Author's Note: I'm back again. As always, thank you for waiting. I will reiterate that I'm not abandoning this story. I just have a really busy life that doesn't leave much time to write. I'm trying to kind of see the world right now. That's why I disappear. I hope you will enjoy this chapter. It's mostly centered on Damon. I wanted to really dig further into his mind after that last chapter. Big thanks to my amazing beta, who never abandons me. Without her, my chapters would be kind of sucky. Enjoy!
Chapter 11
Thought I had an answer once
But your random ways swept me along
Colossal signs so I got lost
With so many lovers singing soft
Elena was fumbling with her keys, trying to see through her tears to open the front door. Every time she'd angrily sweep them away to see, twice as many would follow, leaving her just as blind as before. All she could do was keep trying her keys and hope that one would finally work. She had held together at Damon's, but less than a mile from his house, she'd lost her battle with her emotions.
Everything was a disaster. She had completely miscalculated her plan with Damon. She'd thought he'd need time for his feelings for her to grow, time to accept them and understand them before she dropped the bomb that she was his future wife. She'd thought she was doing the right thing, but she'd been totally and completely wrong. Now it was all ruined. Now she was in a worse place than where she'd started when she got here. She had to get Damon to trust her after he felt she'd betrayed him, and it would not be easy.
He was not a man who gave forgiveness freely, and it rarely came for most. She needed to be one of those people forgiveness would come for. It was an even rockier road ahead of her now, and her emotions felt down for the count. She knew she needed to be strong and formulate her game plan, but she didn't feel very strong right now. She felt like a failure. He was right. She'd known him for decades. Yet, she had read the situation so wrong. Now, she didn't know where things would go.
The front door opened, and for a second Elena thought maybe she'd finally found the right key, but when she saw Jenna's blurry form in front of her, she knew she was wrong about that too. "Elena?" Jenna's voice was filled with concern and she gently ushered her inside the house. "Honey, what's wrong? What happened? Talk to me."
"I messed up, Jenna. I messed everything up." Her words came out between choked cries. Her voice was long past gone, there now was only a hoarse noise left. All of the yelling and crying had drained it all from her.
"Sit down," Jenna instructed, and it was then she realized she'd been guided to the living room couch. "What happened?"
"Damon," she cried, unable to say anything else, because that was the crux of it all. That was what had happened. Damon happened.
"What did Damon do? Did he hurt you?" Jenna's voice now took on that of a mother lion, filled with protectiveness and anger at the thought of someone hurting her loved one. "I need you to tell me what happened."
Elena inhaled a shaky breath, trying to keep from having another panic attack tonight. "I needed him to trust me. I needed him to fall in love with me. I tried so hard to build what we had, and we were getting so close. I was getting closer to him by the day, and now it's all ruined. Now he knows the truth and he hates me."
"Whatever you did, it can't be that bad," Jenna tried to assure her.
"Yes, it can. Cause now he feels manipulated by me. He thinks I'm no better than Katherine. He thinks I'm just like her, and the same way he hates her, he'll now hate me, but I can't let it last. He can't hate me. He can't."
"Honey, you're not making any sense anymore."
"Because none of this makes sense! I'm not supposed to be here!" Just as there was no going back from Damon's declaration that she was not his reason for living, there was no going back from the words that had just fallen from her mouth.
"Hey," Jenna firmly grabbed Elena's face and steadied it in front of her. "Don't you say things like that."
Elena lifted her shaky hands to cover Jenna's, knowing she had to finally lay it all out in the open, and that it was the absolutely worst way possible. "I'm so sorry," she apologized. "I wish I didn't have to do this to you like this, but you need to know the truth."
"Know the truth about what?"
"Everything." And with that the floodgates had been opened.
"You look like crap." At the sound of Caroline's voice Stefan looked up from the table he'd taken over in the back of the Grill.
"Aren't you observant," he bit out.
"Retract the claws," she told him as she slid into the opposite seat in the booth, obviously not deterred by his bad attitude. "This is about Elena and Damon, isn't it?"
"What?" he questioned caught off guard by her accurate guess. "How did you –?"
"Well, seeing as you were with Elena up until a few months ago, and now she's totally in love with Damon, I figured it was just a safe guess."
Stefan took a moment to truly take in the perky blonde sitting across from him. He saw her with eyes no longer tainted with undying love for Elena. She didn't carry the same pain-filled wisdom behind her eyes that Elena did, but her eyes held wisdom nonetheless. She had just pegged him right off the bat.
