…What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.
-William Stafford, from "For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid"
Chapter 8. "Red Flags"
It was Tuesday morning, so Stefan was where he went Tuesday mornings: the right side of the loveseat in the corner of Jasper Rhine's office in the attic room of Ric's house. Today, he had a mug of coffee in hand, his navy winter coat tossed on the seat beside him. Jasper was long since retired as a psychologist, so he no longer split up his workday into fifty-minute hours. They often talked straight through until lunch. Over the years, they'd developed something of a pattern. They would talk about Stefan's mental health, sort through what was on his mind. They'd talk about business, since Jasper managed the bar for them. And then they'd talk about whatever one or the other of them was reading.
But this morning would play out differently.
"Elena called," the old man told him through the pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth, as he lowered himself into his beat-up leather chair.
The doc did it all easily; becoming a vampire had taken all the creak out of his octogenarian joints, the ache from his muscles. He'd started smoking the pipe twenty years ago, after he'd seen wizards and hobbits do it in Lord of the Rings. ("I just knew it was for me," he'd told Stefan years ago, and Stefan had laughed harder than he had in ages, to know this gruff, austere old Lutheran man was deliberately mimicking Bilbo and Gandalf.)
That it was only eight-thirty in the morning didn't stop Jasper now that he was a vampire whose risk of mouth cancer was nil.
"She wants to see me," the old doc continued. "Says Damon has made it a condition of even considering letting her carry the baby."
Stefan grunted. He knew all of that. He'd been the one to suggest it to his brother, and he'd been there when Damon had shouted her down about it. Shouting was the wrong word, actually. Just chided, mocked, scolded, nitpicked, and then started outright ridiculing. He can't tell that you're crazy just by looking, Elena. It'll take at least three minutes worth of conversation. "She's not gonna be your best patient," was all he said.
Jasper sighed. "None of you would win awards. But yes. I'm guessing the self-sacrificing savior of Mystic Falls could be on the Damon end of the 'impossible to treat' spectrum."
"She'll put Damon to shame."
"So glad you two commended her to me." Jasper looked down at the tablet on which he jotted down observations during his session and frowned at whatever his last notes were. "Well. But how are you doing with her return, Stefan? It has to have thrown you."
"I…" Stefan shifted uneasily as the understatement hit him.
Normally what he liked about these sessions was that he didn't have to hide anything, dress it up, or pretend. It felt so good to just say the truth, uncensored, unmodulated. Jasper knew every dark thought he'd ever had, had heard every black desire. He'd listened compassionately while Stefan described the faces and last words of people he'd killed as a ripper. Had asked questions about what it felt like to kill them, before, during, and after, designed to help Stefan understand what had driven him, how it had changed him.
And the doc didn't pretend that Stefan or any of them were innocent of sociopathy. In fact, Jasper's insights about the ways in which vampire society was pathological were a big part of what had inspired Stefan to start thinking and talking about big-picture reform. Once he'd gotten to work saving himself.
Now, though. This was more shameful than the ripper stuff. Than his fights with Damon, his anger at his parents. Than resenting Caroline, after the abortion. Than all of it put together.
"I think I'm still in love with her," he said finally. Flatly. Without looking up.
Jasper was quiet a while. Not unusual, that. "With Elena?"
"Yes. Of course with Elena."
Of course? What about Iris? And how many years has it been, Stefan? How many more will it take you to get over this?
But all the doc said was, "OK. What do you mean by that?"
"I mean… I mean that…" Stefan usually liked this part, this cracking open of feelings that otherwise rolled around like barrels on a low deck of a ship in a storm. But this one felt like it was smashing open on his inner walls. "Well, that I want to be around her. Almost compulsively. I have to make myself give her space. I feel like I'm always, I don't know, always looking for her. And that what I want is to touch her, to hold her, to be with her. To protect her, which is impossible right now because pretty much every new thing she learns about the years she was gone, hurts her. I want to just be able to talk to her, and keep talking. To hear her and then hear more. To see her look at me the way…" Stefan swallowed, because his train of thought had forked, and down one road, his sentence was the way she used to and the other the way she looks at Damon.
"And you're upset. That you feel this way."
Stefan let the coffee he was drinking sit on his tongue for moment. Though he always drank it black, it tasted especially bitter this morning. His mood, he suspected, more than the brew. "As far as she's concerned, I'm the dear friend and ex-lover she rejected in favor of Damon, and Damon's a guy who broke her heart a couple of days ago. Never mind that it's been many years, for the rest of us. She's in the middle of a breakup. She's raw."
"You don't want to compete with Damon again."
That wasn't a question, but Stefan answered it anyway, immediately and resolutely. "I won't."
"So you're upset to have these feelings because you think she won't return them."
"No. No, that's not it at all. She can't handle this. She doesn't need to be burdened with my feelings on top of everything else right now."
Jasper clicked and unclicked his pen on the red leather arm of his chair. "I see. And do you?"
