fic: it's the minor fall and the major lift (tvd; elena; ensemble)
title: it's the minor fall and the major lift
characters: elena; ensemble; talks to elena/stefan, elena/damon.
rating: pg13
summary: she wakes with a dying gasp and can't escape what she's become.
author's note: let's just say I have a lot of feelings. written for the prompt: and then i ran like hell at softly_me's ficathon. OBVIOUSLY SPOILERS FOR THE FINALE.
She wakes with a dying gasp still stuck in her throat.
Eyelids peel open and it’s the blackness of the room she’s in as her back arches off the metal slab she’s on. For one second it’s like she’s still in the car, still in the water, still under the bridge, everything muted and quiet, and the slow shut down of her brain as water pushes air from her lungs, and then it’s really not that at all.
Elena blinks and her fingers curve over the slab she’s on, trying to anchor herself because everything is too much. She wants to scratch the skin from her bones to get rid of the air she feels crawling over it, wants to slam her eyes shut because she can see every trace of paint on the wall, wants to cover her ears because there’s a baby crying two floors up and a heart monitor going flat somewhere else. It’s too much. She wonders how she knows all of that, how her sense are so fine tuned and not at all, everything hitting her at once, over and over again without a second of pausing.
She gets it a minute later. How she feels this way, how she’s here and not in the bottom of the river.
The dying gasp pushes its way out of her throat.
Elena screams.
And then she runs.
-
Jeremy finds her under her covers where she’s built herself a cocoon to keep the world out.
She hears him enter the house, even under her sheets and comforter and grandmother’s quilt, his careful steps as he comes up the stairs, pauses outside the bathroom, hesitating, and then the knock on her door; she can even hear the way his fingers brush against the wood before they close into a fist.
“Elena.”
Her name, two syllables, and he says them in time with the beating two-step of his heart.
She doesn’t move, concentrating on the grinding of her back molars as she wills her fangs to stay in her gums instead of the way his blood pulses under his skin. Strangely, his heart rate never increases, doesn’t rise above anything but a steady, even beat.
There’s a dip on the bed, but it’s not heavy enough to be a body, just a light pressure, an object.
“If you want it.” Jeremy retreats from her room then, closes the door, and she hears him sit outside against the opposite wall. “I’ll be right here.”
Elena waits a moment before pulling the covers up enough so she can lift her head out. It’s a blood bag. Jeremy’s brought her a blood bag, and there’d been them at the hospital, but she’d run, run past the familiar faces and the unknown and Stefan and the others, run past them all to her house until collapsing here in her bed. She reaches out and touches it, traces over the plastic and feels the blood move under the press of her fingers.
A choice.
Jeremy’s giving her the choice.
Already her body feels stretched out and her gums ache and her stomach is so empty and she wants to feed and feed and feed till the emptiness is gone. Till she replaces all of the blackness of dead space inside and fills it up with something else. Anything so she feels better than this thing made up of holes and skin held taut over gaunt bones.
-
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Elena sits against her headboard, her sheets now bunched under toes that have chipped red polish. Her hair’s a tangled mess from her drowning; she hasn’t changed her clothes either, the smell of the river lingering and invading her nostrils. Jeremy’s still outside her door.
She clutches the blood bag in her hands, staring at her mirrored reflection in her vanity. Dead girl, pretty girl, sad girl, empty girl, what will you have?
“It’s yours,” Jeremy pauses, shifts his legs, sighing. “And I know you never wanted this. I won’t, I won’t hate you for it. Whatever you pick.”
Dead girl, pretty girl, sad girl, make your choice. Choices, choices, that’s all her life was and all it is still.
-
She opens her door so hard that the knob slams into the wall and makes a hole. Her lips stained red as she yells down at him, “Are you an idiot? Why would you come in here? Into the house with me like this.”
He blinks open sleepy eyes, because it’s way into the night, and looks up at her, shifting against the wall. “You drank it.”
Elena licks her lips, tastes the blood there and in her mouth. “I couldn’t leave you.”
Jeremy gives her a grin and pulls his hand from behind his back where he’d tried to make himself comfortable. There’s a thin needle in his hand. He gives it a little wiggle. “Vervain. I would have put you down.”
Elena frowns. “I still could have hurt you.”
She’d drained the bag, and there’s still hunger there, but she fights it. Tries hard. She won’t kill her brother.
“Like you hurt the door?” He points behind her.