"You're right, it's about Damon and Elena, but not in the way that you think."
"So you're not still in love with her?" she questioned, obviously pulling no punches. She always had been a blunt one.
"Not by a long shot. I made peace with my relationship with Elena."
"So if you're not jealous that Elena is pining over Damon now, why are you sitting here, sulking in the back of the Grill?"
"Because I'm not mad that she's with Damon. I'm mad that Damon is with her."
He was delving into very murky water by revealing that, but he had to talk to someone. His brother had kicked him out and wanted nothing to do with him. Katherine was certainly not the person one should ever trust. Elena was the whole reason he was in this mess. So that left him with a grand total of no one. Damon was right, his social skills did suck.
"That makes no sense," Caroline interrupted his inner musings. "Elena is like the best girlfriend ever. She'd never hurt a fly. Your brother, on the other hand, is a supreme asshole. He's gonna break her heart, but you're worried about him in that whole equation?"
"I don't think she's good for Damon."
It was as simple as that. His love for her would get him killed. That didn't qualify as being a good significant other in Stefan's book. His brother didn't get to die.
"Ha!" she laughed, but quickly noticed when his face showed no signs that he was joking in the slightest. She grimaced and said, "Sorry, gut reaction. It's just, you know it's true. Your brother sucks, Stefan."
"He may be an asshole, but it doesn't mean I want him to get hurt."
The last thing he wanted was life without his brother. They had their issues and had spent decades apart at times, but he always knew Damon was out there. He always knew his brother was existing somewhere in the world. It was the only constant he'd had in all of his existence. He would never let that go.
And that, he knew for a fact, was why his future self went through the spell. In that future, he told Elena to tell him in this time what had happened. To her, it seemed like a simple request she'd complied with, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe the future version of him was making sure that he'd know in this time so that he could protect Damon.
A pair of pale fingers snapped in front of his face. "Hello?" Caroline called softly, pulling him from his thoughts. Once his eyes were focused on her again, she sighed and asked, "Where were you just then?"
"Sorry," he quickly apologized. "Got lost in my own head for a minute."
"That was obvious. I think it's time to maybe call it quits with the alcohol tonight." Caroline took the bottle of whiskey from in front of him and began to twist the top back on. He took those few moments of silence to get a good look at her without his obsession with Elena clouding his judgment.
He saw a young girl who was all too confident and unconfident in herself at the same time. She was confident in areas such as her grades and standing at school, but as he watched her eyes quickly glance at him and back to the bottle, he noted she, surprisingly, lacked that confidence when it came to guys. It was, how she'd ended up in Damon's grasp, was it not?
Something clicked in his head at that moment. Everything began to fall into place, how he would cope with the situation around him. He had no one he could trust with his own thoughts and feelings right now. At least, not without the assistance of compulsion. His ability wasn't what Damon's was, but it wasn't like he wanted anyone to forget that a person was dead. He just wanted to talk. Caroline could give him that.
"Caroline?" he asked, pulling her attention back to him, "Want to go for a ride?"
Damon pushed through the door at the front of the Grill, immediately basking in the scent of the copious amounts of alcohol flowing in the building. That was just what he needed. The sound of something other than his own thoughts surrounding him would do him some good. As long as there was a lot of Bourbon involved, of course.
He had just spotted Alaric's back at the bar when he heard Stefan's voice from a few feet away. "I promise not to keep you out past curfew," his brother was telling Caroline Forbes as he led her through the tables. Their eyes locked for a few brief moments as Stefan approached him, but his brother soon averted them back to his newfound friend as he guided her past Damon.
A part of him said that he should go keep an eye out to make sure Stefan wasn't about to murder the sheriff's daughter, but then the other part of him reminded him of the fact that Stefan didn't pick victims like that. He didn't go for the same revenge factor that Damon did. So unless Caroline fell and busted her head that night, she'd probably be safe.
Deciding it was no longer any of his business, he went on his merry way toward the bar once again, ready for the alcohol to flow through his veins. Thank the heavens he wasn't a human who had to actually worry about things like cirrhosis of the liver.
"Tell me you saved some bourbon for me," Damon said as he slid into the seat next to Ric.
