Hoodoo
Come into my life
Regress into a dream
We will hide
Build a new reality
-Muse
This sprawling house is as full as I've ever seen it, the closest it's come to being used as a boarding house since before I first stepped across the threshold. The remaining arms of our patchwork family tree have taken refuge within these walls. We're tucked into its many rooms, nursing the phantom limb pain of all the severed branches.
Caroline compartmentalizes her grief in a spectacularly Caroline fashion. It haunts the attic, where she is the curator of Stefan's memories as she carefully sifts, cleans, and tucks into boxes the collected artifacts of his extended lifetime. If she can manage a smile for her girls, she makes it downstairs for breakfast where she is the doting mother, sister, and friend. She accepts my bone gripping hugs, laughs with us through tears welling near the surface, and tucks Lizzie and Josie into bed with a story or three, before retreating back into quiet isolation.
On the days she can't manage, her barely-brother-in-law is the only company she permits. He leaves the diner style breakfast spread he makes for us every morning in the kitchen while he portions out a tray and disappears upstairs with it. Sometimes he's gone a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, before he reemerges with a stack of boxes that he stows in neat rows at the far end of the eight-car garage.
He's still rebelling against the limits imposed by his newly-minted humanity. I've learned better than to express my concern. Instead, I watch in silence as he descends the stairs, straining under the weight he's laden upon himself. I bite my lip against worries of him toppling down the narrow and steep attic stairs original to a house built before safety standards or building codes. He smirks triumphant upon each return with beading sweat wetting his dark hairline and cups my cheek to pull at my bottom lip with his thumb until it's free of my worrying teeth. His mouth smiles against my lips as he presses a kiss there and disappears into the kitchen without a word to scrub it clean. The trail of his fingertips against my skin and the taste of his lips tingle with his love but burn with the longing for more.
Bonnie buries her grief deeper. Or maybe, it's just more difficult for me to see when it's for a man she loved and lost all while I slumbered, oblivious to her joy and suffering. She stays in the room next to Lizzie and Josie's and spends most of her days in the company of the little Saltzman twins. They share her newly rediscovered well of magic, and she guides them with a gentle hand in the art of floating tea parties or animating the illustrations of their favorite storybooks.
After the girls succumb to dreamland, She sits in front of the fire plucking at the strings of an acoustic guitar. Her best friend—in my absence that's what he's become for her—pours them each a finger of bourbon, hands her the cut crystal glass, and joins her on the opposing sofa. This house used to have as many elaborate and well stocked alcohol carts and bars as it does fireplaces. Not surprising, considering that if a fire were blazing in the grate there was usually a Salvatore brother with a drink in his hand standing over it.
Now, all have gone save for this one, locked behind the glass doors of an antique hutch. A nightcap shared between two friends is the only time I see him partake in the bourbon he used to swallow down like tea. He pulls from his glass with thoughtful sips instead of with the sexy aggression he used to throw it back. They exchange quiet, easy conversation, her tinkling laugh, the deep hum of his throat. Some nights I curl into his side as he lifts his arm and pulls me into him. I let their rhythmic back and forth and Bonnie's lilting guitar settle over me like a warm blanket. Others, I leave them to it.
The fresh, horrific grief I had to leave Ric with to begin my forced exile is very cleverly buried beneath the adoration of his daughters. But I see the edge of desperation in his eyes when he watches them, when he joins in their games and imaginary play. I see the way their gravity has shifted his whole world to them, and the weight he carries—acceptance that nothing else in the world matters as much as them. Even after losing so much before and surviving it, he has so much to lose that the loss of it would be the end of everything.
Apart from the dinners we all share, Ric spends most of his time outside the house. He's still dealing with the Armory, a place I've heard about a few times in Bonnie and Caroline's brief recounts of what I've missed. It's one I have no desire to ever visit. Between overseeing the excavation of a building scorched by hellfire and playing with his daughters, his spare time is all invested in his plans for a school for supernatural children.
Hardest for me to grasp is his avoidance of us all. He avoids topics of discussion with Bonnie or Caroline that stray outside the lines of the girls and their magical education. Any small talk with the rest of us is restricted to the domestic topics necessitated by the sharing of this house. He doesn't look me in the eye. And something has irrevocably fractured between Ric and his former best drinking buddy.
The only explanation I've dared to extract from the latter, "He killed me; I deserved it."
Matt hasn't committed to staying with us. But that first night he came by to see me after Stefan's funeral, I convinced him that a family meal was better than eating alone at the Grille every night. I wasn't sure enough of the tentative truce or forgiveness between Matt and his former vampire nemesis to tell him who had prepared the meal, but he's been back almost every night since. Matt still insists on returning to work after dinner, and I'm pretty sure he spends most nights on the sofa in the sheriff's office. Once or twice, his oversight of Mystic Fall's restoration has worn him so weary that he hasn't made it past the oversized leather sofa in our library.
