Elena plays with her necklace, almost ripping off her throat, oblivious of her own strength.
Damon tightens his jaw, watching her step away from her brother when he tries to comfort her.
"I don't want this!" she almost sounds like a spoiled child, but considering the stress she's under, Damon cannot blame her; he could never blame her.
"It's okay," Jeremy tries to reassure her, but she just closes her hands into two fists at her sides and yells at him that, "It's not!" and she has tears in her pretty brown eyes.
"I am dead!" she protests, and Damon takes a step to stop her from going in circles around the unchangeable fact that she is now a vampire.
"Technically, you're un-dead, but that's not the point," he says, calmly, "The point, is that to stay alive you have to complete the transition, so you need to drink now."
"I won't!" she says; he's not sure if she's about to stomp her foot or scream in his face, "this was not supposed to happen! I didn't ask for this!"
As human she was quite emotive, now, her character seemed amplified to some sort of easily reached, emotional outburst. Like a stick of dynamite with a short riot, and he is highly inflammable himself so the very idea of handling her, permanently in this state, is exhausting.
"You need to be reasonable," he tells her, trying to sum all his patience. He wants to understand what she's going through because he knows what it feels like, yet she won't let him say a word without covering it with refusals in high pitches. "And make the best out of it," he continues.
"Elena, please," Jeremy's plead almost gets to her, making her gasp and close her mouth into a pout, "I don't want you to leave me."
She looks sympathetic, "You will leave me eventually," she says, grimacing like the moment she is talking about is just around the corner, "You'll get married and have a family and I'll have to disappear from your life, and even if we find a way, you'll still have to grow old and die."
"Eventually! Like… in a hundred years from now!" Damon reminds her, throwing his hands up in the air.
"I am not turning!" she insists, and then her face softens and she takes two steps to look him straight in the eyes, "please Damon, don't you love me?" she asks him, letting her fingertips trace mid-air, the curve of his jaw. Her pupils don't grow, and she is wearing vervaine, but he is almost sure she's compelling him because this looks so familiar. Yes, this looks like the way Katherine used to be; all whispers and sweetness, talking to him as though he was the only man in the world, the only one she could see and then luring his brother to her bed behind his back.
Elena always had him wrapped around her fingers, manipulating him into doing what she wanted – like she couldn't stand to reason with him for more than five seconds - but she had never been so forward. His stomach turns and he has to look away to not throw up. He feels exposed, like his skin has been reaped away from him while he wasn't watching and now she can hurt as she pleases.
"Stop," he says between his teeth, overwhelmed by the sudden urge to be away from her. He takes a breath and calls it a truce, "Let's talk about this later," he says, turning his back and leaving the room.
Jeremy follows him out and goes to his room to be alone. It must be a little hard to swallow the fact that the last person he has was deciding to leave him without so much as hearing him out.
But Elena never listened to anyone, aside Stefan, maybe.
That's when he remembers that Stefan was in the room too, and he hadn't said a single word, remaining in one corner of the room with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes glued to Elena as she walked in.
Damon turns his head and listens inside the room: two steps from his brother, and a sigh from Elena.
"You want to convince me too?" she asks, "I always told you I didn't want this kind of life."
"I know you didn't," he says, "And as much as I am tempted to beg you to choose otherwise, I won't."
Damon feels like breaking down the door and having a word with him, but he stays still and keeps on listening.
"I know what it feels like to remember and regret the past. I forced Damon to turn when he did not want to because I couldn't bear to lose my big brother," he says, and Damon feels the pull of his own blood and the sense of brotherhood warm his cold flesh a bit, "but I won't do it to you."
"Thanks," she says, sounding a lot like the Elena he used to know.
"But I'll say this to you. I've been walking my years in misery and guilt and I wished many times I hadn't turned, hadn't made of myself the monster I have to keep at bay every day, but this desolation that I made of my life has brought me to you, and I can't bring myself to regret it."
"Would you…" she starts, "If you could, would you…"
"Ask me," he says, his voice stark.
"If you could go back, would you do it all the same?"
