A/N: Hello all – this chapter is a sort of an interval scene, which occurs concurrently with Amelie's fight against Stefan et al during chapter 20. Hopefully it answers some of your questions from the previous cliff-hanger. It will also be the last Damon POV chapter for a little while, as sadly, Damon will be chilling out in mummified undead limbo for the next few chapters – however I should stress, in famous Arnie fashion: HE WILL BE BACK.

Kicking the elephant in the room

Damon Salvatore watched a shaft of sunlight crawl across the floor of his bedroom, threatening around the edges of the bathroom doorway but not breaching his dark little refuge. His head ached dully, his jaw throbbed and his eyes were dry and sore. Thirst crawled spider-like up his throat and his chest felt tight. This couldn't go on. He had a leash on his thirst for the moment, too tired and sick to muster the energy for a good homicidal rampage, but he wasn't stupid. He'd crack eventually. Resisting temptation had never been his thing. He turned to face the girl curled up in the corner by his wash basin. The silence was killing him by degrees. He needed to fill it and didn't feel like poking at the elephant in the room (yet). Elena wasn't ready to see things his way at the moment, but she would eventually. She wasn't going to die for him, after all. She wasn't stupid either.

He cleared his throat. "When I was a boy I wanted to join the gold rush."

"What?" She jolted and accidentally smacked her head against the side of the basin as she came out of her stupor. Damon smirked humourlessly.

"California gold rush of '49 – 1849, I mean." He rolled his eyebrows. "Lot of people went West in the 1850's. We didn't have Twitter back in the day, but you still heard stories."

Elena was giving him a very funny look, like she couldn't decide whether to indulge him or stay angry at him. "Why are you telling me this now?"

He shrugged. "Why not? I thought we should bond." He narrowed his eyes. "Before I snap and suck you dry, I mean. I'd go watch TV but spontaneous combustion - so not a good way to go." He jerked his head towards the sunlight and twinkled his ringless fingers for emphasis.

If looks could kill all his problems would have been solved right then due to the high intensity death rays Elena was sending his way. "You wanted me to kill you a moment ago. Now you don't want to burn. Isn't that a bit picky?"

He rolled his eyes. "One, I don't want you to kill me, Elena. I just don't want to kill you. Two," he stopped and extended a finger to make his point. "Decapitation, staking, or removing my heart will kill me – what I'm suggesting will hurt but it won't off me forever." He rolled his neck. "It's not like I need your permission. I'm just asking you to come in once I'm done and make sure I'm properly shrivelled and bloodless." His joints were beginning to ache, which could be a leftover from his most recent vervaining, but was more likely the beginning of the agonising, slow desiccation he had to look forward to if he couldn't force this stubborn girl to see sense. Why was it so hard for her to get it through her head that she wasn't saving anyone playing the waiting game? He sighed and tried to rein in the sudden surge of frustration he felt. Screw not poking the elephant, if he didn't they'd both wide up dead.

"The plan is sound Elena." He snapped. "Man up and get over yourself."

"Shut up," She fired back, "Don't you dare start that again." Elena looked ready to launch herself at him and scratch out his eyeballs or, alternatively, start breaking things again. Damon tensed in anticipation. Elena was very, very hot when she was feeling violent and if Damon was going to have to suffer through all this he at least wanted to enjoy the perks while he could. He ended up disappointed however as Elena marshalled her self-control and swallowed back the anger igniting her soft brown eyes. She gritted her teeth and turned her face away and he expected that they'd sit languishing in silence until they both starved, but Elena surprised him once again.

"I can't really imagine you pan handling for gold in California." She said quietly, anger still there in her voice even as she clung on to the distraction he had offered for all it was worth.

"Well," He smiled a small yet genuine smile. "By the time I was old enough to go the rush had mostly petered out," he admitted. "Didn't stop me dreaming though." Tilting his head back Damon did something he rarely bothered to do – peel back the tattered pages of his personal history. "Always knew I didn't have a future in Virginia. Father was just waiting for an excuse to disinherit me and give everything to Stefan – which he did, actually, but that's not the issue." Damon shook his head skimming over that unpleasant twenty-first birthday 'announcement' from the old man. "No I wanted to make my own fortune; wanted to be a pioneer." He chuckled softly. "I used to beg Mother to read me newspaper cuttings about Bingham Young's passage West."

"Bingham Young…wait, you mean the Mormons?" Elena almost choked. "You wanted to be a Mormon?"

"Sure Elena." He did the eye thing. "I have a strong appreciation for polygamy." Licking his dry lips he leered at her, trying to at least force the ghost of a smile from her. "The no drinking thing could be a problem…but, eh, I'd just eat all my dozens of wives." Stretching out a foot to nudge Elena's ankle in reproof he gave her a mock stern look. "This was 1847, I was six, and they were pioneers opening a trail to the West. They were awesome; religion didn't come into it."

