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: Extremely dubious consent verging on non-con/ Miscarraiage / Hostage situation/explicit violence and torture/gratuitous angst/ potential character death
"Elena, let me in."
She wants to offer him her bleeding finger. Can imagine what would happen if she did—
Her whole body flushes.
There's got to be a first aid kit under a sink somewhere. Maybe in the upstairs bathroom.
She tries to rush past him, but he catches her about the waist and spins her around to face him. Slowly, oh so slowly, he wraps his fingers around her wrist and guides her hand to his mouth. And then his lips are on her, his tongue laving the wound, stroking her, coaxing the blood free. Languidly, he works his way down to her wrist and to the inside of her elbow, where the blood has trailed.
It's the most erotic moment of her life.
He must sense her body's reaction to him, because his grip on her waist tightens, and his mouth trails up, from her elbow to her shoulder, her throat—
It would be so easy— so terribly easy—to turn her head, to catch his mouth with hers, to wrap her arms around his neck and bury her hands in his hair—
She can't—she can't—
She tries to twist out of his hold. Klaus growls against her throat, rattling alarm bells hidden deep in her subconscious that she should stay absolutely, positively still. She can feel his fangs pricking against her flesh as he tastes the skin there.
"Klaus," she breathes, all the while praying that he's not having some sort of predatorial blood-high response the way Stefan would be. "Let me go."
He pauses. Pulls away to appraise her, his pupils blown wide with lust, his mouth curving into a lazy, fond smile that nonetheless raises the hairs on the back of her neck. "I'll chase you forever, if I must."
Those first few weeks are a terrible time for her.
She can barely do more than go through the motions. Eating when it occurs to her. Collapsing into a restless sleep each night, tossing and turning and regretting and burning.
She spends a good deal of her time cleaning up the mess she'd left of the manor when she'd tipped her hand to Klaus. Straightens up her bedroom easily enough, righting the furniture, sweeping up the broken shards of the mug where she'd smashed it against the wall.
She tucks the Toulouse-Lautrec painting behind her dresser. She can't look at it right now.
The library, too, requires her attention. It's more painful in there than it is in her bedroom. The memories are sharper there.
And yet, there is a weary part of herself that knows that she will need this room. That until Klaus comes back for her (he will come back for her, of course he'll come back for her), she will need these books to keep her company. To help her find answers.
She works.
Eventually, there is no more work to do upstairs. She can no longer avoid the second parlor.
The passage of time has not improved its grim realities one bit. She had shut the doors on the third day—one of the first things she had thought to do, after the reality of her situation had sunk in—but the smell is still bitter and cloying even from the hall. The stench of gore and torture inside the room is sharp enough to overwhelm her as soon she throws the doors open. She makes it no more than a couple of steps inside before she spots the black stain on the hardwood floor and vomits violently into the corner of the room.
Wiping her wrist against her mouth, she swallows convulsively as she takes in the wretched site of the place where Tyler had been tortured. Tries, very hard, to summon a wisp of hatred for Klaus over this. Of disgust.
It never comes.
All she finds instead is hatred for herself. Disgust for her own actions.
She should have guessed that this was how it would all end between herself and Tyler. She can't imagine how she ever thought differently—how she ever could have hoped for differently. She'd been the worst kind of fool, playing with Tyler's life when she proclaimed to love him as her dearest friend.
Maybe Klaus had been right. Maybe she is cruel.
So cruel that even Klaus did not want her.
No. She can't think about that.
Elena cleans.
There's someone sitting on the edge of her bed.
The encounter with Rebekah still fresh in her mind, Elena immediately scrambles away from the shadowy presence fixated upon her. The bedsheets twist around her arms, and she flails, trying to escape.
An amused huff escapes her intruder's mouth. "I didn't mean to alarm you," the intruder drawls, the sound of his voice all-too-familiar.
Elena blinks up through the impenetrable shadows and tries to pick out Klaus's silhouette. She settles back down against her nest of pillows. "What are you doing in my room?" she whispers. She's not sure why she bothers lowering her voice. It's not like there's anyone here who would care if Klaus were discovered here, at this hour. There's no one left to care.
There's a pause, slightly overlong, before Klaus answers. "My reasons are of no importance." He strokes the hair away from her forehead. "Go back to sleep."
It should be well-nigh impossible, falling asleep with a nightmare such as Klaus mere inches from her, but she's grown accustomed to his presence in the weeks since he opened his library to her. She doesn't think about it much at all as his fingers linger on her skin, tracing the curvature of her cheek, the line of her throat as it meets her shoulder. There's something hypnotic about these slow caresses, so light they could almost be a figment of her imagination.
She turns into the touch.
Every morning when she wakes up, there's a moment when she doesn't remember that she's alone.
But at night, and at odd moments during the day, she continues to remember other things.
The memories pour up from the depths of her unconscious without rhyme or reason. Random bits and pieces that make it impossible to ever really get her mind off of Klaus.
(A hidden glimpse of Klaus through the crack of a door as he changes his shirt. The first flash of his skin, golden in the lamplight. The moment he catches her staring, and opens the door. The rush when he kisses her, and her heart flies up into her throat, because she wants to kiss him back—for the first time, she wants to kiss him back—but she cannot quite let herself—)
That's why she puts so much energy into scrubbing and neatening. To occupy herself.
It doesn't work.
The first thing she does each morning is to hurl her senses out, down her mystical tether to Klaus. To feel him.
It's her one bit of solace. Her one connection to anyone at all.
How her friends must be faring back home haunts her thoughts like a double-echo, whispering in the wake of everything she tries to set her mind to.
It's impossible not to fret about Jeremy—about whether he's as angry and sad and withdrawn as he had looked when she caught that brief glimpse of him back in New Orleans, whether he's on track to graduate in May, whether he's fallen back into any bad habits, whether he has anyone to listen to him late at night when his mask cracks apart and he's just a scared teenage boy who's lost his whole family. About whether she had been right, and there really had been something subtly off about the way he moved during the melee.
There's more than just Jeremy to worry about, though—she worries about Bonnie, about what kinds of dark paths her friend must have walked down to achieve the kinds of magicks she'd wielded at the Abattoir. She worries about what her friends must have been thinking, to team up with the likes of this Mikael, whose cold hatred for everything alive and undead had shone so clearly in his eyes.
