All The Same To Me (The Vampire Diaries - Stefan/Damon/Elena OT3)
Title: All The Same To Me
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Pairing: Stefan/Damon/Elena OT3
Disclaimer: I own nothing related to the concept or characters of TVD. This is just for kicks.
Spoilers: all of Season One
Words: 3,100 words
Summary: Post 1x22. Do not underestimate Damon's powers of persuasion. Or: the one where Damon runs for public office while trying to date his brother & their girlfriend, as told by Stefan Salvatore. ♥
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The first time Stefan realizes that he's got a serious goddamn problem here (not just a regular Damon-sized problem, but astronomical, that-one-time-in-Columbia-with-the-firing-squad problem) is when he says, again, "We're not doing this, Damon. We're not repeating history."
And Damon smiles at him small and secretive, and asks, conversationally, "Why not?", hand tucked into the small of Stefan's back as he guides him into the meeting, a gallant nod for the Sheriff and a smirk to Alaric.
He realizes, as he opens his mouth to respond, to explain to Damon all the myriad of ways that of course it's a terrible, world-breaking idea-things that Damon would see, if he wasn't so fucking Damon and impossible about everything-when he has to stop, because absolutely nothing is coming to mind.
It's-it's just a bad idea. It's a Damon idea.
That fact alone should make it rather obvious.
Damon grins and kisses that school board member's hand, the one with the screaming leaflets who wears too much jewelry and vanilla spice perfume, and Stefan's fingers itch for a letter opener to stab him in the lung again, and twist. Maybe one of the pens for the zoning petition. Maybe all of them. They want him to trim their bushes to clear the walkway, anyway. Bushes-they want him to worry about bushes. Just thinking about it makes his head hurt.
~*~
Damon is having the walkway cleared two days later when Stefan gets back from his run. He's leaning back against the bookcases and peering through the window as a vaguely familiar member of the high school football team negotiates with a weed whacker, gaze lazy and unsettlingly unpredatory. The look he turns on Stefan could be mistaken as fond.
"You know what would be super fun?"
Stefan considers the lack of orgies in their parlor since the Brazilian rugby team and takes a wild shot in the dark. "Dead strippers in a bathtub?"
Damon hands him a splash of scotch and rolls his eyes. "That's so 1987."
Stefan, privately, thinks quite a lot of Damon's habits are a strange cross between the anarchist 1850's and the 1967 summer of love. He makes no comments of the kind, however, since the last mention erupted an argument that cut all communication for fifteen years. (Damon can be sensitive about the strangest things.)
"I think I'll run for mayor."
"That," Stefan says, slowly, tasting the word on this tongue, "is the most insane thing you've ever said to me." This was going to take way more than a splash. He hands the glass back, nodding until it's filled to the brim.
~*~
"This could be good for him," Elena says soothingly, stroking a hand over his forehead.
"It's really not him I'm concerned about here," Stefan points out.
~*~
It's not completely unexpected - in that way that nothing can ever be completely unexpected around Damon, because if history has shown Stefan anything it's that (a) tight pants will come back into fashion and (b) when his brother's involved anything, absolutely anything, is possible. Especially if it's a horrible thing.
This is definitely horrible.
~*~
Damon's general platform seems to revolve around city beautification, small business support, and everyone thinking he's awesome.
"I think we can all agree on the urgency of instituting an additional bar where we can get trashed and have regrettable bathroom sex without the oversight of teenagers."
Someone says, "here, here!" and awkwardly clears his throat, while the rest of the crowd mumbles and pretends not to find these ideas deeply alluring.
"And my brother has expressed an interest in strippers."
"That is not true," Stefan assures Bonnie, who is giving him that look again. He has the highest respect for women and, besides, Damon really isn't too picky about the nature of the naked people he eats on their carpet or bathrooms. They could have been male strippers. Would Bonnie feel better if they were male strippers?
And it was more a prediction than a suggestion anyway.
She's still looking at him. He twitches.
~*~
Stefan has been assigned to poll the electorate. He's not exactly sure who assigned him, and how it was decided he's helping at all, but he's pretty sure that Elena tucked her arm through his and kissed the underside of his jaw, and then he had a clipboard.
The task apparently consists of: showing up to bake sales and asking people what they think about stop signs (there should be more) (there should be none) (there should less jaywalking brats when you're fifteen minutes late to work).
Damon holds a barbecue and invites everyone who he once bought a drink at the Grill. It spills into every floor and over onto the neighbors' lawn, who hate them anyway because of all the constant glass breaking and wall breaking and loud music and actual red panties that are occasionally strewn on their rooftop.
He's disgustingly charming and swing dances to the tune of Tuxedo Junction with Jenna and then Jeremy (who appears to be flavors of repulsed, mortified, and thrilled all at once).
He makes vegetarians try the chicken and introduces Stefan to at least twenty people he already knows. It's summer, and no one has died yet - not even the floundering opposition (admittedly, possibly because they are floundering), and it's becoming increasingly hard to explain to himself why he should explain to Elena all the ways Damon will break her heart.
Clearly something is about to go very wrong, but Stefan is still completely baffled when it does.
