A/N: One of those ones I wasn't really expecting but loved the heck out of the idea so much that I had to write it. Usually when I write, I try to find music that I think goes with the mood or the theme of the story and while I don't write to it (although sometimes I do) it's a link to the story for me, it's the soundtrack that's playing in the background. So I thought I'd share what the soundtrack was for this fic: City of Glass - Alexandre Desplat (this one plays almost on repeat), All The Wild Horses – Ray LaMontagne.
Pre warning of heavy, heavy angst.
For a long time she felt as though, if she'd count for long enough, it'd mean he'd come back. The days and the weeks, the months; the moments when she breathes in and can't feel her heartbeat anymore. But the months and the days go past and soon it's a year and then two and she's no longer dreaming of the ways in which he'll come back to her but of all the ways in which she'll survive without him.
Matt proposes one afternoon in June. They started going out again because they weren't kids anymore and Elena was lonely and Matt was lonely and it just seemed to feel…right. So they started dating and it gets way more serious than Elena ever thought she would let it but she loves Matt and he's crazy about her. He takes care of her and makes her laugh. But he isn't Stefan and though she was never really with him as someone who could be, he ends up filling that empty space where Stefan should've been and where Damon could've been.
He had left not long after his brother, in search for him. Leaving a note that told Elena if she ever tried to find them, he'd drag her ass back so fast she wouldn't have even reached the front door to leave. He doesn't ever call but sends, almost 6 months later, a note that says he found Stefan and that Klaus was dead.
Two and half years later, Elena's stopped wondering if either of them will come back.
So she says yes. They have a big wedding, Matt's mom comes and a couple of Elena's distant relatives come and the whole town practically comes because they've grown up loving both of them and secretly hoped they'd wind up back together someday (or some who are brave enough tell her).
Elena, staring out at the crowd with tears in her eyes, feels for the first time, what it's like to be a stranger amongst a sea of people you knew and who knew you. But Matt squeezes her hand and she looks back at him, the warm smile on his face making the ache in her stomach somehow disappear and she thinks, she truly thinks, she'll be okay now even if it feels impossible to be.
"I love you, Elena." He whispers to her that night when they're lying across the bed in the house he had built for them (he'd become a carpenter once he'd finish school and it wasn't just something he loved but also something he was exceedingly good at).
Elena rolls over, meeting him in the middle and doesn't imagine the way Stefan had told her that for the very first time but instead brings her hand to the side of Matt's face, "I love you too, Mattie, so much."
They make love for the first time as a married couple with open windows, a fresh beginning and a baby that had been slowly growing inside her tummy way before he'd bent down on one knee.
Damon calls Bonnie one night, weeks before Elena's due date and she gets why out of everyone, it's her he's contacting after all this time so she doesn't question it or give him grief even though it is late and out of character. She tells him what he wants to know; that Elena got married to Matt Donovan and they were expecting a baby.
Damon is only silent for a moment but then he sighs, so quiet and low it makes Bonnie nervous for the first time since this call started.
"Is she happy?" He asks finally, like it's an effort to even talk and it's both so honest and pure coming from a man that had been everything but towards her that for a moment Bonnie is a little too stunned to give him an answer.
"Yes Damon," She manages without really thinking about it, "Yes, she's happy."
Damon lets out a slow exhale that fills the silence that should've been heavier.
"But she's still sad."
Damon doesn't ask why and they both know it's so he doesn't need to bring up Stefan and so that she doesn't need to talk about him.
He doesn't ever call again.
They name the baby after her mother, Miranda. She's tiny and beautiful and too perfect for Elena to comprehend but she spends the first few weeks after her birth, just staring at her chest, moving as she breathed, knowing she wasn't meant to. She could feel the love for her daughter seeping and growing inside her, spreading out through her limbs; it mounted from grace to wonder, the skies not possibly able to contain it all. Elena thinks, you are mine and you are perfect, as she watches her daughter sleep but she also thinks, hating herself, you just weren't meant to happen like this.
