[fic] Literary License (3/3)
Title: Literary License (3/3)
Author: badboy_fangirl
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Elena & Damon POV; Damon/Elena, with appearances by Bonnie, Jeremy, Caroline, Stefan, and other original characters.
Category: Angst, Romance
Word Count: ~5500
Summary: Elena realizes that Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights has a few similarities to Damon Salvatore.
Spoilers: Set in the undetermined future, but includes references to anything up through 2x16, and speculation as to what might happen beyond that.
Warnings: none
Show/Bookverse: Show
Author's Notes: So, once again, crowandfog and I got to talking about some stuff. And this is what happened because of that. Part One / Part Two
Literary License: to change the details of a story for purpose of theme,
clarity, or better storytelling.
"I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but..." Bonnie pauses and looks over at Elena as they're laying on her bed. "I could do a locater spell, you know. It would probably work with Stefan's blood even more accurately to find his brother than when I used Jer's blood to find you."
Elena shakes her head. "I'm not going to stalk him, Bonnie, though I appreciate your willingness to help. He left for a bunch of reasons; he has to come back on his own, not because I go and find him and make him do it."
Bonnie frowns. "Then why are you lying here all depressed?"
Elena curls her arms around the pillow under head. "Because I miss him. I miss him so much. And every day that he's gone..." She huffs out a sigh. "I have to believe he'll come back, but some days are harder than others to have that much faith."
Graduation has come and gone, and the summer has passed in a flurry of humidity and parties at the cemetery, and the same ol' same ol' of the Mystic Falls teen set.
Elena has gone through the motions of all of it, worried she'll regret it later if she doesn't enjoy it now, but the truth is, she's so over it. She's ready to go to college and move on to the next phase of life. And she really doesn't like seeing Caroline and Stefan mooning over each other. She's glad he's rebounded so quickly, and she's glad that her best friend is so happy, but it just rubs salt in the wound of her own making.
(She never realized how alone she could feel.)
She had ended things with Stefan first, and jumped right into something with Damon second (which had been the right order of doing things), hoping that the action would be enough, but it hadn't. He'd still had to leave, to go do whatever it is that he needs to do, and while most of the time she's completely confident that he'll come back, four months have passed without a single solitary word from him to any of them.
(She really thought he'd at least contact his brother; and Stefan had promised to tell her if he did.)
But they haven't heard anything.
"Look," Bonnie says, drawing Elena's attention back to her. "We'll just do the locater spell so you know he's alive. For peace of mind, not so you can go hunting for him." Her hand wraps around Elena's arm. "What about that?"
"No," Elena says firmly. "He'll be back. I know he will."
Bonnie looks skeptical, but that mixes with some form of pity, and it stings Elena to see it. "How do you know he'll come back?" she asks.
In all the months, weeks, days of lamentation that her friends have suffered good-naturedly through with her, this question has never come up before. Maybe up until now, they thought she was right, that something in her parting moments with Damon had assured her of his return. But this voicing of the question actually buoys Elena up instead of making her feel hopeless.
Because she knows the answer. "Because he's Heathcliff," she says.
Bonnie scoots over closer to Elena on the bed, pressing their cheeks together. "But you're not Cathy," she says. "You're going to wait, aren't you?"
Elena squeezes her eyes shut when tears prick at the corners. "As long as it takes," she whispers.
She gets accepted to Georgia State University in Atlanta, and Jenna, Alaric, and Jeremy help her move down there the last week of August. She shares a dorm with a girl named Laura, who is from Florida. They aren't best friends, but they get along well enough.
Elena throws herself into her studies, and because she's got no boyfriend, and nobody trying to kill her, she gets straight A's. College is harder than high school, but it's not impossible. She's always been smart, and capable, and she does enjoy school, even if sometimes she gets distracted by the empty space in her life.
It's not that she isn't involved. She goes to football games, and parties, she studies with study groups and gets involved with an Animal Rights Activist Club. She's on the go all the time, but she manages to keep in touch with all her friends from Virginia (Bonnie's going to Virginia Tech so she's not too far from Jeremy as he finishes high school, and Caroline and Stefan have moved to New York so she can go to NYU, while Matt's in California on a football scholarship).
But still. There is a very Damon-shaped hole in her heart and her life. It's ironic that just when she embraced everything she felt for him and made a place for him, he left. She'd barely had any time to understand just what she felt, but the more time that passes, the deeper she feels it.
Watching Caroline and Stefan had stirred jealousy like nothing before in her life ever had, and it had nothing to do with wanting Stefan back. She could just see how easy it was between them, how they finished each other's sentences, how they were so in sync.
She watched them have what she'd only discovered and enjoyed for about a twelve-hour period with Damon.
It's not like she hadn't known he would leave. In those precious moments they'd shared, there had been tenderness and wildness, and everything wonderful she could ever imagine, but there had also been fear and hesitancy on his part.
He just couldn't let go like she had, and she supposes that that is just about right. He had a lot more baggage than she did (something like 150 years more). That's why she hadn't been angry when she woke alone in his giant bed. She hadn't been surprised either, but she had rolled over, buried her face in the pillow that still held his head-print and cried. Cried for his pain, for the things that had happened to him to make him so unable to fully connect, cried for all that he'd lost, and for all that he seemed willing to give up even though he wanted it so desperately.
Because she knows he wants her; she could feel it in every touch of his lips and hands across her body, but more than that, she'd seen it in his eyes and heard it in his voice when he said her name, breathing his passion out across her skin.
For all the worry she felt over his love for Katherine being swallowed up in his need to preserve her life, she learned in those hours locked away with him in a vortex of sex and hunger unlike anything she'd ever experienced before that whatever he'd felt for Katherine paled in comparison to what he felt for her. It gave meaning to the camouflaged statements he'd made about how she knew he didn't love Katherine anymore, because she finally admitted to herself that she had known for sometime that he loved her, Elena. Not just because Isobel said so, or any number of other people, but because Damon had told her.
He'd told her and then he'd compelled her to forget.
The reason she knows she was compelled is because it only happened to her twice--on the same day. Once when Elijah took her necklace away, and once when Damon gave it back to her.
