the low road // 09 ninjas and cheerleaders (part one)
Title: the low road // 09 ninjas and cheerleaders
Author: that_treason
Rating: M overall (T-ish this chapter, language)
Length: around 7800 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.”
A/N: This chapter is a little bit different than the past few weeks - a talky chapter where we can stop and catch our breath a little. I may have taken some liberties with the way vampire powers work - but honestly the show has never been internally consistent, so I don't feel that bad.
And once again I had to split across two posts. Keep going when you get to the end.
// 09 NINJAS and CHEERLEADERS
Elena takes a punch to the face like a champ, barely losing her step. She ducks her head as the next blow comes and the ninja's metal-plated arm swings wide. Damon watches as she sweeps her leg along the ground in a circle, knocking down both the ninja in front of her and another running up from behind. They tumble to the ground as she springs up and away. By chance, their heads knock together as they hit the floor, each sending the other unconscious.
Damon is finishing off his own attacker when he hears Elena's cry of warning. His fist flies up and over his opposite shoulder, catching a spiky black gloved hand bearing down on him with a katana. Damon spins, still holding on, breaking the ninja's arm in the process. The man gives a muffled yelp and drops his sword, but stands his ground. He kicks out, trying to break Damon's hold on his wrist, but it's too good and he can't wriggle free. Damon uses the off-balance momentum of the kick to launch his would-be assailant into the nearest set of lockers, adding another layer of dents to the already bent metal. The ninja's head strikes the blunted corner of the box and he falls boneless to the floor.
Before he can even turn, three throwing stars sink into the metal next to Damon's face, but Elena's got him covered. She's already ripping their thrower apart, flinging matte black cloth-covered limbs down the hall. It's a peculiarly bloodless operation, for something so violent. Damon flashes her a look of distaste at the wholly unnecessary mess she's made - so she rolls her eyes and gathers up the larger chunks to add to their growing ninja body pile. Damon heaves his own would-be attackers onto the top and dusts his hands off like some cartoon character. The bodies come up to his waist.
An empty silence falls on the hallway. They've been fighting ninjas up and down this hall for at least an hour, maybe more. A weird little breeze flows through, occasionally rustling the flyers that hang on the bulletin boards along the wall. There's a fuzzy, abandoned-feeling darkness at either end of the hall, the usual state of after hours at a high school. Overhead, one of the soft strips of light flickers, damaged when Damon threw one of their attackers directly up into the air.
Damon surveys the pile of black suited bodies they've piled in the center of the hallway, no longer on guard for more trouble. All around them, lockers are dented from multiple impacts. In places the metal doors are completely missing - ripped off during the fight to serve as impromptu shields and bludgeoning weapons. The contents of one locker are scattered across the floor: chewed pencils, broken-spined paperback novels, and a cheerleader's uniform skirt in burgundy, black, and white. Above the skirt hangs the shredded remains of the similar colored top.
Elena takes advantage of the lull to throw her hair up in a messy ponytail, but she never lets her guard down. Her clothes are well-worn and now torn in places from the fight - comfortable jeans, a faded blue henley, black-and-white converse sneakers. Nothing close to the clothing she's worn since they left home.
"How long are you going to keep this up?" she asks, waving one hand over the stack they've built out of the unconscious and dead.
"What," he says, "you can't deal with a little brawl all the sudden?"
"Unless your little brawl - with ninjas, in my high school - is somehow going to teach me how to do your vision thing, then yeah, I'm going to complain."
Damon looks both versions of her over. One Elena is here, kicking ninja ass next to Timberwolves pennants and fluttering decade dance flyers. The other is lying in his arms, eyes closed and face relaxed, on top of the still tucked-in covers of a chain hotel's lumpy queen sized bed. He can hold them both in his head through years of practice and hard-won skill - the angry girl he can see in front of him and the empty one he can feel on his skin. He holds her close, face nuzzled in her hair.
"Easy there, Gilbert," he says in the dream. "Remember what you promised when I agreed to show you this?"