"She had a girl."
"A girl?" Stefan repeats slowly; the floor beneath his feet is suddenly thin and unstable. He needs to lie across it or least sit to hear the rest of this.
"Yes." Damon whispers.
Stefan turns away from his brother and looks out the window, finding the moon amongst a sea of black stars.
"I would go too." Damon says before he leaves and Stefan turns around to find his brother gone and the decision of going home before him.
Miranda screams through the days and cries through the nights. Elena is exhausted and fed up but Matt's there and her friends are there and it helps but apart of her is frustrated and bitter at this little person, bitter at herself for not being better at something she should've been great at.
She's crying quietly by herself, in the corner of the kitchen one night when Matt's in the nursery with the baby, trying to get her down.
"Hey." Jeremy whispers, sidling up next to her, offering her a cup of tea. Elena, grateful, smiles the best she can before taking it. Her baby brother had been brilliant through of all of this, brilliant with Miranda and looking after the house. Making sure Elena slept and ate and did normal things a human being would do.
"How do people ever do this? And multiple times and want to?" She asks after she's taken a sip and wiped her face with the back of her hand a little.
Jeremy squeezes her arm but doesn't say anything.
"I'm just…I'm failing." Elena whispers, her voice breaking and there are tears rolling down her cheeks again. Jeremy takes her cup, puts it on the counter top and wraps his arms around her.
"Hey," He hushes, kissing the crest of her head, "You're not failing. You're so awesome at this, Elena, we all think so, even Caroline's mom thinks you're doing incredible."
Elena sniffs and lifts her head, balancing herself by splaying out her hands across his chest, "Really?" She asks quietly.
"Elena?" Matt calls out, suddenly at the doorway. He timidly looks between them, sensing the mood of the room.
"Yeah, sorry, what is it?" Elena asks, leaning away from Jeremy and wiping at her cheeks again.
Matt walks towards her, stops when he reaches the table and leans a hand against it, looking down for a moment at his feet, "Mer is asking for you."
The grin on his face spreads as he tips his head up at her and Elena stands, her heartbeat suddenly pounding away in her ears.
"She asked…she asked for me? She's talking?"
His smile, if possible, widens. "Won't stop saying mama."
Elena forgets that Jeremy's arms were just around her and that there are dry tears on her cheeks; she runs, runs past her husband and through the hallway, for the nursery.
She can hear it, so clear, it's like music. Just one word.
"Mama." Her daughter cries.
Elena lifts her up and holds her against her chest; her body is warm and she moulds so effortlessly to Elena's, it leaves Elena breathless, fresh tears in her eyes for an entire different reason than why she was crying before.
"I'm here, it's okay, I'm here."
I'm never leaving you, she thinks, now rocking Miranda, her cries softening. We can do this together.
Stefan stops first, like he always has whenever he has left Mystic Falls and then returned back to it, his bedroom and his home. It's no different, dustier of course and colder but it's the same. He won't touch the bed and he won't sit down but it feels good to be back there. The familiarity of it doesn't scare him as much as he feared it would.
He stops next at the Gilbert house. He has no game plan and no speech written even though he knows she deserves one but he can't stop to think of what he'll say. Can't stop to think of all the years and days stretched thin between them. He left her three years ago and never came back. They were in love and together and best friends and he had left. He never called and he never wrote even though he wanted to. Even though he ached and wanted and needed nothing but her.
He was too dangerous though, for a long time, to go back.
At night when he can't sleep and she's dancing across his mind, this is what he repeats to himself the most.
The Gilbert house is a different color to what he remembered it being and it just, feels different. Emptier, if he had to put a word to it. He knocks and that alone is enough to push against that heaviest in his chest; the last time he had knocked here was the first time he had knocked here.
Jeremy almost goes white when he sees him as he opens the door.
"Stef-what? How? Where?" Jeremy splutters and then shakes his head a little like that would make the image clearer; Stefan doesn't move or say anything, just waits.