She feels guilty, too. Guilty about Tyler, always, always, and guilty about Caroline, about Matt. Even Alaric. Somehow, she's asked too much of them, and they've given and they've given, without any thought for themselves, or even stopping to think about her capacity to take and take and take until there is nothing left of them. They should have known. They should have seen Katherine and they should have realized what kind of girl Elena really is, underneath her cursed face.
And then there is the part of her that can't help but wonder… about Damon. Damon, her Damon, whom she could never quite bring herself to forget. How poorly had he handled failing to reach her, to save her that night? How implacable would his resolve be now that he knows she's alive?
She wishes, with a terrible sort of dread, that, as sweet as that moment had been, Damon had never recognized her the other night.
Better for everyone to have gone on believing her dead.
Better that, than the storm Damon will bring when he figures out how to reach her.
(She doesn't let herself think about Stefan at all. In this, at least, her conscience is blessedly silent.)
She finds a ledger tucked into one of the desk drawers in one of the rooms she used to be unable to access, and takes it down to the kitchen and pantry with her. Spends an afternoon carefully cataloguing exactly what food supplies she has, and estimating how long those supplies will last her. There's enough in bulk to easily make it through the summer into fall, but the fresh produce is already running low. Maybe another month, six weeks at the most before the frozen and canned fruits and vegetables will run out altogether. It's a problem she's not sure how to solve, without any means of accessing a phone or the internet.
(It's proof that Klaus doesn't really plan to leave her marooned here for very long.)
Tonight the chosen language for polite dinner conversation is something Elena doesn't quite recognize—she could hazard a guess it could be Russian, or maybe Polish, or—and here, she hesitates with her whole being—Bulgarian.
Whatever it is, Stefan at last displays the limits of his own personal knowledge. From the way he purses his lips and tilts his head, Elena can tell he's having trouble following along with more than the basics.
When Rebekah places a light hand upon his arm and asks him something directly, he pauses for several heartbeats before responding slowly, carefully, and, Elena suspects from Rebekah's creased brow, very inelegantly.
She glances up at Klaus and catches him trying to hide a smirk behind his wrist. His eyes gleam with mirth when their eyes meet.
Elena hurries to stare down at her plate of untouched food instead.
It's as fine a feast as any of the many extravagant four course meals she had grown accustomed to enjoying in New Orleans. There'd been a complex chilled soup to begin with, followed by a fish course, and now wine-glazed pheasant stuffed with cherries and pistachios. They've gone through six bottles of champagne already, although she's hardly had more than a couple of fortifying glasses.
These meals have dragged out longer and longer, and have only grown more and more elaborate and inaccessible to anyone born after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as Rebekah's distemper with Elena's presence at these functions has grown sharper.
("It's hardly dining en famille if the bloodblank must always hang about," she had overheard Rebekah complaining to Klaus. "Can't you let her alone, even for one evening?"
The thing is, Elena would like to be left alone, very much. She's not Rebekah's enemy in this.
"Don't call her that. She has a name."
Despite herself, something about the quiet, serious way he says this makes Elena's heart pound.
She has a name. She has a name.
"How long are you going to insist on this charade?"
"Whoever said it was a charade?")
The meal lasts for an eternity—every night lasts an eternity—as Rebekah prattles and flirts and Stefan stumbles through small talk and Klaus toys with the both of them, and Elena fights hard to deny the way the low timber of Klaus's voice rolling over those exotic syllables makes her feel hot and flushed all over, or the way that every time their eyes meet, her stomach swoops like one of those birds she'd seen plummeting toward the Gulf. She blames the champagne, but takes another sip anyway. Klaus's fingers brush hers when he refills her glass.
Rebekah especially detests sharing her brother's attention with Elena. She always makes a point to drag Klaus's attention back onto herself whenever she intercepts them looking at each other.
Despite whatever Rebekah might think, Elena's actually thankful for anything that takes Klaus's searing focus off of her, even if it's only ever for a few minutes at a time.
(She's told herself this lie so many times that she believes it.)
It's during dessert—a truly preposterously massive blancmange served with Burgundy pears—that one of the hybrids whispers something in Klaus's ear. Klaus glances up sharply at the hybrid. "Truly?" he murmurs. The hybrid nods, emphatically. Klaus stands up. "You'll have to excuse me for a bit." His eyes are all for her as he commands, "Stefan. Be certain to escort Elena to her room when she is ready to retire, if I am not returned before that time." His gaze flickers to Rebekah for only an instant as he speaks, before his attention returns to Elena and he offers her a warm parting smile.
After dinner, Elena excuses herself and goes upstairs to read in the library, but eventually, the sound of Stefan's piano playing seduces her into joining him downstairs. He's alone, which is unusual, but she doesn't think too much of it, too distracted by her restless yearnings. She settles into a corner of the sofa and watches him play, allowing the bittersweet familiarity of him to wash out her pervasive thoughts of a certain someone.
It's not until Rebekah joins them some little time later, leading a solid, dark-haired teenager by the hand, that it occurs to Elena that she should have worried over the other girl's conspicuous absence.
Rebekah smiles directly at Elena. It's the first time she's deigned to acknowledge her directly since her first day back at the manor, nearly two weeks ago. "Since you've been so selfishly monopolizing my brother's attentions, I thought I might bring your own brother to you. I'm sure you'd much prefer some familial company to Nick's, wouldn't you?"
Elena frowns at Rebekah, at the stranger she's pushed forward into Elena's personal space.
On the other side of the room, Stefan has stopped playing the piano.
Her thoughts tumble wildly together.
It's not Jeremy. (Thank God.) It's just… some kid. Young, about the right age, the right coloring and build. It's not Jeremy, but Elena wonders if she should play along like it is, to keep Rebekah from realizing that herself. Should play along, even if Rebekah ends up killing this boy the way that Stefan had Matt, if it might mean protecting her brother.
No. That could be the game. Rebekah must realize her mistake—must realize that this isn't Jeremy at all, and so the whole point would be to force Elena to willingly sign off on this poor innocent boy's death—
(Which she would she would she completely would if it meant keeping Jeremy safe and far away from all of this for even one more day—)
The only thing Elena feels certain of is that no matter the angle, Rebekah is doing this just to torture her. Like a high school prank but a thousand times worse.
