Sitting outside Stefan's temporary prison cell, Elena is not crying.
Exhaustion leaves her mind raw and arid. She has not moved in hours. Damon, three feet away, has not stopped moving. Tapping his fingers, fidgeting, nervous and irritated at his lack of plan or action and her lack of rationality. Which has led to his retrieval of a bottle of bourbon from the great room upstairs. He poured two glasses for the two of them an hour ago, and has just finished them both off.
"C'mon Elena, take a hint from Stefan, try to sleep for awhile," he suggests. "He won't be trying to massacre the town for at least another few hours." He tosses a pebble at her, one he has been rolling between thumb and forefinger for the better part of an hour. This stone hallway has been crumbling for as long as he's known it, and it's never been his intention to sit around and watch it crumble.
Her head is a flickering collection of nightmarish images from the evening. Her neck is weak, head propped against the stone wall.
He leans toward her solicitously. "Just like a man, huh? Ask him to escort you to the big dance and you find him in the woods with a freshman."
"That's funny, Damon, thanks." She does not look up at him. The sarcasm feels cheap, but she does not have the energy to explain how far she is from appreciating his sense of humor.
He sighs, pouring two more glasses. "One way or another, you'll get through this." The sentimentality of his concern hanging awkwardly in the air. He slides one of the glasses across the two feet that divide them, against her shoe. "Even if Stefan decides he likes human blood more than pretending to be something he's not, you'll find something-"
"Don't-" she interrupts sharply. "We're not having that conv- I'm going to be strong for him until he can be strong for himself." She is too shaken to be proud of her own loyalty, and Damon is too doubtful to approve of it, so they both let her statement hang in the stale air like a battle flag without any soldier to carry it. The glass next to her foot is faceted, one of the faces reflecting the basement light onto the wooden door of Stefan's cell.
"Okay, sounds good," Damon agrees reasonably. "And while you're being Wonder Woman, giving him a wonderful shoulder to cry on, he can decide to take a wonderfully vital chunk out of your neck."
"I'm not afraid of him," she says through a tight jaw, staring at the shard of light on the door. It is her new mantra more than it is the truth.
Seconds crawl by unnaturally, without the world righting itself.
"I don't get it," Damon says irritably. "Why do you want to feel like this? You're no fun at all when you're playing Mom."
"This isn't about me, or what you think of me. I'll be here for him when he wakes up." She will be a pillar of strength for Stefan, a beacon of rationality and affirmations.
"You think it's all about you" Damon remarks breezily, "You're terrified that it will be all your fault if you can't convince my brother to choose you over the delectable scent of the human jugular."
She turns her eyes on him with fire beginning to leak from them. "You can leave now." She will cut him out of her universe if he chooses to question the depths of her compassion and strength.
Damon shrugs innocently. "I'm not saying that's what'll happen, I'm just saying that's why you can't sleep. I actually think you should give yourself a little more credit. You've turned the incorrigible Damon Salvatore into a vegetarian, no reason you can't pep-talk my brother back into the...celibate life."
Games, always games with him, verbal sparring and subject changes and sprinkled compliments like fishing lines he throws. She chooses to ignore the statement about her influence on his diet choices. Not knowing whether he is mocking or manipulating or just spewing words out of boredom, she chooses to ignore his words completely. She curls in on herself slowly, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her head on them. Wrapping her arms around her legs. No quick motions. Keep everything calm.
Damon sighs and shrugs out of his suit jacket. Without speaking, he moves onto his knees and leans toward her, laying his coat across her shoulders. She isn't cold, but she doesn't refuse it. Looking down at it, she sees on his jacket sleeves the evidence of the struggle that occurred earlier, the dirt and broken threads and smudges of dried blood. The disorder of struggle. The messiness of rage. They weigh so much. And she will have to play Atlas again, doing her very best to act weightless as she does every day at school, as she does for Jenna and Jeremy and Caroline and...
When her parents died, she was given permission to fall apart, encouraged to grieve. Her loved ones had formed a circle of support around her and Jeremy so that they were allowed to be weak. But since then, since the Salvatore's came, every shock and crisis and fear has been swallowed and held in the pit of her stomach as if she is supposed to be impermeable, made of iron. She is so tired of secret trauma.
"How did this happen?" she asks no one, precariously. "How is this happening?" Stefan is in the next room. Stefan might be gone. It hurts to not be made of iron, to be soft and full of feelings and to need courage so desperately.
"You decided to let vampires into your life," Damon says sympathetically, still kneeling next to her. "And love, that too" he adds as an afterthought, patting her on the knee. "That's a nice big ocean of smooth sailing."
She breaths a small, exasperated laugh as he stands, brushing off his legs. "What else are teenagers supposed to do with there time?" she jokes weakly, looking up at him with as much sass as she can muster. Pulling back from her moment of weakness, of overwhelming hopelessness. Joking is better, more courageous, than feeling sorry for yourself, right? Perhaps he has been pulling back from his own pain long enough that he's gotten it down to a science. Perhaps he knows how to pull her back as well.
"You take time out's" he responds, eyebrows raised with fatherly wisdom. He dips his head to give her a look of confident permission.
Her eyes fall to the full glass of bourbon and it seems undaunting, trivial. As she picks it up, the shards of reflected light move off of her lover's door and around the room in twitches and darts. She downs it in four gulps. As she lowers her empty glass Damon is standing above her lowering his. When her offers her a hand to stand up, she shakes her head apologetically and hands him the glass instead. He snorts and sits down again, this time right next to her, shoulder to shoulder. He fills her glass with half the amount of her first. She drinks, he watches. The silence of minutes passing becomes less unnatural, or more accurately, she becomes more able to refuse the nature of things.
When she hands him her empty glass again, he sets it down on his other side, away from her. He kisses her forehead approvingly. "Good job, teenager." He is quiet, unusually calm. It only seems right that he is most at peace while everyone around him suffers through internal hurricanes.
"Thanks," she replies, relieved at the softening numbness that is quieting the pandemonium of her thoughts. Also relieved that the pain has not disappeared, but has only become simpler in the form of a deep, unanswerable Disappointment. There should be a stronger word for it, she decides bitterly. Then she decides that her bitterness is soft enough that she may be able to sleep. And that it is braver to sleep and then wake up to her life in the morning than to argue with Damon for another glass of bourbon.
"Ready," she states, looking at Damon with a calm surrender to her exhaustion and hoping it doesn't look like sadness. He nods, and he helps her to her feet, holding her hand carefully as they climb the stairs, walk through the front hall, and climb more stairs to the second floor. At the door to Stefan's room, he lets go of her hand. What she sees in his eyes is part blessing, part apology, and she nods her gratitude without saying goodnight. She sleeps in Stefan's bed alone without dreams or nightmares and wakes with the same amount of fear.