"I'd never dare to take bourbon away from you." Alaric pushed over the bottle in front of him and motioned for the bartender to bring a second glass.
"Wise choice."
"What brings you out here on a Friday night? Shouldn't you be busy with Elena?"
Damon sighed, annoyed that he hadn't even gotten to get in one drink before the inquisition started. "She's spending the night in, tonight. With Jenna I guess, since you're sitting here alone too."
"Surprising. She seems pretty attached to you." He could hear the wariness in Ric's voice, as if he knew that something was off. The man was too damn observant for his own good.
He decided to forego the glass and jump straight to the bottle. Apparently his time here wasn't going to be as simple as he'd hoped. "Fine, so you busted me. We're taking a bit of space from each other."
"Shouldn't you still be in the honeymoon phase?" Ric questioned. "Wait, don't answer that. It will lead to places I never want to go."
"Then you'll drop it?" Damon asked, with more than a slight edge to his voice. He did not want to talk about the disaster that this night had been. He just wanted to drink, and maybe insult his ex a little bit. Good things could come from that.
"Depends," Ric mused, "Did you break her heart?"
"Of course, it has to be my fault, doesn't it? Everyone's always so quick to blame Damon. Horrible, evil Damon. Do any of you ever stop to think that I'm sitting here, getting screwed over too? It isn't always me who screws things up."
"Have you met you?" Alaric questioned.
"The question is, have you?" he countered. "Cause the people who claim to know me the best, are the ones fucking me over the most. How is it I'm getting screwed over for things that haven't even happened yet?"
It was a damn good question and one he wished he could actually get an answer to. He hadn't even died yet, and he wasn't even supposed to for another eighty some odd years. So why was it that his life was the one getting turned upside down? Because Elena and Stefan couldn't cope in the future, he now had a whirlwind of disaster brought into his life, mostly in the form of Katherine. There was no way anything good was coming from that.
"Okay, what?" Ric's voice had now turned serious, upon the realization that something was very off. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"That makes two of us."
"How drunk are you already?"
"Not drunk enough." Truthfully, he didn't think there was a way to be drunk enough to forget what had happened to him tonight. It certainly wouldn't stop him from trying.
"So something happened with you and Elena. Am I getting that right?"
"Five points to the drunk professor." Damon raised the bottle of bourbon as congratulations.
"Did something happen between her and Stefan? Is that what's going on?"
"That would actually make my life easier right about now."
"You're making no sense, man. You've got to start this story somewhere."
"Katherine's back." He started with the only thing he knew to start with, the part that got the ball rolling these past few days. Without her being back, he didn't know how long he would have remained in the dark.
"Girl you tried to get out of the tomb, but she was never there? That Katherine?"
"The one and only."
"Shit, that's heavy," Ric sighed. "Why is she here?"
A sarcastic smile spread over his face. "That's the beauty in it. My brother, in all his infinite wisdom, went and found her. Our relationship wasn't screwed up enough, so why not bring in the girl that got it all started?"
"Damon, I," Ric started, sympathy evident in his voice, but his phone cut off whatever he planned to say. He looked down at his phone and quickly mumbled, "It's Jenna, hold on."
Damon gave a nod of recognition before focusing intently on the remaining bourbon in the bottle as Ric went off to talk to his girlfriend.
After Ric walked away, his mind drifted to Stefan and why his brother was leaving with Caroline. Stefan didn't have anything against the blonde. He seemed to like her just fine, but they weren't friends. They'd only ever interacted because of Elena.
Maybe Stefan had just run into Caroline the same way he ran into Alaric. Stefan probably came here to drink and figure out what to do until he went back home, then he ran into Caroline and decided to talk about all of his feelings. It would be just like his brother, and Caroline would probably love nothing more than to comfort Stefan. Although, wasn't she dating that quarterback?
The bottle of bourbon was ripped out of Damon's hands, and his head whipped around to see an angry Ric. "Leave out a few details in your story?"
Annoyed, he sighed and shook his head. "What the hell are you talking about, Ric?"
"Apparently, Elena came home in tears, and proceeded to tell Jenna everything. Now, I have a hysterical girlfriend asking me why I lied to her, and why I didn't tell her that her niece was dating a vampire. What did you do?"
"Oh, so this is back to being my fault?" Damon shoved his stool back and stood up in front of Ric. "It couldn't possibly be your fault or Elena's fault that you both decided to keep her in the dark?"
