Author's Note: This starts during a scene out of 03x09 "Homecoming" and continues after the scene on the show cut off. This is right after Damon and Mikael tried to kill Klaus and Stefan stopped Damon, allowing Klaus to kill Mikael.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Vampire Diaries or any of its characters, dialogue or plot. Warnings for adult language and violent references, for this chapter and the whole story to come.
DAMON POV
"We blew it," I say grimly, feeling everything that this means.
If we're lucky, we'll get another shot. If we're not lucky, Klaus will have killed us all by tomorrow. My brother is such an asshat. At least in the past he's always been a predictable asshat.
"Where's Katherine?" Elena asks.
She's bewildered by this whole mess. It's like my epic failure can't even sink into her head. That's how epic it is. Elena always thinks the best of everyone. She's probably incapable of even processing a fuck up of this magnitude.
"She ran for the hills as soon as things got bad, as usual, and who could have blamed her? Klaus would have crushed her!"
I had been proud to even have talked Katherine into helping instead of hiding and letting us do her dirty work. I'm pretty sure she saw through my bluff that we wouldn't do it unless she would shield Elena. She knew we didn't have a choice, but she came anyway. I guess I'm so stupid that Katherine and Stefan can both surprise me.
"This is my fault." Maybe if I spell it out for her, she'll shout at me, which would feel really good just now. God I wish I had someone to fight. "I had him. I had Klaus. This could have all been over!"
I feel the rage twitching through my muscles and I hurl the bottle into the fire with enough force to shatter a crane, at a loss for something, someone more satisfying to break.
"Hey, Hey, Listen to me." Elena steps close and I'm not sure she should even stand next to me right now.
The anger in me feels endless, like the power in that alone could create a cyclone around me that would rip her to shreds. Then she puts her hands on my neck, holding me with a softness that short-circuits me for a second.
"We'll survive this. We always survive. Trust me."
She said we. She and I are in this together.
It's true, we're in everything together these days but I can't even feel joy that she accepts it. Because we doesn't include my traitorous fuck of a brother. Coming from Elena, that should make me happy, but it just feeds despair to my anger.
"We're never getting Stefan back. You know that, don't you?"
Does she? Does she understand what this means at all?
"Then we'll let him go. Ok? We'll have to let him go." Her voice breaks a little but I think she believes that she means it.
God, she sounds old for an eighteen-year-old. How can she say that? Elena, with all her forever-love and soulmate crap, her and Stefan running around acting like the old married couple of the Mystic Falls community for the last year. How can she let him go and I can't?
My phone rings. I don't give a shit what anybody has to say but I answer it anyway because my brain just locked up its brakes at Elena's announcement and I can't think of a thing to say to her.
I make the mistake of looking at the caller ID and my mouth tightens. This is not going to help. "Not interested in a play by play of our failure right now, Katherine."
"I just called to say goodbye," she tells me, and then she's trying to make me feel better about my plan but doing it in her detached voice. Katherine never calls to say goodbye. Why the hell did she show up in the first place?
I try to talk to her, but I'm looking at her twin. What is Elena thinking that would make her say that? Does she believe that he's gone for good? Hell, Stef and I haven't really been close since 1864. Is it possible she knows him better than I do? He's sure acting like a lost cause but I feel like I have been compelled, so complete is my inability to give up on him.
Something is off in Katherine's tone and I realize she must be as disappointed as I am. I don't know why she's not screaming at me for my crap aim, since it would have saved both of us the slow and creative death we're likely to get once Klaus gets around to it. Self-serving as she is, she showed up for me today.
I look away from Elena, dropping my voice a little.
"Take care of yourself, Katherine." I'm surprised to find that I mean it. I hang up and catch Elena watching me speculatively. Wheels are turning under all that shiny hair but I'm too tired and pissed off to try and figure her out right now.
I get a fresh drink and scowl at the fire. I hear Elena finally turn away and take a seat on the couch.
That feels odd to me. It takes me a minute to figure out why, but in the end I guess it is because everyone always comes here when they want something and leaves when they don't. Usually they are just on their way to see other people: Stefan, Jeremy, Elena, Tyler. I shake that thought off like a bad smell and roll a sip of scotch around my tongue.