"Do I… need to be burdened with my own feelings?"
"Yes. Given everything else that's happening right now."
"Do I have a choice?"
"Well. Isn't that always the question?" Jasper lips quirked up, but it wasn't a smile. "Do you remember what I diagnosed you with, when we first met?"
"Of course." Stefan was unlikely to forget. It had felt like he'd gotten a key to the code that had been bugging his whole system. "You said I had one of the worst cases of PTSD you'd ever seen. And that since you used to work for the V.A., I should be flattered."
"And so you did. You had seen so many people die."
"Killed so many people."
"As usual, your way of facing facts leaves no room for being generous with them."
Ignoring Jasper's advice about self-forgiveness as usual, Stefan ran a hand over his jaw. Was surprised at his own stubble. How had he forgotten to shave this morning? That's right. He'd heard Elena getting ready, had gone out for a run, hadn't wanted to crowd her.
Every moment was already intense, he could tell.
"There were a lot of parts of the diagnosis," he said slowly. "I thought PTSD was all night terrors and flashbacks and jumping when someone drops a book on the ground. Something only veterans got."
Jasper's brows shot up. "You also keep forgetting that you're a veteran."
Stefan scowled. "It wasn't even the most violent thing I did in the twentieth century," he muttered in reference to his service in Europe in the Second World War.
The doc seemed to want to argue, but decided to stay on topic. "What would you say your symptoms were?"
Stefan didn't hesitate. As soon as he'd gotten a diagnosis, he'd started researching post-traumatic stress, and writing about it for himself, trying to be intentional in treating his own problems. Isolation, Sense of Danger, Guilt, Self-doubt, Memory Displacement, Hopelessness. It had all seemed so simple, on a bullet-pointed list. Each point had represented a huge chasm between the man he wanted to be and the man he was.
He spoke his symptoms more literally than the list had. "I held myself aloof from everyone. Was—was afraid of them getting to close. Because I felt like I was a danger to them. I worried about hurting people, about people getting hurt." He touched that stubble again, wishing he'd been willing to just go in and get his razor, shave and have a normal morning. Elena. What am I going to do with you, this time? "I didn't trust my instincts or gut reactions. I felt guilty. I was emotionally numb, not feeling all of my feelings. I had memory problems sometimes. And I didn't have any hope it would improve."
Jasper nodded. "We haven't revisited that diagnosis in a long time, Stefan. Should we now?" The old man liked to involve him in the direction of their treatment. "Do you think some of those symptoms are… persistent?"
Now Stefan's mouth felt dry. "You think I'm… what. Having some kind of relapse? That my feelings for Elena are a symptom of it?"
"No, no. Not exactly. But many of your most traumatizing events, including the one you told me about the first time you ever came here, involved Elena Gilbert. More importantly, your relationship took shape at a crucial time in your life, when you were transitioning out of decades of comparative solitude into being a functional brother, friend, and partner. They were character-establishing, all part of your response to a need for belonging you'd been fighting for… well, pretty much your whole life. Hence they're building blocks of how you see yourself now."
"OK…" Stefan thought about that. It didn't sit well. "So you just think I can't know what I really feel for her." You had to know Stefan well, as Jasper did, to hear the thread of anger in his tone, and so to intuit the thick vein of it that he was suppressing.
Jasper leaned forward. "Just the opposite. I believe you love her, intensely and almost overwhelmingly. That feeling is most definitely real. I just think it's important that you remember that you've loved others, now, and done it rather well. Because this love may not be healthy for you. And that's what I want you to consider." Stefan let those words settle in before Jasper landed his next blow. "Tell me again about that night. The night you told me about when you first came to my office." Jasper believed he should be transparent when he was fishing, so he added, "I'm wondering if you see it differently, now that you've seen Elena again."
Stefan sucked in air through his teeth instinctively. The story still gave him a little trouble with breathing. Especially when he thought about it unexpectedly. "We haven't talked about that in years. I don't even dream about it anymore. Usually."
"So tell me."
Stefan ran his hand up and down his abdomen, felt his muscles jump under his own hand. His stomach was churning. You can't change it, Stefan. Just face it. "Well. It was the end of a bad few months. I'd gone off with Klaus on a killing spree. My third."
"You mean that you made a difficult bargain to save Damon's life."
"Don't… don't dress it up for me." Stefan knew that some of his personal narratives were wonky—that some of the stories he told himself about his past were needlessly dark, and told in ways meant to punish himself, and do it in ways which would satisfy a conscience which refused absolution. He knew he could be kinder to his past self.
Just not about this.
"So I had killed those seventeen people." Stefan knew all of their names, now, and Jasper did, too, if only deep in his notes. "And then almost killed Elena—bit her at the dance. That night, I wanted to drink her dry. I had wanted to drink deeply of her for so long…" he trailed off. "I crossed every line. Hated myself. Especially hated what I'd liked about doing all that. And so it took a lot for me to come back."
"By the night at the river, though, you were back. Had been for a little while."
