[fic] How Cliché
Title: How Cliché
Author: badboy_fangirl
Characters/Pairings: Damon POV; Damon/Elena with a few cameos by our other favorites.
Word Count: ~2100
Rating/Warnings: PG-13
Spoilers: Everything through 6x08, and the preview for 6x09 + speculation beyond that.
Summary:
Author's notes: Yeah. So, I'm back. For a minute or two. I wanted this to be more than it is, but maybe after nearly a year of not writing Damon, I just need to grateful for what happened and leave it at that. HAPPY AMERICAN THANKSGIVING!
And also, for anyone who thinks Elena erasing her memories is out of character, let me remind you of this:
Elena laughs.
(It always catches him by surprise, makes something in his chest ache in this hurts so good way. Makes him stop and look. What made her laugh? Why is she laughing? How does he make it happen again and again?)
"What?" he asks, not sure if every single anxiety he has about it shows in his tone or not.
Elena looks up from her phone, smiling. "Bonnie just emailed me. She said it sounds like we're having a Summer of Love." She makes air-quotes with the hand not holding her phone.
"And that's funny?"
She shakes her head, her smile getting bigger and bigger. "No, silly. It's true."
Damon's heart turns over in his chest, for lack of a better cliché.
Yeah, they are.
So, it's kinda weird, but he thinks they make out more than they have sex. Not that they don't have sex, because of course they have sex.
But sometimes they just don't get to the sex, and he doesn't really care.
(And that's weird, right?)
They kiss. For hours. For days. For weeks.
This one night they stand in the rain, long enough that humans would be water-logged, catch a deadly cold, and be buried come Monday morning, just kissing.
It's like deep, possess-a-soul-through-your-tongue kissing, but still. It's just kissing. Nobody ends up naked, nobody grinds against each other. Each time Elena comes up for air, she gasps out something like Promise me this is forever and I love you and I hope this night never ends.
Damon's responses are typical, he supposes. I promise and I love you more and Me, too.
Eventually, he drags her back to the car and they lay on a blanket in the backseat while their clothes dry in the front, because even though they could just go home and take care of things, Elena doesn't want to, and Damon can't find a reason to argue.
(This is what being happy does to a person. They do stupid shit, with stupid smiles on their faces, while, you know, practically kissing each others' lips off.)
They sleep in the Camaro, awkwardly naked and completely blissed out, with no orgasms or bourbon in sight.
(They are drunk on love, and each other, for lack of better clichés.)
When he began to let himself accept that Elena might want him, that she might actually love him, it had never really occurred to him what would happen, once (if ever) he got her. He hadn't thought much beyond the climax, even though he'd have been content to just hold her hand for eternity.
But she tells him in her own ways, both subtle and blatant, that eternity already started. That the path they are on, together, is going to be fraught with difficulties, because he's Damon Salvatore; but she doesn't care.
He realizes then, what the kissing means. What it all means. He's always been greedy about her; but he's also always been willing to wait. One step forward to two steps back never slowed him down (for lack of a better cliché) and that was the beauty of their dance, anyway. He learned the steps, figured out just when to twist and turn, when to dip her, when to pull her close, and when to let her go again.
After a while, he didn't even have to think about it; sometimes he did it without realizing it was part of the routine. If he pushed Elena away, she wanted him more; she found more reasons to love him, more (better) reasons to overlook his shortcomings, more (infinite) reasons to give him a chance to fix it.
(He is a work in progress, for lack of a better...well, you know.)
But as he learns his steps, she's learning hers, too. She figures out how to lead him right into what he should be, to what he should do, and then he just naturally wants to do all those things anyway. Without coercion, without expectations.
It was love, always love.
The biggest fucking cliché of all.
He would like to be more complicated.
To those looking in, perhaps he is.
Or at least he was.
It takes about 32 days in 1994 Purgatory for Bonnie Bennett to extract from him all his precious memories. He gives himself a figurative pat on the back for remaining silent for at least 21 of them. And then he retreats into his pick-a-fight coping mechanism (that Bonnie so kindly points out to him during one of their many bickering-that-gets-ugly-for-a-few-minutes arguments) and doesn't speak of Elena at all for days on end.
