Title: live in my skin (the bruises are useless)
Fandom: tvd
Rating: mature
Length: ~2600 words
Author notes: canon au, title from holding a heart, some gore, minor character deaths, and a few lines from genesis

“I didn’t bury them at sea!”

Elijah hesitates, but only for a moment. “I don’t believe you.”

“Brother, please-”

His grip tightens, and he rips Niklaus’s heart out. He has seen thousands of lesser vampires die- it is a pity his brother dies like them. Tongue wagging with anything to keep him safe, and skin turning the same cracked gray.

Elijah begins collecting wood, like they once did together for Tatia’s pyre.

.

Elena wakes up, Jeremy and Bonnie and Tyler in her room. None of them look well, and she sits up quickly enough for a wave of vertigo to hit her, dark spots swimming before her.

“Thank god you’re back,” Jer says, pulling her into a quick hug.

“What’s going on?”

“When Klaus died it um-” Bonnie pauses, wiping her eyes.

“It killed everyone he’s ever sired. Caroline’s gone,” Tyler says flatly.

She takes a gasping breath, eyes watering. Care was gone- and Caroline was turned by Damon, who-

“Stefan?” she whispers, already knows the answer. He would have been here, waiting for her to come to life.

“I’m so sorry Elena,” Bonnie says.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she murmurs, blood pounding in her ears and face hot. It wasn’t- “How am I alive?”

Bonnie takes her hand, it must have been magic, and Jer says, “John. He traded his life for yours.”

Elena never wished to be a vampire before, but all she wants is to turn the pain off. It’s swelling up her throat, she can’t take it. Jenna, Caroline, John, Damon, even Katherine must be gone now. God, how many vampires did Klaus sire? And then those vampires and those vampires and…

And Stefan. Sweet Stefan who respected her choices even though-. It was supposed to be better this way. She wasn’t supposed to survive at everyone else’s expense.

The books have it all wrong: the doppelganger isn’t born to die, but to have death in her shadow.

.

Elena feels like a ghost, all hollowed out. A worse thought now that she’s heard all about the failed ghost uprising while she was dead- of Anna and Vicki, of Matt drowning.

Alaric left once she came back, and Elena couldn’t bring herself to make him stay. It seemed too cruel to doom anyone to this town, to this house.

There aren’t any more animal attacks. She doesn’t know if it’s because every vampire in town was from Klaus’s line, or if the survivors left or are being careful. She knows she’s supposed to care.

She doesn’t.

She is a dead girl walking- can only animate and imitate so much.

.

It helps that for the first time, Elena’s able to be alone.

Jeremy’s gone back to his stoner friends, and she can’t stop him. If it wasn’t for her, none of this would have happened. She’s single-handedly deprived him of any parental figure, can’t reclaim that mantle for herself. Jeremy seems the happiest of them anyways, high as the sky and creating abstract art. (It’s pretty, but she can’t stand to look at it. The deep maroons and dark palettes scream at her, look what you brought into his life.)

Bonnie and Tyler have grown closer together, and she won’t force her presence on them. Both of their best friends are dead, and they’re coping so much better than she is. She won’t drag them down.

She’s lonely, but it’s a good thing. No one she loves has been threatened or killed since.

(Elena doesn’t go to the cemetery anymore. There are too many graves to visit, too much guilt weighing her shoulders down. How did she ever believe she could win?)

.

Time passes, slow as molasses, Elena trudging through each day.

Yet when she checks her calendar, it’s already been a month since the sacrifice- and she still doesn’t know the full extent of it, of how many vampires died with Klaus that day. It feels like nothing has changed since the day after- still feels like the day after.

Every wound is fresh, and she can’t imagine feeling another way. She doomed them all, Pandora and Medusa rolled into one. Jer would laugh and say she’s being melodramatic, offering her a hit. He laughs easy these days, and she can’t ask him how much of it is real. (How could any of it be?)

.

Elijah is in her room, fingers tracing over her old life. She blinks a few times, but he’s really there.

“I thought it would be easier if I saw you again, to examine what my sacrifice was for.”

Elena swallows, stepping further into her room. “Is it?”

His lips quirk oddly as he takes her in. He is before her in a blink, and she goes still, wondering if this is her new ending.

Elijah leans in slowly, nearly brushes their mouths together as he smells her neck. Her pulse flutters wildly, involuntarily, and she wonders if it tempts him. It’d be a pretty mirror to their first meeting to die here. Death is so much prettier on the other side of it. (She’s been waiting for a return since before her first visit, since the car crash.)

