TVD Free-For-All Comment Ficathon fics
It seems that I'm done with all the comment ficathon fics I wanted to write, so I'm just going to post them here before it occurs to me to write yet another one.
The Vampire Diaries Free-For-All Comment Ficathon is hosted by softly-me, who should be eternally loved and worshiped for doing such an amazing thing. If you want to read some more, masterlist by pairing/character can be found here.
For the entire week I was totally behaving like this crazy shipper person; I didn't even know I could write so much Damon/Elena in such a short time. Oh well. I regret nothing.
Warning: since ratings and warnings are not required in places where I usually post, I'm not sure if I got them right. It's all pretty angsty, so theoretically I should warn and everything, but then it feels so silly to warn for angst in TVD... So if you spot that I made a mistake, could you please let me know?
Everything was written after TVD 3x09 Homecoming, so, to be on the safe side, let's say that this is how far the spoilers go.
Title: Normal Again
Rating: PG13
Prompt: You can have my absence of faith, prompted by ever-neutral
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Wordcount: 470
Summary: Elena's moved on, and her life is all normal now. See? All normal.
Normal Again
“So you are all normal now, right? A house with a white fence and everything?”
“I am.”
“And you've moved on?”
“Yes, I've moved on. It's vampires who think that they're gonna live forever, so they can brood over their issues for centuries, Damon. Humans actually deal with stuff.”
“Yeah. Right.”
***
Elena lives in Richmond now, she has a job and a cat, she cooks her meals and keeps in touch with her brother, and sometimes she even manages to forget about all the mess she's put behind her. She is a survivor and a grown-up; she doesn't act out like Alaric, and she doesn't hold on to her sadness like Jeremy. Instead she has a girls' night out with Caroline and Bonnie every Thursday, and she occasionally dates guys who's never ripped an innocent citizen apart. Everything is back to normal.
Damon visits her every now and then; sometimes he even has the decency to call her first, but usually he just shows up and expects her to be thrilled about it. Elena rolls her eyes and treats him like a nuisance for at least fifteen minutes (once she even slammed the door in his face, but he just kept singing Dixie until she let him in, so she doesn't try that any more), but she makes him a cup of coffee and lets him talk nonsense for a while.
(She really should stop letting him in, but he's already been invited.)
***
It doesn't always end like this: a mess on the table, her shirt on the floor and his pants on an armchair. It's nothing, really; it's just her stepping away from her life for five minutes, five minutes, that's all. It doesn't even count as using him, because they are on the same page, finally. Damon reverently kisses her hip (Damon loves to put up a show), and she can feel him relax under her touch; they have an understanding.
They both deserve this moment of peace, so Elena lets her smile peel off her face. Damon grabs her hand and places it on his hair, so that she could lead him exactly as she wants; she's earned this level of sincerity a long time ago. One day, Elena keeps telling herself, one day they are going to stop needing this, and everything will look differently. He will rip her heart out like he ripped Bree's, or she will stake him like she means it, or maybe he will turn her and they will cause death and mayhem for a good part of a century. This will happen any day now, she thinks as she arches her back, because this balance based on things they don't have any more is just bound to fall apart. Any day now.
Any day.
Title: Stuff of Legends
Rating: PG13
Prompt: I am a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl, prompted by softly-me
Characters/Pairings: Katherine, Elena
Wordcount: 660
Summary: Katherine really doesn't mind that she's wearing somebody else's face.
The Stuff of Legends
Katherine is slightly amused by Elena's obsession with identity and self-definition; it's a modern thing, she suspects, or maybe an American thing, like when Stefan and Damon still hold on to this silly little past of theirs. None of them believes it, but Katherine really doesn't mind that she's wearing somebody else's face; after all, she is a doppelganger, a stuff of legends, she is wearing somebody else's clothes and speaking a language younger than herself; she had enough time to get bored with places that weren't on maps when she was born. Even her name doesn't really belong to her; now it has different sounds and a different melody. There are only two men left on Earth who sometimes say it right (Rebekah doesn't bother).
