[fic] The Taylor Swift Anthology (2/4)
Title: The Taylor Swift Anthology (2/4)
Author: badboy_fangirl
Rating: T/PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Elena POV, minor Damon/Rose, minor Stefan/Elena, Damon/Elena (with appearances by Jeremy, Stefan, Bonnie, and Caroline)
Category: Angst, Romance
Word Count: ~2700
Summary: Damon Salvatore fucking hates Taylor Swift. (But Elena loves her.)
Spoilers: Up through 2x08 "Rose."
Warnings: Speculation about what happens post-episode 8, but it's not based on any spoilers.
Show/Bookverse: Show
Author's Notes: Lyrics taken from the Taylor Swift song "The Story of Us." Part One is HERE.
Ever since the events with Rose and Elijah, Elena has woken more mornings than not from a half-remembered dream. It's always elusive; the things she does know are few, the things she doesn't many. What's always the same is the desperate feeling of wanting to remember and the frustration of not being able to.
Damon is always in these dreams, never Stefan. Sometimes he's touching her face, but in others he's far away; she can see him, even though he seems not to know she's there. It's always just as he opens his mouth to speak that she wakes, or her alarm goes off, or her phone buzzes.
This morning it's the latter, her phone vibrating near the edge of her bedside table. When she sees Stefan's name across the screen, she doesn't answer but instead gets out of bed and heads for the shower. She's up before Jer, so she gets all the hot water, and she takes an extra long time. Later she'll tell her sort-of boyfriend she hadn't heard the phone.
He's her sort-of boyfriend because ever since they got back together, it hasn't really felt like that. They go through all the motions, and do all the things they used to (mostly), but Elena can't get comfortable with it.
It's just another thing she has no explanation for. She still loves Stefan very much, but something has changed between them, whether it's Katherine, or the things that have happened because of Katherine, or now because of the proposed danger Rose has shared with them, she just can't say.
She does know that she doesn't like Rose, even though she doesn't hold anything against her for what happened at that abandoned house three hours from Mystic Falls.
Elena figures any wrong doing on Rose's part was paid for in full when she watched her friend's head get ripped off.
She climbs from the shower when she hears Jer beat on the door with a fist. "'Lena! I have to get clean too, you know!"
Wrapping a towel around her body, she wipes the steam away from the mirror and looks into her own eyes. "Just a minute!" she calls to her brother. Leaning close to the glass, Damon and those dreams pop into her head again. She wonders if they're premonitions, and if the reason she doesn't like Rose isn't so much pettiness as it is a warning.
All the same, whether she brings hell down upon them, or saves them all from some unknown entity, the bottomline remains the same. Elena feels jealousy erupt along her skin every time she sees Damon with his new girlfriend. And every time Rose touches him, even casually, Elena can't ignore how much it bothers her.
She knows it's not right, but the reasons why it keeps happening can't be disregarded. It pains her to examine herself so thoroughly and find so much she doesn't like. Her diary pages have remained empty because the idea of writing down I have feelings for Damon isn't something that should be put out to the universe.
*
She goes to the Boarding House after school because she knows Stefan won't be there. He's joined the basketball team for their senior year, and appears to be the star point guard. Tyler still hates him. Or hates him again? Elena can't keep track of it.
She looks through the CDs on the bureau in the living room, but doesn't find what she's looking for, so she goes upstairs and starts looking around Stefan's room.
Damon's not home; he's probably out with Rose somewhere, and that knowledge churns in her gut uneasily. She really doesn't like feeling jealous over Damon. It's ridiculous when the last thing she wants is his attention or affection, and with Rose around, she's hardly getting either. This is a good thing. Regardless of what happens with her and Stefan, she would never be with Damon, not in a million years.
(The fact that she even has this thought is somewhat terrifying.)
She can't find what she's looking for in Stefan's room, so she goes to Damon's. Maybe her teasing him about Taylor Swift had been right on the money. Standing in the doorway, she hesitates in stepping over the threshold. There's something very intimate about going into someone's room, but then she considers it's Damon, and he'd never been uncomfortable all the times he hung out in her room, including the time he pawed his way through her underwear drawer.
She enters quickly, as though someone might catch her, and looks around. It doesn't take long to find it, the CD case sits on a desk next to a laptop. She picks it up and intends to get out of the room as fast as possible, but when she opens the jewel case to check, it's empty.
