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
New York City.
The thought of it buzzes under her skin, electric and hot, whispering promises of that future she'd been so sure was gone forever, and yet, impossibly, has reappeared, bright and sudden as a falling star.
She's never been to New York, and it's with a sense of vertigo, within the nesting darkness of the car, that she realizes that Klaus is fulfilling his long-ago promise to take her there after all.
Except, of course, if Klaus had had his way, he would have left her all over again.
It's Rebekah, really, who has freed her.
Rebekah, whom she thinks she may love forever for this one act of kindness alone.
(She can forget all of the cruelties of the past. They don't matter anymore. Not when the future has opened up to her again.)
She must fall asleep in the backseat of the car, dreaming of the city lights, because the next thing she knows, Rebekah's hand is on her knee, her voice soft as she whispers, "We've arrived."
Klaus is already gone by the time she shakes herself fully awake, the keys passed over to an over-eager valet.
Her heart gallops inside her chest as she takes her first step out into the cool air of the luxury hotel. This is it. The first few steps into a brave new world. The plush carpet sinks under her bare feet, and even though she must look a shambles, no one stops her or comments on her appearance. Rebekah's raised chin and air of complete confidence deflect any questions that might have arisen at her appearance as surely as though she had cast a charm around her.
And there are so many people. Even this late at night, they are everywhere. Streaming through the front doors, on their way inside from dinner or the theater or the club. Tumbling through the hallways on swaying legs, tinkling laughter and hissed arguments and flirtatious innuendo floating after them all. She had forgotten what it's like to immerse herself in this endless tide of humanity. To be one person among many. The sound of it all, the sight of new faces and the press of bodies moving past her to amble to the elevators and the cloying, heady scent of life, of warm breath and warm bodies, fills her head up, makes her dizzy. Drunk with the possibility of it all. She feels like she could float up to the ceiling.
Rebekah ushers her into a private elevator and presses the button for the penthouse suite, chattering in her ear all the while. "I just love the Plaza. Nick and I stayed here once—oh, a century ago, though it hardly feels that long ago to me."
"He's staying here too?" Anxiety rips through her at the prospect of sharing close quarters with Klaus.
She still doesn't know how to exist around him. After all these years, she's completely out of practice with making room for herself when pinned down by the force of his personality.
"He won't be staying with us, if that's what you're concerned about," Rebekah hastens to reassure her.
The impulse to brush over Rebekah's insight as though she hadn't been exactly right rises up within her, but the elevator doors sliding open cuts off whatever Elena might have said next. For a moment, all she can do is gape at the lavishly appointed suite, filled with plush furnishings at once contemporary and redolent of another century. A large parlor and dining area dominate the space, and a staircase against the far wall hints at further rooms just out of sight. It's more an entire apartment than a hotel room.
She wanders over to the huge windows and peers down into the night, taking in all the twinkling lights, the faint silhouettes of people—people!—moving about in the night. Each and every one of them caught up in their own private worries, their own private wants and fears and fantasies. Their whole entire lives.
She feels herself more a part of that possibility now, looking down at them from the sky, than she has in longer than she can remember. Everything before that manor feels like another lifetime. Had been another lifetime.
Hard to say who she will be in this new life she's embarked upon tonight.
(Time will tell.)
"Central Park," Rebekah murmurs from beside her, pointing toward a long rectangle of trees stretching beyond her line of sight in either direction, the light from the streetlamps softly filtering up from beneath their branches like fairy lights.
"Don't you think staying at the Plaza is a little conspicuous?" Elena cannot help but to ask.
A tiny frown appears between Rebekah's brows. "You don't like the rooms?"
"It's not that. It's just… Won't this be the first place Mikael—or Elijah—looks for us?"
Rebekah smiles then, whatever small tension had seeped into her body easing out again. "I wouldn't fret about it. Elijah will avoid looking for us here for as long as possible. He loathes New York City. As for Mikael… I suspect he will have his hands too full with my winsome and irascible brothers to track us here any time soon. By the time he is free of them, we'll be long away."
"That's… That's good. I don't want to face your father again anytime soon."
Rebekah shifts beside her, looking like there is something she would like to say but deciding against it. "I had Stefan book us in the same suite," she says instead. "I hope you don't mind—your bedroom is just over there."
Elena turns to see where Rebekah points toward a closed door beyond the parlor. Takes in the small hesitation that has once again returned to her posture as she waits on Elena's approval. She's not sure whether she's overstepped.
Elena draws Rebekah into a tight embrace. "Thank you for sticking up for me back at the safe house. And for knowing that I wouldn't want to be alone here, either."
Rebekah draws her in all the closer. "I know what it means to be alone. I wouldn't want that for anyone."