"We did what we thought was right, and whatever happened between you and Elena was obviously bad enough to upset her so much she broke down and told Jenna everything."
"You know, I'm getting really tired of hearing people say they did what they thought was right. How about you try this one? Tell the fucking truth. Then, you won't have a hysterical girlfriend because she's been lied to by the people she thought she could trust the most."
"Of course, right, this isn't your fault. Nothing ever is, is it? You're just doing whatever it is you do, and we can all get on board or get over it."
"On the contrary, Ric. See, I own up to my stuff when I mess up. I have no problem being the bad guy and admitting it. Right now, from where I'm standing, I'm the only one in this group actually being honest. Everyone else, you're all the liars."
He couldn't believe that he was seriously getting lectured by Ric because Elena decided to drop the bomb on Jenna. It was as if her knowing was somehow the end of the world. He said good riddance though. It was about damn time she was let in on the secret. And hey, at least she didn't have to tie people to chairs to get the information out of them. She had it easy.
"God, Damon, you actually had me thinking this wasn't on you, that whatever issues you and Elena were encountering weren't because you were a jackass." Ric picked up his jacket and threw a few bills onto the bar. "Now excuse me while I go try and clean up the mess you've made of everything."
A flowery scent bombarded Damon's senses halfway up the stairs. He wished he didn't know why that scent was wafting through his house, but thanks to the shit show his life had turned into, he did know. So though it was his own house, he turned on his heel and descended back down the stairs. He had no energy left in him for whatever Katherine had in store now. He was officially done for the evening.
He was almost to the door when Katherine appeared in front of him, a curious smile on her face. "Going so soon?"
"This might come as a surprise, but I don't find the idea of spending my evening with you very relaxing."
"Ouch, that hurts. I'm almost starting to think you don't want me around."
"Well, you can stop wondering. The jury's in, I don't. So feel free to leave whenever." He stepped to walk around her, but she easily blocked his way, not quite ready to give up the game just yet. "What, Katherine?" he asked, exasperated. "What could you possibly want to talk to me about that you didn't find pressing enough over the past 145 years?"
"Maybe I don't want to talk." She smirked and slid a delicate finger down his chest.
"Then that makes two of us. Get out of my way. I'm not doing this tonight."
He'd lost his last bit of patience twelve hours ago. If he did not get out of the same room as Katherine, he did not know what he'd do. She caused a war within him, something she was probably all too aware of, and he was not in the mood to find out which side would win.
It had been so easy to brush her off before he knew about Elena. Insanely enough, things had actually been fairly simple for him. It was easy to deal with that aspect of his past when his present with Elena was on slightly even ground. Now that they were both shot to hell, and he'd run his brother off to do God knows what, fighting Katherine felt like a losing battle.
"What's the matter, Damon?" Katherine taunted. "Trouble in paradise already? Hope it's not my fault."
"This will probably be the first and last time anyone ever tells you this, but it's not your fault."
"So there is trouble in paradise," she surmised. "What a pity."
"Why are you here?" he demanded, unable to play whatever back and forth game they had going on for any longer.
"Because your bathtub is probably the best one in town."
"Not my house," he snapped. "Mystic Falls. Why are you here? Why let Stefan find you and convince you to come back here? I'm not dumb enough to think you managed to stay under the radar for 145 years, only to suddenly be easy enough for Stefan to find."
"Maybe I was ready to be reunited with my boys."
"Sorry, babe, ship's sailed on that one."
"Really?" she questioned suspiciously, taking a small step toward him. "Cause I'm not so sure. Honestly, I'm not so sure you are either." She ran a smooth finger over his face, a searching look in her eyes. "Come on, Damon. Don't you still remember what we used to have?"
He was frozen in place for a few moments, lost as to what was going on right now. Was Katherine Pierce really standing in front of him trying to seduce him? After everything she'd put him through, was she really back in the place this all started, trying to get him to fall in love with her all over again?
Slowly, he brought his hands up to cover hers, grasping at them as he once had all those years ago. At one point, his life had been so simple that she was the most important part of it. She made it all made sense. After he'd turned, he kept it that way. He hadn't known what to do otherwise. He'd died for her. He'd loved her. It had to have meant something.
That was what he always told himself. All he had to do was get her out of that tomb, and once it was done, she could make things simple once again. She'd make it worth it. Then, the hard realization had come that she was never there and that she had no intention of ever letting him know. She'd been his reason for living, and he'd been nothing more than a pawn in her game.