All she remembers of that moment is the aching emptiness left behind. The deduction had come because that's how she felt the morning she woke up to find him gone, and it's how she's felt fundamentally without him every day since. She hasn't given up, and she hasn't stopped living, but she knows without him, it will never be quite right.
Because in some ways, she is Cathy. Now that she has crossed over into loving Damon Salvatore, she cannot go back. Even if she wanted to.
That morning, after he'd gone, she climbed from the bed, wrapping the sheet about her sore and naked body to keep his scent all around her. She'd found, next to Gone With the Wind on the nightstand, a newer copy of Wuthering Heights than the one she had. Her breath had caught, and she felt more tears rush to the edges of her eyelids. Slowly she reached for the book, flipping through it until she found her favorite passage. In the complete silence of the Boarding House, she read it with different eyes, with the eyes of a woman who had given everything to the man she loved, only to realize it had not been enough to hold him.
...but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger...
Elena doesn't think of herself as particularly dramatic. That's Caroline's niche, but in that moment, wrapped in Damon Salvatore's bedclothes, she learned that the events in novels don't just take the readers away to magical places, or on romantic adventures. They actually happen; that's why people write about them.
So she sat and cried some more, and then she got up, showered in Damon's giant bathroom, did the laundry, remade his bed and cleaned everything up. She stacked the two books on the bedside table in a haphazardly artistic fashion, and then she went home.
She'd gone home and prepared to wait.
Christmas break comes, and she goes home to Mystic Falls for the holidays. Things are normal and wonderful at home, Jenna and Ric are engaged now, and Jeremy and Bonnie are still going strong.
Elena sits amongst their coupledom and tries not to gag.
She calls Caroline on Christmas Eve. She and Stefan hadn't left New York because of a snow storm, and Elena thinks it's funny. They are supernatural beings, undoubtedly they could hazard the weather, but they don't; instead they sound as if they couldn't be cozier in their tiny apartment in the city.
She chats with her friend for a good thirty minutes before she asks. "So, has Stefan heard from anyone in particular?"
She knows the answer before Caroline's sad retort carries through the line.
Hanging up a while later, she knows that the holidays themselves have no particular meaning to Damon, but it eats at her that nothing seems to drive him to make contact.
She barely sleeps that night, and it's not in anticipation of Santa Claus.
She wakes Bonnie early, sneaking into her brother's room to drag her from his grasp.
"I want you to do the locater spell," she whispers.
Bonnie's sleepy eyes fight to open entirely. "How can we do that? Stefan's in New York."
Elena realizes just how desperate she's become, because that hadn't even occurred to her. Tears assault her and she covers her face with her hands.
Bonnie wraps her hand around Elena's wrist and tugs her into the bed with Jeremy and her. Jeremy grunts and then slides over to make room as Bonnie whispers, "Scoot." She wraps her arms around Elena and holds her while she cries.
"Waz'th'matter?" Jeremy mutters.
"She misses Damon," Bonnie says softly.
Elena feels her brother's arms surround the both of them, and while she's cocooned in the love of her best friend and her sibling, the support only makes the tears come harder and faster.
"The next time Stefan comes home, I'll do the spell," Bonnie promises.
Elena meets Tate on the first day of the new semester in Janauary. She's sitting in her new Creative Writing class and he turns around to ask to borrow a pen.
She wouldn't normally even think anything of it as she digs in her bag for an extra writing utensil, but when she looks up and makes eye contact, she almost gasps out loud. He has the bluest, most crystalline eyes she's ever seen on someone who wasn't Damon Salvatore.
"I'm Tate," he says, taking the pen from her hand and then shaking it enthusiastically in greeting.
"I'm Elena," she replies. It's only after he turns back around that she notices she's smiling.
A few days later, she runs into him in the Student Union, and he asks her if can buy her a cup of coffee. She agrees, and they start talking about writing. Before she knows it, she's late for her Calculus class and she dashes off, calling behind her, "See you in class!"
They start exchanging papers when their professor asks them to give each other concrit, and suddenly Tate becomes the person she talks to every day, even the days that they don't have class together.
He kisses her one night toward the end of February in her dorm room while they're studying and she doesn't stop him. In fact, he's got his hand under her shirt before she's overwhelmed by a sense of horror; she pushes him away and sits up on her bed, scrambling for the edge, which isn't hard to find since it's just a dinky, little twin.
"I'm sorry," she gasps, tugging her shirt back down. "I can't do this."
Tate stacks his hands under his head and stays laying on her bed. She looks over her shoulder at him regretfully. "I'm sorry," she says again.
"There's some dude, somewhere, isn't there? Some dude who you just can't get over."
Elena chews her bottom lip and nods at him.
"Where is he, Elena? Why isn't he here with you?"
"It's a long story," she says evasively, getting to her feet.
"You should write about it. Then at least I might get to know why the coolest girl I've ever met is only ever going to be my study buddy."
"I'm really sorry, Tate," she says and he waves her off as he sits up.
"Stop saying that," he says, and she can tell he's not mad. Disappointed, but not angry.
"This probably doesn't help, but if there wasn't the other guy? I'd really like you."
Tate narrows his eyes at her just as her cell phone goes off, and Elena checks it automatically because it's Bonnie's ring tone. "Just a sec, okay?" she asks, switching her phone on. "Hey, Bonnie," she says.
"Damon's in Canada."
"What?" Elena shakes her head in confusion.
"Stefan came to visit me in Blacksburg, and we just did the locater spell. Damon's in Canada."
Elena starts laughing because it's so ludicrous. "Why Canada?" she asks, though she knows Bonnie won't have a clue.
"I don't know, except that the locater spell told us pretty specifically that he's on Prince Edward Island somewhere."
Elena thanks Bonnie, and tells her to tell Stefan that as well. She hangs up the phone and remembers Tate is still standing beside her bed. "Someone you know is visiting Prince Edward Island?" he asks.
Elena laughs again. "Yeah," she says, clutching the phone tightly in her hand, like a lifeline. "The guy. The one. He's in Canada."
She can't help herself, she's thinking of Anne and Gilbert and Lucy Maud Montgomery, and she suddenly feels hope surge through her. "It's a sign," she says. "I'm s--"
"I know, I know," Tate mutters. "You're sorry."