She should be exhausted, but there's absolutely no way she can sleep on a night like tonight. She tells Rebekah as much, half an hour later after a shower to wash the blood and smoke and grime from her skin. To wash away the past three years, she cannot help but think as she watches the cloudy brown water swirl down the drain. She feels like a whole new person when she dons the silk pajamas Rebekah loans her.
"If you can't sleep, then I know just the thing," Rebekah says.
She orders them champagne and caviar from room service and they take it upstairs, out onto the great wide terrace accessible through a pair of French doors in Rebekah's bedroom.
"To celebrate your coming home to us," Rebekah announces when she first brandishes the chilled bottle.
The views from the terrace are absolutely stunning. This high up, the air is crisp and cool with the first taste of fall, later in coming to New York than it had been in coming to New Hampshire. The hum and clatter of traffic in the streets blends and softens with the other sounds of the night—the soughing of the wind rustling through the trees in the park down below, the lull of the river in the distance, the sweet burbling of human voices sifting up like a chorus on the night air.
Like this, it's possible to forget about everything but living in this one extraordinary moment. (To forget about everyone.)
They drink straight from the bottle, passing it back and forth between them, the imprint of Rebekah's mouth still warm around the lip every time Elena takes a sip.
"This is probably a dream," she decides, warm and tingly from the champagne and alive—so alive!— under an alien sky. In New Hampshire she could see the stars so clearly that she could prick her fingers on them. Here, they are all hidden behind the smoke and illusion of city lights—as obscuring as the mist in New Orleans that used to crawl over the city streets and turn reality inside out.
Rebekah slips the bottle from her hand. "What sort of dream?"
Elena catches her up, bottle and all, and reels her across the terrace, fast enough to make their hair stream around their faces. Her bare feet burn against the rough patio tiles as they spin faster and faster. Champagne erupts from the bottle, bubbles fizzing over their hands, splashing onto their throats and collarbones. "The best kind!" she laughs, her words echoing disembodied in the night. A wild joy billows up within her as they dance together under the hidden moon, raw and raucous and as untamable as her Petrova heart. She laughs like she's high, and maybe she is, licking champagne off of her own wrist, careening through the dark with her once-enemy-turned-only-friend, free as a pet bird who had slipped out from between the bars of her cage only to loose herself upon the deep eternal sky.
Rebekah feels it too, the potential crackling between them, a suggestion that had hung between them at the manor now bursting into glorious technicolor fruition.
If Rebekah kissed her now, she would kiss her back. If she asked her to set the moon into a necklace for her, she would try. If she asked her to jump from the ledge of the terrace, she might just do that too.
She wants to stay up forever, but, eventually, the day catches up with her.
She doesn't remember falling asleep out on the terrace, but she realizes that she must have when the low murmuring of voices draws her from the depths of her slumber.
"You lied to me about how much time you spent with Elena," she hears Klaus say from only a couple of feet away.
It takes every ounce of self-control she has to keep her eyes loosely shut and her breathing deep and even when she hears his voice so close to her. When she feels him, like the sun against her skin, close enough to burn her and yet so impossibly far away she will never reach him.
"How do you figure?" Rebekah asks, thankfully oblivious to the fact that Elena has woken up.
"Do you expect me to believe that this… friendship between the two of you sprung up overnight?" He hurls the word friendship at her the way another might throw out the word affair. Like it's a betrayal.
"You're being absurd."
"I saw the way the two of you were together earlier today. Thick as thieves." There's something knife-sharp in his tone.
Rebekah laughs, but there's nothing amused in the sound of it. "Are you jealous?"
"No."
"Are you here to warn me off of your pet, then?"
Klaus takes a deep breath, and when he releases it, his voice is as light and horrid as it had been that afternoon at the safe house. "You mistake me, sister. Elena's no longer of any concern to me beyond her value as the doppelganger."
"Then why are you here?"
Klaus doesn't answer at first.
Elena nearly holds her breath.
"Well?" Rebekah prods. She yawns theatrically. "I'm awfully tired, Nick, and would dearly love to retire if you've no more to say on the subject."
The silence ripples with tension as the two of them wait each other out.
"I came to hear you confirm it," Klaus eventually bites out.
"That Elena is my friend?" Rebekah asks. "That we passed a happy summer together lolling about in the manor gardens and reading Russian poetry?"
"Is that all though?"
"I don't kiss and tell, Nick."
Klaus is silent for so long after that that Elena wonders if he may have actually left. She cannot help, then, but to crack her eyes open just a bit so she can gaze up at him from under her lashes.
