fic: A shot in the dark, aimed right at my throat -- 1/4
Title: A shot in the dark, aimed right at my throat
Characters/pairings: Klaus/Alaric
Rating: NC 17 for violence
Warnings: violence, graphic violence, torture
Disclaimer: I don't own nothing. Anything you might recognize belongs to someone else. Title and chapter-names from Florence and the Machine's Shake it out.
Beta: pleasebekidding
Summary: Kind of an alternate ending to 3.21: The gang manages to lock Klaus and Alaric away. Neither of them is amused.
Notes: Yes, I ship them.
Thanks go to pleasebekidding for the beta and being the wonderful, supportive Starbuck that she is. I love you for putting up with me! *hugs*
It's probably Elijah who comes up with the plan.
Or, maybe, Katherine. Payback of some sorts. Poetic justice.
They are all there, the Salvatores, the doppelganger, the mini-vamp, Klaus’s lap dog. Even little Jeremy Gilbert.
Elijah, standing a little further off, watching the scene without moving a muscle.
The witch, arrogant as ever. Already chanting in the background, power rolling off her in waves, the very air around her vibrating with it. Voices on the wind, some mournful, some delighted, joining her incantation.
Alaric and Klaus are the only ones inside the Bennet house, lying on the floor of the hall. Trussed up with chains like Christmas presents. Drugged beyond their eyeballs with vervain. And possibly wolfsbane in Klaus’s case. Alaric’s thoughts should be racing, trying to find a way to get free, but his mind is just as immobile as his body.
They got the drop on him via witch-aneurism, putting him down long enough to put so much vervain into his system he can taste it in his mouth. It takes him too long to figure out what they are up to. By the time he realizes they are sealing the two of them into the Bennet house with the power of a hundred furious, dead witches and a spell that would have made Esther proud, the magic is already in place.
Damon is the only one talking to him. When everyone has left, he is still standing in the open door, looking down at Alaric.
“I should have snapped your neck before this happened,” he says. There’s genuine regret in his eyes, a rare sight for him. “I’m sorry.”
Alaric wishes he had the necessary muscle control to sneer. The pathetic son of a bitch thinks Alaric actually gives a shit about him. The thought alone makes him feel sick. He’d love to rub the arrogant face in the fact that they have never been friends. That he would never have tolerated a bloodsucker at his side if he had been in his right mind-in his current mind.
But he can’t speak and he can’t move and then Damon is gone.
It takes both of them the whole night to come out of their vervain-induced stupor and start freeing themselves from the bonds. Klaus gets free first and immediately tries to leave-and throws an impressive temper tantrum when he finds out that he can’t. Including yelling empty threats at the top of his lungs and smashing worm-eaten furniture into the wall.
Alaric watches him, amused. Dislocates his shoulder to be able to finally wriggle out of the chains and puts it back in with a satisfying crunch.
And then it’s on.
There’s no trigger, Alaric doesn’t say something stupid, Klaus doesn’t provoke him with a look. But there is a fight. Or, fights, plural.
Actually, it’s more like a war.
They rip into each other with everything they have. Fangs, claws, fists. They throw each other through walls, landing blows powerful enough to sever limbs from bodies. They break bones, sink fangs into each other’s throats to tear them out. Use every advantage they have over the other.
It goes on for hours- for days and they never stop. Klaus turns into a wolf at some point and lays into Alaric so fiercely that he dies, twice, from the blood poisoning, leaving him weak and sick and hurting for an evening. Alaric manages to tear Klaus’s head off only to discover that it will, indeed, grow back within a few hours.
At first, it hurts. Every blow reverberates through their bodies, wringing cries and moans and groans from their throats-but those sounds die down eventually. They turn into grunts and huffs. The occasional growl when they have enough air for it. Or still the necessary organs left to form them.
It’s all about getting the first hit. Whoever has the element of surprise and pain on his side, generally wins the match. And that’s all it becomes after some time, a match. A test to see who is stronger, who can do the most damage in the shortest time.