~*~
He doesn't particularly want to be on The Council, but Damon didn't particularly care and promised to stop giving him shit about the declining bunny population. (Look: he ate all the damn foxes, because he'd been having a really bad year, because his brother is a special kind of deranged asshole, and deer remind him too much of Bambi, so it's environmental correction or whatever. Shut up.)
"Step brother, actually," Damon is saying to that woman with the alarming cats-in-suits vest. "We didn't even meet until he was sixteen. Parents died right away (horrible accident, freak dog mauling), and we were just thrown together."
"Just like the movies!" she offers, rather nonsensically.
Damon nods solemnly. "Tragic, really. A romantic tragedy."
"Damon," Stefan says, "what are you doing?"
"I'm just feeling so comfortable now among our people-you are our people, aren't you Elaine?"
"Oh yes," Elaine says, smiling encouragingly as Damon slings an arm around her shoulders. "I just love that about the Falls. We're a really close town."
"See?" Damon winks at him-he seriously does that. "We don't have to hide our love anymore, just because the world doesn't understand."
"You totally don't," Elaine agrees earnestly.
"That's… that's so great," Stefan says. It looks like Elaine is getting misty eyed. "Damon, can I talk to you for a minute?"
~*~
It's not that he doesn't understand. It's just that-he's not exactly sure he understands. He'd really like to figure out what kind of game Damon is playing, because in most of them Stefan tends to lose. Sometimes body parts, though luckily those grow back.
"What are you up to?" he hisses, crowding Damon (who just leans there like it's his goddamn idea) against the Hall's bathroom door. Damon looks great-- jacket creased like it's been torn off by eager hands and with that crooked smile that makes Stefan want to punch him in the face.
The last time he was in this bathroom he'd dragged a girl out of it and tried to kill her. This is not a good place for him. There's something about this bathroom that makes him homicidal. He thinks about this, and very carefully does not strangle his brother.
"Seriously, Damon."
Damon shrugs. "I like it here. This is our town. And, I can." There's a fierce, fighting light in his eyes to replace that old too-familiar look, the cold sizzle like a spark had gone out. "Now I can do anything. So why not?"
Stefan's gonna have a good answer to that one any day now.
~*~
So, to be honest, the preceding events haven't come completely out of nowhere. There may have been signs.
Damon's been, well, one could say frisky, happy go-lucky, a bounding metaphorical golden retriever, even (if gold retrievers were prone to leering and rabid mood swings and a serious drinking problem).
It's been building since those three weeks when Katherine gutted Elena's dad, stashed her in the First Methodist Church's basement, and tried to turn all the townspeople into juiceboxes while displaying a distracting amount of cleavage.
She fooled them for longer than Stefan likes to think about, so he doesn't. It was Damon who caught the slips, added them up, and left an abrupt voice mail that directed Stefan to the bingo hall in time to catch an ax-laden showdown. He broke a chair into stakes and then, before he could join in, watched it devolve into a pitched argument that seemed to boil down to, 'in retrospect, you were a pretty shitty girlfriend and not as good in bed as I thought you were'. There was also something about ruining the best thing Damon had in this world, and an incident with a riding crop, but frankly Stefan got lost around the part where there are people who give better head than Katherine.
The stakes had still sounded like a sincerely great idea until he recalled, when she bounced Damon off a few walls while explaining that everything she'd done had been for their love and mass power consolidation, that she could probably snap them like twigs. So it was sort of mind-blowing when his girlfriend shot her in the back with one of Alaric's crossbows and then passed out on the raffle table.
When Elena had stumbled with him out the door, with chaffed wrists and a piece of her mind for Bonnie and her fussing, he'd decided to go with a combination of gas leak and performance art for the spectators outside. (You'd think they'd have grown accustomed to the sounds of shrieking and rampant property destruction at 3am, but there were people still trickling onto the street when Damon straightened his collar and said, "You understand that I'm going to have to kiss you now," and bent his head to Elena's, pressing her back into Stefan's arms- still locked around her waist.)
It was so quick, and then he asked if their girlfriend had eaten yet, and Stefan was just so fucking relieved (though he wasn't exactly sure, not examining why, but he was just so glad to see his brother there still that he clapped a hand on Damon's arm too long and fought the urge to not let go, to bring them closer and do something inexcusable like hugging him). He was so relieved he just said no and asked Damon to get her home (because Damon had the car and god knows Elena must have been going out of her mind about him), so Stefan could hang around to deal with a few things.
And it didn't really register until later that they were in public.
~*~
"So, I've heard about your beautiful love," Alaric says, bemused and looking inexplicably naked in his polo shirt and shorts of all things, standing in their doorway.
This is probably because the opposition has ceased floundering and began a barrage of robo-calls decrying the variety of degenerate acts that could be theoretically occurring at the Salvatore boarding house at any given moment, along with a deplorable lack of feigned enthusiasm for school prayer. There is also a question of whether it can be called a boarding house if no one is, in truth, allowed to board there anymore, and strangely enough this consideration is what had taken over most of the coffee house debates the past weekend.