His face is so still and so empty that she doesn't recognize him. Only the slight movement of his fist, clenching around the edge of the iron bench upon which he sits, gives him away.
"Do what you will with her," he says at last. "I wish you the joy of her." He flings himself to his feet and slams through the French doors back into the suite.
A moment later Rebekah sits down next to her and touches her shoulder. "He's gone now. You can stop pretending."
Slowly, Elena sits up. "How long have you known I was awake?"
Rebekah quirks her brows at her. "I saw you open your eyes."
She looks away, over to where Klaus had been sitting only a moment before. Reaches out her fingers to touch the rough edge of the bench where he had crushed the iron under his fingers. "Klaus didn't see though?"
"No. He was too—" Rebekah pauses, as though cutting herself off, before diplomatically finishing her sentence with, "—distracted by other things." The other girl cracks another yawn. "The sun will be up soon. Best hop off to bed. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow."
"Oh?"
"Why, Elena. Darling. You haven't a thing to wear. We have to replace your entire wardrobe in the morning. That takes serious work."
Rebekah is true to her words.
In the morning, she loans Elena a dress from her wardrobe and, after a breakfast of pastries and coffee enjoyed in their suite, the two of them set out, into the thronging masses of Manhattan.
The experience of being out amongst so many people nearly overwhelms her. She had had an inkling of this feeling, years ago, the first time Klaus had taken her to New Orleans. Now that feeling is magnified times a thousand— like the difference between how she had felt her connection to Klaus before the bloodstone had been created and after it had been dissolved. A drop compared to an ocean.
It had been one thing last night to observe all of these wonderful strangers from the distance of twenty stories up, or in the haze of her initial arrival, but now, down on the street, she's truly in the thick of it.
"You look like you've been stricken in the back of the head with something heavy," Rebekah observes as they stroll down Fifth Avenue. "Like a brass candlestick, or a marble book-end."
"See how you'd react after going through three years cloistered away."
"I spent nearly a century daggered and boxed," Rebekah points out.
"Were you aware of time passing though?" Elena asks, distracted, as she takes in the moving sea of strangers all around her, the energy and chaos of New York in September. People hurrying to work, ducking into stores, grabbing a bite to eat, a cup of coffee, dodging between taxis and wandering through the park in pairs. She wants to do all of it. Experience all of it.
"I dreamt," Rebekah replies, something vague and misty in her voice that pulls Elena attention back to her. She doesn't elaborate further, though, instead shaking herself as she catches sight of the enormous stone edifice of Saks Fifth Avenue. "Shall we start here?"
Shopping with Rebekah is an experience unto itself, unlike any of the shopping Elena had indulged in back in Mystic Falls. They engage a personal shopper, who Rebekah sends scurrying all over the store as they hunt through the store top to bottom.
"You'll need an entire wardrobe," Rebekah reiterates, in tones that are at once alarmed and giddy at the very scope of their project. "And not like the sad little wardrobe Stefan put together for you when you first came to us as a little orphan girl. You're one of us now. If you're to travel in our set, you must look the part." She turns to the personal shopper, a blonde slip of a girl dressed head to toe in New York black. "Well, you just heard me, did you not? My companion here is going to need formalwear, casualwear, swimwear, lingerie, hosiery, pajamas, makeup, shoes, scarves, coats, hats, handbags, jewelry—Why are you still standing about?"
It's almost too much—except, there's a joy in the careless way in which Rebekah encourages her to buy each and every little item that pleases her. A freedom in this rare opportunity to choose. Their resources are so bottomless that Rebekah's not even aware that she's spoiling her.
For a few hours, Elena feels like it could be last summer again, when they had redecorated the manor and lived in such ease around each other. In so many ways, it is the same, Rebekah flitting through the departments, picking through silk and satin gowns and Hermès scarves with all the attention of a magpie, trying on cloche hats and aquamarine rings studded with diamonds, pointing out handsome men to Elena and speculating on their virility while Elena attempts to attend to the very serious business of reinventing herself through a new wardrobe. She spritzes Dior perfume onto Elena's wrist, Chanel onto her own, and they hold their wrists up to each other's noses to sniff at the sweet scents, laughing all the while.
But it is serious business. It's the biggest chance Elena has had in years to consider who she wants to be out in the world. The first chance she has had since reaching adulthood to decide how she specifically wishes to present herself. Is she the flirty blouse type? The artistic tunic type? The type who wears tailored coats? Or, she wonders, as her hands linger lovingly over sophisticated leather jackets, is she still the same as that teenaged girl from Virginia who would have killed for a coat like this?
