"What a charming little homestead." It was the same voice that Elena heard in nightmares, from the same mouth that dripped with her blood and grinned and grinned and grinned, split open and curling at the corners as though her fear and misery were the funniest things he'd ever seen.
She tried to keep her head. If Klaus was here, then so was Stefan, but if they came through the door right now, it wouldn't matter if he tried to protect her. There was nothing anyone could do against Klaus. Elena fought against the freezing weight of helplessness and terror, forcing her numb arms to gather up her belongings and cram herself quickly, quietly, into the corner of the closet.
Out in the apartment, the door banged open.
"Do you feel that?" Klaus was closer. "Is anybody here?"
"It's been vacant for decades." Elena's breath swelled in her lungs, fighting to escape in a gush at the sound of Stefan's voice. "People must break in all the time. Why'd you bring me here?" She forced herself to listen, shoving down both terror and hope to try and take in whatever information she might be able to glean.
"Your friend, Liam Grant, the one who drank his wife's blood." Why did that name sound familiar? "I never could figure out why you wanted his name. And then you told me your little secret. It was all part of your special little ritual."
Almost against her will, Elena's head turned, eyes skimming the wall of names that she stood nearly pressed against. The cold of the plaster emanated, untouched for so many decades, and for one dizzying second it felt like the icy fingers of all those names, all those people, dead and cold and drained and rotting, prickling over her skin.
"To write it down," Stefan was saying. Liam Grant. There it was, inked onto the wall by her head. Liam Grant. He'd been one of Stefan's victims. Just like Polly Marston, Vasily Østberg, David Van Nifterick, Nina Geelen, Tilda Abrahams. Just like Rahul Ihejirika, Sunny Kravitz, Margaret Coinnich, and Jennifer Murphy.
"And relive the kill...over and over again," Klaus was saying with smug satisfaction, as though he'd just proven a point. Elena waited for Stefan to explain, to tell him that's not what it was, that this...monument was not a shrine to slaughter, it was an act of penance, a way to punish himself even when he had been at his worst, his most craven.
Stefan didn't say anything at all.
Fingers scraped at the edges of the hidden door, pulling it open. "You believe me now?" Asked Klaus, but it didn't sound like a question. It sounded like triumph. Liam Grant.
There were footsteps on the dusty floorboards, slow and pensive. Luka Isaksen. Daria Browne. Guido Bonaventura.
The footsteps were outside and Elena didn't have time to think. There was nowhere else to go. Silently, she moved as far from the door as she could, pressing her back to the wall of names. The people who hadn't been any different than her, really. It wouldn't help, but it was all she could do. Edward Mullins. Jamesina Wash. Erika Novak.
Stefan stepped into the dark of the closet, and she bit the inside of her lip hard, looking at his profile. She could sense it, the instant he felt her presence, a snap of awareness in the cramped space. Simon Faraldo. Naomi Straub. Katja Rinne.
She should smile, try and communicate something to him. Give him hope that she hadn't given up on him, that they were going to get him out. She couldn't make her face move from its rictus of blank terror. Geneviève Robertson. Mario Alderisi. Marta Jacques.
He looked at her in surprise for one moment, before the unguarded expression was pulled back into neutrality. James De Angelis. Francesca Katz. She wondered what she looked like to him now. Did he still see the girl he loved, the girl he'd fought to save? Gregory Cook. Magdalena Richter. Or did she fade into the wall, another name, just like all these, every one he'd ever stolen and carved on the face of his edifice?
Elena Gilbert.
"Look what I found," Stefan called to Klaus, without taking his unreadable eyes from hers. Elena wondered for one, mad second whether he would reassemble her corpse too, like he'd done to those girls in Tennessee. Would he place her head and limbs lovingly back on her body, as well, pose her like a doll, as he did to them? God, is that what Damon would find when he got back?
She felt as though she was already dead, the future unfolding like a spool of film reel. Stefan would never be able to come back from this, even if he wanted to, someday. He'd never forgive himself for killing her, and Damon would never, never be able to forgive his brother. He would hunt Stefan down and destroy him, and in doing so destroy himself. Jeremy would be alone, all alone without anyone, they only had each other now, all the family they'd ever had was buried in the cold earth and she could feel it, the cold of the grave that seeped through the brick behind the plaster, all scrawled over with those names, all those names.