When Elena tries very hard to establish who she is and who she is not (or at least it seems that this is what she does), Katherine puts on something plain and goes out just for fun, does some schoolgirl shopping and smiles at the people who greet her, thinking that she's someone else. She doesn't mind. The beauty of being the doppelganger is that she gets to be all of them.
***
Of course there were more than just two.
It wasn't that hard to figure out, not for Katherine, and she's done her research (curiosity born out of tragic boredom). There were at least three other doppelgangers between herself and Elena, girls never discovered by anybody but her, girls who lived their mundane lives and never found out about moonstones or curses. They never fell for brothers and never had to run for their lives; they married young and bore children, and maybe they got a better deal (that's what Elena would say), but that's not how Katherine sees it.
(Once she was so curious that she came too close, and the woman grabbed her arm with surprising strength. “Do I know you from somewhere?”, she asked sharply, but Katherine just shook off her wrinkled hand, “I don't think so. I just have one of those faces.”)
She doesn't know a thing about the First.
***
One day Elena walks on her when Katherine, shamelessly dressed in Elena's clothes, goes through Ric's pictures of cave drawings. There is a moment of awkward silence, but, surprisingly, yelling never comes. It seems that Elena just gets straight to her little detective work, and Katherine is about to say something snarky about how Klaus probably wouldn't be killed by photos, but she holds her tongue because suddenly everything starts to make sense; because neither of them is here for Klaus. For the first time Elena is openly staring at her, examining every detail of her face and body, and Katherine lets her; she really can understand this kind of curiosity.
Without a word Elena gives her a picture of a knife, and really, it's strangely fitting that it should be a knife. It's ugly and sloppy, and for a second Katherine thinks that it can't be it, but then she starts laughing at herself, because expecting a lamb or a beautiful virgin was just a rookie mistake. That's just how a legend would have it (that's how a legend will have it): there was a girl, young, and sweet, and innocent, nothing like the monsters who surrounded her, and she was sacrificed on an altar of blood. Katherine looks Elena in the eye and they both nod; they are doppelgangers, so they, of all people should know how legends really work.
“I don't know anything but stories,” says Katherine after a couple of minutes, and Elena just shrugs her shoulders in a very un-Elena-like manner.
“Rebekah said that she'd been the one who forged the daggers.”
“She was a witch?”
“I guess.”
“Strong and fierce. I like her. Do you trust what Rebekah says?”
“I'm not sure.”
“No, you don't.”
“No. I don't.”
Title: Be Careful What You Wish For
Rating: NC17
Prompt: One minute I’m a little sweetheart / And next minute you're an absolute creep, prompted by ever-neutral
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Wordcount: 300
Summary: It feels all wrong, almost peaceful.
Be Careful What You Wish For
“Are you gonna kill me?”
“Mhm. But not yet.”
Elena strokes his cheek and smiles in a way that makes Damon shiver; it's a playful smile, beautiful, bright, candid and open (it reminds him of a delusion he once had). She looks like she's going to say something more, so Damon just leans over her and gives her a kiss; this is the sensation he used to crave desperately, so he doesn't want her to spoil it just yet. Elena giggles into his mouth, but lets him do whatever he wants; she kisses him back, and messes his hair when he moves down to her arms and collarbones. It feels all wrong, almost peaceful, soft skin and feather-like touches, and Damon promises himself that he's going to snap out of this any second now, but Elena starts playing along, so they're both trapped.
It looks a bit like a long-forgotten dream: Damon finds himself lying on his side, his legs splayed, Elena's lips on his chest and her breasts just an inch from his mouth. There is a rhythm he can't quite catch, but it gets easier with every kiss, as Elena's muscles are tensing and her fingers start digging into his skin, and by the time she reaches his stomach everything is familiar, finally; Elena bites his hip and suddenly Damon is wide awake, and so relieved he can hardly breathe.
He bares his teeth just because he can, and Elena laughs out loud. It's a part of the game: she can never be sure it's only a tease, and, to be honest, neither is he.