They get creative. And increasingly bloody. They never give up, no matter how deep the wounds are, no matter how much bone you can see through the gaps. No matter how often Klaus breaks Alaric’s spine or snaps his neck. No matter how often Alaric buries his fist in Klaus’s torso, closing his hand around the hybrid’s heart to make it stop beating for a night.
The floor is wet and shiny with the blood they spill. They slip in it, they roll in it, until they are covered in it from head to toe. They fight like animals with no reason, with no victory to achieve, because there is nothing to win in the end. Just a brief respite for however long it takes the other to heal.
The fact that they are not getting anywhere with the fighting sinks in, slowly. They reach a truce. Kind of. They stay away from each other, as far as they can. Klaus disappears upstairs, declaring the upper rooms his property.
Alaric ‘moves’ into the basement where he is protected against the sunlight during the day. He drags as much broken furniture into the room as he can and starts working on stakes with a shard of glass. They are useless against Klaus, of course, but it gives him something to do. Most of all the opportunity to indulge in violent fantasies of torturing the motherfucker until all Klaus can do is scream and beg for mercy.
The first floor becomes a safe zone. Sort of.
And then they wait.
“You know, they’re not coming for you,” Alaric says one day, his voice deliberately flat. He knows Klaus can hear him, there’s no need for him to raise it. “They got you where they wanted you all the time. Away from Elena and locked away so you can’t hurt anybody else.”
Upstairs, Klaus stops whatever he’s doing and goes silent.
“Of course, if you had a family that actually cared for you, you might have a chance to get out of here-“
It’s the first time Alaric dies in the basement. The fight leading to his death is sluggish in comparison to the others before, and it ends with Klaus tearing his heart out and stomping on it, gushing blood everywhere. It’s the last thing Alaric sees before it goes dark.
Fucking drama queen.
They calm down somewhat after this. Sit down, heal. Consider the situation, try to come up with a plan to get them out. Alaric figures that Klaus is relying on his hybrids to break him out somehow, on the infamous sire-bond. Maybe he’s waiting for Tyler to show up. He won’t, Alaric is very sure of that. The gang will be chaining Tyler up in the boarding house dungeon if he only so much as thinks Klaus’s name.
It’s a surreal situation; it feels like a dream but it’s painfully real at the same time.
Alaric hates it. He can’t help but thinks about all the time he could spend outside, getting rid of the rest of the vile creatures. He thinks about how he could do something to protect the people in town from the Salvatores and their ensemble of supernatural monsters. It’s a moot point to lament the time lost while wasting away in this hole, but he will get out, somehow. And when he does, there will be hell to pay.
Nothing happens. Nobody comes for them.
They start to talk at some point. Because they simply don't have anything else to do.
Well, talk might be a bit exaggerated. It starts with Klaus taunting him with all the ways he's fucked up his life. Making up details, Alaric is sure, to make him angry.
"It sucks to realize that your precious Damon choses Elena over your sorry ass, doesn't it? That he'd rather lock you away than look for a way to save you. I know there are ways, witches can cure pretty much anything. Just when you thought you'd found a friend."
It's a pitiful attempt to hurt him, but Alaric merely smiles. Damon is not nor has ever been his friend. Damon is a mindless animal that had used him to cover his tracks and have a drinking buddy in his free time. At the end of the day he would always have killed Alaric to save the doppelganger, no matter what.
"Your wife couldn't wait to sell your body to me, she begged me to choose you as my meat-suit. She must have really hated you."
It doesn't hurt, not one bit. Isobel was a monster, even before she left him to become a bigger one. Someone who has been longing to become a creature like that just can't be normal, doesn't deserve his sympathy. He was a fool to mourn her. But at least one good thing came out of it: He became the proud hunter he is now, so he has to thank her in a way.
But Klaus isn't the only one who has a way with words.
"At least my father didn't want to kill me at every opportunity he got, he didn’t hate my guts. He respected me. He loved me, even. Wouldn’t you like to know what that feels like?"
When Alaric wakes up hours later he takes a certain amount of pride in the fact that it was him who got the first reaction out of the other. He also knows now that it hurts a lot to feel someone's hand close around your intestines and have them ripped out. But the hurt flashing through the blue eyes has been worth every feeble twitch.
