About a Girl
Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.
Pairing: Tyler/Elena
She should have skipped the third vodka soda.
You'd think, after an adolescence spent mostly sans-supervision, practically living in the Salvatore Boarding House where the most common item on the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner alike was bourbon, that she would have had a higher tolerance, but two years of college in Maine vampire-free had pretty much wrecked whatever she'd built up in high school.
She's been home in Mystic Falls for three weeks now, the first time she's come back since graduation, and once again she's found herself keeping company with Tyler Lockwood in his big, empty home.
Neither of them ever mention why she no longer has a big empty home to return to herself. After she'd taken the cure at the end of senior year, she'd pretty much made every effort to forget about her brief, horrific stint as a vampire. That's why she'd run all the way to Maine for school, why she'd found a summer internship in New York the previous summer rather than facing the ghosts of her past. Why she'd missed the convoluted drama at the end of freshman year that had somehow resulted in Tyler becoming human again, and everyone else she'd left behind in Mystic Falls nearly dying. (She still doesn't fully understand what happened there, no matter how many times they all try to explain it to her.)
"Gilbert," Tyler calls, a note of incredulity creeping into his voice. "Are you wasted right now?"
"Shut up, Tyler."
He laughs at her as she sways onto the sofa and drapes herself over it. "The Old Elena Gilbert would be ashamed of you."
"The Old Elena Gilbert drowned," she snaps.
He picks her sandaled feet up to make room for himself next to her on the sofa and grabs hold of her hand. "I get that. The Old Tyler Lockwood had his neck broken."
The thing is, he does get it.
There's a whole wide world full of people, and Tyler Lockwood is the only other person who knows what it means to pass through the veil of undeath, back into the realm of the living. To have seen the world through a monster's eyes, and remember it through the broken prism of a human heart.
His transformation had been the reason she'd returned. To see if maybe she no longer had to face her fears all alone.
Not that she'd ever told him so.
"You can't keep on being sad forever," he says.
She sits up and climbs into his lap. Digs her fingers in his hair and kisses him soundly on the mouth, all punishing teeth and possessive pressure. He lets her. "Who says I can't?" she asks him when she pulls back to breathe. "My brother's dead. And for what? Just so I could be human again? So I could go on feeling scared and lonely and sad and anxious and uncertain? How is that a fair trade? How is that right?" She doesn't realize she's crying until her voice breaks, the tears already streaming down her face. God, she hates this. Hates how the vodka has loosened her tongue, loosened the emotions she'd buried as deep inside of her as she could.
Tyler brushes the tears out of her face. Pins her with a look so full of tenderness and understanding that it nearly breaks what little bit of composure she still has left in her. "So you can go on living, Elena. That's what Jeremy would want. That's what he gave everything for."
"I don't know if I can."
He draws her into his arms. "You can be angry if you need to be, Elena. I am, all the time. Just don't push me away. Not when you're the only thing I've got anymore."
In the morning, she moves her things over to the guest room at the Lockwood Mansion, and the two of them try to figure out how to live again in a big house that slowly stops feeling quite so empty.