She chooses for herself a wardrobe much more daring than what she would have chosen when she was in high school. Svelte dresses that brush against her knees in ruby, emerald, navy, and charcoal gray. High-necked blouses with fluttering sleeves paired with structured dark-wash jeans and neatly turned boots in leather and suede. Soft sweaters that dip low enough to reveal the swell of her cleavage, and long coats that swish when she walks. She lets Rebekah talk her into evening gowns with daring plunges and eyebrow-raising thigh slits, into sky-high heels and lipstick in sinful shades of red, into chandelier earrings and heavy knots of gold and platinum and silver for her throat and wrists. The simple black leather jacket she chooses just for herself.
Three hours later, Rebekah has the mountain of their purchases delivered to their hotel and the two of them set out for lunch at a sidewalk café.
After, they buy coffee from a cart and stroll arm in arm through Central Park, stopping at the zoo to look at the penguins.
It's all almost enough to distract her from the knot of anxiety hollowing out the pit of her belly—the worry that at any moment, they're bound to run into Klaus, and then she will have to face him again. To discover whether he really had been as cold to yesterday as she had thought, or whether there had been a part of himself buried deep within him that still cared about her after all.
She still doesn't know what to make of the conversation she had overheard the night before.
For her part, Rebekah is as excellent a distraction as they come. It's impossible not to be taken in by her lilting voice and the soft way she smiles at Elena, her face lit up in high color by the glorious autumn sun.
They hit a few more stores that afternoon as Rebekah waxes on her favorite sights and amusements in the city, much of it gleaned from the week she'd spent here when she and the others had first left Elena behind. She spins out a cotton candy fantasy of what the next few weeks can be before they inevitably move on to the next place, everything as syrupy and golden-hued as their long summer afternoons had been lounging under the Japanese Maple in heart-shaped sunglasses.
"What about Stefan and Klaus?" Elena asks her as they settle into supple leather massage chairs for mani-pedis as the sun gets low on the western horizon. "I can't picture either of them being very interested in catching Les Mis."
"Oh, we'll see them, of course, but I've already told you they're not so much fun as they used to be." She takes a sip from the champagne at her side and holds up her wet foot for the pedicurist. "Still, they've retained some of their manners. They usually call upon me before the evening grows too long. We'll most likely see them tonight." She picks up the moon-pale lavender Elena had selected for her nails and rolls the bottle between her fingers, oblivious to how her casual statement had just battered at Elena's composure. "This is just the color of twilight, isn't it? It suits you."
It's just the sort of uncanny remark Rebekah has the tendency to produce from thin air from time to time which completely sweeps everything else out of Elena's head. She doesn't realize it until Rebekah says it, but she's right. The color is the color of twilight—of day on the cusp of surrendering into night. On the cusp of death.
Elena has lived in the country of death so long she has forgotten what it is like to move outside of it. Today, exploring Manhattan with Rebekah, has only proven how true that sentiment is. She had felt as much an actor playing at being a normal human girl as Stefan had used to confess he had often felt during his long existence. Her sympathies had shifted, aligning her not with humanity, but with the vampire beside her.
She shivers thinking about it, but she doesn't change her mind about the color.
They return to the hotel just after dark, where they find all of their purchases heaped onto the dining table and around the sofa. Elena spends a pleasant half hour unpacking her new clothes, carefully tucking them into her closet and dresser.
A little after nine, Rebekah knocks on her open bedroom door.
Elena turns to find the other girl stretched out along the length of the jamb, her short hair tousled from the wind today, her feet bare and pale. She looks particularly lovely.
"Nick's texted me," she explains. "We've been summoned."
"Oh?" she asks faintly, suppressing the way this news makes her stomach lurch as a fine mist of cold sweat films her forehead.
"Wear something bold. We'll want to show you off to best effect tonight, to establish you in our set."
"Rebekah, don't be ridiculous. Everyone already knows me."
"They know you as the trembling little human my brother kept as his pet. Now let them get to know you as I do."
She never upon elaborates what that means.
It is up to Elena, then, to figure out who she is. Who she will be.
Forty-five minutes later Elena trails Rebekah into a dark, windowless bar on the top floor of what had looked like a totally nondescript building when they had taken the elevator up. Rebekah'd compelled the doorman to let them in, though, which implies that this is not a space normally open to just anyone.
Inside, low booths ring the dimly lit edges of the cavernous space, while tuxedoed waiters weave through the tables like synchronized swimmers. There are no drink menus in sight, although the bar in the rear of the room looks amply stocked to handle near anything, and Elena notices more than a few discrete bags the size of her thumbnail passing from the waiters' hands directly into the eager outstretched palms of patrons all around. In the center of the room, a single spotlight casts hazy golden light on a microphone, where a pretty dark-haired girl looks ready to begin her act.
