The darkest evening of the year…
.
"I think it's for the best if you avoid the Boarding House for a few days," Stefan tells her. He has that kissable furrow between his perfect brows, and Elena knows she should listen. Knows that Damon was on edge before his hopes were dashed, and that he's far, far past the edge now.
Elena nods. She means to do her best.
She means to.
.
"You're getting all quiet again."
"I'm tired, Damon." That was what it had to be; she couldn't be comfortable, couldn't be drifting off to sleep in his presence.
"Ah." He cleared his throat, an uncertain sound from a (usually) very certain man. "Well, if you want, I can blast some heavy metal. Help you drift off."
She heard the kindness beneath the snark. "It's fine. We've got five hours to go anyway." Elena tipped her head towards him. Somewhere between the parking lot and her tears and his broken bones, the motel and waking up in the same room as him, she'd come to like him better. Better than anyone who'd done what he'd done should be liked.
(I saved your life.
I know.
And don't you forget it.)
"Got any Christmas plans?" Damon asked, fingers restlessly thrumming the wheel. He was always moving, and it made Elena feel like the world was standing still.
She remembered, belatedly, what he'd asked.
The thought of Christmas, since May, always hit her like an anvil—like something cruel and relentless and almost ridiculous to everyone else.
"No," she said. "Nothing." Honesty and Damon was a combination that was strangely hard to shake, but Elena decided she had little left to lose. "Whatever Jeremy or Jenna wants to do is…fine, I guess. I can't—"
A little muscle in Damon's jaw twitched. "Well," he said smoothly. "Take it from me, Christmas is overrated. Except for carolers. Love me some carolers. Hot meal without having to order in, you know?"
He was teasing her, and she knew it, and he might be confessing to a dozen murders or more, but Elena was grateful. "There's so few delivery places in Mystic Falls," she returned, deadpan, and his smile reached his eyes.
.
She makes it to Christmas Eve. And then Stefan isn't answering his phone and Elena keeps thinking about the way Damon hadn't moved in her arms, after the tomb. Still and silent, the wild hope erased.
Jenna is trying to make a fruitcake, which nobody will eat. Jeremy is in his room with his headphones in. Elena zips up her coat and tells herself that she's done her best, and now she'll do better.
After all, Stefan only offered his opinion.
.
"Was there ever a time you weren't…being…"
"Being me?"
She twirled a strand of hair around her thumb, letting the ends feather out. She needed a trim. She'd been—preoccupied, of late. "Being the big bad wolf."
"I promise the bite doesn't have to hurt," Damon fired back. "Unless you want it to."
But she wasn't afraid of his lasciviousness—thanks, SAT, for words like that—when it was so out in the open. Damon was all layers, and some of them were nothing but show. "I just want to know what it was like to have a Victorian Christmas," Elena said. You know, something far away from here.
All of the Gilbert ornaments would still be the same. Carefully wrapped in tissue paper, nothing broken, even though half the family was gone.
"Ah. Victoria. There's an old broad." Damon switched lanes. "The Gilded Age had its niceties, I guess. If you like champagne towers and candles on trees. Fire hazard, you know, but beauty is dangerous." He said it lightly. Elena didn't ask.
"I liked all the rosy cheeks in wintertime," he added. "You'd be cold too, if all you ever wore was lace and gossamer." He looked at her like he was imagining it.
"Shut up," Elena said, "If you're not going to be serious."
"Fine. Killjoy." Normally, she thought, he'd tack on some dig at Stefan, or how Stefan had made her boring, but he'd been pretty quiet on that front since the phone-call in Georgia. Damon, for all his encroachment of personal boundaries, knew something about giving space. "Ice-skating was better, then," he said. "People—human people, that is—weren't so used to getting around quickly, and that made it all the rage. 1881 wasn't a bad year. New England spruces, bowed down with snow…Robert Frost moved to Massachusetts a few years later, you know. Maybe that was the snowy woods that changed the world."
He was poetic, when he wanted to be. Elena didn't know what to do with that.
.
She raps three times on the door of the boarding house. She thinks if she had their super-hearing, she would hear those knocks echo through the house like a heartbeat.
It's such a huge, cavernous, lonely place. Stefan is probably right. She shouldn't have come here.
The door swings open.
