The night before Prom, she kills three people.
She rips out their throats and engorges herself. Devours their flesh, devours them whole, licking herself clean when she's finished. He watches her as she walks through the door at three in the morning, dirty and unkempt. Her hair though, appears to be clean and perfectly neat and he wonders when she had mastered that art of getting everything but your hair wet when you went swimming in someone's death.
"Lovely feed." She comments without acknowledging him and her voice is clipped; she's angry with him for something, perhaps for being her audience, perhaps for being there at all.
He comes down from the staircase and leans against the nearest wall, taking his eye off of hers because he's tired and can't find the courage he knows he would need if he were to look at her when he asks her this.
"What did you do with the bodies?" He hopes she buried them or at least hid them out of plain view but she isn't old enough, isn't experienced enough to understand nor to learn that it was what needed to be done.
Just doesn't care enough to be so immaculate in the aftermath.
The aftermath was something he would revel in. He tore people, literally limb from limb and remained until he had put those limbs back together, a jigsaw puzzle that consumed his mind, his brain. The pain, the guilt, the screams, the fight. When people would put up a fight.
She used to be the only thing that could get him to forget.
Now he looks at her and hates that it's all he can remember. Hates that when he breathes in, he can smell it against her, smothered to her skin; the stench of someone else's death: soiled and unfiltered.
She tilts her face to the side and it's only then, the lamp on the nearest table illuminating her features, that he can make out the fine traces of faint blood still on her cheeks. Elena smiles and then sighs; swallowing loudly, she licks her lips, finally staring at him through the shadows of a night she finds herself blissfully detached from.
He sees it in her eyes, how she thinks he takes her in. But she's wrong because he's never judged her and couldn't when he himself had shown her that there was a way to get up and sit on the throne of broken bodies if only you turned it off and tried.
"Did I do this to you?" He whispers, forgetting, for a second, that she could hear him. Forgetting for a second that she was even there. Forgetting entirely. He feels his chest burn with the familiar swell of grief, of memories; of a time he can't grasp and can't remember how to remember.
That time when they used to love and freely. Would hold and never part. Think it insane to even gently nudge the idea of perhaps one day running out of things to feel about one another.
Elena begins to walk, walks right by him and towards the room in this house she has claimed as her own even though lately, he's found her wandering and fiddling about in the direction of his.
She's detached but present, she's herself but she's also desperately not.
He wishes he had the script to this re-enactment.
"Did I do this to you?"
"Elena." He hears himself begging though he's at a loss for what. But she stops and turns, stays very still, looking for his eyes and the need to curl himself around her in some attempt to draw her back to the light is a suddenly a rush to his head, his body her contact. His body a reminder.
"I dumped them in the river, no one will ever find them, even if they were to look."
She moves again and he's left reeling in the words she left for him, the words he knows are answers to questions he's been asking for many months now.
He'll look for her even when the moons faded and the stars are ignited, until there is no surface on the earth left untouched. He'll search for her in the shelves of his memory and through the words of his diary and through watching her and through their interactions of numbness and cold severity.
"That depends," He begins to whisper to her, knowing she would hear him however much she would deny that she couldn't, whenever she was in this house, "How deep is the river?"
On the morning of Prom, unseasonal rain pours down relentlessly. He wakes with it thundering and smattering his windowpanes and rolls out of bed only to open the doors of his balcony and become enfolded in the storm. He's drenched in seconds, his hair, his sweatpants; his entire body completely saturated.
"You're as wet as a dog." She yells.
He doesn't turn to meet her and waits instead for her to make the next move even though lately, allowing her that has proved to be nothing but fatal.
In his dream last night, she was carting his body around like she had been carrying nothing but a few pounds and lifeless memories.
Stefan cups both hands around his face and shakes off some of the rains residue, pointlessly because the second he drops his hands, the rain remarks his face; it's why when he finally turns to look at her as she drapes herself across the railing, for a second he's blinded by the vision.
In his dream, he had been the stranger and she the only person he recognized.
"Don't you love the smell of rain?" She asks.
She's wearing nothing but a thin dress he's never seen before and she's now holding her arms straight, gripping to the railing in order to tip the rest of herself back; laughing she looks up at the sky and if he didn't know any better, he would've thought this image would be of someone he recognized, of a women he cradled the nights with.
Pulling herself back to stand there plainly, her hair is now sticking to her cheeks and to the sides of her face, "Stefan?"
