He sits with her on the park bench.
It isn't a windy day, but the breeze is starting to go, and she looks like a vision in it, the same way that Katherine was. He begins to understand, again, as he he watches it take up her hair, the way it really feels to think that somebody is pretty. The city's not treated her well, he thinks - she seems just as saddened, as weary and as forlorn, as she did three years ago hence. But loving him's taught her to hide those things, if that is what she's calling this. When he closes his eyes he can feel the rough-hewn wood threatening to break off splinters; the human, ephemral heat of her body soaking into his skin, and the phantom kiss of salt blowing in from the lake. Some days the wind carries so far that everything smells like brine, but the air is pleasant today, the scent of green growing things touching him through the mist. It's not cold for the city, just one of those days in autumn. There used to be lots of days like this, he remembers, but as of late, so far from the determination that once propelled him, he sees them for what they are. Not holy or homely or vaguely nostalgic. Only just leaves on the pavement, the promise of roads going slick. The last of the warmth will be leaving them soon, and he will not be here to see it. They'll cradle mugs of hot chocolate inside of their heater-fed kitchens and think of the man that they loved; and maybe, just maybe, he'll come and see te warmth leave for himself, someday that isn't right now.
She is the one who called him. It had been only yesterday, and everything'd seemed hotter, then. Her voice on the phone line had wavered, as if she couldn't quite tell whether she was doing it right. She had rambled for fifteen minutes before she had asked him to meet her, and he'd wondered if she had always been like that, or if the girl he remembers, who is, now, a woman, had liked the quiet back then. He resolves to ask her about it. Tonight, even, if he can. But how do you bring it up to someone when you haven't seen them in years? When they can't look at you and you know the exact reason why? He puts those thoughts back on the shelf he took them down from. Sneaks a glimpse at his hand, and sees the blood staining it scarlet. He knows what Lexi would say about this, if she could see him with her. She would say it was normal to do this, to fill the void he has filled. Perhaps that's why he's done it - there is no one save her who understands that he does not, has never wanted.
"You look like you're freezing," She tells him, a soft, lilting whisper of autum park-bench afternoon. He winces when he hears her talk. It's different, he thinks, than it should be. The static of cellular'd masked it, but he hears how tired she is, the keen pains that she has endured. He checks up on her, every once in awhile. She got a job at a publishing house downtown that specializes in books of questionable respute. She talked about it online, sometimes, but she never seemed happy, and he has lain awake nights on end thinking of how she must really have felt without Damon, in those dark moments they used to share. Whatever it was, it is coming plain now, and she does not hide it from him. Part of her even, accepts it, he thinks; from the way that she ha turned to the clouds and let the bitterness free. If he were a better man, he would reach out to her.
"I'm only cold on the inside," He tells her, knowing that it must fall flat. Knowing that it's not enough. His fingers are shaking, he knows that. But they do not shake from the chill. He is exhausted, but he cannot let himself sleep. He wonders if she is like him like that, if she sees him in all of her dreams. If Damon is young, inside them, and hale; if he kisses her with his hands tangled up in her hair and that fierce, fleeting slant to his eyes. He wonders if she lets him touch her, run his hands all over her. He hopes that she doesn't, for her sake, even if it makes him selfish. It isn't what he would've wanted for her, but he does not have to live with it; and there, on the park bench, with his hands trembling for a drink or a drink of a good dream for once, he finds himself wanting to cry. Her hand is so far from his. It inhabits a world of its own. And her hands are steady. They do not shake like the leaves do when they have died, and are only just waiting to fall. The look of her tells him that she has not chosen her life, but that, for Damon, she'll live it.
"You're one to talk," Stefan tells her. "You're the one wearing a scarf."
She laughs at him for it, and he smiles a tight-lipped smile. See, he says, inside of his mind where nobody living can hear him, I'm doing right by her for you. I'm doing the best that I can. It's the very same voice that says, really, he has done nothing, the very same one that is gone. You're not happy, either, the look she won't give seems to tell him. He wishes he was, though, sometimes.
