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 and Implication of Non-Con/Hostage situation/explicit violence and torture/gratuitous angst/extremely dubious consent/potential character death
Her best work has always been done after the ship's hit the iceberg. She's great at turning defeat into victory. She has to be. She's just a mortal girl. Too slow to prevent disasters, but gifted at prizing salvation from doom.
"I told you not to rock the boat," Rebekah chides her without looking up from the window.
"I guess I'm more like you than either of us would like to admit."
This draws a smile from Rebekah. It's a true one, and almost sad enough to make Elena forget, for a moment, about why she's come.
"I knew there was a reason I didn't like you," Rebekah says, finally turning to look at her. "For what it's worth: I'm sorry. For what's happening to your Tyler Lockwood. Nick has done much the same to every man I've ever cared about."
"Thank you." She'd thought it might be more difficult than this to coax Rebekah's sympathies to the fore. None the less, she finds that she really does mean it.
Rebekah ponders her. "Why have you come to see me? I can't free your boy for you, if that's what you're hoping, even if I wanted to." There's something almost regretful in her voice when she tells her this.
Her declaration is not unexpected. Elena pushes it aside for now. Takes a deep breath, readying herself for the plunge. Now or never. "Stefan wants to run away with me. Tonight. In less than an hour."
A shutter draws closed over Rebekah's expression. She rises to her feet and adjusts her uncharacteristically rumpled blouse. "So he's chosen you, after all. Congratulations. I suppose the past is never dead, and all that." She heads for the door.
Hardly the fireworks Elena had prepared herself for.
This calm throwing in of the towel rocks her more than a classic Rebekah-style fit would have. She has to completely rejuggle the talking points she had so carefully rehearsed.
"You don't understand," Elena hurries to explain, before Rebekah can walk out the room. "That night, when you brought Matt here for Stefan to kill him— Stefan knew he wasn't really dead after he drained him. He helped me smuggle Matt out."
"And your point?"
"Stefan is trying to get me out because he feels an obligation to me. But I know how this ends. He'll live the rest of his life being hunted, and eventually Klaus will kill him. Either for choosing me over him then, or for running away with me now. I can't allow that."
Rebekah cocks her head to the side like a bird and studies her. "Why should I help? You've just told me it's official: You're stealing Stefan away from me, despite your prior assurances to the contrary. He chose you. Even after…" Her hands open and close around empty air. Even after I saved him, Elena almost hears her say.
"You're in love with him. Since when have you ever disobeyed your heart?"
"Never," Rebekah answers slowly. Except, it's like Rebekah's not speaking to Elena at all. Her gaze is cast inward, sweeping over a thousand years of heartache and loss. And a heart so full of love that she cannot help but give it out, again and again, despite the way it's been mistreated.
Elena musters all of her considerable powers of persuasion and pours it into her next words. "You have the power to save Stefan." She hesitates. She won't be able to take the next part back. (But she's never been one to balk.) "Compel him. Make him forget he ever helped me. Forget he ever loved about me, if that's what it takes to keep him here. To keep him safe from Klaus. He won't hurt Stefan unless he thinks his loyalties are divided. Please, Rebekah."
Rebekah studies her. "You're asking me to compel him to forget about you?"
"If that's what it takes."
"What'll happen to you, at the end of this plan?"
She shakes her head. "That's not what matters."
The other girl takes her measure. Nods once, to herself. "Okay. I need to find him." She pauses at the door. "Thank you. For coming to me. For choosing to save him."
"Wait. Rebekah…" For a minute, the words fail her. "I have one more favor to ask."
"I already told you I couldn't save your lover. Not from Nick."
Elena squares back her shoulders and lifts her chin. If she looks weak, or uncertain, Rebekah might tear her throat out for what she's about to reveal.
"What if I told you I had a white oak ash dagger?"
Rebekah gives her a pitying look. "Those don't work on him. Werewolves are immune to silver." She turns back toward the door.
"This one's made of gold."
Rebekah freezes. Spins back around. "You'd murder him?" she snarls.
Elena's shocked by how swiftly Rebekah leaps to her brother's defense. The cold, assessing eye she runs over Elena right then is pure predator. It's a look Rebekah hasn't tossed her way in months.
She'd forgotten how frightening Rebekah could be, in the right circumstances.
"No, not murder." Elena licks her lips. "Incapacitate. For just a little while. While you compel Stefan so he's safe from Klaus's questions, and while you free Tyler. I'll pull the dagger out again as soon as you say the word."
Rebekah laughs at her. "Are you insane? You haven't even tasted the bare edge of the sort of rage my brother's capable of summoning. I have though, and I don't desire to retread that ground any time soon."
"You just said he'd done the same thing he's doing to Tyler right now to every man you've ever loved… I already knew that, because I read your diaries, the first time I was in New Orleans."