Then slowly, because he'll lose his fucking mind if he doesn't say her name aloud, he starts in all over again, until by the end, Bonnie probably knows all those moments as intimately as he does.
(Not the intimate ones. He has some things he only pulls out late at night, alone in his room; when he can think about the bed he'll have in the future that will house a delightful woman-child who sleeps peacefully by his side for a season that they will call their Summer of Love.)
"I called it that," Bonnie says one day when he tells her about the inside joke.
"Yes, Bonnie, I know," he snarks, and she rolls her eyes.
Then, "I've never seen Elena so happy, and I've known her all my life."
Damon damn near cries at that, but manages to pick a fight instead.
He's the cliché. He gets it now, from light years and space-time continuums away.
Of course, Elena erased her memories.
He's not sure why he's so surprised, and so fucking hurt; or how he's simultaneously sorry for her and mad at her and just wants to hold her, but she's looking at him like he's got two heads or something.
(He remembers I can't, I can't, I can't! It hurts! It hurts! Just make it stop, please, make it stop, it hurts!
Sometimes, when he thinks back on that memory, he can hear the sire bond snap, but that's something he just made up.)
He wants to tell her how she used to kiss him like she'd never get tired of it. He wants to tell her that she's asked for his life to be joined to hers in death-do-we-part format (Take the cure; be human with me. We can be together--grow old together!), and in for-all-time-and-eternity format (Promise me this is forever!). He wants to tell her that she loves nothing more than their feet rubbing together in the early morning; that her preferred way of waking up was not his tongue between her legs, but instead his toes snaking up the underside of her heel.
He can list a million things and she can't remember a single one, so in the end, he walks away. He lets her have it her way, because he's already danced this dance.
He couldn't possibly get it right twice.
When she comes to berate him for going to Portland without her, there is a split second where his very atoms recognize everything about her that belongs to him; he almost forgets why he didn't bring her along.
(But then he remembers, how she chose to forget.)
When she asks him to help her find Bonnie so she can ask her some lame-ass question, he doesn't even hesitate.
(Cliché. Remember?)
Jo tells them the only way to rescue Bonnie is to go to 1994 Purgatory, and Elena claps her hands and says, "When do we leave?"
"It's Mystic Falls 1994?" she demands as soon as the world stops spinning and they're standing in the town square, right where he and Bonnie had first looked at each other with what the fuck expressions.
"Yup," he says.
"Where do you think Bonnie is?" Elena asks, spinning around to take it all in.
"No telling. We spent most of our time at the Boarding House, but if she's trying to ditch Kai..."
"Wait," Elena interrupts. "Is...my house here?"
Her eyes connect with his and he nods slowly. Her bottom lip trembles. "We hung out on the porch from time to time. Never went inside. I don't know why."
(That's a lie. He knows why. That porch was filled with memories. He fucking loves the Gilbert porch. It had been a place he often went during his four-month stay.)
"Let's go there, then the Boarding House." She shrugs apologetically.
"It's on the way, it's fine," he reassures.
It's funny how daunting some things feel when you look at them through someone else's eyes. It's not like it's a magic porch. He doesn't think she'll see it and remember their first real kiss. Or every conversation of importance that happened there from the douchey time he told her she was a lot like Katherine to the time he justified using the sire bond to his brother to help her get through losing hers.
Kisses (if I'm gonna feel guilty about something, I'm gonna feel guilty about this), vows (it's right, just not right now), and directions (I want you to tell him that Vicki left town).
The sadness in Elena's expression breaks his heart all over again, because he knows it's for childhood memories, and things she shouldn't have burned away in a moment of switch-flipped anarchy. Then she turns to him and says, "I'm sorry for compelling away the memories. They were only half mine."
Maybe she says that because of what she sees on his face, he doesn't know. But suddenly the truth is bigger than all of that. He touches her cheek gently. "We'll make new ones," he says.
They have eternity, after all.
It's then that Damon stops reprimanding himself for thinking in clichés.
They're clichés for a reason; it doesn't mean they aren't true.
Days later he hears Bonnie say, "The heart wants what the heart wants, Elena. You tried to fight it once, and it didn't work, trust me."