He's reaching forward before he's thinking of touching her and touching her before he's telling himself not to.
He loves her. He loves her senselessly.
For a second that is immeasurably too short, she lets him leave his hands there at her cheeks and allows her face to drop to something of an emotion; of need, of vulnerability. But sharply, like the snap of a twig, she's changed and has pulled back her features and her body, pulling back her own hair and cleaning her teeth just to spite him, he thinks.
"Join me for a morning feed, won't you?" She asks before looking away, into an unclear horizon.
She shrugs when he doesn't answer and swings her body back into his bedroom and almost like he's stuck in a daze, he watches, rooted to the spot, his skin, his heart, his spine crimpled to the point of cracking, all soaked through.
"See you at Prom." She sings and he catches the promise in her voice like the wind streaking through the trees; suddenly and all at once, the leaves scattering.
"I know you," He voices to the rain because lately, his journal has felt too static for the thoughts in his mind, "I know you." He repeats, like he believed repetition would be enough.
He stands out in the rain for the rest of the morning, challenging himself to wait it out, to bear through, to buoy himself down and get used to the idea of drowning.
She gets ready for prom in a half assed, very lazy type of way. If Caroline were around, Elena would've gotten her ass severely kicked on preparation attitude alone. Her dress is picked last minute, her hair takes her 10 minutes and her make up is something she bothers with for no less than a few seconds.
It had taken her longer to strip down out of the clothes she had fed and killed three lone campers in. To shower and wash the blood off her elbows and knees and clean her teeth. She was getting sloppier in her feeds, less direct and more instinctual; more animalistic. Crouching on her hands and feet from the shadows of a tree or a bush and sensing when people were alone and vulnerable. She could look at a human being and no longer visualize their heart beating but count quietly to herself how long that heart would take to stop.
The blood, always delicious and never enough, clogged her throat and the infusion from the feed, enflamed her. Made her stronger against an opposing weakness that was beginning to clamour restlessly inside of her. One she couldn't place nor settle without tearing someone's throat out. Twisting a couple necks. She doesn't know how many people she's now killed but thinks it seems pointless to start a list.
She wouldn't know half of their names anyway.
Elena walks down the staircase, the house as empty as it had been when she had entered it no less than two hours ago. She waits in the hall, gritting her teeth; she hadn't expected this to be so easy. They were supposed to be flogged by her side, her body armour that felt tightening to the point of claustrophobia.
But she's entirely alone.
She's going to prom to prove a point. To make one. To see how far she could push to get the two of them off her back but right at this moment, here in silence, with only her mind as company, she wanted nothing more than to be naked and beneath sheets; the desire comes from a place she doesn't understand. Can't quite recall, from a place inside of her that feels too distant to locate.
A place that Stefan lately, seems to be more and more sure of finding and Elena less and less definite that he could. A place, Elena was determined, he never would.
Not going felt like a defeat and defeat was never something she was comfortable with; Elena shakes her hair out, fixes a smile on her lips and walks out the door, alone and unguarded, and into the night.
It fills his eyes, the expression on her face. She looked nervous, even apprehensive but it's been troublesome to him lately, pretending that what he sees is what is truly there.
Beside him, Damon, a faux chaperone for the night, downs his punch in one go.
"Fashionably late, just as I predicted."
Elena walks through the double doors of the gym, lined with decorations and balloons and enters the Prom emporia. Taking a scan of the room, she spots the two of them, her expression lifting, defining itself as something he knows is mechanical and a ploy to manipulate them with, and starts to make a beeline.
Stefan snorts, forcing himself to turn away from her and picks up a glass of punch himself, "Want a medal?"
"Don't tell me, somebody spiked the punch already?"
She's at his back and like a wailing tree, dry from a relentless sun, he's exhausted just by the proximity of her; he can smell her perfume and also something else he can't quite put his finger on but both are intoxicating; he's grateful for the distraction of the punch bowl.
"Hope you weren't disappointed by having no one to escort your royal highness to her ball."
Elena grins slyly, ignoring Damon's jibe and props one hand on her hip just as Stefan turns back around and offers her a glass.
She takes a drink and raises both eyebrows in question, tasting the vodka; Damon sticks a hand up, waving all five fingers, "Guilty."
