A/N: Once again, thank you to all the supporters out there. It makes my morning to wake up, check my e-mail, and see all the lovely reviews. And sorry that this update was so late; I've had to deal with a lot of crap this week, and it made it hard to think of things to write.

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Mistaken Observations: Actions Hurt More Than Words

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A glass from Damon's hand slipped onto the floor, the contents spilling, and his eyes looking like iced over glaciers. His spine was erect and tense against the back of his chair, and Elena thought he looked like he was about ready to pounce on any given demand.

The fire that was contently burning in front of him gave off odd patterns on the walls, on his face, and on the ring that casually sat on his slim, cold finger. There were dark, bruised like shadows under his eyes like he had not eaten anything with a red, sticky quality to it in weeks- he probably hadn't to tell the truth- and the dark brows above his eyes were furrowed in emotion very closely to a mixture of pain and bewilderment.

Elena wasn't trying to guess what thoughts were running through his brain right now, but she was going to go out on a limb and say that all he was thinking about was getting the hell out of this situation as fast as possible.

They had been down this long, tiring road before, and they both know that nothing good ever came out of it. One person would always end up with the hurt feelings, and the threat to never speak to the other person was always said in vain.

If Elena could just get through this one conversation without having the full-effect of Damon's eyes on her, and if she could just manage to say only nice things to him in response, then hopefully there would be no problems or bumps along the way.

They could just move forward from this, continue their friendship with each other, and carry on their business with trying to find Stefan. At least, that is was Elena was forcing herself to think.

But then again, Damon always had a new way of surprising her in odd situations.

"Do you even know how tired I am of being talked to?" He spoke suddenly, his voice bizarrely clear despite all the alcohol he had just until recently consumed. "Do you even know how tired I am of being told what to do, where to go, and who to be?"

Okay, where was this coming from? She was trying to talk about her feelings, not his personal baggage that he had to deal with every day. Was this just one of the many side-effects of Damon's alcohol addiction or just the wave of emotion he was busy brimming up to the top?

Elena carefully moved forwards; she didn't move to fast, in fear that he would suddenly leap up and never look back.

"Maybe we should be done with the Bourbon, Damon" she quietly spoke and gingerly took the bottle away from in between the tight grip of his thighs.

"No," he snapped, but then sighed, defeated. He let her take the bottle and place it on the table in front of him. He looked at it sadly. He could resist anyone else's commands, but when it came to Elena…he didn't stand a chance in hell.

She sat down beside him, and looked where he was looking. She didn't see anything special, but Damon seemed fascinated by the nothingness before him.

Elena licked her lips, looking around, and then moving her gaze to his frustrated eyes. He looked like he was thinking about something really hard; he looked like he was thinking over something too hard.

A light bulb went off in her head. "Did something happen while I was gone? Did you hear anything new?"

Before she could stop him, Damon swiped the Bourbon off its spot on the oak table, toke a hearty swig, and closed his eyes. "What makes you think that?"

Elena studied him closely, taking note of how eternally exhausted he looked to her eyes; he looked like he had just through World War II. "Just a hunch," she spoke, "Or it could be the fact that you're drunk out of your mind, and have no clue what your even talking about right now."

"Isn't that how I am every day?"

If he was trying to make a joke out of this, Elena didn't find it very amusing.

"Stop trying to be cute, Damon." She snatched away his bottle before he could take another drink. She sometimes thought that Damon could stall forever if he wanted to. "What is going on?"

Damon opened his eyes, and turned to her, his pretty mouth set in a frown. There was something…off…about his eyes. The usual laughter and mocking glint was suddenly being sucked into his black irises. These eyes did not belong to the Damon Salvatore she had grown to care about. Those eyes had one been what they looked like when he didn't give a rats-ass about anything or anyone. He looked dead, and not in the un-dead vampire kind of way. He looked weary and defeated.

