AN: Alright, alright, I know I should be working on The Dying Evergreen. But Vampire Diaries, a much more quality vampire show than ol' Twilight, has got me hooked, especially after that crazy finale. IMPORTANT: This takes place some time after the finale. The assumption is made that Katherine had some sort of scheme to use Elena against the brothers. Don't really have specifics, but it's the ruling assumption for the story, so please just go with it

Elena enters her bedroom, and it's dark, but she doesn't flip the switch immediately. With a sigh too heavy for her small frame, she drops her purse on the floor. A creeping breeze passes through the dark, empty interior, then slips right back where it came from. The window is open, she realizes belatedly.

Elena also realizes that her room smells unusually good and musky, and she rolls her eyes the moment the implication is understood. Open windows and the wild odor can only mean one thing.

"I wish you would use the front door like Stefan does."

Damon comes out of the shadows and into the vague light of the moon. It's not so much that he comes out, really, she thinks. It's as though he was melded into the opaque corners of her room, and merely shifted forward, unlatching himself from his natural lover.

"Now that wouldn't be half as fun."

She immediately knows something's up. Even though his trademark eyebrow is quirked and the trademark corner of his lips is upturned and his trademark dimple is curving oh-so-tightly, she hears something in the comment that's off. He's normally crass, somewhat rude, challenging. Now, he sounds oddly exhausted.

"It also wouldn't be half as annoying."

"That's not really the way we roll, now is it, Elena? I annoy you, you act standoffish, and I annoy you some more. Isn't that the way we dictate our friendship?"

She's a bit surprised, because it almost sounds angry, even though he's still smirking and his glassy eyes are twinkling.

"No," she replies unsteadily, "That's not really how I see it."

"And how do you see it, Elena?"

She doesn't answer that, because his smirk has slipped and the shadows are now doing one hell of a macabre piece of work on his expression. He's dropped his attempt at a ruse, and Elena can't help but wish that there could be more than a bed between them.

She chooses her words carefully. "Why are you here, Damon?"

It's not a "what's wrong" and it's not accusatory, because she senses that would only send him off into a territory she doesn't want to go into.

Unfortunately, he goes there anyway. "Remember the Katherine incident?"

Elena doesn't reply, because of course she does. How could she forget? Her father was only missing a few fingers and a hole in his stomach. How Katherine had used her as a pawn against the Salvatores. The fact that she almost won. Oh, and the part before all that where Jenna thought she was making out with Damon on the front porch. And the part where Damon had thought so too. Of course she remembered.

He looks at his feet for a moment, an uncharacteristic gesture, to say the least. When he looks up again, something in his eyes makes the base of her spine clench.

"Well, now." He licks his lips, and it leaves a thin sheen across them. "She used you against us, Elena. I'm sure that didn't escape you."

"Stefan made it clear."

"I'm sure he went all out into lecture mode on his mile long list of safety regulations from here on out." Damon cracks the joke like quiet lightning, and it falls flat in the forefront of an internal storm that brews. When she says nothing in turn, but instead stands silently, as per usual, his smirk falls. "You have no idea how he broods over this. How he hates being a threat to you. That being with him makes you unsafe."

She is tempted not to say anything again because she knows, because Stefan won't look at her in the eye. Because he's tormented over the fact that she can be used against him, that she can be maliciously put in danger for the sake of forcing him into compliance. He can't stand it, and he can't look at her straight, because she'll just know that he thinks about leaving now. She knows he is. She knows he considers it every time. This is why she speaks.

"I know. I can see it." She fiddles with something on her desk, turning away for a moment. Then she turns back, and the dark makes his eyes gleam like two orbs, not unlike an animal staring down the passing headlights from a car in the dead of night. The only difference is he stares her down with a ferocity. "Damon, why are you here?"

He cocks his head. "You don't know yet?"

She shakes her head now, because why should she? He comes through windows and doors and out of shadows on a regular basis, so she's never sure what his agenda is. Sometimes, she toys with the supposition that he has no agenda. That he just likes to play with her, batting at her like a cat may bat a mouse after it's been caught.

"She used you against us, Elena. Against us. Us."

That was not singular, she registers dimly, and the walls may have suddenly moved in a little, and the span of he bed is certainly smaller. She thinks she knows where he is going, and she doesn't need to go there. Ever.

"I can't have it that way," he continues, and it's slow and deliberate, every word stretching in the shadows like an unfurling panther, ready to bite at her throat and penetrate her shields. "I can't be someone's pawn, and I can't have a weakness, Elena."

