(The Stars Were Brightly Shining)

by adlyb

Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.

Summary: After a one night stand with Klaus, Elena discovers she's not going to be alone for Christmas after all.

Spoilers: Seasons 3 & 4

Rating: R

Warnings: canon typical violence/ teen pregnancy / angst angst angst and Christmas

By the time she pulls away from his embrace, they're the only two left on the town green. The clean up is scheduled for bright and early the next morning—her name is on the list, and it's fully possible that she will show up to help despite the hard stone of anger she feels for Caroline for keeping this monumental thing secret from her—but for now, the lights are still up, strung between trees and booths and decorative arches, and so there are twice as many stars in the sky as usual when Elena takes hold of Klaus's hand and leads him to sit with her by the fountain.

"Why are you here?" he asks her after a few more minutes have trickled by, the splashing of the fountain the only sound louder than their breaths.

"Don't you need me to be?"

He leans back and looks up at the inky smear of the night sky.

She looks with him.

"I thought you didn't care." He says it so lightly she could almost believe that her answer doesn't matter to him. That's his tell, though. For when he cares more than anything.

"I was lying."

She can feel him turn to her. Can feel the weight of his evaluation, quieter and heavier, somehow, than it was before. She has the uncomfortable feeling that the incident in the woods with the hybrids has peeled back another layer, revealed Klaus to be this somber, exhausted creature, grievously wounded, that only pretends to be so carelessly cruel, so frenetically cheerful.

The sight of him stalking toward Carol Lockwood flashes through her thoughts, and she has to swallow down the sudden lump in her throat. No, not really carelessly cruel at all… but cruel, still, all the same. It's in his nature.

She doesn't care.

She should. She knows that she should. But—

She just. Can't find it in herself to leave him. Not now. Not like this.

(She wishes, even once, that there had been someone who had refused to leave her.)

"Were you?" he asks her quietly. "You were utterly convincing, earlier today."

"I was lying to myself too. I—You were right. We do have something between us." She twists her hands. Frets with her bloodied dress that is in likelihood stained beyond repair. "I can't help it that that scares me."

A long time goes by before he speaks, Klaus watching her while she looks anywhere but at him.

"I forgive you," he tells her at length, gravely serious.

That answer—so very Klaus—should rile her, but her pride has no place here tonight.

That's why she tells him, before the mood between them shifts, and she loses her nerve, "I have something else I have to tell you."

He waits silently for her to go on, with an air of patience more ancient than the uncut primordial forests out by the falls, more abiding than stone and colder than the deepest waters.

"The thing about this pregnancy—the thing about it is—well—" She falters. Regathers her courage. "The thing about it is that there is no father."

"You mean to say that it's the result of a passing dalliance," he reasons slowly.

"No. I mean… this pregnancy is sort of supernatural. As in, there literally isn't a father."

"You're joking."

"I'm completely, utterly, one thousand percent serious."

His expression falls completely slack. She has the feeling that if she had told him this any other day, he would have laughed at her, but tonight, now, when he is so very drained, it's all he can do to stare at her in blank bewilderment.

His response eats at her nerves. "Klaus, say something."

"What you're suggesting's just not possible. Takes two lives to create a new one. That's just how the Balance goes."

"But I'm the doppelganger."

"So?"

"So normal rules about Balance and Nature don't apply to me. And it seems to me like what Nature really requires of me is that my line continue, no matter what, so there can be another one of me in 500 years. Hence: supernatural pregnancy for a supernatural being."

"The curse has been broken. The conditions that led to your line's creation have already been met. There's no need for such loopholes."

"And yet I'm still supernatural."

"This never happened to Katerina."

"Are you positive? How would you know?"

He scrubs his bloody hands over his face. The movement leaves a trail of red behind. "Say I do believe what you're saying. Why are you telling me this now? Why not last week, when first I asked? Did it amuse you, to watch me chase after a rival that may not exist?"

"I can't go on being enemies with you like this, Klaus. I just… An hour ago I thought you were dead. And now you're not, and I don't want to keep going on like this with you, over an issue that doesn't even exist."

He sighs. "Fair enough."

They watch the moon rise together.

"I don't understand what you were trying to do with Matt," she tells him later, as she picks out constellations.

"Is he dead?" He sounds merely mildly curious, as though the answer doesn't really matter to him one way or another.

She glances at him. Looks away. "Is he supposed to be?"

He shrugs. "I hadn't decided yet."

"He's fine. Caroline was there." She fidgets with her coat buttons. "What do you mean, you hadn't decided? What were you planning?" It doesn't really matter, she supposes. All's well that ends well. And yet… she can't stop wondering what Klaus had hoped to accomplish with that little stunt earlier.

"Either to let him bleed out while you watched or to save him for you. I've been back and forth for days on which it would be. Was distracted, in the end, so it all comes to nothing, I suppose."

"If you were trying to impress me by saving him, it wouldn't have worked. I saw through your scheme before I ever took the stage."

"Clever girl. Were you very angry with me?"

"No." The truth falls from her lips before she can wonder if it would be wiser to not to give it.

This admission thaws something in Klaus that had been cold and hard since she'd found him. She can feel the intensity of his interest ratchet up like a sunburn on her skin as he drawls, "How disappointing. I thought you cared for your friend more than that."

If Klaus had been withdrawn and unhappy before, all of that recedes under the force of what Elena recognizes faintly to be a wild and fierce excitement kindling within him.

She shakes her head, flustered. "No, it's just—I knew something was wrong as soon as I got there, and I couldn't find you. You would never set something like that in motion without showing up to watch it play out. And then I heard…" She trails off, not quite willing to name names in front of him.