"Nineteen-eighteen. Single malt," said Stefan.
"My favorite. Let's go and find someone to pair it with." The door was closing again, leaving her alone, living amongst the dead.
"Elena?" She could hear him. She wanted to speak, call out and tell him where she was. She couldn't. The air in her lungs was stuck, freezing the words inside her chest, and she clutched her bag tight to her torso, arms locked and shaking from the strain. Over an hour had passed and she still hadn't been able to bring herself to leave the closet, straining to hear the slightest whisper of a footstep on the stairs, praying for Damon and fearing that Stefan would change his mind, tell Klaus what he'd really found in his old apartment.
"I got you a dress, come put it on so we can go." No, it wasn't that her arms were shaking, she was shaking, full body trembling as the adrenaline finally drained away. The relief of being safe again flooded her and her muscles lost their strength. Her knees locked to keep her upright and her head weakly thudded backwards onto the wall behind her.
"Elena? Why are you -? Oh." Damon poked his head round the door, and scanned her up and down. "What happened to you?"
Even if she could have found the words, she couldn't have forced them out.
"Stefan was here." She nodded, thankful that he didn't make her speak. His eyes flashed, hands twitching restlessly by his sides. "And Klaus." Nod. "Well, you're still alive, so either they didn't find you, or Stefan covered for you somehow." Nod. "Okay. You want to come out of there?" She nodded again, but didn't move, still clutching her belongings to her chest. She could feel his eyes looking her over, before he sighed. "Come on, let me help."
Reaching out slowly, he tugged on one wrist until her grip loosened on the bag and Stefan's diary. He took them from her and set them on the nearest flat surface, then coaxed her out of the cramped space, sliding a hand round her shoulders. When she was out, he kicked the door shut with one boot, and a jar fell from one of the shelves, thudding onto the floorboards. Elena flinched as though it had hit her.
"Okay," Damon murmured, "you're okay." He sat her down on the loveseat and crouched in front of her. "Jeez," he said with a crease in his brow, "you're messed up. What happened?"
"Klaus came in, with Stefan," Elena began, starting to feel like an idiot now. Why was she making such a fuss? She was fine. "I hid, but Klaus made him look in the closet, at the -" With a wave of her still-shaking hand, she gestured over at the disguised door.
"The murder wall."
She glared at Damon, irritation at his cavalier attitude breaking through the numbness. "The wall. Yeah. And Stefan saw me, he looked right at me, and I thought - just for, like, a second, I thought-"
"You thought he was going to turn you over to Klaus?" For a face that was usually so expressive, Elena couldn't tell what Damon was thinking. Did he think less of her for her moment of doubt? She certainly felt guilty enough about it herself.
"Yeah. No. Maybe, I don't know." Great, Elena, make less sense. "I think it was just - I don't know, the dark, and the fact that I was alone, and I was standing right by -" She waved again.
"Stefan's creepy murder wall."
"Yes, that." Scowling in aggravation at him did at least make her feel better. Part of her expected him to make fun of her, or to tell her to toughen up, that she hadn't seen anything like the worst of it yet.
He didn't, just nodding with a tight-lipped expression. "You gonna be okay to go ahead with the plan tonight?"
"You know where he's going to be?" She sat forward eagerly,
"That sounds like a 'yes'," Damon got to his feet, picked up a bag from the bed and held it out to her. "Good. Get dressed. You're all road-trippy and gross."
Taking it from him automatically, Elena stood. "So we're doing this?"
"Yep. I'll distract Klaus, and you deal with Stefan."
"Okay. Thank you," she added awkwardly, aware that he didn't have to let her come along, or let himself get whaled on by Klaus to give her a window with Stefan.
Damon looked at her for a second. "But you're going to have about five minutes tops before that hybrid freak rips my heart out." He stepped closer. "So please, tell me you can do this."
Holding the bag to her chest, Elena tried to sound confident. "I can do this."
He nodded, pressing his lips together as his eyes flicked around the room. After a second, Elena started to move past him, figuring the interaction was at its end, but he caught hold of her arm in a gentle grip. "So you're - okay?" His eyes were on her face, but not meeting hers.