"Yeah, but obviously things were not the same. Between me and Elena. She knew I still loved her. But I couldn't trust myself near her—even less than I had before—and she… let's just say she had realized Damon was actually the safe option, at least subconsciously, by then."
Jasper made a low sound in his throat. "Come on. We've been through this, Stefan."
"Right. Yes. Elena's comparisons between me and Damon don't have to be mine. I know that. I do." Stefan scowled. "You're right, she's set me straight back fourteen goddamn years."
Jasper held up a quelling hand, albeit one still wrapped around his ballpoint pen. "This is you, Stefan. It's not her. So just tell me. That night in particular. Why were you on the bridge?"
Stefan looked down at his hands, which seemed to have folded themselves together without his asking. "I wasn't. It's not that far from the cemetery. Not far for our ears, anyway. And I'd gone to the cemetery to see my father."
"He was on your mind that night?"
"He was always on my mind, in those days. I hated him. I was terrified I was just like him—you know all this, you're the one who told me it was… transference, right? I was transferring my self-hatred onto him so I could deal with it. I was guilty about what I'd done to him. And the damnedest thing was, in those days, just after that ripper spree, it was the first time I'd realized there was a ripper in him, too." He took a breath. This was difficult. It helped him forgive his younger self, actually, to know that it was still difficult after all this time. "So I went there, to the crypt, trying to get a handle on everything that had happened, how much I wanted to hate Damon, and yeah, how much I hated myself. How everything had gotten so out of control. And that's when I heard that colossal splash. Matt's truck hitting the water. Like it was straight out of the past. A year before, all over again."
"And you ran for the river and dove straight in."
"Of course." Stefan would never count all the times he'd used his powers for good—had run into fires, stopped car collisions with his body—against all the times he hadn't.
"Of course." Jasper kept his face carefully blank. "And so it's all on your mind—your father and the ways he failed you and you failed him, her father asking you to save her the previous year. When you found Matt and Elena. Like your very own nightmare."
"Yeah. A nightmare. That's exactly right. And you know the rest. Elena—she didn't want me to save her. She kept shaking her head—no, no—and pointing at him. And I… God. I still hate thinking about this, even after all we've…"
Jasper studied him thoughtfully as he took a puff of his pipe. "Come back to the present. Tell me something. If Damon and Matt were in the path of a train, and you could only save one of them, who would you save?"
"Matt." He didn't even hesitate. "Damon could save himself."
"But let's say that he can't."
Stefan buried his face in his hands. "Damon, then. I would save Damon."
"You're sure of it."
"Yes. I mean, I'm still, you know, I'm not my brother. He wouldn't take even a single second to think. It's simple for him—just save the one you love best, no questions asked, because the decision is really just raw hedonism, just straight animal instinct. And maybe not stopping to think would give him the extra split second he needed to save Matt, too."
"He's not a superhero."
"Yes, he is." Stefan paused, had a revelation. "We all are, sometimes."
"Yes… I suppose you're right." Jasper scribbled something on the pad on the arm of his chair. "But you're saying, even today, you would still take a moment to think about it."
Stefan blinked. He loved that phrasing—loved how it revealed to him that he was the one "taking a moment," when he always felt like the moment was taking him. I pause for reasons, he thought, drawing in a quick breath. The next thought was even more liberating. The reasons have changed.
"You know, that night, with Elena, I was still so afraid of the beast within me. So I screwed up. I couldn't trust my own judgment. And that meant that I let her demons do the choosing." Why did I do it? Why did I let her die? That was the tortured question he'd brought to Jasper's office twelve years before. And this, this was the answer that had come over time. He spoke the truth that had made him a monster again now. "So that night, I let her commit suicide. By my hands."
Jasper sighed, and Stefan heard what sounded like pity in it. Jasper felt the heaviness of the problem like he did. "You didn't know she was suicidal?" the doc asked finally.
"I should have figured it out. I mean, we all knew she was compassionate, self-sacrificing, and brave, but… The pattern beneath all of that was that she just didn't really believe she deserved to live as much as the rest of us. Wouldn't fight for her own life if there was a hint of a way to give it up on our behalf. I didn't realize it until later, but… I had opened the door. You know? There was a way out. But she didn't make a move for it, didn't even try to get her seatbelt off." Stefan shook his head. "She stayed in the car. Once Matt was safe, she insisted on drowning." He gritted his teeth to cage the memory of his terror. "And we all just went on, as though she hadn't killed herself, just because she happened to come back to life."
"Everyone else didn't know what had happened. You did."
"Yeah."
"And that moment changed your relationship."
"Oh, yeah. Completely, utterly. After that, I didn't trust myself or her. She had wanted to die. I let her. Damon was right. I was insane." He blew out a breath. "And so was she. But after that, I knew it."
Jasper was frowning now. "But what I don't understand is—you didn't think to tell Damon?"
