Who: Elena and Damon What: Damon being annoying Where: Mystic Falls; The cemetery When: This weekend Warnings/Rating: Nope
Dahlia’s approach to her door was scientific, deliberate. She took temperature readings in the hall, and she scraped samples of the wallpaper along the way. Once she reached her door, she photographed it from every possible angle, and she noted every miniscule change, every time the door breathed or shifted. She moved away from it, and she documented the stages of transformation from normal door, to her door - a harmless house door, white slats around the edges. She threw her key at it from a distance, when it was just a hotel door, and she waited to see if the door transformed without her presence. It didn’t, and she sat down on the dirty, old carpet and noted everything she had observed.
She took pictures of herself prior to entering. Her attire - khakis and a button-down shirt that was both too old and too young for her. Her hair - messy blond curls that were tucked up with a pen from the lab, forgotten in her haste to arrive at the hotel in time for the predetermined experiment schedule. Her face - no makeup, a woman in her thirties with very little softness to her features, a vacancy behind her water-blue eyes. Her gun was tucked in the holster, and her shoes were police issue, and her badge was clipped onto her waist. She was neither impressive nor attractive, and she approached the door with the wariness of an officer approaching a crime scene.
She slipped her key into the lock, and she turned it, and she crossed.
It was like waking up for Elena. Like the the gasping wakefulness that always greeted her during that summer at Aunt Jenna’s, the summer after everything went wrong. It felt just like that, though the last few months had been different. But this felt like those early days, and she sat up and pushed her brown hair away from her face. She tried to remember how to breathe.
Her journal - sage green and with her initial in the corner - was on the nightstand, and she reached for it and leafed through the pages. She knew stuff was missing. She knew she’d been in someone else’s mind for weeks, and maybe that should have felt stranger than it did. But she’d just learned her - no, not her anything - she’d just learned Stefan was a vampire, Damon too, and she’d just watched Vicky die, and her best friend was a witch, and being in someone’s head didn’t feel as twisted as it might have once.
She pretended it was all normal, this messed up stuff, and she showered and dressed and wondered if Caroline or Bonnie were around. It would help if they were, but she wasn’t counting on it. She knew the scientist would have found them if they were out there, and she was planning on finding no one here. at all But maybe that was good. If no one was here but her, then nothing bad would happen.
With that positive thought (because hello, optimism), she left Aunt Jenna’s and headed for the cemetery, expecting some Twilight Zone ghost town place where Mystic Falls had once been.
Mystic Falls was not all that different. Every time Damon returned, he expected a jolt, a missed step on a staircase in his stomach, but he never did. At one point they had paved the streets. Sometimes the clothing was a little different. They’d take down a five and dime and put up a coffee shop. But mostly? The same. Immortality was not as exciting as everybody thought it would be. Stefan always went out to the ruins of the estate and cried over old bricks, but Damon lived in the now. He wanted company, people, activity. He hated skulking around in the dark and thinking old thoughts. Now was better. Now was always better.
He was hungry as soon as he got through the door, smug at his own ability to hide his nature from the annoyingly Stefan-like alter named Hunter. It was harder to solve that in broad daylight, but Damon had been hunting lonely little people for a long time. He ate a little teenager on break from her summer job, and then he went looking for Stefan. He was bored and he felt like tormenting something, so after the boarding house proved empty, he went winding through the old spots Stefan liked to brood in.
The cemetery was ridiculously bright and cheerful, and Damon enjoyed casting shadows where they didn’t belong. He heard something before he saw it, a very light step and even a lighter breath. “All ye all ye outs are free...” And then he thought about it, shrugged with a tip of his ear to his shoulder and revised, in a louder voice, “Olly olly oxen free...”
Elena didn’t hear the footsteps approach, and there was no crow to announce him, no fog. It was his voice that made her stop where she stood in the middle of the grassy path to her parents’ grave. Something like fear moved along her spine and, before, she might have discounted it, but now she knew better. “Damon,” she said, not turning, not looking. It wasn’t Stefan. She knew Stefan’s voice, dreamt of it at night, even though she had decided to put him in her rearview. She knew Damon’s voice too, trouble with a smirk that carried in every single syllable. But she wasn’t scared of him, which was maybe stupid. But if he wanted her dead, he would have killed her already, and that made her feel kind of powerful. Maybe he liked her or something, but he wouldn’t kill her. Or maybe he still had some lingering goodwill toward his brother. Whatever the reason, she didn’t run or cry for help. “Your greetings still leave something to be desired.”
