A/N: Sparked by a fantastic request from dykaydubya on tumblr. Following Stefan after he drives away from Elena on the bridge and then some. A special thank you to Rida for your review that honest to goodness made me sit in front of my computer screen for a good 5 minutes dumbfounded, thank you thank you. You have no idea, thank you.
Enjoy!
He doesn't last very long, maybe a couple feet. The car swerves and he barely misses the edge of a forest bed, the belly of a tree before he presses on the breaks and comes to a stop.
He's already crying. Already, even before he bows his head and cups his face, so lonely and angry he was. So tired and thin he was. Needing to scream, needing to get it out; needing silence. To stay silent, just to forget everything he's ever wanted to tell her. Everything he has ever told her. He'll just forget.
He's crying, letting himself, for minutes. He's crying, privately into his hands, his back caved and his head forward, curling into himself in his car off a deserted high way no one would find him on, though no one, he knows. He knows. No one is going to look.
5 minutes pass and he's lifting his head. 5 minutes pass and he's already thinking of calling her. He's thinking of giving up and begging and pleading and pleading for her to take him back. Let him bury himself in her and everything she is and everything he's not because through this Klaus thing and this humanity thing, he just needs her.
When he was with Klaus and miles away, he used to dream. Not just of her but of their life and their future and she was with him, always. She was with him on every step, every thought, every time he closed his eyes. Even through the tortured thoughts of death, he thought of her and dreamed.
Stefan watches the sunrise come through the gaps of his arms covering his head as he rested on the steering wheel. It's blooming and full of color. Full of promise, full of new day and new memories. Letting old ones go.
Forget me, he begs silently. Please, please, please just forget me, he begs.
He wonders when he'll finally ask Klaus. When it'll finally be enough. When he'll know that he'll have to let her go and live and love people, a man that isn't him. Somebody she'll start a life with and a family with, the life she deserved and should've always had. She should've never had him, he knows. Never. He selfishly took her, wanted her, loved her; selfishly and wholly he loved her, wondering how it was possibly so, that she loved and wanted him just as much.
"Is that what you're doing? Trying to make me hate you?"
Stefan picks his head up, ignoring the way his cheeks hurt, his eyes; his face and starts the car. Starts to drive. Just starts.
He follows Jeremy for a good something miles into Denver, ignoring the welcome sign and keeping his eyes instead on the truck with the deep blue bed in front of him. The car is old but decent and he figures that it must've been Jeremy's fathers; Elena had never shown him and he had never seen either Jenna or Jeremy drive it before now. It suits Jeremy though, in a weird, rustic way. It suites him just fine, for his new life, away from Mystic Falls and anyone he's ever known.
There's apart of him that feels bitterly jealous but as he watches her brother unload boxes into a boxed, brown house, he's mostly sad. For Elena and for Jeremy, for everything they've had to go through. Everything they've lost.
His feelings are often smothering. Suffocating though hatred is the coldest. Hatred is the calmest. Hatred allows him to take another step without his head pounding, his heart against his chest. Hatred is calming and comfortable and he sits in it the most because he can breathe, he can breathe the hatred.
But he can feel the way he still loves her. He can feel it like a fist, like it covers him and that, beyond anything is possibly the most smothering feeling of them all.
Stefan turns up the radio, winds down the windows and drives; thinking of the music and the lighting of the sky and not about her face and the tears in her eyes.
Dear Elena, he thinks, would you love me even if you didn't know me? Would you love me even if the thought of it was impossibly slim and dire in your mind. Would you love me, Elena. Even, even if I asked and told you not to?
Stefan passes into Mystic Falls following the bend that would lead him to his mother.
Yes, he thinks and hears her voice.
Something in him begins to break.
Elena can't walk up the stairs and sleeps instead on the couch. Alaric doesn't ask and she's grateful that he gets it, like she knew he would, gets that she doesn't want to face the empty bedrooms; this shell of her house. She'll get up those stairs when she's ready to get up them and he knows that and she's grateful.
Her old cell phone still works and she's checking that all her contacts are still in there when Damon calls. He asks if she's okay again and waits to hear that she is before telling her that Stefan came back to the house but wasn't inside and even though she shouldn't care, she feels relieved for some reason.
"Where is he?" She hears herself faintly ask.
Damon takes a couple seconds to answer. Takes a couple breaths and she can hear it, how relieved he is too.
"He's here." Is all he says and she understands that lately, it's enough.
Stefan stands over the mound of earth that belongs to his mother and his mother only. It's a patch of grass, somehow greener than the rest with a tomb stone only a foot away. This place he'll come to, every once and awhile; when things are especially bad.
He thinks, as he reads the inscription of her name, over and over, of his plans without Klaus and without Elena, his brother. He tries to imagine his life without them all but it's like opening his eyes under water and trying to make out images too far away. He could leave, when Klaus dies. He keeps thinking of it, leaving. He could but knows, hates, that he won't. That he can't.
When his mother died, the future was impossibly distant. Impossible to make out and think to be real.
Stefan kicks at the ground a little, whispering her name under his breath before turning away, not looking back.
The future now was impossible to envision, to imagine but different with his mother; this time he knows it's fixable, this future. To see it and be able to.
