To begin with, no one knew what they were. In truth, they didn't know what they were, which was a sudden and unexpected change: their assigned parts had always been so clear and well-defined, their roles crisp and crystal, sharp enough to cut -they had never thought to trade them out for newer, better ones. Little Red to Big Bad. Sacrificial Lamb to Sacrificer. Protagonist and antagonist. Creator versus destroyer. Vampire against Original Hybrid. So she can't explain how she finds him that night, or maybe he finds her, their magnetic poles and pulls too strong to resist even if they'd intended to.
(They didn't. They want this just as much as the other, even if -or so they believe- they will never say it.)
His eyes spark like opal fire across the clearing they've both somehow instinctively and mutually decided upon, like the flames surrounding the altar on which she'd been reborn, been remade into someone a little more darker, a little quicker to cut, who had an easier time washing blood out of her clothes and herself and her soul with every day that passed, each one stripping the layers of her innocence like the skin of a fruit, revealing the tender, easily-bruised flesh underneath that she had been forced to harden if she wanted to keep on living. Elena is pure in her white graduation dress, the picture of chastity, feathers and fluff and so much weightless stuff she feels in danger of floating away, of being forgotten. Her sire bond is gone, dead and buried, but her memories of what she did under its influence, during her loss of her humanity of her self, are not. No, those haunt her like blue eyes that turned sharply gold, of fangs piercing her neck and a tenderness that encased her in a far more loving embrace than death has ever tried to cradle her in despite it's many attempts to claim her.
She stands before Klaus in the sanctity of the woods, two unnatural beings situated in the middle of nature, unsure of what to say, unsure of where this will go, unsure of how to ask for what she wants but not denying that she wants it. Everything is different, everything is new, and yet some things are exactly the same. The two of them standing opposite, unable to look away out of fears of perceived weakness, a tilted chin a gauntlet thrown down. Yes, I challenge you, every moment and movement of hers has always said to him, the fact that her heart still beat months after he'd thought he'd silence it, snuffed out her defiance like a candle wick. But she blazes on, perhaps not as bright, perhaps her ruby flames are angrier now rather than a glowing shade of comforting amber, perhaps they singe more than they warm...but they're still there.
She is there and here and so is he, looking at her like he always has, like he's both paradoxically amused and annoyed by her stubbornness, like he wants her to submit but silently begs her not to because he cannot stand to have no equal, cannot stand to stand alone in this cruel, cruel world where both of them are ghosts of other people made flesh, a fatherless son and a motherless daughter despite the fact they've had more of both than some are ever lucky enough to have, each one shaping them into who they are today, none of them proud of the blood on their hands even if it is their fault for it.
"Hello, love. It's been a while."
"Too long or not long enough?" She plants her feet, feeling like a kid in her kitten heel, waltzing around her bedroom in her mother's stilettos and crying every time they broke because some things just can't handle her. Her tongue swipes out, scouring along her lower lip, and he follows the motion and seems like maybe he, finally, could.
Moonlight runs it's pale fingers through his golden curls, a loving and affectionate caress. She has always loved him, even when he was forced to turn away from her. "What do you think?"
"I think lots of things. I think that I don't have any clue what to paint my imaginary dorm room with Caroline and Bonnie, I think about how I'm going to explain that my brother is suddenly back from the dead whilst yours tried to kill me and I can't even tell him that I'm sorry for what I did. I'm thinking about the cure burning a metaphorical black hole in my pocket, sucking me of all my willpower and freedom. I'm thinking that it's been far too long since I was Elena Gilbert, and I just wish that I could be the person who looked you right in the eye as I walked to death at your hands. I miss her."
Klaus smiles, wicked and sharp with a piercing-blade nostalgia. "She was a thing of beauty, as are you. You are still her, just in a different font, written with a different hand, one more bloodthirsty and fearless. More defined. Bolder, if this is any indication."
Elena slumps, choosing to ignore his little comment, leaning heavily on her feet, suddenly exhausted. "Fear less, maybe, but I still have plenty of fear, this chief among them at this very moment."
