the low road // 06 the game
Title: the low road // 06 the game
Author: that_treason
Rating: M overall (M this chapter)
Length: around 4200 words (this chapter)
Characters: Damon/Elena
Spoilers
through 4x18
very AU after that
Warnings
references to sex while switched off
vampires eat people & vampires kill people
Disclaimers
Everything belongs to the people who own them.
I am just borrowing.
continuation of this prompt from upupa_epops:
“Damon/Elena, AU from 4x17. When Elena reaches to steal Katherine's addresses, Damon impulsively decides to screw the high road and team up with Elena instead.”
// 06 THE GAME
Damon keeps his word.
They travel just as aimlessly as ever, but now with more purpose in their stops. Elena questions him on every topic and he answers, and every environment they pass through becomes a classroom for their study. Elena learns all the skills of a cat: how to jump and fall and maneuver in the air with grace and speed, how to climb river bluffs and houses with equal finesse. They track humans through forests and cities and sleepy suburban towns.
And endlessly they fight, with words and fists and every weapon that comes to hand.
Elena takes to her new life with single-minded focus, filling herself up with knowledge -- always, always seeking more. She drives Damon crazy with her need to know, never letting up until they’re both exhausted. Strengthening herself becomes her greatest passion, a way through emptiness and eternal grinding hunger.
There’s only so much that can be done in a day before both of them are limp and drained. And without a concrete goal in front of them, that strange awkwardness returns -- as Elena struggles to regain her self and forget her past, while Damon waits too patiently, always giving way.
It becomes inevitable that at the end of every training session they fall almost with the force of gravity into the nearest bar. And over all the nights of tension, with their shared past heavy on their minds and tongues loosened by fatigue, a drinking game develops:
Mention Mystic Falls and take a shot.
Mention Stefan and take three.
So now every time they sit down in a bar the game governs the hours, held fast in its own little rituals. The bartender gives up a bottle and three shot glasses -- meant for use only in the game. The liquor is always nasty and cheap, guaranteed to burn even a vampire’s throat, but otherwise ordinary. They keep on drinking their own normal choices right alongside -- Damon downing bourbon while Elena samples tequilas and vodkas and rums.
In Salina Kansas they go all night without either of them taking a loser’s shot. They talk about everything except home and those left behind. There’s a gaping wound in the conversation, a gap they tiptoe around and eventually have to overwhelm with the liberal application of non-game alcohol. It’s probably the drunkest Elena’s ever been.
In Greeley, Colorado, they manage to spend an entire evening where the present is the present (and the past stays past) -- and home is furthest thing from their minds.
The glasses still sit in a line at the edge of the table, just in case.
But most nights -- like those evenings spent in North Platte and Cheyenne and Boulder -- one or the other of them will slip up and the first shots will go into a glass. Elena likes to whoop and laugh and shout her victory when Damon has to throw one or more back. When Damon catches her he just pours the shots silently and shoves them in her direction, grinning wide and flashing eyes at her.
Sometimes they manage to control themselves, even after they’ve each lost a few. They leave the place behind in search of warmer drinks and further privacy.
And sometimes the game goes too far. Every time it means they wreck the bar.
Tonight starts no different from the others. Damon picks the bar (a shack with paint peeling and floor boards coming loose, clinging to the edges of some tiny mountain town in western Colorado) and Elena picks the booze (a cheap knockoff variety of Bacardi 151). They tuck themselves into a dark back corner, away from the old men nursing drinks at the cramped bar and the pair of bikers shooting pool on the broke-down table.
They’ve been there bare minutes when Elena reaches for the game bottle and pours herself a shot -- leaving Damon to wonder if the bar owner has any insurance on the junk heap where they’re drinking.
“I should be at Prom tonight, back home.” Elena says and takes the shot. Her mouth puckers around it and her eyes squeeze shut as she swallows.
“ohmygodthatsawful,” she gasps out. “I thought a clear one might be better somehow.”