(Damon has responded with a series of doorbell flyers affirming his general disinterest in anything Tom Phillips considers to be educational, challenging said opponent to display stronger support for wild cougar hunts, and claiming that The Boarding House is merely a decorative title, like The King of Pop. There is a distinct omission of a categorical denial about all the hot incestuous sex they're not actually having.)
("Yet," Damon said, and pressed their mouths together, soft but lingering, before leaving for another strategy session-slash-pajama party.)
(Elena keeps saying he needs to listen to what Damon does and not what he says, and so Stefan decided to think about that time Damon promised him an eternity of misery while staring at the fire for a few hours and eating a rabbit.)
(This made perfect sense at the time, no matter how disappointed her face gets.)
Stefan sighs and eyes the worn folders in Alaric's hands. They're bulging at the seams. He knows exactly how those folders would feel if they weren't inanimate objects. "Tell me you're not helping him with this."
"I think he'd be pretty good at it, actually, until he gets bored," Alaric admits. "And he probably wouldn't set off untested supernatural devices on crowds."
"You know, you've really lowered your expectations since we first met," Stefan says.
"Dying will do that to you, " Alaric observes, and makes his way upstairs.
~*~
There's one candidate debate at the Grill, because everything is at the Grill, (which, Damon emphasizes over Phillip's strident objections, kind of underlines his drunken public fucking concerns).
It's held during a full moon, which doesn't seem like it would be any kind of inconvenience until that kid that Vicky almost ate tries to pee on the podium and gnaw off the Green Party chairman's arm.
"He was sniffing glue," Stefan tries.
"He's a werewolf," shrieks the superintendent--which is okay, because he's that guy who's always claiming strange eyes are watching him at night and that there's not actually any mountain lions indigenous to this area of the state, and everyone knows he's crazy.
~*~
Election day begins with a cold, wet morning and a diverted three car collision.
"Dude," Matt says, "did you just pull a Twilight?" and Stefan shares his disbelief after compelling the hell out of him.
Damon sneers and kicks out the dents under the cover of the church bell. "People cannot vote from hospitals, little brother."
He helps an old couple across the street, but it's to the polling station as well, and Stefan spares a moment to deeply regret that Bonnie's still bitter about the whole throat ripping thing, and wouldn't send him back in time to give citizen's rights to kittens.
Damon's acceptance speech is short and to the point. "Neat! I have an office. I may never have told you guys how much I wanted an office (because I didn't actually want one before), but now I am seeing the possibilities. Office."
"Honestly," Jeremy sidles up to mutter into his ear, "there are some things I do not ever want to know."
~*~
The victory celebration takes over their house and people are in his room and likely puking in a priceless vase while Alaric drinks their good scotch, sitting loose and cross legged on the parlor desk. He maybe deserves some amusement after spending three sleepless nights listening to his student howl and demolish a hastily outfitted janitor closet, but Stefan's not entirely convinced it should be at his expense. Alaric is watching Damon watch him, peering over Matt and Elena as they sway to Billie Holiday and shout occasional toasts to Tom's manly tears of failure and sorrow, and Stefan can hear the burst of laughter when Damon asks him to dance.
He's seriously considering saying no, when Elena trips him with her spikey heels and then Damon has him mid-turn, and it's just too much effort to extract himself at that point.
"This is where you say, 'oh honey, I never knew you had it in you,'" Damon suggests. He has a hand on Stefan's shoulder, stroking at his collarbone, an arm firm around his waist, and Damon's pursing his lips in that way that means he's either struggling not to crack up or thinks he's being cute. Likely both.
"Oh, I always thought you could assemble an army of weak willed individuals to follow your bidding."
"But you didn't know it would be quite so much fun."
This is alarmingly true, though Stefan declines to say so.
~*~
A few hours and two tattered family heirlooms later, everyone has left and Damon is dancing sloppily and barefoot with Elena on top of the couch, and then twirls her off to sprawl against the armrest.
"Come 'ere," he says, and makes a regal gesture that would look far more regal if he wasn't mid-stumble over her calf.
There is absolutely no way he's climbing up there, and Stefan says so.
Damon rolls his eyes and tries to subtly smooth his hair into something that doesn't look like Elena viciously attacked it with pillows. It shouldn't be half so endearing, but frankly Stefan gave up that ghost around the time he began voluntarily pressing campaign buttons that had little stars&stripes hearts and said Free Alcoholic Love. "I know, I know-- no repeating."
Stefan sighs, because fucking seriously. "Well, history says you leave me and then our faithless girlfriend is slain by her great granddaughter." There are at least three things he's carefully not saying here, and his brother reads them on his face, and then probably adds on two Stefan isn't even aware of for good measure. He's annoying that way.
Elena will have to tell him about them later, after she's done yanking him down beside her so he's settled between her legs, his brother gripping his shoulders for balance as he joins them, warm at his back and crushing each button of Stefan's favorite goddamned shirt between finger and thumb.
"Let's make this one up as we go along then," Damon concedes.
Stefan shrugs. "Fine by me." When two cushions hit him square in the face, he guesses he deserved that.
END