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
Despite the light filtering in through the large windows, the room has the distinct aura of a tomb. Something about the mistiness of the air, shut inside this room apparently for years, or perhaps the deep, wintery stillness that emanates from those closed caskets. The coffins themselves are grand, beautiful pieces, fashioned from oak and mahogany, cherry and ebony, that almost seem to glow in the morning light, even under the thin layer of dust that coats each one. Lazy dust motes shimmer in the hazy beams of pale sunlight as Elena carefully steps further into the room.
Four coffins, she notes. There's something unsettling about that. Rebekah had been clear—besides Klaus, she had only three other brothers—Elijah, Kol, and Finn, the eldest whom she never spoke of very much. Besides the five of them, the only other Original vampire would be their father, Mikael, whom she had had the distinct displeasure of meeting several years before, so she knows he cannot account for the extra coffin. Besides, from what Rebekah's told her, Klaus would have preferred to somehow destroy his father or drop him to the bottom of the ocean rather than tuck him away here, fastidiously preserving him like a pressed flower between the pages of a book. Who, then, could Klaus have stored in this final coffin? Could it be empty, held here with the intention of one day inevitably returning Rebekah to her place amongst her siblings?
Only one way to find out.
Her heart hammering in her throat, Elena approaches the first coffin, and slowly pushes back the lid.
She half-expects a hand to shoot out and grab her around the wrist. For the vampire within to pull her into its desiccated grasp and sink its razored fangs into her throat and drain her dry. It's what any of the tomb vampires would have done had she been so stupid as to creep this close to them.
Instead, what she finds within is a just a dead man in repose, his smooth gray face free from any signs of fear, anger, or surprise— as eerily serene as she remembers Klaus and Elijah to have been in death.
Elena studies the man inside, trying to figure out whether he might be Finn or Kol. He's a tall man, wiry in build, dressed head to toe in a dark jacket and waistcoat that looks like something from the turn of the last century. His dark fey features remind her of a sharper version of Elijah's. What's more, there's something particularly compelling about his mouth—something about the shape of it that suggests how easily it could slide into a smile—but not a very nice one, Elena somehow ususpects.
The next coffin she opens holds a different brother, this one garbed in rotting velvets. His hair is a long, tangled nest around his face, his skin so discolored that she can hardly distinguish his features. It's obvious at a glance that this brother has been daggered much, much longer than the other. Which must make this one Finn, and the other Kol, put down by Klaus's own admission at the beginning of the 20th century.
It occurs to Elena, suddenly, that these cannot be the original coffins Klaus had stored his brothers in. From what she can determine from the tattered clothing, Elena guesses Finn must have been daggered centuries and centuries ago. Which means at some point, Klaus had taken the trouble to transfer his siblings to these elaborate new… storage containers.
They're just like her, she realizes. Whether he's stuffing his brothers into boxes or entombing her in this mausoleum of a manor, the outcome is just the same. Klaus had grown weary of each of them and so, like a child who refuses to donate the toys he's outgrown, he'd packed each of them up and left them in the furthest corners of his proverbial attic, never to be thought of again.
The thought makes her as furious as it makes her sad. God help her, she pities Klaus for being like this.
Not enough to walk out of this room just yet, though.
The third coffin won't open at all.
Which leaves the just the coffin under the window.
Even though she's expecting it, her stomach still flips when she pushes the heavy lid open to gaze down at the corpse housed within it. Elijah's face is as arresting to her now as it has ever been. A pang of nostalgia shoots through her at the sight of him—as though in his features she can trace the memories of everything she left behind in those final months in Virginia. All of the innocence she lost the night that he betrayed her.
Her hand hovers over the dagger planted in his heart. Likely the same dagger that John had procured while trying to save her from him. The one she had wielded the night she had discovered what lengths she would really be willing to go to to protect the ones she loved. In many ways, the night she had first truly understood herself at all.
She had betrayed Elijah that night when she chose to shelter Damon from him, but he had betrayed her so much more indelibly when he had reneged on killing Klaus.
Even so. There will always be a part of her deeply grateful that he had been unable to go through with it in the end. She knows she would have been happier if he had extinguished Klaus then and there, yet somehow she can no longer quite picture how else her life might have turned out without him in it.
As always, thoughts of Klaus tangle her resolve up into knots.
She doesn't know what to do.
Undaggering Elijah will unequivocally be an act of treachery against Klaus. One that he deserves, probably, and yet—
You're living in a house of glass.
Could she really awaken his enemy? (Her enemy, since he'd broken faith with her?)