“I think you meant to say we should be at Prom tonight, back home.” He pours his own shot of the clear liquid, raises the glass in a mocking toast to Elena, and throws it back without even a wince. “I’m dashing, you’re stunning. Caroline is furious because she has some elaborate bullshit plan for the evening that includes a rented limo -- but I insist on taking you in my car. We dance and drink and probably fight some monster or each other.” He grins at her. “Then the night ends as all good Proms should.”
“And how’s that?”
“Drunken fucking in the backseat of a car.”
She laughs and warmth spreads through his chest. Well worth taking a loser shot of horrible to hear her laugh and see her, if not precisely happy, then at least content in her own way. Relaxed.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have taken you, did you consider that in your perfect little evening? Maybe it’d be just the girls in that limo Caroline rented, no Salvatores allowed.”
“Think you’re being sneaky with that reference? You just earned yourself the coveted three shot penalty,” he says, filling all the glasses with clear liquid. Elena throws her head back to look at the ceiling and mutter in disgust, before downing the shots as quick as she can.
As soon as they're gone, he pours another three. “Besides: you know I’d crash the party--”
“--ridiculous and frustrated and dramatic--” she cuts in.
“--and Stefan would follow right along to stop me from wreaking everything.”
Around and around the conversation goes. Somehow the game has mutated under their feet. They’re in a race to describe the details of all the possible Proms they can imagine, each a bigger wreck than the last, punctuating the mess of a conversation with the constant clack of shot glasses filled and emptied and slammed on the table.
Bonnie re-lives the ending of Carrie and her out-of-control powers destroy the building.
Caroline brings Klaus as her date to teach him what it means to be good.
Silas shows up to wreck havoc, but instead learns a valuable lesson about love and friendship.
Elena eats the Prom Queen out of spite.
Vampire Rebekah ruins everything. Human Rebekah saves the day.
Werewolves attack. Aliens attack. Ninja turtles attack.
Click-clack, the shots flow and the stories grow more and more ridiculous. They kill one bottle and move onto another, laughter growing louder by the minute.
Shot after shot.
One.
One.
One.
Three.
Three.
One.
One more and the second bottle’s done.
Damon heads to the bar to get another. The bartender is obviously irked at them (for the noise they’re making in the back or for being young and strange and beautiful, who knows), but a quick compulsion nets them another bottle with a minimum of fuss.
“Maybe you wouldn’t have even gone to Prom,” Damon says when he gets back to the table. “Maybe switched off Elena doesn’t have time for shitty vodka in the punch and chaperoned slow dances.”
“I had time for cheerleading,” Elena says.
“You had time for eating cheerleaders, you mean,” Damon replies.
“Got me there.”
The weird joy of the last twenty minutes of drifts into comfortable silence. There’s a thoughtful look on Elena’s face as she runs a finger around the edge of one shot glass. Damon just nurses his bourbon and waits for her to speak.
“What was it like for you when you turned it off?” she asks quietly.
He throws back the last of the caramel liquid before answering. They’ve drunk enough that he’s loosened up, willing to talk through topics that he would otherwise avoid.
“In the beginning, it was amazing. I was full of rage and frustration and grief, and then snap,” he says, fingers clicking in the air right in front of her face, “it all went away. No guilt, no grief, no love, none of it. No one could make me do a damn thing -- or take anything away from me. Everything was easy: feeding, fucking -- sensation on my skin and blood on my tongue. The world belonged to me.”
“Sounds about right.” Elena smiles a goofy smile, the sign of all those shots on her face. “So why would you ever turn it back on, if it was so incredible?"
“Eh, I don’t think it was a choice. You did it.”
“Me?” she squeaks out with surprise. “What did I do?”
“You slapped me,” he says and then throws both hands in the air to preempt her interruption. “Ok, ok, alright, you’ve slapped me plenty. But that first time, that was different. It was...shocking.”
“I shocked you?” she giggles out. “With a slap to the face?”
“Let’s say...it was very unexpected. I thought I had you pegged as just another way to hurt Stefan and, bonus, a gorgeous meal. Compulsion meant that no human had a chance of stopping me from getting what I wanted -- so no one had stopped me in a very long time. You resisting... it threw me off my game -- for just the tiniest fraction of a second -- and that was all it took. It was enough to shake me up.”