She's walking back to her dorm after her first final during the middle of May. School is almost out and she's going home to Mystic Falls for the summer. She'd thought about getting a job in Atlanta, but really she just wanted to go home for a while. She has fantasies about going up to the Boarding House and reading in the library, or maybe sleeping in Damon's bed. (What? It's not like he's using it.) She knows Stefan won't mind, assuming he and Caroline are even coming home themselves.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she pulls it out. "I was just thinking about you," she says when she answers Caroline's call.
"Where are you?" Caroline asks urgently.
"I'm at school," Elena says warily. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing, I just wasn't sure when your finals were over and when you were going home." She has that breezy, happy Caroline sound back now, but Elena's suspicions are raised anyway.
"I'm going home at the end of the week. Seriously, Caroline, what's going on?"
"I've gotta go, I think Stefan heard me!" The line goes dead and Elena stops in the middle of the sidewalk to stare at her phone screen. She's trying to decide if she should call her friend back when something makes her skin prickle. She looks up, and there he is, standing on the path between her and her dorm building.
She loses her breath at first, because even though in her heart she always knew he'd come back, she had stopped telling herself it would be any time soon. And seeing him here, now, in this place, the one place she has with no memories of him--she feels a little wrecked already, because if he breaks her heart again, she's going to kill him for ruining her one Damon-free spot.
Then she realizes: he's real, he's here, and there are only twenty yards between them. She throws her notebook down and runs to him, not even slowing to see if he'll open his arms to her. He has quick reflexes, and she depends on that she jumps up, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips.
He catches her easily enough, the only sign he gives that this is any effort at all is the way his eyes flinch when they look fully into one another's faces.
"You're here," she says, and she can't control the smile on her lips. It's huge, and her face threatens to crack under it.
"I'm here," he says, his voice thick with emotion.
Elena wraps her hands around his neck and smacks her lips over his. "Yay!" she says, and he finally smiles, the flash of white teeth reminding her that she should be scared of him.
But she never has been, not really, not even when she should have been. And now, fear is the last thing that she can feel. Happiness, joy, satisfaction, certainty. All of those things chase away the rest. "Yay," he repeats softly as one of his hands cups her cheek.
"I knew you would come back," she says as he pulls her mouth to his for a real kiss.
"I didn't know," he says when they disengage a moment later.
She wraps her arms tightly around his neck and hugs him, her face burrowing into his neck. "Yes, you did," she whispers.
Elena knows that if Laura hadn't already left for the summer, she would have allowed Damon to compel her dormmate to leave so they could be alone together. As it is, Laura took all of her finals early so she could go on a trip to Mexico with her family, so she's gone, and they have the tiny room all to themselves.
So naturally, Elena assumes that the first thing they will do is have sex, because that's all that is on her mind, but Damon wants to talk.
(Really? She can't even believe it. How did she get to be the guy in this relationship?)
First he apologizes, and then he kisses her again. Then he tells her, "I saw Stefan and Caroline yesterday. They're married, did you know that?"
Elena giggles, because she did know that. Stefan had found someone at the Social Security Office and compelled them to let him have a Social Security number because he wanted to be able to marry Caroline for real, in the eyes of the law. "Crazy, huh?" she asks, and Damon kisses her again.
"They're like, insanely happy," Damon says, shaking his head. "And that apartment they live in, in New York? It makes Ric's place in Mystic Falls look like the Ritz."
When he kisses her for the third time in as many minutes, Elena decides she's not the only one with sex on the brain, so she pushes him back on her bed and tries to take command the way she did before.
"Wait, wait," he says, and his hands grip her shoulders to hold her away from his body. "Elena--"
"Damon--" she repeats back to him in the same tone, and he smiles again, like he can't help it.
"Aren't you, like, mad at me, or something? Don't you want me to make some kind of declaration before we just get to it? Don't you need me to make a promise?"
She straddles his lap, and he stops fighting her so hard when she takes his face in her hands. "I'm furious with you. I've been missing you for one year, three weeks, and five days. But you already made your declaration, when you showed up here, and no, I don't need you to make me a promise. I know you'll never be able to leave me again, even if you really want to."
He purses his lips and rolls his eyes. "You do know that this, right here, is why I left in the first place, right? A man likes to have some secrets. With you, I don't have any."
Elena rubs her lips over his and bumps her zipper against his until she can feel him reacting to her movements. "You have plenty of secrets, Damon. And all the time in the world to tell them to me. What you don't have is a way to hide from me."
His hands slide over her hips and pull her down into him. He's hard beneath her, and her skin grows tight, her need for him clouding her mind and heart until she just can't stop herself from shushing him when he tries to talk again. "Later," she murmurs, placing her lips over his.
When they're naked, and he's inside her, he holds her face in one hand and looks right into her eyes as he says, "I love you."
She arches under him, clutching at him with every part of her body that can hold him to her. "I love you," she whispers in return and she feels it when he finally lets go, in every way.
"I just have to drop off this paper, check in with the professor, and then I'll be done. You should come with me," Elena says as she brushes her hair.
Damon's been holed up in her dorm room for two days, distracting her completely from her last ditch efforts at studying for these ridiculous things called finals. (If Damon had his way, she'd probably drop out of school immediately, but he's fortunate enough to know that she's never going to do what he says. It's important that he knows that going in.) Now she's about to finish up the last one, and they can pack up the Camaro and head up the road.
Back to Mystic Falls, and all that that means.
(Which, Damon's not really sure what it means, other than he and Elena are together, and according to her, they are never separating ever, ever again.)
"You want me to come with you? Why?"
She smiles at him over her shoulder. "I don't know. It's just romantic, us holding hands, walking across campus. I like the idea of it."
So does he, but he doesn't say anything. He just watches her as she turns back to the little mirror that hangs just inside her closet door. She's wearing a form-fitting burgundy tank top with lace edging, and the same pair of jeans he peeled off of her that day in the Boarding House. He knows because of the way they cling to the curve of her ass, and he wonders if in all those things she knows about him, if she has any idea how much he wants her, like, all the time.
It's an insatiable hunger, one that he denied himself for so long that now, he almost can't understand how he did it.
"What time do you have to be there?" he asks.
"Uh-uh," she says, looking at him as she shuts the closet door. "I can't be late. This professor grades on punctuality. So no funny business."
