Symbiosis

by adlyb

Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words

Pairing: Klaus/Elena

Warnings: Unhealthy relationships/power dynamics, explicit violence, sexual content, bloodplay, basic vampire stuff

Rating: M

The changes they have wrought together—with her blood, and his ambition—are slow things, so much slower and smaller than the changes that started all of this.

Klaus had spoken about that ritual she'd gone through with as though it would fix everything right away. As though ripe apples and peaches would hang from the trees, and as though what rabbits and deer and people as remained would gather in again, to live in woods and towns and cities full of shining incandescent light like they once had. Elena feels foolish for thinking that now.

The humans that they find are still scattered. She's seen scarcely any animals bigger than a squirrel since she turned, and the trees remain bare, their limbs waving in the wind like ghosts.

"Are you sure that ritual did anything at all?" she asks Klaus, as a copse of dead trees comes in view.

He glances at her. "You can't tell?"

"Tell what? Everything looks the same."

"It doesn't feel the same though, now does it? The air is warmer— Do you feel that? The morning sun gives off heat again." He squats down and places her hand to the ground. Elena kneels next to him and copies him. It's a process she's becoming familiar with, mimicking him and stretching out her senses to try to feel what he feels, see and hear and taste and smell as he does. Her senses are not as sharp as his, but they are close enough. "What do you feel from the earth?" he asks her.

She sifts her fingers over the dirt. "Nothing."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes—it's just—still—"

"The earth no longer heaves and rumbles. The speed of the earth's plates have slowed to the old pace." He smiles, just a little. "The planet's settling again, Elena, becoming navigable. The fresh water, such as there is, will remain where it is."

"And the people will be able to find it and build next to it."

"Exactly." He stands and absently brushes his hands against his jeans, waiting for her.

She fiddles with a blade of grass. It's crisp and firm under her fingers. And maybe a shade greener than it would have been a few months ago. It's hard to tell, with her vision so much better now than it used to be. So many of these changes for the better that Klaus is alert to, and she cannot tell what is new about the planet and what is simply new information, stuff she's only recently able to detect. So hard to be certain.

She lays down on the grass and spreads her arms out wide. Her dress rides up past her knees. Grass scratches at her thighs when she shifts. When she presses her ear to the ground, she can hear movement, deep within the earth. Insects, she realizes, moving around like life is normal. And beneath those sounds, the faint flow of water, creeping through xylem and up into every living plant.

Over her head, the stars glitter, diamond white against a black and violet sky. She can see so many more of them than she ever could before.

Klaus watches her watching the sky. He's silver in the moonlight, a different creature than the one she remembers from their sunny days together, their candlelit nights.

"Come to me," she calls. She holds her arms open to him, and if either of them are aware of a reversal in their positions—that Klaus comes to her when she reaches for him, something she had so pointedly refused him—neither say a word of it.

He slides into her embrace, and covers her body on the grass. There's a sense memory of this somewhere, like déjà vu. It fuzzes in the back of her mind as his hips sink against hers, and she wraps her legs around his waist. A stray thought. She lets it go. It slides back under her memories like a crocodile sinking into dark water, and she knows, vaguely, that it won't emerge again.

"I like this," she tells him. She locks her arms around his shoulders and pulls his mouth down to the crux of her neck. "I like feeling your weight on me."

He puffs a laugh against her throat. "Never imagined you'd admit to such a thing."

"What? That I like to feel you close to me?"

"You've always been such a runner." He twists her wrists above her head and pins them to the grass. "Never thought you'd tell me you like getting caught."

She leans back against the grass and studies him. There's a smile against on his lips, and a playful gleam in his eyes that she has seen turn vicious and deadly in a moment more times than she can count. He's a predator. Even now, his white sharp teeth, only inches from her neck, could kill her in an instant.

Of course, he's more than that to her. Worse than that. He's the thing she should have been running from, but ran toward instead.

She relaxes under his touch.

"You caught me a long time ago. Didn't you notice?" She bares her neck to him. It's a familiar gesture, one they repeated over and over again when she was human. The gesture is the same but the meaning has changed. They're both keenly aware of it.

He doesn't take her offer, though he looks tempted.

Carefully, Klaus takes her chin between his fingers and guides her eyes to his. He stares into her eyes for a long while, looking for something. She hopes he finds it.

He was gentle with her like this before the first sacrifice, and he's touched her like this since the completion of the second. And between, she can remember bruises and gashes left in her throat and thighs, even a concussion once. Another thing that has changed between them.

She stares back, caught in this moment with him. She licks her lips, and she cannot help the way her hips roll against him when his eyes dip to her parted lips.