“Are you gonna kill me?”, asks Damon again before he nestles his head on her leg, and then he lets out a sharp cry, because Elena starts tracing his thigh with her fingernails.
“I don't know. Haven't decided yet.”
Title: The Better Man
Rating: PG13
Prompt: Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you, it will set you free. Be more like the man you were made to be, prompted by dante-kent
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Wordcount: 700
Summary: Elena tries to figure out who Damon really is. It doesn't work so well.
The Better Man
Damon's journal is painfully boring.
Elena finds it in the library in the Boarding House, and it takes her about twenty pages to realize that this is the Damon Salvatore, all neat handwriting and tedious sentences. She starts reading because of sheer disbelief, and after an hour she can't believe she's still doing it to herself; it feels almost like being fascinated by a really bad novel.
“Invading privacy much?”
She is too startled to answer right away, so he just takes the journal from her hands and starts flipping the pages.
“God, why is it still here? This family is just a bunch of pack rats.”
“You used to write a journal? You?”
“Of course I did. It's a national sport in this town, right next to dying during important festivals.”
“Damon, seriously.”
“Seriously, Elena. I was a kid, my father thought it would be a good excercise. He would read this every week to see how I was doing.”
She half-expects Damon would be at least a bit angry, but no. Instead he simply gives her back the book, walks towards another shelf and starts looking for something.
“Oh, here you are,” he says as he grabs some musty old Hemingway. “Anyway, enjoy yourself, Elena. As far as I remember the writing doesn't get any better. Someone should've just burned this journal ages ago.”
And yet he didn't.
***
Damon is so well-adjusted to living in the modern world it's usually hard to process that he was born before bicycles were invented, but once Elena starts spotting all the small things she is surprised she's never noticed them before; Damon always chooses the right glass when he pours a drink and he is so comfortable in a suit he might as well have been born in one.
(Damon does not care about collateral damage, and he usually needs up to five words to humiliate a person he thinks lower than himself.)
At first it's just funny, a bit like accidentaly finding a picture of your boss when he was seven and dressed up as a koala bear, but the deeper Elena digs the more serious it gets, because she can't explain how did this sweet, innocent boy turn into the Damon she knows. So she reads the journal again and again, she observes and asks questions, and when she finds some old photographs, she grabs them as if they were a long-lost treasure.
She looks through them with Damon and Alaric, pretending that it's pure curiosity on her part, and while Rick is obsessively making notes and asking hundreds of questions, Elena picks up a picture of a young man dressed in a grey uniform; a familiar face changed a little by some strange solemnity.
“Is this how you were before you met Katherine?”, she blurts out without thinking, and Damon looks as if he didn't really understand the question.
“Yeah, I guess. I have no idea, it might've been taken when I was on leave. 1862 or 1864, not sure.”
(This is who he was when he fell in love with Katherine.)
***
After a couple of months it really starts messing with her head, and even though Elena tries to draw a fine line between now and then, the two Damons in her mind look more and more like one and the same person. It's dangerous, she knows it, but she can't help it; she keeps noticing all the glimpses from the past, the human Damon who danced with her and fell in love with her.
(The human Damon who believes that love should be All-or-Nothing.)
“You can be the better man, you know?”, she tells him one night when he gives her a glass of wine. She makes a mental note that the bigger ones go with red; she can never remeber how to serve different kinds of wine.
“Yes, Elena, because this is exactly how it works,” he says impatiently, but then he smiles anyway.
“I mean it, Damon. I can see who you are. I believe in you.”
(When he breaks her neck later this night, he does it in the most caressing fashion.)
Title: Anger Management
Rating: PG13
Prompt: I'm looking for my friend, prompted by ever-neutral
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Wordcount: 1000
Summary Elena has no reason to be angry right now; she just can't be angry.
Anger Management
Elena has always been a nice person.
She knows how to keep herself in check, and she can deal with just anything; after all, she's had a lot of practice. It's better this way. She's tried yelling and raging, hell, she's even tried blaming the vampires, but none of those things ever worked. So Elena doesn't get angry any more; her problems are big enough without her blowing them out of propotions. Instead Elena chooses to be reasonable; she deals with stuff, and then she moves on.