Pausing, she turns around, wondering where the CD is, since there doesn't seem to be a CD player up here.
"Should we charge you with breaking and entering?" Damon drawls from behind her. She jumps, because of course she hadn't heard him, and when she looks at him over her shoulder, he's got one arm resting against the doorjamb and a very smirky smirk on his face.
There are moments when she's sort of astounded by how beautiful he is, in a different way from Stefan--from the light eyes and dark hair to the expression of profound delight that he sometimes shows her.
She much prefers the happy expression to the pained one he's given her lately, and though it hurts her to think it's because of Rose, she realizes all she wants is for him to be happy. Because if Damon is happy, he won't hurt people anymore.
This is all she has ever wanted, she realizes now, looking at him. Ever since that moment in the cemetery after the Katherine-less tomb, when he'd been more apparently broken than at any other time, and she had wished she could take away his pain. It's only in this moment, when it's all so beyond her reach that she finds that perhaps it would have made her happy to actually be the one.
There is something going on between the two of us, and you know it.
"If you wanted to keep people out, you'd lock the door," she remarks, shaking her head. She's reeling from these unwarranted thoughts, and all she wants now is to be anywhere else.
He clicks his tongue, chiding her as he moves into the room. "Our lack of foresight does not give you a license to steal. What are you doing in here?"
Forcing her trembling lips into a smile, she holds the jewel case up. "I'm looking for my CD. So where have you hidden it?"
Looking sheepish, he breezes past her to his laptop and ejects the disc from the side compartment. "I thought that was Caroline's. And you totally let me last week when you were here," he accuses, turning towards her. He holds it out to her and then snatches it back when she reaches for it, and she feels the echo again, the same reverberation that sounds in her dreams at night.
She stares at him, concentrating, but as always the feeling of awareness skips just out of reach. His eyes narrow, then drop to her neck before he just hands over the disc without making her beg for it. She presses forward, remembering that she'd just like to get out of there, away from the confusion. But she can't help teasing him first. "I didn't want to take it back when I knew you were enjoying it so much."
He mock glares at her. "I didn't listen to it until after that. I thought I'd give an ear to the song you said you liked. I mean, your taste is questionable--" his eyebrows go up and somehow she hears Stefan even though he doesn't say it aloud. "But, it's not bad. She's got some good angst, that girl."
She can't help smiling at him as she snaps the CD back into place in the jewel case. "You like her, don't you? Tell the truth," she says when his mouth opens in automatic protest.
"I don't like her," he says firmly. "I just...can appreciate her...um, her way with words." He shrugs and then sits down in the chair in front of his desk. He lounges, his body draping over the chair in a way that draws Elena's gaze to his crotch.
She spins away from him when she feels her cheeks heating. Focusing on what he just said, she responds, "Well, fine. I'll take that as your emotionally stunted way of saying you like her." She gets all the way to the doorway before she looks back at him. "I've got to run, so I'll see you later."
"That's really ironic, coming from you, Elena."
"What?" she asks, meeting his eyes.
"I'm emotionally stunted because I don't wear my heart on my sleeve? You'll learn sooner or later that sometimes the best thing you can ever do is not show how you really feel." He watches her thoughtfully, and there's no malice or sarcasm surrounding his words.
She pauses in her retreat, feeling as though he's saying something very important that she's not quite grasping. "Is that what Rose thinks?" she asks.
He gives her a strange look. "No. That's what I think. What's Rose got to do with this?"
"I would just suspect that Rose, being a woman, wouldn't see that the same way. She'll want to know where she stands with you."
He smirks again, but this time it's vaguely sensual in a way that Elena truly despises because of all the ideas it sparks. "Don't worry about Rose. She knows exactly where she stands with me."
Nodding, Elena tries to leave again, only to hear him say her name. She hangs back a moment, looking at him once more. "You might want to clear things up with Stefan on that count though, you know." The smirk is gone and his face is serious; he's offering her a glimpse at how he cares for his brother, and it warms her in a strange way. It feels familiar, knowing that Damon loves Stefan, though he often makes a big production of not caring at all. "He can't be distracted right now. We need to be one hundred percent focused on keeping you and the Mystic Falls population safe."
Elena only nods again because she cannot argue the point, and because she won't stay there any longer and discuss anything else further.
She's running by the time she reaches the top of the stairs, though what chases her doesn't follow.
