Somewhere between trying to be a better man and snapping Jeremy Gilbert's neck, you lost your way. That much is obvious.

Less obvious is how you can come back from it.

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Among your worst traits are: anger, obsession, never shutting up, smartassery, clinginess, and the inability to hide what you're feeling. The last one was a favorite of your father's; he used to cane your hands until they bled, or until you stopped flinching, whichever came first.

The scars are probably still on your palms, if you studied closely. (You were never really able to stop flinching.)

So. Giuseppe Salvatore was a raging asshole and you were afraid of him, and then you were a shitty soldier who didn't care for the Confederate cause, and then you fell in love with a girl who ripped you open.

She didn't only do it with her teeth.

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We were having fun.

You and I have something. An understanding.

You're not the worst company in the world, Elena.

So I think you should stop it with the flirty little comments and the eye-thing that you do.

I'm trusting you. Don't make me regret it.

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It's always going to be Stefan.

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There's not enough bourbon for this.

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But Elena loving Stefan is still Elena, and Elena hating you is still Elena, and you are not going to leave, you can't leave, you are not going to turn off your humanity no matter how tempting it is. You have dug your own grave, more times than you can count. This time feels dangerously close to final, but that's exactly why it can't be.

You turn your considerable charms to climbing out of the grave. That's what your charms are best used for, if experience is any metric.

"Trying too hard," Alaric mutters under his breath, and you didn't ask him, so you wheel on him with your fangs half-ready to make an appearance.

"What did you say?"

"Nothing." But his gaze doesn't break.

You hate that he thinks he knows you. You hate the bittersweet relief that being known can bring.

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Time-out for five minutes, remember? Well, that five minutes is gonna need a beer.

You knock back a bourbon, and then refill the tumbler with O-negative. You need a lot more than a beer, of course. You need Elena, laughing. Her smile can be perilously close to Katherine's, but her laugh-lines are different.

Katherine simpered, but she rarely let herself truly laugh.

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It would be so much easier if you could pretend that you hadn't loved her. But here you are, a century and a half later (give or take, take, take), and everyone who's ever met you probably knows how much you loved Katherine Pierce.

How much you believed that that love would be enough.

(Faith and love are both blind. An accident? No—nothing ever is.)

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When Elena tells you that you've lost her forever, you know you deserve it.

Less obvious is how you keep going.

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Somewhere between begging her forgiveness and tearing out Mason Lockwood's heart, you screwed up again. But this is ancient history—a subject with which you are all too familiar. What you did to Caroline, what you did to Vicki…

You always think you've mastered some new form of misery and monstrosity. That to own, to terrify, to push to the brink is something that damns you forever, and in that way, saves you from the uncertainty that redemption suggests. Probably, it is. Remorse and acknowledgement float in the air around you, when you're alone, but you rarely take them and hold them close.

(You rarely hold anything close, unless to kill it.)

You compelled them. You didn't love them. That made it different, of course; made it uglier than what Katherine did to you. This you told yourself, this you promised your nightmares, all while you closed in on the goal of winning her back again. She'd be impressed, by how you had surpassed her in cruelty.

Nobody surpasses Katherine, though.

Katherine didn't have to compel you to love her. Katherine didn't have to love you to make you stay.

And she didn't love you. She didn't.

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Someday, you're going to stop choosing blood over what makes you flinch.

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You're hurting Elena! Everything you're doing to her is hurting Elena.

And isn't it always?

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Elena deserves better than a man who has lost his way.