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 drinks in the sight of him. There's something unbearably remote, almost alien, in his manner— especially in how he looks at her—and yet every detail of his face is still so heartbreakingly familiar to her eyes, even after all these years.

"What was that move, allowing Mikael to stab you?" Klaus demands.

"Living," she hears herself reply. Everything feels unreal, impossible. She had made her peace with the fact that Klaus would never come back for her. The fact that apparently he had sends her emotions into primal tailspin.

"I don't follow."

"You compelled me to live, or don't you remember?"

"How does mortally wounding yourself figure into that?"

"I knew my only chance of survival would be if I could get close enough to dagger him. So I did what it took." The words tumble out of her mouth like rain bursting from an overripe cloud.

"What if I hadn't arrived in time to save you? What if I had let you bleed out after pulling such a stupid stunt?"

"But you did save me."

He looks away. In profile, all she can see is the arc of his jaw, the length of his eyelashes. Memory, sharp as a lance, pierces her. She has looked at him from just this angle a thousand times before. In quiet moments, just the two of them, when he'd drop his shield and allow her into his loneliness. She had remembered what he had looked like in these small instances, but something in the recollection had failed to capture how beautiful he is in his uncertainty. Abrupt longing rips the air from her lungs. Her chest collapses. She can't breathe. Not until she asks—

"Are you really here?"

"Do you doubt the evidence of your eyes?" he asks her without looking up.

Yes.

Her head still aches from her near brush with death. She could be concussed. Dreaming this all up.

(Wouldn't it be lovely if this were a dream? If only she could just lie here, and quietly look at him for a little while, and never have to say or do anything ever again. If only he would wrap his arms around her, and kiss her again, as he had used to.

Except that there is no such possibility for her. Klaus doesn't even hold her in her dreams anymore.)

She runs a shaky hand through her hair. The scent of smoke billows up from her clothes, her hair. The smell helps to tether her to time and place, to the memory of how she had burnt down her home. To accept the reality of her situation.

Oh God.

She forces herself to look past Klaus for the first time since waking up. To take in the details of their surroundings… her totally unfamiliar surroundings. Her head swims as she absorbs this strange living room with its large bright bay window overlooking a copse of evergreens, the small entrance foyer illuminated by panes of double leaded glass framing the front door, the narrow flight of stairs leading up.

She's left the manor property which she is never, ever supposed to leave. She's sure of it.

All of her angst evaporates in an instant as the old compulsion awakens with her realization and cracks its jaws wide.

The pressure in her head magnifies ten-fold. "Where are we?" Her voice sounds high and faint, even to her own ears. She's going to be sick.

"You look peaky," Klaus observes. She can hear him frowning, even without looking at him.

"I have to go back. I have to—" She struggles to her feet and stumbles for the front door. "I have to go back, I can't stay here—"

Klaus catches her by the arm and spins her back around. "Elena, calm down."

"You don't understand—" She claws at her chest, her legs twitching and her stomach swooping as she realizes with a bolt of terror that she has no idea how to get back. Which direction to take. Her head feels like a struck anvil.

"Then help me." Klaus walks her back into the armchair he'd just vacated and forces her to sit. It's still warm from his body.

She fights against his hold. It feels like there's a wild animal trapped inside of her, eating her alive from the inside out. "I can't leave, I'm not supposed to leave—"

"Ah." The next thing she knows Klaus is kneeling in front of her, his hands gripping her arms and his blue eyes intent upon her as he tells her, quite firmly, "Elena. I release you from your compulsion to remain on the manor grounds. You are free of that obligation."

All of her fear and desperation dissipate in an instant, but do not fade entirely. The afterimage of those emotions lingers with her, the way the sun burns its silhouette into the eyes.

Klaus leans back. "There now, better? Because we need to have a little chat, you and I, and I'd prefer to have done with it." There's not an ounce of apology in him, not a trickle of remorse for the brutal compulsion he'd shackled her with in his absence, or the entirely needless torment she'd just endured because he'd been too thoughtless to remove it when he'd taken her off-property.

For how he'd so carelessly dragged her through hell for years without end.

Elena slaps him as hard as she can before she even processes that she's going to strike him at all. Panting raggedly, she glares at him and watches in satisfaction as he works his jaw.

