Who: Damon Salvatore and Elena Gilbert Where: Lobby; then further into the hotel What: Exploration When: After this Rating: TBD; will update
Being trapped in this hotel meant no running; for once, escaping his troubles wasn’t as simple as drinking his self into oblivion...or inflicting all that internal pain on others, desperately trying to find some kind of balance, one where he wasn’t left in misery. Damon Salvatore had to face who, and what he was, without the ability to hide from it. The bad brother; the corrupting influence. Nothing about him was good for anyone unfortunate enough to care. That included Elena; the love of his life, the only light that he had ever known. Trying to be a better person meant letting her go; but the only way he knew how to be better was when he was around her. The irony, and the paradox of it, wasn’t lost on him. Love was supposed to be selfless; how many people had drilled that into his head? If you truly felt the depth of emotion for someone as he did Elena, then you were supposed to be willing to let them go. When you knew that not only did she suffer, but so did the ones closest to her, the decision should have been that much easier.
Except he hadn’t ever excelled at following the rules; why couldn’t love be selfish? Why couldn’t you indulge in the greatest thing you had ever known? To get so completely lost that the world could end and you wouldn’t notice. That’s what he was struggling with. The knowledge that they had to stay separated clashing with the searing desire to wrap Elena up in his arms. His plans had centered around getting familiar with large bar that no doubt existed somewhere in the hotel; all of that went sideways when he read her message. Seeing a little boy on a bike only to have him vanish; it wasn’t far fetched, they had dealt with ghosts before...and even if his replies hadn’t come across as always serious, Damon believed everything that she said. If she felt something was wrong, he knew to trust that instinct. Besides, he wasn’t about to let her go wandering off...Damon was a lot of things, very few of them positive, but he had always been willing to sacrifice his own safety for hers.
They had agreed to meet in the lobby; he still didn’t have any real idea as to what had pulled them there, or how they were going to get out of it. He believed, though. That he would find a way to get her back to Mystic Falls; back to her brother, back to the people that were important to her. This, whatever it was, couldn’t compare to what it was like being trapped in that cell, knowing that sooner or later, the good doctor was going to show up and start carving into you. If he needed to keep himself together, then he was going to. Arms folded across his chest, pale blue eyes stared straight ahead, lost in the thoughts that never seemed to go away lately. Stefan was supposed to be the introspective one; brooding was his brother’s favorite past time, not his. He’d also seen on Elena’s message that Caroline Forbes was there; his former girlfriend’s best friend wasn’t exactly his biggest fan...justifiably so. He knew that she was probably going to reinforce the idea that they were wrong for each other; make Elena hold firm to what they had agreed upon. Maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be.
“Of course I would decide a haunted hotel was the best place to have an existential crisis….that’s me, always keeping things interesting. Stefan would be soaking this up,” he muttered under his breath, speaking to his self, which probably wasn’t going to earn him any ‘sanity points’ with anyone within ear shot.