She turns and looks, and a tiny laugh bursts off her tongue. Why she’s laughing she can’t say, only that it’s funny. “Sorry.”
Jeremy grins. “It’s not like the rest of the house isn’t trashed.”
They’re both laughing then, loud noises that echo and bounce off the otherwise emptiness of their house.
-
Later, later is when she cries.
She listens to Jeremy answer the door to their friends and tell them she’s okay, but she wants to be alone, and would they please go away because he’s not letting them in. She bites her lips when Stefan and Damon come and her brother tells them the same. Part of her wants them to come in anyway and part of her wants them gone. She knows she will need them later, her family, but she can’t deal with any of it right now and they won’t quiet the voices in her head.
When they’re gone, she cries and it’s like something has been released inside her. She starts and she can’t stop. It’s not anger because then she would be throwing things.
‘Oh’, Elena thinks as her throat closes over air she doesn’t even need, as her fingers tear and shred her sheets to ribbons, as her cheeks grow slick with wetness that drips down her chin and onto her hands and everywhere. ‘This is grief.’ Funny, she’d thought she’d become immune to that.
She cries and howls and sobs and every other verb that can be named. She’s a selfless creature of stolen lives and sadness and the memories of those taken from her too quick. She cries alone.
-
Stefan comes the next day. He holds her close and she lets him, closes her eyes as he strokes her hair, listens to him talk. "Meredith only wanted to help. To keep you alive."
Elena blinks, moves her fingers where she's holding onto his wrist. "I'm not mad."
He looks at her, green eyes soft and wary.
"I'm not." She repeats. "I never wanted this. At least not yet. But it's not a horrible thing. I'll get used to it, I guess. Besides," she swallows, some things ingrained no matter if she didn't need them anymore. "I couldn't leave Jeremy alone."
Stefan nods and the gesture moves her hair. It's warm and comfortable, safe here. But it's not enough. She has to learn to stand on her own first, she has to fit the jagged pieces of herself back into Elena Gilbert before she can be whole again; she thinks he needs to fit those same pieces of himself back too, can read it in the shame that comes across his eyes at time.
Biting her lip, Elena looks up at him, holds his gaze in honesty. "I want Caroline to help me with this. At first. She's already called me a dozen times. I think it would be good if she did."
He nods his head again. "Alright. If that's what you want."
"I just," she pauses and licks her lips. "I just need some time. To do this. I just need some time." So do you, she wants to add.
Stefan smiles and kisses her forehead. "I'll be here. Damon too. He tried to leave, but he didn't get far."
Frowning, her eyebrows draw down in confusion. "He tried to leave?"
Promises, promises, broken and littered on the ground like shards of glass.
Stefan shakes his head. "He's," his voice falters and he tries again, gives her a small smile. "He's okay. He wanted to see you, but didn't want to push."
Her frown deepens because that doesn't sound like Damon at all. Her gums are aching again, her teeth wanting to push forward, and there's blood in the kitchen downstairs.
"I need some time," she repeats at the door when he leaves.
-
“Elena, thank god.”
Caroline throws her arms around her and pulls her close, and Elena loses herself in the strong embrace and the feel of Caroline’s hair against her cheek. Alive.
“You’re okay?” Elena asks when they separate.
Caroline laughs, giving her an amused look. “Really? That’s what you’re going to ask me? I think you just stole my line.”
“Yeah, well.” She shrugs.
Smiling, and she’s so grateful for that bright smile, Caroline looks around her room. She doesn’t comment on the torn sheets that she still hasn’t replaced, but she does talk about the windows that are covered up. Jeremy had done it for her. “Well, we can get rid of those. I’ve got something for you.”
Elena watches her pull something from her pocket. It’s a charm, small and silver with a tiny sliver of lapis lazuli in it.
“Bonnie’s not really talking to most of us, but she still wanted you to have this. She thought you might want something a bit different. It can fit--”
“On my mother’s bracelet,” Elena finishes for her. It’s on her vanity, the bracelet, and she fetches it, holding it out so Caroline can help put it on.
“There,” Caroline declares after she clasps it around Elena’s wrist and lets it go, letting it drop to hang. “You wanna?”
Elena walks to the window seat, kneels, and reaches forward with hesitant fingers. She pulls though, gives a sharp tug, and the towels and spare sheets fall away. The sun’s there and the bracelet gleams and glints in its light.
“We can’t really feel it all that much, but it’s still nice to know we have it,” Caroline says softly.