"But-"
"Ah, ah, ah!" He waves a finger in her face. "What did you promise?"
"To let you teach me however you wanted, without questioning it or getting snooty or thinking I know better even when I don't." The words are bland when she says them, with not even a hint of her previous aggression.
"Good memory," he says and bops her on the end of her nose with his recently waggling finger. She starts back, and brings her hand up involuntarily to rub at the spot that he poked.
"This is ridiculous," she says and then rips a throwing star from where it cut into the metal of a locker. It's apparently her turn to wave something in his face.
"Of course it's ridiculous," he says, moving forward into her space, refusing the implicit threat of the throwing star. "You have to know it's fake at first, otherwise how can you figure out the really good ones? Tell me how you know it's fake."
"Ninjas."
"Other than the ninjas."
"They're kinda a dead giveaway." She brings the throwing star up and lightly presses the tip into his nose.
Damon sighs and steps away, moving to lean against a row of lockers that somehow escaped destruction. "Humor me, Elena."
She chucks the throwing star across the hall into a bulletin board, slicing a timberwolf- embellished flyer in half. She's a crack shot now, with pretty much any ranged weapon. Ric would be proud.
"I'm not wearing the clothes I put on this morning," she says, pointing down at herself. "These aren't even clothes that exist anymore. The real versions are all ashes. This is old-school Elena comfort stuff."
He purses his lips and squints at her for a second, nodding his head a little. Hadn't realized he'd put her in her old clothes, in human Elena clothes. It was all just part of building the scene from memory.
He looks away from her with fake nonchalance, as if checking down the side hallway for any sign of further attackers. A patently ridiculous cover for his thoughts. When he looks back she's dressed the same as the body resting back in the hotel: a layered and lacy sleeveless black dress and bare feet. Her hair collapses down around her face when the elastic holding it back disappears. When the shoes disappear, her feet sink down a half-inch to meet the cold linoleum floor, causing her to gasp and wobble with surprise.
"Not an issue anymore," he says. "What else?"
He watches her takes her time this round, sees her bite back some immediate and no doubt cutting response. She studies the floor while she thinks, the newly released curtain of brown curls falling down along the side of her face. Damon is content to watch both versions of her while he waits, enjoying the peace of it. Little twitchy movements flash across her face as she thinks, bringing the rhythm of her thoughts to the surface. He loves to watch her think, loves to see her working it all out, but he won't let it show on his face. She'd only use it against him.
Damon is starting to think that Elena is more confused about him than he is about her. Why he stays with her, why he follows her and keeps her safe. There's more to her uncertainty than the most simplistic answer - no emotions equals no understanding of love. She's told him over and over about the "real" Damon: impatient and brutal, quick to anger, slow to think things through. And in some ways she's right - he recognizes those descriptions as realistic pieces of his self. But he knows better than her that there is no "real" Damon, no better or worse version of him, separate selves he keeps locked away for just the right purposes. There is just him, in all his layers and faults and experiences and choices. And he knows himself, far better than Elena does. Far better than Elena understands Elena.
And someday - he has no doubt, he repeats it like a mantra - Elena will turn it back on. He intends to be there every step of the way leading up to that day, as an anchor against her unconscious drive towards self-destruction.
And that is why he stays and why he can't explain it to her. Because weighed against every new crazy act - every petty comment she spits and every obnoxious scenario she drags him into - is the hope that his actions will mitigate her future pain. Her guilt is and always will be her guilt, he feels no need to fix her - but he will be there to catch her when she falls.
They have all the time in the world. This amounts to just the blink of an eye. He can wait.
Suddenly Elena is zipping around, glancing down the mostly darkened hallways and peeking through the slit windows of the classrooms. Moments later she zips back to stand in front of him, a smile painted across her face.
"This looks like my school...but it's wrong. Everything is sortof...penciled in. The rooms are in the wrong places with the wrong stuff inside. And the posters and flyers on the walls look like they belong, but when you get close you see all the text is just filler and all the pictures repeat. It's a sketch rather than a full painting."
"Excellent," he says, with an easy half smile. "Know why that is?"