Damon moved in a slow circle around Elena, enjoying the view but making no special effort to frighten or intimidate. “Mmm,” he hummed, softly. “How about, ‘hello’?” He wore his usual black shirt and jeans, and he looked nothing if not a normal guy in the dappled sunshine, though perhaps he better belonged in a biker bar than here. He didn’t much resemble Stefan, and he knew it. Damon played up his strengths: the dark hair, the dangerous smile, the blue eyes. He tried to stay distant, but she looked so much like Katherine, it was uncanny. He moved into her field of view, eyes intent, and simply stared at her with eyes overbright, taking in the details.
“Right, because then you’d just mock me for not being witty,” was Elena’s reply. She didn’t much like being circled like a shark in bloody water, but she was used to it from Damon by this point. She was begrudgingly grateful that he’d wiped Jeremy’s mind, but that warred with the fact that it was his fault Jeremy’s mind had needed to be wiped in the first place. “Why are you here, Damon? Stefan isn’t around,” she asked, knowing cemeteries weren’t really his thing. She wasn’t sure what was his thing, well, beyond causing trouble and that Katherine girl. She crossed her arms, and she moved toward her parents’ grave, not caring if he was in the way. “If you’re done orbiting me now?”
Damon slid six inches to one side like the shark she had so aptly referred to him by; when Damon moved it was lazy and slow, an eeling movement through the air that was unspeakably intentional, approaching grace and yet thoroughly, blackly masculine. Damon moved as if no one and nothing could challenge him. It amused him the little girl was so stubborn in her opinions. Rotating to face in the direction she moved, he prepared to stroll next to her. “It seems to me like this whole town orbits around you, Elena. Including my brother.”
She didn’t stop until she reached the foot of her parents’ grave, and she stood there a moment, trying to get her temper under control as she stared down at the tombstone. She was usually pretty good about reaching for something sarcastic instead of crying or screaming, but it had been a terrible month, and he’d been behind every single terrible thing she could immediately call to mind. “Including you, Damon?” she asked, half-turning toward him. One brown brow arched, and her straight hair slid over her shoulder, and she faced without the fear a teenage girl should probably show an hundred-and-something year old vampire.
“I’m not the town,” Damon said, smiling. No fangs, he didn’t need them at the moment. He put his hands in his pockets and stopped when Elena did, looking at the sky and then slowly dropping his eyes down. He’d only just noticed where they were, and the relatively new grass was distinctive to Damon, who had visited graves that had decades to grow over. Brushing gently past her, he crouched down in front of the stones, as if examining their quality. “Nice. Very modern.” He straightened. “Sorry, were you having a moment?”
The only fangs she’d ever seen were on Vicky, just before Vicky died, and she didn’t actually expect to see them on him. She knew they were there, though, because she’d seen the marks all over Caroline that he’d made with his teeth. “Like it matters to you if I was,” she said, non-answer for non-answer. “If you’re bored, Damon, then why not leave Mystic Falls? Haven’t you done enough damage for one visit?” And she was angry. Angry about Vicky and about Jeremy and about Lexi. It was all fresh and raw, just like the knowledge that he and Stefan were vampires was. It hadn’t scabbed over yet, and he wasn’t helping just then.
The blue eyes looked at her again, and he wasn’t hurried about it. He had a tendency to stare at her, and he never bothered to apologize, or even notice that it wasn’t appropriate. “You’re angry at me,” he noted, with amusement. He moved closer to her, a mere six inches, his eyebrows flexing. A smile grew at the edges of his mouth, slowly but surely. “You are. Look at that. What did I do to offend your delicate sensibilities, Elena? Stefan’s story not tragic enough for you? Or this one is about your friend Vicky? You’d prefer we let her go on a murder spree, then?” He showed his teeth, harmless and white.
