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: T for now, but will become R in later chapters

Warnings: I'll be adding more warnings as I update, but for now, hostage situation/explicit violence/gratuitous angst

This is the family that Elena never knew to want; it's a nightmare configuration that makes her head ache to try to disentangle but that she can't imagine ever doing without.

It starts like this.

"Is that what this is about? Your obsession with hybrids? You just don't want to be alone?"

"What I want is to take my girl, take my hybrid, and get the hell out of this one pony town."

Or so she hears.

Senior Prank Night opens up the future and the vision Elena gets of it is like looking down a long tunnel full of jagged teeth.

She's so out of it that when Stefan pulls her from the hospital bed, she forgets everything and wanders back to last spring, when they were just two kids in love (sort of).

The truth hits harder than that.

"Lovely to see you awake, my dear."

Klaus's words wash through her in the wake of her consciousness.

She opens her eyes to find herself in a pale green room, the shades drawn against the murky morning light, and Klaus in an armchair at her bedside.

"Where am I?"

"You don't recall?"

She frowns at him and tries to sit up, but her muscles feel heavy and uncooperative. Elena settles back against the pile of pillows behind her and lifts her chin instead. "You had that nurse taking my blood. Why?"

Klaus leans over, resting his elbows on his knees and his jaw on the bridge of his hands. "You're evidently much more precious than I had thought."

Confused, she is about to press him further when the door bursts open and Rebekah and Stefan fumble into the room.

Elena's stomach lurches at the sight of them.

Blood fans across their faces like war-paint. Vermilion handprints map every caress they shared as they butchered their victims.

Stefan slings an arm around Rebekah's shoulder and gives Elena a friendly nod and a wave.

Klaus's mouth twists into something like a smile. He lounges back into his chair, submerges himself in shadow. "Welcome to the family."

She spends the rest of the day in bed, still too weak to move.

The bandage on her neck itches, almost as much as the scabs winding up and down her arms. If it were just the arm scabs, she thinks she could have dealt with the discomfort, but the wound on her neck won't let her forget the feeling of Stefan's teeth in her. She's emotionally drained, too tired to deal with the memory of Stefan's emotionless, inhuman eyes, but the physical reminder won't let her forget.

The others leave her alone for the afternoon. She thinks she must be like an object to them, a plaything, something to use when they want and forget about when they don't. Elena is thankful for her time alone. She doesn't think she can see Stefan like that again and hold onto her sanity.

She's still too weak to stand but she spends her time searching for clues anyway. She doesn't know where she is, exactly, or how long it's been since Senior Prank Night.

What she does have a pretty good handle on is the state of her body. She knows she's lost too much blood. She remembers, vaguely, realizing that Klaus was taking her blood—he had confirmed as much earlier, before Stefan and Rebekah had interrupted them. Judging from how she felt, he'd taken a lot. The question is, why?

She lifts her arm and peers at the line of scabs and dark yellowing bruises moving up and down the length of it. Her fingers dig under her neck bandage to toy with the rough, dry edges of the scabbed-over wound there. A few days have passed since she received these injuries, she's sure of it. That answers one of her questions.

The room itself provides very little in the way of information. The blinds to the single window are snapped shut and she cannot reach them from her bed. There's only one door, built from solid oak that will let no sound from outside her room to pass into it. No pictures hang upon the pale green walls. The double-bed she lies on, piled high with pillows and warm blankets, is the primary feature of the room. It faces the door and a dark wooden dresser bare of anything atop it. She does not yet know whether there is anything within it. Off to the side, pushed against the wall, is a bedside table on wheels, the kind found in hospitals that can be rolled up to the bed to ease eating and drinking. The chair Klaus had lounged in sits across from her bedside.

Elena has no choice but to wait for further answers.

Around dusk, the door opens.

Elena expects Klaus, yearns for Stefan, and fears Rebekah.

Bewilderingly, she gets Tyler.

"What are you doing here?" she asks.

He shuffles his feet, and Elena flatters him enough to think he looks guilty.

"Klaus asked me to come along," he mumbles, eyes on the floor.

"Why?"

He looks up at her. "I'm his first hybrid. I'm an asset, you know?" His eyes glow feverishly as he speaks, and Elena realizes she's misjudged him completely. There's something off about her friend—something changed in him since his neck was snapped. She knows the feeling. Even so, she knows he can still be reached.

"So what about Caroline? Did you just up and leave her?"

He blanches visibly.

Satisfied that she's found the right nerve, she presses the knife deeper. "How can you have left her, Tyler? She loves you more than anyone."

"She's better off in Mystic Falls," he snaps, all of his reckless, familiar anger careening toward the surface. He stops himself, takes a breath, starts again. "Klaus wants me here." Tyler sits down on the edge of her bed. "Elena, we're part of something—bigger. You, me—we're like the keys. Klaus needs us—"

"So?"

He smiles at her and stands up to leave. At the door, he pauses to leave her with a parting word. "Give yourself some time to think about it. You'll come around."

For three days, she lies in bed, watching the shadows shift against the walls like ghosts.

Klaus takes an interest in her health. He comes in to check on her everyday, even sits with her for as much as twenty minutes at a time.

Elena tries to keep her eyes closed whenever Klaus visits her. If she didn't, she might mistake his attention for something earnest.