***
Stefan might be gone, at least for now, but sooner or later Klaus is coming back for more blood, and Elena needs to be prepared. So two days after the Homecoming she resumes her training with Alaric, and Damon joins them, even though nobody asks him.
Rick doesn't have that much time for her, so it happens more and more often that she's stuck only with Damon. It takes a couple of days for her to realize how surprisingly not awkward it's going; Damon really tries be helpful. He is full of useful advice, no provocations or strange innuendos (it's entirely possible that she's just stopped noticing them), and even when he gets too close, it seems like the most natural thing in the world.
Elena is fine (she should be fine), but there is something building up in her she can't quite explain. She has no reason to be angry right now, she just can't be angry, and yet she gets annoyed by things so silly she's almost ashamed to mention them, little fights with Jeremy or Alaric putting a frying pan in a wrong drawer.
“Oh, just hit me already,” says Damon impatiently after four or five days. “If it' makes you feel any better...”
“I am hitting you.”
“No, you are training with me. Just hit me for real, and let's be done with all the tension.”
Elena clenches her fists, but she does nothing; at least not that day. A week later, when Damon deliberately puts Caroline in danger just to get more information about Klaus, Elena punches him so hard she hurts her hand.
***
Damon is always there for her to be annoyed with (she has no reason to be angry, she keeps telling herself, right now she has no reason). Sometimes it feels that he deliberately picks fights with her, so after the incident with Caroline she snaps at him so often she's lost count.
“I brought peace offerings,” he announces when she is sitting in his library after yet another argument, holding on to a book and focused on breathing like a normal person.
“I'm not mad at you. Why are you apologizing?”
“Of course you are mad. And I'm not apologizing. I just thought you could use a drink.”
She takes a few sips, because it's a polite thing to do, but refuses to go any further.
“We can't be like that,” she tells him. “I can't fight with you all the time.”
“Of course you can. I mean, if I were you, I'd fight with me all the time.”
“That's not how friendship is supposed to work.”
“Sure about that?”
***
Elena moves out of Mystic Falls right after graduation, and she doesn't even care about the mess she's leaving behind her. She needs her life to be normal, she needs to be happy and date a nice guy; she needs to start over, and she is going to do it even if it kills her.
There always is some background noise in her head, but she learns to ignore it. She decides to work for a year before she goes to college, so she finds a job, and everything is just splendid; she has a good place to stay, and her job isn't as tedious as she thought it would be. She even manages to make some friends and have the kind of social life like she used to have before the whole vampire drama.
She expected that Damon would follow her and fail miserably at properly hiding his presence, but it does surprise her how much she doesn't mind. She simply ignores him, lets him observe her from the other side of the street or wander around her apartament, and one night when she is out with friends and so happy it nearly chokes her, she makes a lame excuse, runs away and takes a seat at the bar, right next to him.
***
When she finally sleeps with Damon, it's the most comfortable sex she's ever had; she is naked and angry, and he doesn't even try to calm her down, he just follows. There is no broken furniture or torn-up clothes, because it's Elena who is in charge, and she doesn't need this kind of show. She is done with yelling and slapping Damon's face; now it's enough for her to touch him like she means it. Elena lets her anger build up slowly, and then she lets go, and suddenly her mind is all clear.
It's hardly the most satysfying sex she's ever had, but that's strangely fitting. It's not like she did it because she needed Damon to rock her world; the point was for her to rock her own world.
“How are you?”, she asks when they are done (when he is done), and she can feel him shifting slightly under her as he lets out a quiet laughter.
“Fine, I guess. And you?”
“Calm. I feel calm.”
There is a moment of silence, and it's not entirely impossible that Damon would choose it to say something silly, like “I love you”, but he does no such thing. Elena is sure that this subject will come up eventually, and she might even tell him she loves him back (neither of them knows what love is), but right now Damon is smart enough to know that this is not an accurate word at all.