"What did you do?" she said this mostly to herself. Surly, whatever caused Damon this much distress had to be about something he personally did, right? Maybe he was feeling guilty for something he didn't mean to do. Maybe he had accidently killed or fed on a girl tonight.

In all honesty, she wouldn't have blamed him. Damon was known to be one of those men that just kept their emotions bottled up until they just couldn't take it anymore. If Damon was stressed about Stefan, stressed about her well-fare, and about what Klause was currently wreaking havoc on, then she really couldn't say she wouldn't do the same. It didn't make it anymore right, but if he had done something of that sort, then she would not be mad at him. For one, she didn't even have the energy to be mad at anyone for a long time, and getting mad at Damon was just a chore in its self.

In the end, she couldn't stay mad at him for long….

Damon eyes seemed to lighten up in the background, but not out of happiness. This fire was out of rage; this fire was pure anger. "Are you serious? Please, just for my sanity, tell me that you are joking."

Elena resisted the urge to shrug her shoulders, and proceeded to look at him with puzzled eyes. What did he want her to say exactly? As far she was concerned there was nothing comforting to be said at this moment.

"I just want to know what's wrong. Is that so bad? You always seem to want to know what my problems are, so why can't I ask about yours?" Elena was trying her best not to get frustrated right now.

Damon scrubbed tired eyes with his clenched fist. "I don't want to know your problems, Elena. I'm the reason you have problems."

What? Now they were talking about his un-canning ability to get her in odd predicaments? Were they even having the same conversation right now?

"We live in the same house," she deadpanned, "We're going to have to talk about these things if we both want to stay sane, if that's even possible at this point."

Elena could recognize the stubborn set in his jaw that said he was not going to talk. Utterly disappointed, she sat up against the armrest of the leather couch, opened his bottle of Bourbon, and took a mouthful of it. It burned on the way down her throat, but she was grateful for the warm feeling that would soon be evading her belly. She could see why someone like Damon could get hooked on this stuff.

She tucked her legs under her, carful in the act as to not brush against Damon. He didn't look like he wanted to be touched any time soon.

After a couple of minutes of pure silence, save for the popping of crackling fire in the pit, and steady thrum of her heartbeat, she opened her mouth only to snap it shut once again. If she wanted Damon to open up, then she needed to choose her words prudently.

"This isn't about Stefan, is it?" So much for filtering the topic of her words. The last thing she wanted to do was bring him up.

By the noticeable way Damon flinched, and then automatically winced in what seemed like pain at Stefan's name, Elena knew that something was off kilter.

"Are you okay?" she asked apprehensively.

Damon only nodded his head, and Elena seemed to let the topic go, but inside she was burning with a thousand questions. He wasn't alright; she could see right through his tough male bravado. Inside, he was just as much of a kid as she was. He had just gotten his life cut too early, his life put in a stand-still where he couldn't even grow anymore. It was tragic to Elena. To never be able to grow old, or have your own children, or see what the world had to offer as you aged with it.

What must that be like? Elena thought. Miserable was the only word she could come up with.

Elena tipped back her drink once more, and thought about the picture she had come across when Damon was maybe about fourteen or fifteen. He was a beautiful boy- not that it surprised her at all- all dimples, smiling blue eyes, and unruly black hair. The scar from when he was six was presently there, creating a white line through one of his dark brows, and even though she couldn't see it, she knew that the bite mark on his inner thigh would be there too.

When Elena had come crossed the picture- it was conveniently placed in one of Stefan's drawers- the only thing she could think of was how sad it was that in eight short years his entire being would simply just stop. It was truly something out of a tragic, melodramatic horror story.

Elena buried the back of her neck further into the couch, letting a certain humorous conversation between her and Damon fill the contents of her mind.

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"What were you like as a child?" Elena asked, watching as Damon fiddled with a large map. This was basically what their life consisted of now. They would do anything they thought would help to find Stefan, and Elena would sometimes busy herself with asking Damon random facts about his human life.