The next time it’s Jenna.
“She was your girl, wasn’t she? I still remember how she was begging me to let her go, she was so scared to die…”
It hurts, this time. It really hurts. Jenna was innocent, he’d loved her. She didn’t deserve what the bastard did to her. It hurts so much Alaric goes into a blind frenzy and comes to with his hands stuck in Klaus’s torso and the monster groaning hoarsely around the fist closed around its heart. Alaric rips it out, throws it aside and kicks the writhing body until it stills.
They are both Originals, so it takes them a lot longer to feel the effects of blood loss.
There comes the day when Alaric finds it getting increasingly harder to concentrate-and the ache in his bones starts bothering him. His teeth ache so badly he keeps his mouth shut, doesn’t talk back when Klaus tries to taunt him about something from upstairs.
One day the smell of dirty dog permeates Alaric’s senses and the sound of silent paws descending the stairs drags him out of his daydreaming. He tracks the sound to the living-room, where it stops and Klaus remains motionless, doesn’t even breathe anymore. Then there is a shriek and the sound of small bones snapping-and the smell of blood. Animal blood. Massive jaws closing over tiny bones, crushing them.
Then there is silence again.
The hunger gets worse every night. Alaric has no idea how long they are in the house, but he’s beginning to realize that he won’t be able to keep on his feet and conscious for much longer. It’s eating him alive, searing through his veins, hurting bad enough to make him moan. Klaus answers each of his sounds with a dark chuckle, as if he doesn’t suffer from just about the very same thing.
“Hungry, love? Too bad you never learned to hunt like the rest of us.”
Alaric ignores the taunts until he can’t ignore the agony any longer. One moment he is twisting on the floor, straining against the pain tearing his stomach in half, fangs extended and panting in the darkness-
-and then he wakes up on the bottom of the stairs, his limbs twisted unnaturally from what he assumes must have been a bad fall. And the taste of blood in his mouth.
Not his blood.
The hunger isn't gone… but it’s bearable. He feels better, stronger. As if he has eaten.
Klaus is nowhere to be seen, but he hears a slightly accelerated heartbeat upstairs and a low growl as he starts moving, twisting arms and legs back into their natural position.
Alaric laughs, like it’s the funniest thing he has ever heard. A deep, rich laugh that echoes off the walls and sounds strange, even to his own ears.
“I fed on you.”
Klaus remains silent.
“What’s the matter, couldn’t fight me off, big guy?”
Klaus is fast, he has to give him that. Alaric is still dusting his torn clothes off, when he is suddenly grabbed and crashed into a wall, hard enough to send plaster and dust exploding to both sides. Yellow wolf eyes glare at him, hybrid fangs gleaming in a face twisted into a vicious snarl that doesn’t look human anymore.
“If you want to live to see another day, I suggest you keep away from me.”
Klaus’s voice is barely a growl, the sound so intense it reverberates through both their bodies, sending a shiver down Alaric’s spine.
“Give me your best try,” he hisses back, never breaking eye-contact, as pissed and stubborn as the hybrid. “Whatever you can do to me will not hold me back.”
It turns out Klaus is really inventive when he wants to be, the days that follow are a mix of pain and wounds that never close, showing him a new kind of agony he has never felt before. There is a difference between them, between him and the hybrid: Alaric might be as strong as Klaus and as fast as him, but the man is still a thousand years older and more experienced. Especially in the art of torture. And it shows.
Not that it stops Alaric from grinning weakly at his tormenter when he finally has control over his facial muscles again.
“Was that all?”
It isn't the end of it, not for another too long and painful day.
It is true, then. What Alaric has picked up about the original father, about Mikael. It is possible to drink vampire blood as a vampire, to find sustenance in it. Maybe it was Esther’s doing, maybe it was part of the spell, he doesn’t know. It does, however, provide him with a way to keep him going. And with the sick satisfaction that comes from the knowledge that it will be him who laughs longest when he eventually drains Klaus of his last blood.