She whiles away his visits by replaying in her mind the hush of Jenna's last gasp, by focusing on the flames that consumed Isobel's body that dance against her stubbornly shut eyelids.

With Klaus so close to her, it's impossible not to think of a different set of flames. The fire was so hot the night she died… the night Klaus murdered her. How many other girls had died in his arms? And how many had lived to tell the tale?

"I've brought you orange juice."

She slides an eye open.

Klaus holds the glass under her nose. His lips are spread wide in a smile that cuts deep dimples into his cheeks.

"I'm not thirsty." She presses her lips together and turns her head away to illustrate her point.

"Come on, now, love, don't be difficult. You need the juice to get your fluid volume back up to standard."

"And whose fault is that?"

Mirth flickers in his eyes. Ease loosens his posture as he wraps an arm under her shoulders and lifts her up against the pillows into a sitting position.

Elena realizes, suddenly, that she's never seen him truly relaxed. His decisiveness had all been a veneer to hide his uncertainty.

"Open that darling mouth, now, Elena," he urges as he coaxes her lips to the glass. "There, now, that's a good girl," he whispers when she finally gives in.

Juice dribbles down her chin as he tips the glass for her to finish.

"I should have brought you a bib," he murmurs as he draws his thumb across her chin and wipes the juice away.

"Or you could have listened to me when I said I didn't want the damn juice." She wishes she could push more venom into her words, but she just can't find it anywhere inside of her. She feels like a puffed up kitten, all show and no threat. Where is the girl who stood up to Elijah and Katherine and even Klaus himself, just a few months ago? She's looking for her, she really is, but it's hard to find her after everything that happened.

Sometimes Elena feels like when she died, that part of her never came back.

Klaus laughs. "If I listened to you, I would have no fun."

Fun. What was fun to Klaus? Had it been fun when he had murdered her aunt? When he had put that timer on Stefan during Senior Prank Night, and compelled him to tear her throat out?

"If you listened to me, I wouldn't have juice down my shirt," she tells him lamely. Her voice sounds weak and petulant, even to her own ears.

Suddenly he is very close. "Would you like me to change it for you?" There's a twinkle in his eye when he asks her this that wasn't there a minute ago. His eyes are very blue.

Elena presses back against her pillows, as far away from him as she can get. "No thank you." Her voice doesn't waver at all. It doesn't.

Klaus pulls back, and switches tack like he wasn't being amazingly creepy at all a minute ago. "Suit yourself, love." He moves toward the door and pauses with his hand on the knob. "Mind, it is a standing offer."

Elena feels flustered the rest of the day.

Four times a day, Stefan brings her a plate of food and a fresh pitcher of water. Blood often speckles his shirt, but his hands are always clean when he fixes the bed-table over her hips. She supposes Klaus wants to guard against her acquiring any blood-born diseases.

She burns to speak to him. Anything to break the ice between them after he had bitten her would be a relief. He's looking at her with a stranger's eyes, though, and she cannot find the words that would beat back this stranger until Stefan, the real Stefan, revealed himself.

"Why are you the one on lunch-duty?" she asks him finally, more because she cannot find any words adequate enough to broach how she feels and she would rather speak to him about these inanities than because she really wants to know.

"Because Tyler would fuck it up and Klaus thinks Rebekah might smother you with a pillow."

"Is it just the five of us then?"

Stefan's dark gaze settles on her like a shroud. "No, there are others," he answers slowly, like he's unsure if he should be speaking to her at all. "They aren't sticking around though; Klaus is going to send them away…" He trails off, and doesn't give any signs of continuing.

Others. Other vampires… or other hybrids?

"Why?"

"Why do you always have to question, Elena? Isn't it enough that you're alive, being cared for?"

His words are like a slap in the face. Stefan has never used this tone on her before. Never been anything but tender and gentle. Even when he was out of his mind with bloodlust last year, he had done everything in his power to protect her from himself. Tears threaten to fall. It would be so easy to give in to them, to pity herself and drown here. Elena fights them back. She can be strong. She will be strong. For Stefan. She resolves herself to saving him. Somehow.

"We both know it's not." She hardly lets the words sink in before she forces the conversation back to getting the information that she needs if she's ever going to figure a way out of this. Besides. If she starts down this road with Stefan, she doesn't think she will ever get out again. She takes a sip from the glass of water Stefan pours for her and continues. "I get why I'm here, but why keep Tyler around?"

"Klaus thinks he'll be good motivation for you to behave."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't play dumb, Elena."

The admonishment stings, but she ignores it. "Fine." She focuses on keeping her expression neutral, her tone even as she admits, "You would have been enough."

He shrugs. "So I would be. But Klaus always has a back-up."

The first time Klaus paid a visit to her, when she was still a little high from the sedatives the nurse had given her back in Mystic Falls, she awakened to his hand on her face, tenderly stroking her hair from her forehead.

The memory drifts back to her weeks later like an empty rowboat on the tide.

A/N: I am back! Thank you to everyone who has messaged me about this fic, or to see how I've been doing. You have all really kept me motivated and inspired to get this fic out into the world (as some of you know, it's been on the backburner since October 2011).

This is going to be minimum about 15-20,000 words, but it could be longer.

Anyway, please review and let me know your thoughts!