Jeremy, getting over the initial shock, now looks a little harder, his face tightening and Stefan both expected and feared this and knows that Jeremy's not thinking of him as the vampire who went out with his sister but as the one who broke her heart.
"She's not here, they live in Rose Dale now."
They, his head's screaming but he nods at Jeremy, as curtly and gratefully as he can and goes to turn.
"You could've told her you were never coming back, Stefan, would've saved her holding on to hope for so long, hurting for even longer."
It stings but he swallows it down because he knows it's true and knows it's something Jeremy needed to say.
"I can't fix this, Jeremy or give you an apology because that wouldn't do anything but I can tell you that it wasn't easy and that it was something I never wanted. I would never, ever intentionally hurt Elena, you must know that."
Jeremy wavers for half a second but steps backwards into the house, his hand curling around the door, "Yeah well, you still hurt her anyway, I definitely know that."
Stefan welcomes the door, slammed in his face.
The first time Miranda laughs, Elena mistakes it for a cry. It takes her about 5 minutes to realize that nothing was wrong and then another 5 to figure out what got her laughing in the first place. It turns out, she only has to yawn. Elena yawns, whether loud or quiet, big or closed and her daughter is in a fit full of giggles, her tiny feet and hands tightening against her body. Elena thinks the entire world is in that giggle.
When she yells for Matt to come see, it makes Miranda burst into tears and then the doorbell rings and Elena's too caught up in the excitement and muddled from the trail of snot across her sweater to really centre herself when she swings open the door and finds the man she had fallen in love with 3 years ago, standing there.
She almost faints.
"Stefan-what?" She tries weakly, her hand at the doorknob slipping and she can hear distantly, Miranda still crying and Matt calling out to her, asking who was at the door but all she can feel is her heart pounding and him and he hasn't changed at all, he's the exactly the same. Beautiful and lovely and him.
The second he sees her, the second, he regrets ever coming back. He regrets leaving. He regrets the way he let time pass without her. Regrets that he let her go. Regrets.
For a long moment, neither of them say a word but just stare at the other like they're reflections and Elena only realizes her mouths gone completely dry when Matt finally emerges around the hallway with Miranda in his arms. He stops dead in his tracks when he spots Stefan and Stefan's heart, spotting the baby, stops beating.
"Elena?" Matt calls out, eyeing Stefan warily, turning Miranda's head out of the direction of the open doorway, "Sweetheart, is everything okay?"
Elena doesn't even think she nods but she must do something to clarify it because Matt doesn't come any closer.
"I'm going to put her down and then go to the workshop, if you need me just call out." He says this all without taking his eyes off Stefan and Stefan takes it the exact way Matt meant it; as a warning. Matt steps slowly backwards and disappears around the corner of the hallway just as the baby in his arms begins to cry.
Elena shuts the door, stepping out onto the porch.
"What are you doing here?"
Stefan's trying to think of all the words he should say and wants to say and needs to say but the baby is that ache in his throat and the pound in his skull and he honestly thinks he's going to be sick.
It was her baby. Her's and Matt's and she was beautiful and looked exactly like Elena, from what Stefan had seen, which hadn't been much but she had a baby. The reality of that wasn't clear thousands of miles away, the reality of that was in seeing it for himself. Is that why he had come back? To cement the reality of it?
"Stefan, please." Elena repeats like she's decided how this is going to start and end and he turns away from her and walks to the end of the porch, as far away from her as he can possibly get with her still in reach.
Fuck, a baby. She had a baby.
"Jesus Christ." He whispers under his breath, clutching at his hair with both hands; they were shaking, trembling and he does his best to tense them so she won't see even though he has no idea if she's followed him down there.
But it's her and it's them and of course she's followed him down there.
"Hey." She breathes at his back and she sounds far more concerned than he deserves and he hates that there are tears in his eyes and that his throat won't stop aching.