Everything about this place screams private club.
Rebekah pauses in the doorway and scans the booths, smiling faintly when she spots Stefan and Klaus. She'd chosen a sequined gown that shimmers like the sea when she glides over to their booth, her sleek hair pinned back from her face with an antique comb wrought with delicate crystal dragonflies that sparkle faintly in bottle green and amethyst when they catch the light.
For a moment, Elena can only look at the three of them as Rebekah slides into the booth next to her brother, seamlessly rejoining the old familiar dynamic. Stefan offers Rebekah an easy smile and pushes a sidecar over in her direction, which Rebekah accepts with a fond roll of her eyes. Even Klaus relaxes after a moment, leaning forward to murmur something to the two of them. They are all so easy around each other.
She will never be a part of that ease.
Her heart catches a little when she first lays eyes on Stefan. Dressed in a neat dark suit with a stark white shirt and slim black tie, he could be dressed to take her to the 60s dance. To the place where she'd first met Klaus, she realizes with a jolt—or, at least, the first time she had known it was him.
For a moment, she's thrown out of time. She forgets that she's here, now, as Rebekah's companion, as Klaus's tolerated fourth-wheel. She forgets that she'd ever fallen in love with Klaus at all, that she had ever broken her own heart over him. Instead, she glimpses what it had meant to just be a seventeen-year-old girl, wanting to go to a high school dance with her boyfriend.
That moment is broken by Rebekah, twisting around to call out her name. "Elena, dear, come over. We won't bite."
Taking a deep breath, Elena straightens her shoulders and runs a hand over the slick length of her crepuscular satin dress, the material like cool, rippling water under her palms. Rebekah had told her to wear something bold, and she had risen to the challenge, selecting a dress that clings to every curve and pairing it with a set of artfully mismatched earrings in the shape of the sun and the moon, which brush over her scarred throat, left intentionally bare, every time she moves her head. When she had looked in the mirror tonight, she had looked like a woman in possession of herself.
She draws upon that memory now, cloaking herself in the confidence she had felt while inspecting her reflection. Holds her head up high and approaches the table like she belongs there. Doesn't let her eyes cut over to Klaus, whom she can sense like a wave crashing against her soul. To look at him now would be to falter.
She can do this.
"Elena!" Stefan calls, surprising her with the warm joviality in his voice. He slides out from the booth and ushers her in, a hand warm on her back to steady her as she settles in. "Bex told me she'd invited you to join us, but I told her I wouldn't believe her until I set eyes on you myself." He smiles at her, that cool dangerous smile that had lured so many innocents to their death over the centuries, all white teeth and crinkling eyes, and God help her, she smiles back at him.
"What are we drinking?" she asks him, already accepting a taste from Rebekah's glass.
"More like who," Klaus murmurs.
Here it is, the moment she has been dreading—the moment when she can no longer ignore Klaus.
Elena gathers herself to face him. Prepares herself for his cold barbs, his disinterested appraisal. Is surprised by the heat she sees burning in his eyes instead.
Her protest against killing anyone pools on the tip of her tongue, but the words refuse to fall from her lips. Her stomach twists as she realizes why.
She can lie to herself all she wants, but she cannot lie to Klaus.
He's still staring at her with an unnerving singularity of focus when she finally gathers her reply. If not for that breach in the wall of his emotions, for that spark of heat in his watchful gaze, she would never find the wherewithal to settle back against the plush leather booth and coolly raise an eyebrow at him, as though her mental stumble had never occurred. To smile and ask, as though she had always meant to ask it, "Are you trying to shock me? Because I did live with the three of you for nearly a year."
"I recall a certain degree of protest in that time."
She shrugs. "Things change when the only friends you have are vampires."
"Do they change so much?"
Horror wells in her gut because she realizes that yes, yes they do. Deep down, she really doesn't mind if they kill people, so long as she doesn't know them. She knows it's true because not a whisper of the compulsion grazes over her nerves when she nearly snaps as much at his smug challenge.
Keep it together, Gilbert.
Elena turns to Rebekah. "Did I ever complain last summer when you would go out to take care of things?"
Rebekah pauses, her stillness full of the frenetic energy of a hovering hummingbird, as she considers Elena's question. "No, I suppose you never did," she replies, sounding the words out as she goes—as though the degree of Elena's capitulation has only just occurred to her.
Satisfied, Elena turns back to Klaus. "See? Do what you will. I won't mind. I've been promised that you won't bite me, and that's good enough."
Stefan grins at her, his eyes lingering overlong on her. "Oh, I don't remember promising anything. You certainly look good enough to eat."