-
“Baby steps!” Caroline chirps from downstairs as she places a blood bag in front of her. “It’s just like cheer camp. Learning routines and stuff. You have to get all the steps down before you can put the whole routine together.”
The veins spread like mascara stains and her fangs burst through with a loud snick. Blood coats her tongue and throat and it's delicious. she craves it, hungers for it, loves it. Blood is blood, and she can think now of how much Stefan enjoyed this and Damon enjoyed this; she has no desire to kill anyone, her humanity and compassion seem to be her amplified trait as a vampire, but it doesn't mean she doesn't enjoy drinking it.
She thinks too that she hasn't given Caroline enough credit for handling this when she'd been turned.
She's a creature of lust and longing and craving for the consumption of blood.
Elena blinks, tilting her head and she lets the straw in her blood slide from her lips. "Caroline," she asks, something pushing through in her mind. "When you turned did you start remembering things?"
Caroline sucks on her own straw, twitching her nose. "Oh yeah. Anything you've been compelled about you remember."
Oh.
-
Now she's mad.
It's funny how much strength she has now and she wields it, sets it loose.
"You lied to me," she screams and throws one of her mother's vases at Damon's head; she’s glad Jeremy isn’t home for this. "You made me forget. You took that away from me, all of it."
Damon ducks and stares at her with wide eyes. Eyes that are so bright and blue and look at her with things like pride and regret and grief and admiration all mixed together.
“Screw you, Damon.” She throws a picture frame next.
-
The thing with being a vampire is that everything’s amplified. She hadn’t known exactly what that meant when the others had told that to her. She’s an 18 year old girl who feels everything, how could it be more than what she feels.
Now she gets it.
The rage and anger at Damon slides from her shoulders and that place that no longer beats behind her rib cage, drops away and sadness replaces it. She lies on her bed, holds her teddy bear close to her and wills herself to find an answer in all of this.
There is none though.
She’s a creature of questions with no answers and feet that want to run but have no place to go.
-
“Matt,” Elena exhales and grins. She wants to hug him, reach out and touch him, draw him close, but she hesitates, seeing the apprehension and hesitation on his own face.
Caroline hovers over his shoulder, his bodyguard, her bodyguard, their bodyguard. She gives him a shove in the back. “She’s not going to eat you, Matt.”
He moves forward then, puts his arms around her lightly, and Elena awkwardly does the same, patting his back. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
Matt pulls away, giving her an incredulous look. He gives a little scoff. “Me? What about you?”
Caroline rolls her eyes and says, “Yeah, she’s still the same Elena. Still worried about all of us before her.”
“I’m so sorry, Elena.” Matt’s eyes are open and his face earnest. She can feel his apology like a tangible thing.
“It’s okay, Matt.” And really it is. She doesn’t have any spare emotions to give to hating him currently; she couldn’t even if she wanted too maybe.
-
She finds them in the living room, sitting side by side, glasses of amber liquid in hand.
“Can I have one of those?”
Two sets of eyes, one warm green and the other brilliant blue, turn to watch her.
Elena lifts her shoulders in a tiny movement and then lets them fall. “So no one said that this was like a Five Step Program to becoming a vampire.”
Damon’s already up and he puts a drink in her hand as she sits next to Stefan. He sits on her other side. In the middle, bracketed by the both of them, their knees knocking into her own. “Was the anger step when you threw the picture frame at my head?”
Elena swallows a mouthful of the bourbon. She gives him a look, narrows her eyes and purses her lips at him. “You deserved it.”
“It’s not easy, no one expects it to be,” Stefan places a hand on her arm, understanding in his words.
“Well the fact that you haven’t ripped out your neighbors’ throats yet speak well.” Damon smiles, winking at her.
She laughs because she’s missed this, missed them.
“Did you sort of what you needed? Your time?” Stefan asks her.
Elena thinks that over and then shakes her head. “Somewhat, yeah. I don’t really know how to do this. Not on my own.”
“Is this the acceptance stage?” Damon tilts back his head and finishes his glass. His question is somewhat caustic, but she sees the same shine of emotions from when she’d raged at him in his eyes.
She slaps her hands down on both of their legs, touching them both, and grins. “Maybe a bit. I’m here aren’t I?”
If she could breathe, she’d breathe a little easier. She's fully aware of the fact that nothing's changed, that a stasis still exists, that her choice is really nothing now that it's been reset, now that she's been reset, but some things are the same and some things aren't.
