AN: I want to thank you all so much for the lovely reviews, I'm really feeling the love here! I would also like to thank the Guest reviewers, particularly Elisa: I've already corrected my mistake, thank you for pointing that out!

For all those that were waiting for more Delena scenes, this chapter has a healthy dose of them so enjoy it! Unfortunately this chapter hasn't been edited by the amazing Short on words so if you catch any mistake, please tell me so I can correct it. I want to offer you guys the best I have when it come to writing, but unfortunately, even though I've been studying English for years, I still make some mistakes.

PS: there is a quote from Shingeki No Kyojin, one of the sources of inspiration for this story, in this chapter so if you find it you'll get virtual Christmas cookies!


Chapter 7 – Walls And Dreams

We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate.

- Amy Tan -

Damon had been staring at the ceiling for the better part of an hour that morning. He was usually and early riser, waking up when the sun started peeking into his room from the floor length windows right in front of his bed. He really wasn't one to just lay around in bed after waking up, it just seemed pointless to him to waste time simply doing nothing. This morning, however, he figured he could spend a little time doing nothing but thinking.

He lightly drummed the fingers of both hands against his pajama clad stomach, furrowing his brows as his mind went to the night before. He couldn't stop thinking about the fact that Elena had been sneaking in at two in the morning and, judging by her catlike movements, she clearly didn't want to get caught. He really wanted to believe that she had done nothing suspicious, that she had just felt the need to breathe some fresh air, yet he couldn't help the little voice in his head that told him she was hiding something.

He sighed, turning on his side hugging one of his pillows close to his chest. The natural distrust cultivated in him by his family told him that maybe Elena could be a spy, maybe she had been up at that hour because she had met with her boss to pass him information on Klaus, or on Damon himself. His chest constricted painfully at the thought that she had been lying to him all along. Had he really been so blind that he hadn't seen what was right in front of him? Had his loneliness made him so ready to accept the friendship of the first person, outside of his family, that treated him with kindness?

Damon shut his eyes. He just didn't get it. He couldn't, for the life of him, reconcile the idea of Elena being a spy with the image of the beautiful, gentle woman that lately was in his every thoughts. It was simply impossible. He refused to think that she had been using him all along to get closer to the Mikaelsons. She couldn't be the kind of person that would prey on his emotions, on his desire for companionship. As much as he wracked his brain in search of an answer, he just had no way to know the truth. In the end he could do nothing more than watch how things would go. He would keep what he'd seen the other night to himself and he would keep an eye on Elena.

Knowing he could do nothing more about the current situation, he quickly dressed himself and went down for breakfast. Once he reached the kitchen he filled a bowl with cereals and poured some milk in it. When he went to sit down in the living room to watch some TV while eating, he froze. There, on the couch he usually sat on, was his whole family.

"Rebekah!" exclaimed Damon with a happy smile growing on his lips.

The blonde vampire turned toward him, a smile mirroring his own painted on her lips. She gestured for him to sit down between her and Klaus, while Elijah stood up and moved to sit on an armchair nearby. Once on the couch, Damon set his bowl of cereals down on the coffee table before letting himself be hugged by Rebekah. He had missed her so much. When the two separated, they let themselves revel in each other's presence.

"I though you weren't going to come back until next month." Said Damon. Rebekah had left soon after Elena had accepted the job as security agent. The two of them had probably spoken to each other only once.

Rebekah shrugged her shoulders, "That was the original plan, but I finished what I had to do and figured I should come home to see my favorite men."

"So now we are your favorite men, are we?" Intervened Klaus, a sly smile on his face. "Just a month ago you were telling me how horrible I was for canceling your party."

It was rare seeing Klaus in such a good mood and Damon decided to enjoy the playfulness of the Original. By Elijah's quirked lips and raised brow, it was clear that the elder brother was thinking the exact same thing. By now he was used to his siblings bantering about everything, even the most silly things. Still, it was good seeing his family in such a relaxed atmosphere.

"Oh, shush brother." Silenced him Rebekah. "Canceling that party must have been one of the stupidest ideas you've ever had. A little bit of fun wouldn't kill you. Elijah on the other end..." She smirked in the direction of her older brother.