Elena giggles as she pours three shots in a line. “Awww. Damon Salvatore got all shook up by a little girl and it scared him enough to flick his switch back on.”
“No,” he sputters and growls. The shots disappear from the glasses as quick as she pours them -- one-two-three Damon swallows them down.
“Someday Elena Gilbert will realize the stupid switch really isn’t about ‘on’ or ‘off’ -- maybe it’s a dimmer or a filter or maybe the older you get the harder it is to shut humanity out. I don’t know how the fucking thing works. But it’s exactly like you said on that roof in New York: hate and anger and need for revenge. I felt all those things way back when. They creeped into my brain over the years and I didn’t even notice.”
He’s silent for a moment, turned inward with eyes down, remembering. “When you hit me though...that I noticed. And it made me notice other things too. I cared about my brother enough to want to make him miserable. I basically worshipped Katherine and I was desperate to get her back. And then there was you.”
“Me?”
“You...intrigued me.”
She snorts into her drink and slurs out a response. “What could possibly be intriguing about a teenager in suburban Virginia to a one-hundred-and-sixty-year old vampire?”
He shrugs and takes another sip of his bourbon. “You fought back. You never let me get away with anything. A thousand other girls would have let me kiss them and more -- compulsion or no. Don’t get me wrong,” he says with humor in his voice, “there are plenty of people in the world happy to tell me no, but very few of them have ever been eighteen-year-old former cheerleaders.”
“I’m starting to think you have a bit of a fetish for girls who tell you no. First Katherine--”
“Katherine?” he shouts and squints and squidges up his nose, all that booze finally showing on his face. “Katherine was all about yes as long as it got her what she wanted. The problem will always be that her yes never means anything.” He looks her dead in the eyes and says, “Never compare yourself to Katherine.”
“But we have loads in common!” Elena yells in reply, too far gone to really think it through. “You and Stefan for a start.”
She giggles to herself, pleased with what she considers just another joke in the conversation. Damon sits still and quiet across from her, until the gears in Elena’s head whirl around to process what she just said, and her hand reaches to pour new shots from the game bottle. He catches her wrist before she can lift the liquor from the table. She glances at him, giggles subsiding into unsteady breath.
“Know what else I remember from when I was switched off?” he says through gritted teeth. “I was an empty, waste of space asshole with no drive beyond my next meal. I had no goal in life except to rescue Katherine -- and that was decades away from even being possible for most of it. So I just hung around, bored and waiting. Causing trouble just to fill the time.”
“What happened to ‘it was amazing’?” she asks, a cruel edge rising up into her voice. There’s a tight place in the hollow of her chest where his words echo back and forth. She lets go of the bottle and crosses her arms. “Twenty minutes ago you were babbling about ‘owning the world’ -- now it’s all whining about how empty you were?”
Damon’s face darkens and he takes more offense than he might have sober. Might be the bathtub full of terrible liquor or just the final exhaustion of his tenuous new found patience, but either way, he goes over the edge in spectacular fashion.
“Sure, I owned the world, but what was the point? I didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone. I was empty and lost and I hated everything.” He’s on his feet, leaning across the table to tower over her, words spitting from his mouth. “As far as I can tell, that’s exactly what you are right now: an empty little girl who doesn’t know what she’s living for.”
“So how does it feel being the lovesick puppy that follows the empty little girl around?”
The bottle of knockoff 151 shatters when it flies from his hand to hit the far wall. Every human in the room is silent and staring, shocked by the sudden violence from the booth at the back of the room.
“Still better than feeling nothing,” he says, so quiet that only Elena can hear him, even in the abrupt hush that’s fallen.
The silence doesn’t last very long. Pretty quick the bartender is hollering and the bikers are crowding towards them. The closer one, a man with a long ponytail snaking down from an otherwise balding head reaches out to grab Elena’s wrist -- a readymade hero pulling an innocent girl away from her drunk and dangerous companion. She snaps his arm in two places and smashes him down to the ground.