"As long as I could have one moment with you, I would do it all over, until it killed me."
#
She turns. She turns with her brother's blood and Damon and Stefan at her side to stop her from doing serious damage.
She wants to go on as humanly as possible and she wants to go out in the sun. Because he can leave her in Stefan's care, Damon decides to go to Bonnie so that he can separate himself from this mess for a few minutes.
Bonnie will be mad for what happened to Elena, will be helpful in the handling part and will face him with all that rightness and will of hers, recognizing he has actually a spine and she didn't conveniently forget that.
He has to wait for her because she's not home and she won't pick up the phone.
Damon notice the new red ankle boots gracing her little feet with the heel making a little hole in the ground as she gets out of the car. She has a few bags hanging from her bent arm and one little one hanging from her closed fingers. There are names all over the bags: Giuseppe Zanotti, Christian Louboutin, foreverunique, D&G, tonimay.
She's dressed in tight, black jeans that hug her curves just right and a tight black sweater that covers her up to her neck. When she walks his way, she does not bother to look at him.
"Where the hell were you?" he asks, while she puts her booted foot upon the first step, "And why didn't you pick up your phone?"
"Hi Damon," she says, waling to the front door that opens itself, "I'm fine, thanks." She talks like she's brushing the words with her tongue, "How are you? Please, step inside and make yourself comfortable."
"Nice trick," he says, following inside, still thrown off by her odd friendliness. "It was urgent," he says, going back to the previous subject.
"It usually is," she says flatly.
"We have a problem."
"That's a line I've never heard before," she says, pulling back a chair to sit down then looks at her nails. She grimaces at her pearly white nails and blows on them, making them turn blood red.
"You're having quite some fun," he says.
"Finally," she says, smiling at her polished nails.
"Did you rob a mall?" he asks "That's a nice sweater," his voice taking a new sharpness when he notices little black veins around her neck peeking out from the neck of the sweater.
"I am glad you approve of my new look," she says, crossing her legs, looking at him with a flirty smile that would give the wrong idea to anyone who didn't know her true self, "If anything else, you know how to dress yourself."
"Yes, and I would like nothing else than to spend the day trading make up advice, but I think we have something big on our hands."
Oh, how fucking right he is.
She props her elbow on her knee and lets her chin rest on the back of her hand, waiting for him to speak.
Bonnie radiates power and the air around her feels colder or maybe his mind is playing tricks on him. What he knows is that Elena's ring is the last of their worries right now, but he supposes he can't just ask her are you high on black magic?
"Are you high on black magic?"
Or maybe he can.
"So forward, it takes out all the fun," she says, rolling her eyes – and if anything he can finally recognize for a moment.
"We should negotiate on foreplay time on another occasion," he says. "You see, we have a new vampire in town," he adds, hoping that worry over Elena's condition will make her be herself again.
She becomes serious and she listens carefully while he tells her what happened.
"You need to make her a ring."
"I don't think so," she says, sounding almost bored.
"You're joking, right? You can't-"
"I can," she states, "Actually, I can. And I'm sick of being your handyman, cleaning up the mess you guys make. Elena made her choice, mine right now is to let her enjoy some private time so she won't get herself kidnapped, or killed or whatever else she's got on the agenda for this week-end."
She's obviously not herself but she is right. And she is kind of, well, scorching hot right now, so it's a bit distracting.
"We do things my way."
The old Damon would have buried himself in that flesh pulsing with darkness, letting her tangle him in her loose-limbed legs and tie him up with the curly ends of her brown hair, to then taste her for hours just so he could satisfy his curiosity to know if she tasted like chocolate too, other than having only its color. But the new Damon shushes the old one because this is his Judgey, witchy, little bird and when she is not leading the way to the righteous path she is simply someone else. And for how fun the new Bonnie can look, go figure, he just found out that he likes the old one just fine.
They just stare at each other until the moment Bonnie turns her head and an invisible force just pushes him like a bullet out of the door – that closes after his passage – making him roll down the steps, to leave him with his back on the ground and his eyes wide on the sky that's turning red.