*
Stefan breaks up with her a few weeks later.
She says, "Really?" and he says, "It's for the best. If I'm trying to work out why things aren't right between us anymore, I can't concentrate on what's important."
Elena's temper soars in a way it hasn't with Stefan since the early days of their relationship. "This is Damon's idea, isn't it?" she demands.
Stefan's eyes dart away from hers and he shakes his head. "Elena, when Damon becomes the voice of reason, you know things are bad. Things are bad between us. And maybe it's all the danger, and the stuff with Katherine, and maybe, if it ever ends, we'll be able to..."
He doesn't finish the thought, but Elena doesn't care. She knows it's not ever going to go back to how it was. She has her vervain necklace, a hole in her memory, and Damon Salvatore in her head.
She'd finally broken down and told Bonnie about the dreams, and the feelings and the vague emptiness she can't explain, and Bonnie had searched the Grimoire looking for answers. In the end, there was no spell to undo Compulsion, but Caroline said one day, "Oh, yeah, once you become a Vampire, you remember everything. Any trick they ever played on you slowly disappears. It's weird, and awful, and sort of liberating."
It's only late that night when Elena is lying in bed thinking that she realizes she's considering becoming a vampire just so she can remember one moment.
The fact that it feels so important --and worth it-- is the scariest thought she's ever entertained, and the last year and a half has employed some very scary thoughts.
*
Eventually, they decide to let Katherine out of the tomb. Damon rants and raves about what a stupid mistake it is, but Stefan calmly reasons that if she's out, the odds of her getting killed instead of Elena are better.
The truth is more people want vengeance on Katherine, so this is not necessarily a bad idea. Except, for the fact that it's Katherine.
Damon fumes as Stefan and Bonnie leave to go find Lucy. Bonnie needs a sister-witch to do the spell, and so they go to find Katherine's "friend." Elena stands in the living room at the Boarding House and watches him, wondering how in the world he can be wrong in this situation. She wants him to be wrong, but not for selfish reasons. She wants them all to be safe, because she's finally realized that Elijah will kill them all to get to her, and she would rather die once than watch any of them go before her.
"You should turn me," she says as she pops Taylor Swift into the CD player.
Damon's drinking, as usual, and his arm freezes in the upward motion of bringing the glass to his lips. "What?" he says, his eyes narrowed on her as she pushes play on the machine.
"I would be a lot more help if I were as strong as Caroline," she explains patiently.
He scoffs. "You've been watching the Twilight movies again, haven't you?"
"Damon..."
"No," he says, the finality there so irritating, Elena throws up her hands in disgust. "No," he repeats and the hand that holds the tumbler full of whiskey clenches until the glass shatters.
She faces him completely, turning so that they're staring at each other across the back of one of the sofas. "Please," she whispers, and she sees how it undoes him, how his face softens, how so much more than just worry for their lives is going on there.
Suddenly he's standing in front of her, and she didn't even see him move. His hands wrap around her shoulders and he says, "You have no idea what you're asking."
She shakes her head fiercely when he gives her a hard jolt, his hands tightening against her body. "I do know, I've been thinking about it for weeks."
"Weeks? Yes, weeks is long enough to decide you'll live for eternity."
"How long did you think about it?" she demands, lifting her chin.
"You mean, before I was tricked into it?" he shoots back sarcastically and then he pushes her away, like she's somehow globbing on to him. "Not fucking long enough," he mutters, moving away from her.
"You drive me crazy," she yells, and he whips around, looking at her in astonishment. "You are so full of contradictions, how can you even function!? You hate Stefan for doing this to you, yet you love being a vampire. You loved Katherine for 145 years, but now you want her to rot in the tomb. You wanted Stefan to break up with me, and now you won't do anything about it!"
She watches his hands curl into fists, and he slowly backs away from her. Elena's chest is tight even though she's just relieved herself of a great deal of emotion, and she wants--she's not even sure what she wants--just, Damon doing something, anything that makes sense, because really, he hasn't, not since Rose came into their lives.
He's been completely different, and more than anything, the absence of him is what has made her realize how much she needs him. How much she wants him, despite all the reasons why she shouldn't.
At the doorway, he says, "If you're going to listen to this crap, I'm gonna go," and he disappears so quickly, she hears the front door open and close with a loud bang.
Taylor sings in the background, The story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now, and Elena crumples. She sinks to the floor, unsure of what exactly she's crying for.