Elena steps away from Elijah's open casket without removing the dagger and curls up on the floor, knees drawn up to her chest, so she can have a think.
Of course she'd suspected what she'd find in here the very instant she figured out how to break through the barrier spell—that it must be a blood ward of the sort Rebekah had described, hiding the rest of Klaus's family.
Once that suspicion had wormed its way inside her thoughts, she'd set all of her will toward breaking through the blood wards, to throwing herself into this position where she, finally, would hold the power.
Now that she's here, though, she's not entirely certain what she wants to do with it. It's as though she had been operating in a fugue state, so singularly focused on getting into this room, on finally one-upping Klaus, that she had never considered what the consequences of her actions would be.
And really, her decision is very simple. To undagger Elijah, or to leave him be? She can't risk undaggering the others—at least, not without Elijah's protection—there's no telling whether they'll stop to ask questions before succumbing to the depths of their hunger after centuries of thirst. She has to assume they'd drain her dry on the instant.
But if she undaggers Elijah, would he lend her his aid? Would he find a way to reverse Klaus's compulsion, or help her get in touch with her friends? Could he protect them from Klaus's retribution so she could return home with a clear conscience?
Could he make her forget she had ever loved Klaus at all?
Or would he gravely and politely thank her, and then, finding his beloved brothers so near to hand, immediately undagger them without sparing her another thought? He could be unaffected by her plight altogether. Might leave her here with as little dent on his conscience as Rebekah had apparently suffered. Rebekah, who had called her a friend. She had never been Elijah's friend.
Another path opens up before her.
She could wait. She could slip out, shut the door behind her, and, when the next hybrid comes—which must be soon—she could have her bring a message to Klaus. Tell her to tell him: I broke through your blood ward. He'd come to her then, she's sure of it. This would be a way of calling him back to her that he'd be unable to resist.
It's a dangerous fantasy. He might kill her for it. (Does she care? At least, then, in her final moments, she would not be alone.)
Then again, he might just simply snatch the coffins back from her, and leave her without even that small lever of power over him to call her own.
Or worst of all. He might slip in while she slept and be gone by morning. He could be right here, and she would miss him altogether.
She could always just do nothing. She could wait.
She could say to hell with it and undagger all three of them.
Maybe she can get that sealed coffin open, with a little work, and that will reveal the best course of action to her.
Elena bangs her head against the wall.
It is exactly as she has always feared.
She's clawed herself to the edge of the precipice, to the place where if she plays her cards the right way she could win her freedom from Klaus, leave all of this behind… and she's not certain what she wants to do.
No, she does know. She wants to scream.
She'd been absolutely livid that day with Rebekah, when they had fought and Rebekah had called her out on it, but the truth is this: She wants to go home, yes, but more than that, she wishes she could return to a time before Klaus had discovered her betrayal, when it looked like she just might be able to pull together a future with him.
Even now, she still can't shake the feeling that she's supposed to be with him.
She laughs, because otherwise she might cry.
All of this is just so stupid and she knows it. She's no better than Damon had been, really: pining after a memory of someone who doesn't want her.
She can live with Klaus never coming back for her, but she refuses to live her life in bitter solitude.
She can't survive another year here all alone. She won't.
And she has the power to make sure that she doesn't. One way or another, she won't go on like this.
Resolved, Elena stands, and sidles up to Elijah's casket. Elijah, because even if he is her enemy… she knows him. Knows that he considers himself a creature of honor, even if she knows that to be untrue, and that he can be persuaded to help her.
It must be possible, because this is her only possible choice.
Not a whisper of Klaus's compulsion attempts to halt her.
Her hand grasps the dagger.
The sound of a car pulling up the gravel drive drifts in from outside.
Frowning, Elena leaves the room and hurries across the hall, into one of the rooms overlooking the front drive. It's a bit early for the next hybrid, but they've come early before. Better in that case to wait until tomorrow, irritating as that is. It can't possibly be Rebekah, even if her whole body flushes warm at the thought that maybe it could be—
For a long moment, as Elena peers down at the gravel drive and the unfamiliar people spilling out of the black SUV below, followed a moment later by two more SUVs packed with still more strangers, she doesn't understand what she's looking at. Then she catches sight of one face in the crowd below she does know, and the blood freezes in her veins.
Mikael.
"Fuck."
Just then, Mikael glances up, toward her window.
She throws herself back on pure reflex, praying he hadn't seen her. Sweat beads her face, and her temples throb. Blood rushes in her ears. Her heart pounds so hard against her chest that she has trouble drawing a breath.
