Chapter 5: Tears of A Clown

DAMON

"Just give it up. I'm a vampire. It's not like my neck gets cold," I tell Elena.

She frowns down at the knitting in her lap. I swear if she were a human, that scarf would have given her two aneurysms and an arrhythmia by now. But she's Elena, so she can't give up on a lost cause. Which, of course, is the only reason she ended up with me.

I make a grab for the scarf but she hangs on tight. "I can do it, Damon. I just need to practice. It's important to me."

I give the scarf a narrow-eyed look. That thing is going to be sorry once I get it alone. I decide on a valorous retreat for the moment and kick my legs up onto the sofa, shifting Elena back between my knees. That way, she can recline against my chest while she gets herself all worked up over her new "relaxing" hobby.

"It's important to you to tie string into knots?"

She bends her head over her needles with more concentration than her lack of movement requires. This has my suspicious side halfway up the ladder into the alarm bell tower but I can't figure out what she could possibly be hiding from me about the world's ugliest winter accessory.

"What's this really about? Are you trying to practice keeping your frustration under wraps so you don't lose it the first time Jeremy brings some bimbo home and tells you she's The One?" I sneak my thumb under the hem of her shirt to stroke the soft skin hidden there. "Because I'm pretty sure it's your job to freak out on him when he's being stupid, which is most of the time."

"I wanted to make you something," she mumbles, tugging at the hopelessly snarled yarn.

"You make me happy." I kiss her hair. "You make me really hot. You can make me take off my clothes, too, if you put a little effort into it."

She laughs and swats my knee half-heartedly.

"Tell me," I growl into her ear. "You know I can torture it out of you."

She shivers and presses closer. I've developed a technique for getting Elena to admit things she thinks she wants to hide from me. Sometimes the ends justify the means. And sometimes the means are so good I wish she had more secrets from me.

"I have to save most of our parents' trust fund so Jeremy can go to college, you know that. So I can't spend it, and you get me such nice presents all the time and I just…" She pauses, fidgeting with the seam on my jeans. "I wanted to get you a good present, too. I thought if I couldn't buy you anything, maybe it would mean something to you if you knew how hard I worked on it." She tosses the whole mess of yarn onto the coffee table, sighing. "I know you don't like it. I'll think of something else."

Fuck.

"You know I never minded being an asshole until you came along," I tell her, wondering how I'm going to dig myself out of this one. "Elena, I didn't mean…"

I hear running steps on the pavement of the driveway and stiffen. The front door flies open and Stefan shouts, "Caroline, don't!"

I move to boost Elena off my lap but she's already gone. She collides with Caroline, abbreviating the blonde's flying leap into a tumble of arms and legs as they wrestle each other across the living room floor. I sit up with a grin. "Saved by a catfight. My favorite interruption."

Stefan frowns, unused to seeing the girls going after each other this way. "Should we stop them?"

"How do we have the same genes?" I stand up for a better view. "They're fighting over me. This is fucking awesome."

Stefan glares. "They're not fighting over you."

"Yeah? So then you were yelling at Vampire Barbie to stop attacking Elena, not me? What'd she do, borrow her Jimmy Choos and scuff 'em?"

Elena surges to her feet and kicks Caroline flat, then plants a boot across her throat and growls a warning, eyes bloody and fierce. For the first time, I realize they're not playing. Which I guess I should have figured out earlier. They're practically Salvatores, but they've never adopted our roughhousing habits. I head around the couch to break it up.

Elena raises the stake she took from Caroline and snaps it over her knee, pointing the splintered end at her friend. "If you ever," she hisses around her fangs, "bring a stake in this house again, I will put it in your chest. Do you understand me?"

"Whoa, whoa, easy, Killer," I say, wrapping my arms around her and putting a little bit of my elder-vampire strength to work as she explodes in a predator's instinctive reaction to being attacked from behind. She stops fighting as soon as she realizes it's me. Caroline lies on the floor looking shocked, hurt, and more than a little ridiculous in a well-cut but soggy jacket covered with brightly colored polka-dots and peeling shreds of darker-colored fabric.

