Damon. Neither brother carries any stakes, but from the twisted rage and pain on Damon's face, she can imagine that whatever he screams at his brother is just as sharp.
For a second, the memory of him last summer, searching for Stefan, determined to bring him home no matter the cost, overlays the image of them fighting. Certainty that Damon is here to save his brother once again floods through her. That determination might be Damon's only thing left tying him to his humanity.
She hopes, recklessly, fiercely, that he'll succeed. Rescue Stefan from himself. Do what she could not.
On the other side of the courtyard, a resourceful handful of witches join hands and raise their voices together, weaving their words into a spell imbued with their combined strengths. Elena can tell the moment it takes effect, because the previously deadly speed of the hybrids and vampires on the field under Klaus's control slows to a mortal crawl. Without their speed, they're sitting ducks for the witches, even with all of their strength intact. It levels the playing field for her friends, a little, but she finds herself more frightened by this development than not. She can't bear the idea that either Stefan or Tyler could be left so vulnerable. Even the hybrids earn her pity, as they start falling before the brunt of the onslaught twice as fast as they had before.
So many dead, and all of them her responsibility, in one way or another. Her creations, as much as Klaus's.
In the midst of this bloodshed, Bonnie marches onward, to the front line, both hands raised, lips moving in a steady chanting stream as she tosses her magicks at Davina's shield.
"I'm not going to hold this up forever, Klaus," Davina calls over her shoulder. "Not without a cure for Marcel!" If Davina drops the shield, how long until she starts casting back at her friends? How long could they survive, if Davina unleashed even a fraction of what she had just the night before?
And yet—Her words are like a lifeline in a turbulent ocean. At last, something she can do.
Klaus doesn't seem to hear Davina. All of his attention is for the man Rebekah had called their father, who prowls toward them with singular purpose, that awful stake in his hand. Wherever he goes, hybrids fall like wheat beneath a scythe.
"Come out from behind your witch and face me, you little coward," Mikael sneers as he draws near.
Elena clutches at the back of Klaus's jacket. "Why is he here?" Her throat is so dry with fear that she can barely raise her voice above a whisper. Coward isn't a word she's ever dared to associate with Klaus before.
"He's my oldest enemy," he tells her, as though that is explanation in and of itself. "He's always hunting me."
The terrifying thought that even Klaus sometimes runs away ripples through her.
"I don't understand," she says. "You're invulnerable."
"Not to everything."
Bonnie makes it to the front line and shoves at Davina's shield. The shield cracks. Grimly, Davina raises her hand, in a dangerous, twisting motion Elena has seen her use before. "You're not from my coven," she hears her say.
They're running out of time.
Tyler appears at her side, and Klaus pushes her into his arms without turning to look at her. His eyes never leave Mikael as he stalks toward them. "Get her away," he orders him.
It's that stake, she realizes. Something must be different about that stake, to make Klaus so uncertain of himself.
For the second time in a day, Elena grapples with the very real possibility that Klaus might actually die.
She can't afford to dwell on this right now. Not when she has her own task to complete. (She won't be able to stand it if she takes the time to process this. Except, she cannot stop thinking, over and over, that a world with Klaus in it has become essential to her.)
Helplessly, she darts forward and squeezes Klaus's hand. Surprise flits across his face when he finally glances back at her.
"Come back to me," she commands him.
Klaus nods, the barest dip of his chin, before turning his focus back to his father.
Tyler pulls her away.
One of the daywalkers caught outside of the shield notices Bonnie battering away at it, and throws himself at her throat in a last ditch attempt to keep it up.
It takes Bonnie only a moment to turn and end the threat, but a moment's distraction is all Elena needs. Not letting herself think on this, or how much it hurts not to reveal herself to Bonnie, she ducks under Tyler's arm and dashes over to Davina before he can rein her in.
"For Marcel," Elena says, urgently, as she passes over the vial of Klaus's blood she had lifted off of him while she clung to him.
Davina stares at her mutely, and Elena wants to say something more—to please spare her friends, or to find a way to end this conflagration, something—but before she can muster anything articulate to say, Tyler catches up to them and pulls her away.
"Are you crazy?" he yells over the noise as he propels her along, getting her as far away from Davina as fast as he can. "Bonnie's about to blow that witch up!" He doesn't give her a chance to respond, instead hurrying over to the fountain. "There's a weak spot in the shield just over here," he explains as he brings her splashing through the basin of the fountain and out the other side into the melee.