"What, me? Aren't we passed all that, my love?"
She shakes her head, waves of hair shifting like the curtains being pulled open at the start of a play -this is when it begins, this is where the tale unfolds, the rest was just a prelude, my love, and everything is and can be and will be before you- red streaks stark like drops of blood sliding down the neck of the waitress she'd killed in Willoughby. "I'm not scared of you, Klaus, I'm scared of me. I'm always scared of myself. What I'll do, how far I'll go, what line I'll cross that someone will try to pull me back from but never to them, into them, to just hold me. I have no one who will just let me be for a while. Everyone expects me to be fine, to bounce back, to reclaim my previous shape, perpetuate me pre-destined lie. I am not Caroline; I don't want this. I can't be like this. I need to mourn this, put my ghosts and the ghosts I've made to rest before I move on."
"You are a vampire, Elena. You can be anything you want to be." He's gentle. Considerate, not careful, and it's exactly what she wants, exactly what she was expecting, the very thing that she was looking for because Klaus may be evil, but after he'd killed her, she'd had nothing to fear from him, knew the monster would not sink it's claws into her even if it was only in the name of maintaining his interests. She could curl up by the fire of his anger and even though he would never drape a blanket over her, he would not let the flames scorch her. She was and is untouchable, now because he came when she called, because Caroline wasn't the only one who sent out a graduation invite, even if it had only been as a joke, a mocking 'You took my life, but you can't take away the sight of me in a cap and gown with a diploma, I made it and doesn't that just drive you mad?' and a 'I want you there, want you to see that I'm still here, doesn't that mean something for us if we're both still here, at the same time?' all in one confusing, contradicting tangle, the world's biggest ball of emotional baggage yarn.
The best way to cut through a knot is slowly, methodically, separating each strand as you go. The fastest is with a pair of scissors. A pair of fangs will hopefully just have to do.
"And if I say I want to be yours?" A daring step forward, a sword laid down, weak point in her armour bared like an artery waiting to bleed. "Would you want me too? Would you finally stop ignoring the way you've been looking at me all this time and finally give it it's proper name, whatever that turns out to be? Can we finally admit that, since you came into my life, you've eclipsed everything else, sent me into a tailspin the likes of which I never imagined? That as heroic -in their own ways- the Salvatores are, as much as I know they love me, I know that's not the kind of love I want anymore?"
He draws closer to her, expression sketched like one of the paintings she'd caught sight of in his house when she'd been hallucinating under the Hunter's Curse, heavy with gilt edges and gesso and guilt and guile. He thrums with want, vibrating like a plucked string, like she's his puppeteer but he doesn't seem to care if she's pulling at him because it's exactly what he wants. "You've never wanted me before, we've never been like that before." It went unspoken, a glance across a room, a possessive hand on an elbow with squeaking sneakers and fluorescent high school hallways lights frothing above, his eyes the cresting waves below. Elena knows he will never drown her. If he was going to kill her, he'd do it some other way, has enough respect for her to make it quick and painless as he did that very first time.
"Is that a no, Klaus?" Her mouth curls like a dog-eared page in a book, something to go back and revisit later; right now she only wants the truth, his truth, this truth, that she can run from for the rest of her life if she really wants, can take the cure in her pocket and settle down with some guy she'll meet in pre-med and marry in springtime with chirping birds and carry her over the threshold of a blue house with shutters and a cherry tree and a white picket fence where they'll have Sunday barbeques and water fights with their three kids, where she will pretend that she's never washed blood out of her clothes for any reason besides work, where no one will talk about birthday and Christmas cards from an 'Aunt Caroline' or 'Uncle Stefan' they have never met, where Jer will come over for dinner but never stay for more than a day and where Bonnie goes around, fingers twitching like she wants to pull at something, where no one will talk about why their iced tea tastes funny or there's a trunk in the cupboard by the vacuum and old playpen with a lock and rattles like there's sticks of wood inside.