I resist a snarky comment about her clown suit having the mange. My latest pranking brilliance needs to take a backseat for the moment to the fact that my toddler-vampire progenies appear to be on the verge of ending each other in the supernatural version of a hair-pulling fight.

I pull the two pieces of wooden stake out of Elena's hands and toss them away. Elena's cheekbones are still dark with a lacy network of veins, her blood-filled eyes locked with singular focus on her vanquished prey. I grab her wrists and turn her away from Caroline, squeezing with enough force to remind her who is the strongest among us. "Enough."

She struggles against my hold and I shake her once, hard, letting a little blood creep into my eyes as I step closer to make the most of the difference in our heights. Her head bows slightly and she drops her eyes to the floor. I loosen my grip on her and stroke my thumbs over the veins in her wrists.

"Breathe," I murmur, waiting for her to relax.

Stefan pulls Caroline back to her feet and checks her over, glaring at Elena and me. I ignore him, watching for Elena's human side to regain the upper hand. When her cheeks are creamy and clear, I let her go. She turns back to Caroline, not a hint of apology in her expression.

"What were you thinking?" she spits at her friend.

"I wasn't going to kill him. Jeez, Elena."

"You were going to gut-stake me?" I click my tongue. "Nasty, nasty. Didn't the good sheriff raise you with any manners?"

"Manners?" She gestures to her ruined jacket. "You Trojan-horse me and you want to talk about manners?"

"This has got to stop." Stefan crosses his arms over his chest. "This pranking thing has gone way too far. Caroline, I don't want you picking fights with Damon, and you…" He looks at Elena and shakes his head, three brow-creases into his Disapproving Papa face. "Elena? Really?"

"Keep your bossy pants out of this," I say as Elena sucks in an outraged breath. "Your girlfriend's the one who brought a gun to a knife fight. What, you afraid I'm going to rough her up?"

"I think if she came at you with a stake, things might get a little out of hand, yeah. You're impulsive, Damon, and–"

I punch him in the face.

"Trust me," I say as he crawls back to his feet. "That was pre-meditated."

Caroline steps in between us. "Have we all forgotten what is important here? He melted my beautiful Saint Laurent jacket! Melted it!" she says, her voice hitting a pitch that feels like it is re-arranging the bone structure of my inner ear.

"I gave you that jacket. I can melt it if I want to." I grin as I give her a once-over, because she really does look awesomely awful.

"You gave me a freaking clown suit!"

"You seemed pretty grateful at the time," I drawl, remembering the squealing hug she'd given me at Christmas when she'd unwrapped what she thought was an Yves Saint Laurent jacket.

"Compelled somebody to change the sprinkler schedule at the park, didn't you?" Stefan says in a carefully casual tone.

I don't look at him. If he thinks he'll get back into my good graces by admiring my prank setup, he's even dumber than he looks. He's ruined most of my enjoyment in a prank I worked on for months and I'm not going to let him steal what remains.

"You ruined our picnic." Caroline crosses her arms in a way that spells suffering for me sometime in the very near future.

"I was just doing my brother a favor." I spread my arms. "Encouraging him to stop going cliché on his romantic date choices."

"I like picnics," she pouts, and I think I catch a glimmer of moisture in her blue eyes, but it's gone before I can be sure. "I liked my jacket. I should have known you wouldn't give me something that nice unless you were going to take it away again."

"Yeah, you should have known." For an instant I wonder with an uncomfortable twinge of guilt if I should have gotten her a real Christmas present, too. She had been really excited about that jacket.

Which is why it made a great prank, I remind myself.

"Come on, Damon. You can't tell me you wouldn't be pissed off if someone went after Elena with a stake." Stefan gestures at the pieces on the ground. "Elena lost her temper today, too, and it was only Caroline."

Elena shifts her weight and glances away. "It's one thing to play fight. Stakes are totally different."

"That's exactly my point!" Stefan says.

"Yeah, well why don't you cross-stitch up a copy of the house rules, then, Mom?" I take an aggressive step forward. "Rule number one: no stakes when fighting with the overly-impulsive psychopath." His hands are slack at his sides, so I know I'm not going to get the fight I'm spoiling for. I glare at him. If he's going to be a little bitch, the least he could do is let me pound him into a fine paste for it. "I'll be at the bar. Feel free to use that time to go fuck yourself."