She pauses to think. "This is all built from your memory, not mine. And since you don't give a damn how the classrooms are actually situated or what might really be on the posters, everything is just filler. Your experiences here were all cursory at best. Mostly what can I kill and when can I kill it." There's a flirty quality to her voice and movements, glancing looks and purring tones. She leans slowly into his space.
And he responds in kind, leaning his own face down to come close to hers. "Don't leave out the all important when do I get my turn dancing with Elena."
She pulls back and dances away, with a forced barking laugh. "Or where's Ric keeping his stash - I bet his classroom's perfect, down to the very last detail. Or really, really wrong but with booze in every cabinet. Or maybe it's some kind of shrine you've built for him - a perfect reconstruction of the Grill."
Damon narrows his eyes at her, but says nothing, clearly unwilling to go down that road with her. She waits just long enough to see if he'll change his mind and take the bait, but then shrugs and drops the act.
"Fine, whatever," she says. "You weren't interested in the details of the scenery. Since you're the one building it, you have only your own memories to work with. But if the person you attack doesn't look too close, you've got them right?"
He shakes his head. "It's not that simple."
###
He hadn't really intended to teach her this - the mind power thing as Elena insisted on calling it, probably just to annoy him - or at least not right now, while she's so volatile. Maybe some day, when they both have clearer heads.
They drove the remainder of the night, down through the emptiness of southern Utah and on into Arizona. He let her stop to pickup a pair of college age hitchhikers, but made sure that they both drank only exactly what they needed to limp away quickly. They left both kids alive, forgetful and healing, by the side of the road.
After that they drove without pause (despite clear evidence that Damon needed more blood) until they absolutely needed gas two hours later. Only then did he let either of them drink their fill - draining the life from a late night attendant and a foursome on a road trip also stopped for gas. Damon finished off three of them all on his own - needing to feel whole in case they carnival pack managed to track them. Within ten minutes they'd finished the lot, piled all the bodies in the back of the road trip SUV, and rolled it off a nearby cliff.
(He was vaguely impressed by how quickly it all went down. If there was one thing that switched-off Elena was good for it was efficiency. Even if it was efficiency forced by the need to flee her latest disaster.)
And then it was back to the road with Damon in the driver seat. They doubled back the way they came to confuse the trail. It was just a matter of time before the SUV was discovered - there wasn't time to more thoroughly hide the bodies. Anyone paying attention would understand the details of their deaths, but nothing could be done. All they could do was put time and miles between themselves and the evidence.
On they drove through the long empty hours of the night, crossing into Flagstaff by the time the sun crept over the horizon.
Elena slept half the way, probably more out of boredom than need, with her face pressed to the glass and her mouth half open. Damon was tempted to leave her that way when he parked the car in the bottom of an underground lot, but it would cause more problems than it was worth. He couldn't risk anyone seeing her there and investigating. Plus she'd probably take off somewhere, looking for ever more creative ways to annoy him. Maybe bring the mountains down on their heads or find some way to jump start a long dead volcano. The way things were escalating he wouldn't be surprised.
Instead he scooped her up and carried her inside the hotel. She didn't do more than murmur a little when he set her down on the scratchy fabric of a lobby chair, just long enough to check them in. She looked perfect and peaceful swallowed up in the overstuffed plush of the furniture, brown-and-pink curls strewn over the arm. He ended up carrying her, through the halls and in the elevator, all the way to their room on the sixth floor. She didn't wake even when he laid her down on the rented bed.
There was one final phone call he had to make, just to finalize the details of the plan - and Elena seemed out of it enough to risk her wrath by just making it from the room. Caroline and Stefan were probably fine managing Rebekah's rescue without him - at least for now - but he still wanted to check-in to see how things had progressed since he was abruptly cut-off at the carnival.
It didn't take long to figure out from Stefan that nothing crazy had gone wrong with the plan (yet, he reminded himself), so when his brother launched into his latest Elena-needs-to-be-fixed diatribe, Damon ended the call mid-lecture and shut down the phone. The guilt-trip twins have managed this far without his supervision; a few days of radio silence probably wouldn't matter. Having his phone on wasn't worth the trouble it would cause with Elena. He had it hidden from sight by the time she woke up.