"Pretty much an ass," he smirked. "If you add the fact that I had a major case of ADHD, or as people back then called it 'the devil in a boy', and the detail that I couldn't shut up to save my life, then I could safely say that I was hell on two legs."

Elena absently twiddled her thumbs; a vampire with ADHD? Now, that was something you didn't hear every day.

"What's it like?"

Damon shrugged, and circled with red pen on the map. "Kind of sucks. You can't sit still. They tried shoving some pills down my throat, but it was the olden ages, they didn't know shit back then."

She couldn't help but smile at this. "Seems like you were exciting back then."

Damon grinned, flashing his white teeth. "Oh, I was. You just had to be there to get the full affect, believe me."

"Did other people see you that way?"

Damon scrunched his eyebrows together, ponding. "I don't know. All I think they knew was that I was a Salvatore, and that Salvatore's were born to create trouble."

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The lingering memory silently left, and Elena was still faced with a fire, dimmed down lights, and a very drunk and seemingly sad vampire.

This time when she looked towards Damon, he had his head in his hands, looking at the floor, she guessed.

"Stefan came by the house."

The words seemed all wrong to her. They reverberated off the walls, and back into her ears. They sounded hallow, and oddly rehearsed, like Damon was just waiting for the right time to tell her. This just confused her more. What was going on?

The room did a slow spin around her. She had to grip the edge of the couch just to convince herself that this was real, that this was really happening to her sad little life right now.

Through the hard lump in her throat that had not been there moments before, she spoke in a peculiarly haunted kind of way. "And when was this?"

"A couple of hours after you left with Caroline. He came with Klause."

Elena tensed. Of course he would come with that bastard. After all, they were best friends and all. Klause was probably the reason Stefan even dared to step inside his old house again.

Elena spoke the next line through clenched teeth. "And what did they want exactly?"

Damon didn't say anything for the longest time, and Elena just assumed that he was done talking again, like he felt he had already said too much, and he didn't think her weak, human heart could take much more. It probably couldn't, but she was going to die trying, then.

"What did they want, Damon?" she was using her 'I mean it this time' tone that Damon was all too accustomed to hearing every now and then.

He noticeably swallowed, but never met her eyes. She was going to pretend that the act alone didn't mean anything at all. He was perfectly fine in front of her, well, he wasn't dead. She didn't know how 'perfectly fine' he was though. Whatever he was going to say couldn't be that bad.

"He tried to kill me."

But Elena wasn't prepared for that. She felt her throat close up, and her eyes blurred with what seemed like fury, or maybe tears, but it was probably just a combination of both. She couldn't move; her bones were locked together in an inflexible state, and if she did move then she probably would have seriously hurt herself.

"Klause tried to kill you?" she was now pleading to whoever in the heavens would listen to her. If he said 'Stefan' then she really didn't think her heart could take it. She didn't know how she would react that low blow. Maybe it would actually kill her.

But Damon couldn't hear her inner monologue. He simply just shook his head, looking at the ground like it held the world's most complicated puzzle. "No, Elena. It was Stefan."

As it turns out, Elena didn't really have to think about how she would react to this news. Instead, her world just merely turned black.

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When Elena woke up some hours later, she found that she was no longer lying on the couch next to Damon, but on a large, comfy bed that couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's but Damon's.

The lights were turned off, but even as she turned she could still see his profile in the moonlight shining through his windows. His blue eyes shining through the darkness were the only indictor that he was even awake.

Awake. She needed to take time to appreciate that he was still alive and breathing. If she had lost Damon tonight then there would be no possible way that she could go on in her life. That would be one more person she could put on her mental list of innocent people that died trying to protect her or someone else they loved.

Without Damon keeping her afloat…she truly had no one. How undeniably sad was that?