His scream is high and falsetto, full of terror and pain.
Elena pulls on a warm, wide smile just for Damon, who cannot help but roll his eyes.
The old men make a break for the door, but Damon’s over and standing in their way before they lay a finger on the knob. He compels them each in turn: “Go home, go to sleep. When you wake up you’ll remember there was a bar fight between two bikers. You ran away and hid. You know nothing else.”
He steps aside to let them scurry out into the darkness as fast as their legs will carry them. He turns back to find Elena in front of him, all the recent anger drained away into a drunken version of curiosity. Her face is a mess of black veins and her eyes are red -- there’s new blood on her lips and he can smell more on her hands. Beautiful, he thinks, and feels his teeth grow sharper in his mouth.
“Why let them go?” she asks.
Damon shrugs. “Need a plausible scapegoat for when we burn this place to the ground. Otherwise cops with questions, witnesses with accurate descriptions, and very annoying region-wide manhunts. Why let the witch on the farm go?”
Before Elena can answer, a shotgun blast tears through her in a wide and bloody mess. She crumples to the floor, clutching her chest.
Damon is a creature of pure rage when he falls on the man, teeth ripping open his throat. The bartender screams and tries to use the barrel of the gun like a club, a feeble attempt to fight him off. Damon crushes the man’s hand without looking and the gun goes whirling across the room to slam into the shelves behind the bar, sending all the stacked liquor crashing to the floor.
He drinks until the man is dead in his arms.
The remaining biker flings himself from his hiding place behind the pool table -- running full tilt at Damon, pool cue in hand like a spear, but he never gets close. Elena pulls him down to her as he passes by. She rips into his shoulder with her teeth, drinking deep while her wounds begin to close. When he continues to struggle, she snaps his neck and feeds unhindered.
And then it’s all gone still and quiet in the bar.
Damon drops the bartender to the floor and heads behind the wrecked counter to poke around. He rummages through broken glass and rusty drink equipment, looking for anything that can be used to start a fire. The fight has cleared the over abundance of alcohol from his system -- he can still feel the fraudulent warmth of booze in his blood, but he knows that won’t last long now. He makes the deliberate choice to focus on clean up and let go of the fight that started this mess.
Elena rises to her feet, steadied by blood but clearly still intoxicated. He glances over the bar to watch. Ever the lightweight Gilbert, he thinks.
But then he can see the anger return to her face and it dawns on him: she isn’t ready to let their fight go so easily. She’s ready for round two, this time without human interruption.
Before he even knows what he’s doing, Damon vaults over the bar -- landing heavily but recovering with grace. In an instant he’s in her space, pressing into her, and she’s so startled that she gives ground, falling back across the room until she bumps into the pool table. She’s overwhelmed by his presence, with movements more animal than human, aggressive and tense. Her hands come up as a shield through instinct alone -- all defensive training trampled -- but he snaps her wrists from the air before she can make any contact.
The sudden touch breaks her from the spell of his aggression and she catches herself, catches the fear blossoming in the empty spaces where nothing should be. Fear swirled with anger, real anger, and the tiniest fraction of grief.
She slams them all away, steadying her face into a perfect mask again -- but not before Damon notices and quirks his head.
He lets go of her wrists without a fight when she tugs back on them gently. Pale blue eyes stare into brown ones, searching for some other hidden sign. Elena brings her newly freed hands up to finger the collar of his shirt.
“The Damon I left Mystic Falls with was aggressive, impatient -- quick to anger, slow to let go.” Her hands slide down to the line of buttons and starts to pop them out one by one, following along with the rhythm of her speech. “He made rash decisions, particularly in the face of threats. There was so little anyone could do to stop him...”
Her voice trails off for a moment. Her hands slip inside his open shirt to flatten against his chest.
“Back at the farm all you wanted was to tear out that woman’s throat but then you stopped -- all because I asked, because you’re walking on eggshells around me. You’re afraid I’ll see you as a liability and leave you. Or get annoyed and leave you. So you give me whatever I want, patient and flexible and...resigned.”