"It isn't a real scarf," She tells him, a bit more sad than before. He can still remember that day, how hot the sun got in summer, and how she had dragged him away from the party. How, through the thickets of wild grass and the struggling foliage that grew at the wind of the creek, and she had pleaded with him. With booze on her breath and the weight of the world on her shoulders, she'd asked him, Can you keep a secret? Elena isn't that girl anymore, and she will not tell him her secrets, but something in knowing her all of this time makes him feel as if it could be worse. He can tell now, anyways. Catches the seam of the long, dark shirt that he used to wear, the shape of it torn, reassambled, so that she could keep him near. Is that something that everyone does, Stefan wonders, or only the two of them, lost? Would she think he was cruel if he asked her? He thinks that she might, but more of him thinks that she'd love it, the way that she hasn't for years; starved for the lines of her lover that still come to light in his face. And didn't they used to joke about that, how she couldn't tell who was who? When they joked about it, she had laughed - a real laugh, thinks Stefan, not just what the closeness brings out. And he thinks about what their mother said once, in the old days when they breathed and bled. There are some things you always remember, she'd told them. Some beautiful things that you never forget, not even when God calls you home. Her laughter, he thinks - it had been one of those things for Damon. But try as he might, and despite that she was not Katherine, it never had been one for him. Still, there is something in it, perhaps that very same something, and it draws Stefan yet closer to her, even if only an inch.
"Can I - Would you mind if I -"
"No," She says, with her back still turned and her gaze still cast out to the sky, "It's alright," She says, "Go ahead."
He raises a trembling hand. Brushes the hang of the fabric over the curve of her neck. His nails catch her hair and it burns him, forcing a thick swallow down. Underneath all the green growing things, he can smell what his brother smelled like, and what he had smelled, whenever he hadn't just drank. There's the slightest hint of rosemary there, the leather spines of the books he had read and the bourbon that he'd liked to drink, and in that moment - for just one moment - he hates her. Her fluttering pulse sings loud and clear.
"Why are you here?" Stefan asks her, not caring if it comes out harsh, as he yanks himself back from the scarf.
"Because," Says Elena, "I loved him."
He's never heard someone sound sadder before, but he knows how they sound when they scream. That's what she'd done when the time of his dying had come. She had thrown open the car door and vomited onto the roadside; in the bright, silvery moonlight it had looked near as pretty as she had. Near as devastatingly broken to pieces that nobody could ever look at, precisely, as if they were not disgusted; something to be pitied and gossiped about in the halls. She had reread the message that Katherine had sent him, and then she had howled the high, jagged sobs of the damned. It's a good thing, he thinks, that Elena does not want his pity, because he does not pity her. She hadn't loved him like he had. Not ever, thinks Stefan. Not once. He'd deserved better than her; some girl that looked like their old love that they both couldn't help falling for. He wonders if she feels him tense on the park bench and move to start shifting away. Every edge of her tautens in response; as if she is only realizing now that he is the last thing that she'll ever have of the child that she used to be.
Either way, it does not matter.
"What are you looking at?" Stefan asks - and adds, without speaking, If you are not looking at me?
"Everything," Says Elena, "Everything's beautiful here."
Just the way you are, he thinks. It is one more thing he will keep to hismelf; that he'd thought she had looked like a flower, a white rose that bloomed in the dark, so rare and sublime that he'd had a true need to hold her close to his heart. Isn't she beautiful? Stefan had thought, the very first day that he saw her, walking to class alone. Not quite a park bench, he thinks. And isn't it funny, he ruminates on, as a wilted sigh slips through her lips, that Damon was who she'd been closest to in the world, when he could not comprehend it, the very way that she'd seen things? Elena was pretty - she looked like Katherine had, with her long rowan hair and her soft eyes just darker than hazel - but she was not beautiful. Had not been that and could not be that, for too much inside her is anger. The grieving has tempered it, somewhat, he can still get the glimpses that lie beneath her facade, and he knows that part of her well. There is no part of Elena Gilbert that Stefan, himself, does not know. Not the one that is frightened of spiders, and walking alone at night. Not the one that liked skipping classes sometimes and didn't much know how to flirt. Further, deeper, than all of those parts, the part of her that had loved him, far less than he should've been loved.