Damon falls silent again, and she knows inherently that this is a pause she wants to go on forever, because what's coming next is going to be catastrophic.

"I won't have you as my weakness. Not when it puts us both in danger, imminently. So there's either two solutions I see, and trust me, I've done plenty of Stefan-worthy brooding over this." He begins to slowly move around the bed, inching his way around the frame, sidling through the darkness like he was wading in water. Elena doesn't move. A part of her wonders if she can't, if he was somehow compelling her to stay, despite her necklace. Her muscles practically tremble in trepidation, begging to be released, to let her run, to let her flee in some direction.

But her brain won't send the signal. Instead, she warily watches him approach, breathes in as he rounds the corner, sucks in weighty gulps of oxygen as he stops mere inches away. Elena doesn't rip her gaze from his gleaming cat eyes, forces herself not to roam across the wide expanse of broad chest within touching distance. Instead, she attempts a warning tone: "Damon—don't…"

He doesn't listen. "Two choices, Elena. One: this will be the last time I will truly speak to you. Our 'friendship,' or whatever you call it, will end right now."

She tries again, but his scent, that musky odor of books and rain and something feral, drugs her into silence. She can only beg with her eyes: Don't say it.

"Or two." Damon states plainly. "Two. You can stop being Stefan's problem." He moves closer, and his mouth is in that strange place right to the left of her nose where it would take only a small shift, a small twitch to complete the action hanging in the air. "And you can start being mine."

She isn't unaware of the kiss before it comes. His lips are just in the right place to take hers, his large hand has snaked around the nape of her neck, and his other has taken her by the hip. Elena sees it coming long before he really knows that he's actually going to have the gall to take it.

She doesn't move, even though an alarmingly large portion of her is begging her to, because how good it would feel to just take a taste, to sip at this forbidden fruit for just a moment, to fully know what it is that she isn't supposed to want. But thanks to the very abhorrent emotional hole ripping its way through her chest cavity, she doesn't move.

Elena instead tastes guilt and anger pooling in her mouth.

She is still for only a moment, really, before the prerogative to rip herself away finally courses through her nervous system. She does just that, yanking her head as far back as she can while cupped in his hand. Because his long, scarecrow fingers are snaked through her hair, she doesn't get far.

"Bastard." This is the first word that she can verbalize out of the vicious swarming mess in her head. His expression flashes with surprise before it returns to its unaffected, smug defect mode. Perhaps he did not anticipate such harsh language. A harsh reaction, definitely, but not necessarily such words.

"You didn't even give it a try," he leans into her hair, and she finds herself pressed to the nape of his neck. Were she a vampire, she mused, this would be an opportune moment to rip his throat out. But she isn't, and his smooth, alabaster skin isn't exactly giving her the inclination to waste any ruin to it.

"I'm not planning on giving it a try." She hisses the last word against his flesh. It's not fair, really, that he won't let her go, that he won't let her have her own space to have this discussion. Her head would be clearer. And he knows this. Damon plays dirty, always and forever.

"You can't lie to me and say you don't want to." He whispers this smugly, because it's true. And it is. The residual taste of Damon on her lips makes her groan inwardly.

"I'm not going to lie to you." She replies, frowning deeply. "But I am going to ask you to step back. You can't do this, Damon. He's your brother."

"Why should he get you exclusively? He took Katherine from me. Ruined the only woman I've ever wanted to marry. And now, she's nothing but a vengeful, evil bitch." When he curses, she can feel the words course through her veins.

"Because I love him." She is able to draw back an inch or two because his grasp is looser. She looks him in the eyes, and sees a vague hurt there, like a wounded animal. "And I think you do too. Even if he forced you into being a vampire. Even if he has me. I think you do too."

As Elena accuses him, his expression changes. It's the way she imagines he looked right after Katherine left him on her porch. Elena will never admit that she's imagined this too many times, that she wonders how he would have looked after had it really been her kissing him back. This must be it.

Damon darkens noticeably, as if resolve has finally come. He wrenches back suddenly, drawing back into the wispy shadow clutch. "This is goodbye then, Elena."

Wondering if he means that little to her, that she can let him go like this, Elena feels the emotional hole in her chest threaten to widen.

She then does something bizarre, something that she doesn't even remember deciding to do. She goes after him into the shadowy corner by her window, where he no doubt intends to make his exit. But she won't have it, because she isn't done, because they can't be done.