They bust through a worm hole and land in the Salvatore crypt Kai-less, and it's a victory. Damon takes it, happily, because he knows there's something else around the corner that will fuck him up.
Stefan and Caroline are waiting for them, and after massive amounts of hugs, she says, "Okay. Now we figure out how to break the no-magic zone."
He looks at his brother, who shrugs his solidarity with Caroline (because of course he's never gonna let her down again, now that it seems she's forgiven him), and Damon says, "I need a drink."
Bonnie smiles at him and reaches over to squeeze his arm. "It doesn't have to be done tonight," she says.
A few weeks later, Elena comes bouncing into the bar just off Whitmore's campus that he spends the majority of his time in now. Her smile is sort of ridiculous, and he feels his suspicions rise.
"What?" he asks.
"Bonnie found a spell that she thinks will de-activate the border."
Impossibly, her smile gets larger.
"Oh, really?" he asks, tipping his glass of bourbon at her. "Why does she think it will work?"
Elena pauses, and then moves in really close to him. He stiffens, because even though they spend a considerable amount of time together, it's not like they are together because Elena, while intrigued enough by what she felt to dump Liam, doesn't trust it fully, and she never let it go too far. In all these weeks with her he'd had one moment where she almost kissed him, but he watched as she lost her nerve, and all but ran from the room they were in at the time.
(The irony of not liking repeating 2010 was not lost on Damon. If only the Summer of Love could be the Groundhog Day of his life, he'd never complain again.)
At this moment, however, she looks into his eyes, drops her gaze to his lips and then slowly, oh-so-torturously drags them up until they are looking at each other again. "She tried it on me, first."
He can see it then, the laughter, the wildness, the love that's been missing from her face since he returned. His breath gets trapped in his chest, and even though he wants to ask, he can't make words.
"I love you, Damon," she whispers, wrapping her arm around his neck. "I love you," she repeats urgently, just like the first time. Her lips hover over his, and she says, "That's my favorite memory--when I knew, when I really knew, and I was brave enough to tell you, even over the phone. I wasn't scared anymore; I was free."
She kisses him then, like she's got all the time in the world.
Author: badboy_fangirl
Characters/Pairings: Damon POV; Damon/Elena with a few cameos by our other favorites.
Word Count: ~2100
Rating/Warnings: PG-13
Spoilers: Everything through 6x08, and the preview for 6x09 + speculation beyond that.
Summary:
Author's notes: Yeah. So, I'm back. For a minute or two. I wanted this to be more than it is, but maybe after nearly a year of not writing Damon, I just need to grateful for what happened and leave it at that. HAPPY AMERICAN THANKSGIVING!
And also, for anyone who thinks Elena erasing her memories is out of character, let me remind you of this:
Click to viewElena laughs.
(It always catches him by surprise, makes something in his chest ache in this hurts so good way. Makes him stop and look. What made her laugh? Why is she laughing? How does he make it happen again and again?)
"What?" he asks, not sure if every single anxiety he has about it shows in his tone or not.
Elena looks up from her phone, smiling. "Bonnie just emailed me. She said it sounds like we're having a Summer of Love." She makes air-quotes with the hand not holding her phone.
"And that's funny?"
She shakes her head, her smile getting bigger and bigger. "No, silly. It's true."
Damon's heart turns over in his chest, for lack of a better cliché.
Yeah, they are.
So, it's kinda weird, but he thinks they make out more than they have sex. Not that they don't have sex, because of course they have sex.
But sometimes they just don't get to the sex, and he doesn't really care.
(And that's weird, right?)
They kiss. For hours. For days. For weeks.
This one night they stand in the rain, long enough that humans would be water-logged, catch a deadly cold, and be buried come Monday morning, just kissing.
It's like deep, possess-a-soul-through-your-tongue kissing, but still. It's just kissing. Nobody ends up naked, nobody grinds against each other. Each time Elena comes up for air, she gasps out something like Promise me this is forever and I love you and I hope this night never ends.
Damon's responses are typical, he supposes. I promise and I love you more and Me, too.
Eventually, he drags her back to the car and they lay on a blanket in the backseat while their clothes dry in the front, because even though they could just go home and take care of things, Elena doesn't want to, and Damon can't find a reason to argue.