Stefan scoffed at that. "Yeah, I can see it now. 'Damon, she needs a life raft. Keep telling her she's your reason to live so she keeps herself alive for you. It would be a big favor.' That would have gone over well."
"You thought Damon would save her."
"Damon would have pulled her out of the river first. He would have killed a dozen strangers to save her life, in those days, without blinking. He was so stopped up he wouldn't even have let himself feel regret. You didn't know him then, but… well, you can imagine."
"Indeed I can," Jasper murmured. And he had, many times, in endeavoring to understand the puzzles represented by this little clan of misfits. "But now, you're saying, you would choose to save her. If it happened again."
Stefan nodded slowly. "I still don't know if it's right, you know, ethically. I love Matt like family, and he would be dead now if I hadn't done what Elena asked." He looked up, met Jasper's deep brown eyes with deep-spring-clear green ones. "But I know what I did was unnatural. To let her choose. To bury what I wanted, to let the person I loved most die. At the time, I was so screwed up that I thought that maybe saving Elena wrong because I wanted it. But I don't feel that way anymore. About what I want."
"Give me some reasons you would give Elena if she asked why she could trust you with her life. Today." This was a game Jasper often played, to stage hypothetical conversations and force him to articulate positions he might not otherwise take.
Stefan thought for a while. "As long as my feeding schedule is relatively normal, I can walk through a burn unit without being terribly tempted to feed on anyone." He dug deeper. "I have put my life on the line for all of our friends a hundred times. I would die for any of them. For her. Of course I would. Any of us would, for each other."
"Is there any reason she should trust you more now than she would have back then?"
Stefan was already halfway to the realization that Jasper's question hinted at. Yes. Of course. I've become the man she used to believe I was. "You know, she told me once—'you should love the person who makes you want to live.' And what I would tell her is, she was wrong. Totally wrong. Was looking in the wrong place for a reason to live. She could trust me because… I want to live, now. Not for her, or for Caroline, or for my brother. For myself, because I'm a person who I know is worthy of all of those people's love, because there are things I want to do in the future, for them, with them, but also just for myself. It didn't used to be true. But she could trust me because I'd fight, and fight hard, for my own life, on its own terms, if my car went over a bridge."
"Do you think she can say the same?"
Stefan felt that question lodge in his chest and turn his lungs to rock. "I doubt it." That wasn't true. He knew she couldn't, knew that much hadn't changed.
You should love the person who makes you want to live. God, it sounded like such a sad joke. Elena had wanted so badly to have a reason to survive.
She'd loved only in order to make herself want to live.
Stefan had understood this. He had a doctorate in understanding the dynamics among himself, Damon, and Elena, he'd thought about them for so long. Damon will keep her alive, he'd told himself back then. And with some help, he had. Now, though….
"She fights for the rest of us, but if it were just for herself… I still don't think she'd believe she had anything to fight for." He sighed. "That's why I lean toward thinking Damon should let her carry the baby. She would fight to keep Damon and Bonnie's baby alive, and by extension herself. It would buy you some time."
"What, you think I can wave my magic wand and fix her if I have nine months?"
Stefan reached into the breast pocket inside his coat. He pulled out the card he always kept tucked there. "This isn't a magic wand," he said. Jasper Rhine, M.D., Ph.D., the card said, followed by an address in another town and an old phone number with only ten digits.
Jasper, well into his retirement, had come to town to look after Alaric a while, more than a decade before. He'd met Stefan for the first time, down at the Grille, on one of Stefan's black nights. Talked to him. Drank with him. Saw him through. Then gave him an old business card. On the back he'd written, I may not be as old as you, but I've seen my share of shit. Let me know if you're willing to take some help in dealing with yours.
It was the first time he'd sought help outside of their little clan since Elena had fallen asleep. It had taken all the courage and all the hope he could have mustered, to knock on Jasper's door.
"When you told me vampirism was just a chronic disease—that I was just a person with a disease who had to learn to manage it—that it was also the least of my troubles—you changed my life." Stefan leveled his eyes seriously with Doc Rhine's. "You can fix her. I know you can. Because you did it for me."
"Ha," Jasper snorted. "You're a work in progress at best."
"Don't I know it. But I wanna believe you can help her." Stefan got up now. "That this time she won't be able to just look away from her problems. She's downstairs, you know. In the kitchen. Pacing around. Nervous about what you'll see." He reached down for his jacket.
"I hear her, too." Jasper usually liked to end their sessions by testing him, and today was no exception. "What would you ask her to talk about, if you were me?"
Stefan didn't hesitate. "Ask her about the night she burned down the house that used to stand here."
He didn't wait for Jasper's response. He was ready to face what he'd avoided earlier this morning.
And he just, after all, wanted to see her. Fourteen years without being able to look into those eyes had been a long drought.
"No, Stefan. I don't think she's ready for that yet," the old man muttered to an empty room.