"You did what?"
"I read your diaries," Elena continues over her, "and I learned that you're not the monster you like to pretend you are. At least, that's not all you are. You're also a girl who loves, deeply, completely. I know you would have saved those loves from Klaus if you could have. Please, Rebekah. Help me save Tyler."
Rebekah wavers. Softens. The romantic girl in Rebekah overpowers the blood-drenched vampire in her.
"You would need white oak ash, to dip the dagger in ahead of time," she finally says.
"I was hoping you could help me with that."
"If you can dagger my brother, I'll free your Tyler Lockwood."
"He's stubborn," Elena says. "Brave. You'll have to compel him not to come back."
"Obviously," Rebekah scoffs. "I'm not going to participate in this far-fetched plan only for it to fail for lack of precaution. Now. How will you manage to dagger him?"
"I have a plan to lure him out."
"You think it'll work?"
"Have you ever known Klaus to pass up the chance to chase after a woman with my face? Especially when she's running away from him?"
Rebekah gives her a pitying look, then, that Elena cannot parse. "No, never." Then, "You'll be the doom of each other before this is through."
(The thing about Rebeka, is that as much as they have hated each other, they have also come to understand each other. It's not possible to really hate someone who loves someone you also love. Doubly impossible when that person also knows what it means to live in Klaus's power.
Impossible things become possible, in those circumstances.)
Klaus startles her when he brings up running away before she has the chance to mention it again. Part of her, though, is breathlessly ecstatic that he'd picked up the thread she had dropped for him earlier in the night, before the kiss, before she'd seen what exactly he'd done to Tyler, without the need for any extra prompting from her. It makes what she needs to do just a little bit easier if he's already revved himself up into a covetous paranoia all on his own.
It's a high thin hope that burns in her blood when she runs out of the library. Like breathing fumes to survive, but it's all she has.
There's another part of her deeply satisfied that he's plucked the idea of running from the surface of her mind with such ease. It proves their attunement toward each other flows both ways, whether or not he is conscious of their connection in the same ways as she is.
She'll use that tonight to win.
She'll use anything, anyone, to win at this.
Even him.
She can feel him watching her as she says her goodbye to Tyler. Can feel his jealous rage, his needling desire.
For a moment, she doesn't think he'll let her get as far as the lawn. She fears she'll have to come up with some other way to get close enough to him to plant the dagger.
Yet she can do nothing other than proceed with the plan as discussed with Rebekah.
But just as she had hoped, he lets her slip out of the house. Lets her run from him.
Part of her hates him for trying to toy with her like this. She intuits so clearly how he intends to punish her by allowing her the hope of escape, only to choke her with despair at the last moment.
The larger part of her hates herself even more, because she uses the same strategy on him.
It's the instant when he catches her, when he feels most assured of his victory over her, that she steals the crown from his head.
The feeling of the blade sliding into Klaus's heart makes her blood sing with victory. Relief.
That's not all, though. Turning this weapon on Klaus, using his obsession with her to get close to him, feeling his heart beat slow and his body fail, all at her own hand—
It utterly devastates her.
Achilles also thought he could not be slain.
What does that make her, to lay him so low?
The dagger pulls loose with terrible ease.
Unlike the last time she had done this, she does not tuck the dagger into her pocket.
For the second time, Elena watches as living color and warmth erupt over Klaus's body. She can feel his first heart beat explode through his chest. Can hear his first gasping breath, just before his eyes flutter open and fix upon her.
The grass underneath him is soft and green with spring, and the early morning sunlight paints his skin in shades of rose and gold. Watching him come back to life is like seeing a scene from a fairytale unfold before her. Like true love's kiss has woken the sleeping prince.
Except, Klaus is no prince, and the blood drying tacky on her hands and her shirt proves that she is no innocent princess.
For a long moment, Klaus and Elena simply stare at each other.
It is not a quiet moment, but one filled to the brim with excess. With expectation. She can see the questions churning over in Klaus's eyes, the uneasy shock of finding himself undone by her, a feeling carried over from beyond his grave, and the dawning awareness of the intimacy of lying in his murderer's arms.
These are all feelings she can relate to.
Birds sing in the trees just behind them, and squirrels chatter from the branches. Rebekah shifts from foot to foot, awaiting her brother's displeasure.
There's something else in the way that he looks at her that she doesn't quite understand. Something new and strange in his expression that knots her stomach almost worse than the moment right before she had stabbed the dagger in his heart.
He doesn't give her a chance to identify what it is.
Klaus looks away from her face and carefully disengages himself from her arms, taking pains to touch her as little as possible as he slowly rolls to his feet.
He stares unblinkingly at the dagger in her hand for some time. Her fingers twitch around the hilt, but she resists the urge to hide it from his view.