She frowns at him, caught off guard by the direction of his attentions. She's known for years, of course, that Rebekah had compelled the memory of their love out of him. The last time she'd spoken to him, he'd only cared about her in the context of Klaus's orders to watch over her. Even now, the memory of facing him with all of their history wiped clean from him still aches, necessary as the compulsion had been to save him at the time. She hadn't expected how quick Stefan would be to flirt with her now.
"Stefan," Klaus warns.
Stefan leans back, hands in the air. "Hands off the doppelanger, I know." He winks at her. "Doesn't mean I won't enjoy looking."
"Men are so predictable," Rebekah sighs. "Throw a new pretty trinket their way and they lose all sense of proportion." She pauses. "Not that you're a trinket," she assures Elena.
"Well, not Stefan's at least," Elena adds.
Klaus glances up at her at this, but she resists the temptation to look his way.
They order a round of sidecars, followed by another, and another. The dark-haired girl Elena had seen at the microphone starts her set at some point, crooning to the crowd in a language Elena doesn't recognize. The room grows dimmer as the evening passes and the air fills with smoke.
The conversation lilts in and out of English as they exchange champagne cocktails for old fashioneds and sazeracs and finally just fingers of bourbon for Klaus, Stefan, and Elena, gin for Rebekah.
The entire evening feels like watching a memory of any of those family dinners she had participated in during the weeks directly following her first trip to New Orleans—what had, in retrospect, been in many ways some of the happiest weeks of her life. Yes, she'd been anxious and lonely and had had to endure Rebekah's often cruel ideas of what constitutes a practical joke, but at the same time… She'd been in love, though she would have never admitted it to herself back then. In love, and enjoying Klaus's uncomplicated affections…or what passed for uncomplicated with him. It had been the time before she'd uncovered how he'd played with her head. Before she'd made the nearly fatal error of slipping from friends to lovers with Tyler. Before she'd crossed any lines that could never be uncrossed.
Yet there is something very different about tonight, because unlike those uncomfortable dinners, when Rebekah had gone out of her way to exclude her and Stefan had contorted himself like a carnival performer trying to strike the balance between Klaus's temper and Rebekah's jealousy and his own divided loyalties, tonight, everything feels surprisingly natural. Maybe it's the way that Rebekah grasps her hand across the table when she laughs, or the way that Stefan nudges her when he jokes with her about the mismatched couple at the next table over, or maybe it's the warmth of the alcohol lighting her up and making it possible for her to laugh with him, making it possible for her to nudge him back and point out that he and the man with the wife who obviously doesn't love him back are dressed just the same. Even Klaus, quietly and steadily drinking across the table from her, doesn't bother her.
It's easy not to look at him when she can feel him looking at her.
"So Klaus tells me you daggered ol'Mikael," Stefan prods her as he refills her drink from the crystal decanter kindly left behind by their waiter.
She darts a glance at Klaus, meeting his gaze for just a fraction of a second before she looks away. "He told you right."
"Don't be shy. Tell us all about it."
She hesitates.
Rebekah leans forward. "Do tell. I haven't heard this yet myself."
The story comes out slowly at first, just the bare facts, because she can't let herself dig into the depths of the terror she had felt only yesterday—not right now. So she tells them how she'd gathered the Dark Objects she'd collected over the years and used them to take out the vampires she'd encountered as she fled the manor. How she'd kept the white oak ash dagger hidden, knowing that if Mikael caught her, she would need to get very, very close to him if she had a prayer of using it. She doesn't talk about the woods, or about the way Klaus's compulsion had shackled her and nearly doomed her. She doesn't mention how his instruction to live had been the very thing that had saved her life. Stefan's eyes gleam when she explains the circumstances in which she had ultimately felled her enemy.
"Classic Elena Gilbert strategy," he declares, raising his glass to her. "Brilliantly conjuring victory from defeat, as per usual. Just like at the lake house."
She blushes and sips at her drink.
"What lake house?" Rebekah asks.
Stefan crosses his arms and leans over the table. "Oh, the first time Elena used one of those daggers. Your brother Elijah had plans to spirit her away, to hide her until he could lure Klaus out for the sacrifice. Elena didn't want to go with him, so she brought out this huge kitchen knife, and tried to bargain with him from just inside the threshold of her family lake house. Told him she'd kill herself if he refused to negotiate with her."
"And? What happened?"
"He tried to call her bluff. She wasn't bluffing. He begged for her to let him save her, and when she threw herself into his arms—"
"She drove a dagger into his heart," Klaus cuts in. "I believe I've heard this story before." He gestures toward Rebekah, who moves out of the way to let him out of the booth.