[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )(]
She might not have had vampire senses anymore, but Elena could recognize the footfalls of either Salvatore without a problem. So she heard Stefan come up behind her, but didn't bother to turn around. She was staring out Ric's kitchen window at the yard which had once been home to her old red wooden playset, to Jeremy's sandbox that had been painted like a turtle right down to the little feet, to her mother's vegetable garden, to her father's hostas and roses. Now it was home only to a deck which was bare except for a chipped old barbecue in need of scrubbing, and two weather-worn canvas loungers. The landscape was all but unrecognizable. Only the tree in the far northeast corner had escaped the blaze. A black oak, she thought. That was something.
"Damon and Ric spend evenings out there once in a while, watching the neighborhood, shooting the breeze," he said quietly, believing she was looking at the empty chairs.
She wasn't. Something else entirely was on her mind. "You know, Stefan, I've never asked, but I guess you guys must be millionaires."
Stefan reached around her for the coffee pot, still half full as he'd left it, refilled his cup. "Money's not really relevant when you can compel just about anyone to give you just about anything."
"I'm just saying. Why didn't you build a pool out here, or at least do some landscaping?"
"A big old pool on a teacher's salary?" Stefan shook his head. "It's Ric's house, remember. We didn't want people asking questions. I wish he would've fixed up the yard, though."
"Ric's house." She shook her head. "I wanted Jeremy to have it. The land, I mean."
"He came to me about selling it, Elena. Asked if I thought you'd mind. We bought it from him, me and Damon and Ric together, so he didn't have to worry about it not being there for you, when you woke up. Invested the fire insurance money for him. And he used the dividends to pay for graduate school, and the money from the land to put a down payment on his house up in Quebec." He paused a moment. "We tried, but he wouldn't just take our money when we offered it to him. He was furious when I paid his tuition one year, and didn't speak to us for months after he noticed Damon had been siphoning microdeposits into his checking account."
"He was raised right," Elena murmured.
"He sure was."
She tore her eyes away from the yard, looked at him with the light of challenge in her eyes. "Tell me about Jasper."
Stefan didn't hesitate. "Born and raised in northern California, spent the first half of his career working for Veteran's Affairs up in Oregon. Treating vets and their families at first. Then he went into private practice, specialized in disorders stemming from bereavement—depression, anxiety, things I don't understand. Attachment and fixation disorders. Stuff like that."
She took all that in, heard what Stefan wasn't quite saying. You should trust him. He's seen it all. "What happened to his family?"
"He had a daughter. Gwendolyn. Gwen, he calls her. She was killed—hit by a car crossing the street in Seattle. Around thirty years ago. She was about thirty herself, at the time. The grief nearly drove him mad, he told me. Almost destroyed his marriage, too. And his wife, Annie, she passed away… let's see. Less than a year before he came to Mystic Falls, so must be thirteen years ago, now. Cervical cancer, I think. We never met her." She heard the subtext again, here, even felt it. A little. He has lost as much as you have, Elena. "So he came out to visit the family he had left. Alaric is his great-nephew. His sister's grandson. When he found out about us, he took our backs when it counted. And then just…stayed."
"And now he's a vampire?"
"Yes. Only vampire I know who was a practicing vegetarian before he started drinking blood." Stefan drew a deep breath. "Caroline turned him. Not long after we lost the baby. Jasper was already pushing ninety, but said we'd given him a new lease on life, a new problem to solve—vampire mental health issues. Especially ours." He smiled wryly. "You might have noticed we've got plenty going 'round." He hitched himself up on the counter, took a pull from his coffee. Same coffee, but it tasted like cinnamon, this time. Damn it, Elena. I don't want this. Not now. "Damon and I were conflicted, and Ric was opposed to turning him. Dead set against it. But Caroline said he was one of us, and it was his choice. She was… Let's just say that, after the abortion, choice had become especially important to her."
Elena bit her lip. "You think you'll ever forgive her?" she asked quietly.
Stefan had had harder questions this morning. "Maybe not entirely," he said after a moment. "Anyway, not yet."
"What I don't understand," Elena returned, very softly, whispering as though she thought it meant Jasper wouldn't hear them, "is why you said at the end of your last journal that she was still the 'lightning in your veins.' When you can barely stand the sight of her."
"It's not like that, Elena." He reached over Elena's head, now, to get another coffee mug, this one for her. Poured it only three quarters full, to leave enough room for her almond milk. "I'm angry, sure, but Caroline is family. Forever. And our little clan is like any other family, Everyone plays a different part. Damon our hands and shoulders, Ric our intellect. I try to be our conscience. And so on."
"Do everyone," Elena said, fascinated. "What about Matt and Tyler and Jeremy? Bonnie? Iris and Jasper and Odette?"
Stefan leaned back on the cabinets. In his gut, he was charmed by this. It felt like old times, when he and Elena first started dating. She would challenge him with metaphors ("what colors and symbols would you put on a crest for each of the founding families and why?"). They would write each other joking notes about classmates, back and forth, write little fairytale stories about their friends—Bonnie as a unicorn, Tyler as a panting dog. He'd felt young—no, not young, just like his life was… interesting. Worth noticing.