It's total madness around them. Elena takes everything in in flashes, seconds that hang sickeningly on forever and yet pass so quickly that she can hardly trust what her eyes are telling her. One of the hybrids—that fifteen-year-old girl Elena had noticed training with Tyler just a few days ago— nearly takes Matt's head off, only for Jeremy to step in and take the girl down with a brutal efficiency she does not remember in her brother at all. He's acquired a machete, at some point during the fight, and hacks the girl's head off without a glimmer of hesitation. She sees Katherine twice more, near Alaric, who bleeds steadily from a wound in his shoulder. Every now and then Caroline pauses to scan the room while she holds the line against the hybrids—looking for Tyler, maybe. If any of them spot a glimpse of her, they don't seem to realize that she's not Katherine. There are scores of hybrids and vampires fallen around her friend's feet, but they're starting to tire, their mistakes more and more dire. It's only a matter of time before one of them falls.
Behind them, she can feel Bonnie and Davina hurl enough magic up between them to make her teeth rattle.
That strange awareness she has of Klaus ignites white hot in her blood. She stumbles, whipping around in time to see Mikael spring at him through a split in Davina's crumbling shield. He makes contact, throwing Klaus across the room before launching himself at him again and landing blow after furious blow to his face.
The distraction costs her. She gets hit with a stray spell that rips her out of Tyler's grasp and tosses her across the room as though she were a doll. Her head smacks against a glass window before she crumples to the ground.
She thinks she might have blacked out for a few seconds, because when she can open her eyes again, all of the fighting has shifted away from the doors and closer to the center of the room. She shakes her head, trying to clear the nausea and the pain spreading out along the base of her skull, and works to recover her bearings.
The first thing she sees when she regains her feet is Klaus, struggling beneath his father, who has him pinned, and narrowly managing to block that stake from impaling his heart. His whole body strains with the effort of keeping Mikael from reaching his goal.
They are interrupted by a blonde blur crashing into them with a savage scream. The impact pitches Mikael back fifteen feet. Breathing heavily, Rebekah offers her brother a hand and helps him to his feet. They have only a moment before Mikael rights himself and throws himself back into the brawl. What follows is too fast and brutal for Elena to follow.
Eventually, Klaus manages to get a hold of the stake, and, with Rebekah's help, successfully pins Mikael beneath him. "You've always underestimated me," Klaus informs his father with violent satisfaction, just before swinging up to drive the stake home.
The strike never lands.
Bonnie manages to finally shatter Davina's barrier spell at the exact moment as Klaus brings the stake down. Instead of attacking Davina straight away, Bonnie fires off a spell at Klaus that batters him like a gale force wind, smashing him across the room. The stake clatters from his fingers, and gets spun out into the crowd.
No sooner does Bonnie get that spell off then Davina twists her hand, and Bonnie's arm snaps and turns into an unnatural angle. She screams when it happens. Elena can't hear her over the din, but she sees the way her mouth distends. The way she gathers herself and, gritting her teeth, blocks Davina's next move and counters with her own. There's something not quite right about the spells Bonnie's throwing. She'd thought Bonnie had lost all of her super charged magic after she'd used it to resurrect Jeremy last May, but, even against Davina's extraordinary might, she manages to hold her own.
With the shield down, Davina has no choice but to begin exchanging rapid fire with the other witches. The conditions within the Abattoir deteriorate exponentially as the atmosphere ignites with deadly magic.
The distraction caused by Bonnie's spell doesn't keep the Original vampires down for long. Immediately, Mikael tries to buck out of Rebekah's hold, but seems to find the task more difficult than he expected. For all that Rebekah hangs on to him like a hellcat, Mikael seems oddly reluctant to harm her in order to free himself.
On the other side of the room, Klaus rolls onto his elbows, and shakes himself, as though emerging from a stupor.
Matt materializes out of nowhere from the crowd, that white stake in hand. Without hesitating, he takes his shot at Klaus, the stake aimed to punch through his back.
Elena feels reality slip out from under her feet as that piece of wood hurtles for Klaus's heart. Without even thinking, she runs to him.
Faster than she can track, Klaus flips up and catches the stake in one fist, the other lashing out to wrap around Matt's throat. His eyes bore into Matt's just as she skids to a halt, only yards away. Recognition plays over his face.
"The former lover," Klaus says slowly. "You're supposed to be dead." He turns to face Elena, and locks her in his gaze. "Yet somehow you don't seem the least bit surprised by this, sweetheart." There's some smoldering, unpredictable emotion flickering in his eyes, that puts her in mind of a wildfire just before it jumps containment and becomes an inferno.
Even with his throat caught in Klaus's fist, Matt still looks at her with equal parts astonishment and bewilderment, but she can't deal with that right now. Not if she wants Matt to live.
Elena takes a step toward Klaus. She holds out her hand to him. Prays that he'll take it. "Klaus, I can explain."
The next part happens very fast.
She's still watching Klaus, so she doesn't see Mikael step up behind her, or raise the dagger to bury it in her heart—all she sees is the way Klaus freezes mid-sneer, his face twisting instead in horror as he drops Matt and darts straight for her.
