The Journey Home – Chapter Six
The atmosphere was stagnant; there hadn't been any conversation since they had pulled out of the motel parking lot. She sits in the back, silently watching out the window as the mountains pass by as do various over the road semi's making the long haul to the west coast. She tried not to focus on him or even look at him at the moment, she had caught his gaze through the rear view mirror a few times now and every time it made her feel incredibly guilty. Truth was, she completely deserved it, she deserved the disappointment in his eyes, she deserved the silence, but she didn't deserve him. What she had done was so very selfish that she was questioning how he could possibly forgive her. Her sight became blurry and she held her breath in order to keep the gasps from escaping her mouth, which would only concern both men in front of her. She slips on her dark gray hooded sweatshirt and uses it to hide, leaning her head against the window as she silently cried in the backseat. Part of her wanted him to see, wanted him to see just how terrible she felt and how sorry she was. The median separating them from the other side of the highway doesn't get any closer, so she was sure he hadn't noticed how upset she was, or he was just very good at multitasking.
She had thought last night may have fixed it, it may have been just his way of getting his frustration out, but when they had returned to their room he had stayed up for a long while, engrossing himself in a magazine. She'd laid there for about an hour, watching him from her pillow as he flipped through the pages aimlessly, no expression on his face and never glancing in her direction. The last thing she wanted was for him to shut her out, it was the most terrible feeling in the world and that's exactly what he was doing right now while he tried to figure out how to deal with the situation. The two people he had counted on the most, her and Alaric, had completely decimated his memory and the sacrifice he had made to bring his brother and everyone else she loved back from the dead. The people he had helped save had turned their back on him, and she knew he didn't know how to deal with that. It was a major breach of trust that he hadn't expected.
She's relieved when they turn onto the familiar dirt road leading to the cabin and when the car comes to a stop she wastes no time exiting the vehicle, grabbing her bag and heading inside before anything can be said. She heads up the stairs to her room, completely bypassing Bonnie and Jeremy, who are sitting at opposite ends of the room, not talking. Bonnie sat with her arms crossed, staring out the front window towards the lake, Jeremy was engrossed with something on his phone.
"What the hell is going on between the two of you?" Alaric asks as he grabs his bag from the backseat. Damon simply shrugs and tosses him the keys before heading down to the lake, towards the dock. Alaric shook his head in confusion and headed inside, finding the other two lovebirds having a silence contest of their own. "What the hell is going on in here?" Alaric asks as he enters the living room, setting his bag down.
"Nothing." Jeremy says quickly.
"Right, I should have figured as much." It was the same answer Damon had just given him when he asked what the hell was going on between him and Elena. He didn't quite understand how both of these couples were not talking to each other, how, after four months of being separated they were letting something come between them. He simply sighs, shakes his head and walks to the kitchen to grab a drink. Damon enters the room a few minutes later and drops his bag on one of the chairs, immediately noticing the tension in the room.
"I can see your day is going just as well as mine." He says to Bonnie sarcastically. Jeremy gives him a glare from across the room and then goes back to staring at his phone. Damon's attention is caught by the sound of a door slamming and it takes every fiber of his strength to not give in and head up those stairs leading to her room. Damon walks over to the liquor cabinet, selecting a cheap bourbon and not bothering to take a glass with him as he plops down on the couch next to Bonnie, draping an arm over the back of the couch as he takes a swig.
"Any luck finding Stefan?" Bonnie asks she tucks her legs beneath her and turns toward him.
"Yes, and when we found my insufferable little brother he proceeded to stab me and run off into the sunset with my ex-best friend."
"I thought I was your best friend?" Alaric says from behind the kitchen counter.
"That's recently been thrown up for debate." Damon says as he stands back up from the couch. "Last time I checked best friends don't try to erase their girlfriend's memories when one is stuck in another dimension."
The room fell silent and Alaric pauses, somewhat shocked.
"Yep, she told me everything." He says as he puts his feet up on the coffee table.
"So, she told you everything and is crying up in her room and you're still sitting down here?" Alaric turns the tables the wrong way on Damon.
"Last time I checked I wasn't the one that did anything wrong."
"She cried for you for the last four months, Damon. Would you have rather she try and kill herself? Because let's all be honest about something, she probably wasn't far off from trying."