"Perhaps that was to be expected," he says tightly. "Now that that is out of your system—"

She throws herself at him, lashing out with her fists as hard as she can, pouring all of her rage and her grief into her blows. No matter that they must land on him like the gentle patter of rain. Each strike for her feels like the rushing sweep of a summer downpour. Like she's waking up. She can't hold anything back from him, not after years and years of holding everything inside of herself. "You left me!" she shrieks as she pounds her fists into him, again and again. As he lets her. "For three years! You left me and I called for you and you never came—" Her voice breaks at the end, all of her love for him warping the dark maw of her anger into bitter, helpless sobs. She wants to curl up against him and breathe in the scent of his skin even as she wants nothing more than to scratch his eyes out. She wavers on the edge of doing both.

"My patience for these histrionics grows thin," Klaus warns her, catching her wrist with one hand just as she decides she really would like to gouge out his cold beautiful eyes after all.

"Fuck you," she spits, wiping at her face with her free hand.

"Flattering, but I'm no longer interested." He lets go of her wrist and shoves her back, before withdrawing to the sofa, out of her immediate reach.

She stares at him for a long time, trying to read him. He watches her right back, elbows planted on knees, chin resting on the bridge of his interlocked fingers, but there's something different about it from all the times in the past when he had looked at her. Where before she had always felt burned by the intensity of his attention, now all she can detect in his mild gaze is a studied indifference.

Klaus had never been indifferent to her before. Angry, wounded, and cruel—but never indifferent.

Elena looks away first.

Even so, her physical awareness of him beats inside of her like a second heartbeat. Every molecule in her body strains toward him.

There's no sign at all that Klaus feels anything remotely similar towards her. If anything, when she glances at him out of the corner of her eye, he looks impatient. Like he cannot wait to have done with her all over again, when all she wants is to keep him here with her forever. Anything other than to be left all alone again.

The cosmic unfairness of it all makes her want to cry, makes her want to hit out again. To make him hurt the way that she does.

Except, she's not so sure that she can hurt him, anymore.

Maybe that's the worst part of all—to remember the power she used to hold over his heart, and to come face to face with how irretrievably she has lost it—and to know that his power over her had not diminished in the slightest.

The silence draws out thick and oppressive as she struggles against how inexplicably hurt she is by Klaus's attitude towards her. She'd realized, years ago, that whatever his feelings for her had been, she'd smashed them to pieces when she'd driven that dagger into his heart. That he did not have the same capacity to forgive her for her true nature as she did for his. She'd accepted that he would never come back, and she'd learned to take that piece of herself that loved him still without thought or reason and tuck it somewhere deep and far inside herself where she could almost always avoid looking at it. She had been happy, truly happy, in her home. This past summer, especially. And yet, even though she remembers feeling that way, she cannot access that happiness now. All of it pales beside the swell of anguish Klaus evokes in her simply by being near.

None of that matters anyway. All of that is gone now. Her art, her novels and her paintings, her letters and her diaries, her garden and her library and her Japanese Maple. All of it burnt to ashes by her hands—just like the future she may have had with Klaus.

She wishes she knew how he felt. That she could read the strange and complicated expressions that have clouded his face ever since she pulled that dagger free from his heart. It is as though in planting that dagger in his heart, she really had murdered him, and the person who had awoken that soft morning had been a stranger wearing her beloved's face.

"How did you come to be in possession of that dagger?" Klaus asks, finally breaking the suffocating silence between them.

Elena opens her mouth, and, to her horror, finds herself on the verge of telling Klaus exactly the information he wants to hear. She snaps it shut, a thin vein of foreboding worming through her, even as outrage overpowers it. "That's it?" she cries. "We're not going to talk about how you left me for three years, in what turned out to be a death trap, or how you mysteriously showed up just in time to save me?"

"What is there to say?"

"You're sorry?"

"I'm not."

Fury spikes through her all over again, hot and screaming. "Screw this." Elena leaps to her feet, intending to storm out the front door, but Klaus intercepts her in an instant.

He shoves her back down into the chair and leans over her, one fist planted on each side of her head, every line of his body emanating pure menace. "We're not finished yet."