So it was dangerous, but he let himself get drawn into the shine in her eyes. "Well, Matt's our... he's our feet. Just metaphorically. Connects us to the outside world, keeps us from being stuck in place. Tyler's our sense of adventure, the thing that sometimes makes us… daring. Jeremy's our curiosity, that's obvious. He's never had a problem he didn't end up in the middle of. Iris is our eyes, of course—she sees more than just the future—and Jasper's like our immune system, always policing, keeping us healthy from within. Odie's the family's memory, keeps our history, tells us when to remember to be cautious. And Bonnie…" he hesitated, weighed whether it would hurt her. Decided he was past that concern. "She's our center, the thing that holds it all together, keeps it all in balance. Our soul. It's not like we're not glad you're here, but—"
"No. I know. That's really… right. Wonderful." Elena surprised him by accepting the metaphors as plain fact. "And then there's Caroline. You're still in love with her, aren't you?"
"No," he smiled, and if his tone sounded rueful, Elena chose to ignore the reasons that might have sprung to her mind. "I'm not in love with Caroline. But she is the lightning in my veins—in all of ours, I think. She's our will, Elena. Our determination to carry on no matter what, and not just out of duty, but with actual joy." He shrugged, but not the nonchalant kind—the kind that said that what he was saying was actually too heavy for his shoulders, so he needed to carry it somewhere else. "Even if I haven't forgiven her, I understand her. And I trust her. She's everything I never believed a vampire could be."
I could never have been that, as a vampire, Elena thought to herself, stricken to feel a pang of jealousy welling up within her. And why not? Why was I such a terrible vampire? All that had to be different was drinking donated blood, right? There was an answer there somewhere deep in the dark at her core, but she never, ever reached in there and didn't now. So she asked her other question aloud. "And where do you think I fit into the clan, Stefan?"
He smiled. Met her eyes. Held them. "You're our heart, honey." He let his words linger just a little on the last word, and Elena felt them low in her stomach, which seemed to have a horde of small hungry butterflies fluttering in it, even as her heart lurched. "You're there in the reasons we find to love each other, to take care of each other. You're what makes us about more than ourselves." His voice went as gentle as it ever had, now. "Which is why you've got to start taking care of yourself, Elena."
"I'm trying," she breathed back, her stomach clenching again as he leaned very close to her… only to press the coffee mug into her hands, and fold her fingers around it. But he was close enough that she could feel his breath on her face when he spoke again.
"You're gonna wanna lie to Jasper."
She hadn't expected that, but she was used to dodging emotional blows. Her lashes shot down to screen her eyes. "What do you mean?"
"It'll seem like he sees too much. And then eventually it'll annoy you, what he doesn't see, what he misunderstands. You'll wanna test him, see if you can get away with lying to someone who you'll resent precisely because he's trying to understand you and you don't want to be understood, because then you'll have to confront yourself. Maybe have to change. So you're gonna wanna lie. I'm saying, it's kid stuff. Don't lie. You can trust him with the truth."
What do you see, Stefan? Coffee mug in her hands or no, her hands felt cold. "I didn't ask for Jasper to become my new best friend and high confessor, you know."
"No, but listen, Elena. He literally saved my life. Because I was honest with him." He paused for a long moment, seeming to debate with himself. The thing that won made his eyes turn liquid. "Elena, honey," he let himself say it one more time. "You can't keep lying to everyone forever."
An arsenal of her defenses sprang into places, weapons and shields and a high wall, faster than Elena could blink. "What the hell are you even…?"
He squeezed her shoulders, just briefly and very hard. "Please."
"I don't know what you…" she began, but then he pressed a hand over her mouth. Please don't see, she thought wildly.
"Lie to me all you want. Tonight, tomorrow, next week—tell me whatever you need to. But just try to tell Jasper the truth. Please."
Absolutely not, she thought. Not him, not you, not anyone. It's for your own good. For mine. I can't keep going if people know how much I don't want to. I'll fall, and I'll never be able to make myself stop.
And then, bewilderedly, what the hell was that?
"I'll try," she said aloud.
He shook his head, and she knew he saw through her. "Ask Jeremy about your half of the property revenue," was all he said. "He kept it for you, invested it. Last I heard, you were worth close to half a million dollars, yourself."
Elena's jaw dropped. "He… that's… what?"
"I'll see you back at the main house, Elena." And Stefan, apparently done with her half-truths, turned and left, each footstep seeming louder for how nearly silently he moved himself.
Like always.
She looked at the staircase balefully, knowing Jasper had probably heard all that, knowing he was waiting. I'd rather go back in the crypt, she thought.
It didn't occur to her to wonder why she felt like she meant it. She was very good at avoiding questions like that one.
Maybe I'll just go down to see Bonnie instead.
