First things first: I don't own these characters. They belong to LJ Smith, Kevin Williamson, and Julie Plec. I just own a Mac from sometime around 2001 and a radio.
This isn't part of the Alpha series. People who want to complain because of that, go look at my sister. She asked for a VD fic based on a line from a Rihanna song, and she got it. This song's been stuck in my head for a few days, so it slipped in here, and you get mildly angsty, using-each-other Delena instead of something Forwood-flavored because my Forwood muse was quiet today. If anyone wants more in the Alpha series, I need ideas.
Spoilers: Not really.
"We're two psychopaths but we know that no matter how many knives we put in each other's backs that we'll have each other's backs."
-Love the Way you Lie Part II by Rihanna (featuring Eminem)
What they have isn't safe, isn't good, isn't right, and they both know it.
Damon is single at least, although Elena wonders about how he acts with that newslady, Andie Starr. She's still dating Stefan, and she knows that he can smell Damon on her clothes and sheets and skin.
She knows that it hurts him, but she can't stop.
Another one of Elena's dates with Stefan.
He hates these nights, hates them with all the passion he can muster. He might have Elena's body, but his baby brother holds her heart and love.
And that's all that really matters, isn't it?
She pulls away once she's finished shuddering against him, smoothing her hair down and straightening her dress.
He just pulls his jeans up and fastens his belt before going back in the Grill to finish his drink.
He curls his arm around her naked body one night and ignores the slight space she always leaves between them. "Why?" he asks again, not really expecting an answer.
She doesn't say anything for a long time, almost so long that he thinks she'd fallen asleep. "I tried not to be Katherine for so long," she says eventually. "But then I realized it was inevitable."
Katherine.
So many things can be traced back to Katherine.
How he shuts himself off when he doesn't want to feel (he's hoping that Rose was lying to him, all those months before everything happened, about how the switch to turn everything off disappears when you get old enough.) How Elena still flinches at mirrors occasionally. How Jenna doesn't fully trust Elena or Alaric anymore after she found out that they lied to her for months. How everything got so fucked up.
"I told Stefan something once," Katherine told Elena as she got ready to leave, for good this time hopefully. "I told him that hating someone sounds like the beginning of a love story, not the end of one. Remember that."
"Why are you telling me this?" Elena asked. She didn't know that he was listening from downstairs, but Damon knew that Katherine did. She meant for him to hear this.
"You need to remember that there's a fine line between loving and hating, before you slip to one side or the other."
"I'm not you," Elena said with the slightest tremble to her voice.
Katherine took a breath in as she closed something with a quiet click. "I know. And you have no idea how thankful I am for that."
Two days after that Elena kissed him against the wall of the living room and he didn't fight.
What is it about her that attracts all these vampires, Elena wonders as she runs towards where she'd left her car. Is there some kind of invisible sign saying, "Eat me!" over her head or something?
She pulls at her car door frantically, hoping that it isn't locked, but it is.
She hears a familiar voice behind her and nearly faints with relief. Damon. "Elena?" he says after a minute. "You can come out now." He's standing over the slumped gray body of the vampire who'd wanted to kill her, and he looks like he wants to make sure that she's alright. But he won't.
She smiles weakly at him and squeezes his arm. "Thank you," she whispers.
"Get going," he tells her. "I'll deal with this."
Elena nods and brushes past him to grab her keys and purse from the Grill.
"I love Stefan. It's always gonna be Stefan," she'd told him once.
"Always" ended partway through her senior year.
Elena and Stefan still aren't on speaking terms.
She's the only person that's ever made him act like this. All... domestic, with cooking and laundry and arguing over paint colors for her new apartment in New York (he'd followed her like a lost puppy when she left for college. Not like he could stick around Mystic Falls for much longer anyway, and what would he stay for if he did?)
At least if he can't compel her into seeing that he's right, he can convince her in other ways.
Damon quickly decides that getting his way with something as inconsequential as what color the walls are isn't worth the vervain-spiked blood bags that follow.
"I love you," she murmurs one night, half-asleep on his shoulder.
He blinks once before smiling and pulling her body even closer to him. "I love you too," he whispers.