fic: here for the echoes... (3/4+epilogue)
Title: Here For The Echoes
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries (television series)
Characters/Pairings: General cast. Eventual Damon/Elena.
Word Count: 1900
Rating: M
Prompt: From miss_blanche. Damon is in danger of some description and Stefan and Elena are standing aside helpless. Elena is distraught and certain feelings are revealed when Stefan questions her.
Summary: Damon POV. Season 2 AU. She's crying. Silent tears that drop from her chin and fall heavily to the hardwood at her feet with a thunderous clap that echoes through his ribcage.
Author's Note: Title and cut text from “In The Veins Of Death Valley”, Birds of Tokyo.
Part 1: You tell me that everything is fine here, and you can handle it...
Part 2: Struggle to fight the feud within, to face what you've become...
Time seems to burst into fragments. Incoherent, abstract as it jumps around him in leaps and scratches. Hours, days, minutes. He can no longer be sure.
Stefan slings him over his shoulder at one point. And he's too stunned by the frozen look of fear on Elena's face to do anything more than offer a cursory protest that barely makes it to audible anyway. Her fingers play across her lips, pull at the skin there. She's crying. Silent tears that drop from her chin and fall heavily to the hardwood at her feet with a thunderous clap that echoes through his ribcage.
The world slides all the way to the left then. And so far south that the endless white light becomes a welcome reprieve.
He wakes to darkness and echoes and ever present agony.
He does not wake to solitude.
“You need to eat something...” Fingers tap lightly against his wrist.
The thought sends a ripple of revulsion through him that he refuses point blank to acknowledge. Digs his fingertips into the tangled sheet instead and manages to bite out something predictably inappropriate and glib in response.
“You offering, babe?”
His voice betrays every desperate shred of panic that has filled him since Bonnie's departure. Flayed him to ruins in the presence of the one person he'd sworn would never bare witness to his failings...
“Damon, don't...” Her fingers are gone. Maybe they were never there.
She deserves better and he knows this like he knows she deserves better than him...
- - -
A lamp bursts to life in a far corner, bathes the room in a glow that burns his retinas to blackened ash. The groan trips from his lips before he has the sense to clamp it down.
Down. Down.
So far down.
“Damon.” She's whispering but it's still nails across chalkboard. Powder white.
“Vervain.” He grits the word out between teeth that grind viciously.
“What?” But she's no where near as confused as she's pretending to be. Of that he is certain.
“Please, Elena. Please...” He forces his eyelids to open, wide. Knows he needs all the superficial advantage he can get in the fight he can already feel building in the feet and inches of space between them.
He doesn't want the end. He just wants the end of this.
“No. No...” She doesn't pretend for long... Shock. Outrage. Knuckles in her mouth and head lolling. Side to side to side...
He pushes up from the mattress, fingers splayed, elbows locked. She's on him in seconds. Hands and words and big, brown eyes that threaten to undo him all over again.
“It's poison...”
“It'll kill you...”
“You can't...”
“I won't...”
And that last one could shatter his ribcage. If she meant it.
(He knows that she couldn't possibly...)
But it's too much now. Was too much too many days ago to count. And he may be weakened, shaking, but she's still no match for him.
And he'll never be a match for her...
- - -
He makes it to the head of the staircase before her screams catch him up. Considers simply throwing himself over the side but is still lucid enough to reconcile the fact that the fifteen foot drop will end none of his problems.
And he never was one for symbolic martyrdom anyhow...
“Stefan.” She's shrieking. A desperate panic that pierces the parts of him that are still functioning with some degree of normalcy. “Damon, no! Stefan, help me.”
He laughs but doesn't bother to turn back.
“Make up your mind, Katherine...” He regrets the words as soon as they're out. Deflates as the air behind him falls to loaded silence.
“Why do you always do that?” Whispered. But she knows the answers. She knows them inside out. And so he doesn't bother to invent a lie.
Another one.
After all, she stopped believing in them months ago.