“Roll over,” he tells her instead. “Your turn.”
The Vampire Diaries Free-For-All Comment Ficathon is hosted by softly-me, who should be eternally loved and worshiped for doing such an amazing thing. If you want to read some more, masterlist by pairing/character can be found here.
For the entire week I was totally behaving like this crazy shipper person; I didn't even know I could write so much Damon/Elena in such a short time. Oh well. I regret nothing.
Warning: since ratings and warnings are not required in places where I usually post, I'm not sure if I got them right. It's all pretty angsty, so theoretically I should warn and everything, but then it feels so silly to warn for angst in TVD... So if you spot that I made a mistake, could you please let me know?
Everything was written after TVD 3x09 Homecoming, so, to be on the safe side, let's say that this is how far the spoilers go.
Title: Normal Again
Rating: PG13
Prompt: You can have my absence of faith, prompted by ever-neutral
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Wordcount: 470
Summary: Elena's moved on, and her life is all normal now. See? All normal.
Normal Again
“So you are all normal now, right? A house with a white fence and everything?”
“I am.”
“And you've moved on?”
“Yes, I've moved on. It's vampires who think that they're gonna live forever, so they can brood over their issues for centuries, Damon. Humans actually deal with stuff.”
“Yeah. Right.”
***
Elena lives in Richmond now, she has a job and a cat, she cooks her meals and keeps in touch with her brother, and sometimes she even manages to forget about all the mess she's put behind her. She is a survivor and a grown-up; she doesn't act out like Alaric, and she doesn't hold on to her sadness like Jeremy. Instead she has a girls' night out with Caroline and Bonnie every Thursday, and she occasionally dates guys who's never ripped an innocent citizen apart. Everything is back to normal.
Damon visits her every now and then; sometimes he even has the decency to call her first, but usually he just shows up and expects her to be thrilled about it. Elena rolls her eyes and treats him like a nuisance for at least fifteen minutes (once she even slammed the door in his face, but he just kept singing Dixie until she let him in, so she doesn't try that any more), but she makes him a cup of coffee and lets him talk nonsense for a while.
(She really should stop letting him in, but he's already been invited.)
***
It doesn't always end like this: a mess on the table, her shirt on the floor and his pants on an armchair. It's nothing, really; it's just her stepping away from her life for five minutes, five minutes, that's all. It doesn't even count as using him, because they are on the same page, finally. Damon reverently kisses her hip (Damon loves to put up a show), and she can feel him relax under her touch; they have an understanding.
They both deserve this moment of peace, so Elena lets her smile peel off her face. Damon grabs her hand and places it on his hair, so that she could lead him exactly as she wants; she's earned this level of sincerity a long time ago. One day, Elena keeps telling herself, one day they are going to stop needing this, and everything will look differently. He will rip her heart out like he ripped Bree's, or she will stake him like she means it, or maybe he will turn her and they will cause death and mayhem for a good part of a century. This will happen any day now, she thinks as she arches her back, because this balance based on things they don't have any more is just bound to fall apart. Any day now.
Any day.
Title: Stuff of Legends
Rating: PG13
Prompt: I am a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl, prompted by softly-me
Characters/Pairings: Katherine, Elena
Wordcount: 660
Summary: Katherine really doesn't mind that she's wearing somebody else's face.
The Stuff of Legends
Katherine is slightly amused by Elena's obsession with identity and self-definition; it's a modern thing, she suspects, or maybe an American thing, like when Stefan and Damon still hold on to this silly little past of theirs. None of them believes it, but Katherine really doesn't mind that she's wearing somebody else's face; after all, she is a doppelganger, a stuff of legends, she is wearing somebody else's clothes and speaking a language younger than herself; she had enough time to get bored with places that weren't on maps when she was born. Even her name doesn't really belong to her; now it has different sounds and a different melody. There are only two men left on Earth who sometimes say it right (Rebekah doesn't bother).