“No.”

She opens her eyes at the light breeze, not sure when she shut them. Elijah is gone.

.

She remembers telling Jenna she wasn’t going to be a girl that fell apart because of a boy.

It’s so much more than that though. It is Jenna and Caroline and John and hundreds, (thousands?), of unknown vampires condemned. She even feels sorry for Katherine, for the girl who ran from a monster for half a millennium, only to die with him.

It’s Stefan. It always comes back to Stefan. Stefan saving her from the car, Stefan making her happy, Stefan was supposed to be deathless.

Heroes aren’t meant to die.

(Fuck a Greek tragedy.)

.

There’s a clearing in the woods that Elena’s been going to. If she stays in her room all day, Jeremy will notice he isn’t the only truant, and she isn’t about to go to school. Instead she lays on the shrubby grass, staring up at the sky through sunlit yellow-green leaves.

It’s beautiful and she imagines dying here.

But this death wouldn’t be like last time, perhaps a real animal attack. Parts of her body consumed, others tossed aside, and her blood staining the ground. It’d wash away with the next rain, bits of her decomposing slowly.

It’d be disgusting. Bugs inhabiting her corpse and-

“Fair Elena, might I have a word?”

Giggles burst past her lips, she’s missed vampires and their impeccable timing. The laughs won’t ease up, breath coming in gasps, perhaps she’s finally cracked. (Was it Despair that turned into Delirium in Jer’s comic books?)

She can’t breathe. Her stomach twists too tight, sitting up to be sick all over a nearby rock. Bile burns her throat, reminding her she hasn’t eaten today. She pukes again at the smell, crawling to the other side of the clearing. The movement tests her gut again, acid rising in her throat, but she swallows it down, wincing at the taste.

Elena sits with her head in her hands, vainly wishing for toothpaste. She’ll get up when her head stops pounding. Get home, clean herself up and crash.

She looks up, belatedly remembering Elijah. But he isn’t there- grossed out by her or perhaps she did crack, and he was never here. (She thought with vampires gone she’d be able to trust her mind again. Oh what a little fool she has been.)

.

She’s supposed to be living. Elena knows this.

But she can’t stop going through the motions, there’s nothing left to imbue them with. Every page she writes in her diary is identical to thirty others, every meal she consumes tastes like ash, every time she grieves there is no resolution.

Nothing feels real anymore, and she is a terrible sister that can’t even live for Jeremy. A terrible friend- she isolates herself and names it safety rather than cowardice.

(But she’s right isn’t she? The population of Mystic Falls has never been so steady.)

.

Elijah is in her room again, sitting at her windowsill.

“I am returning to Europe tonight. I would like you to accompany me.”

She blinks, taken aback and Elijah smiles.

“So you are still capable of surprise, good.”

Elena shakes her head, the words that her old self would mean coming easily, “I can’t leave everyone here.”

“Your brother has been fine without you.”

She wants to snap back at him, to say something about his brother- but Elijah must see the anger in her, the smile drops off his face. And that’s all it takes to remind her that he is one of the most dangerous creatures on Earth.

She wets her lips, knows already that he’ll be taking her. “I have a condition.”

“Of course you do. Let’s hear it then.”

It’s hard to swallow past the dryness in her throat, but she does and forces the words out. “If someone else discovers a human doppelganger is still alive- I can’t- I can’t stay human. You need to turn me.”

Elijah sighs, but beckons her closer. She sits next to him, their knees knocking. She pulls all of her hair to one side of her neck, she can do this again. (Her father died for her heartbeat, but she can’t stand the weight it carries.)

“The things I do for you,” Elijah says, the words hitting her like a cursed oath.

Elena tries to keep the relief off of her face. Doubtless he knows the only chance of ever bringing back Klaus is with her blood. She’s tempted to remind him that he wanted his brother dead first, probably long before she was born.

“Very well,” he says, biting open his wrist and offering it to her.

He holds her gaze as she takes his blood, warm liquid slipping down her throat. It doesn’t taste different from any other vampire’s blood, only in that she really tastes it- there’s no adrenaline or fear or pain to distract. There’s only a tingling in her chest, like pins and needles.

His wrist heals itself in her mouth, and she lets go, taking one of her last necessary breaths.

“Do it quick please,” she says, has no need to relive the torture that was a slow death by blood loss.