Part Three
Author: badboy_fangirl
Rating: T/PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Elena POV, minor Damon/Rose, minor Stefan/Elena, Damon/Elena (with appearances by Jeremy, Stefan, Bonnie, and Caroline)
Category: Angst, Romance
Word Count: ~2700
Summary: Damon Salvatore fucking hates Taylor Swift. (But Elena loves her.)
Spoilers: Up through 2x08 "Rose."
Warnings: Speculation about what happens post-episode 8, but it's not based on any spoilers.
Show/Bookverse: Show
Author's Notes: Lyrics taken from the Taylor Swift song "The Story of Us." Part One is HERE.
Ever since the events with Rose and Elijah, Elena has woken more mornings than not from a half-remembered dream. It's always elusive; the things she does know are few, the things she doesn't many. What's always the same is the desperate feeling of wanting to remember and the frustration of not being able to.
Damon is always in these dreams, never Stefan. Sometimes he's touching her face, but in others he's far away; she can see him, even though he seems not to know she's there. It's always just as he opens his mouth to speak that she wakes, or her alarm goes off, or her phone buzzes.
This morning it's the latter, her phone vibrating near the edge of her bedside table. When she sees Stefan's name across the screen, she doesn't answer but instead gets out of bed and heads for the shower. She's up before Jer, so she gets all the hot water, and she takes an extra long time. Later she'll tell her sort-of boyfriend she hadn't heard the phone.
He's her sort-of boyfriend because ever since they got back together, it hasn't really felt like that. They go through all the motions, and do all the things they used to (mostly), but Elena can't get comfortable with it.
It's just another thing she has no explanation for. She still loves Stefan very much, but something has changed between them, whether it's Katherine, or the things that have happened because of Katherine, or now because of the proposed danger Rose has shared with them, she just can't say.
She does know that she doesn't like Rose, even though she doesn't hold anything against her for what happened at that abandoned house three hours from Mystic Falls.
Elena figures any wrong doing on Rose's part was paid for in full when she watched her friend's head get ripped off.
She climbs from the shower when she hears Jer beat on the door with a fist. "'Lena! I have to get clean too, you know!"
Wrapping a towel around her body, she wipes the steam away from the mirror and looks into her own eyes. "Just a minute!" she calls to her brother. Leaning close to the glass, Damon and those dreams pop into her head again. She wonders if they're premonitions, and if the reason she doesn't like Rose isn't so much pettiness as it is a warning.
All the same, whether she brings hell down upon them, or saves them all from some unknown entity, the bottomline remains the same. Elena feels jealousy erupt along her skin every time she sees Damon with his new girlfriend. And every time Rose touches him, even casually, Elena can't ignore how much it bothers her.
She knows it's not right, but the reasons why it keeps happening can't be disregarded. It pains her to examine herself so thoroughly and find so much she doesn't like. Her diary pages have remained empty because the idea of writing down I have feelings for Damon isn't something that should be put out to the universe.
*
She goes to the Boarding House after school because she knows Stefan won't be there. He's joined the basketball team for their senior year, and appears to be the star point guard. Tyler still hates him. Or hates him again? Elena can't keep track of it.
She looks through the CDs on the bureau in the living room, but doesn't find what she's looking for, so she goes upstairs and starts looking around Stefan's room.
Damon's not home; he's probably out with Rose somewhere, and that knowledge churns in her gut uneasily. She really doesn't like feeling jealous over Damon. It's ridiculous when the last thing she wants is his attention or affection, and with Rose around, she's hardly getting either. This is a good thing. Regardless of what happens with her and Stefan, she would never be with Damon, not in a million years.
(The fact that she even has this thought is somewhat terrifying.)
She can't find what she's looking for in Stefan's room, so she goes to Damon's. Maybe her teasing him about Taylor Swift had been right on the money. Standing in the doorway, she hesitates in stepping over the threshold. There's something very intimate about going into someone's room, but then she considers it's Damon, and he'd never been uncomfortable all the times he hung out in her room, including the time he pawed his way through her underwear drawer.
She enters quickly, as though someone might catch her, and looks around. It doesn't take long to find it, the CD case sits on a desk next to a laptop. She picks it up and intends to get out of the room as fast as possible, but when she opens the jewel case to check, it's empty.
Pausing, she turns around, wondering where the CD is, since there doesn't seem to be a CD player up here.