I'm fine, jumped to her lips, and she opened her mouth, before closing it again. "I really believed for a second that he was going to kill me," she said, not sure why she was saying this to Damon at all. "I mean, I don't know what's bothering me more. The fact that I was about to die, again, or thought I was, anyway - or that I thought he would do that. To me." She was the one who dropped her gaze this time. "It's not fair, I get that. He's killed so many people and I shouldn't -" She struggled for a moment. "I'm not any different to them, the names on his wall. They all deserved to live, too, and I'm not special. I shouldn't be."
"You are." Damon was looking at her now, vivid eyes unapologetic. "And I get it, it's not fair, and honestly, I'm probably not the best person to talk to about being a habitual murderer's exception clause, because to me? You are."
Elena wasn't sure how to feel about that. Living a life with vampires meant that a certain moral muddiness around murder was a necessity of life, and she knew perfectly well the kind of body count of which Damon had been capable - of which he was still capable when he lashed out. But that - she cast her eyes over Damon's shoulder to the door, that tiny, hidden room where the only remnant of all those people lived, scratched into a wall by their murderer for his own perverse enjoyment. That wasn't killing for food, or even bloodlust. That was slaughter for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of the kill and the power that it gave. She was well aware that her perception of normality wasn't great, it was downright twisted at times, but even for a vampire, for whom taking human life was a fact of life, this wasn't normal.
There was a sadism to Stefan's past and present actions that she couldn't reconcile with the man she knew; an inherent, calculated horror that she couldn't escape, now that she was forced to look. She didn't want to believe that the man she'd known was the exception rather than the rule, that this was what he truly was and would always return to. She didn't want to believe that.
Taking a breath, she tightened her grip on the garment bag, nodded at Damon with an admirably un-wobbly smile.
His hand left her arm. "Alright. Get changed for tonight, we don't have a lot of time." She moved to the side and he sat down in the loveseat she'd vacated, sprawling with studied nonchalance. Her hand was on the doorknob to the ramshackle bathroom when he spoke again. "Uh, I'm sorry that I left you here. Alone. I mean," he sighed as though he was annoyed, very carefully looking anywhere but at her. "I'm sorry you were scared."
Elena felt that frightening rush of affection for him that she felt more and more nowadays. "Thanks. I'm okay now." She closed the bathroom door before she could say anything too unwise.
Damon nodded to her before he disappeared inside the dive bar that (apparently) contained Klaus and Stefan. She nodded back, hoping she looked more confident than she felt. This close to last call, in the dilapidated district of Chicago where they'd found themselves, the street was empty, silent and still. Her every movement seemed exaggerated, obtrusive in the dead night, so she tried to stand as motionless as she could, suppressing a shiver when the breeze curled around her bare legs.
It had been barely thirty seconds when the door opened again and Damon walked out. She was about to call out, and ask where Stefan was, when in a blur of motion Damon was slammed back into a car, Stefan was holding him there by two fistfuls of his shirt.
"What is wrong with you?" She heard Stefan hiss.
"What is wrong with you?" Damon broke his brother's grip and glared indignantly. "You kill Andie one day, you save my life the next. What are you, good, bad? Pick one!"
"Klaus almost saw Elena today," Stefan wasn't moving an inch. "You have to get her out of Chicago."
"She's not going anywhere until she's got you checked into vampire rehab and on the mend. Trust me. I've tried." Even at this distance, Elena could practically feel his eye-roll.
"She is the key to everything," Stefan said insistently, and Elena wondered wearily what she was supposed to be an essential ingredient for now. "Klaus can't know that she's alive."
"What are you talking about?"
"She was supposed to die in the sacrifice and she didn't. Now Klaus can't create any new hybrids. His witch is seconds away from figuring that out. Tell Elena to go home and forget about me." Elena tried not to make a sound, but her stomach heaved queasily, the familiar, unbearable weight of her own inevitable demise settling on her like a shackle, one which she had been free of for only a few short weeks.
"Tell her yourself." She shook herself, trying to bring her attention back to the job she'd promised to do. Death once again hovered at her shoulder, and as Damon went back into the bar she wondered absently whether it had been there her whole life, and she just hadn't known.