Every Petrova has died. Some peaceful, many others not. All her steps have been taken before, this path is well-worn, but Elena longs to veer off it, into the uncharted unknown, the place that sailors used to mark on maps with 'Here Be Monsters.' She doesn't want easy, wants something hard, something difficult but ultimately so very rewarding. She wants to make Klaus laugh at least once every day and see for herself if those lips are really as soft as they look, wants to see what he looks like first thing in the morning bathed in a dawning sunrise with her head on his chest and their clothes strewn around the floor. She wants the one man who has never looked at her with pity, but with pride, with admiration like she is his greatest work of art even if she isn't quite yet finished, just waiting for him to fill in the blank spaces.
"It's an 'I Don't Know,' Elena." His breath dances along her neck, tangled in her curls, makes a home for itself against her red-stained cheek. "I've always had so much fun hating you, despite you and your merry gang and all the men who fling themselves at your feet, the knights and nobles and warrior queens who wish to give you there all, their names and their love, begging for meager scraps of your affection, to know that they matter to you. You are a Petrova, nothing good as ever come from my caring for any of you."
"Is that so? Then why are you still here? Why did you save us all at graduation today and give Damon your blood and promise to leave but still ultimately seek me out? Why did I just break up with Damon and wish Stefan all the best because I could think of nothing and no one else but you since the moment I woke up this morning, maybe even before that?" Since she kissed a Mikaelson in Willoughby and suddenly wished she was kissing another instead, one with lighter hair and a darker heart but a sense of love and beauty that she can't help but admire, who just didn't want to be alone...because that's what she always wants, isn't it? Why she propels herself into danger time and time again because she just can't handle any more grief, would rather inflict it on others at her potential loss than feel it all over again?
She is danger and he is daggers, but at the end of the day they just can't bear to be alone. They are reflections of each other. Not perfectly mirrored, no, but equally opposite, oppositely equal, every action a reaction to the other, a dance that they perfect without ever needing to take a single step together.
"I can't deny that I want you. That I think of you. That I have always thought of you, long before I ever laid eyes on you. But wanting alone...that's not love."
"No, but it could be, it could grow to be, if we let it. Don't you want to be loved, Niklaus? Don't you want to not be alone? Don't you know that I stand by the people I chose to have in my life no matter what, no matter what they've done, no matter how bloody their hands are? I see the blood on you, the blood of my ancestors, the blood of the last of my family...and my own. I can neither forgive or forget it; all I can do is let it be. Let them rest. I will mourn Jenna forever, but I no longer wish to grieve. I don't want to be sad forever."
"Is that what you want me to be for you? An adequate distraction?"
"No." Her hand sweeps up, fingers gliding along his cheek bone like swans across the surface of a lake, lithe and graceful but underneath predators still. "I want you to be my change. I want you to shake me up and shake me out and set me free. You know what it feels like to live on a cage, Klaus, but i made this one myself, have willfully loved and lived in it for so many years. I will live forever, but my soul will not survive if I don't know."
"Know what?" There are walls in his eyes, standing tall and proud behind irises such a deep shade of blue that his cerulean tie can never hope to compete with such a hue, like he's been painted and sculpted by someone else like he's not really real. But Elena knows otherwise, knows that he's as real as herself, if not more so, because at least he has never pretended to be anything besides what he is, never tried to fit in for the sake of it, to plaster on fake smiles like they're lipgloss, hoping her cracks don't shine through. She's like that Japanese ceramic style she saw in one of Jeremy's books -Kitsungi, yeah, she remembers it now- where they take a broken vase or beloved but of pottery, put it back together and then fill all the cracks in with gold.
Gold. The gold of his eyes. The heat of sunlight on her face that she can see but no longer feels. The wedding rings sitting in a safety deposit box, gather dust amidst recycled oxygen. Gold like a medal, something to be proud of, to mark an achievement, a trophy to commemorate a moment. Elena needs no trophy for this moment; it will be a reward in and of itself. It'll be the starting line, a shift, tectonic plates merging and rending to create something entirely new and unexpected and undiscovered yet she knows she will have finally found herself amongst it.