"My life would be so easy if I didn't," he finally told her.
"Then you remember that it wasn't bad. We were good once."
"So were you and my brother. I used to think you'd played him for a fool, while I was the trusted one. I couldn't have been more wrong."
A slow smile spread over her face once more. "Oh, Damon. Sweet, loving, blind, Damon. You were just so easy, ripe for the picking. I had your devotion from the moment you set eyes on me. How could I turn my back on that?"
"It certainly seems like you figured out a way."
"I did what I had to do. I had to protect myself. Unlike you and your brother, I don't weigh myself down with emotional baggage. That's why I've gotten to five hundred years and why you never will."
She said the words with such assuredness, like she knew what she was saying could be nothing but true. The only question was, did she know or were her words ill timed? Two days ago, he could have brushed off the comments as if they were nothing. Now he knew that she was right, he wouldn't live to 500. At least, he didn't before Elena came back to try and save him.
"Katherine," he whispered, moving his hands to the bottom of her face.
"Yeah?" she asked, her voice just as quiet.
"Stop talking." Before she could open her mouth to respond, he violently twisted his hands to the left, snapping her neck like a twig.
With a sigh, he let her fall lifelessly to the floor. It was a dramatic move, and one she'd probably see as a sign that she was getting under his skin, but at least it got him free for the rest of the night. Now, all he had to figure out was where he was going to spend the night. He obviously wasn't going to find peace in his own house.
"So I hear you let Jenna in on the secret." Damon watched as Elena jolted up in her bed, clutching at her chest. Her head whipped in his direction, her eyes wide with fear, but as her eyes fully took him in her form relaxed. "Hi."
"How did you know?" she questioned, jumping right past why he was in her room at two in the morning.
"She called Alaric freaking out. I predict he's having a rough night."
"You went to Ric," she said, an air of happiness in her voice.
"I don't know if you could say I really went to him. I went to The Grill and he just so happened to be there." Granted, Ric probably wasn't too far away from having his name carved into one of the barstools at The Grill, but Damon didn't know if he was ready to admit to himself that he'd taken Elena's words to heart. For now, he would tell himself it was a coincidence that he ran into the History teacher and spilled his guts.
Also, he suspected the talk with Ric didn't go exactly how Elena had hoped it would. She probably thought they'd get to bond over shitty exes and being lied to. It had started out promising, but the call from Jenna ruined it all. Now, the only person she'd said Damon could talk to wanted nothing to do with him. And quite frankly, he didn't want much to do with the professor either.
"And now you're here." The look of hope was evident in her eyes, and he wished it wasn't there. He didn't want her to be hopeful of what it meant by him coming her. He was here because he didn't know where else to go. It didn't mean things were different with them. He was nowhere near ready to forgive and let bygones be bygones, but he wasn't quite ready to cut all ties either. In fact, it had taken him two hours to even end up at her house. It had been a circular battle in his head, going nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. The only thing it had come down to was that he didn't know who else he could even talk to at the moment.
"And now I'm here." He sighed and sat down in her window seat, deciding to gloss over why he was in her room and what she might think it meant.
"Do you want to talk?" she asked softly, hope hanging from her words, but then she let some reality seep in.
Rather than answering either of her questions, he settled for, "I wouldn't even know where to start."
"Those are words I never thought I'd hear you say."
"Funny, I never thought I'd hear you say you're my wife in the future."
Her eyes fell at his words. "I should've told you. I should've trusted that you could handle it."
"God," he blew out, "I don't know how to make sense of any of this. How the hell am I supposed to wrap my mind around this, Elena?"
He could see her throat tighten in the dim moonlight and her mouth fell open, but no sound came out for a long time, just short breaths of anxiety. Finally, she closed her eyes and shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted quietly. "I don't know. I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what, that you lied or that you don't have your husband? Cause I know you can look at me and tell me you love me, but I don't get it. You haven't known this version of me for over 80 years. How can you come back to me in this time and still have the same feelings? Cause it really kind of feels like you just love the part of me you think is buried under the bad guy, and you're hoping with some time that my edges will just smooth out."