Elijah lazily smiled before answering, "I enjoy a good party once in a while," he retorted, "or did you forget who helped organizing Woodstock?"

Damon chuckled, listening as they threw comebacks at each other. These were the moments he really treasured, when he could feel the love shared by the four of them flowing through his body. Most people would have found it odd for a human to live with three vampires as family members. Damon considered himself lucky. Yes, none of them was perfect, even the honorable Elijah had done horrible things in his life, but Damon felt only love and acceptance coming from them. Rebekah had once told him that he had a talent for spotting the good in people, and maybe she had been right. It wasn't that he turned a blind eye to their faults, he just saw the good in all of them and when you see the good in others, you start seeing them under a new light.

Once the three Originals had finally stopped teasing each others, Rebekah turned toward Damon who was happily slurping the cereals he had previously put aside.

"So, Damon," she started, giving him her full attention, "has anything happened while I was away?"

Damon thought about it, munching on his cereals while he collected his thoughts. "I've almost finished a sonata I started composing a couple of weeks ago," he said, putting down the empty bowl, "and Klaus helped me finish some of the drawings you liked."

"Perfect, maybe you could show them to me sometime." She was always eager to see his newest creations. Damon had a real gift when it came to artistic creation.

"You didn't tell me you were composing a piece." Spoke up Elijah, his eyebrows settled into a frown.

"Well," started Damon uncertainly, "it's just an experiment and I didn't want to bother you with it." Damon hoped that Elijah would stop asking him questions. The truth was that he had been composing that sonata for Elena, hoping to surprise her with his gift.

Elijah stared at him for a moment before speaking. "Nonetheless, I would like to hear it once it's completed."

Before Damon could come up with an answer to that request, after all he wanted Elena to be the first one to listen to it, Klaus intervened.

"Come now, brother," he said with a shrug of his shoulders, "if Damon wants to keep this for himself, just leave him be. An artist should never feel pressured into exposing his masterpiece if he doesn't wish to."

After those words, he subtly turned toward the young man and quickly winked at him with an amused glint in his eyes. Damon bowed his head at him, silently thanking him for stopping that line of questioning. He wasn't embarrassed at the thought of performing in front of Elijah, the two of them had played together lots of times, but this felt like something private, something between only him and Elena.

The four of them went on talking for quite sometime. There was nothing important to discuss, they just reveled in each others presence. It was rare, lately, for them to be all together: Rebekah liked to travel, saying that she just couldn't stay put for too long and Klaus was always busy managing his kingdom, as he called it. Only Elijah spent most of the time in the Mansion, probably because he liked to keep and eye on his younger brother and because he wanted to keep company to Damon. So Damon felt overjoyed at the possibility of spending time with his four favorite people.

When in the afternoon he went into the garden to wait for Elena, he was still in a happy mood. He leisurely made his way toward a wooden bench positioned at the foot of one of the most majestic trees in their garden. While just outside the Mansion the were only low bushes of roses and other plants, when one kept walking toward the outside, the garden turned into a regular forest. Elena and Damon had decided early on to meet underneath the protection offered by the trees, where they could be a little more shielded from prying eyes.

Damon sat down, closed his eyes and threw back his head, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his skin. Even though the leaves of the tree blocked the majority of the light, some rays managed to penetrate the thick foliage, giving him the sensation of being in another world; a world made of lights and shadows dancing around him at the rhythm of the wind softly moving the branches of the tree.

While he sat there, surrounded by the chirping of the birds, Damon wondered if Elena would come at all. Granted, he had managed to briefly inform her of his success in stopping Klaus from retaliating against her, but what if that hadn't been enough? He wouldn't blame her if she decided to call it quit, not wanting to incur in Klaus's anger once again. However, while he would understand her, he secretly hoped she wouldn't give up so easily. He didn't want to go back to a world without her, without her laugh, her smile and her kind warm eyes. He needed her. There was no going back anymore.