He looks at her, puzzled, staring hard at her hand, which has somehow found its way onto his forearm. "Don't do this, Damon."

"Why shouldn't I? You don't want to part from precious Stefan, so why should I stick around and be forced to suffer?"

"Because I care about you. You know I do. You mean something to me, Damon, even if it's not exactly what you want." Elena stutters, frowning at the crook of his elbow, because she can't look at him. "If you go, you'll be hurting me. And I care for you." She determines that this is not a lie, that the weird hole in her chest is threatening to rip further if he steps out the window. "Very, very much."

It isn't exactly "I love you," and it isn't exactly "I don't." The second fact doesn't escape him.

"And you can still be with him, knowing that I'm here, in the back of your mind, waiting?"

"It has to be this way."

"Why?"

"It has to."

"I won't do it. I'm leaving. I have to." He shifts as though he really is going to leap out the window.

"Please."

"Elena." The way he says it is so different than Stefan. Stefan cradles her name, holds it and protects it. Damon rolls it around like a storm, before consuming it back in with a ferocious need. "Elena." She closes her eyes now, because another kiss is coming, and she thinks she might want this one. Because if this is it, if this will be the last time he's ever going to say her name, she wants to taste it coming out of his mouth, and she wants to let him taste his own name, to draw it out of her lips with luxurious pressure.

Very absurdly, he doesn't kiss her. She was so sure.

Instead, he presses his forehead down against hers and meets her now open eyes as awkwardly close as it is. "Elena," he whispers, "I love you."

And suddenly she kisses him. Because he said it. He said it, and he meant it, and all her resolve suddenly means very little, because he said it.

It's nothing like she thought it would be. When Stefan kisses her, she floats. She's in the sky, flying in white, ponderous clouds, the sun kissing her shoulders, her hair. Elena has imagined that kissing Damon would be the opposite. That it would be like drowning or falling or suffocating.

Instead, when Elena kisses Damon, when he kisses her back just as fiercely, she has the strange inclination that she is solidly in place. That this is just herself, on the soles of her feet, and Damon on his. That it is just the two of them, and the stillness, and they are the only things moving. Motion is for them alone, a construct only created for this momentary union, and the rest of the world is frivolous. Everything else becomes a fading silhouette, and the two of them are fullness, darkness, light, completion.

It is an entirely unexpected sensation.

Elena has the strange inclination that she might want to feel this way forever, because if she does, she will need nothing else. This will be food, water, life.

She's shocked that it's Damon who pulls back, because she didn't think he'd be the first one to come back to his senses.

It takes a moment for him to articulate past the warmth still lingering all over his mouth. "You shouldn't have done that."

It's an odd statement, because of course she shouldn't have. Of course. She knows that. "I know that." She loves Stefan, and she loves him so much sometimes that it hurts, but this, this want, this need was going to come to the surface sooner or later. Damon wasn't going to go away, even if he were to physically leave her. Elena doesn't know how to fix this. Because she is becoming everything she hates, because Damon is just too damn…Damon.

"I'm not Katherine." It sounds wrong when she says it, because this isn't the same, this isn't a game she wants to play, to toy with them. She doesn't play games like that, she never wanted to.

"I know." He is barely even audible now. She can't really see his face, because even though her eyes have adjusted to the dim light, he is purposely leaning into the darkest places.

"I can't—I don't—"

Elena is quieted by a finger on her lips. The trademark smirk is back, and this time it's genuine. With it, a strange, but deeply sad, understanding is present. Damon leans in and kisses her cheek, and it's chaste, but it leaves the deepest sense of warmth in her face. "I won't push you anymore."

It's a shocking promise, considering his ultimatum that he laid out five minutes prior. Somehow, though, she realizes it was never really a choice. He had already made up his mind. "You were going to leave no matter what I said."

Damon isn't startled at all that she knows. "Yes. I was."

"Are you still leaving?"

He sighs, licking his lips again. Which she quickly decides she hates, because it's quite enticing, that pink slip of tongue. "No, Elena, I'm not."

"Why?" A part of her is devastated, another part elated. She can't decide which one is remotely more dominant.

"When I came in here, I didn't think I had a shot in hell. I came here to get my goodbye kiss and that was that. Things changed."

"You still don't have a shot." Elena declares, and she knows it's an empty threat, it even feels weak as it leaves her lips. She's mad, because he knows it too.

His smirk widens before Damon perches on the windowsill. "I think you may be wrong."

And then he's gone.