I consider that Klaus took the compulsion off of Stefan, which means he should be running about mid-grade crazy, not full-on Joker. But he hasn't poked his poufy little head up yet, so either he's out getting his hair shirt fitted or drowning his sorrows in Sorority Chainsaw Massacres IV. Either way, I don't give a damn. If I see his face again I'm going to pound all the pretty right out of it.
A sound. I tune back into the room and it is too quiet.
I turn and Elena's sitting on the couch, utterly silent tears rolling down her cheeks. My shoulders slump. If she's crying about Stefan, there's nothing I can offer her. I won't make any more false promises on his behalf.
"Elena?"
She blinks rapidly and starts wiping ineffectually at her face, as if I've never seen her cry before.
"I'm okay."
The flow of tears is in no way diminished by her swipes.
I wince and shake my head in disagreement.
I venture just close enough to hand her my handkerchief. I know it's been out of style for a long time to carry one, but it's better than trying to fit a package of baby wipes in your pocket to clean up stray blood. Talk about unmanly.
"It's nothing." She sniffles.
It took me sixty years to figure out what to do with a crying woman, and I only learned reluctantly. They want you to hold them apparently, tears and snot and all. But with Elena and me, that was a door I'd never been invited inside.
"Nothing new, I mean. It's just…everything. It's too much sometimes. I'm sorry, Damon, you shouldn't have to deal with this. I'll go."
Would it be pussy to pass this one off to Ric? He'd been married, he might have learned a thing or two.
"No," my stupid mouth says. "Stay."
Her lips twist and a sob breaks free. "I'm just so tired of all of this. The scheming and the constant worrying about Stefan and you and Jeremy, and I miss Jenna."
Oh shit. She is into the ugly, hard sobs now. I pick up the blanket off the back of the couch. It is chenille, and a little cheap compared to the rest of the furnishings, but I let it stay because Elena brought it over months ago. She is so skinny she can get cold in front of a roaring fire. I wrap it around her shoulders now, tucking it tightly so that it will embrace her for me. I should buy her a better one, something softer, warmer.
"Now's not the time to feel guilty about everyone that Klaus has hurt, Elena. He was an evil bastard for hundreds of years before you came around. One of these days very soon I'm going to kill him for you, but until that happens I'd prefer it if you didn't make yourself a whipping boy for his non-existent conscience."
She is nodding but she is still crying. I am distracted for a second by the thought that she'd included me in her list. I'd be insulted that she thought she had to worry about me, but there is a certain fascination in the idea that some of those crystalline tears are because she cares about me. At least one or two of them.
She blows her nose and I watch her delicate shoulders shake with grief, more than a little out of my element. For a second I consider what Stefan would do, but that kicks the anger in my gut back to life. Little bro and I have an appointment with a tire iron later on.
How about 1864 Damon? Would he be any better at this than I am? That finally gives me an idea and I sit on the coach and pull Elena down, blanket and all, to lay her head on my lap.
"Damon, what?"
"Shhh," I tell her, arranging the blanket to better cocoon her shoulders. "You've killed your quota of vampire Homecoming queens for the day. You've earned your rest."
"As if I could go to sleep right now."
"Just try," I tell her, and then I start to sing. I pitch my voice to a low octave, deliberately keeping it husky, intimate.
"You can sing?" she interrupts in obvious shock, turning to look up at me.
I smirk patronizingly. "Everyone used to be able to sing until stereos and studio mixing made everybody go all chickenshit. It's like sex: you can be born to it, or you can practice up, but everyone can be good at it if they want."
"Which are you?"
I grin, happy that she walked into that little trap. "Honey, I was born to make love, but a little practice never hurt anybody."
"Damon!" she protests, glaring at me with just enough resignation to tell me she kind of likes it that I'm predictably bad. I'm starting to like that face as much as her rare smile.
"Shut up and listen politely," I tell her. "Not everybody gets a private Salvatore concert."
Actually, any vampire can sing: with our hearing and perfect control over healthy vocal cords, it's a cinch, but I'm not averse to having her think me unique in my talents.
With only a second to think and all love songs and anything loud out of the running, I settle on a lullaby from my own time. It's been out of fashion for over a century and I bet she's never heard it.