Elena watches as he approaches a lovely woman in her forties standing over by the bar, her black hair loose around her shoulders. When he leans down to whisper something in her ear, she throws back her head and laughs, her fingers brushing against Klaus's suit jacket. A gesture he would never allow from her, yet tolerates from this total stranger. A moment later, Elena does recognize the stranger though—it's the woman from the next table over—the one who had so obviously not loved her husband back. Klaus's hand ghosts over the sliver of bare skin exposed by the plunging back on the woman's dress, a slow caress. A seduction.
Unable to watch any longer, she turns her focus back to the table. Tilts her head as she refocuses on the conversation at hand. "Stefan, remind me why you were with us at the lake house that night. I can't seem to recall." She'd been surprised that he still recalled that episode with Elijah, considering his compulsion.
Stefan pauses. "You were the girl my brother was in love with. Of course I came with him to help protect you."
Ah.
She glances meaningfully at Rebekah, who merely shrugs as if to say, What's done is done.
When she glances back up, Klaus and the woman have both disappeared.
"I need to get some air," she announces.
She finds her way over to a discretely hidden door that empties onto a rooftop terrace overlooking the dazzling skyline. She takes a deep breath, already cycling through the first step in her meditation routine in a last-ditch effort to rid herself of all of the ugly hurt and jealousy she'd felt when she had realized that Klaus had left with someone else.
She's about to kick off her shoe to hold the door open behind her when the very object of all of her stormy emotions calls out, "Don't bother. I won't let you get locked out."
Elena swallows. Finds herself wandering over to where Klaus leans against the balustrade, a lit cigarette dangling from his fingers.
"I've never seen you smoke before," she notes.
"Quit one habit, start another." He doesn't even glance up at her.
That's okay. She can handle his moods.
They both look out over the city for a long time. It's the longest he's tolerated her company with such ease since New Orleans. That, and the memory of the way he had looked at her all evening, gives her hope.
"I thought you left with that woman earlier," she says after a while.
He takes a drag on his cigarette. Exhales slowly, the smoke curling from his lips. "Are you jealous?"
She swallows her reply down. Very carefully asks him instead, "Does it make a difference if I am?"
"Not really."
"You're such a liar."
"That's your purview, I'm afraid."
"You know, after I daggered you, all of your old compulsions on me wore off. I remember all those times you compelled me to forget. All those nights you were so lonely that you sought meout, all of those insecurities you used to whisper in my ear. Those secrets you trusted me with and then asked me to forget."
"You think you know me so well."
"I do know you. You're in my blood."
His eyes snap to her face. Hold there. He looks at her in that moment like he sees every part of her, the way that he used to look at her. "I was taken aback yesterday, when I first saw you," he confesses. "You never used to wear your hair like this."
"You mean like Tatia or Katherine."
He makes some sort of noise of agreement, a small, pained sound, low in his throat. Slowly, he raises his hand, and tucks a loose curl behind her ear. "I thought it would be painful to see you again. To remain in such close proximity to you for so long." The back of his fingers stroke the curve of her cheek.
She cannot help but chase his touch. To reach for him, the one she has wanted more than anyone in all of her long lonely hours. "But?" she prompts, breathless and suddenly almost shy as she leans into him.
"You're not as beautiful as you once were."
She stumbles out of his grasp. "What?"
He extinguishes his cigarette against the balustrade. Looks out over the city for a moment before turning his attention back to her. "I find you so altered in face and disposition that your presence does not pain me in the least." He takes a deep breath. "It's actually quite a relief."
Stricken, Elena stands in stunned silence, the imprint of Klaus's touch still warm on her cheek, for several long minutes after he leaves.
With a shaking hand, she presses her fingers to that lingering warmth, thinking all the while that this face is the problem. Before, she'd possessed the face of his obsession. Her appearance alone had been enough to enthrall him, ensorcell him, ensnare him. With your face comes access, he had told her. She had never appreciated how true his words had been. If she'd still looked as she had just a few years ago, if she still looked like Tatia and Katherine, like herself, would Klaus have been able to push her away again so easily? Or would she have found some hidden pathway back into the wilderness of his heart? She imagines it, some remote, secret pass, visible only to girls who bear the magic of that one particular face. A magic that has, apparently, slipped through her fingers with the inexorable passage of time.
An icy gust of wind sends a shiver rolling down her spine, urging her to head back inside. She finds the lock to the access door broken when she finally shuffles to the exit—Klaus's way of making sure she doesn't lock herself out.
She pauses for a moment just inside to compose herself. To throw herself back into the role she had so happily played earlier in the evening. She raises her chin and straightens her spine. She can do this.
