"Stefan?"
It was the most beautiful name in the world. Stefan. Her Stefan. The echo of that name had once brought her so much comfort and safety and now, due to an evil twist of fate, saying it felt like shards of glass on her tongue. How many times had she uttered that name in vain these past months, hoping for a response, for a softly spoken 'Elena' to reach her ears? How many times had her fingers reached towards where Stefan should have been, grasping a hand that was no longer there?
She called the name again, just to be sure. "Stefan." Her eyes burned with tears, but they were ones she no longer wanted to shed. Tears would not bring him back. Nothing would – or that's what Damon had said.
"He's gone."
But he wasn't. He was standing there, staring at her from across the cafeteria. He heard her muttering under her breath, calling for him, and he saw her red-rimmed eyes and quivering lips but made no effort to offer her comfort. Instead, he smiled. He smiled like her pain would have amused him.
"Do you have any idea how pathetic that makes you?"
She shuddered, imagining Stefan repeat the sentence he had so indifferently thrown her way only a few days ago. She couldn't shake off the sound of those words, no matter how much she had struggled to. She heard them during daytime and in her sleep, spoken in Stefan's barely audible voice, one that had been far too gentle to speak such cold, harsh words. She remembered standing there, determined, Istillhavehope,and having that hope trashed and shattered into pieces. She no longer even knew what hope was. She didn't remember what it was like to feel alive again, to feel the wind on her face and the touch of rain on her cheeks. To her, there was no sunlight, no silvery glow of the moon, nothing. Her world was empty. The darkness she had once struggled with had returned, and Stefan wasn't there to save her.
Not this time.
Come back, Elena willed with her eyes. Please, come back. I need you. I miss you.
Stefan almost looked like he would have understood, with the way his eyes darkened, the way they narrowed as he stared back at her. She was hopeful for a fragment of a second, maybehewasn'tlost, but he never rid of his smirk. His face was a twisted, dark memory of what it had once been. Filled with so much confidence, so much predatory hunger and hardness, it wasn't the face she knew, the face of which contours she had once traced with her fingertips.
The silence around her was deafening. It was so lonely and absolute that nothing could penetrate it, nothing could erase it. The only thing that existed was the two of them, surrounded by silence even in a roomful of noisy people.
She waited.
Stefan tilted head in amusement, cocking an eyebrow, and his smile widened. It was a mocking smile, a lookhowpatheticyouare one that tore Elena's heart to pieces and caught the breath in her throat. It was as if a freezing, invisible hand would have been squeezing her heart into a small, painfully tight ball that was barely able to pump blood through her veins. It hurt. It hurt so much.
Then, even after seeing the tears that streamed down her face, Stefan turned around and walked away.
She counted the steps, watched the door slam close behind him.
He was gone.