Lizzie and Josie are tiny balls of light and energy that scatter color and joy in the farthest reaches and corners of the house, corners I didn't even know existed until a marathon day of epic hide and seek made me familiar with all of them.
Upon our first introduction they had many questions for me about my extended sleep, a multitude relating to my feelings on princesshood.
"But she didn't need a prince to wake her up," Josie whispered loudly to her sister.
"Yeah, because Aunt Bonnie used her magic to break the spell," Lizzie said.
They've since taken to calling me Princess Elena, something that always manages to delight their Uncle Damon when he's in the vicinity.
He is their elusive playmate. While the rest of the house, including myself, seem to be at the mercy of their constant whim, always willing to be sucked into their world free of burdens and grief, Uncle Damon's willingness to participate is one extreme or the other. He throws himself with abandon into their joy, nearly breaking his neck to find an even more thrilling hiding spot than the one before, or he's aloof, unswayed by their insistence that he join in their games. The days he denies them attention are usually those Ric spends at home. He pulls back from them in their father's presence, retreats as I've seen him do in the past when he didn't believe he belonged.
"Sorry munchkins," he tells them in response to their pleas that he throw them into the air and then fling them in circles. "Don't you two have a magic lesson you're late for?"
But they're resilient to his apathy. They know his mornings belong to them. Damon is always the earliest up, followed by Lizzie and Josie. On more than one occasion I've watched from the kitchen door as the girls giggle from stools, one on either side of him, stirring pancake batter. The only two people in the world I've seen Damon look on with affection after making a disastrous mess of his kitchen. He is patient with them, attentive, guards them constantly from danger or injury.
My heart swells and clenches on these mornings in a bittersweet twang. I see glimpses of a future with the man I love in these moments, of our family, the life that we fought so hard to make a possibility. But I've only been awake weeks, and this unconventional stability we've built with each other in the wake of devastation I can't quite grasp, is a holding pattern. I have in my reach everything I've ever wanted on the back of sacrifice by so many of the people I love.
Now that we're so close, I'm so much more desperate for our future to begin than I've ever been.
I'm afraid it's slipping away.
"A crown! A crown!" Lizzie says, jumping up and down.
"A kitty!" Her sister joins her.
He makes them each a special pancake in the shape of whatever they demand. When he started out, simple shapes like hearts or flowers turned into unrecognizable blobs the girls scarfed down anyways. But I've since caught him watching tutorials on YouTube.
One day last week he came home from a trip to the hobby store with a bag of precision-nozzled plastic squeeze bottles and a bunch of food dye. His sense of hearing far less keen than before, he froze when he spotted me giggling across the entranceway.
He pointed at me and narrowed his eyes. "Say nothing." The hint of a smile tugged at his lips.
"Princess Elena!" One of the girls will screech as they spot me in the doorway.
His smile will stretch across his face, etching lines into his cheeks. Lines I imagine marking him permanently as the skin around his eyes begins to crease and gray begins to fleck his dark hair.
"Uncle Damon," the other will tug at his sleeve. "Princess Elena needs a special pancake too!"
"Does she?" He'll look up at me with a grin and a raised eyebrow. "What'll it be, Princess?"
"A crow," I'll answer like always. An omen of my future Bonnie gave me many years ago that I've taken as a good luck charm instead. He's gotten quite good at them.
The girls'll run around the island to join me on the barstools. The three of us devour pancake masterpieces as he cracks eggs, whisks batter, and ladles out the plain round cakes for the rest of the house.
Brother. Best Friend. Lost Friend. Former Enemy. Uncle Damon. Pancake Master. The Love of My Life.
In my absence, he has forged a place in the lives of everyone in the world that matters to me, has made his own place in their lives and their happiness. But before them, before me—
He's lost the one person that loved him unconditionally before any of us.
Damon's grief is so heavy, I am constantly in fear that it will crush him. Like the boxes packed to the brim with the weight of his brother's life, Damon acts as though it is something he must bear all at once and bear alone. His love for me shines brilliantly through his smiles and his touches, but he tempers them with a restraint that makes panic crawl under my skin.
He cares for the house and the people in it with unrelenting diligence and love, anticipating everyone's needs with amazing efficiency. He lives in the kitchen, pouring over his phone for new recipes, content in his ability to fill everyone's stomachs if not the holes torn through their lives by loss. He is quieter, more reserved, but if you leave an opening he never passes up the opportunity to add his snarky and colorful commentary. His pain is there, but he is coping remarkably well, far better than the drunken depressive spiral both Bonnie and Caroline have admitted that they expected.
And that terrifies me.