The first day in hiding sped by with no real trouble. Damon finished one ancient paperback and started another. Elena mostly stared out the window, taking in the mountains. Sometimes she'd switch on the TV and flip around listlessly before up on it again. Every time she interacted with Damon she was respectful, verging on cordial, and definitely subdued. They never discussed the events of the past few days, but Damon could tell she was turning them over and over in her head. So there was hope, at first, that she had gotten all the recent crazy out of her system.
But as time wore on, it became apparent that Elena hated being caged inside the hotel - despite the need to stay out of sight for the time being. She paced, she whined, she moaned, she threatened.
On the third day he had to stop her from dropping a nearly dead maid in the middle of the hallway, in a lame attempt to force them to flee. As if the choice for Damon between hiding out from a justifiably pissed off werewolf clan and dealing with the consequences of one dead maid wasn't absolutely clear. It ended up not mattering either way - he caught Elena before she could finish the poor woman off. He grabbed Elena by the scruff of her neck and hauled her into the hotel room, before turning back to deal with the maid. Healed her, compelled her, and sent her on her merry way to clean the next room along the hall, no one else in the hotel ever the wiser.
"We can't go on like this," he growled, once the door slammed shut behind him. "I don't know if you've gone suddenly suicidal or stupid or suicidally stupid, but something has to change, Elena."
The look she gave him made his blood run cold. It was empty. Emptier than a mask.
His anger faded away as he sat down on the bed across from the chair where she was curled. For long minutes neither of them spoke. That was when he offered to teach her about vampire dreams and visions.
###
"Fine," Elena says, breaking through his momentary reverie, "explain the complications to me."
"Humans with no protection - no vervain - are wide open. They can't begin to keep you out, so it's easy to open them up and get the details you need to make a perfect illusion."
"So when you gave me that nightmare back when we first met...you pulled all the details from my head, that's why it was so perfect. And felt so real." She says it matter-of-fact, without even the memory of fear coloring her voice.
"Well, that and all the horror movie tropes I threw in to make it worse: dark, creepy house, TV that talked about you directly, looming shadows. Even if the details of every kitchen cabinet and drawer weren't completely right," he flashes her a smile, "you were too busy to find out."
"I mostly wrote it off as a bad dream," she says, trying to deflate his ego. "If you had such easy access to my brain, why wouldn't you just do that all the time?"
"Difficult to maintain without concentration. I had other things to do and people to annoy, I couldn't just give you all my attention."
"And then Stefan gave you your necklace-"
"- and the vervain kept you out of my head from then on. So far it sounds pretty simple."
"Pfft, humans are easy," he says. "It's the vampire half of the equation where things get more complicated."
"We're complicated creatures," she replies.
The ease with which she makes that statement sends sparks scurrying through his chest. There was a time when Elena had nothing but distaste for her vampire existence; now it's just another part of who she is, accepted deep down on her skin. He suspects it's there to stay, emotions off or on. The changes to the core of her are too permanent and deep engrained for guilt and regret to wash away. It's knowledge that makes this past week of idiocy almost worth it.
There's a little more enthusiasm in his lecture as he launches back in. "We have natural defenses against this type of attack, as long as you're well fed and healthy. Keep up a steady diet of human blood and you'll be almost impossible to fool."
"Almost?" Elena asks.
"For a vampire that's really good there will always be loopholes. But your garden variety creature of the night? They'll need you weak before they can get inside that head of yours."
"So the easiest way to protect myself is to feed until I burst - got it. Which is why you've had me starving for the last two days - to break down my natural defenses."
"Yep. Too much fresh blood in your system - between those kids at the gas station and the maid." He doesn't bother to hide his annoyance as he remembers the incident. "Had to soften you up a bit or we'd never be able to get started. As it is, this is a pretty basic dream I've got you caught in. Doesn't hold up to scrutiny - once you know to look."