Elena shifted a little her expression smoothing out and body relaxing as curiosity sparked in her eyes. "Why didn't you do it? Go West I mean?"

"I don't know." Damon shrugged, suddenly awkward. He'd asked himself the same question many years back and never come up with a satisfactory answer. He'd mostly given up playing 'what-if' in the last one hundred and sixty-eight years but now he found himself coming back to all those answerless questions. What if he'd said screw it and left Virginia after his father had made it clear he wasn't worth more than a paltry stipend to be controlled by his baby brother? What if he hadn't gotten roaring drunk and signed up with the army of Northern Virginia on the same night? What would his life have been if he'd followed the railroads and the trails out to California, or someplace along the way? Who would he have become if he'd never met Katherine?

"Was it Stefan?" Elena's hesitant question stirred him from his own introspection. He frowned.

"Was what Stefan?"

"Was he the reason you didn't leave Virginia?" Elena looked both intent and hesitant. "The two of you were close back then. I just wondered if you didn't want to leave him."

Damon smiled a bitter little smile. "Believe it or not Ripley, my life, and the world in general, do not revolve around my brother." He cut her a look that he supposed wasn't particularly friendly, but damn it she'd hit a nerve and he hated when that happened. "It's hard, I know, to imagine that anyone might actually want to get away from Saint Stefan and his holy aura of Effortless Perfection, but then you didn't grow up with him." His smile turned sharp and caustic. "The allure of Sir Broodalot wears thin once you've seen him spit up on his nurses and soil his smallclothes."

Elena gave him a droll look. "I have a little brother Damon; I know how annoying they are." She put on her firm but compassionate face, an expression Damon really did not like because it almost always formed the precursor to some kind of declaration about his soft and fluffy side he could generally do without. "I also know that you love Stefan, I think you loved him even when you hated him, as screwed up as that is, so don't act like you couldn't wait to be free of him."

Damon didn't bother to reply to that - what was there to say? Elena was stubborn, as stubborn as Stefan, and she'd hear what she wanted to hear and see what she wanted to see. Truthfully Damon was tired of even thinking about Stefan. He was tired of hating him, tired of living up or, more to the point, down to his expectations. Mostly he was tired of being judged in comparison to his brother and not as a man in his own rights. Yet all this was old news and he didn't feel like rehashing it.

So instead he kicked the elephant again.

"You're being stupid, you know." He looked at Elena through heavy-lidded eyes. "You should see this as pay-back."

"See what as pay-back?" Elena blinked at him, nonplussed by his unannounced change of subject, which was exactly how he wanted it. Damon's smile turned predatory.

"I killed Jeremy." He almost purred tilting his head back and gazing innocently up at the bathroom ceiling. "I snapped his neck and made him dead. If I'd had my way he'd have stayed dead too."

He didn't need to see Elena's flinch to feel it. In some other time and place he'd feel guilty, not just for rubbing her face in what he'd done, but also for killing baby-bro-Gilbert in the first place. Jeremy was more annoyance than acquaintance most of the time, but he was a fly in Damon's ointment that he knew and had spent time with and he…he regretted that he'd hurt him. Not as much as he knew Elena and Stefan wanted him too – Damon just didn't sweat casual murder like they did, but he regretted it all the same, and not entirely because of the hassle it had caused between him and Elena.

"I used to eat Blondie." He continued. "I used to fuck her and bleed her and then, when she was sobbing and whimpering and being annoying I used to fuck with her brain and make her say and do exactly what I wanted her to."

Elena had risen to her feet and now stood staring at him, face twisted half-way between disgust, outrage, and confusion. Her fists clenched and unclenched. "Stop it." She hissed between her teeth. "I know what you're doing. You can't manipulate me Damon." Her eyes blazed. "I know exactly what you are."

The smile wavered on his face then, seeing the curdled anger in her eyes and worse, the truth to her words. She did know what he was and it…hurt. It hurt for a lot of reasons; some of them selfish, some of them less so. He rallied all the same. "Then what's the problem Elena? C'mon, I'm the bad guy. I'm evil. I'm…" he wracked his brain for juicy adjectives. "Perverse, twisted, insane – don't forget that – seriously emotionally disturbed of Virginia, that's me." He waved his hands for added effect. "I'm very, very bad and you should put me out of your misery."

Elena slapped him. If he'd been a little less tired and sick and just basically off his game he would have seen it coming and been able to avoid it (though he might not have bothered) as it was she actually surprised him. The stinging slap hardly hurt. He wasn't that far gone, but still it didn't make him feel good either. He touched his cheek and looked at Elena who had retreated back to her corner of the bathroom almost immediately.