Rebekah sits down next Elena and guides her face toward her own with a single white, finger under her chin. Even so light a touch is impossible to break away from.
She captures her gaze with her own like a viper—just that fast. Just that irresistible.
"I've brought your brother to you, Elena. Aren't you happy? Doesn't the sight of him just make your heart sing like a little dove's?"
Elena nods, fiercely. Tears spring to her eyes.
Smiling sweetly, Rebekah releases her. "You should be very grateful to me for reuniting the two of you."
She is! She is! In a minute, she'll tell her so, only, the temptation to see her brother for herself is too strong to resist.
Elena turns, taking in the sight of her brother—her brother whom she hasn't seen in so long, whom she's barely allowed herself to miss let alone think about, because the pain of their separation is a sharp enough knife to kill herself with a thousand times over if she lets herself.
The tears pour out of her eyes as she bounds to her feet and reels Jeremy up into a tight hug. His arms come up around her, and she buries her face against his neck. Inhales the smell of him, the smell of home and safety and being loved without having to cut out her heart in exchange.
"Rebekah, this is going too far," she can hear Stefan protesting from across the room.
She pulls away to look up into Jeremy's face. He looks bewildered, frightened, and so terribly, terribly young. She squeezes his hand. "I never thought I'd see you again. What are you doing here?"
"I- I don't know. I don't know how…."
Elena nods. It doesn't matter. "I'll protect you," she mouths before turning to face Rebekah. "Please, let him go. He doesn't have anything to do with this."
Rebekah's brows shoot up her forehead and she laughs a little ruefully under her breath. She pins Elena with a look of true loathing. "Aren't you just a noble little thing. Reunited for under a minute and already pleading for him to be set free. You're not even a little happy to see your brother? After all this time?"
"It's not that I'm not grateful—I am—it's just that Jeremy doesn't belong here."
Rebekah leans forward. "What if I extended him an invitation, so he could join us here, hm? Would you like that?"
Stefan cuts in again. "Bex, this is cruel."
Rebekah holds a hand up and silences him. "I'm sure my brother wouldn't mind," she presses Elena. "He's so eager to please you, after all."
Elena shakes her head. "You know that's impossible."
The other girl shrugs elegantly. "You're probably right. We'll just keep this visit short, then, while my brother is away. Doesn't that sound nice?"
Elena struggles to answer.
Because yes, it does sound nice—it sounds like an oasis she could return to for the rest of her life, this memory of Jeremy here with her again, if only for a short while, for an evening, if only she could trust Rebekah to let him go at the end—
That must be the game. Give her a little taste of what she wants so desperately she can't even let herself think it, and then rip it all away, so that all of her grief for her old life can come rushing back, as fresh and devastating as it was in those first few weeks here.
She'll have to beg Rebekah to bring Jeremy home right now—or better yet, Stefan— She better do it right now— Before she grows anymore tempted—
She makes the mistake of glancing back at her brother and, at the sight of his dear, beloved face, she feels her resolve crumple.
She can't do this.
She can't keep doing this alone.
Desperately, she pulls him into her arms, feels the sweetest bolt of relief when Jeremy hugs her back, and yes, okay, it's probably really selfish, but she's so tired, and so love-starved, and in a minute she can let him go again, in a minute she'll promise whatever it takes to have him returned home—She'll sell her soul if she has to—
A hand on her shoulder draws her out of her thoughts, out of the comfort of Jeremy's embrace. She looks up into Stefan's dark eyes. Notes the clench of his jaw, the pinch of his brow. He's concerned. That's good. That means he's sympathetic.
Gathering herself, she risks one more glance up at Jeremy, before she asks Stefan, "You'll get him home safely, right?"
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Rebekah saunter over to one of the side tables and slip something out of one of the drawers.
Stefan shakes his head. "Elena, you've been compelled. That's not…" He trails off, as he looks at her, as though whatever he sees in her face draws him up short.
Elena frowns. Looks back at her brother. Feels the ferocity of her love for him pounding in her veins. Brushes off whatever Stefan had been trying to tell her. "You have to take him back, Stefan. You're the only one I trust with this." She can't even look at Stefan while she tells him this. Can no longer even bear to take her eyes off of her brother. He looks so scared.
Without saying a word or batting an eyelash, Rebekah steps up to them and slashes a silver letter opener across Jeremy's throat. His flesh parts like seafoam. A crimson wave of his lifeblood's cascades from the wound.
It all happens so fast that for a moment, all Elena can do is stare as her brother drops to his knees, shock and confusion leeching into terror as his face drains of all color.
No no no no no no no nonononononononono
She drops with him, hands scrabbling over his throat as she tries to push his blood back inside of him. He clutches at her shirt, his mouth working soundlessly, like he's trying to tell her something.
Someone's howling, something incomprehensible, just one long wretched syllable over and over and over again, and it's not until Jeremy drops his hand from her shirt that she realizes it's her, she's the one chanting no like a catechism, like that one word can ward off what's just happened.
"I did say we'd keep this visit short," Rebekah chides. She tastes the edge of the letter opener where Jeremy's blood stains the blade and then flicks it away.
What's happened.
Supernatural death. She fumbles for Jeremy's fingers. Blinks without comprehension when she doesn't see the ring. Yanks out his other hand, because she just has the wrong hand, that's it, that's got to be it—No ring on that hand either, so it must be on the first hand—She keeps looking back and forth between his hands, because his ring has got to be on one of those fingers—
"No no no no no no no no no," she moans, the words more of a sound, a visceral, primal feeling, than a human word at this point.
Stefan kneels down in the spreading pool of blood and tries to pull her away. "You have to let go, Elena."
She heaves Jeremy up so she can wrap her arms around his chest and cling to him. He's going to wake up. He's going to be fine.
"I hope you're satisfied," he spits in Rebekah's direction.
Rebekah traipses over to the sofa and flings herself into the plush velvet cushions. "You don't think this is rather droll?"
"What's going on here?" Dimly, she registers Klaus entering the room. There's a very long pause. "Would anyone care to explain why Elena is cradling that corpse so possessively?"