When Elena tries very hard to establish who she is and who she is not (or at least it seems that this is what she does), Katherine puts on something plain and goes out just for fun, does some schoolgirl shopping and smiles at the people who greet her, thinking that she's someone else. She doesn't mind. The beauty of being the doppelganger is that she gets to be all of them.
***
Of course there were more than just two.
It wasn't that hard to figure out, not for Katherine, and she's done her research (curiosity born out of tragic boredom). There were at least three other doppelgangers between herself and Elena, girls never discovered by anybody but her, girls who lived their mundane lives and never found out about moonstones or curses. They never fell for brothers and never had to run for their lives; they married young and bore children, and maybe they got a better deal (that's what Elena would say), but that's not how Katherine sees it.
(Once she was so curious that she came too close, and the woman grabbed her arm with surprising strength. “Do I know you from somewhere?”, she asked sharply, but Katherine just shook off her wrinkled hand, “I don't think so. I just have one of those faces.”)
She doesn't know a thing about the First.
***
One day Elena walks on her when Katherine, shamelessly dressed in Elena's clothes, goes through Ric's pictures of cave drawings. There is a moment of awkward silence, but, surprisingly, yelling never comes. It seems that Elena just gets straight to her little detective work, and Katherine is about to say something snarky about how Klaus probably wouldn't be killed by photos, but she holds her tongue because suddenly everything starts to make sense; because neither of them is here for Klaus. For the first time Elena is openly staring at her, examining every detail of her face and body, and Katherine lets her; she really can understand this kind of curiosity.
Without a word Elena gives her a picture of a knife, and really, it's strangely fitting that it should be a knife. It's ugly and sloppy, and for a second Katherine thinks that it can't be it, but then she starts laughing at herself, because expecting a lamb or a beautiful virgin was just a rookie mistake. That's just how a legend would have it (that's how a legend will have it): there was a girl, young, and sweet, and innocent, nothing like the monsters who surrounded her, and she was sacrificed on an altar of blood. Katherine looks Elena in the eye and they both nod; they are doppelgangers, so they, of all people should know how legends really work.
“I don't know anything but stories,” says Katherine after a couple of minutes, and Elena just shrugs her shoulders in a very un-Elena-like manner.
“Rebekah said that she'd been the one who forged the daggers.”
“She was a witch?”
“I guess.”
“Strong and fierce. I like her. Do you trust what Rebekah says?”
“I'm not sure.”
“No, you don't.”
“No. I don't.”
Title: Be Careful What You Wish For
Rating: NC17
Prompt: One minute I’m a little sweetheart / And next minute you're an absolute creep, prompted by ever-neutral
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Wordcount: 300
Summary: It feels all wrong, almost peaceful.
Be Careful What You Wish For
“Are you gonna kill me?”
“Mhm. But not yet.”
Elena strokes his cheek and smiles in a way that makes Damon shiver; it's a playful smile, beautiful, bright, candid and open (it reminds him of a delusion he once had). She looks like she's going to say something more, so Damon just leans over her and gives her a kiss; this is the sensation he used to crave desperately, so he doesn't want her to spoil it just yet. Elena giggles into his mouth, but lets him do whatever he wants; she kisses him back, and messes his hair when he moves down to her arms and collarbones. It feels all wrong, almost peaceful, soft skin and feather-like touches, and Damon promises himself that he's going to snap out of this any second now, but Elena starts playing along, so they're both trapped.
It looks a bit like a long-forgotten dream: Damon finds himself lying on his side, his legs splayed, Elena's lips on his chest and her breasts just an inch from his mouth. There is a rhythm he can't quite catch, but it gets easier with every kiss, as Elena's muscles are tensing and her fingers start digging into his skin, and by the time she reaches his stomach everything is familiar, finally; Elena bites his hip and suddenly Damon is wide awake, and so relieved he can hardly breathe.
He bares his teeth just because he can, and Elena laughs out loud. It's a part of the game: she can never be sure it's only a tease, and, to be honest, neither is he.
“Are you gonna kill me?”, asks Damon again before he nestles his head on her leg, and then he lets out a sharp cry, because Elena starts tracing his thigh with her fingernails.