~~~~*~~~~
next
Characters/pairings: Klaus/Alaric
Rating: NC 17 for violence
Warnings: violence, graphic violence, torture
Disclaimer: I don't own nothing. Anything you might recognize belongs to someone else. Title and chapter-names from Florence and the Machine's Shake it out.
Beta: pleasebekidding
Summary: Kind of an alternate ending to 3.21: The gang manages to lock Klaus and Alaric away. Neither of them is amused.
Notes: Yes, I ship them.
Thanks go to pleasebekidding for the beta and being the wonderful, supportive Starbuck that she is. I love you for putting up with me! *hugs*
It's probably Elijah who comes up with the plan.
Or, maybe, Katherine. Payback of some sorts. Poetic justice.
They are all there, the Salvatores, the doppelganger, the mini-vamp, Klaus’s lap dog. Even little Jeremy Gilbert.
Elijah, standing a little further off, watching the scene without moving a muscle.
The witch, arrogant as ever. Already chanting in the background, power rolling off her in waves, the very air around her vibrating with it. Voices on the wind, some mournful, some delighted, joining her incantation.
Alaric and Klaus are the only ones inside the Bennet house, lying on the floor of the hall. Trussed up with chains like Christmas presents. Drugged beyond their eyeballs with vervain. And possibly wolfsbane in Klaus’s case. Alaric’s thoughts should be racing, trying to find a way to get free, but his mind is just as immobile as his body.
They got the drop on him via witch-aneurism, putting him down long enough to put so much vervain into his system he can taste it in his mouth. It takes him too long to figure out what they are up to. By the time he realizes they are sealing the two of them into the Bennet house with the power of a hundred furious, dead witches and a spell that would have made Esther proud, the magic is already in place.
Damon is the only one talking to him. When everyone has left, he is still standing in the open door, looking down at Alaric.
“I should have snapped your neck before this happened,” he says. There’s genuine regret in his eyes, a rare sight for him. “I’m sorry.”
Alaric wishes he had the necessary muscle control to sneer. The pathetic son of a bitch thinks Alaric actually gives a shit about him. The thought alone makes him feel sick. He’d love to rub the arrogant face in the fact that they have never been friends. That he would never have tolerated a bloodsucker at his side if he had been in his right mind-in his current mind.
But he can’t speak and he can’t move and then Damon is gone.
It takes both of them the whole night to come out of their vervain-induced stupor and start freeing themselves from the bonds. Klaus gets free first and immediately tries to leave-and throws an impressive temper tantrum when he finds out that he can’t. Including yelling empty threats at the top of his lungs and smashing worm-eaten furniture into the wall.
Alaric watches him, amused. Dislocates his shoulder to be able to finally wriggle out of the chains and puts it back in with a satisfying crunch.
And then it’s on.
There’s no trigger, Alaric doesn’t say something stupid, Klaus doesn’t provoke him with a look. But there is a fight. Or, fights, plural.
Actually, it’s more like a war.
They rip into each other with everything they have. Fangs, claws, fists. They throw each other through walls, landing blows powerful enough to sever limbs from bodies. They break bones, sink fangs into each other’s throats to tear them out. Use every advantage they have over the other.
It goes on for hours- for days and they never stop. Klaus turns into a wolf at some point and lays into Alaric so fiercely that he dies, twice, from the blood poisoning, leaving him weak and sick and hurting for an evening. Alaric manages to tear Klaus’s head off only to discover that it will, indeed, grow back within a few hours.
At first, it hurts. Every blow reverberates through their bodies, wringing cries and moans and groans from their throats-but those sounds die down eventually. They turn into grunts and huffs. The occasional growl when they have enough air for it. Or still the necessary organs left to form them.
It’s all about getting the first hit. Whoever has the element of surprise and pain on his side, generally wins the match. And that’s all it becomes after some time, a match. A test to see who is stronger, who can do the most damage in the shortest time.