"You shouldn't be here," were the first words Stefan said to her. All these weeks, and that was it. The helpless fear she'd felt in that dusty apartment coalesced, turning in on itself like a nascent black hole. It was an ugly feeling that Elena thought was probably best described as anger. It had really never occurred to her to feel angry at Stefan, before. She'd understood. In leaving with Klaus, he'd been doing what he had to in order to save his brother, but now they were here to save him. Why couldn't he just let them?
"Where else would I be?" She asked, pushing down the anger burning in her belly. It had no place in what she was trying to achieve.
"What do you want? Damon won't be able to distract Klaus for long."
She took a breath, and touched his face, trying to bring love to the forefront. "Come home." His proximity was making her body lock up as it remembered what it felt like to fear him, when barely two hours ago she'd felt her life spinning like a coin in the air, not knowing how it would land. She remembered the tiny, suffocating space, pressed cold against a wall while Stefan looked at her with the eyes of a mass murderer. Nonetheless, she pushed her arms to rise, embracing his shoulders as she brought him down to her, glad that her face was hidden from him as she lifted the vervain dart.
Faster than she could process, he was out of her arms and holding her wrist in a punishing grip.
"How much clearer can I make it?" He growled, squeezing and squeezing the bones in her wrist until they ground together and creaked with the force. She tried not to cry out, afraid to draw outside attention, but her hand went numb and she lost her grip, the dart clattering to the ground uselessly. "I don't want to come home!" He released her wrist, throwing it away from him with bared teeth. "Klaus is obsessed with siring these hybrids. The second he knows you're alive, he'll figure out why it's not working."
"Look, I know you're trying to protect me, but I can't let you do it. Come with me, Stefan, please."
"And what do you expect if I do?" He was nearly shouting, apparently not worried about being discovered by Klaus. "It's never going to be the same, Elena!"
Didn't he think she knew that? As if anything could be the same, ever, now that she'd seen what he was really capable of. "I know that."
"I don't think you do," he pressed condescendingly, as though she was stupid enough to not understand what his bloody killing spree meant. "I've left bodies scattered from Florida to Tennessee. Innocent people. Humans."
"Lexi found you like this before," she tried again, although she could feel all her hope slipping away. "In the twenties, and she saved you."
"And you know what I did after that? I spent thirty years trying to pull myself together. To a vampire, that's nothing. To you? That's half your life."
The anger she'd been ignoring burned a hole in her throat, spilling like bile into her mouth. "You really think I'm doing this for me?" She snapped. "I know we're over, Stefan. I'm not stupid. I can't just ignore everything that you've done, all the things that you didn't have to do. You did what you had to do to save your brother, I get that, but since then you've slaughtered your way across the country just because you could, because you finally had an excuse to do it." Stefan's eyes were unreadable. She took a breath. "I still want to save you. I want Damon to get his brother back, because he's my friend, and I know that he feels like he owes you, even if he'd never admit it. And I owe it to all the people that you're going to hurt if we let you carry on. If I don't save you, then all their deaths are on me, too, and on my failure."
There were tears on her cheeks, but she ignored them. "So, no. I can't give up on you."
"Yes, you can," Stefan finally said, his voice flat. "It's done. You said it yourself, there's nothing left between us, no reason for you to be here. That part of my life is done." It was harrowing to see how much of the person looking back at her wasn't Stefan. Or maybe it was. God, what did she know? She was eighteen years old and had known Stefan for all of a few months. "It was nice to play pretend, Elena, but I think it's time I went back to being who I've always been."
The guilt set in before he had even turned around, but the fight was draining out of her. She couldn't force him, and she couldn't persuade him, so just watched him walk away while her own inadequacy cried out in helpless frustration inside her. It wasn't until she'd reached Damon's car and was sitting huddled in the front seat that it occurred to her that she'd ended her relationship. She and Stefan had reached the end, and now they both knew it. Even if the writing had been on the wall all this time, nothing had seemed quite real, or quite so irreversibly final until it had been said out loud.