Here, at last, is a familiar emotional response from him.

Elena thrills under his hostile regard. Rises to it.

She meets Klaus glare for glare. "Fine. Let's talk. Explain to me why it is that I had Mikael breaking into my house with a team of lame vampires trying to kill me. I think you owe me that, at the minimum."

Klaus doesn't pull away physically, but she senses it the moment he slips away from her emotionally, that spark of intimate aggression cooling into an unassailable reserve, even as he answers her directly, "Because he sought to use you against me. He could not catch me, and so he thought to lay a trap for me, using you as the bait to lure me to him."

"It worked though." Her unspoken question hangs between them: If I don't matter to you, why did you come?

He considers her. "Do not forget that my brothers were also in residence at the manor. I could not let them fall into that monster's hands. Which brings me back to my question—how did you come by that dagger? What magic did Mikael have that witch use to tear asunder my blood wards?"

"Why do you care?"

"Because I need to know what was done to my family. If whatever magicks that witch used could have done them harm. Tell me what you know."

Again, the unaccountable urge to answer directly, honestly, hooks into her. The words slip out before she can stop them. "I was the one who took the blood wards down. Before Mikael even showed up. I was going to undagger Elijah anyway, but when I saw Mikael, I knew it would be my only chance." It takes her a moment to even realize she's spoken. Her thoughts spin as she grapples with what she's just told Klaus—information it would have been much, much better to keep to herself. Then, like a clap to the ear, the memory of Klaus commanding her, Tell me only true things until I say otherwise surges up from out of the depths of her memories. With sudden, vivid clarity she remembers what it had been like to scramble for the right words to weave for Klaus, only for the compulsion to rip the raw truth from her mouth. Oh no. Oh no. She hadn't even realized, until just now, that she could still be under this slippery compulsion.

Does he even remember he'd compelled her?

He runs an assessing eye over her. "Not possible."

Apparently not.

"Your habit of underestimating me is going to get you in real trouble one day," she snaps, smarting at how quickly he had dismissed her.

"I have your measure exactly." He says it so softly and seriously that his words draw her up short. For a moment, she senses a crack in the mask of his great indifference—and, beneath that, the possibility that he might still care.

Her anger fizzes away. She opens her mouth to respond, but isn't sure what she'll say to him. She feels like a rowboat on the high seas, battered about by colossal waves. Every time she thinks she knows how to feel about him, what he's thinking, he says something or looks at her in a certain way and she gets tossed.

"What happened after I daggered Mikael? Where's Elijah?"

"Elijah attacked me with that stake. It was all I could do to break free of him and escape with you."

"You saved me. You could have let me bleed out but you saved me."

He doesn't respond, one way or the other.

She absolutely hates herself for how vulnerable she sounds, how vulnerable she is, when she asks him, "Why didn't you ever come back for me?" But she cannot help herself. Not with him.

He pins her with a complicated look she has no idea how to interpret. The direct weight of his attention pains her, strips her down so much more viscerally than it ever had before. It is as though she had built an immunity up against him over all those months they had spent together, had hardened her heart enough to withstand him, but in being thrown back into his company, she finds that all of her defenses have crumbled from disuse.

"There was nothing worth returning to," he finally tells her. He pulls away from her.

She feels his words hit her with all the gravity of pure and simple truth.

Rebekah bursts into the room before she can muster a response.

"You're both here," she breathes, as though she cannot entirely believe it. There's a high color in her cheeks, and her hair and clothing are rumpled as though she's been dashing about like a hare. "When I saw what had become of the manor, I had thought surely— Elena, you look hideous. Have you been mauled by a bear?" She pushes past Klaus to draw Elena to her feet, looking her over critically before pulling her in to a brief, tight hug. "I was so worried about you, darling. I came as fast as I could—"

The shock of Rebekah's warmth and concern, in sharp contrast to Klaus's freeze-out, drags Elena out of her swamp of self-pity. "I'm fine," she murmurs to Rebekah. Their fingers tangle as Rebekah continues to look her over. She feels stronger, just having a friend with her.

"Both of us are well, in spite of your actions," Klaus drawls from his new perch over against the bay window's sill. The brightness of the late afternoon light pouring in from the window at his back casts his whole figure in hazy shadow.