"Is funny business a euphemism, Miss English Lit Major?"
She flips him off, and he bursts into laughter. He follows her out the door, wrapping his arm around her neck as he presses his lips to her cheek. "I love you, 'Lena."
"I know," she says cockily.
He waits outside the door of the classroom, because this professor is actually taking roll, on the last day of class, so it's about fifteen minutes before she emerges from the room.
She comes walking out with this boy, and he's smiling at her in a way that Damon knows all too well. He has a moment, one where he calls himself every filthy name he can think of, because what the hell was in his head? Leaving her like that, and just expecting that she'd be there if or when he ever got his shit together?
She could totally be shacked up with this guy, because Damon can tell he'd be all for it.
"So," the kid says. "You're the one, huh?" He gives Damon a once over and Damon looks at Elena, whose grin could not get any bigger.
"Who is this guy?" he asks, jerking a thumb at him.
"This is my friend, Tate," Elena says, turning so she's standing between them like a mediator. "Tate, this is Damon."
Tate extends his hand, and Damon shakes it only because he'd look like a complete dick if he didn't. "Don't blow it, buddy," Tate says, his grip pretty hard for a human who doesn't know he's dealing with a vampire.
Damon wishes he had some snappy comeback, but since this guy is obviously thinking something along the same lines as he is, just from the other side, he nods and says, "I won't."
Just before he walks away, Tate says, more to Elena, but definitely loudly enough that Damon can hear him, "You ought to let him read some of what you wrote."
Elena's grin lessens into a soft smile. "Maybe someday."
They've been back in Mystic Falls for a week when she finally gets around to being upset with him.
(He knew it was crazy to think they were just fine.)
It happens after they've made love in his bed at the Boarding House. She rolls away from him and suddenly she's crying, and when he leans over her to ask what's wrong, she starts pummeling his chest with her fists, and he just lets her, because duh.
He deserves it. What he doesn't deserve is her unconditional love and forgiveness, but soon she's apologizing in some sort of crazy, sob-fest way that ends with him grabbing her arms and pinning them to the mattress above her head.
"Baby, baby, baby," he says until she finally stops shaking her head in agitation and looks into his eyes. "I promise you, you will never wake up here alone, ever again. Not unless you know I'm going to be downstairs cooking you breakfast, and probably not even then, because I'd rather be here with you than down there anyway."
"I love you, Damon, so much," she says, tears on her cheeks, her voice choked. It does something extremely painful to his heart to see and hear her in this way, and so he presses his lips to hers, kissing her soothingly.
"I love you, more than you'll ever know, Elena."
"Then tell me about Katherine," she says, and he can no longer deny her anything.
So they sit up in the middle of his bed and he tells her. He talks about how he'd been at war when Katherine first came to Mystic Falls, but how he'd fallen for her from practically the first minute he saw her. It hadn't been until later that Stefan's affections for her seemed to appeal to her more, and then of course, the Council had rounded her and everyone else up.
Damon and Stefan died, and then lived again, and parted ways.
Then he tells her about Katherine's return, their kiss on the front porch when he'd thought she was Elena, and then the next day when she'd told him that she'd never loved him.
"That was why you were so upset that night, in my bedroom," Elena says, her hand touching his face gently, like at any moment, he might go off again.
"It was a lot of things. But yes, a lot of it was her. But even that, even the worst possible thing I could do didn't keep you out of my head, or my heart. And you forgave me. Like you always do. Like you probably shouldn't."
He shakes his head, and continues without her prompting him. "When I killed her, the only thought in my head was for you. But after I left here--after I left you--I realized that when I killed Katherine, I killed that part of myself, too. The part that could just exist, but not live. I finally got what Stefan was talking about."
"Rose, too," Elena says softly. She climbs into his lap and puts her head against his shoulder.
"It was you, though, Elena. You're who made me want to live again. You make me want to be alive. But it's never going to be easy."
"I know," she says, snuggling into him.
"So. We're really going to do this, then?" he asks.
"Yes," she murmurs.
"And what will we do about this eternity thing?"
"We'll figure that out when I get to be about 24." He feels her lips on his throat. "And until then, I'm going to be a college student, and you're going to be my boyfriend."
He presses his lips to her forehead. "Will you let me read what you wrote?" he asks.
"Maybe someday," she sing-songs, and she starts laughing because his fingers attack her sides. They fumble around on the bed until he's got her pinned down again, and they're both panting, but it's more from arousal than it is from wrestling.
Damon makes love to her slowly, agonizingly, making her beg him for it, holding out until his own desire is so paper thin that he can barely control himself.
She cries his name, and arches her throat, whether consciously or not, until he can practically taste her blood singing in her veins for him. He rakes his teeth over her neck and she says, "Please," and he bites her without strictly meaning to.
She seizes up around him, so he thinks she likes it, and he stops drinking from her before he can cause any damage to her. He throws his head back and then his orgasm roars through him, and he wonders, if maybe one day, this is what she'll choose.
(Maybe she does love him enough to want to live forever.)
She curls herself around him sleepily and he puts his hand to the wound in her neck. "I'm sorry," he says.
"I'm not," she murmurs. Then she slumbers in his arms, as trusting and beautiful as only Elena can be.
That autumn, they move to Atlanta and find an apartment to share. (They have more breakdowns in bed, like, "Where were you for that whole year?" But the answers become less important as they both settle into what they are together. Elena stops worrying--and denying that she's worried--that he might leave again, and truth be told, so does Damon.)
At Christmastime, Elena gives him a book filled with the essays she wrote in her Creative Writing class the previous spring. (He reads them voraciously, then exclaims, "You knew I compelled you?!" She just smiles and asks, "How did you get that out of what I wrote when I never state it explicitly?" But he knows, even though it's beautifully hidden in prose that is, in his opinion, as good as any of those classic novels that they both love. Only he can fully decipher what she's saying, because she said it about him.
Later, it occurs to him and he says, incredulous, "You let that Tate kid read all this?")
Three years after that she graduates with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, and they travel for a year, spending time in England, a long stretch of it in the Moors.
When she comes to him, certain that she wants to become a vampire, he no longer worries she doesn't know what she's getting into.
He got over that a long time ago.