Stefan heaves a world-weary sigh. "Rebekah's compelled her to think it's her brother. Presumably her idea of a joke to watch Elena unravel as her brother dies in her arms."
"The kind of joke I learned from you, by the way," Rebekah scoffs.
Elena doesn't understand what they're talking about, but it doesn't matter. She combs Jeremy's hair back from his face and curls her body around his, trying hard to ignore the way his skin is already cooling. She's still looking back and forth between his hands for his ring as she whispers to herself.
There's another long pause from Klaus. "But that's not in fact her brother, correct?"
Elena doesn't hear the response.
There's more to the conversation, some sort of brief, hissed argument, but she tunes it out.
Klaus crouches down next to her and reaches a hand out to touch her shoulder, and she startles under his touch like a spooked deer. She drags Jeremy with her when she scrambles out from under Klaus's hand.
Undeterred, Klaus reaches for her again, and coaxes her to look up at him.
He looks at her for a long time without saying anything at all.
It's the most vulnerable she has ever been in front of him.
She should be terrified, but the wilderness of her grief blocks all of that out.
Instead, as the silence lengthens, something inside of her cracks, and she finds herself trusting him. Right now, with this, she trusts him.
Gently, Klaus runs his hand from her shoulder down to her hands, where they are clutched so tightly to her brother's sodden shirt.
She doesn't have the strength to fight him when he pulls her hands away, or when he urges her to stand with him. She falls into him as soon as her feet are under her, and she wants nothing more than to close her eyes and give up right now, except that Klaus pulls her back and tips her face up to look at him again.
"That's not your brother, Elena. When you look down in a moment, you're going to recognize that boy for the stranger that he is. Okay?"
Hazily, she nods. Glances down, expecting to see her brother, but instead seeing the corpse of someone she'd never lain eyes on before tonight.
Relief saws through her. Horrible, monstrous relief.
She staggers back and lands hard on the sofa as she stares at the boy whose blood is sticky and cold against her skin. She's absolutely covered in his death.
Distantly, she notes that Stefan and Rebekah have left the room. It's just the two of them, and the body.
Klaus kneels in front of her. "Alright, then?"
Elena shakes her head. No, she's not alright.
She hates how comforting the sight of that dead stranger's body is, because it means that Jeremy really is fine. Hates how her palpable joy in this discovery is intertwined with the bone-deep sorrow of Jeremy's loss, because even if it didn't happen, she can still feel that devastation in her bones like an aftershock.
Klaus must see the conflict in her face. "What's wrong?"
"I'm just so happy that it's just some stranger's who's dead. I'm just so happy, and I can't live with that, and I still remember Jeremy dying and I can't—I can't—"
"You don't have to live with that."
"What?"
"I can make you forget, if you'd like."
It would be so selfish if she accepted his offer.
She is so very, very tempted to let him help her.
"What's in it for you?"
He frowns, taken aback. "Nothing at all."
"You would do that for me? Take away the memory of tonight? Just tonight?"
"Of course."
She nods. Her heart feels like an open wound. "Because I really can't—I can't—"
"Then let me."
"Okay." Because—as terrifying as this realization is—she trusts him. Right now, she trusts him.
(He wipes away that revelation along with everything else.)
It had been his greatest act of kindness toward her, and he had never mentioned it to her even once. Presumably had planned never to mention it to her ever.
Later, she finds herself rehashing that conversation.
Asking him—Would you ever hurt Jeremy? Would you swear to keep him safe, even if it's just to keep from hurting me?
A month ago she thinks he would have promised it.
Now, of course, she has nothing of him left, least of all his promises.
Oh. She loves him though. More with every passing day, every reemerging memory.
The first night in New Orleans she can hardly sleep. New surroundings, when she had resigned herself to never sleeping anywhere other than that pale green room ever again, combined with the hum of other humans in the house—even compelled humans—make it impossible for her to relax. If she didn't know better, she might identify the giddy, racing feeling tingling through her as excitement.
The door to her bedroom creaks open without warning, and there is enough light filtering in through the windows for Elena to make out Klaus, paused in the act of silently shutting the door.
"You're awake."
She glances at the clock. It's nearly four in the morning. She can't think of any good reason for him to be in her room. (The thought of those shadows she sometimes thinks she sees hovering at the foot of her bed flickers across her mind, but she shoves the image away as quickly as it appears, unready to analyze that insight more closely.)
"Was I not supposed to be?"
He doesn't respond. Sidles closer to the bed instead, until he' s looming over her.
Downstairs, she can still hear the staff straightening up.
He reaches out and captures her chin in his hand, stroking his thumb over the corner of her mouth.
She stares up at him. That feeling coursing through her—that could-have-been-excitement—twists and sinks within her, transforming into something else entirely as she takes in the absorbed expression on his face.
"What are you doing?" she whispers.
"You were very beautiful, tonight. The way the moonlit water gathered and reflected in your eyes…" He trails off, his words lost to whatever strange and unknowable labyrinth passes as Klaus's thought process.
Elena waits, still as she can make herself be, hoping that this is just another one of his weird episodes and that he'll bid her goodnight and leave in a moment. She's not ready to deal with the way his touch enlivens her, like little sparks under her skin everywhere they're in contact. The way that she has to hold herself back from leaning into his palm.
Without warning Klaus swoops down and lays brutal claim to her mouth, his fingers on her chin prying her lips wider as he thrusts his tongue into her mouth and tastes her with a raw, unnerving urgency. He's atop her before she actually understands what's just happened, the weight of him pinning her to the bed as his hard thigh pushes her knees apart.
This has to be a dream. It has to be a dream because no way is Klaus in her bedroom, in her bed, kissing her like she's fire made flesh, kissing her like he can't stop, like he's been dreaming of her the way she's been dreaming of him—
His hands rove hungrily over her body—her arms, her breasts, her ribs, her hips, and it's at that moment, when he wraps a hand around her thigh and roughly tugs it up, over his hip, so she can feel the way their bodies align, eliciting a rough moan from Klaus, that she feels it. A rapid-pulse shot of desire, intermingled with a wild plummeting terror.
She doesn't want this. Doesn't want him. Not like this.
That's how she knows. She always wants him in her dreams.
This is real.