(This is what being happy does to a person. They do stupid shit, with stupid smiles on their faces, while, you know, practically kissing each others' lips off.)
They sleep in the Camaro, awkwardly naked and completely blissed out, with no orgasms or bourbon in sight.
(They are drunk on love, and each other, for lack of better clichés.)
When he began to let himself accept that Elena might want him, that she might actually love him, it had never really occurred to him what would happen, once (if ever) he got her. He hadn't thought much beyond the climax, even though he'd have been content to just hold her hand for eternity.
But she tells him in her own ways, both subtle and blatant, that eternity already started. That the path they are on, together, is going to be fraught with difficulties, because he's Damon Salvatore; but she doesn't care.
He realizes then, what the kissing means. What it all means. He's always been greedy about her; but he's also always been willing to wait. One step forward to two steps back never slowed him down (for lack of a better cliché) and that was the beauty of their dance, anyway. He learned the steps, figured out just when to twist and turn, when to dip her, when to pull her close, and when to let her go again.
After a while, he didn't even have to think about it; sometimes he did it without realizing it was part of the routine. If he pushed Elena away, she wanted him more; she found more reasons to love him, more (better) reasons to overlook his shortcomings, more (infinite) reasons to give him a chance to fix it.
(He is a work in progress, for lack of a better...well, you know.)
But as he learns his steps, she's learning hers, too. She figures out how to lead him right into what he should be, to what he should do, and then he just naturally wants to do all those things anyway. Without coercion, without expectations.
It was love, always love.
The biggest fucking cliché of all.
He would like to be more complicated.
To those looking in, perhaps he is.
Or at least he was.
It takes about 32 days in 1994 Purgatory for Bonnie Bennett to extract from him all his precious memories. He gives himself a figurative pat on the back for remaining silent for at least 21 of them. And then he retreats into his pick-a-fight coping mechanism (that Bonnie so kindly points out to him during one of their many bickering-that-gets-ugly-for-a-few-minutes arguments) and doesn't speak of Elena at all for days on end.
Then slowly, because he'll lose his fucking mind if he doesn't say her name aloud, he starts in all over again, until by the end, Bonnie probably knows all those moments as intimately as he does.
(Not the intimate ones. He has some things he only pulls out late at night, alone in his room; when he can think about the bed he'll have in the future that will house a delightful woman-child who sleeps peacefully by his side for a season that they will call their Summer of Love.)
"I called it that," Bonnie says one day when he tells her about the inside joke.
"Yes, Bonnie, I know," he snarks, and she rolls her eyes.
Then, "I've never seen Elena so happy, and I've known her all my life."
Damon damn near cries at that, but manages to pick a fight instead.
He's the cliché. He gets it now, from light years and space-time continuums away.
Of course, Elena erased her memories.
He's not sure why he's so surprised, and so fucking hurt; or how he's simultaneously sorry for her and mad at her and just wants to hold her, but she's looking at him like he's got two heads or something.
(He remembers I can't, I can't, I can't! It hurts! It hurts! Just make it stop, please, make it stop, it hurts!
Sometimes, when he thinks back on that memory, he can hear the sire bond snap, but that's something he just made up.)
He wants to tell her how she used to kiss him like she'd never get tired of it. He wants to tell her that she's asked for his life to be joined to hers in death-do-we-part format (Take the cure; be human with me. We can be together--grow old together!), and in for-all-time-and-eternity format (Promise me this is forever!). He wants to tell her that she loves nothing more than their feet rubbing together in the early morning; that her preferred way of waking up was not his tongue between her legs, but instead his toes snaking up the underside of her heel.
He can list a million things and she can't remember a single one, so in the end, he walks away. He lets her have it her way, because he's already danced this dance.
He couldn't possibly get it right twice.
When she comes to berate him for going to Portland without her, there is a split second where his very atoms recognize everything about her that belongs to him; he almost forgets why he didn't bring her along.
(But then he remembers, how she chose to forget.)
When she asks him to help her find Bonnie so she can ask her some lame-ass question, he doesn't even hesitate.
(Cliché. Remember?)