And besides, they're writing their own story; it can end any way they like.
Author: badboy_fangirl
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Elena & Damon POV; Damon/Elena, with appearances by Bonnie, Jeremy, Caroline, Stefan, and other original characters.
Category: Angst, Romance
Word Count: ~5500
Summary: Elena realizes that Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights has a few similarities to Damon Salvatore.
Spoilers: Set in the undetermined future, but includes references to anything up through 2x16, and speculation as to what might happen beyond that.
Warnings: none
Show/Bookverse: Show
Author's Notes: So, once again, crowandfog and I got to talking about some stuff. And this is what happened because of that. Part One / Part Two
Literary License: to change the details of a story for purpose of theme,
clarity, or better storytelling.
"I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but..." Bonnie pauses and looks over at Elena as they're laying on her bed. "I could do a locater spell, you know. It would probably work with Stefan's blood even more accurately to find his brother than when I used Jer's blood to find you."
Elena shakes her head. "I'm not going to stalk him, Bonnie, though I appreciate your willingness to help. He left for a bunch of reasons; he has to come back on his own, not because I go and find him and make him do it."
Bonnie frowns. "Then why are you lying here all depressed?"
Elena curls her arms around the pillow under head. "Because I miss him. I miss him so much. And every day that he's gone..." She huffs out a sigh. "I have to believe he'll come back, but some days are harder than others to have that much faith."
Graduation has come and gone, and the summer has passed in a flurry of humidity and parties at the cemetery, and the same ol' same ol' of the Mystic Falls teen set.
Elena has gone through the motions of all of it, worried she'll regret it later if she doesn't enjoy it now, but the truth is, she's so over it. She's ready to go to college and move on to the next phase of life. And she really doesn't like seeing Caroline and Stefan mooning over each other. She's glad he's rebounded so quickly, and she's glad that her best friend is so happy, but it just rubs salt in the wound of her own making.
(She never realized how alone she could feel.)
She had ended things with Stefan first, and jumped right into something with Damon second (which had been the right order of doing things), hoping that the action would be enough, but it hadn't. He'd still had to leave, to go do whatever it is that he needs to do, and while most of the time she's completely confident that he'll come back, four months have passed without a single solitary word from him to any of them.
(She really thought he'd at least contact his brother; and Stefan had promised to tell her if he did.)
But they haven't heard anything.
"Look," Bonnie says, drawing Elena's attention back to her. "We'll just do the locater spell so you know he's alive. For peace of mind, not so you can go hunting for him." Her hand wraps around Elena's arm. "What about that?"
"No," Elena says firmly. "He'll be back. I know he will."
Bonnie looks skeptical, but that mixes with some form of pity, and it stings Elena to see it. "How do you know he'll come back?" she asks.
In all the months, weeks, days of lamentation that her friends have suffered good-naturedly through with her, this question has never come up before. Maybe up until now, they thought she was right, that something in her parting moments with Damon had assured her of his return. But this voicing of the question actually buoys Elena up instead of making her feel hopeless.
Because she knows the answer. "Because he's Heathcliff," she says.
Bonnie scoots over closer to Elena on the bed, pressing their cheeks together. "But you're not Cathy," she says. "You're going to wait, aren't you?"
Elena squeezes her eyes shut when tears prick at the corners. "As long as it takes," she whispers.
She gets accepted to Georgia State University in Atlanta, and Jenna, Alaric, and Jeremy help her move down there the last week of August. She shares a dorm with a girl named Laura, who is from Florida. They aren't best friends, but they get along well enough.
Elena throws herself into her studies, and because she's got no boyfriend, and nobody trying to kill her, she gets straight A's. College is harder than high school, but it's not impossible. She's always been smart, and capable, and she does enjoy school, even if sometimes she gets distracted by the empty space in her life.
It's not that she isn't involved. She goes to football games, and parties, she studies with study groups and gets involved with an Animal Rights Activist Club. She's on the go all the time, but she manages to keep in touch with all her friends from Virginia (Bonnie's going to Virginia Tech so she's not too far from Jeremy as he finishes high school, and Caroline and Stefan have moved to New York so she can go to NYU, while Matt's in California on a football scholarship).
But still. There is a very Damon-shaped hole in her heart and her life. It's ironic that just when she embraced everything she felt for him and made a place for him, he left. She'd barely had any time to understand just what she felt, but the more time that passes, the deeper she feels it.
Watching Caroline and Stefan had stirred jealousy like nothing before in her life ever had, and it had nothing to do with wanting Stefan back. She could just see how easy it was between them, how they finished each other's sentences, how they were so in sync.
She watched them have what she'd only discovered and enjoyed for about a twelve-hour period with Damon.
It's not like she hadn't known he would leave. In those precious moments they'd shared, there had been tenderness and wildness, and everything wonderful she could ever imagine, but there had also been fear and hesitancy on his part.
He just couldn't let go like she had, and she supposes that that is just about right. He had a lot more baggage than she did (something like 150 years more). That's why she hadn't been angry when she woke alone in his giant bed. She hadn't been surprised either, but she had rolled over, buried her face in the pillow that still held his head-print and cried. Cried for his pain, for the things that had happened to him to make him so unable to fully connect, cried for all that he'd lost, and for all that he seemed willing to give up even though he wanted it so desperately.
Because she knows he wants her; she could feel it in every touch of his lips and hands across her body, but more than that, she'd seen it in his eyes and heard it in his voice when he said her name, breathing his passion out across her skin.
For all the worry she felt over his love for Katherine being swallowed up in his need to preserve her life, she learned in those hours locked away with him in a vortex of sex and hunger unlike anything she'd ever experienced before that whatever he'd felt for Katherine paled in comparison to what he felt for her. It gave meaning to the camouflaged statements he'd made about how she knew he didn't love Katherine anymore, because she finally admitted to herself that she had known for sometime that he loved her, Elena. Not just because Isobel said so, or any number of other people, but because Damon had told her.
He'd told her and then he'd compelled her to forget.
The reason she knows she was compelled is because it only happened to her twice--on the same day. Once when Elijah took her necklace away, and once when Damon gave it back to her.