As she glides deeper into the club on the way back to the table, she senses that the atmosphere within has subtly shifted since she left. There's an edge to it now that hadn't been there before. The singer, she notices, is nowhere to be found. Instead, there is only a dark red slick pooling under the microphone. She notices how no one else seems to look directly at that empty spot, their heads intently bent instead over their drinks.
Their table itself is overflowing, now, the singer slumped over in Elena's corner of the booth, her throat torn out. Stefan holds another girl in his lap, his arm looped around her to steady her as he drains her. Klaus has his own prey tucked close to his side—the same woman he had chatted up before, apparently not bright enough to escape him when she had the chance. Klaus leans over and whispers in her ear every now and then, whatever he says causing the woman to tremble like a rabbit.
In a way, it all looks so normal—she imagines how everyone else must see them in the dimly lit club—the singer slumped over after a few too many drinks, a young man canoodling with his date in his lap while another tries to seduce the woman beside him.
No one even bats an eyelash at the vampires feeding in plain sight.
Neither does she, come to think of it.
Maybe that's the most chilling thing of all.
In the midst of all of this, Rebekah watches her brother and Stefan with an air of faintly repressed boredom, a smear of red at her mouth the only indication she's fed as well. Her eyes light up when she sees Elena.
"Oh, at last. I don't think I could bear another moment of this." She shoves at Klaus's arm to make him move and let her up, but he ignores her, so she ends up having to climb over him. "If I rip the seam on my dress because you can't be bothered to move, I will snap all of your paintbrushes in half," she warns him with a huff and a grunt as she breaks free of the booth.
"Some things aren't worth interrupting," Klaus tells his sister, all without taking his eyes off of his prey. He doesn't look back at Elena even once.
Rebekah grabs hold of Elena's arm. "If this club isn't dead now, it's going to be before much longer if Nick and Stefan decide to finish out the evening here. Let's say we find somewhere with live music and a dance floor, shall we?"
They take the elevator down in silence, which suits Elena just fine. She tries not to look at her reflection in the mirrored car.
Outside, Rebekah steers them south, as fearless at this hour of night as only an apex predator can be.
"I don't really feel like clubbing right now," Elena admits as they walk through the noisy streets, marveling how even at this hour they are far from empty. Even as unhappy as she is, she cannot help the trickle of joy she feels just walking this city street. It still feels unreal to her.
Rebekah nods. "Alright. Care to share then why you look like you've been stabbed?"
Elena looks down at her hand, where the silver fleur de lis ring, the only personal item she'd managed to escape with, glints up at her in the soft city lamplight.
Rebekah catches her looking. Clears her throat. "Let's go back to the hotel then."
They order a bottle of cognac up to the room, and stretch out together on the cushioned lounge chairs on the terrace overlooking the city.
"I never thought I'd really escape," she admits to Rebekah as they both look out over the Manhattan skyline.
"I promised I'd come back for you."
"I didn't really believe you though." Her heart breaks from how happy she is to have been proven wrong. Even now, as upset as she is about what Klaus had said to her earlier, there is part of her that is still so unbearably happy.
Rebekah is silent for a long time after that. Then, she sits up, pulling Elena up with her. "I never meant to hurt you when I left."
"I know."
"Nick doesn't mean to hurt you, either."
"I don't know what you mean."
"I know he must've said something to you, when you were both gone for such an awfully long time. I could see it in the way you looked at him."
"All he told me was the truth."
"Which was?"
"He's over me. Completely."
Rebekah cocks her head. "He told you that?"
"He was crystal clear."
She hums a little, lost in thought. "He came absolutely untethered when he discovered I'd led Mikael to you, but he left in such a rush to get to you that I assumed he was saving his wrath for after he'd rescued you."
"Maybe seeing me was enough to make him realize whatever he used to feel for me is gone."
"Maybe. He didn't react at all as I thought he would when he discovered we'd spent the summer together," Rebekah muses. "He seemed almost resigned to it." She shrugs, takes another sip from her glass. "Or maybe my brother is as great a liar to himself as he is to everyone else."
A/N: First off, HUGE thank you and shout out to CHoG1WA/monsierbbh for making me AMAZING Fairytale Ending art and gifs over on tumblr, I am STUNNED by these still.
Second, if you haven't found them yet, I've been updating klaulena ficlets under my fic anthology Bite-Sized, and have started a new fic anthology entitled About a Girl for all of my non-klaulena ficlets. I still have a bunch more updates for both of those to upload throughout the week, so keep your eye out for updates on both of those!
Finally, if you're looking for Fairytale Ending writing updates, sneak peeks on future chapters, moodboards/edits, or playlists, or you just want to slip me some questions through my askbox, come visit me over on tumblr at livlepretre
Thanks for reading!