Soft footsteps on his left made him open his eyes, turning toward the direction of the sound. His heart leaped in his throat when he saw Elena approaching him. The light streaming through the leaves, gave her an ethereal quality, making her appear even more beautiful than she normally was. Damon unconsciously liked his lips wondering, not for the first time, what it would feel like to kiss her. He blushed when she locked eyes with him, a smile twisting her lips, fearing that she had somehow heard what he was thinking.

"Hey." Smiled at him Elena, moving to sit down next to him.

"Hey." Answered him in a breathy whisper. He cleared his throat upon hearing his own voice. "I was unsure if you would come."

Elena turned to him with a frown. "Why wouldn't I come?" She asked as if what he had just said was preposterous.

Damon twisted his hands in his lap. "Well, you know," he haltingly said, lowering his eyes, "with the Klaus thing I thought you wouldn't want to risk it again." He managed to say, "I wouldn't blame you." He tried to reassure her.

A punch on his arm made him raise his eyes to meet hers. She was regarding him with an infuriated expression, as if she felt insulted by his words.

"How can you even think that?" She gritted out, her hand still clenched in a fist, "Do you really think so little of me, that you'd believe I would bail on you for such a silly thing?"

When she saw him massaging his arm where she had hit him, looking at her with wide shocked eyes, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm down. She was still a little rattled from her mission to save Jacob and, hearing Damon insinuating that she would abandon him like that, just made her blood boil. When she felt more like herself, she opened her eyes and turned to him.

"I would never bail on you. We're in this together." She said, resting her hand on his knee. "I'm sorry for the punch, I guess I'm still a little upset about yesterday's mission."

Damon exhaled a relieved breath at her words, reassured by her admission that she wouldn't just leave him alone. However, upon seeing her troubled eyes, his smile waned a bit. He didn't like seeing her worried, in his opinion a smile should have always been on her lips. When she removed her hand from his knee, he immediately felt the loss of her touch. He moved a bit closer to her and, swallowing against his natural shyness, he decided to attempt at comforting her. He wasn't sure how that worked, he'd never had anyone to console, but when Rebekah comforted him it didn't seem that hard. You just had to listen and offer all of your support.

"Do you want to talk about it?" He gently asked her, trying to not make her feel obligated to talk to him. "I'm not sure if I can be of help, but I'd like to try." He minutely smiled, feeling like he had said the right thing.

For a while Elena just looked straight in front of her, not sure what to say. Damon was starting to think that she would never answer him. A part of him didn't want to push the issue, if she didn't want to talk about what was troubling her, it was her choice. But another part of him felt disappointed, he really thought they had gotten close in the last month. He wanted to help her, just as she had helped him. She had not given up, even when he had tried to discourage her from pursuing a friendship with him, so he didn't want to give up either.

"I hate this job sometimes." She whispered as if talking to herself. "I hate having to hurt innocent people for reasons that I don't think are right."

"What do you mean?" Asked Damon, wanting to understand her. She had once told him that it had been her choice to apply for a job at the Mansion, so this hate she was professing came as something new.

She turned to look at him and she looked tired. For the first time Damon could see the weight of her years on her shoulders. He knew she was a vampire, older than what she looked, but he had never thought of her as old. Right now, though, that was the only definition that came to mind.

"You probably don't know this, but things weren't always like this." She revealed to him. "There had never been a king of the supernatural before Klaus. Our kind used to be free of doing as they pleased, no rules to follow, no one to respond to. You may think it a chaotic world, but at least we owned our choices."

Damon understood what she was talking about. Elijah had told him a bit about how things used to be before he was born. He had never cared too much about it, he had been born in a different world so he saw no use in worrying about the old one. Elena, though, had obviously been used to how things used to be.

"Sometimes I envy the humans." She was whispering now, as if she was confessing her deepest secret to him. "They live in a much simpler world, with much simpler problems."

Damon wasn't sure what he was supposed to say. How do you comfort a vampire who's having a midlife crisis? He wondered if Elena would really prefer being human. When he thought about it, he could not imagine her as such. She was a vampire, that was the only Elena he knew and liked. Some things could not be changed, nor should they. When Damon looked at her he saw a perfectly functioning vampire. She never lost control, she still had her humanity, something he could not say about the countless vampires in the Guard Corp, so why would she want to change the beautiful creature she was?