All she remembers of that moment is the aching emptiness left behind. The deduction had come because that's how she felt the morning she woke up to find him gone, and it's how she's felt fundamentally without him every day since. She hasn't given up, and she hasn't stopped living, but she knows without him, it will never be quite right.
Because in some ways, she is Cathy. Now that she has crossed over into loving Damon Salvatore, she cannot go back. Even if she wanted to.
That morning, after he'd gone, she climbed from the bed, wrapping the sheet about her sore and naked body to keep his scent all around her. She'd found, next to Gone With the Wind on the nightstand, a newer copy of Wuthering Heights than the one she had. Her breath had caught, and she felt more tears rush to the edges of her eyelids. Slowly she reached for the book, flipping through it until she found her favorite passage. In the complete silence of the Boarding House, she read it with different eyes, with the eyes of a woman who had given everything to the man she loved, only to realize it had not been enough to hold him.
...but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger...
Elena doesn't think of herself as particularly dramatic. That's Caroline's niche, but in that moment, wrapped in Damon Salvatore's bedclothes, she learned that the events in novels don't just take the readers away to magical places, or on romantic adventures. They actually happen; that's why people write about them.
So she sat and cried some more, and then she got up, showered in Damon's giant bathroom, did the laundry, remade his bed and cleaned everything up. She stacked the two books on the bedside table in a haphazardly artistic fashion, and then she went home.
She'd gone home and prepared to wait.
Christmas break comes, and she goes home to Mystic Falls for the holidays. Things are normal and wonderful at home, Jenna and Ric are engaged now, and Jeremy and Bonnie are still going strong.
Elena sits amongst their coupledom and tries not to gag.
She calls Caroline on Christmas Eve. She and Stefan hadn't left New York because of a snow storm, and Elena thinks it's funny. They are supernatural beings, undoubtedly they could hazard the weather, but they don't; instead they sound as if they couldn't be cozier in their tiny apartment in the city.
She chats with her friend for a good thirty minutes before she asks. "So, has Stefan heard from anyone in particular?"
She knows the answer before Caroline's sad retort carries through the line.
Hanging up a while later, she knows that the holidays themselves have no particular meaning to Damon, but it eats at her that nothing seems to drive him to make contact.
She barely sleeps that night, and it's not in anticipation of Santa Claus.
She wakes Bonnie early, sneaking into her brother's room to drag her from his grasp.
"I want you to do the locater spell," she whispers.
Bonnie's sleepy eyes fight to open entirely. "How can we do that? Stefan's in New York."
Elena realizes just how desperate she's become, because that hadn't even occurred to her. Tears assault her and she covers her face with her hands.
Bonnie wraps her hand around Elena's wrist and tugs her into the bed with Jeremy and her. Jeremy grunts and then slides over to make room as Bonnie whispers, "Scoot." She wraps her arms around Elena and holds her while she cries.
"Waz'th'matter?" Jeremy mutters.
"She misses Damon," Bonnie says softly.
Elena feels her brother's arms surround the both of them, and while she's cocooned in the love of her best friend and her sibling, the support only makes the tears come harder and faster.
"The next time Stefan comes home, I'll do the spell," Bonnie promises.
Elena meets Tate on the first day of the new semester in Janauary. She's sitting in her new Creative Writing class and he turns around to ask to borrow a pen.
She wouldn't normally even think anything of it as she digs in her bag for an extra writing utensil, but when she looks up and makes eye contact, she almost gasps out loud. He has the bluest, most crystalline eyes she's ever seen on someone who wasn't Damon Salvatore.
"I'm Tate," he says, taking the pen from her hand and then shaking it enthusiastically in greeting.
"I'm Elena," she replies. It's only after he turns back around that she notices she's smiling.
A few days later, she runs into him in the Student Union, and he asks her if can buy her a cup of coffee. She agrees, and they start talking about writing. Before she knows it, she's late for her Calculus class and she dashes off, calling behind her, "See you in class!"
They start exchanging papers when their professor asks them to give each other concrit, and suddenly Tate becomes the person she talks to every day, even the days that they don't have class together.
He kisses her one night toward the end of February in her dorm room while they're studying and she doesn't stop him. In fact, he's got his hand under her shirt before she's overwhelmed by a sense of horror; she pushes him away and sits up on her bed, scrambling for the edge, which isn't hard to find since it's just a dinky, little twin.
"I'm sorry," she gasps, tugging her shirt back down. "I can't do this."
Tate stacks his hands under his head and stays laying on her bed. She looks over her shoulder at him regretfully. "I'm sorry," she says again.
"There's some dude, somewhere, isn't there? Some dude who you just can't get over."
Elena chews her bottom lip and nods at him.
"Where is he, Elena? Why isn't he here with you?"
"It's a long story," she says evasively, getting to her feet.
"You should write about it. Then at least I might get to know why the coolest girl I've ever met is only ever going to be my study buddy."
"I'm really sorry, Tate," she says and he waves her off as he sits up.
"Stop saying that," he says, and she can tell he's not mad. Disappointed, but not angry.
"This probably doesn't help, but if there wasn't the other guy? I'd really like you."
Tate narrows his eyes at her just as her cell phone goes off, and Elena checks it automatically because it's Bonnie's ring tone. "Just a sec, okay?" she asks, switching her phone on. "Hey, Bonnie," she says.
"Damon's in Canada."
"What?" Elena shakes her head in confusion.
"Stefan came to visit me in Blacksburg, and we just did the locater spell. Damon's in Canada."
Elena starts laughing because it's so ludicrous. "Why Canada?" she asks, though she knows Bonnie won't have a clue.
"I don't know, except that the locater spell told us pretty specifically that he's on Prince Edward Island somewhere."
Elena thanks Bonnie, and tells her to tell Stefan that as well. She hangs up the phone and remembers Tate is still standing beside her bed. "Someone you know is visiting Prince Edward Island?" he asks.
Elena laughs again. "Yeah," she says, clutching the phone tightly in her hand, like a lifeline. "The guy. The one. He's in Canada."
She can't help herself, she's thinking of Anne and Gilbert and Lucy Maud Montgomery, and she suddenly feels hope surge through her. "It's a sign," she says. "I'm s--"
"I know, I know," Tate mutters. "You're sorry."