He's here to kill her. She's certain of it. There can be no other reason for a visit.
Here to kill her, along with his entourage of flunkies, and she can't escape the property. She's as trapped as a rabbit in a snare.
She bites her fist, hard, against the urge to scream.
She's going to die, she's going to die, and it will all have been for nothing, her whole life spooled out into a total waste—
Live.
The compulsion slides through her veins with the same power of relief as cool water sliding down the throat on a hot summer day. Her breath eases and her thoughts clarify as the compulsion forces her to search out the surest path of survival.
She has to hide—no—she has to get to the woods. Only there does she have any prayer of eluding Mikael and his cohorts. But first, she has to arm herself.
Elena tears back into the room with the coffins and wrenches the dagger out from Elijah's heart. If the last time she undaggered him is anything to go by, it may take him hours to wake—it doesn't matter. There's no time to sit by his side and hope that he'll choose to rescue her from his father.
She has to escape this death trap of a manor right now if she has any chance of surviving.
The bloody dagger she leaves where it is—too great a chance that the smell of her blood would draw them right to her. And—even though she feels a little sorry about this, since it means leaving Elijah and the others so vulnerable—there's also the chance the smell of all of her blood smeared along the doorway and on that dagger will cause a distraction for any vampires who may be in the house. Not too sorry though. She leaves them with that bloody dagger fast enough.
As quickly and quietly as she can, Elena creeps down the long disused hallways back toward the center of the house, straining with every ounce of focus she possesses to detect any footsteps, any voices, lest she run headlong into one of the intruders. She's not even sure what most of them are—Vampires? Witches? A mixture of both? She keeps the white oak ash dagger clenched in her fist, useless as it is against a regular vampire—against Mikael, without a fresh coat of ash on the blade. Doesn't let herself think too closely on how fast she would be to sink the blade into a witch's heart if it comes to that. Her bare feet slip against the floors.
At the end of the gallery, their voices begin to filter up to where she can hear them.
"Find the girl, and bring her to me alive. You will do me no good if you bring me her corpse."
She recognizes that resonant, commanding voice. Mikael. Still down in the entry foyer, she thinks.
Barely daring to breathe, she eases out onto the second floor landing. It's a gamble, but if she can, she has to make it across the landing and up a flight of stairs, so she can get to the library, where she's stashed the bulk of her interesting finds over the years. Any weapons she can take with her might be the difference between life and death.
"She's not here," one of the intruders, a man, says.
"Of course she's here," Mikael snaps. "Do you not see the evidence of her presence all around you? Smell her sweet scent in the air? The very stones themselves reek of her. The dirt out front. She's been a resident here for a long while."
Elena presses herself against the back wall as she edges toward the stairs, praying that the shadows keep her hidden. It's no use, probably—any moment they'll stop arguing, and, once they're no longer distracted, they'll sense her.
"Can't smell her though. Can't hear her heartbeat. Maybe that hybrid lied," another one suggests. Vampires, then, but that's odd that they can't smell or hear her. She doesn't dare to hope.
"Oh, I very much doubt that abomination would have lied to me. By the end, she would have done absolutely anything for me just for the mercy of a swift death."
So he'd captured and killed the hybrid dispatched for this latest visit. That must be how he had known where to find her. A pang of grief surges in her at this, even though she probably wouldn't have known the woman.
But she can't think about that now. She has to keep moving.
If not for those years of solitude here, she wouldn't know this house in all of its rhythms and moods. If there had been someone to talk to during all those long months, she would have been too preoccupied to learn just how to step to keep the floorboards on the stairs from creaking, just how to ease herself up as fluidly and silently as a shadow.
"How do you explain it then?" the same man presses Mikael from down below.
"She's hiding from us. Some sort of spell, perhaps, that the boy has placed on her. It is no matter. She is here. Fan out, and bring her to me."
Their words catch up to her as she slips onto the third floor and she nearly pauses. Of course. The cloaking bracelet Davina had given her, still on her wrist. It must be somehow smothering the smell and sound of her, the things vampires would use to hunt her from afar.
Feeling more confident in her stealth, she darts down the long, turning corridors to the library. Her refuge.
As soon as she is inside she rips open her desk drawers and piles everything her hands touch on top of the desk.
Her jacket from a few days ago is still hooked over the back of the chair where she'd tossed it when she first came in here two days ago in a blaze of revelation, eager to prove herself right.