Jo tells them the only way to rescue Bonnie is to go to 1994 Purgatory, and Elena claps her hands and says, "When do we leave?"
"It's Mystic Falls 1994?" she demands as soon as the world stops spinning and they're standing in the town square, right where he and Bonnie had first looked at each other with what the fuck expressions.
"Yup," he says.
"Where do you think Bonnie is?" Elena asks, spinning around to take it all in.
"No telling. We spent most of our time at the Boarding House, but if she's trying to ditch Kai..."
"Wait," Elena interrupts. "Is...my house here?"
Her eyes connect with his and he nods slowly. Her bottom lip trembles. "We hung out on the porch from time to time. Never went inside. I don't know why."
(That's a lie. He knows why. That porch was filled with memories. He fucking loves the Gilbert porch. It had been a place he often went during his four-month stay.)
"Let's go there, then the Boarding House." She shrugs apologetically.
"It's on the way, it's fine," he reassures.
It's funny how daunting some things feel when you look at them through someone else's eyes. It's not like it's a magic porch. He doesn't think she'll see it and remember their first real kiss. Or every conversation of importance that happened there from the douchey time he told her she was a lot like Katherine to the time he justified using the sire bond to his brother to help her get through losing hers.
Kisses (if I'm gonna feel guilty about something, I'm gonna feel guilty about this), vows (it's right, just not right now), and directions (I want you to tell him that Vicki left town).
The sadness in Elena's expression breaks his heart all over again, because he knows it's for childhood memories, and things she shouldn't have burned away in a moment of switch-flipped anarchy. Then she turns to him and says, "I'm sorry for compelling away the memories. They were only half mine."
Maybe she says that because of what she sees on his face, he doesn't know. But suddenly the truth is bigger than all of that. He touches her cheek gently. "We'll make new ones," he says.
They have eternity, after all.
It's then that Damon stops reprimanding himself for thinking in clichés.
They're clichés for a reason; it doesn't mean they aren't true.
Days later he hears Bonnie say, "The heart wants what the heart wants, Elena. You tried to fight it once, and it didn't work, trust me."
They bust through a worm hole and land in the Salvatore crypt Kai-less, and it's a victory. Damon takes it, happily, because he knows there's something else around the corner that will fuck him up.
Stefan and Caroline are waiting for them, and after massive amounts of hugs, she says, "Okay. Now we figure out how to break the no-magic zone."
He looks at his brother, who shrugs his solidarity with Caroline (because of course he's never gonna let her down again, now that it seems she's forgiven him), and Damon says, "I need a drink."
Bonnie smiles at him and reaches over to squeeze his arm. "It doesn't have to be done tonight," she says.
A few weeks later, Elena comes bouncing into the bar just off Whitmore's campus that he spends the majority of his time in now. Her smile is sort of ridiculous, and he feels his suspicions rise.
"What?" he asks.
"Bonnie found a spell that she thinks will de-activate the border."
Impossibly, her smile gets larger.
"Oh, really?" he asks, tipping his glass of bourbon at her. "Why does she think it will work?"
Elena pauses, and then moves in really close to him. He stiffens, because even though they spend a considerable amount of time together, it's not like they are together because Elena, while intrigued enough by what she felt to dump Liam, doesn't trust it fully, and she never let it go too far. In all these weeks with her he'd had one moment where she almost kissed him, but he watched as she lost her nerve, and all but ran from the room they were in at the time.
(The irony of not liking repeating 2010 was not lost on Damon. If only the Summer of Love could be the Groundhog Day of his life, he'd never complain again.)
At this moment, however, she looks into his eyes, drops her gaze to his lips and then slowly, oh-so-torturously drags them up until they are looking at each other again. "She tried it on me, first."
He can see it then, the laughter, the wildness, the love that's been missing from her face since he returned. His breath gets trapped in his chest, and even though he wants to ask, he can't make words.
"I love you, Damon," she whispers, wrapping her arm around his neck. "I love you," she repeats urgently, just like the first time. Her lips hover over his, and she says, "That's my favorite memory--when I knew, when I really knew, and I was brave enough to tell you, even over the phone. I wasn't scared anymore; I was free."
She kisses him then, like she's got all the time in the world.