She’s a being of regret and love and sorrow. She’s got her friends and her two boys by her side. Forever can figure the rest out.
characters: elena; ensemble; talks to elena/stefan, elena/damon.
rating: pg13
summary: she wakes with a dying gasp and can't escape what she's become.
author's note: let's just say I have a lot of feelings. written for the prompt: and then i ran like hell at softly_me's ficathon. OBVIOUSLY SPOILERS FOR THE FINALE.
She wakes with a dying gasp still stuck in her throat.
Eyelids peel open and it’s the blackness of the room she’s in as her back arches off the metal slab she’s on. For one second it’s like she’s still in the car, still in the water, still under the bridge, everything muted and quiet, and the slow shut down of her brain as water pushes air from her lungs, and then it’s really not that at all.
Elena blinks and her fingers curve over the slab she’s on, trying to anchor herself because everything is too much. She wants to scratch the skin from her bones to get rid of the air she feels crawling over it, wants to slam her eyes shut because she can see every trace of paint on the wall, wants to cover her ears because there’s a baby crying two floors up and a heart monitor going flat somewhere else. It’s too much. She wonders how she knows all of that, how her sense are so fine tuned and not at all, everything hitting her at once, over and over again without a second of pausing.
She gets it a minute later. How she feels this way, how she’s here and not in the bottom of the river.
The dying gasp pushes its way out of her throat.
Elena screams.
And then she runs.
-
Jeremy finds her under her covers where she’s built herself a cocoon to keep the world out.
She hears him enter the house, even under her sheets and comforter and grandmother’s quilt, his careful steps as he comes up the stairs, pauses outside the bathroom, hesitating, and then the knock on her door; she can even hear the way his fingers brush against the wood before they close into a fist.
“Elena.”
Her name, two syllables, and he says them in time with the beating two-step of his heart.
She doesn’t move, concentrating on the grinding of her back molars as she wills her fangs to stay in her gums instead of the way his blood pulses under his skin. Strangely, his heart rate never increases, doesn’t rise above anything but a steady, even beat.
There’s a dip on the bed, but it’s not heavy enough to be a body, just a light pressure, an object.
“If you want it.” Jeremy retreats from her room then, closes the door, and she hears him sit outside against the opposite wall. “I’ll be right here.”
Elena waits a moment before pulling the covers up enough so she can lift her head out. It’s a blood bag. Jeremy’s brought her a blood bag, and there’d been them at the hospital, but she’d run, run past the familiar faces and the unknown and Stefan and the others, run past them all to her house until collapsing here in her bed. She reaches out and touches it, traces over the plastic and feels the blood move under the press of her fingers.
A choice.
Jeremy’s giving her the choice.
Already her body feels stretched out and her gums ache and her stomach is so empty and she wants to feed and feed and feed till the emptiness is gone. Till she replaces all of the blackness of dead space inside and fills it up with something else. Anything so she feels better than this thing made up of holes and skin held taut over gaunt bones.
-
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Elena sits against her headboard, her sheets now bunched under toes that have chipped red polish. Her hair’s a tangled mess from her drowning; she hasn’t changed her clothes either, the smell of the river lingering and invading her nostrils. Jeremy’s still outside her door.
She clutches the blood bag in her hands, staring at her mirrored reflection in her vanity. Dead girl, pretty girl, sad girl, empty girl, what will you have?
“It’s yours,” Jeremy pauses, shifts his legs, sighing. “And I know you never wanted this. I won’t, I won’t hate you for it. Whatever you pick.”
Dead girl, pretty girl, sad girl, make your choice. Choices, choices, that’s all her life was and all it is still.
-
She opens her door so hard that the knob slams into the wall and makes a hole. Her lips stained red as she yells down at him, “Are you an idiot? Why would you come in here? Into the house with me like this.”
He blinks open sleepy eyes, because it’s way into the night, and looks up at her, shifting against the wall. “You drank it.”
Elena licks her lips, tastes the blood there and in her mouth. “I couldn’t leave you.”
Jeremy gives her a grin and pulls his hand from behind his back where he’d tried to make himself comfortable. There’s a thin needle in his hand. He gives it a little wiggle. “Vervain. I would have put you down.”
Elena frowns. “I still could have hurt you.”
She’d drained the bag, and there’s still hunger there, but she fights it. Tries hard. She won’t kill her brother.
“Like you hurt the door?” He points behind her.
She turns and looks, and a tiny laugh bursts off her tongue. Why she’s laughing she can’t say, only that it’s funny. “Sorry.”