"Why is everything always my fault?" Damon asks. "For the past six years everyone's been pushing me to be a better person, to be the better man. When I finally do something worth a shit everyone still criticizes me, I pull Liz out of a burning building and yet Blondie does all she can to get the woman I love to move on from me, I save my little brother and he stabs me in the gut, I come back and find out the only woman who's ever loved me tried to erase me, and some how it's my fault and I have to feel bad because she's upstairs crying? That makes a lot of damn sense." He says as he pushes himself up from the couch and walks out the front door, exiting as quickly as he came, the bottle of bourbon still held firmly in his left hand.
He finishes the rest of the alcohol as he walks back towards the dock, sucking up every last drop before throwing it towards the large pine nearly ten feet away. It explodes on impact, the glass shards shooting in different directions as he keeps walking until he gets to the very edge of the dock, his boots hanging over the weathered boards slightly as he looks down into the water. The anger was back, Alaric had brought it on this time. He noticed. Of course he noticed she had been crying, of course he'd noticed her hand held tightly over her mouth in order to keep from drawing attention to herself, it didn't matter though, as soon as he'd looked at her through the mirror and saw the glimmer on her cheek he couldn't keep his eyes off her. Why did he always have to feel guilty? Why was it always him being insensitive? Was it really him against the world again?
"Damon…"
He really wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone, not even to her.
"Don't you have your hands full with your own problems?" He asks, not turning around.
"Did you think this was going to be easy?" She asks him. "Did you think we were just going to walk right back into our lives and pick up where we left off? Our lives have always been anything but ordinary, Damon. You need to realize that they all thought we were gone, they didn't know we were trapped somewhere, we did, but they didn't. We didn't give up because we knew if we made it back they'd still love us. We knew there was still a place for us."
He's silent for a moment, not speaking.
"It's not your fault, Damon."
That's something he really needed to hear, and not from Elena, but from someone else. He sighs heavily and rolls his shoulders a few times, trying to release the tension.
"I've tried for so long to keep everything together, to be strong for her. I've done terrible things along the way, things that caused you among other people to hate me. But can you honestly say I didn't try?"
She sighs and shakes her head. "Everyone knows you tried, Damon. Even if some of them are still bitter about it, deep down everyone knows. Because of you, Tyler, Enzo, Alaric and Stefan are all alive and somehow we still managed to find our way back. You mended part of Elena's heart."
"Yeah, before I ripped open the rest of it." He says. "There's always a cost."
"But you're missing the point, Damon." She tells him. "You fixed it. We fixed it."
"I'm not even mad anymore." He tells her. "I was, and I was disappointed that she'd consider erasing me…us. But I keep thinking about all the terrible things I've done to hurt her, all the things I've done to make her jealous when I was upset." He shakes his head. "We are all terrible people. We've all made so many mistakes along the way, and yet we're still here, we still help each other, we still love each other..."
"Damon, why are you still out here? Why don't you just go talk to her?"
"Being a little hypocritical, aren't we now?" He asks.
Bonnie sighs and her face drops slightly, Damon really didn't think he was the appropriate person to talk to her about this. But they were both in the same boat when it came to crazy emotional lovers.
"What's his deal?" Damon asks.
"He's mad at me because I told him I'd do it all over again to save everyone."
Damon laughs to himself slightly at the similarities. Elena had done that to him so many times he'd lost count. Always wanted to be the hero and sacrifice herself for her friends and family, and she would never deny it, which always made him furious and so very nervous.
"He thinks you're choosing everyone else over him?" Bonnie nods. "Yep, I've been in that position."
"What am I supposed to say?"
"Lie to him, tell him you'll never leave him again." He tells her.
"Why would it be a lie?"
"Because let's face it, your track record is worse than mine when it comes to dying."
"Thanks, Damon. You really know how to make a girl feel better."
He simply shrugs. "Men are simple. Just cuddle up to him and tell him you're sorry and compliment his muscles and you'll be just fine."
"Seriously, you haven't changed at all." She says through as she shakes her head, a small smile on her face.
"I beg to differ, because I very much disliked you before this whole…debacle."
"Is that so?"
"Yeah, now you're tolerable."
