A/N: This chapter brought to you by the question Why did Stefan think that killing Andie would be an effective deterrent, unless he believed that Damon actually cared about her enough to be hurt by it?
~ Little Pieces of Nothing ~
"You can come back from this. You can be saved. I will never give up on you," Elena pleaded into the phone, knowing Stefan was listening on the other side, even though he wasn't speaking to her.
He waited until she ran out of things to say. Seconds of uncomfortable silence trickled by slowly.
"Did Damon tell you about Andie?" he asked flatly.
Elena, who had fully given up on expecting him to say anything, stammered incoherently for a moment in response to this non-sequitur, before recovering her powers of speech enough to reply.
"He told me that you killed her, but not the details."
"Oh, I didn't just kill her in front of him, although that probably would have done the job. You see, I know my brother. He likes to pretend that he doesn't care about anything, but the truth is that he cares a lot. Always has, ever since were human. When he loves, he loves deeply. He wouldn't have cared about the death of some random human, not even one he was fucking. He wasn't in love with Andie, nowhere near it. But he'd kept her around long enough to form some kind of emotional attachment to her."
Elena was horrified by the cold calculation that had gone into his decision, and yet she still didn't want the conversation to be over yet. When it seemed that Stefan wasn't going to say any more on the subject, she scrambled to come up with something that would keep him talking.
"Wait, you said you didn't just kill Andie. What did you do to her?"
She heard a hard puff of breath from the other side of the line, which could have been a sigh - or, worse, a laugh.
"I compelled her to kill herself and when Damon tried to save her, I physically restrained him so he couldn't."
Elena didn't say anything, didn't know what to say, could hardly believe what Stefan was telling her he'd done, thought about hanging up the phone.
After a pause, he continued, "He struggled, but I was stronger than him for once. I let him go once she was dead. He went straight to her body and he reached out like he was going to pick her up, like that was his first instinct. But then he stopped himself. If he moved the body, her death couldn't be played off as a tragic accident. If she mysteriously went missing, it would be more trouble for him than... whatever sentimental thing he wanted to do was worth."
Long after he'd hung up on her, Elena realized that the phone call was also coldly calculated - with the intention of making her give up searching for Stefan.
~oOo~