As her sleep induced eyes flittered down, she noticed, in great shock, that Damon was shirtless. When she looked even closer, she could also see that he wasn't doing it to make her uncomfortable or because he always did that when he went to bed. He was doing it because there was a large, bloodied patch of white on his abdomen. She hated to note that it was inches away from his un-beating heart.

Without any words, she hesitatingly reached out and touched the red-spattered gauze. When he didn't protest or cringe from the pain, she carefully took one of the edges and pulled it back, revealing more and more of the same thing: dried blood and then some fresh blood that coated his smooth skin. Her hand ghosted over the open wound. She was trying to convince herself that Stefan wasn't capable of something like this, but it was hard to when the facts were being shoved right in her face. Stefan had stabbed Damon before; Elena even had wanted to stab Damon before, but never to permanently end, never to kill.

This time, Damon did flinch, but not out of pain. Her hand must have been cold on his skin, she presumed. At least, she hoped that the action was because of that.

She met his eyes in a strong beam of light coming from deep outside. "Why isn't it healing?"

Damon looked down at his wound, and then back to her. He shrugged, trying to keep the alarm of shock and eternal pain out of his actions. "I haven't eaten in a while. I think he used a special kind of stake, one that makes it take longer to heal even if you do happen to survive…which I obviously wasn't supposed to."

Those damn tears were making their way back into her eyes. She was sure that Damon could see them, but was thankful when he adverted his gaze to somewhere else. He was probably thinking that she was crying because Stefan was now permanently gone, but she was really crying because she almost lost the person who cared for her more than life itself.

The softer and more sensitive part of Elena told her to grab Damon's hand, and that is exactly what she did. Reaching over, she took his cold, limp, and slightly bloody hand in hers, and held on as tightly as she could. After a moment of brief pause, Damon squeezed back.

"What would I have done if you were killed?" she found herself asking the ceiling.

Damon blew out a breath. "You would have gotten over it."

"No," Elena shook her head. Of all the insane things for Damon to say, it just had to be something like that. "I'm really starting to think you underestimate my feelings for you."

She didn't dare turn over to see what Damon made of that sentence.

"You don't have feelings for me."

"Yes, I do. I may not act like it, but I do. Even if they are more sisterly than anything, they are still there. If you die, then a part of me would die, too." Elena turned on her side, facing him, and watching as his right hand fidgeted around the achy looking hole in his stomach, and how his left hand encircled her own.

He was going to break down, she suddenly realized. Even someone like Damon- who was basically programmed to deal with shit like this- couldn't take all of it in in one night. She saw it in the way he bite down so hard on his lip that blood beaded in its place, and she saw it in the way his eyes took a shiny, glossy quality to it. She never thought it was possible, but Damon was going to cry, and he was trying to damn hard not to that it almost hurt to witness.

"I don't know if anyone told you this, but men sometimes cry, too." She soothed her thumb over his hand, trying to generate as much comfort in her small embrace as possible. It was good for Damon to get rid of these emotions he had been building up. Pretty soon he was going to choke on all of his inhibitions.

Damon used the back of his hand to scrub away angrily at the tears gathering in the corner of his eyes. "What did I do wrong?" he asked suddenly. "I'm the bigger brother; I should be the one taking care of him, and all I can do it sit back and watch as he destroys himself and everyone around him."

Elena shook her head, managing to clear it slightly and also wonder why Damon always blamed himself for things completely out of his control. "You didn't do anything wrong, Damon. It's Klause, and he's the reason we're in this mess. Nothing you did caused this. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

That just seemed to make Damon angrier. He let go of her hand, and used it to rub more of those pesky tears away. "It's always my fault, Elena. Nothing I do or say is ever going to be right, and you know it."

Elena looked at him, really looked at him hard. The saddest part out of all of this was that he believed that. He believed that he was a lost cause that didn't deserve to be fixed. He couldn't be more wrong. If anything, he had earned the right to be fixed more than anyone she knew. She could always count Stefan, too, but she hardly knew him anymore. He was a stranger to her heart.