I've sung my way into more than a few sets of panties, though I've got a bit of a different angle tonight. Elena doesn't know this about me, but one of my favorite ways to kill time used to be to reveal myself to a woman at my violent, horror-movie best (by killing her boyfriend, if I'm in the mood for a challenge) and then slowly seducing her into trusting me and then eventually giving herself to me, compulsion-free. Singing is about a mid-course tactic for softening them up. For some reason, they assume that men that sing are sensitive and I am not going to correct the assumption.
I am also not ever going to tell Elena about this hobby of mine. I was grouchy when I got to Mystic Falls, so I short-cutted Caroline with compulsion. She's not really my type, anyway. After that, I was so busy with all the drama that this town attracts that I didn't choose a new candidate. I made do with distractions and I flirted with Elena just for fun, but I'd never seriously tried to seduce her. Once I realized I didn't want to use her to get back at Stefan, I'd turned the charm into the negative numbers to try and keep myself out of trouble.
She's calmer after the lullaby.
"You know, in case I didn't mention earlier, you daggering Rebekah was a little bit amazing."
"Yeah, right before she was getting all teary about her first Homecoming dance," Elena groans. "I'm going to hell."
I laugh. "Yeah, right. Catfights, though. So hot. Only way it could have been better would be if you were wearing less."
"Damon, you're such a tool."
I tuck her hair behind her ear so I can see her face better.
"You're probably the only human in history to dagger two Originals. Three, if you count Mikael, but he was kind of a freebie." This thought cheers me. Why not celebrate the good parts? Leave the brooding to the professionals.
"We may not have gotten our money's worth out of Mikael, but it can't be a bad idea, given my luck, to have a legendary vampire hunter out of the way. And Rebekah?" I snort. "Any centuries-old vampire who finds cheerleading interesting can't be mentally stable. Ergo, it is nice to have her safely daggered."
I sing her a little Meatloaf, "Cause two out of three ain't bad…"
It swells my head to hear her sniffly giggle. Seriously, any singer that names himself after an ambiguous meat product has to be good for a laugh.
I run with the ball, twanging my way through "Friends in Low Places," which drags her all the way from giggling to laughing.
She's not half-bad company, even if she is inclined to the waterworks. God knows she's had reason enough to cry since the Salvatores came to town. I rest one hand gently on her shoulder, squeezing a little. She responds by snuggling closer into my lap.
I need another quiet song. I pick something new this time, "My Lady's House" by Iron and Wine. Great middle-of-the-night-sipping-red-wine music. As soon as I start, though, I remember that the lyrics are maybe more applicable than they should be. One section reminds me of last night, watching Elena curl into my side.
"It is good in my lady's house
every shape that her body makes
love is a fragile word
in the air on the length we lay."
Despite all the poetry that used to be standard to the curriculum in the 19th century, I rarely have the patience for interpretive reading. Maybe I just needed a fire, a girl, and a maudlin kind of introspective mood. For whatever reason, the next line never caught my attention before, but tonight it starts to make sense.
"No hands are half as gentle or
firm as they'd like to be."
I look down at my hand on Elena's shoulder, inept at giving comfort, and apparently, at placing a stake in just the right place to pierce a black vampire heart. I smirk a little that I managed to choose lyrics that mock me, and then lose the smile as I remember the next line.
"Thank God you see me the way you do
Strange as you are to me…"
My voice wants to go rough on these words, but I don't allow it less than perfect pitch. I hope she's asleep. I hope that she isn't.
Either way, she says nothing, and when I finish, I listen to her breathing for a second. She's asleep. Maybe in the morning she'll be ready to face this whole mess again.
As I watch her sleep with tears dried on her cheeks, I catch myself humming and recognize the tune to "Amazing Grace." It's cliché now, but it's always been a beautiful song, and I can really carry it if I'm in the mood, which I haven't been in 150 years. Since David caught a musket ball in the face and I left the Confederate Army, I suddenly remember.
I sang it at his funeral before I went home, met Katherine, and made an enemy of my brother. I let the last few bars fade into silence and then listen to the crackling of the fire while I watch Elena sleep, my anger gone for the moment, my mind quiet.
Author's Note:Please leave me a review/comment and let me know what worked for you or didn't work for you about this chapter. I hope you enjoyed the Iron and Wine song…