She pulls it on now and shoves her collection of razor sharp blades and Dark Objects into the pockets. For most of these she only has a vague idea of their usage, but she's desperate. She'll try anything. Do anything. The compulsion pounding at her temples ensures that the reward weighs greater than the risk.
The last thing she pulls out of the drawer is that phial of white oak ash she had found in Klaus's bedroom a couple of years back. She's kept it here, just in case, ever since.
Just in case is now.
She dips the dagger in the ash, watches carefully as the magic inherent in the blade binds the ash to the metal. Tucks the phial into her breast pocket, where it's least likely to break, and the dagger into her waistband. It feels like a bar of ice against her spine.
She casts about, hoping she'd left a pair of shoes in here too. She'd have to carry them in one hand while she creeps through the house, but they would make the going a lot easier if she makes it to the woods. When she makes it to the woods.
A stake would also be really great right about now. She kicks herself for not having taken the time to whittle a few in the infinite hours of free time that she's had—It's just—stakes don't stop an Original vampire, and they're not very useful against hybrids in and of themselves. She'd been too busy thinking about larger predators to think about the more mundane threat of a regular vampire. The possibility of an invasion like this had simply never occurred to her.
Which again begs the question: What's the point of this raid? Mikael had told his little minions that he wanted her found and brought to him alive, but Elena doesn't believe for a second that he wants anything with her other than to kill her. Maybe he'll draw it out—torture her like he apparently had the poor hybrid Klaus had sent for her this fall—or maybe he'll want to use her in some ooky spell first, which would be so predictable and tiresome, but the end result will be the same. Her, dead.
Fuck that.
She's just about to leave when she hears a pair of bickering voices—heading straight her way.
Scrambling, she dives under her desk and pulls the chair in as close as possible to camouflage herself.
This isn't going to work. They're going to hear her breathing or they're going to sense her body heat or see her shadow and that will be it. Except—
She gropes through her pockets. Pulls out the long bone needle. She'd found a description of this in one of Klaus's diaries—one prick with this needle guarantees an ugly, writhing death as the blood boils and evaporates from the veins and the bones literally melt. She hopes it's fast-acting enough that she can use it and escape. But maybe not too fast though. She really doesn't want to live with that sight burned into her brain forever.
The door bangs open and a pair of vampires amble into the room. One of them walks right past her.
"This whole thing's pointless," one of them says. The same one who had argued with Mikael downstairs, she thinks. "Whether or not that girl was here, she's not here now."
"So long as Mikael says she is then she must be. You'd do best to remember that, else you won't live much longer."
"It just makes no sense." She hears him take a deep whiff. "Girl was here recently, yeah, that's obvious. But if she's here now, you'd think we'd have caught some sign by now. Her bed smells like it hasn't been slept in for days, and you know it."
Thank God for all-night benders in the library.
Thank God for Davina Claire and her astonishing cloaking bracelets.
The fact that they'd been in her room at all though makes her skin crawl.
The second one isn't so easily persuaded as his partner. "Mikael thought the girl might be under some sort of spell hiding herself away, making it so we couldn't sense her. He has his witch working on breaking it right now. Bet we find her right quick after that."
Elena's stomach flutters at this news. Definitely not good, although, the idea that Mikael would show up here with nothing but vampires for fire power had been just too good to be true.
There's a long pause, interrupted only by the sound of things breaking, one after another. Then, "Don't you wonder about this though? Show up, house is all empty. I'm not so sure we haven't walked into a trap."
One of them circles around and sits on the desk. The wood groans under his weight.
She has a clear shot on his leg. She aims the needle. One quick jab and it'll be over—at least until the other one pulls her out by the hair and drags her off.
"Keep your head, man," the calmer of the two, the one atop the desk, scolds. "And stop breaking shit. We're here to find the girl, not to trash the place."
"I'm nervous. I break things when I'm nervous."
"Why be nervous? We have the great Vampire Hunter himself on our side."
"Yeah, but I'd never even heard of him 'til recently. Klaus, though? You hear whispers about him everywhere—"
A voice rings out, the words indistinct to Elena's human ears yet the tone obviously pitched toward excitement.
"That Avery? Sounds like he's found something."
They both hurry from the room.
Elena counts slowly to ten before she shoves the chair out of the way and climbs out from under the desk.
She pauses to listen at the door for a moment before heading out.
The manor is alive with the subtle presence of vampires combing the space. It hasn't held this many people since that Christmas when Klaus had been in residence, and the place had been packed with hybrids. But whatever it was this Avery had found, it seems to have drawn the bulk of them off toward the other side of the house, giving her a clean shot off of the third floor. Maybe they'd found her bloody dagger. Maybe they were busy making the mistake of undaggering the other Original brothers.