There's a fine tremor in his limbs that she remembers from when she'd awoken him in the New Orleans cellar. The faintest trace of his death lingering over him, reminding him.
"How long was I out?" He asks the question like he's throwing it out to the universe at large, some big, cosmic question.
It's only Rebekah who answers, "Less than an hour."
He takes his sister in, from the defensive way she wraps her arms around her chest to the guilty way she refuses to meet his eyes. "Must I assume you were in league with the girl?"
"I didn't do it to hurt you."
"Why, then?"
"Because I wanted to be able to save someone for once."
The honesty of her answer must take him aback, because he can't seem to summon any acidic remarks, only a vague nod, as though to himself.
She doesn't know how to read this air of quietude that has descended upon him since he awoke. The contrast against the raging storm of his fury of a mere hour ago fills her with a viscous unease that shimmers under her skin.
He's silent for a long while after that. He looks down at Elena, the dagger clutched in her fist, with that same unreadable expression on his face from earlier.
For the first time, she thinks she doesn't really know him at all.
After what seems like an eternity, he holds out his hand to her.
Elena takes the offered hand, wary of the peace offering, and yet hungry for the reassurance of his touch, even now. Klaus hoists her to her feet and plucks the dagger from her. He drops her hand the moment he has the dagger tucked into his pocket. It's as though touching her at all had merely been a means to an end.
He's never not wanted to touch her before.
"You daggered me." He says it so simply, as though doing it hadn't been the greatest risk she had ever taken.
As though it had not clawed out her heart to do it.
She cannot tell what he feels about it. Can only grope blindly at what emotions that bland tone must be hiding.
"Yes."
"I assume you've loosed my hybrid?" He asks her this as though the answer to the question doesn't really matter to him at all.
"I warned you not to hurt anyone else I loved."
"Yes. I suppose you did." He snares her in his gaze and commands her, "Go to your room and wait for me there."
The compulsion marches her off the lawn and up into her bedroom without any chance to protest.
There, Elena sits shivering on the edge of her bed, and she waits.
It's nearly an hour before Klaus appears. In that time, Elena tries to compose herself. Debates explanations and worries over words, twisting the fleur de lis ring around her finger over and over while she thinks. She picks over what he must be thinking like the edges of a raw wound.
What must he be feeling, now? To have thought one thing of her—to have seen her as his—his—his what? His lover? His consort? His partner in crime? (His possession, still?)— She struggles even to name the terms of their relationship. To wrap her mind around the alien circumference of his ambition for her. He'd truly imagined he could effortlessly hold that special place in her life as her lover and her confidante, that place which he had carved out through seduction and subterfuge, without having to remain by her side to keep it. Had never entertained the thought that another might mean enough to her that she would sacrifice him to save that other person if he pushed her to it. That she would sacrifice him to save anyone.
She could break her heart on him a thousand times, in a thousand different ways, and she would never hesitate to do it.
She'd warned him, and he had not listened.
He'd believed himself to have an indomitable power over her. She'd shown him where the power between them truly lay.
Where does that leave them, though, now that Klaus has been stripped of the pretty illusion she'd spun for him while she danced like a mad thing trying to tread the wicked path of desire and crimson deceit which he'd led her down?
She comes up with a dozen possible speeches. Twenty different excuses. A handful of really, really good lies. None of it does any good, because all of it flies right out of her head the moment she's actually face to face with him. At that moment, the only thing left between them is the ragged truth and daylight.
He sees her now.
Her heart pounds in her throat.
He sees her now, and she has no idea what that means.
Klaus presses the door shut behind him one handed and eases into the room. He pauses when he catches sight of the destroyed Toulouse-Lautrec painting, but says nothing of it, or the general wreck she has made of her bedroom. He rights the armchair she had kicked over the night before, and settles across from her, so that they are eye to eye, as though nothing at all is amiss.
Except, something is terribly, terribly wrong.
He looks off. Not bad, exactly. Much better than anyone else would look two hours after taking a mortal wound. No, what bothers her is that there is a distance in him that she's never experienced before. Klaus has been furious and he has been passionate. She's laughed and she's cried and she's bled and she's ached for him. Their connection has always been elemental. Fire and water, life and death. He's never been out of reach before.
And yet, even so, at least he is here. There's a certain reassurance in his mere presence. Whatever he is feeling, she knows she can reach past that. Can reach him. She's done it before, every time.
He must be very unhappy, she thinks. She is, all the time. It's not an easy thing to face your lover in the cold morning light, when all of the fantasy and possibility of midnight are long gone, and only unforgiving realities remain.
For long minutes, neither of them make any move to speak.
The weight of his appraisal should crush her to powder. May yet still. Blanketed by the silence that has grown between them, she can feel every year of him pressing in upon her.