"Should we charge you with breaking and entering?" Damon drawls from behind her. She jumps, because of course she hadn't heard him, and when she looks at him over her shoulder, he's got one arm resting against the doorjamb and a very smirky smirk on his face.
There are moments when she's sort of astounded by how beautiful he is, in a different way from Stefan--from the light eyes and dark hair to the expression of profound delight that he sometimes shows her.
She much prefers the happy expression to the pained one he's given her lately, and though it hurts her to think it's because of Rose, she realizes all she wants is for him to be happy. Because if Damon is happy, he won't hurt people anymore.
This is all she has ever wanted, she realizes now, looking at him. Ever since that moment in the cemetery after the Katherine-less tomb, when he'd been more apparently broken than at any other time, and she had wished she could take away his pain. It's only in this moment, when it's all so beyond her reach that she finds that perhaps it would have made her happy to actually be the one.
There is something going on between the two of us, and you know it.
"If you wanted to keep people out, you'd lock the door," she remarks, shaking her head. She's reeling from these unwarranted thoughts, and all she wants now is to be anywhere else.
He clicks his tongue, chiding her as he moves into the room. "Our lack of foresight does not give you a license to steal. What are you doing in here?"
Forcing her trembling lips into a smile, she holds the jewel case up. "I'm looking for my CD. So where have you hidden it?"
Looking sheepish, he breezes past her to his laptop and ejects the disc from the side compartment. "I thought that was Caroline's. And you totally let me last week when you were here," he accuses, turning towards her. He holds it out to her and then snatches it back when she reaches for it, and she feels the echo again, the same reverberation that sounds in her dreams at night.
She stares at him, concentrating, but as always the feeling of awareness skips just out of reach. His eyes narrow, then drop to her neck before he just hands over the disc without making her beg for it. She presses forward, remembering that she'd just like to get out of there, away from the confusion. But she can't help teasing him first. "I didn't want to take it back when I knew you were enjoying it so much."
He mock glares at her. "I didn't listen to it until after that. I thought I'd give an ear to the song you said you liked. I mean, your taste is questionable--" his eyebrows go up and somehow she hears Stefan even though he doesn't say it aloud. "But, it's not bad. She's got some good angst, that girl."
She can't help smiling at him as she snaps the CD back into place in the jewel case. "You like her, don't you? Tell the truth," she says when his mouth opens in automatic protest.
"I don't like her," he says firmly. "I just...can appreciate her...um, her way with words." He shrugs and then sits down in the chair in front of his desk. He lounges, his body draping over the chair in a way that draws Elena's gaze to his crotch.
She spins away from him when she feels her cheeks heating. Focusing on what he just said, she responds, "Well, fine. I'll take that as your emotionally stunted way of saying you like her." She gets all the way to the doorway before she looks back at him. "I've got to run, so I'll see you later."
"That's really ironic, coming from you, Elena."
"What?" she asks, meeting his eyes.
"I'm emotionally stunted because I don't wear my heart on my sleeve? You'll learn sooner or later that sometimes the best thing you can ever do is not show how you really feel." He watches her thoughtfully, and there's no malice or sarcasm surrounding his words.
She pauses in her retreat, feeling as though he's saying something very important that she's not quite grasping. "Is that what Rose thinks?" she asks.
He gives her a strange look. "No. That's what I think. What's Rose got to do with this?"
"I would just suspect that Rose, being a woman, wouldn't see that the same way. She'll want to know where she stands with you."
He smirks again, but this time it's vaguely sensual in a way that Elena truly despises because of all the ideas it sparks. "Don't worry about Rose. She knows exactly where she stands with me."
Nodding, Elena tries to leave again, only to hear him say her name. She hangs back a moment, looking at him once more. "You might want to clear things up with Stefan on that count though, you know." The smirk is gone and his face is serious; he's offering her a glimpse at how he cares for his brother, and it warms her in a strange way. It feels familiar, knowing that Damon loves Stefan, though he often makes a big production of not caring at all. "He can't be distracted right now. We need to be one hundred percent focused on keeping you and the Mystic Falls population safe."
Elena only nods again because she cannot argue the point, and because she won't stay there any longer and discuss anything else further.
She's running by the time she reaches the top of the stairs, though what chases her doesn't follow.
*
Stefan breaks up with her a few weeks later.