Elena slips back down the stairs, onto the second floor.
She overhears Mikael conferring with the witch downstairs—camped out in the parlor, maybe.
"You can't perform a locator spell, even with hair from her brush? That seems unlikely."
"I've told you, this land is shored up against locator spells of any sort. It's unplottable. Off the map. Everything inside the perimeter of this property doesn't seem to exist—"
"That's nonsense."
"Of course it is. It's a spell."
"Every moment, our window to find the blasted girl closes."
She dives into the familiar hall on which her bedroom is located. Hurries straight past it, toward the back stairs on the other end of the wing. From there, she can reach the kitchen, and the backdoor. With any luck, Mikael and his gang will be so busy searching the house that she can slip into the woods without any of them noticing.
Her luck goes bad just as she's rounding the corner into the stairwell.
She runs smack into one of the vampires, who looks as startled as she when they collide. Her surprise doesn't last for long. In an instant, she has her hand around one of her arms, has called out, "I've found her!"
No sooner does she speak than Elena stabs her in the throat with the needle.
The vampire drops her, howling.
Immediately another vampire bursts out of the stairwell. Elena stabs him before she even realizes what she's doing, but this vampire doesn't go down so easily. He swats the needle out of her hand as he collapses screaming to the floor, pulling her down with him. She shoves and kicks at him like a wild thing, screaming herself when his fangs slice the fingers of her right hand open from tip to base. A lucky kick to the stomach knocks the dying vampire back, just enough for her to claw her way out from under him.
Staggering to her feet, she casts about for the bone needle only to find it snapped in half, probably useless, over by the remains of the female vampire who'd first run headlong into her. Her stomach heaves at the sight of what she's done, but she pushes it down.
Dives back around the corner just in time to hide from another vampire, who steps over his still-writhing compatriot like he's a log in the road.
"Come out now, pretty girl," he calls softly. "No need to fear us. We're here to rescue you."
Elena backs away, scarcely daring to breathe. Her thoughts race. She's lost her best weapon. Her escape route's been cut off. Any second now he's going to smell the blood from her torn up hand. She's fucked fucked fucked.
She steadies herself against the wall with her good hand as she takes careful steps backward, not daring to take her eyes off of the turn ahead where any second now the vampire will come around the corner. Her other hand fumbles in her coat pockets, searching for anything more useful against a vampire than a metal blade.
The bleeding hand in her pocket brushes against something hot just as the hand on the wall slides over a bit of wall that feels different than the rest. Elena pulls out the intricately designed mechanical disk, the one that ticks like a grasshopper when she holds it up to her ear, at just the same moment as she turns to find the dumbwaiter that leads down to the kitchen at her back.
The disk, slicked in the blood from her fingers, grows searing hot to the touch, nearly too hot to hold. The frequency of the ticks growing ever louder and faster the longer Elena holds it, until they reach a hair-raising rate and pitch. Every instinct in her gut shrieks at her that she's holding a bomb, and it's about to go pow. Probably blood activated. Typical—
"Oh shit, there she is," someone calls behind her. Elena turns, spots the two from the library prowling toward her, just as she glimpses on the edge of her vision the other vampire who'd come out of the stairwell stepping around the corner. "What's that she's got in her hand?"
The disk scalds her palm, the acrid smell of burning flesh hanging pungent in the air. She grits her teeth against the reflex to drop it. Leans hard into the compulsion screaming in her nerves to hang on. The disk screeches like a wounded animal, like something alive.
The vampires approach her with slow, cautious steps. "We don't want to harm you," says the oh-so-reasonable-one from the library. "Whatever it is you've got there, just put it down on the floor, and the four of us can have a nice little chat—"
She yanks open the dumbwaiter door behind her and throws herself in, smashing the disk onto the ground as it erupts into virulent green flames. The whole hallway explodes into a wall of fire as the dumbwaiter plummets to the kitchen down below.
Elena spills out into the kitchen, banging her hip against the sharp edge of the counter as she tumbles free of the confined space. Cursing, she grabs hold of the edge of the counter and uses it to leverage herself up, only to remember her injured hand, bleeding and already blistered from the roaring heat of the disk. She grits her teeth against the pain and hobbles for the back door.
Something huge crashes upstairs, and the whole room rumbles in its wake. Black smoke rolls down the stairwell, filling the kitchen in an instant until the whole room is murky with it. There's silence, absolute silence for a moment, before Elena hears shouting emanating from deep within the house. One voice carries further than all the others—Mikael, calling for her, demanding that they find her before she perishes.