"I like you now, just the way you are." He simply said to her, watching as she turned toward him with wide eyes full of surprise. "I don't know why you would envy the humans, Elena. To me, you seem like the poster girl for functioning vampire. You have complete control over your hunger and you still have morals and a conscience."

"But I've killed innocent people." Reminded him Elena. Because the man you love like a father ordered me to, she silently added.

"Yes, you did," answered Damon without hesitation, "but you feel bad about it, don't you?" When she nodded he continued, "I'm not saying that that fixes everything, but I can tell you, without shadow of a doubt, that the other members of the Guard Corp don't regret what they did. They're not as human as you are." He was staring her deeply in the eyes, willing to convey how much he believed in his words.

Elena felt like she could cry. What had she done to be worth of such blind trust? She never knew he considered her in such high regards and it made her want to never let him down. If he thought her to still have her humanity, then she would fight to never lose it. For him. For this man who believed in her as much as Alaric did.

Damon smiled when he saw her perk up a bit. "Plus," he decided to go on in the hopes of seeing a smile come up to her lips, "being a vampire doesn't sound so bad to me. I mean, you're fast, strong, your blood heals not only yourself but others as well," he counted off his fingers, "and you get to see the whole world. Most people only see some places during their lifetime, but you get to see all of it, in all its beauty."

Elena saw his eyes shining bright when he started thinking about all the places he would have liked to see. She had noticed he always got excited when talking about the outside world. Every time she caught him watching the TV, he was always choosing programs that talked about the most exotic places to see, or about the various cultures all around the world.

"You really like traveling, don't you?" She asked him, interested in this aspect of him.

Damon huffed throwing a sad smile her way. "I'd like to," he pointed out, "if I could leave this Mansion. I've been living her for as long as I can remember."

Elena's breath caught at his involuntary admission. He had been here his whole life? Did that mean that he had never left? She couldn't even imagine living like that. Damon didn't seem to notice the anger that was starting to gather inside of her, he simply went on talking.

"Actually, I remember living in another place when I was little. I think it was in the mountains, or something." He took on a pensive expression before shrugging his shoulders. "But then, I think I was six at the time, Klaus decided to move here because..." He trailed off when he saw her clenching her jaw, her eyes filled with anger looking at him.

"E-Elena?" He stuttered, a little scared by her fury.

"You've never seen anything outside this Mansion?" She gritted out through clenched teeth. At his fearful nod, she could only ask, "Why?"

Damon swallowed heavily, before finding the courage to answer, "It's for my protection." He said in a little voice. "The outside world can be cruel and it's better for me to stay here, where Klaus and the others can be sure nothing happens to me."

Elena got even more angry. He sounded like he was reciting something he had been told to memorize. She could not understand this level of cruelty. Nor could she understand how it was possible that Damon seemed okay with all this. He was essentially a prisoner and he didn't even care.

"You're just okay with this?" She had to ask, "You're going to let them keep you captive without even batting an eye?" Damon lowered his gaze as if ashamed. "Don't you have a dream that you want to turn into reality? Or do you want to live the rest of your life like this?" She gestured with her hand to their surrounding, the luxurious garden looking nothing more than a prison now that she knew how Damon lived, "Like a bird in a golden cage?"

Damon raised his legs, hugging them with his arms. He leaned his chin on top of his knees, looking scared of her and resigned to his future in equal parts. Elena, realizing her violent emotions were doing more damage than good, breathed deeply to calm down. She didn't want him to be scared of her, that was the opposite of what she wanted. She wanted him to be comfortable in her company, to feel like he could talk to her about anything. She just found difficult to reign in her emotions at the defeat she saw in him.

"I do have a dream, you know?" His voice was so soft that she had to focus to hear him.

She moved closer to him. "What is it, Damon?" If he still had a dream, it meant that he still wasn't completely resigned to his fate.