She didn’t backup when he moved forward. In fact, she took a step forward, closer, just to keep him from thinking she was intimidated. “Don’t act like you’re surprised, Damon. You know I don’t like you,” she said. “What was supposed to win me over? Your charming personality, or the way you keep killing people in Mystic Falls?” She didn’t sound angry. If anything, she sounded like a bored, annoyed teenager. “As for Vicky, she wouldn’t have gone on a murder spree at all if you hadn’t made her a vampire in the first place. Or is that too logical for you?” Her already dark eyes were impossibly dark in her anger, and she didn’t even try to keep her dislike off her face.
He chuckled, linking his hands behind his back, working his shoulders. “I don’t know about that. She was on the edge, that one. Besides,” he brought his eyes back to her, malevolent for the first time, “nobody said I was trying to win you from anything. You’re boring. Your town is boring. The only thing at all interesting about you is Stefan’s obsession with you, and the fact that you have very familiar eyes.” The malevolence manifested into a slow, mirthless smile. He leaned in so she could take its full effect.
“You asked what you did to offend me, and I pointed out that you were never trying to win me over in the first place, Damon. And if we’re so boring, then leave.” Elena paused a beat, and then she smiled a knowing smile. It wasn’t malevolent, not like his, but it was a little taunting, a lot smug, a fair bit entitled. “But, right, you’re obsessed with Stefan, so you won’t go, even if we’re boring.” She turned away from him then, dismissive, and she hunkered down on the grass, across the grave from her parents, determined to pretend he just wasn’t there.
Unfortunately for Elena, Damon didn’t have anything better to do. He gave her an irritated sneer that told her how right she was. Eventually, Stefan would find her, and until then it was fairly pointless to go floating around town if he wasn’t hungry. In a show of gentlemanly respect that was deliberately put on, Damon stepped back from the new grass, dropping his hands again and letting them swing. He began to circle her again, this time in a wider radius, glancing down without real interest at the stones around them, sniffing the air and listening to a skinny rabbit scuffle around in the brush not far away. Damon couldn’t stand the silence for long, however. “How is it going with Mr. Broody? All’s fair in love and war?”
She knew he wouldn’t be able to hold out for long, but she didn’t do anything to try to make him less uncomfortable. She wasn’t actually concentrating on her parents either - all his fault - but she wasn’t going give him twice the win by interrupting his antics. She might have rolled her eyes a few times, but that was all. She was thinking, though, dark eyes far away and thinking about something he’d said earlier. “My relationship with Stefan isn’t any of your business,” she said, forgetting to clarify that she currently had no relationship with Stefan, because she’d just told him she couldn’t be a part of all the death that chased him all over. She looked up at Damon finally, curiosity just managing to eke its way into her expression. “Familiar eyes. What did you mean when you said that?”
All of Stefan’s relationships were Damon’s business. He smiled at any thought otherwise. He was trying to make the guy’s life hell, after all. How was he supposed to do that if he didn’t know all the people he cared about and why? He stopped pacing and rotated to stare at her, tipping his chin down to look at her steadily. “Familiar. I mean Katherine, Elena.” He raised both eyebrows. “Stefan told you about Katherine. Right?” He smiled but this smile was different; he seemed to have an entire repertoire of them.
Her expression was all of course, and it wasn’t feigned in the slightest. “You told me about Katherine first, remember? How could you forget how quick you were to make me think Stefan was on the rebound?” Damon hadn’t told her the truth, but Stefan had, and Elena thought they were both kind of messed up over Katherine, but that’s as far as it went. “She wasn’t exactly nice. Am I supposed to be insulted that I remind you of her? Clarify it for me, Damon, so I know what you’re not getting from me right now,” she said, her tone saying she’d already decided that this was Damon’s way of insulting her, of reminding her Stefan had been in love with someone else for a hundred and something years.
He hadn’t forgotten, and his expression made that clear, but he didn’t argue with her. In the end, Damon was ridiculously easy to manipulate, but Elena didn’t have all the cards yet to manage it. He was silent for a moment (always a bad sign), staring at her. “Nice,” he said, savoring the word and adding his own flavorless bitterness to it. “No. She was not very nice. But she was very, very beautiful.” He put one hand up into the air between them and reached out one loose finger for her cheek, imagining in the split second before he touched it exactly what the soft, warm down would feel like.