Elena struggles beneath him, shoving at his shoulders and twisting her face away from his, but all that does is encourage Klaus to redouble his efforts. Her traitorous body trembles under his furious caresses. Her hips roll involuntarily when his thigh brushes against her center, and she hates herself for the way she gasps and rolls her hips again, even as she scratches at his face, his throat. He pays her no heed. Traps her wrists above her head with one hand and pushes the other under her camisole to explore her breasts. The heat of his hands against her bare skin radiates through her. Urges her blood and violence up just under her skin.
She hates him. Hates him so much she can barely breathe.
He kisses her again, and she launches herself at him, biting him as hard as she can. She draws blood and watches, enraged, as his torn mouth mends itself as though it were never wounded.
Klaus pulls back and slowly licks the blood from his lips. His eyes are black with lust as he gazes down at her.
"You're here with me now, are you not? For true?" he asks her.
Panting, she refuses to answer him.
His free hand wanders, from her breast down over the plane of her stomach, and down, to the waistband of her pajama pants. His fingers toy with the cotton bow holding them up around her waist. "This is better, isn't it? More honest?" Slowly, so slowly, he unknots the bow. Dips his hand below the hem, to rest against her hip bone. "You're truly here, like this. This is better." He keeps saying that. She has no idea what he means. He releases her wrists and pulls away altogether, grinning at her. "You may strike me again, if you'd like."
Oh, she thinks he'd like it if she did. If I bit him again, she speculates darkly, he'd probably get off on it.
(She might get off on it too.)
She clenches her jaw and turns her head away.
If he's going to abuse her like this, she won't give him the satisfaction of playing along with whatever warped fantasy he's dreamt up.
"Look at me." He grabs her by the jaw to turn her head. "Elena, look at me."
She looks fixedly past him.
Klaus ducks into her line of sight and viciously snaps her up into his web. "Look at me."
She does. She doesn't have a choice. The compulsion presses almost painfully against her mind—this is the worst sort of compulsion, she thinks. The sort where you're aware it's happening. Where you can feel it smothering your free will.
Klaus glares at her for a long time, and she glares back.
"No," he finally says. "I can see this won't do either."
Even the terrible ones.
Once she's done cleaning the house, she turns her attention back to the library. Spends long hours searching through Klaus's catalogue, reimplenting her workarounds to avoid any unpleasant shocks or side-effects from the more unsavory texts in the collection. Her hands sweat inside of her leather gloves as she works, and her eyes ache from reading and deciphering. She doesn't bother hiding her notes anymore. Klaus had picked through all of her secrets already.
More than anything, right now, she wants to understand why these memories are resurfacing now, when none of them had in December. She knows it must be connected to the daggering, since none of the time she lost traveling to New Orleans earlier in the month under Tyler's compulsion has reemerged. The question, though, that nags at her like a mosquito bite, is whether her memories have returned because she had been the one to dagger Klaus this time… or if it had something to do with the elemental connection between them that had exploded back into brilliant existence when Davina had dissolved the bloodstone.
She dives so deep into these questions, into her research, that she goes days where she hardly leaves the library. Forgets to eat, stops sleeping in her bedroom, instead curling up in the deep leather armchair or on the rug in front of the cold fireplace when her eyes grow too heavy to go on. She has pages and pages of notes, of everything she can remember ever being told about the white oak ash daggers, of everything she can remember reading about the gold dagger and a type of magic called kemiya in those old diaries stashed away in Klaus's study back at the Abattoir.
She spends weeks on the topic, yet she doesn't get very far past her own speculations, her own tortured reasoning.
It occurs to her that she might never know for certain. Not until she has a chance to talk to Klaus about it, anyway.
And that chance will come.
(Klaus has never been able to stay away from her for long.)
Klaus crawls into her bed the night that Celeste had almost slit her throat. Gathers her to his chest and holds her close to him.
She can feel the bloodstone singing to her from his jacket pocket.
Elena turns in his arms to face him. Her mouth brushes against his throat when she asks, "What are you doing?"
"Couldn't stand the thought of being so far from you."
"I was just upstairs."
He's quiet for a long time. "I was afraid tonight."
"So was I."
"I almost lost you," he murmurs, repeating his words from earlier.
She wraps her arms around his waist and lays her head against his shoulder. Listens to his heart beat. "I'm right here."
He sits up, and presses her back down into the mattress. She can't see him very well in the dark, can just barely make out his silhouette. A shadow deeper than the rest.
"You make me weak," he tells her.
She tries to push up onto her elbows, but his hold on her, gentle as it is, is implacable.
Pinned, she stares up into the darkness concealing his face. "What are you saying?"
"I think I should turn you."
Elena's whole body goes cold as ice. "I don't want to be a vampire."
"You won't want to be dead, either."
"Yes I would. I would prefer it, actually."
He strokes along the side of her face. She still can't see him, so he's nothing more than a phantom caress, nothing more than a low voice in her ear, as he mutters, almost more to himself than to her, as though he hadn't really even heard her, "If I turned you, you wouldn't be of use to anyone. I'd no longer have to guard you against power-hungry witches, or plotting vampires."
Panic edges in on her. He could turn her in an instant, and she would have no way to stop him. No father willing to step in and save her from that fate this time around.
No one but herself.
(But who is more capable?)
She takes a deep breath, trying to force herself to calm down. To find a perspective that he'll understand. "I'd no longer be of use to you, either."
"I don't think I care about that anymore." The confession strikes her like a physical blow. Nearly drives out any of her earlier fears about being turned.
(Nearly.)
"Of course you do."
"No, truly. I just—I just want you, Elena."
He can't possibly mean it.
She wants him to mean it so badly she can hardly breathe.
She reaches out, gropes blindly for Klaus's hand until she finds it. Threads her fingers through his, and brings their joined hands to rest against her cheek. "I get that you're scared, Klaus. But you can't just turn me into a vampire because we've had a bad night."
Slowly, he eases back down onto the mattress to lay beside her.
"I could keep you with me forever," he murmurs. "We could have an infinite number of nights."
"It's not what I want."
He draws away from her. "You don't want me?"
"That's not what I said."
"You told me you had the feeling you were supposed to be with me. This is part of that. Now or later, this is part of that."
"I thought you had more imagination than that."
"I do. I'm imagining my future with you in it."