As close as they've grown in my absence our friends and family have never seen the other half of Damon I have. He kept it that way on purpose, distracted them with his explosive impulses, the sting of his words, elaborate displays of off-kilter and unstable emotions. In the shadows, he formed calculated plans to protect me, his brother, the people we loved and he grew to love as well. The sacrifices he made were never showy, the pain he took on only flashed to the surface when no one was there to see. He accepted everyone's disdain and hatred, so no one else should have to bear it. And part of him always believed he deserved it.
The way he retreated into himself after he found out about the sire bond frequently haunted my magical sleep. Because once Damon decides he is not worth something—sacrifice, compromise, friendship, love—he is unreachable.
There are moments when we're alone, tucked into the only quiet, isolated part of the house that's ours alone, where the tightly knotted cords holding him together loosen. He holds me tighter, his kisses deepen with desperation. His chest heaves against heavy breaths as he presses me against him and curls bruising fingers into my shoulders and sides.
His mouth and fingers trail searing heat against my skin as he removes my clothes. He grips my wrists tight as he restricts me from reciprocating. His breath is hot on my neck. When he's sure I'll behave, he releases my hands and traces the line of my stomach to pop the fly of my jeans or up the inside of my thigh under the skirt of my dress to tug at the elastic of my panties. His voice vibrates in his chest against me and shudders in my ear.
"Come apart for me, Elena."
These nights end in my body alone in it's own heavy unwound ecstasy, pressed against the hard and straining desperation of his body's need to join me in the release he won't allow me to give him. Trembling, unsatisfied against me, he presses a kiss against my closed eyes and turns away from me. My body screams at his absence.
The first night, my voice shook with all my doubts and fears. "Damon?"
His blue eyes, glossy and wet with unshed tears, met mine. "Please, I just need a little longer."
He rolled away. I used to love the luxurious size of our bed, but now I curse it for all the space it allows between us. .
I told myself that I could wait as long he needed. But I'm not so sure anymore that he was asking for more time to grieve his brother. Each time, the desolate anguish in his eyes grows larger, the intensity of his touches burn further into my flesh and bones. It feels more and more as if his agonized plea for more time is something different, a frenzied selfish delay of a goodbye he believes is inevitable.
I don't press him for answers anymore. I don't want tonight to be the night he decides to begin some self-imposed exile or trigger some form of self-destruct he believes he deserves. I wait for him to slip from bed and extinguish all the lights. I lay silent and still, waiting for the soft lilt of a snore he acquired along with his human vulnerability, before crawling across the massive expanse of bed separating us and pressing my face between his shoulder blades. In the morning, I'll wake alone in an empty bed. He's already downstairs starting coffee and drawing a little girl's heart's desire in pancake batter. He's retreating further and further out of reach.
I'm scared to death of losing him forever. What if I already have?
Um . . . This is not a You Become update (just in case you hadn't noticed by now), but if you've read this far whether or not you've read You Become, I want to thank you.
I've wanted to write a post series fic since the show ended, but because I was determined not to let anything derail me from You Become, I put it on the back burner for a long time, and it's been spiraling out in fantastic head canons of what I imagined happening during, around, and after the events of the finale for like the past what is it now. . . (almost two years? No, that can't be right.) And then you know, other things derailed my from You Become anyway, like book cons and NaNoWriMo and trying to draft an original novel.
So, this happened.
I'm not sure what it is yet. I would like it to be more than this and have idea fuel to make it more (in fact I even had a ch2 written until I lost it to the digital ether and irresponsible back up habits), but it also has the ability to sit here on its own until the day I do decide to flesh it out. But I do know the stuff I see adding will not be incredibly plot driven as it is angsty character driven stuff.
In a lot of ways I was very happy with the way the show ended and understand why it couldn't be the 3 day long delena angst fest I would have needed to feel some form of satisfaction. But while we got a happy endgame, the majority of the finale was a lot of tragedy, and I desperately need to see some of the emotional fallout and what I know had to have been a rocky recovery for Delena, their family and friends. While a few of the post series fics to come out since the show ended have been great, (Notably: A New Normal by NorahB) none have quite scratched that itch for me. If you're hoarding a secret stash of fics about Damon sobbing, cradling Elena's still sleeping body in the boiler room waiting for Bonnie to meet him and lift Kai's spell after waking up and realizing what Stefan had done, or the days leading up to Stefan's funeral, or the days or weeks after Elena wakes please please share.
Anyways, this is my beginning of an attempt at that. The title of the story and this chapter come both from a song by Muse that completely encapsulates the mood of this story for me and a type of rock formation found primarily in North America that is caused by weathering and looks like a tall narrow spire of rock capped with a wider much larger chunk of rock. It seemed like an aptly angsty metaphor for coping with the burden of guilt and the erosion of grief at the same time.
You Become still exists, I still have plans to update it someday, I just have to stop promising next week, next month, or soon, because I fail at delivering on those promises. I'm sorry, guys. But if you enjoyed this, and would be interested to see more, please leave a review and let me know. I love you all.