Some days, when Stefan thinks about them, he thinks of how he felt young, as if life were a glimmering forest that beckoned to be explored. When going to high school felt like a bane, and he only drank animal blood. But more than that, even, he sees her and Damon together. The way that he'd folded his arm around he and grinned so smug while she leaned against him where they sat. It had never ceased to amaze him that Damon, somehow, had not seen it it for months - how she had put distance between them with all of her long silences, and the manner in which she had told him that she was not his to keep; and that her love, which she'd claimed to have given so fully, would never have belonged to him. He can't stand the way she avoids him now, in this future he'd not got to have, and the small town that both of them ran from without so much as looking back. You left? Caroline'd asked him, What do you mean you left?! From a barstool he'd told her he'd be there for Christmas, running his hands through his hair. The barstool had been an island. His feet had not touched the floor. You'll be alright, though?, Caroline'd asked him. And he had told her of course he would, sharp nails digging into his palms.
She paints her nails the same color as blood, and Stefan hates her for that, too. If she wanted to paint them, they should be blue, like his eyes. But he cannot fault her for that, and what's left in him spiteful reminds him of that; that he need do nothing more to surpass her than keep to himself what had not been his brother's to give. The rest of him is as cold and as lonely as she is. It gets the scent of Damon's shirt deep and clings to it there like the best thing that he's ever known. It is that part of Stefan that hopes she knew how close they had been to each other - the numb and unyielding part of him that once had been human, before Katherine left them for dead. His cold, shaking hands that her sure, steady hands will not touch. Just touch me, Elena, he thinks. Give me something, at least, that's not this. She might be right about it. Everything's beautiful, here. He'd looked out the window in snatches and fits as he left, and the worn, living beauty of it was what he had let himself weep for.
He still thinks that she understands.
He does not, has never wanted. All that he does is feel. He feels her say that she chooses him, that she does not mind what he is. He feels as she makes a new choice. He feels Damon's anguish as the poison courses through his veins, feels watching his brother die. She's looking off into the half-past-noon breeze, and still her hand does not touch his. He stops looking at her and gives himself up to the sky; he sees the forms in the hot, gray clouds that they used to see from her room, and he wonders how long she will stay.
"I loved him," She says, and he wishes that she were a liar. But that one moment has passed, and he will not hate her for that. Everyone thinks that they love somebody, evern now and again. Just because they're wrong about it doesn't mean that it wasn't true once. And somehow, he thinks, it is worth it to him, even if it was a falsehood. He stares to the distance and sees it; the form of dark shirt and dark curls, the soft, sly grin that Damon had favored in boyhood. His clammy hands shake on the park bench, and the wood, suddenly, seems too frail. He's been doing this for too long, Stefan thinks. Searching for himself in her, like some demonic reflection. He was wrong about her back then, he thinks.
He gives into saying,
"I know."
Makes himself feel it; the stretch of the words and the letters. The heft of them on his tongue. God, he thinks, but they hurt.
"Do you think that he loved me back?" Asks Elena. It is when she does it, that uncanny spin that charts with the sweep of the wind and the oath of the night's coming storm, hooking him on a gaze so earnest and wounded it just about breaks his heart, that Stefan says,
"Probably."
"Probably," Says Elena. "Probably," She says, "I like that."
Don't we all? Stefan thinks. She does look beautiful, now that the rain clouds are gathering close and the sky is beginning to darken, and Stefan knows what she means. They are of one loss, one sorrow. One choked out, strangled conviction. There's a low, empty ache in his soul, he thinks, in the place that Elena once was, and seeing her has not replaced it the same way that feeding can do. He reaches in to get at his anger for her, but it is not there, anymore; only the dull, throbbing flail of her pulse as she thinks of when Damon was here, the then that has left them behind. Do you still want to be with her, brother?, the voice in Stefan's head asks him, but he doesn't know how to answer, and she neither wants not wants back anything; merely yearns that time might be rewritten. What kind of a fool does that make her? And knowing that he would do it again in a heartbeat, if it meant he could see her like this - what kind of man does that make him? Her fingers are cold when they catch up to his on the park bench; the blood she can't see has dried sticky on them and they feel like old dust where they meet. She gives him that laugh - one more time, before all that they are and all that they were fades away, she lends him the sound of her laughter. He was wrong about her back then, Stefan thinks, but he was not wrong about this.
She may be a Petrova, this woman that his brother loved, but she still only laughs like a girl.