His brother is defeated; he can see it in his footsteps, in the way he can't seem to keep his face together anymore, keep the façade up as strongly. He looks defeated and it's everywhere, his face and his neck, his feet and his legs. It's everywhere, his defeat.
"Didn't think you had it in you."
Damon stands from the couch; he's not going to cut his brother any slack, sick of this game they're playing. Sick of his brothers toxicity and need to be something that he isn't and couldn't ever be even as he looks at him and only sees the bearest of anything he's ever been; human.
Stefan tries to smile but it's pathetic and sloopy and he looks even worse than he did 5 seconds ago.
"It's good Elena has someone who does care about her."
That's all it takes, like Damon knew it would and Stefan's face slips into a hard, mechanical one and the grin gets fixed, his shoulders get fixed; his body tightens like he's been programmed to suddenly change just at the sound of her name.
"Yeah Damon, she's lucky she has you. She's lucky she has someone else other than Jeremy to be a brother for her. She's really lucky."
"We kissed. She kissed me, Stefan, you know that? Standing on that porch knowing where you were, knowing that she didn't have to keep looking and fighting to hold you because you told her to let go."
It comes quickly and Damon isn't fast enough, Stefan hitting him so hard, Damon can feel his jaw break. He's kicked in the stomach before he can catch his breath and his brother is gone before Damon can stop him.
Damon staggers, blood pooling in his mouth and tries to remember through a flood that is filling his mind, where his phone is.
He's defeated, he thinks as he dials her number. Finally.
He's just sitting on the edge of her bed and she knows.
He's just sitting on the edge of her bed and she knows, can see it shadowing across his face as he stares at the floor. He doesn't move even as she shuts her bedroom door, even as she lets them be together and alone in this.
It's been awhile since they've been in alone in here. She thinks of that as she holds her breath, watching and waiting for him to make the first move; looking like a man that had moved too much.
"Stefan." She whispers and it breaks her heart.
She thinks they begun in this room. That afternoon when they rolled around on her bed and she was surprised at how badly she wanted him and how much. How visceral the feeling had been, how she knew even then.
How she knew she loved him, even then.
"I miss this bedroom." He says quietly and it's over; she's ready to quit, ready to fall against the floor and let him take her heart, flee this place and this town and be with her brother.
She doesn't have the answers, not the way he'll want them or need them. Not the way she's been trying to figure out for herself. Not in a clear or simple way. Not in the right way or wrong way. Not in the way he'll need to hear them.
"I get it." He whispers, like she's told him and Elena looks at him, wondering if he really did, wondering how it could be possibly true when she didn't, not even for a second, get it herself.
"It's good. You should be with him Elena, Damon. You should be with my brother."
She wants to shake him or at least shake herself but she can't move. He isn't saying these things, sitting there, he isn't she tells herself. Repeats in her head but his eyes are sad and his heart is breaking and he's telling her that it's okay to be with his brother when it isn't because she's in love with Stefan, she is.
"Fall in love with him." He says softly and she takes a step forward, feels the air in her lungs and the anger in her body, how mad she is at him.
"He'll make you happy, Elena."
Stefan feels so tired, he's sure he'll tip; he feels so tired, he's sure he'll collapse. He feels so tired, he's sure he'll have to lay here and be with her and never move, he's sure.
Forget me, he begs silently, staring at her with clear eyes and finding her pink cheeks and her brown hair and the way her eyebrows were knotted in the way they always did whenever she was about to cry.
"You made me happy." She whispers and he's bowing his head, letting it crush him. He's not ready and she's not ready but her fingers are suddenly there, cradling his neck and her face is against his hair and it's been so long, he's missed her. Wanted and craved and needed nothing but her. It's been so long.
But he's thinking, as she kisses him against his forehead and the sides of his head, of her face in his car as he stuffed his arm against her mouth. He's thinking of her fear and her desperation, how terrified she had been. How terrified he had made her. And it's drowning and blinding and it's all he can see, her face.
"Come back to me." She whispers and he can't.
"Do you love him?" He's asking her, fingering the material of her shirt and the skin of her belly, remembering; remembering how he kissed and held and touched her, loved her. Remembering it all.
Elena kisses against his head once more before she stops, rests, just stands there with her head pressed to his and she doesn't think he realizes that he's holding her but he is, just so, he is holding her and it's the way it's always been.
"I love you." She tells him and feels it, like a punch, her guilt.
Stefan disengages, slowly and carefully, like he's folding away a note and stands from her bed, stands to her with his back and holds the doorknob in his hand even though he doesn't think he has the strength to leave.
She's crying but can't bring her hand up to wipe at her face.
"Stefan." She says weakly because she can't tell him even though he needs it, even though he knows and it's too much, coming back here and being with her when so much he was fighting not to, to push and push and push. It was all too much.
"It's okay, Elena. It's okay." He says and she gets it but hates it and doesn't agree because it isn't okay, to love them both because she's in love with him, she is.
"I love you." She says again even though her voice is breaking and she's breaking and he's breathing out and opening the door, agreeing completely, not saying a word; letting this fight go, for now, she knows. Letting her go, for now.
This time, she watches him leave. This time, she watches.
A/N: I don't even know, honestly. I have no idea how that conversation would end and I'm so worried they won't do it properly in the episode because it is so important. I don't even know what 'properly' is but just, gah. Sorry to leave it so empty.