Yet, instead of feeling intimidated, as she knows that she should, she feels comforted. The sound of his deep, steady breaths fills her ears. She could nearly live in the tide of it.
Her bones ache to breach this gulf she's opened up between them. Her throat burns from the words of explanation she wants to give him, the lies she wants to tell him but cannot. Not when he has seen her as clearly as he saw her this morning, with a dagger clutched between her bloody fingers and her feet still muddy from running away.
She longs for him, now that she has room to think of him again. Now that she's made it so that he can no longer be her enemy, with no one left to hurt except for her.
She would let him hurt her, if he wants. So long as it is her, and no one else.
Unable to suppress herself any longer, she reaches for his hand.
He stops her cold with the whip crack of his words. "You kept the dagger," he says, sharp and precise. Not an accusation, but a statement of the damning truth.
After so much silence, the words fairly startle her. She drops her hand.
"I did."
"Why?"
"In case I needed it."
He leans forward. "You've had possession of the blade since December. Why wait until now to use it? Why not stab me in the back on some other occasion? You had every opportunity to strike at me when I would never have suspected a thing."
"Because I didn't want to, okay? I didn't want to hurt you at all. I—" She cuts herself off. "You forced my hand."
"You had a choice between myself and the boy and you chose the boy."
She shakes her head. "No. I chose the path where everyone lived." Even you.
He doesn't respond to this, instead switching his line of questioning altogether. "Any other weapons I should be aware of?"
"I'm not going to hurt you," she says, pleading with him. Trying to make him understand. "I wouldn't do that to you."
"You just did."
"Was I supposed to just sit back and let you kill him?"
He regards her with a stranger's eyes. All of the heat has gone out of them, leaving only a glacial blue behind. "My point stands that you made your choice."
"It was my only choice. You made sure of that."
"You would like to think that, I'm sure."
"You've used me and kidnapped me and played with my memories and made me watch while you seduced other lovers into your bed. I don't understand how you can expect me to forgive you for those things, but you can't forgive me for what I've done."
"Because none of what you just mentioned betrayed what we had between us."
The words hit her like a kick to the stomach.
He's wrong. He's betrayed her monstrously, again and again, and she has always taken him back.
Just as he will take her back. He must.
Klaus takes a deep breath. "Any other weapons?"
"No. That was my last."
He raises his brows. "Your last? What else have you kept hidden?"
She twists her fingers in her lap. She really doesn't want to answer him.
"Elena, look at me."
She knows what he's going to do. Knows it, but she looks up anyway. She wants this intimacy with him.
"Aren't you afraid I'm on vervain?"
"Are you?"
"Only one way to know for certain." She offers up her fingers for him.
Klaus clenches his jaw. He clearly doesn't want to bite her, to taste her. It's a calculated risk on her part, forcing on to him this reminder of their shared destinies written in her blood and the magnitude of their mutual attraction.
His desire for answers outweighs any misgivings he may have. Klaus snags her fingers and delicately bites into the tip of her index finger, drawing the blood to the surface with virtuosic precision. She doesn't even feel the cut.
The moment ends much too soon. Klaus drops her hand as soon as he's had enough of a taste to assess that there really is no vervain in her blood. As though drinking from her truly had been merely transactional.
The entire interplay disappoints and confuses her—could Klaus really be immune even to the sway of her blood? – but she doesn't have time to sort through her feelings before Klaus captures her gaze and issues his command.
"Tell me only true things until I say otherwise." He leans back into the chair, away from her. "Go over each weapon you've acquired since I brought you to this house last summer. Each weapon, and how you used it, and where it is now. Spare nothing."
She licks her lips. Pushes everything else down. She can do this. Her mouth trembles as she fights to find the best words. The ones he will listen to. She takes a breath, thinking she can do this. She can do this.
The compulsion gels in her brain.
The words come spilling out before she's ready.
"I had a sprig of vervain that I used when we were in New Orleans the first time. I ate it slowly, only every other day, so that it would last as long as possible. I took the last dose the night of the solstice. I stole a cursed dagger from your brother's plantation, and kept it hidden in my duffel bag with the vervain. When the witches abducted me, I murdered one of my captors with it and escaped. I didn't know it was cursed until later, and I didn't see it again until your father gutted Stefan with it. I helped Davina forge the bloodstone the night of the solstice party. We were interrupted before we finished, and I was already trapped in the witches' compound when I threw it up. I did find the paragon diamond, but Agnes took it from me when she caught me, so I never got to use it. I kept the dagger after I freed you, and I hid it here. I found a dark object in your study and gave it to Davina so she could take control of Celeste. Marcel snuck me bottles of vervain water and he armed me with a knife before we broke into the witches' compound to find the bloodstone. You were there when I figured out how to destroy it. I assume you still have the gold dagger."