"If you want to change everything with me. If it's all just in my mind. If I haven't connected this whole thing up in my head as some coping mechanism so that j don't have to deal with everything else in my life, if I'm feeling so insecure and broken that I'll cling to anyone or anything in the hopes of not feeling so scarily adrift. I want to know you, Klaus, but the question is if you want to know me, outside of the supernatural and opposite sides and ploys and plots and subterfuge, if you think there's more to our story than just bloodshed and tears."
His face shifts, tension melting from his shoulders with each and every word like they're chisels chipping away at the rough stone of his opposition, his resolve, and Elena knows then it won't be long before it breaks, before it all fall away and he finally, finally gives in. "I cannot deny that I have always been intrigued by you, since the moment I laid eyes on you. You were so different from the rest that, if I had not seen your face on two others before, I would have almost doubted you shared blood. I couldn't tell if it was your upbringing, or just who you were, and once I learned it was the latter...it made everything seem more real, every atrocity I enacted against you grew more potent. Everything would have been so much easier, love, if you were just like all the rest. But you're not. I cannot deny that you're so very, very special, that after we broke the curse, I missed having you around. Even in the middle of your darkness, you still somehow managed to bring forth light."
"You don't need to deny it. This isn't about revenge for Jenna or how you hand in my turning into a vampire. This isn't about your mother or your brothers or your sister: this is about us. About what we could be, together. We've been fated to be enemies for over a thousand years; why not give the universe hell and be each other's forever instead?"
His hands dart out to grip her waist, lace daises dying in his crushing grip. "And how would you go about that, love?" Klaus purrs like the animal he is, eyes blown wide like he's taking her all in, every inch his to assess, to judge and to uncover and to marvel at. Her hands are softer, twining around his shoulders gently, settling in the golden strands of hair at the nape of his neck like an anchor, like something permanent. "Well, I'd start it with a kiss."
And so they do.
Sparks surge.
Above, stars die, and fate rolls in her grave while destiny rubs it's hands like gleeful children. Below, their two hearts race, crashing and colliding, as forceful as their lips against each other. Her hands dig into his hair and his fingers tighten around her hips but they both know that they can't hurt each other -or that if they do, it won't be permanent, they'll heal, because there's nothing, not the death of brothers or of aunts, that's so insurmountable as to keep them apart, because every piece of a whole will always come back to its others, a siren song of home that cannot and will not be denied.
Home. That's what he sees when he looks down at her, his thumb caressing her jaw in delicate strokes like she is his greatest canvas.
Peace. That's what she feels when she reaches up and places a kiss on his forehead, a promise like a fairy in a story. Yes, I will love and protect you, always.
Beginning. That's what they both feel as their hands find each other, fingertips meshing together, metamorphosing into a new shape, a new form, what that is familiar and yet so new and fragile its almost heartbreaking, but as their gazes meet they know they will never break it.
Everything has changed.
"My, Miss Gilbert, that was quite the kiss. But I think a repeat performance would best, really drive the point home, don't you agree?
Maybe not everything.
Elena laughs, and Klaus can no doubt feel it in his mouth, vibrating through every cell, solidifying into something solid and hopeful, a dream finally fulfilled, the impossible made real, like magic. If she asked, he'd tell her it tastes like sunshine, like golden apples and fall breezes and endless possibilities, like the death of loneliness and the birth of love eternal.
Inside, every cage door opens. Their birds are set free, soaring high into the sky, together at long last.
Author's Note: Hello, everyone! I've been in a bit of a slump lately and I had this idea for a fic and decided to write it out rather than let it collect dust in my drafts. I was thinking of making it a multi-chapter, but I think it stands well on its own. And yes, I did take the title from the Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran song, 'Everything Has Changed,' because it was stuck in my head at the time and gave me the initial idea.
Anyway, thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed it!
All my love, Temperance Cain.