"You'd regret turning me. Throwing all of your ambitions away on me. You'd grow to resent me in time. To hate me."
"I could never hate you."
"You don't know that. You hate Katherine."
"You're not Katerina."
"Aren't I? You don't know me well enough—"
He cups her face and draws her mouth to his. Kisses her deeply, thoroughly, until she forgets.
"I do know you," Klaus vows, pressing his forehead to hers. "You're in my blood. I know you as I know myself."
It's not true, it couldn't possibly be, and yet, she believes him.
"Then you know this isn't the answer."
He's quiet for a long time. "No. Not yet."
She frowns. Wants to say something else, but he kisses her again, rolling her beneath his body so he can cage her between his arms. Devours her the way that only he can.
This thing between them—this ill-fated attraction, this irrepressible connection— sparks and catches. She cannot deny him. Can barely do more than cling to him, her fingers twisting in his shirt and her legs shifting to wrap around his hips, as his sharp teeth catch at her lips and draw blood. He groans into her mouth, and she cannot tell if it's the pulse of the bloodstone or her own desire which she feels trembling straight down to her bones.
She wants him closer, wants him as close as she can have him, screw whatever she'd promised herself before turning in, but Klaus pulls back.
He traces her bleeding lip with his thumb. "I'm going to protect you."
"I know."
"I was weak tonight."
"Hush."
(But in the morning, after he kisses her again, breaking the scabs loose from her lips and tasting her unnatural blood, he pulls back and tells her, quite intently, "Do you realize, the vervain's already passed from your blood."
She looks up at him. Sees him so clearly in the pre-dawn light: vulnerable, uncertain. Trust is still so new to him.
"I'll keep your secrets for you, you know."
"I know… That's not the issue.")
She reaches for him before she realizes he's not really here with her.
(Closes her eyes, and reaches for him the only way that she can.)
Eventually, there are no more new memories to keep her company.
She begins to live on her memories of Klaus, the way she lives on her memories of Tyler, of Jeremy, of Damon and Bonnie and Caroline and Matt and Jenna and her parents (and Stefan).
One day, the urge to write in her diaries springs up out of the blue, fully formed like Athena bursting from her father's skull. Impossible to ignore once the impulse has her in its grasp.
That's when she finally notices that it's gone missing.
She tears her room apart all over again looking for it, certain it must be somewhere. Except it's not.
Remembering that Klaus had read it, she goes searching through the rest of the house. Finds a room she realizes must be his bedroom, even though she's never stepped foot inside it before, and, unable to let herself dwell on how she could be so certain, on how just the smell of this room, sharp and enticing and familiar, is nearly enough to bring her to her knees, rifles through the drawers and ransacks the armoire.
She ends up sitting in a pile of his shirts. One of them has a bloodstained hole in it, right over the heart. If she hadn't found that shirt, she thinks she could have gotten out of that room without crumbling.
Instead, she gathers the shirts up into her arms and buries her face in them. Takes long, deep breaths, warding off the deep, full-body sobs that threaten to wrack through her. Her entire body aches with how much she misses him. Longs for him to return to her.
She wakes up in that pile of empty shirts as the sun is going down. The light from the low angle blinds her for a moment as she stands up, and shuffles back to her room.
By the next evening, she's certain that he's taken her diary with him, as well as her novels, and a stack of her drawings.
She finds the portrait Tyler had drawn of her—the one that had inspired her to kiss him all those months ago—torn up into tiny little pieces and scattered like ashes under her floorboards. Easily overlooked.
The idea that Klaus has taken her diary, her novels, and her drawings—her art, her truth—with him shakes her up.
Infuses her with new hope.
He wouldn't have taken those things with him if he hadn't cared.
(If he hadn't loved her back.)
May slips into June without her really noticing. She only realizes it because of the ledger she keeps in the kitchen with her tallies on the supplies, and the careful notations she makes each day.
Elena checks and rechecks her tally marks. Three weeks have already passed since Klaus had left her here. That had been in mid-May. She can't understand how she's let so much time get away from her.
All at once she realizes that she hasn't had a period since April. Without that natural marker, she'd completely lost track of time.
She remembers last fall, when she'd gone off her cycle—she'd been under so much stress and had taken such poor care of herself, had lost so much weight as a result, that her body's natural rhythms had faltered.
She makes a note to herself that she has to keep her strength up. Easier said than done, of course— She hasn't had much of an appetite. It's hard to force herself to eat, with her anxiety and her grief swarming over her and turning her stomach into vicious knots. She's thrown up more than a couple of breakfasts over the past few weeks, especially whenever she gets to thinking too much about the uncertainty of her situation.
Still feeling out of sorts by how out of it she's been, she works hard to figure out exactly how much time has passed since Klaus left with the others, since the last date she had known for certain, back in New Orleans. She puts together a timeline of her days, and after a few revisions, think she has the date pinpointed.
Her birthday is less than two weeks away.
Klaus had promised her a gift.
And he'd never broken a promise to her before.
The anticipation of her birthday almost makes her happy. It's a bright thing to look forward to.
On a gut level, she feels certain that she'll hear from him soon.
She spends the days leading up to it going for long, contemplative walks in the gardens amongst the daylilies and the asters, imagining what she could say to Klaus when she sees him again.
A thousand apologies cross her mind, a thousand declarations.
Just the chance to talk to him again would be a blessing.
She marks the days off on her calendar carefully, carefully—
Her nineteenth birthday dawns soft and lovely.
Elena pulls out Joy of Cooking and bakes herself a cake. She has no candles, and so she just has to close her eyes—
—and make a wish.
She spends the whole day outside, under the Japanese Maple, wishing.
Waiting for a sign from him that never comes.
The next morning, when she wakes up and reaches for Klaus, she cannot feel him at all.
After that, she never feels him again, no matter how she searches for him. He is so distant from her now that even the echo of him has passed from her reach.
Even so, she waits for him.
The last of her hopes that Klaus will return to her are dashed when she finds an unfamiliar woman rummaging through her cupboards sometime in late June.
After so long on her own, she nearly jumps out of her skin when she sees her. "Who are you?" she asks from the doorway, keeping her distance. Her voice is rough from disuse.