"Damon–"

I slam out the front door before he can finish. He's lucky I'm not pinning those house rules to his chest with a hatchet. Dick.

The front door opens and closes again and I turn, my hands curling hopefully into fists, but it's only Elena.

"I'm coming too," she tells me, her lips pressed together like she needs the cooling off period as much as I do. "I could use a drink."

"Fucking roommates," I agree. "I'll drive."

Kyle has two bourbons lined up by the time we make it from the door to the bar. I take the glass on the right and empty it, shaking my head at the coarse burn of cheap liquor. I leave the drink meant for Ric in front of his vacant stool. I'm so used to my little ritual that sometimes it doesn't even hurt anymore to see that glass. Especially since I know that stool's not always as empty as it looks.

"Wine or bourbon, sweetheart?" Kyle asks Elena.

She takes the seat to my right. "It's a bourbon day. Trust me."

He keeps his hands under the bar while he pours the third bourbon in a coffee mug, his answer to underage vampire drinking. "What happened?"

"Caroline tried to attack Damon and I kicked her ass."

I have to smile at that, even though I still wish I could be re-defining my brother's sinus structure.

"Why? Caroline attacks Damon twice a week," Kyle says. "Three times on holiday weekends. Is all the gratuitous violence around here finally rubbing off on you?"

"She had a stake!"

Kyle chuckles, sending a conspiratorial smile my way. "Good thing you haven't told her about all the times I've tried to stake you." He refills my glass. "That one's on the house. Consider it a toast to your discretion."

I toss back my free drink and slide my glass back to him. Thankfully, Elena doesn't comment past a suspicious sideways glance at me.

Kyle pours me another bourbon and looks to Elena. "What else happened? I haven't seen him three drinks deep over Caroline since her glitter glue guerrilla tactics ruined all his jeans."

"Stefan implied that that he might kill Caroline accidentally." Elena gives my thigh a comforting squeeze.

Kyle winces. "You want me to help you dig his grave?"

"As if I stake people I don't damn well mean to stake." I scowl into my bourbon.

"As if he'd hurt Caroline!"

A reluctant smile tugs at the corner of my mouth again. She's too cute when she gets all protective like this. She's ruining my bad mood.

"Stefan did have a point on that one. You totally throat-stomped her. She wasn't really going to stake me."

Kyle whistles. "You throat-stomped her?"

"Not hard." Elena reddens slightly.

Kyle pokes her in the arm. "I haven't forgotten you going teeth-first for my jugular when I shot Damon with that crossbow. Remember?"

She glares at him. "I remember your horrible vervain glove. I thought I was dying."

"Sorry."

"You've apologized for that like a hundred times," I say. "Where's my apology for the damn crossbow?"

"Hold your breath, pretty boy. I hear your kind can keep it up for a looong time." He smiles. "It'd be nice to have the quiet around here for once."

"You wish." I lay a hand on top of Elena's. She flexes her fingers so her nails score my thigh through my jeans and I shift, flaring my eyes. She smiles, looking pleased with herself.

Kyle leans back against the bar beneath the wall of bottles and crosses one boot over the other. "So spill. I've got to hear the latest prank. It must have been good if Caroline was packing heat when she came after you."

"Yeah, what was the deal with the sprinklers? Was the jacket coated in water-soluble paint?" Elena raises her eyebrows. "It looked really realistic to be paint."

"Back in the 80's, there was this doll that was really popular for a while. It came in a hospital gown, like a baby or some bullshit." I take a drink.

Elena gives me an odd look and pushes her empty mug toward Kyle. "One more, please?"

Kyle shakes his head. "No way. Every time I give you more than one drink, I have to put up with way too much PDA from you two."

I snatch up the bottle from his side of the bar. The vampire-hunter-turned-barkeep is surprisingly quick for a semi-mortal, but not quick enough to stop me. I pour her a drink with a smile.

Kyle glares at me. "You know I hate it when you get grabby with my booze, Salvatore."