They get creative. And increasingly bloody. They never give up, no matter how deep the wounds are, no matter how much bone you can see through the gaps. No matter how often Klaus breaks Alaric’s spine or snaps his neck. No matter how often Alaric buries his fist in Klaus’s torso, closing his hand around the hybrid’s heart to make it stop beating for a night.
The floor is wet and shiny with the blood they spill. They slip in it, they roll in it, until they are covered in it from head to toe. They fight like animals with no reason, with no victory to achieve, because there is nothing to win in the end. Just a brief respite for however long it takes the other to heal.
The fact that they are not getting anywhere with the fighting sinks in, slowly. They reach a truce. Kind of. They stay away from each other, as far as they can. Klaus disappears upstairs, declaring the upper rooms his property.
Alaric ‘moves’ into the basement where he is protected against the sunlight during the day. He drags as much broken furniture into the room as he can and starts working on stakes with a shard of glass. They are useless against Klaus, of course, but it gives him something to do. Most of all the opportunity to indulge in violent fantasies of torturing the motherfucker until all Klaus can do is scream and beg for mercy.
The first floor becomes a safe zone. Sort of.
And then they wait.
“You know, they’re not coming for you,” Alaric says one day, his voice deliberately flat. He knows Klaus can hear him, there’s no need for him to raise it. “They got you where they wanted you all the time. Away from Elena and locked away so you can’t hurt anybody else.”
Upstairs, Klaus stops whatever he’s doing and goes silent.
“Of course, if you had a family that actually cared for you, you might have a chance to get out of here-“
It’s the first time Alaric dies in the basement. The fight leading to his death is sluggish in comparison to the others before, and it ends with Klaus tearing his heart out and stomping on it, gushing blood everywhere. It’s the last thing Alaric sees before it goes dark.
Fucking drama queen.
They calm down somewhat after this. Sit down, heal. Consider the situation, try to come up with a plan to get them out. Alaric figures that Klaus is relying on his hybrids to break him out somehow, on the infamous sire-bond. Maybe he’s waiting for Tyler to show up. He won’t, Alaric is very sure of that. The gang will be chaining Tyler up in the boarding house dungeon if he only so much as thinks Klaus’s name.
It’s a surreal situation; it feels like a dream but it’s painfully real at the same time.
Alaric hates it. He can’t help but thinks about all the time he could spend outside, getting rid of the rest of the vile creatures. He thinks about how he could do something to protect the people in town from the Salvatores and their ensemble of supernatural monsters. It’s a moot point to lament the time lost while wasting away in this hole, but he will get out, somehow. And when he does, there will be hell to pay.
Nothing happens. Nobody comes for them.
They start to talk at some point. Because they simply don't have anything else to do.
Well, talk might be a bit exaggerated. It starts with Klaus taunting him with all the ways he's fucked up his life. Making up details, Alaric is sure, to make him angry.
"It sucks to realize that your precious Damon choses Elena over your sorry ass, doesn't it? That he'd rather lock you away than look for a way to save you. I know there are ways, witches can cure pretty much anything. Just when you thought you'd found a friend."
It's a pitiful attempt to hurt him, but Alaric merely smiles. Damon is not nor has ever been his friend. Damon is a mindless animal that had used him to cover his tracks and have a drinking buddy in his free time. At the end of the day he would always have killed Alaric to save the doppelganger, no matter what.
"Your wife couldn't wait to sell your body to me, she begged me to choose you as my meat-suit. She must have really hated you."
It doesn't hurt, not one bit. Isobel was a monster, even before she left him to become a bigger one. Someone who has been longing to become a creature like that just can't be normal, doesn't deserve his sympathy. He was a fool to mourn her. But at least one good thing came out of it: He became the proud hunter he is now, so he has to thank her in a way.
But Klaus isn't the only one who has a way with words.
"At least my father didn't want to kill me at every opportunity he got, he didn’t hate my guts. He respected me. He loved me, even. Wouldn’t you like to know what that feels like?"
When Alaric wakes up hours later he takes a certain amount of pride in the fact that it was him who got the first reaction out of the other. He also knows now that it hurts a lot to feel someone's hand close around your intestines and have them ripped out. But the hurt flashing through the blue eyes has been worth every feeble twitch.