She says, "Really?" and he says, "It's for the best. If I'm trying to work out why things aren't right between us anymore, I can't concentrate on what's important."
Elena's temper soars in a way it hasn't with Stefan since the early days of their relationship. "This is Damon's idea, isn't it?" she demands.
Stefan's eyes dart away from hers and he shakes his head. "Elena, when Damon becomes the voice of reason, you know things are bad. Things are bad between us. And maybe it's all the danger, and the stuff with Katherine, and maybe, if it ever ends, we'll be able to..."
He doesn't finish the thought, but Elena doesn't care. She knows it's not ever going to go back to how it was. She has her vervain necklace, a hole in her memory, and Damon Salvatore in her head.
She'd finally broken down and told Bonnie about the dreams, and the feelings and the vague emptiness she can't explain, and Bonnie had searched the Grimoire looking for answers. In the end, there was no spell to undo Compulsion, but Caroline said one day, "Oh, yeah, once you become a Vampire, you remember everything. Any trick they ever played on you slowly disappears. It's weird, and awful, and sort of liberating."
It's only late that night when Elena is lying in bed thinking that she realizes she's considering becoming a vampire just so she can remember one moment.
The fact that it feels so important --and worth it-- is the scariest thought she's ever entertained, and the last year and a half has employed some very scary thoughts.
*
Eventually, they decide to let Katherine out of the tomb. Damon rants and raves about what a stupid mistake it is, but Stefan calmly reasons that if she's out, the odds of her getting killed instead of Elena are better.
The truth is more people want vengeance on Katherine, so this is not necessarily a bad idea. Except, for the fact that it's Katherine.
Damon fumes as Stefan and Bonnie leave to go find Lucy. Bonnie needs a sister-witch to do the spell, and so they go to find Katherine's "friend." Elena stands in the living room at the Boarding House and watches him, wondering how in the world he can be wrong in this situation. She wants him to be wrong, but not for selfish reasons. She wants them all to be safe, because she's finally realized that Elijah will kill them all to get to her, and she would rather die once than watch any of them go before her.
"You should turn me," she says as she pops Taylor Swift into the CD player.
Damon's drinking, as usual, and his arm freezes in the upward motion of bringing the glass to his lips. "What?" he says, his eyes narrowed on her as she pushes play on the machine.
"I would be a lot more help if I were as strong as Caroline," she explains patiently.
He scoffs. "You've been watching the Twilight movies again, haven't you?"
"Damon..."
"No," he says, the finality there so irritating, Elena throws up her hands in disgust. "No," he repeats and the hand that holds the tumbler full of whiskey clenches until the glass shatters.
She faces him completely, turning so that they're staring at each other across the back of one of the sofas. "Please," she whispers, and she sees how it undoes him, how his face softens, how so much more than just worry for their lives is going on there.
Suddenly he's standing in front of her, and she didn't even see him move. His hands wrap around her shoulders and he says, "You have no idea what you're asking."
She shakes her head fiercely when he gives her a hard jolt, his hands tightening against her body. "I do know, I've been thinking about it for weeks."
"Weeks? Yes, weeks is long enough to decide you'll live for eternity."
"How long did you think about it?" she demands, lifting her chin.
"You mean, before I was tricked into it?" he shoots back sarcastically and then he pushes her away, like she's somehow globbing on to him. "Not fucking long enough," he mutters, moving away from her.
"You drive me crazy," she yells, and he whips around, looking at her in astonishment. "You are so full of contradictions, how can you even function!? You hate Stefan for doing this to you, yet you love being a vampire. You loved Katherine for 145 years, but now you want her to rot in the tomb. You wanted Stefan to break up with me, and now you won't do anything about it!"
She watches his hands curl into fists, and he slowly backs away from her. Elena's chest is tight even though she's just relieved herself of a great deal of emotion, and she wants--she's not even sure what she wants--just, Damon doing something, anything that makes sense, because really, he hasn't, not since Rose came into their lives.
He's been completely different, and more than anything, the absence of him is what has made her realize how much she needs him. How much she wants him, despite all the reasons why she shouldn't.
At the doorway, he says, "If you're going to listen to this crap, I'm gonna go," and he disappears so quickly, she hears the front door open and close with a loud bang.
Taylor sings in the background, The story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now, and Elena crumples. She sinks to the floor, unsure of what exactly she's crying for.
Part Three