Jeremy grins. “It’s not like the rest of the house isn’t trashed.”
They’re both laughing then, loud noises that echo and bounce off the otherwise emptiness of their house.
-
Later, later is when she cries.
She listens to Jeremy answer the door to their friends and tell them she’s okay, but she wants to be alone, and would they please go away because he’s not letting them in. She bites her lips when Stefan and Damon come and her brother tells them the same. Part of her wants them to come in anyway and part of her wants them gone. She knows she will need them later, her family, but she can’t deal with any of it right now and they won’t quiet the voices in her head.
When they’re gone, she cries and it’s like something has been released inside her. She starts and she can’t stop. It’s not anger because then she would be throwing things.
‘Oh’, Elena thinks as her throat closes over air she doesn’t even need, as her fingers tear and shred her sheets to ribbons, as her cheeks grow slick with wetness that drips down her chin and onto her hands and everywhere. ‘This is grief.’ Funny, she’d thought she’d become immune to that.
She cries and howls and sobs and every other verb that can be named. She’s a selfless creature of stolen lives and sadness and the memories of those taken from her too quick. She cries alone.
-
Stefan comes the next day. He holds her close and she lets him, closes her eyes as he strokes her hair, listens to him talk. "Meredith only wanted to help. To keep you alive."
Elena blinks, moves her fingers where she's holding onto his wrist. "I'm not mad."
He looks at her, green eyes soft and wary.
"I'm not." She repeats. "I never wanted this. At least not yet. But it's not a horrible thing. I'll get used to it, I guess. Besides," she swallows, some things ingrained no matter if she didn't need them anymore. "I couldn't leave Jeremy alone."
Stefan nods and the gesture moves her hair. It's warm and comfortable, safe here. But it's not enough. She has to learn to stand on her own first, she has to fit the jagged pieces of herself back into Elena Gilbert before she can be whole again; she thinks he needs to fit those same pieces of himself back too, can read it in the shame that comes across his eyes at time.
Biting her lip, Elena looks up at him, holds his gaze in honesty. "I want Caroline to help me with this. At first. She's already called me a dozen times. I think it would be good if she did."
He nods his head again. "Alright. If that's what you want."
"I just," she pauses and licks her lips. "I just need some time. To do this. I just need some time." So do you, she wants to add.
Stefan smiles and kisses her forehead. "I'll be here. Damon too. He tried to leave, but he didn't get far."
Frowning, her eyebrows draw down in confusion. "He tried to leave?"
Promises, promises, broken and littered on the ground like shards of glass.
Stefan shakes his head. "He's," his voice falters and he tries again, gives her a small smile. "He's okay. He wanted to see you, but didn't want to push."
Her frown deepens because that doesn't sound like Damon at all. Her gums are aching again, her teeth wanting to push forward, and there's blood in the kitchen downstairs.
"I need some time," she repeats at the door when he leaves.
-
“Elena, thank god.”
Caroline throws her arms around her and pulls her close, and Elena loses herself in the strong embrace and the feel of Caroline’s hair against her cheek. Alive.
“You’re okay?” Elena asks when they separate.
Caroline laughs, giving her an amused look. “Really? That’s what you’re going to ask me? I think you just stole my line.”
“Yeah, well.” She shrugs.
Smiling, and she’s so grateful for that bright smile, Caroline looks around her room. She doesn’t comment on the torn sheets that she still hasn’t replaced, but she does talk about the windows that are covered up. Jeremy had done it for her. “Well, we can get rid of those. I’ve got something for you.”
Elena watches her pull something from her pocket. It’s a charm, small and silver with a tiny sliver of lapis lazuli in it.
“Bonnie’s not really talking to most of us, but she still wanted you to have this. She thought you might want something a bit different. It can fit--”
“On my mother’s bracelet,” Elena finishes for her. It’s on her vanity, the bracelet, and she fetches it, holding it out so Caroline can help put it on.
“There,” Caroline declares after she clasps it around Elena’s wrist and lets it go, letting it drop to hang. “You wanna?”
Elena walks to the window seat, kneels, and reaches forward with hesitant fingers. She pulls though, gives a sharp tug, and the towels and spare sheets fall away. The sun’s there and the bracelet gleams and glints in its light.
“We can’t really feel it all that much, but it’s still nice to know we have it,” Caroline says softly.
-
“Baby steps!” Caroline chirps from downstairs as she places a blood bag in front of her. “It’s just like cheer camp. Learning routines and stuff. You have to get all the steps down before you can put the whole routine together.”