She won't stick around to be caught.
Elena emerges into the back yard coughing, with tears streaming into her eyes, whether from the smoke or the slicing pain in her mangled hand, she's not sure. For a moment, she leans against the side of the house, gulping down the clear, cool September air.
She's made it out of the death warren. Just one more straight shot, and she can hide herself away in the dense shelter of the woods.
The manor walls warm ominously against her back. Alarmed, Elena turns to discover that the fire has rapidly spread throughout that entire wing of the house where her bedroom had been, tongues of flame licking up the walls like twining serpents, consuming everything in its path. Black smoke pours from the open kitchen door. A window bursts upstairs, raining down deadly shards of glass right next to her, followed by another, another. She has no more time to catch her breath.
Elena sprints across the lawn, bitterly ignoring the bite of her injuries, the fear squeezing her insides in a vice, the way the air itself seems ready to ignite from the incinerating blast of that infernal disk. With every heartbeat she's certain that Mikael will be upon her in a second.
It's almost the longest run of her life. Almost.
She crashes through the tree line just in time to turn and see the roof of the manor collapse under the weight of those unnatural flames. Huge embers shoot down onto the lawn like meteors. Pitch black smoke that seems to eat the weak sunlight billows up into the sky, like an oil spill across the clouds.
Swallowing hard, not allowing herself dwell on how she's just inadvertently set her whole life on fire, she pushes her way deeper into the woods.
It feels like she walks for hours.
She knows from the position of the watery sun, which hasn't even reached its zenith point, that that cannot possibly be true, but it feels like it.
This morning, deliberating over Elijah's body, feels like another lifetime altogether.
The ground beneath her tender bare feet is sharp with stones and broken branches. Picking her way through the underbrush is incredibly slow-going, but her conviction that the only way to survive this will be to get as far the hell away from Mikael as possible presses her forward. For the very first time, she feels a glimmer of gratitude toward Klaus for laying that oppressive compulsion on her. If nothing else, it pushes her to keep fighting. To do what she needs to in order to survive and not to let herself worry too much about the morality of her decisions.
Later, when she thinks back on the lives she ended this night, she'll be able to blame the compulsion for that. It will be much more comfortable than whenever she lays awake at night thinking about all of those witches she'd irrevocably harmed during her first year away from Mystic Falls.
She's deep into the woods by the time she dares to stop for breath.
By now, her whole right hand is a raw throb that she can no longer ignore. Blood still oozes slowly from the gashes in her fingers, through the ruined burnt skin of her palm.
Exhausted, Elena slumps against a boulder and works up some spit to wet her dry mouth. She'd kill for a glass of water right now.
Songbirds call out to each other from the branches above, their voices soft and lovely. The noon sun burns through the tree cover, dappling the canopy and carpet of leaves beneath her feet in shades of brilliant topaz and scarlet.
She glances at her hand, cradled in her lap. Not that it matters. This wound will probably get infected out here, and then she'll die from it.
It might have been better to surrender herself to Mikael. At least that death wouldn't have been so pathetic.
No. No. That's just the fatigue talking. Making her want to give up. She can't. Not ever.
First thing's first is to cover the wound. Fumbling with the end of her shirt, she lifts the hem to her teeth and rips the bottom six inches off of it. Carefully, she wraps the length of the fabric around her hand and fingers, wincing every time the fabric shifts against the damaged skin.
That done, Elena wracks her brain, trying to recall anything else about wilderness first aid. What else do you do with a wound after covering it to prevent infection? Rinse it out—not possible. Even if she finds the streambed, washing her hand in that water is what's bound to give her an infection if she hasn't already gotten one. Cover it in mud? Sounds familiar, but she's not eager to test it.
Her stomach growls. She wishes she'd had breakfast before breaking into Klaus's super-secret-storage-room-cum-family-crypt.
Groaning, she hoists herself up and starts walking again, continuing on deeper into the forest.
Looking around, she realizes she has absolutely no idea where she is. It doesn't seem possible that she could have failed to ever hike this way before, yet she's so disoriented from the past few hours that she can't say. At one point she tries to gain some elevation so that she can orient herself by the plume of smoke presumably still rising from the manor house, but with her hand injured she cannot really climb, and the ancient trees towering over her block her view entirely in every direction.
She keeps going.
The compulsion to live wars with the compulsion never to leave the property.