Elena was almost surprised to realize that she was crying, her cheeks wet and eyes spilling. Wasn't it stupid to cry over breaking up with her boyfriend, when everything else was so much bigger than that? Bodies lay slaughtered and sadistically mutilated across four states, she was once again on the hit-list of an insane and immortal hybrid, she'd failed in the one thing she'd promised Damon she could do, and so many more people were going to die because of her. But she couldn't help it.
Her hand went to the vervain charm around her neck - Stefan's first gift to her, and for a moment her fist tightened around it and she wanted to tear it from her throat. The urge passed as logic reasserted itself, and she made her hand relax again as Damon opened the driver's side door and got in.
After sitting silently for a second, she felt his eyes turn to her. "You okay?"
"Just drive," she told him quietly, hugging her free arm around her torso.
His gaze dropped and he started the car, but as he drove them away from the scene of her spectacular failure, something in the lines of him seemed slumped, weary. Guilt roiled, burning and cannibalistic inside her. "Are you okay?"
She didn't think he was going to answer, but after a silence that was just a little too long, he smiled, a painful expression that pulled up the corners of his mouth. "Aw, honey, I'm always okay." His languid drawl was as unconvincing as his smile.
"I'm sorry I couldn't get Stefan back."
"Not your fault, Elena," he replied, with a note of warning in his voice that told her he really didn't want to talk about this now.
"It is," her voice was insistent and unpleasantly high, even to her own ears. "I'm sorry. I thought I could get him back for you but he wouldn't listen."
"You - for me? You thought we were doing this for me?" He sounded incredulous and he was staring at her, but she didn't turn her head. "Well, what a coincidence. I thought I was doing this for you." His voice was hard.
"I realized today that I've been fooling myself," Elena confessed. "I still want to get him back. I want to save him, for his sake, for your sake, and for all the people that are going to get hurt if I don't."
"But?"
"But I'm pretty familiar with what grief feels like, and I know what it's like when you finally get to the end of 'denial'. It feels like this. I've spent all this time grieving the person that I lost when he left, and it's pretty clear that even if he does come back, the person that I knew is gone, now. If he was ever real," she added in a mumble.
"What does that mean?" Damon demanded tensely.
"It means that -" Elena struggled to put it into words. "The - the ripper, is who he is, it's the same person that I've always known, even if I didn't know it. He isn't two different people, even if I think he'd like to be. I'm not sure if he lied to me deliberately, or whether he just wanted to believe it himself, but he can't just draw a line and claim that beyond it, he's not responsible for his actions. He is, we all are, and I can't ignore the things he's done."
The lingering cold of the Chicago night was still on her skin, and she shivered. Damon reached wordlessly into the backseat and snagged his leather jacket, spreading it one-handed over Elena's lap. She curled her hands into the worn collar and brought it up to her chin like a blanket.
"But it's still my fault," she started again, feeling that her confession wasn't done yet. "I told him I wanted him to come home, but he told me it wouldn't be the same as before. I said I knew it wouldn't, that things between us would never be like that again. It was more honest than I needed to be. And now if he doesn't come home, it's because of me." God, she was tired of being a failure.
"Nope," Damon interjected, popping the p with cavalier assurance.
She scowled across at him. "'Nope'? You can't just decide that."
"Yes, I can," he replied without batting an eye.
"Why? How can you not blame me?"
"Easy, it's your own logic. Stefan's responsible for his own actions, right? Including the ripper-y ones."
"Yeah," she said grudgingly.
"So he's the only one responsible for his decision not to come home, not you. Boom."
She pressed her lips together, unconvinced by his simplistic argument. Sighing, Damon dropped the offhand attitude. "Look, Elena, I don't know if this is gonna be a comfort or not, but I was already pretty sure before tonight that this wouldn't work."
"Why didn't you say anything, then?" She demanded, irritated.
Shrugging, he turned the wheel around at an intersection. "You had hope, I didn't want to step on your dreams." He glanced over at her, folded up small under his leather jacket and paused as though he wasn't sure how much to tell her. "Don't get it wrong, Stefan's in his right mind. He hasn't flipped his humanity switch, and he knows exactly what he's doing. He might fool himself that it's Klaus forcing him, but it's not. Nobody tortures and slaughters if they don't already kinda want to." Carefully, as though he was sure she would pull away, he pulled her hand out from under the jacket and squeezed his fingers around hers. "We can't force him to do anything, either."
