Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, nor am I profiting from this.
Notes: Written for Part 3 of the Vampire Diaries Comment Ficathon on LJ, for the following prompt: Damon/Elena, I'm only here to witness the remains of loving you.Title from "The Engine Driver" by the Decemberists.
After Elena leaves for college, Damon starts writing again. Not journals or novels, this time; letters, and only when he's drunk. Letters are sacred texts that he hasn't written since he was alive, since he was human. These particular scriptures say you're not the worst company in the world and I love you and sometimes I do things I don't have to do. He throws them into the fire along with his bourbon. He'll burn the words like incense on an altar, just another offering to the god of cowardice.
Love, like religion, always ends with an apocalypse.
/
After Elena leaves for college, she starts writing again. She goes to a normal school and chooses a normal major but minors in creative writing because it's what she wanted to do once, back before her life became too fantastic to believe. She likes her classes, gets good grades and tries not to think about how all her compositions involve codependent brothers or destructive women. Mostly it's fine—I'm fine—except for the aftershocks, the tremors of memory. She freezes whenever she sees the drape of a leather jacket over strong shoulders, and once at a party she comes dangerously close to going home with a dark-haired boy who has a smile like a clenched fist. She goes back to her dorm instead, stares at her bookshelf, at the Ellis Bell copy of Wuthering Heights that Stefan gave her and Damon's first edition of Brideshead Revisited that she borrowed and never gave back. She wonders if she's like Julia.
She wonders what happens to the stories that never get told.