He keeps his back to her because he just needs a couple more seconds or even minutes to wrap his mind around it all but then he's thinking, she gave him years to wrap his mind around it all and it isn't fair that he expects or wants more time from her.
"I'm sorry." He manages and drops his hands away from his face to instead clutch at the porch banister for support.
"It's okay." She whispers even though they both know it's a lie and that nothing about this was even remotely okay. But she still says it, like she did when they were boyfriend and girlfriend and he messed up by drinking blood and she was by his side through all of it and shit, what is he doing back here?
"It's not, Elena, it's not okay…I'm sorry, I shouldn't have come back."
He turns to leave, willing himself not to look up at her because he wouldn't have a chance in hell of leaving if he saw her face but then her hand is at his elbow and she's tugging him back with more strength than he ever thought she had and he's letting her because he doesn't have any more strength left.
"No, you don't get to leave." She says loudly, clenching her teeth and shoves him away when she's pulled him back close enough. He stumbles a little, his stomach hitting the banister but he grabs for the railing, hunching over it to stop himself from screaming or crying or breaking down completely.
"How dare you come back here like that and just expect to say nothing and leave me again, Stefan, how dare you." She spits and he can hear the tears in her voice and feels the torment and heartache and everything else he did to her and hates himself for.
She shoves at him and pounds at his back, so hard it makes him choke on his next breath but he lets her hit him, again and again and again until he can't take anymore, turning around, grabbing at both of her hands. She fights him until her back hits the wall of the house and he's somehow managed to wrap both his arms around her and pin her wrists to the wall on either side of her waist.
"Stop it, Elena, just stop it." He says, panting, pushing his forehead to hers and she's breathless with him, her face wet with tears, her eyes red from crying but she stops, stops fighting against him.
He doesn't let her go even when he knows he should because she's gone limp and won't try to hit him again but being this close to her, having her pressed against him is intoxicating and addicting and he doesn't ever want to stop being this close to her, ever.
"You left me." She says after a moment, quietly into his cheek and lets out a few shaky breaths before he can really say anything because he did leave her, he did.
"Forgive me." He whispers and she lets out this noise that's stuck in her throat and moves against him a little, struggling but rubs her nose against his cheek, "Please, forgive me."
"No." She says and suddenly yanks her wrists free, pushing her hands at his chest and slap him so hard across his cheek that his neck snaps back.
Elena gasps and covers her mouth with her hands as Stefan hunches over, holding the side of his face and there are tears in his eyes not just because his cheek stings but because his heart does too and he doesn't expect her to come back over, clambering for his cheek and whispering that she was sorry, over and over again against his face but she does, she does and it's terrifying.
The sky was growing pink, the sun beginning to set and she doesn't know how long it's been since he's been here but it hasn't felt as long as it probably has been.
"I'm sorry I hit you." She says quietly when they've both recomposed themselves and she's a few feet away from him; he barely shrugs, looking at her in a way that makes her entire heart hurt.
"Can you walk?" He asks because he doesn't think he can stand being near this house any longer and thinks, as she nods, that she probably can't either. Not with him anyway.
It's quiet for a while as they walk but it's okay and it doesn't feel like they should be talking right now even though there's still a lot to stay; they reach the tip of the forest without either of them really noticing.
"Can we go up to the hill?" She asks, remembering when he had taken her up there, long ago, when they had both believed her life had ended and her eternity had begun and he nods, smiling a little, understanding why she'd wanna go there out of all the places they could.
It's growing dark when they get to the top and he gives her his jacket and they stand there, watching the stars like they were out on a date or something. They never really dated, she thinks, only a couple of times; they weren't really the dating type. They were the couple type.
"I never wanted any of those things without you, you know."
He turns his head towards her, thinking he knows what she's talking about; hoping that he doesn't.
"What do you mean?" He asks anyway and looks back out across the field and he hears her sigh softly and close her eyes.
"To grow old and have kids, get married. I wanted all of those things with you."
He thinks you can break your heart many times before you realize it can't be fixed; he thinks your heart can be broken and then break again.