Apparently vampires sweat, because Damon smells like alcohol and Jeremy's ratty t-shirts. He course-corrects a leer into a brief blank stare of confusion, and then to nothing at all.
"You." He shakes his head. "I was expecting…"
Elena remembers that she looks like Katherine, and flushes. It's sympathy, not shame, but Damon wouldn't know that.
"There's those rosy cheeks." He bites his lip. Carefully, the leer returns. "I'm actually waiting on an order of sorority girls, pre-compelled, so if you don't mind…"
"Actually," Elena says, "I was wondering if you would take a walk. With me."
It is, perhaps, the stupidest thing she's ever done. Or at least it's up there—hopefully there will be no cataclysmic consequences, no bloodshed. But she feels stupid, and he looks lonely, and she keeps thinking about how her parents are in the ground because she might as well have put them there.
The only thing left, this season, is giving.
Damon's face stays almost expressionless, but his eyebrows lift slightly. "Is this your gift to Stefan? Good Samaritan-like plots?"
A week ago, when he fed her his blood, she hated him. Now, she doesn't think he'd hurt her.
"It might snow," she says. "Get your coat?"
He shrugs, and steps outside the door, bare-armed. "I'm dead, remember? Can't feel a damn thing."
She'll take the minor rebellion. Stefan is nowhere to be seen, which is for the best—Elena feels a little guilty at the appearance of that turn of phrase, and then pushes the feeling away. "This isn't pity," she says aloud. "Just so you know."
He blows out his breath, which fogs the air, just like hers does. "Isn't it, Elena?"
He always says her name like it belongs to him. He is good at that, at the card-trick swiftness of confidence, like he knows where he is and what he has.
Damon, she thinks mutely, has nothing.
Wrong. He has Stefan, and—you. Not in general, but right now. As his friend.
They walk away from the Boarding House. Elena wants to ask if he's alright, but she knows he isn't. Giving, remember? It might be Miranda Gilbert's voice.
"They haven't even been dead a year." Elena burrows her hands deep into her pockets. "We're still getting through all the firsts."
"And I'm all seconds, or hundredths," Damon answers dryly. Yet he pauses, halfway down the lane, and faces her. His arms and face are pale against a gray sky. "Hurts, doesn't it? All the eyes on you, wondering how you're doing?"
She ignores the barb. "I miss them," she says. Her eyes are burning, and she knows he can probably taste the salt of her tears, standing as close (as far) as he is. "I want to break down and be a complete mess, like Jeremy. Or I want to take care of everyone, like Jenna. Or—"
"Ever considered that you might be both?" Damon asks softly, taking a step nearer. "The savior and the perfect mess?"
Elena swallows. A gulp, really. Something heavy and desperate, pushed down.
"Takes one to know one," he murmurs.
"Which one?"
"Oh," and he turns away, nonchalance again, no goosebumps on his smooth skin. "The perfect mess, Elena. Surely you know that."
.
Damon told her about when Macy's was built, and how the Rockefeller tree was better in the thirties. Elena found herself talking about how she'd kept the Santa-secret from Jeremy until he was almost eleven, and she was pretty sure he was still mad at her about it.
They were five hours from Mystic Falls and then they weren't.
She was unwilling to admit that she was comfortable, and then she wasn't.
Damon, after all, wasn't the worst company in the world either.
.
The wind picks up, whistling in Elena's ears. She keeps wishing that she was better at this, that she was more than a girl with a liar's face and dead parents and a boyfriend who will live forever. She keeps wishing that Damon was more than a monster, and keeps believing that he is.
A car careens up the driveway. The windows are down, even in the cold, and Elena hears tinny laughter. Oh, she thinks, with a sick lurch of her stomach. The sorority girls.
Sure enough, Damon gives her a pinched smile. (It doesn't meet his eyes.) "That's my cue," he says. "Alright, bright-and-shiny Gilbert. You've done your duty."
Elena thinks she's going to say, you look wrecked, and I'm worried, but she can't bring herself to give that today. Maybe that's because it would feel more like taking something away. "Thank you for the walk," she says. "I…"
He looks like he wants to kiss her, but he always looks like that. Elena tells herself that the ubiquity of it makes the sensation neutral, unalarming.
"Merry Christmas, Elena," Damon says, somewhere between sardonic and mournful, and turns back towards the house.