He opens the door slowly and it creaks the entire way until he can walk through the threshold into the bedroom. He finds her sitting on the bed, looking out the window with her back turned to him. She was being somewhat dramatic, he knew, and it was making him feel so very guilty. Her diary is sitting next to her on the bed, closed and with a pen fasted securely to the cover.
He closes the door softly behind him and stands there for a moment, giving her an opportunity to tell him to leave. She doesn't, so he slowly makes his way around to where she's sitting. He quietly takes a seat next to her and looks over to find sadness written all over her face and yet she just keeps staring ahead, blinking slowly. He grabs one of her hands, which is resting in her lap and holds it there. Her eyes follow the connection and she studies the back of his hand.
He decides to surprise her by starting out the conversation in a positive way, it was a question he didn't even know the answer to but he was more than a little curious.
"You know, you never told me." He can see her eyebrows furrow in confusion, but she doesn't look up or say a word. "You never told me about the moment you knew you loved me." Just as he suspected she turns her head to look at him, somewhat puzzled he hadn't started to talk about the thing that was now bothering her more than him. She doesn't smile, but she looks somewhat relieved.
She turns and looks back out the window. She's silent for a moment before she speaks, as if she's trying to picture it in her mind all over again.
"It was the night of my birthday party." She tells him simply, at first. "I had no reason to even want to be there. I remember putting on that dress and looking at myself in the mirror and contemplating just locking the door and staying upstairs because I wasn't in the mood to socialize or celebrate. Then you walked in." The smile finally appears and she shakes her head. "And, like you always do you made it better. I had told you not to get me anything and you promised me you wouldn't, but secretly I was excited when you pulled that box out of your back pocket. I didn't want you to go through any trouble for me, but you didn't listen and I have to say, I was so surprised when you opened it and my necklace was sitting there in your hand. It wasn't the fact that you brought it back to me, or that you put the thought into giving me something. It was the fact that it symbolized something between Stefan and I, it represented hope and you still brought it back." She turns her head to look at him, happy tears in her eyes. "That was the most selfless I've ever seen you and even though it confused me and it was wrong at the time, I knew without a doubt I loved you. It took me a really long time to admit it, because even after we were together and Stefan and I were just history, I still felt awful for thinking of those feelings I had for you while I was still with him."
He was somewhat surprised by her confession. He hadn't a clue it had been that early in their friendship, he had been suspecting it was only a recently when she felt it. He can see the difference in her features, they were softer and some of the sadness had left when she was done reminiscing.
"It's so weird to say it." She tells him. "But I sort of miss those days, because even though we were still dealing with so much, life seemed…easier. We were all together, not like things are now. I feel like we all lost ourselves. As strange as it sounds, you and Bonnie were the ones that held us all together. You took care of us and I didn't realize until you were gone how much. You were always the one that faced our problems head on, you always took it upon yourself to fix things and I just started to expect it, that Damon would save the day and everything would be okay. When you were gone, everything fell apart, including me."
"I'm going to fix it." He tells her in complete seriousness. Here he was, jumping right back into making things better temporarily until the next challenge came along. When he was focused he was so very good at it. He was good at manipulating, would kill without hesitation for the people he loved, wouldn't stop until he knew the love of his life was safe and as happy as the situation would allow.
She squeezes his hand and nods. "I know you will, Damon. I'm still sorry about…"
"Elena, I know." He tells her. "You made a mistake. How am I supposed to hold it against you when I've made so many of my own? I made a mistake when I took advantage of you last night and there's no excuse for that because that's not how I want to treat you, I love you too damn much." He tells her as he pushes her hair behind her ear. "I'm sorry too."
She nods slightly and he brings her left hand up to his lips, kissing her knuckles and catching a bit of her ring in as well. He wraps his arms around her and pulls her into his side, giving her a messy hug, causing her to laugh.
"I need you to do something for me." He tells her.
"What is it?"
He places a kiss on the top of her head and rests his chin there.
"I need you to invite Caroline over."
He had every intention of finding out just what type of information Caroline was feeding Stefan, and if he was giving her anything in return. If there was one person he knew Stefan still cared about, it was Caroline Forbes.
As always, thanks for reading. Please, let me know what you think.