She's walking back to her dorm after her first final during the middle of May. School is almost out and she's going home to Mystic Falls for the summer. She'd thought about getting a job in Atlanta, but really she just wanted to go home for a while. She has fantasies about going up to the Boarding House and reading in the library, or maybe sleeping in Damon's bed. (What? It's not like he's using it.) She knows Stefan won't mind, assuming he and Caroline are even coming home themselves.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she pulls it out. "I was just thinking about you," she says when she answers Caroline's call.
"Where are you?" Caroline asks urgently.
"I'm at school," Elena says warily. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing, I just wasn't sure when your finals were over and when you were going home." She has that breezy, happy Caroline sound back now, but Elena's suspicions are raised anyway.
"I'm going home at the end of the week. Seriously, Caroline, what's going on?"
"I've gotta go, I think Stefan heard me!" The line goes dead and Elena stops in the middle of the sidewalk to stare at her phone screen. She's trying to decide if she should call her friend back when something makes her skin prickle. She looks up, and there he is, standing on the path between her and her dorm building.
She loses her breath at first, because even though in her heart she always knew he'd come back, she had stopped telling herself it would be any time soon. And seeing him here, now, in this place, the one place she has with no memories of him--she feels a little wrecked already, because if he breaks her heart again, she's going to kill him for ruining her one Damon-free spot.
Then she realizes: he's real, he's here, and there are only twenty yards between them. She throws her notebook down and runs to him, not even slowing to see if he'll open his arms to her. He has quick reflexes, and she depends on that she jumps up, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips.
He catches her easily enough, the only sign he gives that this is any effort at all is the way his eyes flinch when they look fully into one another's faces.
"You're here," she says, and she can't control the smile on her lips. It's huge, and her face threatens to crack under it.
"I'm here," he says, his voice thick with emotion.
Elena wraps her hands around his neck and smacks her lips over his. "Yay!" she says, and he finally smiles, the flash of white teeth reminding her that she should be scared of him.
But she never has been, not really, not even when she should have been. And now, fear is the last thing that she can feel. Happiness, joy, satisfaction, certainty. All of those things chase away the rest. "Yay," he repeats softly as one of his hands cups her cheek.
"I knew you would come back," she says as he pulls her mouth to his for a real kiss.
"I didn't know," he says when they disengage a moment later.
She wraps her arms tightly around his neck and hugs him, her face burrowing into his neck. "Yes, you did," she whispers.
Elena knows that if Laura hadn't already left for the summer, she would have allowed Damon to compel her dormmate to leave so they could be alone together. As it is, Laura took all of her finals early so she could go on a trip to Mexico with her family, so she's gone, and they have the tiny room all to themselves.
So naturally, Elena assumes that the first thing they will do is have sex, because that's all that is on her mind, but Damon wants to talk.
(Really? She can't even believe it. How did she get to be the guy in this relationship?)
First he apologizes, and then he kisses her again. Then he tells her, "I saw Stefan and Caroline yesterday. They're married, did you know that?"
Elena giggles, because she did know that. Stefan had found someone at the Social Security Office and compelled them to let him have a Social Security number because he wanted to be able to marry Caroline for real, in the eyes of the law. "Crazy, huh?" she asks, and Damon kisses her again.
"They're like, insanely happy," Damon says, shaking his head. "And that apartment they live in, in New York? It makes Ric's place in Mystic Falls look like the Ritz."
When he kisses her for the third time in as many minutes, Elena decides she's not the only one with sex on the brain, so she pushes him back on her bed and tries to take command the way she did before.
"Wait, wait," he says, and his hands grip her shoulders to hold her away from his body. "Elena--"
"Damon--" she repeats back to him in the same tone, and he smiles again, like he can't help it.
"Aren't you, like, mad at me, or something? Don't you want me to make some kind of declaration before we just get to it? Don't you need me to make a promise?"
She straddles his lap, and he stops fighting her so hard when she takes his face in her hands. "I'm furious with you. I've been missing you for one year, three weeks, and five days. But you already made your declaration, when you showed up here, and no, I don't need you to make me a promise. I know you'll never be able to leave me again, even if you really want to."
He purses his lips and rolls his eyes. "You do know that this, right here, is why I left in the first place, right? A man likes to have some secrets. With you, I don't have any."
Elena rubs her lips over his and bumps her zipper against his until she can feel him reacting to her movements. "You have plenty of secrets, Damon. And all the time in the world to tell them to me. What you don't have is a way to hide from me."
His hands slide over her hips and pull her down into him. He's hard beneath her, and her skin grows tight, her need for him clouding her mind and heart until she just can't stop herself from shushing him when he tries to talk again. "Later," she murmurs, placing her lips over his.
When they're naked, and he's inside her, he holds her face in one hand and looks right into her eyes as he says, "I love you."
She arches under him, clutching at him with every part of her body that can hold him to her. "I love you," she whispers in return and she feels it when he finally lets go, in every way.
"I just have to drop off this paper, check in with the professor, and then I'll be done. You should come with me," Elena says as she brushes her hair.
Damon's been holed up in her dorm room for two days, distracting her completely from her last ditch efforts at studying for these ridiculous things called finals. (If Damon had his way, she'd probably drop out of school immediately, but he's fortunate enough to know that she's never going to do what he says. It's important that he knows that going in.) Now she's about to finish up the last one, and they can pack up the Camaro and head up the road.
Back to Mystic Falls, and all that that means.
(Which, Damon's not really sure what it means, other than he and Elena are together, and according to her, they are never separating ever, ever again.)
"You want me to come with you? Why?"
She smiles at him over her shoulder. "I don't know. It's just romantic, us holding hands, walking across campus. I like the idea of it."
So does he, but he doesn't say anything. He just watches her as she turns back to the little mirror that hangs just inside her closet door. She's wearing a form-fitting burgundy tank top with lace edging, and the same pair of jeans he peeled off of her that day in the Boarding House. He knows because of the way they cling to the curve of her ass, and he wonders if in all those things she knows about him, if she has any idea how much he wants her, like, all the time.
It's an insatiable hunger, one that he denied himself for so long that now, he almost can't understand how he did it.
"What time do you have to be there?" he asks.
"Uh-uh," she says, looking at him as she shuts the closet door. "I can't be late. This professor grades on punctuality. So no funny business."
