A/N: TVD (and Delena) is my guilty pleasure. It has been for years. I caved and wrote fic.
When they learn that it was Klaus who first wrote the histories into being, who scratched out hieroglyphs and Roman figures by turns, to Damon, there is surprise only in the turning of a page.
Damon, at least, has long since known that they write their own stories.
(Gods and demons always do.)
.
When you've fought in half a dozen wars, why not spend a few detached from any bastion of bravery? Why not spend a month or two letting the rest of the world be bloodletters, for once?
Perhaps he spends it in silence, in the wilderness, or perhaps he has wandered a war or two through the cold sarcophagus of a museum, drinking rich dark coffee that is never as bitter as blood.
.
Damon has lived too long. It puts everything in perspective; the next tattered vein, the next conquest. He doesn't deserve anything anymore, so he might as well get what he wants.
.
Mystic Falls is like a well. Narrow as the barrel of a gun; endlessly deep. The smallness, even, of his brother's charades is striking: Stefan, who has half-a-dozen advanced degrees, who has lived in thirty countries—now demoted to high school student, orchestrating football politics instead of guiding a senator's hand.
(Damon, for his part, has never enjoyed the taste of politicians. Oil in the blood, maybe. Fatty livers; hollow eyes, even before they are dead. Where is the permanence of that?)
Narrow, deep, but not too small for him. It would be easier if it were. But if his chest can entomb a thing as heavy as his own heart, then surely this town can hold past and future and destiny, too.
.
The tomb is empty. And not as the Christian gospels have it; no, this is not the emptiness of freedom.
He deserves nothing. He has nothing. He claws out of his own shuttered soul, and tears apart the world as he finds it.
And the girl with Katherine's lips but never, never her eyes—she pities him.
.
He'll never be as wicked as Katherine. It's not for lack of trying.
And there's the rub. Damon, unlike Stefan, has to try.
Always, it has been so. At smudged lessons on slates; at riding and shooting and a gentleman's civilized pursuit of death. Giuseppe Salvatore raised his sons to be hunters.
(In the end, he was a blind old man, never quite pathetic enough to cease being the ogre of Damon's childhood—but blind enough that he could not see wolves, even when they sat at his table and drank of his rosy wines.)
.
He loves Elena for all the right reasons, and all the wrong hopes.
He loves her because of the hitch in her laugh, how confusion shows itself in the furrow between her wing-like brows, because of how she has all of Katherine's fascination but none of her guile.
Elena, and her friends and her patchwork family and her search for higher standards.
Elena, and her relentless willingness to die.
And what it is that bites back against her—fear, or knowledge, some bittersweet taste that only the endless gray of immortality can bring—he loves her like a suicide, and tells himself that death does not mean the same for god or for demon, as it would for her.
.
Stefan, in this allegory, is the god.
Stefan, you see, has never suffered as a monster; he suffers as a martyr. When he falls, there is a tragedy to it. A loss not only of his own soul, but for the world.
(When demons writhe or waste away, who grieves?)
(Katherine was supposed to understand that, but Katherine had done with suffering.)
.
He's never been good in times of crisis. Except—except when he is, and he stops her from being stupid, walks her through the endless spiral of Stefan's labyrinth of guilt, fraying threads, monster at the center of it all.
Damon manages to win her trust, to walk her through, and then he loves too much or breathes too little, is too alive or too dead, and he blows it all to pieces because he only sees her.
.
(And he always means it, too. Only she matters. He'd let them all die.)
(Damn Stefan. At least Damon is honest.)
.
This is what Elena and Katherine have in common: they always keep his love in their peripheral vision.
This is where they diverge, clean and painful as a break in bone:
Katherine clawed through every rib to find herself a monster, and left him empty.
Elena wanders into that same emptiness the same way she wanders into the shadows of their every day, and puts it all together again.
(Whether he wants it or not.)
Elena is neither god nor monster, but somehow, his story is hers to tell.