[)-( )-( )-( )-( )-( )(]
Damon and Odette were already with Bonnie, six floors below. Though Damon was not above listening to Stefan's sessions with Jasper when he felt like it—almost a form of therapy in itself, he thought, though decent people had those conversations in bars and not doctor's offices—this morning he found himself rather preoccupied with the sight of the glaringly bright stone at the center of his girlfriend's rib cage, seeming to shout at him all of his own failings.
Bonnie was lying now atop a grey comforter, still in the white cotton shorts and green silk blouse she'd been wearing when the Alchemists had caught her. The braided silver, yellow gold, and rose gold necklace Damon had given her on their first anniversary was around her neck, a rose gold watch she'd bought herself to match it on her wrist. She was motionless. All but the terrible sound of the ticking second hand on that watch. Completely and utterly still, still like the blue and gray rock, dark and dense enough that light couldn't penetrate it, which was holding all of her life force within it.
He hated that damn stone. Her whole life was walled up in there, made fragile by being given a container simultaneously so much weaker and so much stronger than the mortal body of a witch.
"…so I think I can use the sleep curse thread that's tying Bonnie to Elena to move the baby out of the Pegacite," Odie was concluding. "If the two of you can come to an agreement. Even after that, we'll need to wait for the right time of the month."
Damon, his eyes tracing the curve of Bonnie's cheek, made himself glance up. "Full moon as usual?"
"No, I'm actually talking about Elena's menstrual cycle, although I bet she'd rather I didn't. But as I well know," she huffed out a breath, "pregnant ladies lose a hell of a lot of privacy."
"Right… God. OK." Elena's period, funnily enough, had once been a fixture of his months, one that made their love life a terrible challenge—all that blood and tissue. It had usually a reason to stay away from her, and why he was grateful Bonnie had had an IUD, until recently. Damon rarely let himself consider downsides of being a vampire. But he did hate it that a woman's period could deter him from sleeping with her in the twenty-first century. Still, he wasn't Stefan. He didn't run pointless risks just to prove he was strong enough to confront them.
Well. Not usually.
OK, at least not the same kind that Stefan did.
He could see now, calling back to him across the years, a vision of Elena laughing and pulling him into the apartment she'd shared with Caroline and telling him, as though his senses weren't on high alert about it, that her period had started. I'm not worried, she'd said. I believe in you. To think of it now, of how much it had meant to him that she'd believed… God, she had been insane to believe. Waving a red flag at a bull, practically literally. What was I thinking? It made Damon feel a terrible inverse of what he felt when he pictured himself tumbling into bed with Katherine. Thinking that he could prove to her he was a better lover, a better man, than his brother, that this time would be different.
Thinking of Elena Gilbert's period, now, at Bonnie's bedside, somehow, made him feel every one of his hundred and eighty-nine years.
"So I'll figure it out," Odie was concluding, "gather up the couple of other things I need, and… you think about it. And talk to Jasper."
Damon nodded slowly. "But I need to talk to Bonnie first." Ridiculous as that seemed, an oration masquerading as a dialogue. He needed it. He lowered himself down on the bed next to the woman he loved, ran a slow hand over the hair at her temple. God, she would be annoyed if she saw what a mess they'd left it. Looks beautiful to me, Bon, he thought to himself, recalling that it had just been last week when she'd delayed a dinner date for forty-five minutes to let some product set in it. Vanity, thy name is Bennett, he'd mocked. "Thanks, Odie-o," he said softly. "As always—we couldn't do this without you."
"Same goes, Damon." Odie hovered in the door just a moment. "Let me know when you want to talk parenting advice."
Damon drew in a hard breath. "Yeah, I'm not there just yet. But… you'll be the first to know. You know I want yours and not your idiot husband's."
Odie grinned. Damon's harping on Jeremey's recklessness was a way he showed his love. "See you soon, champ."
When he heard the door close, Damon let himself settle down into he crook of Bonnie's arm, cold and stiff as it was, opposite from where he'd tucked her teddy bear the morning before. He felt ridiculous; he knew it did no good to be here, but until he could think straight enough to do what he knew he had to, this was all he had in him.
"Bonnie. God." He reached out, wanting to rest his hand where he was used to resting it when she slept, curled up against him at night: just over her sternum, under her breasts, against her heart. But that goddamn stone. "You're the best person I know, sweetheart. The bravest. The person who has always, always come through for all of the rest of us. Even for me. Even when you didn't like me. When you were right not to like me. So I know… I know you'll come through this."
He was glad it had occurred to Odette to install a painted light box window on the wall, because it was hard to leave each day, leaving Bonnie this far underground, away from the sunlight she loved… even though he knew it was the right thing to do, and the safest. The glowing picture, incongruously of tulips and a cypress tree, two things that would grew together nowhere on earth he'd ever seen, relaxed him. Reminded him of himself and Bonnie. Vampire and witch. Hell, she was a black woman in America and he was maybe the only person alive who'd served in the Confederate army.
They had grown together against a lot of steep odds.
That let him say what he knew he had to.