"Is funny business a euphemism, Miss English Lit Major?"
She flips him off, and he bursts into laughter. He follows her out the door, wrapping his arm around her neck as he presses his lips to her cheek. "I love you, 'Lena."
"I know," she says cockily.
He waits outside the door of the classroom, because this professor is actually taking roll, on the last day of class, so it's about fifteen minutes before she emerges from the room.
She comes walking out with this boy, and he's smiling at her in a way that Damon knows all too well. He has a moment, one where he calls himself every filthy name he can think of, because what the hell was in his head? Leaving her like that, and just expecting that she'd be there if or when he ever got his shit together?
She could totally be shacked up with this guy, because Damon can tell he'd be all for it.
"So," the kid says. "You're the one, huh?" He gives Damon a once over and Damon looks at Elena, whose grin could not get any bigger.
"Who is this guy?" he asks, jerking a thumb at him.
"This is my friend, Tate," Elena says, turning so she's standing between them like a mediator. "Tate, this is Damon."
Tate extends his hand, and Damon shakes it only because he'd look like a complete dick if he didn't. "Don't blow it, buddy," Tate says, his grip pretty hard for a human who doesn't know he's dealing with a vampire.
Damon wishes he had some snappy comeback, but since this guy is obviously thinking something along the same lines as he is, just from the other side, he nods and says, "I won't."
Just before he walks away, Tate says, more to Elena, but definitely loudly enough that Damon can hear him, "You ought to let him read some of what you wrote."
Elena's grin lessens into a soft smile. "Maybe someday."
They've been back in Mystic Falls for a week when she finally gets around to being upset with him.
(He knew it was crazy to think they were just fine.)
It happens after they've made love in his bed at the Boarding House. She rolls away from him and suddenly she's crying, and when he leans over her to ask what's wrong, she starts pummeling his chest with her fists, and he just lets her, because duh.
He deserves it. What he doesn't deserve is her unconditional love and forgiveness, but soon she's apologizing in some sort of crazy, sob-fest way that ends with him grabbing her arms and pinning them to the mattress above her head.
"Baby, baby, baby," he says until she finally stops shaking her head in agitation and looks into his eyes. "I promise you, you will never wake up here alone, ever again. Not unless you know I'm going to be downstairs cooking you breakfast, and probably not even then, because I'd rather be here with you than down there anyway."
"I love you, Damon, so much," she says, tears on her cheeks, her voice choked. It does something extremely painful to his heart to see and hear her in this way, and so he presses his lips to hers, kissing her soothingly.
"I love you, more than you'll ever know, Elena."
"Then tell me about Katherine," she says, and he can no longer deny her anything.
So they sit up in the middle of his bed and he tells her. He talks about how he'd been at war when Katherine first came to Mystic Falls, but how he'd fallen for her from practically the first minute he saw her. It hadn't been until later that Stefan's affections for her seemed to appeal to her more, and then of course, the Council had rounded her and everyone else up.
Damon and Stefan died, and then lived again, and parted ways.
Then he tells her about Katherine's return, their kiss on the front porch when he'd thought she was Elena, and then the next day when she'd told him that she'd never loved him.
"That was why you were so upset that night, in my bedroom," Elena says, her hand touching his face gently, like at any moment, he might go off again.
"It was a lot of things. But yes, a lot of it was her. But even that, even the worst possible thing I could do didn't keep you out of my head, or my heart. And you forgave me. Like you always do. Like you probably shouldn't."
He shakes his head, and continues without her prompting him. "When I killed her, the only thought in my head was for you. But after I left here--after I left you--I realized that when I killed Katherine, I killed that part of myself, too. The part that could just exist, but not live. I finally got what Stefan was talking about."
"Rose, too," Elena says softly. She climbs into his lap and puts her head against his shoulder.
"It was you, though, Elena. You're who made me want to live again. You make me want to be alive. But it's never going to be easy."
"I know," she says, snuggling into him.
"So. We're really going to do this, then?" he asks.
"Yes," she murmurs.
"And what will we do about this eternity thing?"
"We'll figure that out when I get to be about 24." He feels her lips on his throat. "And until then, I'm going to be a college student, and you're going to be my boyfriend."
He presses his lips to her forehead. "Will you let me read what you wrote?" he asks.
"Maybe someday," she sing-songs, and she starts laughing because his fingers attack her sides. They fumble around on the bed until he's got her pinned down again, and they're both panting, but it's more from arousal than it is from wrestling.
Damon makes love to her slowly, agonizingly, making her beg him for it, holding out until his own desire is so paper thin that he can barely control himself.
She cries his name, and arches her throat, whether consciously or not, until he can practically taste her blood singing in her veins for him. He rakes his teeth over her neck and she says, "Please," and he bites her without strictly meaning to.
She seizes up around him, so he thinks she likes it, and he stops drinking from her before he can cause any damage to her. He throws his head back and then his orgasm roars through him, and he wonders, if maybe one day, this is what she'll choose.
(Maybe she does love him enough to want to live forever.)
She curls herself around him sleepily and he puts his hand to the wound in her neck. "I'm sorry," he says.
"I'm not," she murmurs. Then she slumbers in his arms, as trusting and beautiful as only Elena can be.
That autumn, they move to Atlanta and find an apartment to share. (They have more breakdowns in bed, like, "Where were you for that whole year?" But the answers become less important as they both settle into what they are together. Elena stops worrying--and denying that she's worried--that he might leave again, and truth be told, so does Damon.)
At Christmastime, Elena gives him a book filled with the essays she wrote in her Creative Writing class the previous spring. (He reads them voraciously, then exclaims, "You knew I compelled you?!" She just smiles and asks, "How did you get that out of what I wrote when I never state it explicitly?" But he knows, even though it's beautifully hidden in prose that is, in his opinion, as good as any of those classic novels that they both love. Only he can fully decipher what she's saying, because she said it about him.
Later, it occurs to him and he says, incredulous, "You let that Tate kid read all this?")
Three years after that she graduates with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, and they travel for a year, spending time in England, a long stretch of it in the Moors.
When she comes to him, certain that she wants to become a vampire, he no longer worries she doesn't know what she's getting into.
He got over that a long time ago.
And besides, they're writing their own story; it can end any way they like.