"That's not true at all," she argued forcefully. "If you think we could spend nearly a century together with me only loving a part of you, you are seriously deluded. You're the same person right now as you are in the future. The difference is, you mellowed out with time. Life was really hard on you for longer than it should be for anybody, but once you felt like you had a purpose outside of Katherine, and you started building a life, things changed for you."
"You make it all sound so simple," he mused softly.
"I really wish it had been," Elena said. "The truth is, it was anything but simple. Before I came back and altered history like this, you still had a lot of pain ahead of you. We both did. I'm hoping now that I've maybe saved you from some of it. I'm at least trying to save you from a lot of the pain I put you through, cause I did. We weren't always very good to each other for a while, but I'm hoping to change that. I don't want to hurt you, Damon."
He looked away from her piercing gaze then, not quite able to hold it any longer. She painted such a pretty picture when she really started going. She made them sound like an intense love story. He didn't know how accurate her descriptions of them were, but he did know that she believed them. She believed everything she was telling him with every fiber of her being. That much, he could see.
"Here," he stood up and moved toward her bed as he bit into his wrist. "Drink this." He held out his arm for her and she stared up at him wide-eyed and surprised. "Drink."
She looked like she had a million questions she wanted to ask him, but she instead pushed them aside and did as he instructed. She grabbed onto his forearm and put her mouth to his skin before the wound could heal. He watched intently, noting how relaxed she was, nothing like when he'd forced his blood on her a few months ago. No, this Elena knew exactly what she was doing, and if he was reading the look on her face correctly, she actually liked it.
Once she felt she'd had enough, she pulled away and wiped at her mouth with her hand. "Wanna tell me what that's about?" she questioned, staring up at him.
"Grace said a witch is going to show up wanting something from you. She thinks it will happen sooner rather than later."
"What do you mean a witch is going to show up?" her voice hitched in what he could only decipher to be fear.
"The only way for the witch who performed the spell to ever collect her payment for it is to show up in this time in some form. Grace says you won't be hurt, but I figure this gives you a safety net."
"And you're making sure I don't die?"
"Figure it would kind of suck if you went through that crappy spell only to die because of it."
Her eyes dropped to her bedspread for a moment, before she looked back up at him, her gaze darker. "You know about the spell?"
"More or less," he confirmed. "Did you really have vervain poured over your heart?"
"Stefan and I both did. I know he's doing some questionable things at the moment, but I wouldn't be here if he hadn't done that in the future."
"You're defending him after everything that's gone down between the two of you these past few months?"
"It might seem weird, but yeah, I guess I am. Ultimately, I believe Stefan is the same person now as he is in the future, just like I do with you. Right now, he's just trying to focus his anger and pain on me because it's easier than facing the reason of it all. With a little time, I believe he'll come around. He always does."
"The question is, though, how many people have to die before he does?" He looked away from her piercing gaze. "I know it's coming, and if you know Stefan, you know it's coming."
He felt Elena's warm hand slide against his, and she slowly closed her fingers around his. "He's not going to die, Damon."
"We already know by now that Sheila has gotten a plan together to handle me and get rid of Stefan if she thinks she needs to. Between that, Katherine being back, and me knowing about you, I don't know how to fight all three battles at once. I'm good, but I'm not that good."
"Hey," Elena squeezed his hand to pull his gaze back to hers. He couldn't turn to look down at her. He couldn't bear to see the look of love and understanding that he knew would be pouring from her gaze. It was too much.
"Just stop, Elena. It doesn't matter."
"It does matter." She climbed out of her bed and placed herself directly in front of him. "It matters, because you and I aren't a battle. Things are rough and really confusing for you right now, but we are not a battle."
"Easy for you to say. You're not inside my head."
A sad smile spread over her face, and her head shook lightly in denial. "Oh, but I am," she sighed as she lifted her fingers to the sides of his face. Involuntarily, he backed away from Elena, causing her hands to fall to her side. She quickly took the hint and moved away, as if she'd been burned by him. "I'm sorry," she apologized softly.
"God, what am I doing?" he asked, more to himself than her. When she'd pressed her hands to his face, the moment with Katherine flashed in his memory, and he'd reacted instinctively. "I don't even know how to trust you right now, but here I am, giving you my blood. Katherine's right. I haven't changed. I'm the same old Damon from 1864." He had two women claiming to know the inner workings of his mind, but only one could be right. At the moment, he didn't know which one of them it was. They'd both deceived him in different ways. They were similar and all too different all at once, and he didn't even know where to begin with any of it. He didn't even know which way was up right now.
