Disclaimer: I do not own The Vampire Diaries.
"You lied to me…" She barely said the words. She couldn't see him. He was there.
He spoke to her, because even if she couldn't hear, he could, and though he was resigned to his death, the knowledge that she could feel and touch and speak and be heard even if he couldn't was all that was keeping him sane right then. "Even if I wanted to apologize, you couldn't hear me, so I won't."
"Please don't leave me…" she begged, as if she could hear him. Knowing those two, the likeliness of their defying the universe was two to one.
"I don't have a choice, baby." Even in death, his eyes were a cerulean blue, and if she could see them right now, feel his hands, she would be putty.
A crippling pain was searing through her chest, and it was enough to buckle her knees. She held onto the pole behind her, because she knew that if she fell, she would never get up. Somehow, that didn't seem like the worst thing anymore, staying here forever, never moving another muscle, never speaking another word. She stopped trying and fell to the floor.
Elena never heard Damon's words, nor did she feel the brush of his warm fingers against her cheeks. Nothing mattered anymore. A deep emptiness filled her, and she marvelled at the beauty of irony. No one would ever know, she realized, or understand, just how it felt to lose every bit of hope inside you, to feel as empty as she did in that moment, to be completely and utterly dead inside.
And, as tears streamed down her cheeks, Elena stood up, sobs suddenly silenced, and made her way over to the wooden table. Her fingers trembled as she shoved it over, an angry growl escaping from her lips, and she drew her hands down over her face, tugging harshly at the skin on her wet cheeks, pressing so hard that she almost thought she'd changed the shape of her bones. Then she stopped, grabbed a table leg and snapped it in two, one edge squared off but the other dangerously pointed.
Damon's immaterial hands grabbed at her frantically, tried to pry the weapon from her hands, but they only went right through it, through her; he'd never felt more helpless in his life — or more accurately, his afterlife — than when he watched her carve the stake, make with her own hands the only thing that could make her heart stop. His cries were silent to her, his desperate protest and sobs that would break her heart because, as much as he wanted her to be with him, he would die a thousand times over to keep her on this earth, well and alive, and he was well on his way before he'd been sealed on the Other Side forever.
Her trembling stopped, because her resolve was finally rock solid; there was no reason for her to be here anymore, not without Damon. So she smiled as she lined the knife up to her heart and closed her eyes, contented, as she prepared to plunge it through. The pure terror on her love's face, however, was unbeknownst to her, the desperation to keep her alive, the memory that he had died for her and now she was doing the same for him. He knew that the Other Side was falling apart, and that soon he would fade into oblivion. He also knew that if Elena died, the same would happen to her.
She drove the stake through her heart, and she was aware that the blood stained her hands for a moment before the familiar grey-blue stone crept up from her feet, enveloped her, turned her into a statue, and she collapsed onto the floor, which was made of the same type of wood as the knife that was lodged in her chest. Death took over her, and the last thing she thought about was the beauty of irony.