On the one hand, if she wants to live, she must get as far away as possible. Must risk leaving the property. On the other… her body cannot directly disobey the command to stay. The further she goes, the more uneasy she becomes, fearing that she may have wandered too far, until she feels completely sick with it. Twice she realizes that she's turned around and started heading back in the direction she thinks the manor grounds are without having consciously decided ever to do so. Only the fear of what will certainly happen to her if she does return helps her correct her course in what she hopes is the opposite direction.
It's early afternoon when she realizes that the persistent chatter of the songbirds has gone completely silent.
Elena pauses. Takes in the preternatural hush of the forest around her. No chipmunks rustling through the underbrush, no deer browsing in the distance. Even the wind has died down. Everything is still.
She senses it then— a pull—the way the ocean gets sucked back before a tsunami thunders into shore.
Mikael materializes before her like an apparition.
Immediately, Elena throws herself back, but it's no good. Mikael strikes like a white shark, all boundless speed and brutal power, as he latches onto her arm and yanks her to his side.
"At last," he says, peering down into her face. "I do not believe we have had the pleasure of a proper introduction."
"I know who you are."
"Then allow me to observe that you are a very troublesome girl. Much like your forebear, unfortunately."
Before she can even think to defend herself, he twists her bad arm up behind her back, hard enough for her to cry out, for tears to spring to her eyes, and absconds with her, back to the manor grounds.
It's even worse than she thought it'd be.
The flames have lost their wicked green hue, burning in fearsome shades of red and orange now instead as they continue to eat up the remains of the place she has called home for these past four years.
She hadn't meant for this when she threw that disk down. Only to escape. To survive.
"It would have been much more pleasant to wait in the parlor, but this will have to do," Mikael tells her as they approach the gardens from the edge of the woods. Her arm is still twisted painfully up behind her back. Mikael forces her to march forward with a firm hand on her shoulder, making it impossible to turn and face him.
"Have to do for what?" she grinds out.
He doesn't answer. Instead, goes on, as though she hadn't spoken. "I am impressed, however. You destroyed over half of the vampires I brought with me with whatever little trick you used to start that fire, and it's taken my witch quite some time to subdue it. It was because of her diversion that I was forced to track you myself." He fishes around in her coat pockets, pulling out the remaining blades she'd tucked into her jacket and flicking them aside as they continue toward the house. "I am less impressed with your armaments. This is a very foolish place to store a blade," he chides her. "Any trained eye can tell at a glance what you have in your pocket, and your draw speed is greatly reduced." Pausing under the shade of the Japanese Maple, he spins her round to face him and flourishes a blade he'd had strapped to his side. Presses it to her belly, below the ribs. "Do you mark how much more effective this is?"
"Are you going to kill me now?"
"No, not as yet."
Her whole body trembles. Fear and adrenaline, anger and a raw, reckless resolve to survive mix together into a heady cocktail in her blood. Intoxicating her. A plan—a very stupid plan—coalesces in her mind.
"So what is this?" she dares to ask him. "Blood sacrifice for a spell? Some misguided attempt at revenge? Maybe you're planning to torture me for information I don't actually have? If you haven't noticed, I'm 100% isolated out here." (There's a rising expectation inside of herself, redoubling every second, until she feels it as a physical pressure beating against her sternum, howling to burst free.)
Mikael chuckles. "I fear the answer's much more prosaic." The blade's tip digs into her stomach. "You're bait."
"For what?" Her left hand itches, prickly with anticipation.
"Me."
The sound of that voice still holds an unearthly power over her— a power to compel her heart and obliterate the past completely unconnected to the supernatural.
Heaven help her.
Swallowing hard, Elena turns her face toward that achingly familiar voice.
She had expected it from the moment that she had heard him utter that single syllable, and yet, the sight of him, here in the flesh after all of this time, still shocks her down to her very bones.
There's nothing human in his demeanor at all. No expression she can read in him, save a certain calculation. A purity and indomitability of will. An unearthly, impenetrable cold radiates from within him, and in his shadowed eyes is the deep stillness of death. Standing here, embers from the burning house falling around him like flakes of snow, his face and hands speckled in blood, he's even more beautiful than she remembers. (Beautiful, and terrifying.)
The sight of him scalds her soul raw.
She understands, now, that that restless churning building and building and building inside of her hadn't been instinct or fear or even just adrenaline. No, what she had felt had been a premonition, the tremors presaging the cataclysmic reordering of the universe. The looming shadow of the wave before it breaks. Klaus.
He does not so much as glance her way. All of his mighty focus cleaves to Mikael alone.
She can look nowhere else but at him.