"You need space. I know that. I wasn't thinking."
"Apparently neither of us is." He shook his head and took another step back from her. "You say all the right things, and I know you love me. On some level, I know that. I see it. It doesn't change anything for me though. You've got this entire history of us in your head, and all I've got is three months. Three months that were never supposed to happen."
She immediately chastised him. "Don't say that."
"Why not? It's true and you know it. Everyone knows it, everyone but you and Stefan apparently. You both had to get your heads together in the future and come back to fuck everything up. You don't screw with the universe like this, Elena." And now they were off. He'd just opened a door that neither of them should have opened on this night, of all nights. Neither of them could handle it, but there he went. Now it was open, and he didn't know how to close it. He'd come here to get away from fighting, and now he'd started it all over again.
"I did what I had to do," she argued. "You can like it or you can not like it, but it's done. I'm here and now we have to figure out how to deal with it." She came to him, despite his body language probably screaming for her to do the exact opposite. With no hesitation, she lifted her hands to his face once again. "You can also believe me or not believe me, but it wasn't your time to die. That's not how your story ends."
How did she do that? How did she always manage to paint such a pretty picture? She sounded so sure of the words coming out of her mouth, and she always did. From the moment the change happened, Elena had had full confidence in what she said about their relationship, and about him. She never faltered. She remained steadfast that he was good and that things would work out. She fully believed that they were meant to be, and nothing he or anyone else said would get in the way of that. Then, on the other side, he had Katherine painting a totally different picture, one she also believed in with the utmost confidence. The vampire thought she had him figured out down to the very last detail.
And then there was Stefan, who took yet another side different from his former lovers. He believed his brother would find nothing good from Elena. Katherine believed he wouldn't find anything at all. Elena, well she just believed that he'd find them. With every fiber of their being, they all believed their own visions of what his life would be. Yet, he didn't know if he could believe any of them.
"And why is it up to you to decide that? Why is it up to any of you to decide what happens to my life?" he demanded. He pushed Elena's hands off of his face. "You're all circling me, telling me completely different things, expecting me to believe you. I can't trust any of you. You've all made sure of that."
"Damon, what are you talking about?" Elena asked. "Who is all of us, and why were you saying Katherine was right? What's going on?"
"I don't know," he laughed humorlessly. "That's the beauty of this all. I don't have a fucking clue what's going on."
"Then talk to me. We'll figure this out. I can help you."
"Help me?" he shouted. "You did this to me!" His life had been pretty manageable up until a few months ago. Yeah, there was the whole Katherine not being in the tomb thing, but he'd been sleeping his way through that decently enough. Then, Elena came in and turned everything upside down. She started making him question things he hadn't, and now he was left spiraling when he learned the truth about everything. If she hadn't come back, he could be having great sex with any woman of his choosing tonight. Instead, he was wandering around town trying to find someone who wasn't trying to get in his head and mess everything up.
"That is not true and you know it."
"I can't do this." He threw his arms up in surrender. "I came here to try and do the right thing for once. I gave you my blood, and I'll give you more in a few days."
"Damon, no." She grabbed for him as he moved toward her window. "Don't go, not yet. You're confused and you're hurt. I know that, but just let me help you tonight."
"There's nothing to help with. I talked to Alaric, just like you wanted me to and it blew up in my face. I went home to try and escape from it all, but that blew up in my face, too. So I came here, hoping that this would work out for me, and surprise, it didn't. I'm done. Right now, I'm done."
"What the hell happened after I left you, Damon? You were upset, but you were handling this. What is going on?"
"Everything. That's what happened."
Elena pushed herself in front of his body and her window. "Stop! You can't leave like this."
He saw the look of determination in her eyes as she stared up at him, her hands firmly on his chest. They both knew he had the strength to physically move her out of his way, but they both also knew it wouldn't work. She wouldn't let him leave without going after him.
"Elena," he said, focusing into her eyes. Her eyes glossed over as his hold began to set in, and he knew he had her where he wanted her. It was a low blow, one that could have backfired if she had vervain in her system. She told him the night they slept together that she hadn't taken vervain or worn her necklace since she broke up with Stefan. She hadn't because she trusted him, and probably thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to be free of vervain in case of an emergency and he needed blood. Now, he was using that information to his advantage.
"Go to bed, and don't try to follow me."