"What kind of bartender refuses a lady a drink?"

"Why do you know what kind of toys they had nearly thirty years ago?" Elena interrupts.

"Because once you bought the doll, the gimmick was that you put the gown in water and it dissolved and inside were its real clothes."

"How on earth would you know that?"

"I'm rich," I say. "And immortal. I have an unbelievable amount of free time. I can't spend all of it lounging around looking dangerous and sexy."

She crinkles her nose at me in fond exasperation and takes a sip of her pilfered bourbon.

"I'm a lot more interested in what doll clothes have to do with Caroline trying to stake you than in what you do with your free time," Kyle says.

"She made my favorite bourbon a little more than it appeared to be. So I thought I'd return the favor."

"Jell-O." Elena bites her lip. "And apple juice."

"So I tracked down the company and paid them an outrageous amount of money to dust off their old dissolving-cloth recipe and custom-make me a dummy Yves Saint Laurent jacket." I take a sip of my drink. "Which I then gave to Vampire Barbie for Christmas."

"I've seen that jacket," Kyle says. "That's a damn good copy, my friend. That'd pass on Fifth Avenue as the genuine article."

"Yeah, well, it cost about six of the genuine article."

Elena's hand is starting to wander higher on my thigh. I wonder if I should remind her we're in public. I settle for shifting a little to hide my lap from the rest of the room.

"I love that it turned into a clown suit." Elena giggles into her second bourbon.

"I really wanted it to have those little pompoms down the front," I tell her. "But we couldn't figure out how to disguise the lumps."

"Have you been praying for snow every day since Christmas?" Kyle grins. "It's been too warm of a winter this year. Tough when you have a water-soluble jacket to dissolve."

"The weather was looking too shiny. So I compelled the groundskeeper in the city park to turn the sprinklers back on for a day…right in the middle of the picnic Stefan conned me into helping put together. That'll teach him to try to get me to do his dirty work for him."

"He really should know better," the bartender says. "I'd never trust you for a second."

"Yeah, well apparently he doesn't." My mood soures slightly at the reminder.

Elena squeezes my leg. "It was a good trick," she offers hopefully.

I smile at her so she'll stop giving me those big sad eyes. "Damn right."

"It's a good thing you don't have to eat," Kyle says. "I wouldn't trust that blonde not to poison your dinner for this one. She wore that jacket for two months straight before I saw her give it a rest for a day."

"Well worth the price of admission, my friend." I tilt my head and give my girlfriend a lazy once over, enjoying the affectionate stroking of her fingers. "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"

Kyle snorts and snaps me with a bar towel.

"Looking for a ride home." Elena peeks up at me through her eyelashes with a mischievous smile. "What are my chances?"

"Incredibly good." I give her my most charming smile. I stand up and take Ric's glass, tilting it toward his empty chair in salute before I shoot it.

"You kids try to keep from killing each other in that great big house of yours, you hear?" Kyle says.

"Yessir." Elena gives him a pitiful excuse for a salute.

I sling an arm around her shoulders and steer her toward the door, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. She's not Ric, but she's not half-bad barstool company.

Elena's sober again by the time we get home, but she pretends like she's not, growling kisses into my neck and pinching my butt like she's two bottles into my favorite kind of giggly. I play along like a champ, scooping her up to carry her as if she might trip. The fact that it positions her just right for her to nibble on my earlobe is a totally unintentional bonus.

Riiiight.

I pause when I see the stake lying prominently in the middle of my bed. Elena looks up and goes stiff before she wriggles out of my arms. "Is she threatening you? After I warned her?"

I catch her around the waist as she goes stomping off toward the other wing of the house.

"It's okay. It's not from Caroline. It's from Stefan."

"Stefan?"

I tip her chin up and give her a slow kiss designed to distract. "Don't worry about it. Run us a bath?"

She grins. "Uh-huh." She strips off her shirt as she heads for the bathroom and I watch her go, her hips swinging a little extra because she knows I'm looking.

Once she's out of sight, I pick up the stake and flip it once in the air before I stow it safely in the bedside table. Now that's an apology I can live with.