The dry factuality of her words horrifies her. Before she can add anything else, Klaus asks, "And what of your schemes against me?"
"I wanted Stefan to love me enough that he would choose me over you. I conspired with Marcel and Davina to re-bind your werewolf side the night of the solstice and to sever my ties from you. Tonight I set a trap for you by letting you think that I would run away, and I killed you."
Nothing of these terse explanations speak to the heart of any of her motives. Her reasons. None of it comes close to how much it had hurt to realize that she couldn't win Stefan's loyalty without tearing him apart. How it had devastated her when she'd discovered that Klaus hadn't really been interested in her as a person, hadn't really seen her as anything more than as a pet and a project. How he had so carelessly revealed how little she had to live for, how empty her future really would be. That had damn well broken her heart. And Marcel had saved her. Grappled her back from the jaws of death and given her a purpose when she needed it most. Given her hope.
She wants to tell him why she'd schemed to take him down. To remind him that he'd been playing games in her head, twisting her about until she couldn't tell what was right and what was wrong. Wants to scream at him that he never asked her why she had blood on her hands that night she'd been kidnapped, that he never cared enough to ask even though she wished, she wished that he had. Wished that he knew how she'd twisted and turned through the nights, not with nightmares about the murder, but about how empty it had left her feeling. How afraid of herself she had become.
She wants to confess how having to drive that dagger into his heart had nearly undone her. How terrible it had been, to have him die in her arms, even when she knew it wasn't permanent. Knowing something rationally and feeling it emotionally are two very different things, and at that moment, she had murdered him, too.
And she had known in that instant that she would do it again, and again, and again. The sorrowful inevitability of the thought had made her want to lay down and die along with him.
All of these thoughts bottle up under her skin, crowding her, suffocating her. Each of them are true. Under the compulsion, she could tell him, and he would have to believe her. She opens her mouth to do just that, but nothing comes out. It's as though there is too much that she has kept dammed for too long, and now her mouth can no longer shape the words. It all remains trapped inside of her, a second heartbeat, impossible for her to ignore, yet invisible, unremarked upon.
Klaus drums his fingers against the arm of the chair. All this time, she has been watching him, hoping to catch some sign of how he has taken her list of sins against him. He's given her nothing, his face remaining as smooth as a flat glass sea, even at the mention of re-binding him to his curse. At last, after a terribly prolonged silence, he says, "You did not list your latest venture to the witches' compound as one of your schemes."
Hope flares within her. This is the first real opening Klaus has given her to win him back to her side. "I already told you that I went in there to get the bloodstone so I could keep it out of Marcel's hands."
"You lied to me about when you made it. You truly had the gall to ask me when you had ever lied to me."
"I told you that I helped to make it before I even knew you. That's true."
At her words, some unreadable emotion flits across his face, there and then gone. "The night of the solstice. What would have happened had you succeeded?" When he speaks, his voice is empty, save for a note of mocking curiosity that cuts her to the quick.
"I would have gone home. You'd have been cursed again. Weaker, hopefully, and I would have used the chance to go home." She bites her lip. Opens her mouth to remind him that given a second chance with the bloodstone, she hadn't taken it. She'd chosen to stay by his side, and give up her chance to return to Mystic Falls. She hadn't abandoned him.
"The thing I remember most clearly from that night was waking up to your face hovering over mine as you drew that dagger from my heart. Why did you do it, if you were planning to overthrow me?"
There. Flickering in his eyes, blink and you'll miss it, there's a hint of the vulnerability she had been searching for earlier. The hope.
She knows how much he's built up her reasons for being there in that place at that time. Knows what it will mean for her to give him this truth, which she would have preferred to keep from him until the end of her days. "Because I needed you to save me," she admits, her voice barely more than a breath, as though confessing this any louder would break whatever might still linger between herself and Klaus.
"Go on."
"You were already at the compound and daggered by the time I was brought there. They were going to sacrifice me, and I had to get out. I pretended I had come there looking for you so that you would save me from them."
Klaus closes his eyes then, and when he opens them, whatever feeling she had glimpsed in him is dead.
"Get out."
"But it's my room."
"Get out, Elena," Klaus repeats softly, implacable command laced through the words.
Elena clambers to her feet, but instead of moving to the door, she stands, frozen, staring down at him, wondering what it means that he's not screaming or breaking things or threatening to tear anyone's heart out.
A muscle in his jaw ticks. His breaths come slow and very deep. It's like all of the rage has drained away from him, leaving in its place this quiet and remote stranger she doesn't recognize. She notices, suddenly, that he's still wearing the same shirt she'd daggered him in. There's a tear in the fabric over his heart. The memory of slipping her fingers through a tear in the last shirt like this he'd worn plucks at her. She wants so badly to reach out and touch him with the same easy intimacy with which she'd done it before. Except, she doesn't think he would allow it. He doesn't look up at her, only sits staring straight ahead. Waiting for her to leave.