- - -
Arms circle him from behind and he all but collapses into her as they slump to seated. He can hear the front door open. Close again. Stuttered footsteps over hardwood floor that hammer as heavily as her heartbeat. They'd been the only ones in the house but Stefan wasn't far.
Stefan is never far...
And he can't blame him for the complete distrust. It has been more than earned.
- - -
Stefan's response parallels Elena's. Only with a little less of the seizure inducing shrieks. He makes a deliberate effort to point this out. Plasters on a smirk that feels oddly unfamiliar by now and digs his fingernails into his palms.
A momentary reprieve of sorts.
The answer is still no. And they still don't get it.
“I just...” he trails off because they're not listening. They're not even looking.
They devise a glorified suicide watch. He rolls his eyes and makes promises he knows they want to hear but will never believe.
“We're fixing this, Damon...” A mantra mumbled many times over.
It falls on deaf ears. For there can be no fixing this.
- - -
“Stefan is mad at you.” His words are a statement of fact. Not a question.
She shrugs. A brief up and down of her shoulders by way of a response. Doesn't even bother to look up. Her fingers are tapping out a tentative rhythm against her thigh, he counts the looping beat. One, two, five, nine... loses it again.
“I'm sorry.”
He's not.
(Except maybe he really is this time...)
She shrugs again. A non answer.
“Elena...” The tapping continues. Thunderous drumbeats inside his shattering skull. “Seriously, you can call off the suic-”
“Why did you want the vervain?” She looks up as she speaks. Demands a response despite the fact that she'd all but refused him one.
He brings his knees up to his chest. A foetal position of sorts. “I just-”
“Because if you've given up on us already then...”
He gets stuck on the us for a beat. Rolls the word around inside his chest to see what it feels like. To taste it just for a fleeting moment.
“... they're all down there right now you know. Researching. Stefan, Alaric, Caroline... me when we're not three quarters to convinced you're about to put a gun in your mouth.”
Oh.
That 'us'.
He doesn't bother to point out that a gun in his mouth won't kill him. Her lips part. Fall closed again around a sigh.
“So,” She's crying. He's not entirely convinced that she knows this. “I just want to know if we're wasting our time.”
Matter of fact.
He feels ill. All the time. And maybe it's only been hours. Or days. But it feels like years and he thinks someone might have taken a meat mallet to his brain at some point because everything hurts. Everything. Constantly. Even his fingernails. And he's so goddamn tired that, even though it's not what he wants the vervain for, not really, the idea of going to sleep and never waking up again grows more and more appealing with each sliding second.
But she's crying...
She might even be crying for him.
And so he kisses her then, saltwater slick, because it is all he has left to give.
- - -
“Damon.”
His name as an exhale of warm air.
“Shhhhhh... please.” Fingers and thumbs and his lips, soft, against her ear.
- - -
The house is a whirlwind of activity. Footsteps tap out patterns against hardwood and stone on the floors below. Muted voices float up staircases and through closed doors and they're never loud enough but they're always too loud just the same.
Elena rarely leaves. He's no where near brave enough to ask her why.
Or why now.
Or if the endless arguments that punctuate his dreams have anything to do with him.
She rarely leaves but when she does she always returns with yet another layer scraped loose. One more angle chiseled in, ten more grey shadows lurking over her shoulder.
And the only thing he does know with any degree of gut wrenching certainty is that, somehow, it will all come back to him. One more demise to add to the never-ending list of travesty he's spent the best part of a century and a half cultivating.
That she shall be his last seems oddly poetic.
(Katherine was his first. So he likes to think.
Or maybe he was hers... He can no longer decipher the difference.)
She curls up on the foot of his bed. Clamps raging hot fingers around his left ankle. Holds tight. His anchor. As though he'll up and float away while she's sleeping if she doesn't keep him grounded.
And she may be right.
He only just resists the urge not to kick her loose.
Tells himself it's for the best. It's for her. Manages to conjure a lie that even he almost believes.
- - -
“Bonnie's here...” Elena appears in his doorway, leans her weight against the frame.
He flinches. Visibly. Too tired and too numb to care enough to hide it.
“We have a plan.”