"I suppose I have, at that," he murmurs.

They're gentle with each other that night. It's a new thing they're trying out. His hands glide over her skin, applying on the barest of pressure, and her mouth is soft and fluttering where she touches him. Her quiet, breathy laughter puffs against his throat.

"I've wanted you like this, on the grass beneath the sky, for weeks and weeks now," she tells him.

She can feel his smile against her breast. "I'm well aware, my lovely, lovely girl."

"I think I'm developing a taste for this."

"Hmm?"

"For getting what I want. I so rarely used to."

"And what do you want?"

"Isn't it obvious?" She urges him up her body, so she can kiss him, and accuse him between kisses, "You're making fun of me."

She can feel his smirk, slow and steady, against her mouth. "Have I ever treated you with anything but the utmost serious regard?" he asks, words barely more than breath.

"No, I suppose you haven't."

"Nor do I intend to start."

"But how do you regard me?" she asks, suddenly serious.

He crawls down the length of her body, so that his mouth is pressed against the tender flesh of her stomach, just below her navel. "Let me show you," he murmurs against her skin.

He nudges her underwear out of the way, until she is bare beneath his gaze. Klaus shifts lower, hooking her legs over his shoulder, and pauses with his mouth just over her slit. She feels his breath fan against her clit, making her shiver and twitch, wanting him, as he looks up the length of her body. That dark gaze, like a clear midnight sky, pins her as surely now as his teeth in her throat would have done. It's the heat in that look, the longing and possession and determination to chase after her, that sparks the low heat in her belly, the wetness slicking her entrance. He's still looking right at her when he licks into her, red mouth working her in a pattern and a pressure learned from years of trysts such as these.

Just his eyes on her while he does this is enough to make her cum. She's certain of it. Certain of the pressure that builds inside of her like a spring pulled taught and straight. The second she lets go, the spring will snap and curl, and she will go hurtling forward with it, no control whatsoever of how far or how fast she goes. Her toes curl into his back.

"I want you closer," she tells him. "Inside me—Klaus—will you?" She pulls at his shoulders, drags him back up the length of her body so she can reach his mouth, so her fingers can work at his belt buckle and his fly. He obliges her, let's her drag him up, she knows that, because there is no force left on this earth that could make him do anything—and this is his version of doting on her, of loving her, to accede to her wishes and whims and let her push and pull when it is absolutely in his nature to be the one who dominates. She doesn't care. She's long past if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. She simply loves him, wants him, needs him inside of her right now.

He kisses her slowly and thoroughly, his tongue probing into her mouth, tracing along the edges of her teeth and stroking against her tongue, against the insides of her cheek and the seams of her lips. She mimics him, tasting herself on his tongue and on his lips, tangy and ripe. "Careful," he cautions when her tongue flicks past the edge of his too sharp teeth.

The heat between her legs has grown from a steady thrum to a hot pulse, a reverberation of need need need. If she were to reach down and touch herself, she would find herself positively drenched, the slickness starting a slow roll down her thighs.

"Right now," she tells him, taking the hard length of him in hand and position him at her entrance. "I need—I want you right now. Klaus—"

He enters her in a slow, deliberate thrust. She feels like the sea must feel parting for a wave, each inch of him pushing her apart, each part of her grappling to sink in around him and hold him within her.

"You're all I ever want, Elena." He smoothes the hair from her face, stares long and dark into her eyes. "Elena, my girl—are you my girl?"

It's such a loaded question—when he says her name, she can still hear something else underneath the familiar lilting vowels—

Elena Elena Elena Katerina Katerina Tatia Tatia Tatia

But that is overridden now. Taken over now. The sea and the wave, rising and parting and reuniting again. She can hear the lap of his words against her ear, the tide of what he means in his heart, what he means truest of all when he says her name—

Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena Elena

—is herself and no other.

She can feel him tense, the muscles in his back hard and tight under her hands, his arms shaking with something other than fatigue. He comes hot inside of her, and the spasming feel of his orgasm sets her off, a fluttering that becomes wave after wave of clenching release.

Klaus stays inside of her afterward, locked between his arms as he looks down at her by moonlight. His mouth is slightly shiny, his hair mussed.

"You never answered my question," he notes. He twines a piece of her hair around his finger like the question is casual, like he doesn't care too much about the answer. Though he has finally averted his gaze from her face, Elena knows that his attention is on her now more than ever.

"Yes," she tells him.

"Yes?"

"I am your girl." She offers it to him like a pledge, her word that she will not break.

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