All she hears is him screaming her name.
She doesn't understand what's happening until Stefan shoves her out of the way and takes what would have been a killing blow in her place. Elena only has an instant to stare up into Mikael's cruel face before Klaus tackles him to the ground.
Elena has just enough time to recognize the curved bone hilt of the dagger before it moves, burying itself in Stefan's chest as it digs itself deeper into him. She knows this dagger. Had held it in her hand and used it to defend herself last winter. The French Quarter Coven must have retrieved it from that witch's body, must have given it to Mikael as a contingency against Klaus.
Exquisite agony blooms over Stefan's face, and he screams, and it's all Elena can do to wrap her arms around him to keep him from falling. Blood pours from his wound, soaks into her shirt. He convulses under her touch. She can feel the dagger moving under his skin, carving him up. Torture, that witch had called this. Torture, that Stefan chose to endure for her.
She can't stand this. Can't stand how no matter what choices she makes, the people she loves always end up hurt because of her.
"Tell me how I help you," she pleads with him. Tears burn at her eyes. "How do I—how do I—" Her fingers search his chest, trying to find where the dagger has shifted to inside of him.
She glances up, into his face, but it's like he can't even hear her.
Completely by accident, her eyes meet Damon's across the room.
He recognizes her.
She can see the moment it happens—the moment he understands that she's not Katherine, but the girl he thought he'd lost last year—it's in the way his mouth goes soft and his whole body seems to collapse a little bit in on itself, like he's just released a breath he's been holding all the time she's been away. His eyes rove her face, and then he's coming for her, a fervent determination written into him, shoving hybrids out of the way and ducking under spells.
And she can't help herself, the relief she feels at Damon's approach overwhelms her. Damon, who had always taken care of her. Who had always stood by her. Whose scheming nature and stormy feelings had dovetailed so closely with her own. If Atlanta were burning, there is no one she would rather have with her.
It feels right now like Atlanta is burning.
Stefan's knees give out, and Elena sinks with him to the floor. She holds on to his hand, and she lets herself cry, because none of this matters anymore—
The near year of her life that she's given up trying to keep everyone in Mystic Falls out of this, the lengths she's gone to to try to keep a measure of control on Klaus, the betrayals she's committed, the deaths on her head. It doesn't even matter that her loyalties are divided. None of it matters anymore.
Not when Damon is coming for her.
Someone pulls her up to her feet, forcing her to relinquish her hold on Stefan's arm. Elena spins to find Tyler holding her by the shoulders, having managed to make his way back over to her.
"We have to go, right now," he says.
"I can't leave—I can't!" Not like this, not with everyone still here—
He shakes his head. Tosses her over his shoulder before she can protest and races with her like that out the door.
She catches sight of Damon chasing after them, fury etching his face, just before Tyler clears the threshold of whatever spell was dampening the vampires' speed and he takes off at a true dead sprint.
Tyler doesn't stop running until they get to a parked car, parked several blocks away down a deserted side street.
He has her in the car, buckled, and the car tearing out into the street before she has time to process what's happened. He stabs the accelerator hard enough that she's slammed back against the leather.
Her hands shake on the seat belt button as she tries to figure out if she could survive jumping from the car at this speed, except she can't think at all—it's like every time she tries to take a breath, she gets no air at all, and every time she tries she just gets more and more out of breath.
"You need to calm down, 'Lena," Tyler tells her.
"How?" she pants. "We just left them there." Panic starts to blacken the edges of her vision. "How could we do that? We have to go back—Take me back. Take me back." She grabs at the wheel, and the car jerks into an abrupt u-turn that narrowly avoids side-swiping a row of parked cars.
"Oh fuck, Elena, you can't do that!" Tyler hollers as he wrestles control of the vehicle back from her and turns them back around.
"You're not listening to me at all! Our friends are back there! Caroline! And Jeremy!"
"I know. Okay? I know!"
"Then turn around!"
Tyler's jaw clenches. "Fine. But sip this first," he says, pulling out a bottle of water and handing it over to her. "You can't be having a panic attack if you're going back."
Elena obliges him, mostly because he's right, she has to get her head on straight—she needs to think—she just needs to think—now that she's no longer in the line of fire, just reacting moment to moment, she can see that there has to be a way she can diffuse this—
"This tastes strange," she realizes. She holds the half-empty bottle up and looks at it closely. The label on the bottle swims in and out of focus. "Tyler? What did you do?" The words slur thickly in her mouth.
If Tyler responds, she doesn't hear it.
A/N: Chapter 40 coming soon. Real soon.
In case any of you missed it, I posted a new klena oneshot as chapter 2 of my fic Power Plays (each chapter is a standalone oneshot).