"My demise must've been a relief," Klaus muses.

"It wasn't."

"You've been trying to kill me for months now, off and on." He says it so fondly.

"I've told you my heart was never in it."

"No, you told me you didn't have a heart."

"That's not true."

"So what is your heart, then, Elena?"

She dares to glance up at him from beneath her lashes. Finds herself transfixed by the hungry, intent way he looks at her as he waits for her response. Notes that unmistakable spark of hope burning in him, brighter, brighter still as he marks her reaction to him.

She takes a deep breath. Recollects herself. The cold from the fountain radiates into her back, a solid wall of ice that seeps into her, keeps her grounded in this moment.

"That depends," Elena says. "Are you going to keep threatening my friends?"

"Can you truly call them your friends?"

"What about my child?"

He frowns at her. "You know that I wouldn't."

"Swear it."

"Will you answer me if I do?"

"Klaus—"

In a trice he has taken her hand and gotten down on one knee in front of her. His voice drops down into a formal register as he vows, "I swear unto you that I will neither harm nor ever allow harm to befall your child, through action or inaction, else let me be stricken down on the instant." He holds her gaze the entire time he speaks, even when he takes hold of her hands and presses his mouth against it.

Fever races over her skin at the touch. She draws her hand back sharply.

"You didn't think I would be willing to do that," Klaus observes. "And yet, it seems to me that you've driven a bad bargain, if you thought this would get you out of answering."

"I just don't understand where you think this is going. I get that you're attracted to me, and that maybe if things were different, we could have a shot. But I'm having a baby, Klaus."

"Maybe I haven't made myself clear. I'm not merely attracted to you."

"Okay, you have feelings for me—"

"I'm in love with you."

The words stun her. "That's not possible."

"Would that that were true."

Elena stands up and backs away from him. His eyes trace her every step.

"Klaus, that's insane."

"Is it?"

"Besides, what would you do with a baby? You won't want to be with me in six months when I've gained thirty pounds and I'm waddling, let alone when I have a toddler clinging to me—"

"I've raised a child as my own before."

Elena pauses, all of the gears in her head grinding to a halt. "What?"

"I had a ward once. A boy I raised as my own. I'm not daunted by the task. If that's part of what it would take to have you, then I accept that."

"You were mad with jealousy about this pregnancy mere hours ago."

"That was over the putative lover—never over the child itself. If there truly is no father, then you have no need to worry," he rejoins smoothly, rising to his feet with leonine grace and stalking toward her. He cups her face. "Tell me what's in your heart, Elena."

She squeezes her eyes shut. "I can't."

"Tell me."

"I'm afraid."

His fingers stroke over her jaw. Trail possessively down to the scars he'd left upon her throat. "There's no need for that. I could be good to you."

"You hurt me so much last fall."

"I thought I could shut you out of my life if I simply willed it strongly enough. I was a fool."

"I can't just forget that."

"I'll make you forget."

"I don't love you," she whispers, opening her eyes.

He brushes aside her tears. "You will, though."

"How can you know that?"

"Because we're inevitable, you and I. Fated." He sounds so certain.

"That's ridiculous."

"I'll prove it to you."

"How?"

"By loving you."

"Lots of people have loved me. That never stops them from leaving me."

"I came back, did I not?" he asks her, all seriousness.

She nods, lets him pull her close, into the sheltering embrace of his body wrapped around her own.

She doesn't know if that's enough for her.

He takes her back to his house, and she lets him. She lets him lead her upstairs, into his bedroom. Lets him sit her down on the edge of his bed. Lets him kneel down to take her shoes off. Peel off her ruined dress and running tights and lay her down into the soft and inviting warmth of his bed. Lets him treat her well.

And God, she's too tired, too emotionally wrung out, to say no when he kisses her. When his hands stroke over her sides, her breasts. She's dreamt about his kisses and his caresses for months now, longed with painful regret for the feeling of his mouth upon her skin, her throat, her sex. It's so easy, to turn off all of her many, many valid reasons to protest this and instead to part her thighs for him, to soak in the way he murmurs pet names against her flesh as he tastes her and tastes her, his mouth unspooling her until she is left with nothing but the terrifying crater of her yearning for him.

She cries out his name when she comes. Cries harder after, the tears streaming down her flushed face as all of her pent-up feelings for Klaus, so carefully contained and hidden away where she hardly had to ever look at them, come spilling out in unstoppable, full-body tremors.

Her lover takes no pity on her. Watches her tears fall with a sort of intense, mesmerized scrutiny, only to lick them from her chin, her throat, her collarbone. He bites her before she really understands what's happening, the sear of his teeth piercing her throat sudden and acute. It's an animal bite, a claiming bite.

She thrashes against him even as she drags him closer. Feels his hand at her knee just before he pushes her back, drives inside of her in one smooth stroke that feels like too much too soon despite her orgasm. Maybe that's just how it's going to be with him. Maybe it will always feel like too much. Maybe what's between them is like an exposed nerve, quivering in ecstatic agony every time they let themselves brush against it.

When Klaus pulls back from her throat to kiss her mouth, it's with the copper tang of her blood on his lips. She splays her fingers against his breast, feels his heart slamming wildly against his chest, and kisses him back.

After, she tells him again, "I don't love you."

Klaus traces a path from her navel to her hip with his finger, marking the way she shivers at his touch. Smiles at her knowingly. "Not yet."

A/N: I haven't checked this over… so… we die like men, I guess.

Thanks so much for the mountains of reviews, guys- Your love for this little fic is motivating me so hard to keep the updates rolling. I'm just... so floored by the response this is getting.