She shoved his hand away before he could touch her, annoyance rather than fear or anger in the swat. “Quit it, Damon. I’m not playing whatever game you’re trying to play with me,” she said. She was too young to understand how to play a woman’s games yet, but she knew Damon was probably trying to make Stefan jealous, so that he could run back and tell Stefan and cause trouble. “I’m not dating your brother anymore, so you can just go torment someone else,” she added. She hadn’t actually planned on saying that, but there it was, the truth, and she expected Damon to leave once the statement was said. Whatever game he was trying to play would run its course, and life would go back to normal. Or, whatever normal was these days. She hoped it wouldn’t involve not wanting to get out of bed again, like she hadn’t wanted to do all summer. No, she reminded herself. She was pretending that everything was cool, and eventually it would be.
Damon’s expression spasmed as soon as his venturing hand was shoved away. He could have had his hand around her throat before she took a second breath, and his hand jerked as his temper blossomed at the idea that Katherine could reject him again, so easily, after so many years--but he caught himself. This was not Katherine. He could hear her blood moving through her heart, her breath tangling in her lungs. She was fragile, oh, so very fragile.
The control was exquisite as he let the muscles in his arm loose and his hand bounced on the seam of his jeans. Some of his sanity returned, and he made his blue eyes glisten as he widened them in mock sympathy that hid true surprise. “Why is that?” He shifted his head on his neck just to one side and his face lit up in amusement. “Oh, is it the vampire thing? Are you jealous of the eternal beauty? Can’t stand the idea he’s always going to know more than you can? That he’s always going to be stronger?” He didn’t see a reaction and his expression flexed. He made a little mocking gasping sound and put both hands up against his mouth. “Are you afraid? You?”
“No,” she insisted, a perpetually-teenage expression of denial on her face. But it wasn’t bravado. She wasn’t scared of him, and she wasn’t scared of Stefan. In fact, she edged closer, got more in his face, left less space between them. “If you were going to hurt me, you would have already done it. Anyway, you don’t actually want Stefan to hate you so much that he kills you or never talks to you again, and killing me would do that.” It was a girl’s confidence, but it was confidence, and it wasn’t born out of any supernatural abilities or methods of self-defense. No, she just sensed her own importance. Neither of the Salvatore brothers were going to kill her, though she didn’t yet understand precisely why. “But death follows you two everywhere, and I just can’t do that anymore, be around that.”
He smiled at her immediate denial. It was not unexpected, but in the end it gave him little satisfaction, as he was surprised seconds later as she approached. It was not as if she did not understand the reality of the situation; she had seen what Vicky had turned into. He wasn’t looking at denial, he was looking at acceptance. Vibrant, alluring acceptance--and defiance, at the same time. She smelled absolutely delicious. “Psht,” he said, dismissively, tossing his chin. “Stefan can’t kill me. He will always talk to me again. Eventually.” He worked his neck and brought his chin in a circle and down again. He met her eyes. “That’s your problem? Death?” He jerked his head over his shoulder to indicate the grave behind them. “Seems to me like you’d be used to it by now.” His breath whispered over her mouth, inches away. “Maybe we’re not the ones death is following.” He didn’t mean it. He was angry at her for being so like Katherine in looks and dedication to Stefan, at being right there, within reach and yet so far away.
“That’s not true,” she said about his claims, the ones about Stefan. “We both know you can push him too far,” she said, and she knew it was true. She knew it, and it showed that she knew it. As for his question, the one about her problem with death, it earned him a momentary slip, a glance at the grave and the shadow of hurt on her features. “People don’t get used to death, Damon,” she said, though she wasn’t sure it was true, not for everyone. “Even you,” she added. She had seen him after Vicky died, and there had been something almost like guilt there. She might have imagined it, but she didn’t think so. And then there was Katherine, who she knew he mourned for, maybe even more than Stefan. “You’re just a big act, Damon Salvatore,” she finished, not acknowledging his statement about who death followed. That one hit too close to home, and she just tipped her chin in defiance at the low blow. “Go away.”
A cool breeze made it through the surrounding trees, taking some of the dark strands from Damon’s forehead, obscuring his gaze for a few brief seconds as his anger slid away and he realized (very, very briefly) what he had said. Yet he would not apologize. He straightened, putting distance between them, and allowed his gaze to go cold. “Tell my brother I’m looking for him when you see him.” He gave her a short, cursory little smile (from the disdainful end of the spectrum) and turned away, leaving at an ordinary, human pace, following the ordinary, human little path.