title: the ballad of breaking
summary: her brown eyes meet blue ones, and she feels her heart drop, if only just.
notes: for the record, this is not what i want to happen at all. but i like the idea of waiting until the time is right, so that there is no guilt or open ends – damon was really one point last episode. and so this is kind of what would happen if they didn't wait.
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When they walk together along the lakeside, cold mist spraying into their faces from the gusts of wind, she lets her mind wonder. She wonders about things that can't quite be formed into words, things beyond her, like why she got the life she did – why she fell in love with the people she had.
And it's okay to wonder these things, she tells herself. She has every right to want to know the truth. And she glances down at her hand, intertwined with a pale one, one that's stronger than she can fathom. It feels right, being connected to somebody like this.
But sometimes her mind isn't all the way there, and she feels like she is still caught in the middle of two people all over again.
And sometimes the past creeps up on her and walking lakeside gives her a lot of time to think about that. She thinks about how her life has slipped away from what it once had been. Her morals had been twisted and beaten and shattered in the process as she learned more and more. People had died, and she had watched.
Once her thought starts to flow down that path, she brings herself back, albeit carefully, so that she almost doesn't notice the turn in the wrong direction. She thinks of how her moral had also been strengthened with the love she had been shown by her friends, old and new, and her brother. She had been tested in ways that made her stronger.
But what if.
And that's what gets her every time.
What if something she did could have changed where she was standing right then in this moment? What if she had given in too early… what if there had still been hope for the other one? Had she given up too easily? She hates when this happens, because there are so many images that play in her mind that it makes her sick, and she stops walking, a faraway look on her face.
This isn't the first time.
"Elena."
She flinches at his voice, smooth and concerned. It almost sounds like him, like the other one.
Her brown eyes meet blue ones, and she feels her heart drop, if only just.
And then it contracted even more, because how had her heart dropped, when this was the choice she had made with utmost caution? She loves him, she does. Of course she does, or she wouldn't be standing here with him, letting him look at her with such beautiful concern. Such beautiful concern that she didn't deserve.
How, when she had this, when she chose this, could she her heart still ache?