She wants to speak to him, but she can't. Not anymore. Not when he's like this.
Elena leaves, reassuring herself that in a few hours Klaus will be back to his usual self.
She's halfway down the hall when she hears him scream, followed by the sound of something large, heavy, and probably wooden smashing against the wall.
It's a good sign, she thinks. At least he's finally venting.
In a little while, everything will be okay.
There's a certain surreality to the manor this morning that Elena can only appreciate now that her interview with Klaus has finally come to an end.
The library is still smashed to bits. Klaus has taken over her bedroom. The front parlor is in bad shape, and the second parlor where Tyler was tortured is covered in blood and guts and emanates a fierce odor that makes her teeth ache and her hair stand on end when she passes too close to the doors. She doesn't envy the hybrid who will no doubt be tasked with cleaning it up.
She can't stomach going outside right now.
In the kitchen, Elena makes herself a breakfast of dry toast and hot tea.
The tea's gone cold in her hands by the time Stefan ambles in, looking disheveled and tired.
"You're okay," he says, looking her over with dark, sharp eyes.
"When am I ever not?"
"Klaus didn't hurt you upstairs, did he?"
Elena puts her mug down and studies Stefan. She'd given Rebekah her blessing to erase his love of her altogether. Rebekah'd said she'd compelled him, and, insofar as Elena had allowed herself to speculate upon what it might be like when she saw him again, she had prepared herself for the inevitable pain of facing him without the weight and the comfort of their shared history. She hadn't been expecting him to care one way or the other what Klaus decided to do to her. Even though she knows it's really over between them, she still can't help the way her heart races when she asks him, oh, so carefully, "Why do you care?"
"Klaus ordered me to watch over you," he tells her slowly, as though maybe she's a little thick. "It's my job to make sure you don't get yourself killed pulling suicidal stunts."
His answer lands against her like a slap. It's the sort of carelessly cruel answer he might have given to her last fall, but without even the hesitancy instilled in him by his buried love of her.
For a moment, Elena had been stupid enough to think Rebekah might have spared her the pain of facing a Stefan compelled to forget he ever loved her.
Stupid, stupid. She'd asked for this, after all.
It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
Maybe it was. Maybe it is.
"I've got to go," Elena mumbles, ducking into the stairwell.
Stefan lets her.
Eventually she wanders into the library.
Even tossed and smashed, this room still belongs to her. Still feels like her special refuge.
Straightening up the room gives her a purpose that also manages to keep her mind too occupied to think overmuch. It helps ease the ache and uncertainty that has bloomed bright and enormous in her chest, now that the immediate tasks of saving Tyler and saving Stefan have been accomplished.
As it turns out, she doesn't know how to fight when she's the only one left still on the board. Not really.
Without Tyler or Stefan or her lost loved ones in Mystic Falls or even poor dead Jenna to think about, she is left with nothing but her own desires.
Right now, it's hard to remember why she shouldn't just let the world burn down and laugh.
Her capacity for selfishness is apparently limitless.
Klaus stands in the door to the library for several minutes without announcing himself. Watching her with a silence so complete that she would have overlooked him entirely had she not been able to feel him in the thrum of her blood, eagerly reaching for him. Calling for him.
She forgets, sometimes, that he has the ability to be so preternaturally still. He so rarely is.
For a little while, she goes on straightening up the room while she builds up the nerve to face him again. She feels light-headed with him near. Unmoored.
She wonders if she'll always feel her connection to Klaus so forcefully. If helping him destroy the bloodstone had been a dire mistake. Would she have done it, if she had realized that in destroying it, she would be absorbing the distilled power of their connection back into her blood?
Yes, she realizes. Yes to both questions. It's a mistake she would repeat again and again.
If she's going to have regrets, it should be for getting close to Klaus in the first place. For creating the opportunity for a latent mystical residue to flare up into a full-fledged bond.
She can't bring herself to regret it. To regret him.
When she finally summons the courage to look up and meet his eyes, it's like the whole room falls away, the whole world, and the only thing that exists are the two of them. She doesn't understand how she can feel both so relieved to see him and so unhappy all at once. The dual pains of elation and dread twist her stomach into knots. Hot sweat breaks out on her brow. The sight of him fills her with an anxious longing that she feels as a sharp pain in her chest.
For a long time, the two of them simply watch each other.
"I needed to speak with you," he tells her at length as he finally joins her in their library.
"I'm glad. I didn't get to say everything I needed to earlier."