Before she has a chance to say anything in return, Caroline is suddenly on the speaker, echoing all around them. Elena heads towards the stage and like they've tag teamed, which they really haven't, Damon and Stefan exchange a look and Stefan shadows her.
Caroline welcomes the crowd and runs down a quick list of rules Stefan guesses weren't Mystic Falls High approved but Caroline Forbes pre-determined; the idea of that makes him laugh quietly to himself and Elena catches it out of the corner of her eye and gives him a look he interprets as reluctant bemusement.
Louder music begins to play just as Caroline finishes and before he can question what he's doing or really how he was doing it, Stefan manages to grab Elena's fingers and spins her out before bringing her close to his chest.
She's breathless against him, caught off guard and he hides his smirk by ducking his chin over her shoulder.
"You know, I honestly wouldn't mind if you and Caroline wanted to get together. I know how much you like her."
He wants to roll his eyes but doesn't and instead chooses to play along with her, knowing she was partly doing this to cover herself and partly doing it to get a reaction out of him.
"Nah, you know I don't have feelings for her. But please, continue to play match maker if it makes it easier for you to hide the fact that it's getting under your skin."
As he presses her closer, he's able to smell more undoubtedly what he hadn't been able to place on her before: blood. The blood of another person she might've spared though he knows, her understanding of restraint worse than his, that she probably hadn't.
He distracts her and himself by spinning her out again but she comes back to him with an elated grin on her face that tells him she sensed the change in his demeanour as quickly as it had come.
"Speaking of things getting under our skin. Campers out north, my morning feed turned into an afternoon snack. You should've been there but then again, maybe not. It's hard enough to dump a body with a head, can't imagine dumping it in pieces."
He's so overwhelmed; he bumps into somebody behind him. It's a girl he recognizes from his Lit class and her date. He drops himself from Elena and apologizes to Emily, clamouring together what warmth he can bring to his face as he smiles at her. Emily, if she does sense something, doesn't show it and gently waves his apologies off as she and her partner swing back into the rhythm of the song. Stefan turns back, knowing, even though Elena's disappearance is somewhat of a startled hit to the head, that she would be gone.
He doesn't bother looking around for her, nor does he bother looking for anyone else; he finds the double doors and leaves through them, his knees weakening with every step.
If nothing else, he needed some air. Some space. Some recollection.
Though he smells the blood with every step and blinks through the shards of her hunger, the images of her hunting, maliciously killing, coming to him in perfect little pieces.
Caroline finds him leaning against his motorcycle in the car park.
He looks, how she, if were being honest, feels. Exhausted: mentally, physically, emotionally, just spent. She wonders if it was the reason he hadn't left, too tired to move. Too unsure as to how he could possibly get his body to do the work.
"James Dean, you planning on gracing us with your presence again anytime soon?"
He manages a smile and nods up to the sky, "Full moon." He notes and turns his head around to meet her; Tyler's absence is across her cheeks and in her eyes and Stefan feels a sharp sting of guilt tunnel through him even though the reminder hadn't been his intention.
Caroline slowly makes her way around the bike and sits against the curb, repositioning her dress before patting at the ground beside her.
"You know for a moment I almost thought he would turn up. Talk about a cliché." She snorts as Stefan sits down, bumping her softly with his shoulder.
A comfortable silence falls between them, the two of them staring up at the sky; he finds as he sits there, the warmth that he had so struggled to find earlier, coming easily; Caroline's presence was growing more and more to be a cure for him, as always, Lexi's had been.
"Do you ever think about leaving? To maybe search for him, what that would mean if you tried?" He voices softly and feels Caroline's eyes turn from the sky to his. She hesitates and he finds his answer in her silence. Without saying anything further, he moves a hand out from his pocket and takes her own.
"I'm sorry Caroline."
"Yeah," She starts, her throat closing and her eyes filling with tears, "I'm sorry too."
It would mean abandoning the life before her; beginning a life of endless looking and endless searching, following an invisible trail Tyler might've inadvertently left for her to one day follow.
Though knowing as she did so, that she might never find him.
Stefan holds Caroline's hand and tries not to think about all the trails he'd leave behind him and all the trails he'd also follow.
Caroline, with a lot of arm-twisting, convinces him to come back inside and they're inseparable for a good portion of the night, dancing and making each other laugh. He almost manages to forget entirely about Elena.