"People are going to die," she said in a small voice.
"Yeah," he said calmly, "but more people are gonna die if we keep chasing them. We're out-gunned here, Elena, and now I need to keep you safe." Clearing his throat, he released her hand and put his back on the wheel. She retreated under the jacket, and let herself fall back into her own conflicted thoughts.
They were well into Indiana by the time Damon spoke again. "So you can't forgive him?" He asked abruptly into the silence. "For all the things that he's done. You're sure you can never forgive him?"
Frowning, Elena looked across at his profile. His eyes were fixed determinedly on the road, vivid eyes flashing with every streetlight that they passed. "No, I can forgive him, but that doesn't mean I have to be with him. That's not how it works. Forgiveness doesn't mean a person is owed a relationship with you."
She waited for him to say something, maybe to tell her why he seemed so oddly invested in her answer. But he just nodded, tight-lipped, and didn't look at her. She thought for a moment about what she'd said, and what it might mean to him, and then sighed. "Damon, don't do that, I wasn't talking about you. It's a completely different situation. You're not Stefan."
"Yeah, thanks, you've made that pretty clear," he muttered, and she could practically see the walls rising around him.
"That's not what I meant." Trying not to snap at him, Elena rubbed her fingertips wearily over the furrow between her eyebrows. "You and him are two different people, Damon. I forgave you for all the shit you pulled and I still want to be your friend. I forgive him for what he's done, but I don't want to be in a relationship with him anymore, and it's my right to decide that. It has nothing to do with - with you and me. It's apples and oranges."
"Maybe, but the apples are looking awfully orange to me."
"What does that mean?"
"God knows why I'm arguing about this with you," he snorted. "I'm selfish, Elena, I should be glad that you're - that he -" Damon broke off. "But how are you okay with all the shit that I've done, but you draw the line with Stefan?"
"Because you're two different people, and the things that you've done are different!"
"I'm a murderer, Elena," Now he did look across at her, eyes nearly feverish in their intensity. "Don't think for a moment that I'm somehow better than Stefan. I don't even know how many people I've killed."
"I know that," she snapped, sick and tired of people underestimating her comprehension. "You really think I'm that dumb? You killed my brother." She saw him flinch. Good. "I get it, believe me. I've seen you at your worst. I've seen what you do when you get pissed off or hurt, and lash out because it's the only thing you know how to do. Even if I don't know the specifics, I know the kind of things you do, I know what it looks like when you give in to the worst parts of yourself, I know that you do it deliberately, because you freak out when someone comes too close to thinking the best of you. You make everyone hate you so that you don't have to go through the disappointment of actually trying to be good, and then letting them down anyway. I know that, because I know you, Damon."
She took a deep, shaky breath. "I know you. Which means I also know that you're not like Stefan. You don't hurt people just because it's fun. You don't write their names down so that you can relive it over and over. You don't put their bodies back together like they're dolls that you dissected for your own amusement." With conscious effort, she relaxed her white knuckle grip on the collar of his jacket. "I'm not naïve. I know you've done some godawful things, probably things that would horrify me, but you're not that."
He was staring ahead at the road, eyes flared wide and jaw clenched. She swallowed. "I also know that you can be kind. You make the tough decisions because you'd rather save the people you care about and be hated, than lose them and be loved. You don't want to give up on your brother, however much you tell me he's a lost cause, and you've been nothing but supportive this whole time, even though you nearly died because of me. Even though you lost him too."
She swiped at her eyes angrily. God, she was so sick of crying. "So don't tell me what you think I should be feeling about you, or him. It's not up to either of you."
Damon didn't say anything, but she didn't really expect him to. Even though he usually took her emotional outbursts in his stride, anything that reflected too transparently on his better nature was guaranteed to shut him up and send him running. She was surprised, therefore, when after a long silence, he reached out his hand across the car towards her, palm open and waiting for hers. Looking across at him, she was just as taken aback to see his open, unflinching expression. If some people wore their hearts on their sleeves, Damon wore his in his eyes.
Without a moment's hesitation, she fitted her hand into his, linking their fingers together securely. She turned her eyes back to the road and settled in to watch the sunrise.