He looks behind her, to the wall of books she has so meticulously reshelved over the past hours. Some of them had had their bindings snapped, others torn clean in half. It is not so resplendent a collection as when she had first seen it, but she had still taken great care to put it back together. To make it as close to how it was as she could.
"After you left I searched through your effects," Klaus tells her tonelessly, as though he has not admitted to violating the last of what little privacy she has.
Elena struggles not to react. To remind herself that this isn't a surprise at all. Her privacy here had been stolen from the get go. Now that she had so spectacularly revealed her capacity for scheming and for hoarding secrets, she can't possibly have expected that luxury to go unsurrendered.
"What did you find?" she finally asks.
"You."
"What?"
"I found you. Your words. A whole inner life you'd kept hidden away. Secret from me. Yearnings." He turns his attention back to her, the weight of his gaze pinning her helplessly in place as he lays out the pieces of herself she had so meticulously kept from him. Kept for herself. "Under your floorboards I found a diary, nearly finished. Two novels. Several drawings that seemed somehow more revealing than the rest. The Degas pastels. A cache of stolen things—my sister's diaries, freshly dog-eared, and a silver locket with an old portrait of my brother."
"Did you read my diary?" she asks, her voice quavering.
"Yes."
"Oh. And what did you find?"
"That I never knew you at all."
"But you know me now."
"I do."
Elena steps forward. "You see me."
Klaus's eyes rove her face. The old feeling, of him taking in every hair on her head, every pore on her face, washes over her, surprisingly welcome in its familiarity. In its assurance that Klaus still reserves this unadulterated level of attention for her, and her alone. "I see you clearly for the first time."
Elena reaches for his hand. He lets her take it. The warmth of his skin against her own makes her tremble. Carefully, she enfolds both of her hands around his fingers and holds his palm up to her heart, against the place where it beats for him. Be brave, she admonishes herself.
"You see me, and I see you," she tells him. "I see all of you, the good and the bad. The wicked. I used to be so afraid of you. I knew what you are. Who you are. It used to scare me so much, because sometimes I would look at you and I would realize that deep down we were just the same."
"You would do well to be frightened of me."
"My fear isn't what you want from me."
"No. What I want is your blood to make my hybrids, and your body to nourish a child of your bloodline so that in five hundred years I may have another one of you to serve me."
"I'll give you those things, if that's what it takes. Let me prove myself to you."
With a terrible gentleness, Klaus pries his hand from her grasp and steps away from her, so that he is out of her reach. "You misunderstand," he tells her softly. "It's too late for that. I've thought on it, and I realize that I have been a fool. It wasn't you I was besotted with, but a fantasy of who you might be that was built upon your lies. I wanted to believe that you would choose me first. That you were as irresistibly compelled by me as I found myself to be by you. When you pulled that dagger from me in the witches' lair, it was like seeing the sun rise for the very first time. All was repainted in your colors. I imagined myself devoted to you. Now I see that all was as a dream, and a shallow and vapid one at that. I thank you for ridding me of my delusions."
"What are you saying?" Her voice comes out strained, weird.
"I'm leaving you."
All the air leaves the room. She can't breathe. She hears herself say, as though from a great distance, "I don't understand."
"I wish to return to what I originally intended when I took you from your home. You'll live out the rest of your days here. I'll send a nurse when I require your blood, and, in time, I'll arrange for you to bear an heir, to secure your bloodline."
She can barely speak around the tightness in her throat. "And where will you go?"
"Away. Everywhere. Just never here. I plan to take Rebekah and Stefan with me, so you need not worry over their interference in your life."
No.
No.
No, he can't be doing this. She hasn't suffered and wept and seethed and burned with empty longing so that he could just abandon her. She hasn't torn herself apart and rebuilt herself up from the ashes of who she had been before, all for his sake, just for it to end between them because he can't bear to see her for who she has always been deep down.
"Don't go." She hates to beg him for anything. "Don't leave me." She will.
"Goodbye, Elena."
She darts in front of him, to stand in his way.
Elena has one secret left to tell.
Looking up into his face, into his eyes, gone dark and blue as the river back home when the moon was low in the sky, she finally admits the truth she's been hiding from herself for months. The thing she has been most afraid to ever, ever say, even to herself. Her gravest sin, which in this moment, feels like her redemption. "I love you." Saying it out loud is like the moment she drove the knife into her own side.
Klaus stares at her in cold indifference. "I no longer care." He sweeps past her as though she is nothing.
Blindly, Elena grabs at the edge of the table. Her hand comes down against the slick sharp edges of one of the broken decanters and slices her palm clean open. She stares uncomprehendingly at the wound as crimson seeps to the surface and oozes down her wrist. A numbness steals over.
"Elena."
Klaus calls, and, fool that she is, she answers.