Daylight has faded. Tick off another twenty four hours.
“We do?” The words catch at the back of his throat and he chokes around them. Trips, falls. She's beside him then, fingers threaded through his.
“We do.” She nods. As though to convince herself more than anything else. “But there's a catch. Bonnie thinks she can break it, but she'll need some help and the people she needs help from, well they'll only help her if she gives them the moonstone.”
“Katherine has the moonstone.” He frowns. Can't quite put all the pieces together into a picture that makes sense.
“It's okay, we have a plan for that, too.” And he already hates the hesitation in her voice. The implications hidden there.
“No.” He drops her hand. Backs away a staggered step or seven.
“Damon, it's the only way.”
“No. No, I won't let you.”
“You can't stop me.” The fact that she's right burns slow. And ice, ice cold.
- - -
He doesn't understand the plan. What they're attempting to fix. Why they're willing to risk so much for nothing.
For almost nothing.
“Stefan? What the hell are you thinking?” A chair is shoved at the back of his legs. He offers a show of resistance that he absolutely does not feel before sinking into it. Head in his hands. Eyes slammed to shut.
Tight.
The room is ominously silent. They have made their decisions.
His input is no longer required.
“What's going on?” He pushes back to staggered standing. Faces the line of them. Wild. Wired.
The tension in the room is palpable. Suffocating. Caroline shifts as he locks his gaze on her, figures she is the weakest link in this incongruous chain.
Except she's not.
She never was.
(It was always him.)
Stefan steps forward. Pushes strong hands against his chest.
“We're doing this, Damon.” Nods once. Decision made.
“No.” Adamant.
“It's too late for no. She's already on her way...”
He drags his eyes from Stefan's at that. Notices the room has emptied out.
The temperature inside his chest drops by degrees.
“What have you done?” His fingers wrap around his brother's jaw, angle his chin across to look at him. “Where is she? What the hell have you done?”
Stefan shrugs, shakes himself loose. Blurs into the endless oblivion.
And his wrist is in his mouth then. Stifling a scream.
Rage. Fear.
Elena.
A heady mix of both.
Part 4
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries (television series)
Characters/Pairings: General cast. Eventual Damon/Elena.
Word Count: 1900
Rating: M
Prompt: From miss_blanche. Damon is in danger of some description and Stefan and Elena are standing aside helpless. Elena is distraught and certain feelings are revealed when Stefan questions her.
Summary: Damon POV. Season 2 AU. She's crying. Silent tears that drop from her chin and fall heavily to the hardwood at her feet with a thunderous clap that echoes through his ribcage.
Author's Note: Title and cut text from “In The Veins Of Death Valley”, Birds of Tokyo.
Part 1: You tell me that everything is fine here, and you can handle it...
Part 2: Struggle to fight the feud within, to face what you've become...
Time seems to burst into fragments. Incoherent, abstract as it jumps around him in leaps and scratches. Hours, days, minutes. He can no longer be sure.
Stefan slings him over his shoulder at one point. And he's too stunned by the frozen look of fear on Elena's face to do anything more than offer a cursory protest that barely makes it to audible anyway. Her fingers play across her lips, pull at the skin there. She's crying. Silent tears that drop from her chin and fall heavily to the hardwood at her feet with a thunderous clap that echoes through his ribcage.
The world slides all the way to the left then. And so far south that the endless white light becomes a welcome reprieve.
He wakes to darkness and echoes and ever present agony.
He does not wake to solitude.
“You need to eat something...” Fingers tap lightly against his wrist.
The thought sends a ripple of revulsion through him that he refuses point blank to acknowledge. Digs his fingertips into the tangled sheet instead and manages to bite out something predictably inappropriate and glib in response.
“You offering, babe?”
His voice betrays every desperate shred of panic that has filled him since Bonnie's departure. Flayed him to ruins in the presence of the one person he'd sworn would never bare witness to his failings...
“Damon, don't...” Her fingers are gone. Maybe they were never there.
She deserves better and he knows this like he knows she deserves better than him...