The next time it’s Jenna.
“She was your girl, wasn’t she? I still remember how she was begging me to let her go, she was so scared to die…”
It hurts, this time. It really hurts. Jenna was innocent, he’d loved her. She didn’t deserve what the bastard did to her. It hurts so much Alaric goes into a blind frenzy and comes to with his hands stuck in Klaus’s torso and the monster groaning hoarsely around the fist closed around its heart. Alaric rips it out, throws it aside and kicks the writhing body until it stills.
They are both Originals, so it takes them a lot longer to feel the effects of blood loss.
There comes the day when Alaric finds it getting increasingly harder to concentrate-and the ache in his bones starts bothering him. His teeth ache so badly he keeps his mouth shut, doesn’t talk back when Klaus tries to taunt him about something from upstairs.
One day the smell of dirty dog permeates Alaric’s senses and the sound of silent paws descending the stairs drags him out of his daydreaming. He tracks the sound to the living-room, where it stops and Klaus remains motionless, doesn’t even breathe anymore. Then there is a shriek and the sound of small bones snapping-and the smell of blood. Animal blood. Massive jaws closing over tiny bones, crushing them.
Then there is silence again.
The hunger gets worse every night. Alaric has no idea how long they are in the house, but he’s beginning to realize that he won’t be able to keep on his feet and conscious for much longer. It’s eating him alive, searing through his veins, hurting bad enough to make him moan. Klaus answers each of his sounds with a dark chuckle, as if he doesn’t suffer from just about the very same thing.
“Hungry, love? Too bad you never learned to hunt like the rest of us.”
Alaric ignores the taunts until he can’t ignore the agony any longer. One moment he is twisting on the floor, straining against the pain tearing his stomach in half, fangs extended and panting in the darkness-
-and then he wakes up on the bottom of the stairs, his limbs twisted unnaturally from what he assumes must have been a bad fall. And the taste of blood in his mouth.
Not his blood.
The hunger isn't gone… but it’s bearable. He feels better, stronger. As if he has eaten.
Klaus is nowhere to be seen, but he hears a slightly accelerated heartbeat upstairs and a low growl as he starts moving, twisting arms and legs back into their natural position.
Alaric laughs, like it’s the funniest thing he has ever heard. A deep, rich laugh that echoes off the walls and sounds strange, even to his own ears.
“I fed on you.”
Klaus remains silent.
“What’s the matter, couldn’t fight me off, big guy?”
Klaus is fast, he has to give him that. Alaric is still dusting his torn clothes off, when he is suddenly grabbed and crashed into a wall, hard enough to send plaster and dust exploding to both sides. Yellow wolf eyes glare at him, hybrid fangs gleaming in a face twisted into a vicious snarl that doesn’t look human anymore.
“If you want to live to see another day, I suggest you keep away from me.”
Klaus’s voice is barely a growl, the sound so intense it reverberates through both their bodies, sending a shiver down Alaric’s spine.
“Give me your best try,” he hisses back, never breaking eye-contact, as pissed and stubborn as the hybrid. “Whatever you can do to me will not hold me back.”
It turns out Klaus is really inventive when he wants to be, the days that follow are a mix of pain and wounds that never close, showing him a new kind of agony he has never felt before. There is a difference between them, between him and the hybrid: Alaric might be as strong as Klaus and as fast as him, but the man is still a thousand years older and more experienced. Especially in the art of torture. And it shows.
Not that it stops Alaric from grinning weakly at his tormenter when he finally has control over his facial muscles again.
“Was that all?”
It isn't the end of it, not for another too long and painful day.
It is true, then. What Alaric has picked up about the original father, about Mikael. It is possible to drink vampire blood as a vampire, to find sustenance in it. Maybe it was Esther’s doing, maybe it was part of the spell, he doesn’t know. It does, however, provide him with a way to keep him going. And with the sick satisfaction that comes from the knowledge that it will be him who laughs longest when he eventually drains Klaus of his last blood.
~~~~*~~~~
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