"Knock, knock," Stefan says as he actually knocks on the half opened door of her bedroom. "I come in peace," he pushes the snickers bar through the crack, and when he hears her laugh lightly, he pushes the door open and steps inside of her room.
She's sitting in her bed in her pajamas, covered with a pink, fluffy blanket, her hair tied into a high pony tail, there's still hot tea on her bedside table and an opened book in her lap. Elena loved being in her pajamas, she could spend the whole day in them, and when she was sick, she did. Chamomile tea and a book were simply something that went along with Elena's personality.
"As long as it's not pancakes," she frowns at the thought of food she once used to love to eat as she caresses her tummy.
Stefan drops his school bag on the floor, puts the snickers bar next to her tea cup, pulls himself a chair from the writing desk next to her bed, and sits on it.
"I'm sorry I made you hate pancakes," he lowers his look down on the floor. He never thought she will actually eat twenty pancakes. He didn't know girls can eat that much. Or Elena in particular. She's so small, she looks like she barely eats anything.
"It's okay," she exhales tiredly, "I'm sure one day when I reach my teenage years and go through a socially demanding stage of being displeased about my body I'll be thanking you," she says, and he bursts into laughter.
Sometimes she talks funny. Probably because she reads a lot.
"I brought you chicken noodle soup," he jumps from the chair and goes for his school bag to gets it for her, "I can write your homework for you while you're eating," a smile appears on his face.
She takes the plastic box with soup in it. "I can write my own homework," she says, knowing Stefan doesn't even like doing his own homework. So doing two of them for a week already must be his definition of hell.
"I insist," he says, still feeling guilty for making her eat twenty pancakes which caused her tummy ache.
She doesn't even like chicken noodle soup. His handwriting is too messy, he spells 6 out of 10 words in a sentence wrong, he always does math tasks wrong so she has to correct them. She hates when someone interrupts her in the middle of her reading. But she loves him. He's her friend, and you don't hurt your friends. So she lets him do all of those things. Bring her chicken soup she can barely swallow, ruin her notebooks with his messy boy handwriting, write 'sumarey' instead of 'summary', solve advanced math problems and interrupt her in the middle of her reading even though she always forgets where she left off.
She lets him do all of those things because she knows how many football games with the guys he had missed because of her, because it takes her a while to understand how to play races on playstation, because he taught her how to swim, because he borrows her books from the library when she's sick, because he broke his arm climbing on a tree when her jumping rope got stuck on it.
"Are you feeling any better today?" he asks while still standing next to her bed.
"Oh, much," she answers happily, "Why?"
"So I don't get any pancake germs."
She shoots him a confused look, and before she even knows it, he's leaning his head and his lips land on hers. He puckers them and gives her one short lasting, gentle kiss. He closes his eyes while doing so, but she doesn't. She watches his every move, from the moment his head starts falling down to the moment he starts pulling it up.
She can feel blush attack her cheeks as she watches him confused, maybe even surprised.
"Just holding on to my part of a deal," he says shyly, "You ate 20 pancakes, which means I had to kiss you."
"We're still alive," she smiles at him.
He nods. "What now? Do I have to marry you?" he asks panicking. They're too young to marry and to have babies and to start working.
Elena wiggles her lips. "My mom says a boy should never kiss a girl unless he has serious intentions towards her," she cocks her eyebrow in his direction, "What are your intentions, Stefan?" she teases him.
He sighs. "I'll marry you if you promise me you'll never make me play dress up again."
Elena exhales disappointingly. "Well, I guess marriage is about compromise."
He sits back on the chair next to her bed, and they spend few minutes in silence.
"You're going to give our children weird names like Sunshine or Apple or something, aren't you?" he looks at her knowingly.
"Probably," she nods her head while picking a book up from her lap and giving it to him, "Read to me?"
He takes the book in his hands and says, "Sure."
He starts reading, and when she's sure he's not looking, her finger lands on her lips, and she smiles.
"What's with you and high places?" Stefan asks as he pushes the rooftop door open and steps on the cold concrete. He watches Elena from afar, sitting on the edge of the roof, her arms around her knees, looking straight ahead of herself. "I remember that tree house in your backyard," he starts walking towards her, "You loved that thing," he says to defuse the tension he's feeling between the two of them, "I almost broke my neck climbing on the damn thing," he reaches the edge of the roof and sits next to her. He looks at her, thinking how beautiful she looks from a profile. Her nose is perfect, her eyes are shimmering, her lips puckered a little, her hair floating in the wind.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" she asks, taking no regard for anything he said so far.
He glares at her some more, trying to capture her beauty, beauty he would never admit to anyone she holds out of superficial reasons. Beauty he was not even aware exists until couple of days ago. "What is?" he furrows his brows.
A faint smile appears on her face, like she's aware of his lack of interest in her thoughts. "Everything," wind carries her words to him in the form of a whisper.
He ponders on her answer, trying to understand it, but he simply can't see it. He can't see the beauty of everything, unless everything is her. And she hasn't been his everything in a very long time, if ever.
"This city is beautiful," she finally says, like she knows he doesn't understand what she meant by everything, "The way sun pokes the edges of the buildings with its bright colors as it goes down. Slight cracks on the curbs of a sidewalk and the missing spots of paint on the buildings. The way people dress and talk and hold themselves, and the way they make strangers wish they were them," she exhales silently, almost tiredly, still looking straight forward.