"I already told you, I had no idea he was tracking me," Rebekah says, turning away from Elena to face her brother with the air of someone continuing a prior argument. "I would never have gone back if I'd known—"

"He's always hunting us."

"No, he's always hunting you," Rebekah corrects. "He cares very little for the rest of his children."

"A fair point." Klaus turns to stare out the window at the wooded grounds beyond. "Elena's helpfully planted a dagger in his heart, but at the expense of waking up our dear Elijah, it would seem. I shan't be surprised if Elijah has already undaggered him just to spite me."

"Elijah's awake?"

Klaus goes on as though he hadn't heard his sister. "He's very cross with me, by the way. We had a bit of a row, and he brandished Mikael's stake at me."

Rebekah shakes her head. "He tried to kill you? That's not like him at all."

Elena frowns. Isn't it though? Her entire perception of Elijah is steeped in his desire for his brother's death.

"Yes, well, he may require some time to regain his composure. Resurrection is rattling like that." He turns back to look at them—no, at Rebekah. He's hardly glanced at her since his sister arrived. "Where's Stefan?"

"I left him in New York. I didn't see how he could be of any use to us if it was to be a fight with Mikael."

"Good." He heads for the front door, calling over his shoulder. "Let's make haste then. I'd like to put some distance between ourselves and the rest of our family before daybreak."

Rebekah hurries after Klaus, catches him in the foyer. "Finn and Kol are awake too?"

Elena follows, watching them from the living room doorway.

"One must only assume." He pauses. Tucks a strand of hair behind Rebekah's ear before trailing the back of his fingers down the side of her upturned face. "Are you with me, Bex? If it comes to it, and you have to choose between the others and me, do you choose me?"

Rebekah leans into his caress. "I'll always choose you."

He kisses her brow. Turns back to Elena, almost as an afterthought. "This property is not so large as the manor was, but it's warded just as well. Better, even. I've kept it as a safe house for decades. You should be comfortable enough, and safe from Mikael's retribution, so long as you do not stray past the yard."

Elena's jaw drops. Bright, choking panic tears at her throat. "You're leaving me? Again?"

"You're perfectly secure here, I assure you."

Elena shakes her head, backing into the living room. "No. Not acceptable. I refuse to go through that—that hell again." She'll do anything rather than face complete isolation a second time. She doesn't think she has the strength to bear it again. Not when she'd grown acclimated to others again. Not when she had come so close to breaking free.

Klaus stalks into her personal space. "Do you realize what Mikael will do to you if he ever finds you again? If you leave the protection of these wards, and he finds you, he'll attempt to use you to lure me out again, and then he'll tear you apart just to spite me. He'll draw out your death over weeks to assuage his pride for having been felled by a girl. Your blood is too valuable and finite a resource for me to risk your premature death by dismemberment."

She seizes on the first idea that comes to mind. Seizes hold of him. "So take me with you instead. If you're running from Mikael anyway, let me come too."

"No."

"Look, you say he'll come after me to get to you if he knew where to find me, so you can't release me. Fine. So take me with you. If he's really gunning for me, then the safest place for me is with you."

"That's not an acceptable option."

As far as she's concerned, it's the only option.

"The manor had a cloaking ward on it and he still found me anyway," she points out.

"An error I do not intend to permit again," he promises, glancing meaningfully at his sister. "I assure you, Rebekah will not endanger you with her visits in future." He turns for the door.

"I'm not staying here alone. I won't go through that again," she calls after him.

He flashes her a wicked smile that never reaches his eyes. "I can compel you if you would prefer. That should make matters simpler."

"I won't go through that again. I won't. I'll kill myself if you trap me here alone."

For an instant, Elena almost thinks she sees the old, palpable rage slide over Klaus's face, before his expression clears again into sneering indifference. "You don't have a choice. I compelled you to live, remember?"

"I almost died plenty of times over the past few years. If I really wanted to, I could find a way." Elena raises her chin. "You know that I could."

"Do not push me," he warns her quietly.

"Don't push me."

Rebekah cuts in. "This argument's irrelevant because you cannot compel me, Nick, and I refuse to leave Elena behind again."