He brings his head down so that his lips are an inch from hers, but he doesn’t quite connect. Just orbits so close in her space.
“We made a deal back in New York, on the roof. I promised not to push -- said I’d wait for you, for as long as it takes -- so long as you stayed with me.” he whispers to her.
“Do you think I want you like this?”
Damon leans back from her, hands flying up with exasperation into the air.
“I have no idea what you want, Elena. We’re wandering aimlessly from city to city -- sample a little blood here, a little mayhem there. You’re interested enough in whatever I have to teach you, but that’s a hobby not a life.”
He sighs and looks down to the floor and crosses his arms against his chest.
“But I promised to wait for you -- so for the moment I’m perfectly content to follow you around -- because you are what I want. If that means chasing after you like a love-sick puppy, then so be it. Wouldn’t be the first time I acted like an idiot in the name of love. Hell, this doesn’t come close to the stupid things I’ve done in the past -- and at least this time I have real hope that someday...”
He looks at her with nothing but hope in his eyes.
Her instinct is to throw it back in his face, how his emotions rule his life and make him weak. But there’s something in what he says -- the brutal truths that he’s willing to admit -- that gives her pause. She thinks back to the night when they hunted each other, when she snapped his neck but couldn’t leave him.
The words that come out of her mouth surprise them both. “I... I don't know who I am anymore. Before all this started I was just some teenager -- all I wanted was to go to parties and hang out with my friends. But then came disaster after disaster after disaster -- I became this pathetic little girl with too much conscience and not enough sense."
“I used to define myself by the people around me. I was with Stefan, who let me make all my own decisions but had so much trouble telling me the truth. And then there was always you, the man perfectly comfortable laying out everything with almost too much honesty -- but completely incapable of letting me have any choice.”
“That’s over now, though, isn’t it?” she asks him, but leaves no room for a reply. “I left that all behind. So what am I now? An empty shell like you said before? Just another dead girl wandering the earth with no purpose? Or can I be something more? I honestly have no idea.”
"The one thing I do know? What happens now between us is your choice. You can go on waiting patiently for the girl I was, hoping that I switch it back on and everything goes back the way things were...or you can be with me now, without holding back. It’s your choice, Damon."
He makes no attempt to answer her with words, just picks her up and sets her down on the edge of the pool table. Their lips meet with the full force of all the pent up tension of the time on the road and soon he’s pushing her backwards, down onto the scarred felt, hands wrapping around her and his tongue in her mouth.
Elena feels slightest scratch of fangs on her lips and when she opens her eyes she catches a glimpse of black veins on his face -- but only quickly, before he moves to follow the path from her chin to her throat with his lips. There’s sweet pain when his teeth sink into the skin of her neck and subtle pressure when he draws her blood into his mouth.
All he can think of is how she tastes -- sweet copper and fire and strength.
She cries out and his teeth come loose, returning to their human bluntness. He nips at her collarbone as his fingers scurry down, first to the buttons of her jeans and then to the edge of her top, fluttering -- he wants all of her all at once and can’t decide the place to start.
“Wait, wait, wait--” she gasps the words out when he turns his head and captures his hands lightly with her own.
He pulls back a fraction, puzzled -- unsure what further turn the conversation could take.
“It’s Prom night remember? Even if I don’t get to go, I still want that perfect Prom night ending.”
Damon squints for a moment, thinking back through the rest of the evening, trying to piece together what she means.
She doesn’t wait for him to figure it out. “Drunken fucking in your car.”
“Ah,” he laughs, completely relaxed with her for the first time in weeks. “Better idea: semi-sober fucking on this pool table right now, followed by some arson and celebratory binge drinking, followed directly by drunken fucking in my car.”
He leans down to bite again bluntly at her neck, where the wound from his sharper teeth is already fading. Her nails sink into the skin of his wrists in response. Blood wells up under her nails and drips down onto his arm.
His pulls back from her just long enough to mutter: “This way, everyone gets what they want.”
She drags his wrist to her mouth and licks the copper stains away, before tearing at the delicate skin again with her teeth.