"That was pointless." He told her flatly. "Hasn't anyone ever told you violence doesn't solve anything?"

Elena stared at him, the same devastating, soul eroding glare she had given him during their curse fact-finding road trip to Duke. The same look she had given him when she told him: yes you have lost me forever. He would never have believed it possible that he'd be glad to see Elena look at him like that again, but he was. He didn't want her to hate him, he knew too much about hate to wish that burden on her, but contempt and indifference would be just peachy. He was right, he knew he was, but Elena would never see it if she kept thinking she cared for him. If he had to kill every good feeling she had for him in order to save her then he would.

"Why are you doing this?" She asked him harshly, and to his distress the contempt collapsed into hurt. Damn it – that was not what he wanted. "Why won't you just wait for Stefan and Bonnie to figure something out?" She demanded, and he watched as all her anguish and contempt for the pathetic, vile monster he was became subsumed in a wave of compassion and hope. "They won't leave us Damon – we just have to trust that…"

"Go downstairs Elena." He spoke over her. He just had to shut her up. "Go downstairs, get some coffee, read a book, paint your goddamn nails just…just go away and let me do what we both know needs to be done."

Months ago he'd made a choice, probably a cowardly one now he thought about it, to confess the sin of his love to her and make her forget. He'd wanted to get it off his chest, hoped that just saying it would relieve the incredible pressure and free him from the feeling. He'd also hoped that it would release her from the burden too. Because he knew she knew – how could she not – almost every Tom, Dick, and Harry involved in their lives had an opinion about his useless, inconvenient adoration for his brother's girl. He knew that she hated it, the fact that he loved her.

At first he was pretty sure she was disgusted by the mere idea that someone like him could love her – and yeah, he didn't actually blame her for that, nice girls didn't appreciate self-serving psychopaths obsessing over them, or so he'd heard. Things had changed though; she didn't hate him anymore and was only disgusted by him seventy percent of the time instead of one hundred percent, but in some ways that was worse. It was worse for Elena anyway, because now she felt guilty. She felt guilty that her boyfriend's brother, the recovering homicidal maniac, was hopelessly in love with her. It was guilt that made her forgive him, Damon knew that. They were friends because Elena was too kind for her own good and couldn't leave the reject Salvatore all alone with his infatuation. So she gave him pity dressed up as concern and placated him with friendship not because she liked him, not because he was hot, fun, exciting, witty, dashing etc. but because he was dangerously unstable, lonely, and liable to snap necks at inappropriate times if she didn't at least pretend to tolerate him.

It broke his goddamned heart.

It broke his heart for her. If he could have obliterated the feeling, made himself stop loving her – or wanting her, or whatever the hell it was he felt that made him so full and so empty all at once – he would do it. If he could compel himself to forget he loved her he would, because he truly did love her and he knew that his love hurt her. He desperately, stupidly, wanted to never, ever, hurt Elena Gilbert again yet he did so just through his continued presence. He'd thought about leaving, bailing out of town as soon as the dust had settled after the Klaus debacle. He'd held out for the sake of his cover-story as Stefan's legal guardian and made plans to get the hell away from Mystic Falls and anyone associated with it right after Stefan's high school graduation. In the meantime he'd tried to be better, really better, not just hiding his failings but not failing to begin with – all to ease the burden on Elena as much as he could. He'd worked on sinking into the fabric of her life, becoming wallpaper she could look to when she needed something but otherwise ignore.

It was all bullshit of course. All the selfless, helpful crap, it was just window dressing over an open wound. He wasn't the solution to the problem - he was never the solution – instead he was the problem and there was no way he could make this all better for Elena. Inevitably he would only make things worse in the long run. He knew that. He just hadn't expected the inevitable to come so soon.

"Damon." Elena was talking and he hadn't been listening. Not that it mattered. They were done arguing back and forth. Elena wasn't the only bull-headed person in the room. He glanced at her disinterestedly, already plotting his next move.

"Don't make me drag you out of here." He interrupted whatever itineration of the standard 'never give up, never surrender' speech she was rattling off this time. "Not having my ring is inconvenient, but that's all it is." He made sure to afford her his most obnoxious smirk. "I will lock you in the damned broom closet if I have to. Stefan can find you once the spell is down. Knowing my brother's keen deductive powers it should only take him about a week to figure things out."

"You wouldn't dare." Elena squared her jaw – it was almost cute.

He laughed harshly and shook his head. Sometimes Elena read him so well he felt about as insubstantial as air, then other times, like now, she was so far off the mark it was almost sickening. He fixed his eyes on her and hoped to god she could read how very serious he was. "I've got nothing to lose. Let's not go there."