- - -
A lamp bursts to life in a far corner, bathes the room in a glow that burns his retinas to blackened ash. The groan trips from his lips before he has the sense to clamp it down.
Down. Down.
So far down.
“Damon.” She's whispering but it's still nails across chalkboard. Powder white.
“Vervain.” He grits the word out between teeth that grind viciously.
“What?” But she's no where near as confused as she's pretending to be. Of that he is certain.
“Please, Elena. Please...” He forces his eyelids to open, wide. Knows he needs all the superficial advantage he can get in the fight he can already feel building in the feet and inches of space between them.
He doesn't want the end. He just wants the end of this.
“No. No...” She doesn't pretend for long... Shock. Outrage. Knuckles in her mouth and head lolling. Side to side to side...
He pushes up from the mattress, fingers splayed, elbows locked. She's on him in seconds. Hands and words and big, brown eyes that threaten to undo him all over again.
“It's poison...”
“It'll kill you...”
“You can't...”
“I won't...”
And that last one could shatter his ribcage. If she meant it.
(He knows that she couldn't possibly...)
But it's too much now. Was too much too many days ago to count. And he may be weakened, shaking, but she's still no match for him.
And he'll never be a match for her...
- - -
He makes it to the head of the staircase before her screams catch him up. Considers simply throwing himself over the side but is still lucid enough to reconcile the fact that the fifteen foot drop will end none of his problems.
And he never was one for symbolic martyrdom anyhow...
“Stefan.” She's shrieking. A desperate panic that pierces the parts of him that are still functioning with some degree of normalcy. “Damon, no! Stefan, help me.”
He laughs but doesn't bother to turn back.
“Make up your mind, Katherine...” He regrets the words as soon as they're out. Deflates as the air behind him falls to loaded silence.
“Why do you always do that?” Whispered. But she knows the answers. She knows them inside out. And so he doesn't bother to invent a lie.
Another one.
After all, she stopped believing in them months ago.
- - -
Arms circle him from behind and he all but collapses into her as they slump to seated. He can hear the front door open. Close again. Stuttered footsteps over hardwood floor that hammer as heavily as her heartbeat. They'd been the only ones in the house but Stefan wasn't far.
Stefan is never far...
And he can't blame him for the complete distrust. It has been more than earned.
- - -
Stefan's response parallels Elena's. Only with a little less of the seizure inducing shrieks. He makes a deliberate effort to point this out. Plasters on a smirk that feels oddly unfamiliar by now and digs his fingernails into his palms.
A momentary reprieve of sorts.
The answer is still no. And they still don't get it.
“I just...” he trails off because they're not listening. They're not even looking.
They devise a glorified suicide watch. He rolls his eyes and makes promises he knows they want to hear but will never believe.
“We're fixing this, Damon...” A mantra mumbled many times over.
It falls on deaf ears. For there can be no fixing this.
- - -
“Stefan is mad at you.” His words are a statement of fact. Not a question.
She shrugs. A brief up and down of her shoulders by way of a response. Doesn't even bother to look up. Her fingers are tapping out a tentative rhythm against her thigh, he counts the looping beat. One, two, five, nine... loses it again.
“I'm sorry.”
He's not.
(Except maybe he really is this time...)
She shrugs again. A non answer.
“Elena...” The tapping continues. Thunderous drumbeats inside his shattering skull. “Seriously, you can call off the suic-”
“Why did you want the vervain?” She looks up as she speaks. Demands a response despite the fact that she'd all but refused him one.
He brings his knees up to his chest. A foetal position of sorts. “I just-”
“Because if you've given up on us already then...”
He gets stuck on the us for a beat. Rolls the word around inside his chest to see what it feels like. To taste it just for a fleeting moment.
“... they're all down there right now you know. Researching. Stefan, Alaric, Caroline... me when we're not three quarters to convinced you're about to put a gun in your mouth.”
Oh.
That 'us'.
He doesn't bother to point out that a gun in his mouth won't kill him. Her lips part. Fall closed again around a sigh.
“So,” She's crying. He's not entirely convinced that she knows this. “I just want to know if we're wasting our time.”