Elijah’s hands settle at the base of her throat, “Any last requests?”

The words pass her lips before she thinks them, “Kill me before you drink my blood.”

There’s an odd twitch in his cheeks, like he might be about to blush or deny it. And then everything goes dark and mercifully silent.

.

Elena wakes up on a plane. She recognizes it by the small windows to the clouds- the interior is nothing like any plane she’s seen. There are plush leather couches and a bar, and it feels far more like a lounge with wings.

Elijah hands her a glass of blood, “How are you?”

She drinks before answering, downing it in a single gulp.

Physically, she feels incredible. It’s as if she’s never been in tune with her body before. As if she’s been delaying the inevitable since the fate of her face was passed down to her.

Mentally, she tests it out, thinking of Jeremy. She loves him of course, but it feels muted. All of her attachments do, like they’re behind a solid glass wall. She knows they’re there, and she can feel them to some extent, they simply aren’t vivid.

As though she packed away her previous self.

“Great. Where are we going first?”

There’s a ring on her finger that she’s tempted to ask about. It’s a daylight ring, a gorgeous vintage thing that screams engagement, and she wonders if it was made for Katherine. It doesn’t really matter: the point, is that it fits her perfectly.

Elijah refills her glass, pouring a second for himself. “The fair city of Budapest.”

.

Elijah resents her. He loves her too, but it’s the resentment that keeps things interesting.

He kisses down her spine in Barcelona, the summer heat making every movement lazy. He kisses her sex, has her moaning easily, and she does appreciate his extensive experience with this body. She felt like a virgin the first time, fumbling to figure out what Elijah liked when he could already play upon her like an instrument.

“Tell me Elena,” he says, pulling his fingers out of her, making her pout into the pillow. “What kind of man is able to kill his brother in cold blood?”

She gasps- from his words or the sudden thrust into her- arching, and pushing back. “Elijah,” she groans, for it is far too humid to play such games today.

He fucks her slowly, damp fingertips barely stroking up and down her spine, setting all her nerves alight. “Shall we wander the world forevermore? There is no need for a mark, heaven is safe, none can murder me.”

She shoves backwards, rolling them over with a mess of limbs, and he permits the movement, Elena straddling his lap.

“You aren’t allowed to die,” she says, sinking back down on his cock.

Elijah nearly smirks, cupping her check. “Have you finally developed some self-preservation? A few years late Elena.”

She rolls her eyes and hips, gratified when he can’t quite keep a straight face. “You misunderstand, you are mine. And I don’t allow what’s mine to leave me.”

The not anymore doesn’t need to be said, and he must be feeling soft tonight, doesn’t snatch the words from the heated air. Instead his hands burn around her waist, beckoning her to go faster.

Elena smiles down at him indulgently, and slows her movements by half.

.

She had a list once.

She would repeat the names whenever the fear came, setting her shoulders. The tune she marched to death to. It was the only thing that made it bearable, the belief in their safety.

Only Jenna wasn’t supposed to be part of the sacrifice, Stefan wasn’t supposed to be offering himself. It all went wrong even before Klaus died, she should have taken the sign.

(It was supposed to be Katherine, Elijah confesses one night. And Elena catches the question that nearly sneaks past her tongue; of course he could watch a once lover die, he did kill his brother.)

.

Elijah finds the coffins.

It’s been hundreds of years, and he’s allowed himself to be consumed by Elena. If he’s being honest with himself, if he must, it’s why he turned her in the first place. (Or was it because he couldn’t stand to watch her die again? Or to age past all the other doppelgangers?)

He’s allowed himself to become his brother. Elijah stands before the coffins, hesitating to open them.

He’s spent centuries burying the guilt, pushing away any stray feelings. And Elena took all he had to offer and more, his queen of eternal damnation.

He is Klaus- only more monstrous. For he succeeded in killing a brother. And he didn’t even look for his siblings, not at first, not seriously.

It’s easy to rationalize keeping Finn asleep, for he has always hated what they are most. Kol, the bloodthirsty rapscallion, is easy to keep in a box too, for safety’s sake. The world’s population has already been decimated thrice over, needs to steadily rebuild itself now more than ever.

But Bekah, his sole sister- it is far harder to find a reason. Always and forever was easy to swear at the beginning of an eternity, when none of them had any idea of what was to come.

Elijah’s fingertips brush over her coffin, it all comes down to a simple question: does he really want to face it?

(What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil.)