"Still seems pretty real," she says, stretching out her hands and wiggling her fingers, "regardless how many holes I point out."
"Of course it does. I'm good at what I do," he says with a cocky smile. "The weaker you get, the better the illusion will become. There's this... point of balance between the strength of two minds - yours and your attacker's. Once you fall out of balance things really fall apart. I can overwhelm all your senses - make it smell right, make it taste right. I can use your memories against you, pull in more details from your mind to make everything perfect - until the dream is more real than when you're awake."
"I bet I'd have to be pretty wreaked for that to work, though, right? Like how you made a dream for Rose. I'd have to be dying or something, for you to give me a dream of somewhere you'd never been?" There's nothing petty in her voice as she asks; it sounds like an honest question rather than another attempt to wound. So he does his best not to flinch at the mention of Rose.
"Dying or something, yeah," he says. "And at that point - most of the time at least - it's not worth it to bother with something like this. Might as well just stake you or rip your head off. This isn't something someone will use when you're dying - it's what they'll use when they want to find something out or fuck with you. They'll attack when you're vulnerable but plenty alive, so most of the time they won't get to take details from your head. They'll have to work with what they already know. Use the current environment, play with what's already there - or," he throws his hands up in the air, gesturing along the school hallway, "know the victim well enough to believably change the scenery."
She nods at him, a thoughtful expression tracking across her face. "Stefan told me about when he was locked in the tomb with Katherine, how she played with his reality."
"Stef told you about that?" Damon's surprised, and it shows in his voice. Stefan is the "good" brother in many ways, but upfront honesty isn't usually one of them. He wonders what must have happened to trigger that discussion with Elena.
"Yeah," she says with simply, with pasted on disinterest in her voice, "he was in one those moods with just that perfect combination of guilt and regret, so he told me a bunch of stuff that he'd normally never bring up."
The sideways look she gives Damon while she talks makes him file the comment away for later discussion. Stefan's mental escapades with Katherine probably weren't all they talked about. And the way she's dancing around the topic, when normally she'd be displaying it for her own version of amusement, makes him think it has to be good. Later he'll have to remember to send down to the bar for a couple of bottles of Elena's favorite vodka - perfect for prying out secrets.
But for now he lets it go. "Tell me what he told you about it."
Elena thinks for a moment. "Katherine always kept it to their current surroundings - never made it look like somewhere else. They were always in the tomb. Never lasted more than a few minutes. I think he said he was always asleep when it happened, but I might be remembering wrong."
"So in that case," he says, "longterm bunny diet plus no food source plus bitch queen with nothing else to do equals screwing with my saintly brothers head. Easy math. She attacked him in his sleep to make it more difficult to figure out."
"What does it matter if he knew?" she asks.
"If you know you're being tricked you can fight it. There's a particular sensation that- it's like a weird little itch in the back of your head. Do you feel it here yet?"
Crinkles appear across her face as she concentrates. Her eyes squint and her mouth purses. "Maybe...there's...I'm not sure. There might be something that feels a little off."
"I'm willing to bet the longer we stay here, the more you notice, but there isn't exactly a manual for this stuff. Once you know, you can try to break it. Which means that if you're ever on the sending end of things, you'll want to try for scenes that won't be outright rejected, the place where you are right now or familiar settings-"
"-like the school-"
"Right, like the school - but then you have to pay attention to the details." He thinks for a moment, then adds, "Wish fulfillment can be a good method too, if you can't use something recognizable or don't know the details well enough. Give them what they want, and even if their brain knows it can't be true, their emotions will go right along with you."
He doesn't give her the perfect example of this: how Rebekah drained his blood out onto the floor for hours. How it weakened him enough that he saw and felt and heard Elena come and rescue him - and it was real and true and perfect. How he wanted it so badly he ignored all evidence to the contrary and gave Rebekah yet another way to hurt him. A perfect illustration of how to break a man with his own desires. It's a story that Damon doesn't want to tell, not even for Elena. Another reason this whole exercise makes him nervous.