They're on their third drink of punch and fourth dance when he's tapped on the shoulder and Caroline, dropping away and letting Elena take her place, leaves to go find Bonnie.
"It's my turn." Is all she says, her voice soft and as if it's instinctual, he brings an arm around her back and pulls her hands close, finding a newfound strength in the hold. They begin to move, slowly, the song has changed again and this time when he breathes in, he smells her and nothing else.
"Okay, I admit it." She says and he flicks his eyes from her lips back to her gaze, she's looking at him softly, differently than before and for a second that seems to last and last, he believes her. This.
"What do you admit?"
She's close, too close, her forehead to her nose, their faces ghosting and in this meet, he's lost his reserve, his façade, he can't pretend anymore. That she hasn't hurt him, that he doesn't want her. That he would stay, over and over and over again, here before her if she asked.
He can't do this anymore and yet, she's holding his hands and against his chest and he can't think of how to stop. Of how to leave her.
"I was jealous. Of you and Caroline. When you laugh together. When you dance together. When you talk together. I'm jealous of all of it."
Elena feels weightless, empty, her hands would be shaking if he weren't holding them. In the feeds and in the blood, the trouble of Stefan's unwillingness to let her be, was behind her and easy to displace. The more she fed, the more she forgot. The less her humanity encroached The less he encroached. But he was crumbling her down, quicker than she could climb her way back up.
"You make it…you make hard it to fight." She suddenly whispers and takes back her hands and steps away from him.
He feels like he's tumbling over a cliff, looking through still images of her smiles and her faces and that girl he fell completely in love with. He starts to move to follow her but she's disappeared in seconds.
"Go." Caroline presses, suddenly at his side and he only takes a second before he's moving, looking for Elena, following a trail that has been and will always be left for him to trace.
He finds her in the place he would've never expected her to be and yet the place she had been lately, so often.
Her hands tiptoe across his dresser and he watches her from the silhouette of his doorway; she hadn't bothered to turn on any lights, moving these days, much better in the dark and he understands this compounding need to be hidden, how unchained and unguarded you could be.
She finds the photograph he has kept in this room for almost a year and a half now, his favorite photograph and takes it in both hands, staring at it. He wants to ask her what she sees but the silence felt reassuring, stilling almost because he's sure that when they start to talk, the walls just might break down and she'll leave him again all over.
He's missed her. Terribly so. It's barely been a month and already he has had enough, he wants her back. She was without him for practically half a year and he pushes up against the truth of that. How she had waited, effortlessly patient, hoping he would return and come back to her.
"What do you see?" He asks, not able to keep the silence any longer and expects her to flinch though she doesn't, almost as if she had known he would be there. Had known he would follow her. Had known he would chase her and catch up with her. Had known to slow down in order to allow it.
"Who is this?" She asks in reply, holding the picture and turning towards him, pointing at herself in the frame. In it, she's beaming and holding him tightly. She's bright and happy and content. She's motherless and fatherless but has her brother. And him. Friends, a life. Without vampires or curses or continuous grief.
He can't speak, his limbs ach and his throat aches and he aches for her and with her. He's so sorry, that it's not enough. It's not enough to speak and give her words that aren't complete answers. Your brother is dead, you have nothing left. I have nothing to give you, though I would give you everything if I could.
Leave with me, he suddenly wants to say to her. Leave with me. We'll leave a trail of this life together.
Stefan steps closer towards her, rationalizes with himself that touching her would do more harm than good but it's been months since he's held her and he doesn't want to do anything else but hold her.
In a way she doesn't control, she grips to him. To his neck, to his shirt. She grips all while he has his arms encased around her. They have knifed at one another with words, with threats. She has betrayed him, used his hope against him but now, in the shadows of a night. In a somewhat treaty, they were alone and holding one another as if for dear life.
He knows this won't last. He'll get her back in sharp, short clumps. Maybe tomorrow, she'll kill three more people. She'll sleep with another man, ignore him, hate him, push him away.
But tonight, she was here and holding him.
And he was prepared, ready to give up whatever life to follow the trails endlessly.
A/N: Oh man, I'm so frustrated by the conclusion of this. I wanted to get so much across and I don't know if I achieved any of it. It's very, very hard to write Elena at the moment and I think I took the lazy way out with this by not really appropriately addressing her grief/guilt? But, I guess that could be for another time, in another fic. I hope you enjoyed it though, as fragmented as it was. And happy episode day/night!