"I wanted life with you." She says, her throat aching and opens her eyes that are filling with tears.
"Elena." He sighs, ducking his head but she reaches over for his hand and squeezes it and that's enough for him to want to break down and enough for him to gather himself together so he won't.
"I'm not angry with you for not coming back." She says softly and he can't lift his head back up but he's surprised and also a little shocked so he does, only barely, to catch her eye.
"Why not?" He asks and she squeezes at his hand again, shaking her head a little. She was doing pretty well so far but she doesn't think she can hold on much longer.
"Because I know you needed the time and the space and whatever else…I'm angry with you because we were in love, Stefan and I wanted you and I needed you and you never wrote or tried to contact me and I get that you couldn't, you know? I really get that but I deserved a goodbye, I deserved more than silence."
She's crying, unable to stop and she's dropped his hand and covered her face with her hands, now sobbing openly into the night, not caring that he was next to her or how she sounded or anything else. But Stefan steps towards her and enfolds her into his arms, holding her against him, caring so much.
"I'm so sorry." He whispers, brushing her hair back, kissing her forehead because he can and wants to and fuck, he's missed her and it isn't fair that Klaus took him away and that they met when they did and that they couldn't be together, both humans with a normal life; with children and jobs and old age together.
"I'm sorry too." She tells him, taking fist full's of his shirt in her hands.
They hold each other for awhile, long after the suns go down and it's pitch black; the stars above them but it's too much, for either of them to let go just yet.
"Damon?" She asks after a moment and she can feel his breath on her neck, warm and steady.
"He fell in love, she's a writer and made him turn her…they're both living in Paris."
"Oh." Elena whispers, feeling a pang of her hurt in her chest for a reason she can't quite articulate, "Oh."
"He still loves you though, in his own Damon way, always will."
She wonders if he's not just talking about Damon now but she holds that knowledge close to her and it means something because she'll always love Damon too.
"You got everything in the end, everything you wanted." He says as he's pulling back, still holding onto her hand and it feels like he should be hurting her by saying that but he wants to ground some sort of reality into this; maybe in a way, of hurting himself.
"Yeah, I guess I did." She whispers, thinking of her daughter's eyes and laugh, the way she curled her toes when she sneezed. The way she left sloppy kisses across Elena's neck, waking her up in the mornings. The way she breathed and made sounds and connected with everything around her. The way she said mama.
"Her name is Miranda."
Stefan nods, hearing the name and thinking of her mothers; he wants to smile but can't and doesn't think she expects him to anyway.
"She's beautiful." He tells her instead, looking at her and Elena barely gets out the thank you.
"If she weren't…if things were different-" She starts, a little desperately but Stefan takes hold of her shoulders to stop her because he didn't need to hear this and she didn't need to think it. He could see the way she loved her daughter, knew the way she loved her.
"It's okay."
But it's not, she wants to tell him but can't and he leans forward and presses his lips to her forehead in a way he used to do when they were both teenagers and it was just the two of them, like it always sort of will be.
"I love you." He breathes against her skin and she clutches for his arm, her chin trembling, her legs trembling; her heart trembling.
"Please, please come back again, I beg you." She whispers, staring at him, seeing the tears in his eyes even through the dark of the night.
And he will, he completely will, as much as it will hurt and wreck him, he will.
"Promise." He breathes and drops his lips away, kissing her once more and stepping back.
Without another word, he lifts her up into his arms and starts to run. They make it to her house in less than a minute, even though it took them an hour to get to where they were and she's a little breathless and a complete mess when her feet hit the floor and he's gone before she can even look at him again.
Inside, Miranda begins to cry.
Outside, Elena doesn't stop.
A/N: I know that seems like a harsh ending but the reality of this entire story (as is there current situation that Elena never seems to want to talk about) is harsh and I felt like I needed to write that, for once, write their harshness. As depressing and horrible as it is to think about and write. It's open ended this way too, so I have the opportunity to add to it in the future.