"I'm not going to tell you. You would laugh at me." He sounded so sure of it that Elena wondered if he, perhaps, had really been laughed at for his dream.

"I would never do such a thing, Damon." And it was the truth; she would never laugh at anyone's dream. "I've known you for just a little more than a month, and I already know what a wonderful man you are." She saw him looking at her from the corner of his eye, a light blush on his cheek appearing at her words. "I'm sure your dream is as wonderful as you are"

Damon touched his forehead to his knees, debating whether to tell her or not. This felt like a turning point in their relationship. He could trust her and tell her his dream, opening up to her like he had never done with anyone else, not even his family, or he could stay silent and put an end to everything. He gripped his legs tightly, mustering up the courage to do what he had to. He only had one option really, when he thought about it. He was already in too deep to turn back now. He sighed deeply.

"Okay." He finally said and Elena felt elated that he wanted to trust her. "But I can't tell you. I have to show you."

After his words, he rose up and took her hand. He started in the direction that lead to the deepest part of the forest, dragging her behind him. Elena wondered what he wanted to show her. As far as she knew there was nothing remarkable in that direction, only the white wall that delimited the Mikaelsons' property. She had walked past that wall so many times during her turn of patrolling, she had lost count but she had never noticed anything out of the ordinary. Maybe Damon knew some secret passageway that led to the thing he wanted to show her.

"I hope you're not planning on killing me and burying my body out here." She joked, trying to lighten the mood.

When the only answer she got from Damon was the corner of his mouth slightly twisting up, she decided to just remain silent. She focused instead on the feeling of his hand clasping hers. His skin was so smooth and soft that she was a bit jealous of it. She wasn't surprised by it, though. He had the hands of an artist, used only to the feeling of a paint brush or the keys of a piano. She absentmindedly thought that she liked this about him, his talent for music and drawing. They gave him a certain cultured air that she found incredibly attractive.

"We're here." Damon's voice infiltrated in her musings.

Just like she expected, there was nothing but that wall. It was made of white concrete, thirteen feet tall. It stood there, massive, towering over them with its silent built, a silent sentinel. Only the trees could rise higher then it, their tops standing out against it. Elena turned to Damon, waiting for him to explain why they were there. He let her hand go and walked closer to the wall. His head tilted back, allowing him to look at the wall in its entirety.

"You asked me what my dream is," he said, his back to her, "this is it." He rested his let hand against the concrete. "I want to know what's on the other side of this wall."

Elena got closer to him but did not move to touch him. She knew he was feeling vulnerable right now, and she didn't want to make this harder for him than it already was.

"I know that there are only trees on the other side of it," he went on, his voice getting stronger the longer he talked, "I can see them from the window in my bedroom, and I think there's a river not far from here." He closed his eyes, listening to the silence. "If I concentrate I can hear the distant sound of running water."

Elena didn't need to concentrate to hear it. Her vampire hearing told her that there was, in fact, a river close by. But Damon couldn't know that, he could just rely on intuition. Elena couldn't imagine living confined in one place, never to leave it. Only now could she start to understand the depth of Damon's loneliness. For a man as bright as he was, never leaving this place was pure torture.

"But there is so much more than that in this world!" He exclaimed, the fingers of his left hand clawing at the wall. "Plains of sand, frozen earth, flaming water...The man who will get to see all of that, will be the freest man of all!"

Elena's left hand covered his, her fingers intertwining with his, while her free hand came to rest between his shoulder blades. She could do nothing for him right now, no amount of words could offer him the freedom he desired. However, she could not stop the words that came tumbling out of her lips.

"One day, I will take you with me to see the world beyond this wall." She told him, knowing that what she was promising would be hard to realize. "I swear to you that I will, Damon."

He turned to look at her. When he saw with what determination she was speaking, he felt the need to tell her how much her words meant to him. He wanted to tell her everything he was feeling, maybe she would be able to explain to him why his heart was beating so furiously in his chest, why his stomach felt as if thousands of butterflies were flying around in it. But he couldn't get the words past the lump in his throat.

In the end he just nodded, believing in her and in the sincerity of her words.