"I have one final instruction for you," he explains, locking her into his compulsion. "Live," he orders with exquisite cruelty. As though he can see the dark path her mind has already set itself down. "Live, and never leave this property."
She watches him go, blank with misery.
Three years pass before she sees him again.
A/N: I'm so sorry y'all. I know time skips are torture. This is a tortured fic.
Thank you to everyone who has read and commented. Y'all keep me writing this behemoth.
To all my Americans out there, happy Thanksgiving! Hope it's a good one spent with your family and friends.
If you want to stop by my tumblr to chat or for more klena content/fe content, my handle is livlepretre
Also, if you haven't seen it yet, I posted a new oneshot entitled The Quick and The Dead. It's a horror story for sure, but also has some fun klena power plays and romance (?) galore in it.
I had a few questions left by guest reviewers that I wanted to answer:
When did Klaus start obsessing over Elena? He starts the fic flirting with her/trying to seduce her essentially because he is bored, and because he's upset that Stefan and Rebekah are in love and that makes him feel lonely. Elena does intrigue him when she rejects him, repeatedly, and he does make some efforts to seduce her vis a vis the compelled dreams/altered memories of his failed seductions. I do think that Elena repeatedly rebuffing him really captured his interest, enough that he really was enjoying her company in New Orleans the first time, but of course, it does turn out that he had ulterior motives for bringing her. It's not until she persuades him to let her help him in chapter 21 that he starts to really sit up and pay attention, and not until she removes the dagger from his heart in chapter 22 that he falls for the idea of her that gets cemented by that episode- that maybe she would choose him first, and give him the sort of reckless devotion he so craves. From there, his feelings for this idea of Elena grow exponentially. He might have even thought he was in love with her... until the moment he found out who she really was. Discovering it was just a shadow and a thought he loved, to quote the lotr movies, seriously fucked with his head.
How will Elena have a child if he won't let her get close to anyone? So, I brought in this question back in chapter 18 or 19 because I wanted to remind everyone that Klaus is not a nice guy, no matter how thoughtful or romantic he seems, and that no matter what, he still has ulterior designs on Elena and still has shady af motives for everything he does. He brought Elena to Nola to lift her spirits/fatten her up because he was concerned her depression had impacted her health and therefore her fertility. I think Klaus at that point would have been fine with Elena conceiving a child with a live man, so long as it was just for the purpose of having the child (and it's implied so long as the father resembled Klaus himself. Klaus is real fucked up, y'all). The change in his priorities happens not too long after that. The solstice party/dagger incident happens, and Klaus reels, because he finds himself falling for the person he thinks Elena is. Now, it's one thing to be attracted to Elena for her body and her face and because she reminds him of the other doppelgangers and he's a bit bored, and another to develop real feelings for someone. Notice he doesn't bring up the baby issue again until now, when he's been wrecked by the revelation that Elena isn't who he thought she was. He was totally going to drop it, at least for the foreseeable future, when he thought to possess Elena for his own. Now, it's back on the table, because he's back to calculating and using her, full swing, just from afar. And he definitely has no idea about the hybrid baby thing. And if he got Hayley pregnant, well, she's a vampire hybrid now, so no one would ever even know.
Finally, Why is Klaus obsessed with Elena and is it because she's different than the other 2 doppelgangers? I actually tend to think that Elena is exactly just the same as Tatia and Katerina. In other words, I think the 3 women have identical natures, and any differences among them can be chalked up to different nurtures. For example, we see that Katherine used to care very deeply for her entire family. It's not until Klaus murders them all that she becomes selfish and out only for her own survival. I bet this is the road Elena would walk down if that ever happened to her. I explore it a little in this chapter- once she no longer has to worry about Stefan or Tyler, she suddenly has room to examine what she wants, and feels able to reach for it for the first time without feeling guilty about it. (I mean, she got swatted down hard, but so it goes.) Anyway, another thing about the 3 is that they are all polyamorous. I doubt it's a coincidence that they all keep being attracted to Klaus, Elijah, Damon, and Stefan. Those 4 are all just that girl's type. As for why is Elena different to Klaus? I would argue that she's the only one he's actually gotten to know so far. He probably put Tatia on a pedestal without getting to know her. Katerina obviously never let him see the real her, as evidenced by her never telling him she had had a baby. Elena is the only one he's spent enough time with to realize that he actually likes her. Also, I tend to think that he sees her as his destiny; Tatia and Katerina were just red herrings or warm ups at best, but it was Elena with whom he actually broke the curse. That to him would make her seem like the one he had really been waiting for all this time. Almost like his soul mate. (Klaus is definitely high key superstitious and believes in destiny and fate and curses and bad luck. If he were suddenly thrown into a soul mate au, he would probably just go with it without even asking any questions.)
Hope this answers your questions!