The veins spread like mascara stains and her fangs burst through with a loud snick. Blood coats her tongue and throat and it's delicious. she craves it, hungers for it, loves it. Blood is blood, and she can think now of how much Stefan enjoyed this and Damon enjoyed this; she has no desire to kill anyone, her humanity and compassion seem to be her amplified trait as a vampire, but it doesn't mean she doesn't enjoy drinking it.
She thinks too that she hasn't given Caroline enough credit for handling this when she'd been turned.
She's a creature of lust and longing and craving for the consumption of blood.
Elena blinks, tilting her head and she lets the straw in her blood slide from her lips. "Caroline," she asks, something pushing through in her mind. "When you turned did you start remembering things?"
Caroline sucks on her own straw, twitching her nose. "Oh yeah. Anything you've been compelled about you remember."
Oh.
-
Now she's mad.
It's funny how much strength she has now and she wields it, sets it loose.
"You lied to me," she screams and throws one of her mother's vases at Damon's head; she’s glad Jeremy isn’t home for this. "You made me forget. You took that away from me, all of it."
Damon ducks and stares at her with wide eyes. Eyes that are so bright and blue and look at her with things like pride and regret and grief and admiration all mixed together.
“Screw you, Damon.” She throws a picture frame next.
-
The thing with being a vampire is that everything’s amplified. She hadn’t known exactly what that meant when the others had told that to her. She’s an 18 year old girl who feels everything, how could it be more than what she feels.
Now she gets it.
The rage and anger at Damon slides from her shoulders and that place that no longer beats behind her rib cage, drops away and sadness replaces it. She lies on her bed, holds her teddy bear close to her and wills herself to find an answer in all of this.
There is none though.
She’s a creature of questions with no answers and feet that want to run but have no place to go.
-
“Matt,” Elena exhales and grins. She wants to hug him, reach out and touch him, draw him close, but she hesitates, seeing the apprehension and hesitation on his own face.
Caroline hovers over his shoulder, his bodyguard, her bodyguard, their bodyguard. She gives him a shove in the back. “She’s not going to eat you, Matt.”
He moves forward then, puts his arms around her lightly, and Elena awkwardly does the same, patting his back. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
Matt pulls away, giving her an incredulous look. He gives a little scoff. “Me? What about you?”
Caroline rolls her eyes and says, “Yeah, she’s still the same Elena. Still worried about all of us before her.”
“I’m so sorry, Elena.” Matt’s eyes are open and his face earnest. She can feel his apology like a tangible thing.
“It’s okay, Matt.” And really it is. She doesn’t have any spare emotions to give to hating him currently; she couldn’t even if she wanted too maybe.
-
She finds them in the living room, sitting side by side, glasses of amber liquid in hand.
“Can I have one of those?”
Two sets of eyes, one warm green and the other brilliant blue, turn to watch her.
Elena lifts her shoulders in a tiny movement and then lets them fall. “So no one said that this was like a Five Step Program to becoming a vampire.”
Damon’s already up and he puts a drink in her hand as she sits next to Stefan. He sits on her other side. In the middle, bracketed by the both of them, their knees knocking into her own. “Was the anger step when you threw the picture frame at my head?”
Elena swallows a mouthful of the bourbon. She gives him a look, narrows her eyes and purses her lips at him. “You deserved it.”
“It’s not easy, no one expects it to be,” Stefan places a hand on her arm, understanding in his words.
“Well the fact that you haven’t ripped out your neighbors’ throats yet speak well.” Damon smiles, winking at her.
She laughs because she’s missed this, missed them.
“Did you sort of what you needed? Your time?” Stefan asks her.
Elena thinks that over and then shakes her head. “Somewhat, yeah. I don’t really know how to do this. Not on my own.”
“Is this the acceptance stage?” Damon tilts back his head and finishes his glass. His question is somewhat caustic, but she sees the same shine of emotions from when she’d raged at him in his eyes.
She slaps her hands down on both of their legs, touching them both, and grins. “Maybe a bit. I’m here aren’t I?”
If she could breathe, she’d breathe a little easier. She's fully aware of the fact that nothing's changed, that a stasis still exists, that her choice is really nothing now that it's been reset, now that she's been reset, but some things are the same and some things aren't.
She’s a being of regret and love and sorrow. She’s got her friends and her two boys by her side. Forever can figure the rest out.