"I think Elena's gonna be the one to carry our baby, Bon." He let the words hang in the air, let every part of himself hear them. "I'll be on hand while it happens. It's gonna be… really weird. I mean, I think it's a good sign that, after everything that's happened, I'm mostly worried about what it's gonna do to Stefan." He felt a little relieved to say this aloud, to let this train of thought take him away from his other worries. "I can't lose him. And I suspect our warrior-poet still loves her, Bon. Like you said—we can't see into his corners when his light's not all the way on. But maybe she's brought back the light switches this time. One for Stefan, one for herself."
There was so much dogging Damon today that he had to struggle to continue. "Speaking of lighting up. Remember that day in Borneo? You'd just returned the nautilus pendant to those radical old witches, you remember. Their coven leader had piercings that still haunt me. And they invited us to that bonfire celebration. And then they all ran off when the nautilus told them their ancestors had returned, and left us there, and I… and we…"
Damon swallowed, feeling like speaking aloud what had happened there would only trivialize it, reducing it to words instead of what it had been, which was magic. "I wish I had told you I loved you before then. I did, you know. Love you. I know you know, but do you know how long? Since Kandahar. That was when I knew it. I shouldn't have needed all that fire and starlight to say the words. I was a coward. I should have told you the second I realized it. On a cliff in rural Afghanistan. In the middle of that fight we were having about whether to keep looking for the Aronian scroll or to move on to the next impossible way of lifting the sleep curse."
Damon looked up, caught the artificial glow of the light box shifting from morning to mid-day well above the cypress or its flowers underfoot. Smiled. "You said that if all I wanted was for you to keep my bed warm until Elena was back in it, I could jump straight off the cliff. And I thought… God. I'd forgotten we were doing it for her. I had started doing it because you needed to live without the guilt of Elena lying cursed with every breath you took. Because you had done everything for her, for me—over and over again—someone needed to finally take care of you. And as soon as I realized that I wanted you to be happy more than I wanted Elena back, in my heart, I knew I loved you beyond anything I could have imagined. But I was afraid I could never convince you, so I waited, months and months, for all that starlight… I was an idiot." Damon pressed his lips to her forehead, ignoring the rigidity that made Bonnie's skin feel horrifically like the dashboard of a car. This wasn't death. He wouldn't fear it, wouldn't think it, even though he saw it, felt it. "Be honest, though," he challenged his cursed lover. "You know the starlight helped my case."
He pulled Bonnie up gently, eased himself behind her to hold her a while. He was suddenly very glad that they had left Bonnie where he could reach her. It was telling, he realized suddenly, that they had collectively conspired to spell Elena out of reach.
We needed to find out who we were without her.
A heady thought. But one for another time. "You said no promises, Bon, no ceremonies—that you were never gonna marry me. I'm still gonna wear you down on that front. But for now, let me just promise you this. I'm going to be there for our baby, every step of the way. I know you'll want that. And I'm going to figure out the Pegacite, and stop the Alchemists from doing whatever screwed-up hell-brained thing they want to our baby, and also stop vampires from killing the baby along with Elena for this damn cure. And at the end of it all, I'm gonna do whatever I have to do to finally lift the burden of this sleep curse off your shoulders, so when you wake up, you and Elena can both be here. And then you can know, really know, that you're always gonna be first with me. And we'll work hard for her forgiveness. And raise our baby. Together."
Damon's focus had been so absorbed by Bonnie that he hadn't realized he wasn't alone until he heard something in the hall. The protections spelled onto this basement would only have let a handful of people come down. He concentrated a moment to the breathing, the heartbeat, all the other biorhythms he could pick up on. Sounds he knew as well as he knew anyone's.
Elena, he thought. His own heart pulsed hard. And harder, when he heard her struggling on a barely audible shaky breath that sounded like it was trying to swallow a sob.
She'd heard him, then.
"We'll work hard for her forgiveness," he repeated to Bonnie at a murmur.
He knew he couldn't comfort Elena—had fought to gain that knowledge and let it sink in deep before she'd ever opened her eyes back up. Still, out of kindness, he said the rest silently.
I'm gonna start a lifetime's worth of paying you back for saving all our sorry asses all those times, Bonnie. By loving you for every minute of your life. So you never doubt it.
It didn't matter that he couldn't say it aloud.
It wasn't like Bonnie could hear him anyway.
The sound of Elena's feet clambering up the stairs sounded to Damon like an echo of their past. Well. No. It was just the sound he'd always expected to hear, back then, and Elena had been cursed not to live long enough to deliver to him. Oh, Elena. I wish you could have stayed awake so we could both come to see what we needed from each other. And then see we'd already gotten it.
Elena would be OK, for now. She'd be on her way to Jasper.
Regret, guilt, and raw fear for her stole through Damon now, to think of what the old man might face if he cracked open Elena Gilbert's walnut-thick shell.
"I think it would probably be better for all of us," he told Bonnie, letting himself sit with a feeling he would once have ruthlessly ignored, "if I don't listen in on that, either."