The woman turns and fixes dark eyes upon her. She's sleek and pretty, in a reserved, distant sort of way. "Klaus sent me to check in on your supplies and to replenish anything you may need."
"Oh."
The girl whips out her phone and taps out some notes, before continuing her investigation.
Elena sidles closer. Unable to resist gravitating toward contact of any sort after being starved of it for so long. "Are you a hybrid?"
The girl nods absently.
"Where's Klaus now? Have you seen him recently?"
The woman glances up at her briefly. Backs away several feet, continuing to tap notes into her phone as she explains, as though by rote, "I've been instructed not to converse with you at any length, and to keep my physical distance from you."
"Did he say anything else?"
The woman doesn't answer.
"Are you going to see him again soon?"
Still, nothing.
Elena narrows her eyes. Considers throwing a fit, just to be petty, and stabbing herself with a kitchen knife again, just to make sure that this hybrid will report the incident to Klaus—except that her hand cramps as soon as she thinks it, and she knows she won't be able to intentionally mortally wound herself while under Klaus's compulsion.
Resigned, Elena sits down at the kitchen table and watches the hybrid work. She's perfunctory and efficient. She leaves after only 15 minutes, and returns an hour later with enough fresh food and other essentials to last Elena for another interminable stretch of solitude.
"What's your name?" Elena asks the woman as she turns to leave.
"Carmen."
"Will you be back?"
"Who knows?"
The slow weeks of summer slide idly into July.
A listless despair sinks into her.
Out of topics to research, rooms to clean, or even far-flung hopes to dream about, she finds herself at a complete loss as to what to do. Her only directive is to live.
She's not sure how.
The food Carmen brought back must have been off, because the smell of the chicken sizzling in the skillet has her gagging into the trashcan.
After the third time this happens, she gives up on it.
In her dreams, he tells her he forgives her. Kisses her tears away and holds her, the way he only ever really had a bare handful of times.
("I wish you'd let me make you happy."
"What's the point in trying? It's not possible."
"I think it could be. If only you'd let yourself.")
Sometimes, it's Damon who invades her rest.
It's always the same: He reaches her at the Abattoir. Stefan is dying and the building is coming down around them as witch-blue lightning arcs overhead, but the moment his hand closes over her own, she knows that she is safe. That she is home.
She always wakes, teary-eyed, longing for an escape which isn't possible.
Listlessly she takes to wandering the house. Pulling open doors and sifting through drawers.
Some doors are locked, and try as she might, she still cannot open them.
She's in what she imagines must be Rebekah's personal sitting room, off of her bedroom with the pink chaise longue. The morning light here is cool and pale, and Elena likes to watch the birds in the trees outside the windows while she thumbs through Rebekah's keepsakes. It's while she's trying to prize open a silver box that she accidentally knocks over a vase, shattering it completely. When she moves the heavy table out of the way, she finds that old copy of Jane Eyre which she had dropped so hastily last fall.
Hesitantly, Elena reaches for the novel, abandoning the shards of glass and the silver box to gather dust.
She throws herself onto the chaise longue and she reads.
All morning, into the afternoon, and past that, into the evening, she reads.
Until she gets to the line which had so disturbed her last fall— which had fallen upon her heart like a dark prophetic shadow.
"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!"
She takes a deep breath. Reading it now should be so much worse than it had been last fall, when she'd been merely flustered and overcome by Klaus's initial advances—and it is, it is so much worse—but it's also soothing to read something so sympathetic to her sentiments in a way she had not anticipated.
She reads.
Reading becomes an escape for her again, the way it had been in the fall.
For a few hours at a time, she can forget. Can slip into other lives. Other places.
She rereads Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, something she'd read once before in the ninth grade, and she thinks, Could I put down the thing I love the most? She's only ever stood between her loved ones and the abyss. She doesn't know that she would have the strength for more than that.
She begins taking books out of the library with her when she wanders down to the kitchen or when she grows tired of the ghosts that linger in the library. She never bothers to return them anymore, leaving them in random spots all over the house.
It's not possible to forget entirely, though.
She feels wretched a lot of the time—ill and wasted from the loneliness that eats at her heart, day after day.
There are long afternoons when her desire rises up so strongly in her it chokes her.
Desire for Klaus. For his regard and his knowing smile and his hands on her body. For sex and touch and taste and life.
She spends entire days ruminating on the few times they had been together—the night at the Abattoir vividly coming to mind, the kisses they'd passed back and forth like unkept promises. They'd only actually had sex the once—that one, aborted attempt back in October of last year—but between her compulsion dreams and her own fantasies, she has plenty to work with.
It's an empty famine of a release though. It always is.
The boredom is probably the worst of it though. She feels like Penelope, spinning and unmaking her tapestry each day. Waiting.
Sometimes she likes to go into Rebekah's room and try on all of her clothes. Fling herself dramatically onto the chaise longue and imagine what it must be like to be Rebekah, beautiful and damned and carved from fragile, melting ice.
She should hate Rebekah, after the memory of that night with the Jeremy-who-wasn't had resurfaced, but she cannot find the space for within her. The problem is that she understands Rebekah too well by now to hate her. Sees her actions now for what they were: a manifestation of her fear that her brother would grow bored with her and box her up again if she lost his favor. She's an ancient vampire with a young girl's heart, too uncertain and unloved to trust in anything good, but wanting to, always. Just another girl with a reckless heart.
She finds a trunk full of old clothes, once, stuffed away in the attic. When she opens it up, she finds beautifully beaded dresses and glittering headbands and real silk stockings.
She steals the stockings for her own.
Her hair falls around her face in damp ringlets as she stares at herself in her bathroom mirror's foggy glass. It'll curl if she lets it dry naturally.
On a whim, she pulls out the bottles and tubes of her mostly unused cosmetics and does her makeup the way she remembers, smoky eyes and lined lips and long sooty lashes. Everything sharper and harder. Once she's satisfied with the effect, she steps back and lets her towel drop to the floor. She twists and turns in front of the mirror, examining the stretch of her too-pale skin over her ribs, her belly, the way her slender waist curves to the round jut of her hips. If she focuses, and moves very carefully, she finds she can mirror that serpentine grace she remembers so well, can sway her hips and tilt her head just exactly so. Everything but the scar on her lip is exactly as she remembers.