"This city is not your home," she fell in love with this city, he thought to himself, in only a matter of days. And she's going to miss it, and regret leaving it, and he didn't want that for her. He didn't want her to feel sorry for something that was out of her power.
And as those thoughts crossed his mind, as he realized when she loves something she loves every fiber of its existence, even all of the imperfection that something holds, and for a fleeting second he wished she could love him. Every fiber of his being, even the things he doesn't like about himself.
Stefan Salvatore found himself jealous of Rome, because it had one thing he could never have again - Elena's love. Despite all of its cracks and curves and imperfections she loved it, and he knew she couldn't do the same with him.
But then again, Rome has never hurt her as much as he did, and Rome has never left so many depths in her heart.
She's walking away from Rome, unwillingly, and he walked away from her, selfishly.
"It could be," she whispers again, like she's ashamed of the words that are coming out of her mouth.
He looks up at the sky, and he notices how grey it is. How dark the city is becoming, slowly hiding the burning sun. Maybe it's sad because she's leaving, and maybe it will rain for days after she does. Because he knows how annoyingly depressing his life would be without her. Maybe Rome feels the same.
"Look," she points with her finger, "See that spot, where the sun is touching the ground?" she looks in the distance, smile bright and clear on her face. He nods, even though he's not even sure she's paying enough attention to him to know he's reacting to her words. He's not even sure she cares. "My mom used to say that's the place where reality and dreams meet," she continues gently, looking in the distance, "I wish I could be there right now," words escape her lips as the smile leaves her face.
He finally realizes she's not sad or mad or annoyed or hurt.
She's broken.
And he played a part in that breaking.
"I wish I could stay here forever," she sighs, "I wish I don't have to leave this place, and I wish I don't have to leave behind everything this place has given me. Because when we go home," and for the first time since he came up there, she turns her head to look at him, "Everything goes back to how it was before, doesn't it?" her look lingers on his.
The time they spent together in Rome changed everything, he knew that, and he had no power over it. He had no power to change or erase everything that has happened during the last ten days. He had power over how that change affects them, though.
Her eyes start glimmering more than they usually do. "All of those kisses, smiles," she says with a husky voice, "Feelings," she chokes on her own words.
There were a lot of those, most of which scare him.
"It's better that way," he looks away from her like a coward he knows he is, not able to stand the intensity of her stare, "If things go back to how they used to be," he swallows, "We don't work unless we bicker and snap at each other," he lies to her and he lies to himself.
Because it works better for him when she lets him kiss her, and when she directs one of those unbelievably bright smiles in his direction. And he never used to care for those before, and the way she makes him care for those trivial things scares him more than anything ever did.
She turns her look away from him as well. They sit there in silence, which is not uncomfortable or awkward, simply painful, until she speaks again, "What are you scared of?" she asks with a teary voice.
"Nothing," he shrugs, still unable to look at her, "Everything."
"Caring for someone is not a bad thing," she frowns.
He inhales a stream of mildly cold air before he says, "It's a weakness. Love is a mess I don't want to clean after," when he feels her look on him, he finally finds enough strength to look at her. He meets her teary gaze, and something tightens inside of his chest, making him lose some air.
Things he felt for her in such a small amount of time is something he never felt towards anyone. Her words made him laugh, and he would hold that laugh inside of his throat for as long as he could because he didn't want anyone to know she has a power to make him laugh truthfully. She made him think about things he closed his mind to long time ago.
She made him feel like he could love her, and that's not something he could ever forget.
But that's something he doesn't want to accept either.
He doesn't want to love her, he doesn't want to fall in love with her, and it irritates him that she seems to be the only girl who holds that kind of a power over him.
"We could never work," he thinks if he says it out loud he will be able to convince himself in his own words, "We're so young, we have our whole lives ahead of us, plenty of room for these kinds of mistakes. I don't see the point of making them earlier than we have to," he takes his look off her cowardly once again.
"Love is not a mistake," a tear falls down her cheeks as she hisses those words at him.
A smirk appears on his lips, like a reflex. "Yes, it is," he says determined, "Maybe one day it won't be," he shrugs. "We're a couple of kids, what do we know about love?" he points that question more to himself than he does to her, hoping she would give him an answer.
A painful chuckle escapes her throat as she looks straight ahead once again. "You know more than you think."
He doesn't want to accept her point of view. Her strangely optimistic point of view. "I don't think anyone knows anything about love. But as we grow up we get more accustomed to the idea of having it in our lives. We're 18 years old, the only thing we can give to each other is the movie based idea of romance which is the product of imagination."
She keeps on nodding her head as her lips tremble and few more tears fall down her cheeks. He turns to her and puts his finger under her chin, making her look at him. She's so tired she doesn't even fight his attempt to make eye contact with her. "Oh baby, baby it's a wild world," he says before he leans his head and gives her one last peck on the lips before he jumps back on his feet and turns to leave.
I'll always remember you like a child, girl.
When she's sure he can't see her anymore, her finger flies to her lips over which she pulls her fingertip and a faintest smile appears on her face.
AN: If their time in Rome solved all of their problems, it would be far too easy. And love is never easy.