In an instant, Mikael flips her around, his blade still poised to gut her, his free arm snaking around her shoulders, keeping her pinned. If she so much as breathes too deeply, that sharp blade will sink effortlessly into her side. There's no possible way for her to move at all without tasting its bite. Simultaneously, she realizes that Mikael's also armed himself with that pale stake she remembers from the fight at the Abattoir.
"So I was correct about the girl," Mikael says, breaking through the web Klaus had made of her thoughts. "Cowardly beast though you are, you've still come for her." A vast, unyielding hatred colors his voice, overlaid with a slick of disgusted satisfaction.
Klaus's expression remains fixed in stony indifference as he drawls, "You call me a coward and yet only one of us is using a woman as a shield." Something in his shrug dismisses Mikael as a man altogether.
Behind her, Mikael's whole body quivers with rage. "More like a snare, set for an animal. And behold! See how it has worked!" The blade digs deeper into her side.
In that moment, Elena sees very clearly how this scene is going to unfold. They will continue to taunt each other for a few more volleys, until one or the other grows impatient, at which time Mikael will skewer her in a fit of vindictive pique and toss her aside like a piece of garbage, and the two of them will brawl like savage beasts for possession of that stake. Whoever wins it will be the only one to walk away.
Either way, she'll be dead.
Her thoughts rabbit. She can think of only one way out of this.
"This is between the two of us," Klaus calls, circling closer to them. "Release her, and fight me instead. It's what you've always desired, is it not? To destroy me?" He holds his arms out in invitation. "Have at it. Try again where you have always failed."
"What I've always desired, boy, is to cleanse the earth of your filthy abomination of a bloodline—"
"Pardon, what do I interrupt? It seems I must've dozed off between acts."
Both Klaus and Mikael pause to stare at Elijah, as cool and aloof as she remembers him, if still a little gray in the face, as he brushes non-existent dust from his faintly singed shoulders.
"You're awake," Klaus says, just as Mikael calls out, "It is not too late, my son. Join me now, and help me destroy this beast—"
Half of Elijah's mouth tips up in a chilling facsimile of a smile—a cruel expression she had forgotten about altogether in the intervening years, but which comes bounding back upon her now. "I see by your surprise, Niklaus, that it wasn't you who pulled the dagger from my heart." He shifts toward his father. "I found Kol and Finn, but where is our sister? Not locked away in that other coffin, surely."
"What other coffin?" Mikael growls. His grip on her shifts, and with it, the angle of the blade. Something about this latest development has enflamed his rage to incandescence. She can feel it roiling off of him in a black wave. All of her awareness centers on the sting of that blade edge against her flesh. The inevitability of spearing herself with it if she moves even the slightest bit.
Now or never.
("Live.")
Now. While he's distracted.
In one fluid movement, Elena grabs the white oak ash dagger from her waistband and twists in Mikael's hold, impaling herself on his blade so that she can drive the dagger up into his heart.
She has the satisfaction of seeing the shock twist his features before he collapses, lifeless and gray, dead at her feet.
The weight of the dagger in her hand, the agonizing pierce of a cold blade ripping her insides apart—all if it is so utterly familiar. A memory transfigured into dazzling reality.
A rushing fills her ears as she stumbles back. A pair of hands catch her before she falls.
Her vision blackens, strobing in and out. She sees Elijah grab Mikael's stake where it had tumbled from his hand, then nothing. The crimson leaves of the tree above her. Nothing. Someone curses brutally, then there's a wrist pressed to her mouth. That familiar voice, urging her to drink.
The next thing she knows she's been thrown. What little air she had punches from her lungs on impact.
Her whole body screams as she fights to open her eyes. She can barely make out Klaus and Elijah blurred forms, grappling for that stake. Everything is so dark.
There's a fire inside of her. Lightning in her brain. Every breath—sheer agony.
Someone snatches her up.
She blacks out.
Something hot and viscous fills her mouth. She chokes on it, wavering at the crossroads between the living and the dead.
(She lives.)
She doesn't understand where she is when she first wakes up. Everything is a white haze.
Elena blinks, trying to clear the bleariness from her vision, trying to remember where she is and how she got here. The taste of blood, coppery and cloying, clings to her tongue.
"At last. Lovely to see you awake."
At the sound of his voice, Elena jolts bolt upright.
Klaus regards her from a leather armchair on the other side of the room, an expression of cold tolerance on his face. "I was beginning to think you were staying under simply to vex me."
A/N: And we are off and running! Please let me know your thoughts! Thanks for reading!