"Do you really believe that?" Elena shifted slightly, curving herself languidly into Damon's side. There was nothing sexual about this, and there wasn't anything to read into. This was just her being deeply involved in one friend's misery. She was just willing to split this agony with him half and half so he wouldn't collapse under all the pressure. "Do you really believe that you haven't changed?"

"I may have changed on the inside, Elena, but that still doesn't change who I am or what I have done."

Elena was about to say the stupidest thing known to man, and she couldn't give a reason as to why she should even care at this point. "I don't care. I don't care what you are or what you have done. It doesn't matter, not anymore. If you're still alive, then none of it matters to me."

Damon was quiet after that, and when Elena checked his expression, she saw the heavy struggle in his eyes. He was trying unbelievably hard not to read into this. He wanted this to be real, but it was always on another playing field, somewhere he couldn't quite reach not matter how much he wanted to.

Damon wanted nothing more than for her to love him as much as he loved her. But, as far as he could tell, it was never going to happen. Not in this lifetime, at least.

Elena spoke up, her voice creeping towards a happier range. "When I walked in the living room earlier, I wanted some answers that only you could give me."

"Did you find them?" he still sounded choked up.

She sighed, tracing the scar in the hollow of his throat until he shivered and she pulled away, not wanting to push him too far. "No, I didn't. But then I decided that I don't need any answers; they are just right there in front of me."

Her breath hovered over his skin, and Damon wanted nothing more than to just throw her under him and have his way with her. Leave it to Elena to consistently tempt even if he was on the verge of an emotional breakdown and was in an ass-load of pain.

Damon tried not to look down because if he did, then he would get an eyeful of cleavage that he couldn't handle right now. It was bad enough that her body heat was slowly seeping into his own skin, and her fragmented hair was curling over his collarbone where she rested her head. It was bad enough that her curves were pressed almost intimately into his side, and it was bad enough that her hand was ghosting- almost without being aware she was doing it at all, he was sure- along his denim covered lower hip where the tattoo was located.

He was sure that if he had any more blood in his body to spare, it would have gone completely south.

He couldn't even begin to tell how many times he had woken up in a cold sweat, completely aroused, and still reliving the dreams of what Elena did to him. The dreams were not something you could discuss in polite company, and he often wondered if Elena even knew what she did to him.

And even though Damon felt like he had been betrayed by his own flesh and blood- that's because he had been betrayed by his own flesh and blood- and there was still a gaping wound in his side, he still managed to feel happy that Elena was sharing the pain and heartbreak with him. It was all really fucked up if he thought about it hard enough.

"One day, I am going to see the entire tattoo."

If Damon had been shocked before, he was just reeling now. And then it hit him. She was still a little tipsy from all his Bourbon, and all the crazy emotions that were probably racing through her head was sure to have some effect on the words that were coming out of her mouth. She didn't really mean any of these things. Well, she probably meant the other stuff, but sure as hell not the whole naked tattoo part.

Why did it always come back to the damn tattoo? Okay, so he had a tattoo on his pelvis. Big friggin' deal! It wasn't like he had created NASA or something.

Elena knew what she was saying was wrong, but it seemed like there was no longer a filter that was running through her mouth and telling her what she should and shouldn't be saying.

So, Damon just pretended like he had never even heard her say it. He closed his eyes, hoping sleep would come. With Elena there next to him, it was highly likely that he would be doing more tossing and turning than anything.

He didn't even really get to appreciate the fact that she wanted to stay in his bed this time.

When did they both become such a cliché?

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A/N: And there you have it, folks! Like I said before, I had a crappy weekend and really did not want to write some lovey-dovey chapter that probably would have made me sick to my stomach. I hope you all have a lovely week, and look forward to Halloween; I know I am. Hopefully, I will have the next chapter up sooner than later…And now I need to go to bed…

Please review, you generous people, you.