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livlepretre · 4 years

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He finds her when she’s 25, not 16. // elena + elena/klaus, whatever you prefer (:

That’s the entire problem. A sixteen year old he could have seduced and sacrificed with all of the cold calculating contempt he had felt for Katerina all of those centuries ago. A sixteen year old would have been just another echo wearing Tatia Petrova’s face. A ghost in the machine, haunting him, demanding that he exorcise it lest that error in reality keep rippling through time.

A twenty-five year old though. A twenty-five year old is an entirely different beast.

A twenty-five year old can’t so easily be swept aside as a mere duplicate. No, when he meets Elena Gilbert, at a lecture at the Whitney one close May evening when the air itself feels heavy with repressed need, her face is entirely new to him. So familiar it steals his breath the moment he first glimpses her across the auditorium, primly jotting down notes in a little black journal she keeps nestled in her lap, yet new all the same. He’d been looking forward to this lecture, had been mulling over a few questions he would like to ask the artist at the end, but all of that flies out of his head the moment he recognizes her. He doesn’t hear a word the lecturer says after that. Every nerve in his body attunes itself to her instead. To this girl who had somehow transformed a stolen face into something unique and her own.

After, he follows her away from the reception, to one of the open gallery spaces where she stands off on her own, gazing at up at a series of cyanographs. She’s so artlessly lovely, her plastic cup of untouched red wine clasped against her shoulder as she contemplates the work.

It’s not terribly hard to engineer a meeting with her. To catch her name, somehow more beautiful and lilting than it has any right to be when pronounced in her faint Tidewater accent. He says something flip about the lecture-- he doesn’t remember what, too distracted by the unlikely reality of her-- and she laughs, the sound deeper than he expects, not the girlish giggle he remembers at all-- and challenges his assessment.

For the next few minutes, in addition to her laugh and her accent and her name, she needles him with her sharp tongue and bright eyes, her dry wit and secretive smile and her surprisingly forceful opinions on the topic of performativity.

(“Everything’s a performance, when you get right down to it.”

“Hardly.”

“Well, perhaps if you’re either tragically overconfident in yourself or remarkably incapable of introspection, then no. But everyone else is performing every minute of the day.”

“Even when they’re alone?”

“Oh, especially.”

“You mean to say everyone is a liar.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”)

The hard part is getting any more from her.

“Come have a drink with me,” he tempts her, as the crowd begins to thin out onto the streets. “I know a place just a couple of blocks over.”

“I really wish I could, but I have a paper due in--” She glances at her wrist-watch-- “about ten hours.”

He catches hold of her hand, squeezing the fingers as he stares deep into her eyes. “Have a drink with me,” he compels her.

She bites her lip as she gazes up at him. He can hear the way her pulse quickens and her blood stirs as she takes him in. Desire ripples through her scent. He has her now.

Except, maybe not, because she shakes her head. “Really, I can’t. Maybe I’ll see you around?” She hurries away without so much as a second glance back.

Not a hint that she had been aware of his attempt to compel her, either. Perhaps this Elena Gilbert is a master liar herself.

He wonders if she drinks vervain, or if she’d had it cleverly stashed somewhere on her person. Wonders what kind of girl she must be to have learned that trick at all.

It’s not terribly hard to follow her onto the underground, careful to remain out of her sight as he stalks her through several line changes over to Queens, and then down several city blocks to a walk-up apartment on the third floor.

There’s a nice girl who lives in the building across from hers one floor up, who’s naive enough to lean past the threshold when he knocks on her door, so he can yank her out from the relative safety of her home and do away with her without too much fuss. Her apartment becomes the perfect place from which to watch this Elena Gilbert, whom he learns has a habit of working in front of her bare bedroom window.

He learns a lot of things about her, those first couple of weeks. He learns that she truly is a student, working on her MFA from Queens College. Performative drawing, he hears her explain again and again as he shadows her all over the city, to coffee shops and galleries and libraries and bars, meeting friends for an espresso or classmates for a pint and a smoke after an opening, calling her mother back home in a quaint little town called Mystic Falls.

He tells himself he’s following her so that he can discover more about her. Tells himself he’s just keeping tabs on her while his agents seek out Katerina and the moonstone in whatever dark corner of the world she must have hidden it.

He makes the mistake of letting himself into her studio one night, after she’d spent the better part of the night and early hours of the morning toiling away in there. Immediately, the scent of her body-- sweat mostly, with just the faintest coppery edge of blood-- immerses him. He sucks deep lungfuls of the perfumed air into his lungs, greedy. Then he sees the drawings. Stacks and stacks of them, tacked onto the wall, littering the floor, the desk. Imagines the arc of her body as she had made these, the emotion and the intent behind the gestures. Sitting on the desk is a camera. When he picks it up, it’s still warm. He presses play, and there is Elena Gilbert, gliding across the tiny screen, her body and her breath somehow the brush, the color, and the art all at once.

Weeks more pass before he realizes the gravity of his error-- before he realizes that in slipping into her studio to see her artwork, he had allowed her to slip into him, until he could no longer bear to imagine a world without her in it.

That to see her art would be to fall in love with her.

He has the moonstone in his breast pocket the next time he sees her. There’s a full moon just four nights away. He has a werewolf and a vampire and a witch. He could abscond with Elena now, and make it down to Virginia with her in plenty of time.

It’s why he’d come to this show, orchestrated by one of Elena’s classmates, where he’d known he would find her, drinking whiskey in the back of the gallery with a couple of disaffected sculptors.

In a moment, she’ll wander right past him, and he can grab her without too much fuss.

Except, she glances up, and she recognizes him. Blinds him with her smile and bounds over to him. “You again! What are you doing here?”

And all at once, he’s at a loss for words, because he realizes he doesn’t really want to kill this fascinating, spirited girl. At least, not yet.

“Playing a role, it would seem,” he replies.

She steps back, then, openly appraising him. “And what role is that, then?”

“How about we catch that drink, and we can find out.”

#anonymous #5 sentence fics #klena #klaulena #don't worry I'm still working on the prompts #and have I mentioned yet that I SCREAMED when this prompt came in

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