Klaus spins around. "My apologies, I believe I misheard you."

Rebekah steps into the living room, to stand by her side, and takes hold of her hand. "I'm not leaving without Elena."

The steadfastness of Rebekah's declaration throws her, even as it brings up a fierce surge of love and devotion for her.

"Mikael knows about her now," Klaus reminds Rebekah. "Our presence here can do nothing but alert him to her location. We should leave. At once."

"Leave, then. Elena and I will go our own way."

"What happened to choosing me?"

"She wants to come with us. That sounds like the best plan I've heard in ages, and what we should have done from the start. You're the one forcing my hand with your obstinacy."

Klaus grabs Rebekah by the arm and yanks her aside. "Do not tell me she's seduced you," he growls.

"It's as Elena said. If she's in danger from Mikael," Rebekah presses, ignoring the accusation altogether, "then the safest place for her is with us."

"She's not as innocent as she looks. She's sly. She could plant a dagger in your heart as easily as she planted one in mine. She could betray us to Mikael at any time. What reason could possibly be good enough to bring her with us?"

"She would never do that to us."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because she's family." Klaus looks ready to argue, but she doesn't allow it. "You've said as much yourself. I've heard you name her so." Rebekah takes his hand. "We don't abandon family. Especially not to Mikael."

He clenches his jaw, everything within him tense as a drawn wire. "This is a mistake," he warns them, finally, before throwing himself out the front door.

Rebekah turns to her and beams. "That means I've won and he just doesn't want to admit it. He'll have gone to fetch the motor around."

They're really going to take her with them.

She has to sit down. Her legs feel like jelly. She falls onto the sofa in a boneless heap.

"You stood up for me," she notes, grasping at that small detail.

"Of course. I told you you were my friend."

"Exactly. I thought Klaus was your family, and I was only your friend."

"Yes, well, I've been thinking on that quite a bit. I've come to realize I may have been wrong in drawing that distinction. Besides which, the boys are lousy company by themselves. I think we'll have great fun together, the four of us."

Elena tries not to think on what kind of fun she's just signed herself up for by insisting upon her place with three notorious vampires.

"So Mikael was able to find me because he was tracking you?" she ventures into the ensuing silence as they wait for Klaus to, apparently, pull the car around.

"I'm afraid so. I was a tad too conspicuous while in New Orleans. He traced me all the way up to New Hampshire, hoping I would eventually lead him to my brother—but instead I led him to you. It seems like he spent quite a while biding his time and waiting for me to depart before perpetrating the raid. And of course, he had to get in touch with Nick, to ensure that his trap would succeed. No point in taking you hostage unless it looked like my brother would show. Nick's ever so unpredictable in that regard, is the thing. Completely unlike my father, who will keep giving chase forever, once he's caught the scent of blood." Rebekah sits down next to her on the sofa and pats her hand. "No need to worry, though, dear. We can all run from Mikael together. It's practically a family tradition."

The sun is low in the sky when Elena climbs into the backseat of Klaus's shiny black SUV. She's unprepared for the rush of bittersweetness that overtakes her once she's settled, enveloped by the familiar interior of the car, its rumblings and its leather and pine scent. The pressure of the seatbelt against her shoulder, the cool of the glass against her forehead as she stares out at the endless endless blur of landscape streaming by, the trees nearly black against the orange-red glare of the sinking sun. For how fierce her joy would be in finally taking flight.

No one talks during the journey, other than the occasional murmured comment from Rebekah, who flicks through her phone and fiddles with the radio and asks, often, if the air conditioner can blow any cooler. Elena doesn't mind. Her thoughts are too full of the possibilities that have opened up in front of her. For the first time since her parents died, her future feels infinite.

Every now and then, Elena glances over to Klaus, to look at his profile silhouetted in gold, then, as the hours pass and the evening lengthens into night, bathed in the blue-green glow of the console lights. Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror twice before the sun sets, when it grows too dark for Elena to see if he looks back at her at all.

A/N: Thanks for reading! Your reviews have been giving me LIFE and have really inspired me to keep up these rapid updates. Thank you to everyone who has left me a comment, and to everyone reading! Xoxo

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