And yet something isn't right.
She's turning into a ghost she doesn't recognize.
(Some rare unearthly thing.)
Haunted by herself, her past.
She thinks this hunted suspension in time must be what Katherine's final months as a human must have been like.
She wipes the makeup off and straightens her hair.
In late July she wakes at dawn with a terrible pain in her belly, in a pool of her own blood, slowly seeping out from between her thighs.
It's her period, finally arrived after months and months without it.
Except it's not. It's different.
Something's wrong.
The bleeding won't stop and the pain in her belly and lower back only ratchets up as the dawn deepens into a bright and sunny summer morning.
By the afternoon, she feels like she's being ripped in two.
There is so much blood.
She makes it to the bathroom, where she crawls into the tub and braces her hands and feet against the sides. Lets herself scream when the worst waves hit her. Her body feels completely out of her control—like some foreign entity she has no hope of understanding or controlling—as she strains and pants and begs for it to be over.
She's so scared.
She wants her mother more than anything. Someone to hold her hand.
The day dwindles into dusky evening, and by then, she's so exhausted she can barely do more than whimper as each wave rolls into the next.
She thinks she knows what's happening, now that the initial shock and confusion have worn off.
She doesn't know how much longer she can do this. Doesn't know if she's strong enough to get up out of this tub and keep going after today.
She wants nothing more right now than to lay down and die.
Live.
She grits her teeth, and pushes through.
It's fully dark when Elena finally forces herself to stand on legs as weak as a foal's.
She flips on the lights and stares for a long time at the blood and tissue at the bottom of the tub. Tries to see if there is anything there that could be—
She can't tell.
Weeks pass. Her physical recovery is slow, her emotional recovery much slower than that. It boggles her mind how she can feel such a deep sense of loss for something she hadn't even known about until it was over. To love so much someone who had died before she even knew they existed.
Part of her wants to deny that this ever happened. To pass over it as one of the inexplicable events in her life, never to be thought about or rehashed ever, ever again.
Idly, she wonders how it could have been possible in the first place. If this had been a fluke of her unnatural blood. She never has the heart to really look into the mechanics of it.
She spends entire days at a time in bed, staring up at the ceiling, just listening to herself breathe. Turning over the same question, over and over: Was it my fault?
She dreams about her dark-haired baby all the time. She always imagines it would have been a girl.
Once, and only once, she even dreams of herself showing the infant to Klaus.
More often, she dreams she has to bring the baby to her father, but the baby dies in her arms, and by the time she makes it to him, she's just this little indistinguishable bit of red that slips through her fingers.
Whenever she wakes from those dreams, she fills the bath tub to overflowing with water and submerges herself beneath the surface, where she lets herself cry. It's a risky thing to do. Sometimes she hopes she'll choke on her sobs and aspirate, but Klaus's command always pushes her up to the surface, hacking and gasping.
She finally finds it in herself to hate Klaus again, for forcing her to push through this with his stupid cruel compulsion, and for being absent, completely absent, when she needs him most. For his complete indifference while she crawls through this hell.
She hates him almost as much as she hates herself for losing Tyler Lockwood's baby.
In late August, a nurse comes to take her blood.
It's the first time anyone but Klaus has taken her blood since she arrived here a year ago.
Another reminder that Klaus simply doesn't care anymore.
She should have taken him at his word. How stupid of her to have hoped.
The nurse is middle-aged and blonde and clearly compelled. She asks Elena a number of questions about her health, weighs her and takes her blood pressure. At the usual question about the date of her last cycle, she lies.
What happened isn't something she can tell this vacant stranger.
Isn't something she can tell anyone at all.
She's under the water again. It's late, the night of the new moon, and she hasn't bothered turning on any lights when she ran the water. No, she's content to let herself sink into the dark, compelling water, where she feels most in her element. Floating beneath the surface, cradled in eternity. All she can hear is her own heartbeat echoing.
She feels close to her parents like this. Close to her daughter. Swimming through eternity. Forward and back.
Her thoughts drift, back to the time before her parents died. It had been such a simple, fleeting time, and she hadn't even known it.
There had been so many times that had been over before she ever knew to appreciate them. Her last year in Mystic Falls, as harrowing and electrifying as it had been. That final summer, when she'd thought her heart was broken— and it was, it was just that she hadn't yet learned the dimension of her capacity to love, and so hadn't appreciated how much worse her heartbreak could be. The happy weeks she'd spent in New Orleans last fall, falling in love despite herself—or maybe, because of herself. Because of who she really is—a woman she had never expected herself to turn out to be. That carefree time last winter and spring, when Tyler had coaxed her back to life. Had given her a child.
She takes a deep, steadying breath—
And chokes as fire punches through her lungs.
She bursts through the surface of the tub and slips like an eel over the side of the tub, retching and vomiting, except she can't get the fire out of her lungs, she knows this feeling, this death, she's felt it before, and she realizes with tears scalding her eyes that she doesn't want to die, she wants to live, more than anything, she wants to live.
Elena clings to the side of the tub, coughing and gasping for air as the compulsion screams in her veins and the water trickles out of her lungs, little by little.
Nearly taken out in her own bath tub by her own stupidity—forgetting she was underwater. After everything she's survived.
She laughs, her ravaged throat stinging with each nervous exhalation. Laughs until her diaphragm aches, until there is nothing left inside of her but a few slow tears.
She gets up, very slowly and carefully, and dresses in a warm sweater to ward off the pre-dawn September chill.
Goes outside, under the starlit sky, and places her palms against the rough familiar bark of the Japanese Maple. It's leaves have just begun to flush scarlet. The color of blood, of womanhood, of change—her color.
Carefully, she finds herself the lowest branch and pulls herself up. It's been years since she's climbed any trees, but a childhood spent traipsing through the woods around Mystic Falls and nearby lake is not so easily forgotten.
She makes it to the highest branches just as the sun is rising pale and golden over the forest insulating the property from the outside world.
"I want to live," she whispers to the rising sun. Not just to survive, the way she had been ordered to do. But live. On her own terms.
And maybe… one day…
The sun rises, and Elena looks south. Toward home.
A/N: Sending my love to everyone who's stuck with me. Come find me over on tumblr at livlepretre if you'd like to talk. Reviews = life.