Elena's eyes widened unbidden and he saw the tiny flicker of fear in those brown orbs as she remembered that she was talking to a genuine serial killer, and maybe calling his bluff was not so smart. She wavered, her body language giving her away. "Damon – don't." She began but it was too late.

He bounded to his feet, using sheer force of will to close the gap between them before Elena could jump back into the safety of the pool of sun light puddling on the carpet just beyond the bathroom. Gritting his teeth he caught Elena up and threw her over his shoulder. Elena Gilbert was a feather weight and picking her up and blurring out of the bedroom, swerving to avoid pesky stripes of sunlight, shouldn't have been an issue even with her squirming and beating her little fists and kicking her little feet, but it was. He could do it, but it wasn't anywhere near as easy as it should have been.

"Damon!"

He dropped her on the leather couch in the remains of the library and slammed closed the library doors before blurring back up the stairs. He kicked shut his bedroom door, skimmed a patch of sunlight so he could heft his easy chair over to form a barricade, and then snatched the stake and the knife Elena had left on the nightstand before darting back into the bathroom. He was panting and wheezing as he dropped to his knees before his tub and tore his collar back from his throat.

"Damon, open the damn door!" He heard the rattling and banging as Elena tried to get in. He was impressed with how fast she had chased him back upstairs. Despite everything he was proud that he'd got a chance to know this girl. She had spunk; she had fire. He hoped to the bottom of his rotten heart that what he was about to do was enough to get her out of this house safely.

"Damon! Damon - let me in. Don't do this. Damon. I mean it. If you do this I'll never forgive you. Damn it! Let me in." Across his room the easy chair shifted an inch across the floor but remained blocking the door. The sound of fists and feet pounding against the wood increased in tempo along with the shouting. He knew that in another few minutes she'd have the door clear, even if she had to break it down.

"Goodbye Elena," he whispered too low for her to hear and shoved the point of the stake right through his jugular vein.

Unbelievable pain caused his jaws to drop open on a silent howl as he tipped forward, grasping the sides of his bathtub as he fumbled to pull the burning piece of wood out of his throat. Blood spouted, hitting the far side of the tub as he leaned into the bath as far as he could, choking and spitting on more blood. He had to do it again; he had to make sure the wound didn't close. Almost blind with the stunning pain he shoved the stake in and dragged the tip downward, ripping open his throat right to the bone. His own blood, hot and scalding, flooded the bathtub, staining the ceramic like rust water, gurgling and congealing around the drain. He vomited the dark blood coating his tongue and fought to keep upright so he bled into the tub and not all over the floor.

Again he punctured his throat, driving the wood so deep he felt it when the point hit his spine, and all the while he wished he could have figured out a way to hang himself upside down over the tub so he'd bleed out faster. He tried to climb into the tub, but couldn't make his legs move. Angry grey dots ate away his vision like an army of malevolent Pac-mans and he could only hope he didn't pass out before he bled out. His strength was failing him rapidly, massive blood loss doing the job of slow starvation in half the time and reducing his demigod physique to that of a withered husk in minutes.

"Damon!" Elena ran across the room, having wriggled through the door just like he'd known she would. Too weak to lift his head as the last half pint of blood dwindled out of his body he knew he had only seconds to finish the job before the stupid, beautiful girl undid all his hard work and tried to save him.

(She was always trying to save him. He wished that he'd had the courage to tell her not to when it still mattered. He wished he'd told her that the only person who could save him was him and he'd given up trying too many years ago to count.)

Numbly he clasped the Japanese lacquer handled knife in shrivelled fingers and drove it into his sternum, rooting for his heart even as the siren call of Elena's blood threatened to ruin everything. His failing hand pushed the blade upward, past wasting muscle and gristle. All he had to was stop his heart from beating. Heart and blood; that was the source of Amelie's power, always had been, if she was using him the way he thought she was then bleeding out and stopping his heart would stop her, at least long enough for Stefan to figure out a more permanent solution.

The knife found his heart, finally, puncturing the maligned organ like a wet balloon. The sensation of satisfaction he gained with that last fission of pain was glorious. His hands slipped from the knife still lodged in his chest and he slipped sideways to the floor, not quite gone but fading fast.

There was no more pain, just dissociate sensation. He could feel his veins deflating under his skin, his flesh desiccate and shrink around his bones. He'd stopped breathing because there was no way he could get oxygen to his lungs with a torn open throat. He was stone deaf and lost to touch; thoughts and awareness spiralled downward in ever decreasing circles towards oblivion. Finally his eyes dried up and sunk into the sockets before rolling up into his skull. It was then that Damon Salvatore checked out of the world of the living completely.

His last coherent thought as he went was that he was glad he'd finally hit on a plan that worked.