“I don't know. Haven't decided yet.”
Title: The Better Man
Rating: PG13
Prompt: Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you, it will set you free. Be more like the man you were made to be, prompted by dante-kent
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Wordcount: 700
Summary: Elena tries to figure out who Damon really is. It doesn't work so well.
The Better Man
Damon's journal is painfully boring.
Elena finds it in the library in the Boarding House, and it takes her about twenty pages to realize that this is the Damon Salvatore, all neat handwriting and tedious sentences. She starts reading because of sheer disbelief, and after an hour she can't believe she's still doing it to herself; it feels almost like being fascinated by a really bad novel.
“Invading privacy much?”
She is too startled to answer right away, so he just takes the journal from her hands and starts flipping the pages.
“God, why is it still here? This family is just a bunch of pack rats.”
“You used to write a journal? You?”
“Of course I did. It's a national sport in this town, right next to dying during important festivals.”
“Damon, seriously.”
“Seriously, Elena. I was a kid, my father thought it would be a good excercise. He would read this every week to see how I was doing.”
She half-expects Damon would be at least a bit angry, but no. Instead he simply gives her back the book, walks towards another shelf and starts looking for something.
“Oh, here you are,” he says as he grabs some musty old Hemingway. “Anyway, enjoy yourself, Elena. As far as I remember the writing doesn't get any better. Someone should've just burned this journal ages ago.”
And yet he didn't.
***
Damon is so well-adjusted to living in the modern world it's usually hard to process that he was born before bicycles were invented, but once Elena starts spotting all the small things she is surprised she's never noticed them before; Damon always chooses the right glass when he pours a drink and he is so comfortable in a suit he might as well have been born in one.
(Damon does not care about collateral damage, and he usually needs up to five words to humiliate a person he thinks lower than himself.)
At first it's just funny, a bit like accidentaly finding a picture of your boss when he was seven and dressed up as a koala bear, but the deeper Elena digs the more serious it gets, because she can't explain how did this sweet, innocent boy turn into the Damon she knows. So she reads the journal again and again, she observes and asks questions, and when she finds some old photographs, she grabs them as if they were a long-lost treasure.
She looks through them with Damon and Alaric, pretending that it's pure curiosity on her part, and while Rick is obsessively making notes and asking hundreds of questions, Elena picks up a picture of a young man dressed in a grey uniform; a familiar face changed a little by some strange solemnity.
“Is this how you were before you met Katherine?”, she blurts out without thinking, and Damon looks as if he didn't really understand the question.
“Yeah, I guess. I have no idea, it might've been taken when I was on leave. 1862 or 1864, not sure.”
(This is who he was when he fell in love with Katherine.)
***
After a couple of months it really starts messing with her head, and even though Elena tries to draw a fine line between now and then, the two Damons in her mind look more and more like one and the same person. It's dangerous, she knows it, but she can't help it; she keeps noticing all the glimpses from the past, the human Damon who danced with her and fell in love with her.
(The human Damon who believes that love should be All-or-Nothing.)
“You can be the better man, you know?”, she tells him one night when he gives her a glass of wine. She makes a mental note that the bigger ones go with red; she can never remeber how to serve different kinds of wine.
“Yes, Elena, because this is exactly how it works,” he says impatiently, but then he smiles anyway.
“I mean it, Damon. I can see who you are. I believe in you.”
(When he breaks her neck later this night, he does it in the most caressing fashion.)
Title: Anger Management
Rating: PG13
Prompt: I'm looking for my friend, prompted by ever-neutral
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Wordcount: 1000
Summary Elena has no reason to be angry right now; she just can't be angry.
Anger Management
Elena has always been a nice person.
She knows how to keep herself in check, and she can deal with just anything; after all, she's had a lot of practice. It's better this way. She's tried yelling and raging, hell, she's even tried blaming the vampires, but none of those things ever worked. So Elena doesn't get angry any more; her problems are big enough without her blowing them out of propotions. Instead Elena chooses to be reasonable; she deals with stuff, and then she moves on.