Matter of fact.
He feels ill. All the time. And maybe it's only been hours. Or days. But it feels like years and he thinks someone might have taken a meat mallet to his brain at some point because everything hurts. Everything. Constantly. Even his fingernails. And he's so goddamn tired that, even though it's not what he wants the vervain for, not really, the idea of going to sleep and never waking up again grows more and more appealing with each sliding second.
But she's crying...
She might even be crying for him.
And so he kisses her then, saltwater slick, because it is all he has left to give.
- - -
“Damon.”
His name as an exhale of warm air.
“Shhhhhh... please.” Fingers and thumbs and his lips, soft, against her ear.
- - -
The house is a whirlwind of activity. Footsteps tap out patterns against hardwood and stone on the floors below. Muted voices float up staircases and through closed doors and they're never loud enough but they're always too loud just the same.
Elena rarely leaves. He's no where near brave enough to ask her why.
Or why now.
Or if the endless arguments that punctuate his dreams have anything to do with him.
She rarely leaves but when she does she always returns with yet another layer scraped loose. One more angle chiseled in, ten more grey shadows lurking over her shoulder.
And the only thing he does know with any degree of gut wrenching certainty is that, somehow, it will all come back to him. One more demise to add to the never-ending list of travesty he's spent the best part of a century and a half cultivating.
That she shall be his last seems oddly poetic.
(Katherine was his first. So he likes to think.
Or maybe he was hers... He can no longer decipher the difference.)
She curls up on the foot of his bed. Clamps raging hot fingers around his left ankle. Holds tight. His anchor. As though he'll up and float away while she's sleeping if she doesn't keep him grounded.
And she may be right.
He only just resists the urge not to kick her loose.
Tells himself it's for the best. It's for her. Manages to conjure a lie that even he almost believes.
- - -
“Bonnie's here...” Elena appears in his doorway, leans her weight against the frame.
He flinches. Visibly. Too tired and too numb to care enough to hide it.
“We have a plan.”
Daylight has faded. Tick off another twenty four hours.
“We do?” The words catch at the back of his throat and he chokes around them. Trips, falls. She's beside him then, fingers threaded through his.
“We do.” She nods. As though to convince herself more than anything else. “But there's a catch. Bonnie thinks she can break it, but she'll need some help and the people she needs help from, well they'll only help her if she gives them the moonstone.”
“Katherine has the moonstone.” He frowns. Can't quite put all the pieces together into a picture that makes sense.
“It's okay, we have a plan for that, too.” And he already hates the hesitation in her voice. The implications hidden there.
“No.” He drops her hand. Backs away a staggered step or seven.
“Damon, it's the only way.”
“No. No, I won't let you.”
“You can't stop me.” The fact that she's right burns slow. And ice, ice cold.
- - -
He doesn't understand the plan. What they're attempting to fix. Why they're willing to risk so much for nothing.
For almost nothing.
“Stefan? What the hell are you thinking?” A chair is shoved at the back of his legs. He offers a show of resistance that he absolutely does not feel before sinking into it. Head in his hands. Eyes slammed to shut.
Tight.
The room is ominously silent. They have made their decisions.
His input is no longer required.
“What's going on?” He pushes back to staggered standing. Faces the line of them. Wild. Wired.
The tension in the room is palpable. Suffocating. Caroline shifts as he locks his gaze on her, figures she is the weakest link in this incongruous chain.
Except she's not.
She never was.
(It was always him.)
Stefan steps forward. Pushes strong hands against his chest.
“We're doing this, Damon.” Nods once. Decision made.
“No.” Adamant.
“It's too late for no. She's already on her way...”
He drags his eyes from Stefan's at that. Notices the room has emptied out.
The temperature inside his chest drops by degrees.
“What have you done?” His fingers wrap around his brother's jaw, angle his chin across to look at him. “Where is she? What the hell have you done?”
Stefan shrugs, shakes himself loose. Blurs into the endless oblivion.
And his wrist is in his mouth then. Stifling a scream.
Rage. Fear.
Elena.
A heady mix of both.
Part 4