***
Stefan might be gone, at least for now, but sooner or later Klaus is coming back for more blood, and Elena needs to be prepared. So two days after the Homecoming she resumes her training with Alaric, and Damon joins them, even though nobody asks him.
Rick doesn't have that much time for her, so it happens more and more often that she's stuck only with Damon. It takes a couple of days for her to realize how surprisingly not awkward it's going; Damon really tries be helpful. He is full of useful advice, no provocations or strange innuendos (it's entirely possible that she's just stopped noticing them), and even when he gets too close, it seems like the most natural thing in the world.
Elena is fine (she should be fine), but there is something building up in her she can't quite explain. She has no reason to be angry right now, she just can't be angry, and yet she gets annoyed by things so silly she's almost ashamed to mention them, little fights with Jeremy or Alaric putting a frying pan in a wrong drawer.
“Oh, just hit me already,” says Damon impatiently after four or five days. “If it' makes you feel any better...”
“I am hitting you.”
“No, you are training with me. Just hit me for real, and let's be done with all the tension.”
Elena clenches her fists, but she does nothing; at least not that day. A week later, when Damon deliberately puts Caroline in danger just to get more information about Klaus, Elena punches him so hard she hurts her hand.
***
Damon is always there for her to be annoyed with (she has no reason to be angry, she keeps telling herself, right now she has no reason). Sometimes it feels that he deliberately picks fights with her, so after the incident with Caroline she snaps at him so often she's lost count.
“I brought peace offerings,” he announces when she is sitting in his library after yet another argument, holding on to a book and focused on breathing like a normal person.
“I'm not mad at you. Why are you apologizing?”
“Of course you are mad. And I'm not apologizing. I just thought you could use a drink.”
She takes a few sips, because it's a polite thing to do, but refuses to go any further.
“We can't be like that,” she tells him. “I can't fight with you all the time.”
“Of course you can. I mean, if I were you, I'd fight with me all the time.”
“That's not how friendship is supposed to work.”
“Sure about that?”
***
Elena moves out of Mystic Falls right after graduation, and she doesn't even care about the mess she's leaving behind her. She needs her life to be normal, she needs to be happy and date a nice guy; she needs to start over, and she is going to do it even if it kills her.
There always is some background noise in her head, but she learns to ignore it. She decides to work for a year before she goes to college, so she finds a job, and everything is just splendid; she has a good place to stay, and her job isn't as tedious as she thought it would be. She even manages to make some friends and have the kind of social life like she used to have before the whole vampire drama.
She expected that Damon would follow her and fail miserably at properly hiding his presence, but it does surprise her how much she doesn't mind. She simply ignores him, lets him observe her from the other side of the street or wander around her apartament, and one night when she is out with friends and so happy it nearly chokes her, she makes a lame excuse, runs away and takes a seat at the bar, right next to him.
***
When she finally sleeps with Damon, it's the most comfortable sex she's ever had; she is naked and angry, and he doesn't even try to calm her down, he just follows. There is no broken furniture or torn-up clothes, because it's Elena who is in charge, and she doesn't need this kind of show. She is done with yelling and slapping Damon's face; now it's enough for her to touch him like she means it. Elena lets her anger build up slowly, and then she lets go, and suddenly her mind is all clear.
It's hardly the most satysfying sex she's ever had, but that's strangely fitting. It's not like she did it because she needed Damon to rock her world; the point was for her to rock her own world.
“How are you?”, she asks when they are done (when he is done), and she can feel him shifting slightly under her as he lets out a quiet laughter.
“Fine, I guess. And you?”
“Calm. I feel calm.”
There is a moment of silence, and it's not entirely impossible that Damon would choose it to say something silly, like “I love you”, but he does no such thing. Elena is sure that this subject will come up eventually, and she might even tell him she loves him back (neither of them knows what love is), but right now Damon is smart enough to know that this is not an accurate word at all.
“Roll over,” he tells her instead. “Your turn.”