the low road // 07 puzzles (part two)
Title: the low road // 07 puzzles (continued)
Author: that_treason
Rating: M overall (T (sliding into M) this chapter)
Length: around 7000 words (this chapter)
Characters: Damon/Elena
Spoilers
through 4x18
very AU after that
Warnings
references to sex while switched off
vampires eat people & vampires kill people
Disclaimers
Everything belongs to the people who own them.
I am just borrowing.
continuation of this prompt from upupa_epops:
“Damon/Elena, AU from 4x17. When Elena reaches to steal Katherine's addresses, Damon impulsively decides to screw the high road and team up with Elena instead.”
The blinds in the kitchen are closed, but not shut tight, which lets the dying rays of the sun slip in through the cracks, casting bars across the man's face. Elena closes her fingers around his chin and gives his head a little shake. Smudges of red cling to his skin when she pulls them away again.
His eyes go wide when her hands come close again, this time landing around the sides of his face. The unsubtle pressure of her fingers angles his head away just enough. He whimpers when he sees the change to her face, but doesn't really start to struggle until she's already on his neck, biting down and pulling hard at the wound. He struggles feebly to bat her away but it just means that Elena squeezes him harder, with both the arms she throws around his sides and the teeth she has lodged in his throat. He gives up then, relaxes into her embrace and soon enough it's over: that fluid alchemy changes the weight in her arms from man into corpse.
He falls to the floor when she loosens her grasp. His blood joins the other stains on her hand, when she wipes her mouth with her fingers.
Elena looks around for the phone. Pops up onto the kitchen counter and grabs the handset from the base, charmed by the old style. The corded phone is an obvious affectation, one of a number of antiques in this house, almost uniformly decorated in the vestiges of the past. Her finger twirls through the spiraling black cord that links the phone's handset to its base; she leans back against the brick covered wall above the counter and dials. Dark stains smear along the track of numbers as the dial turns, streaks left behind by her bloody fingers.
She listens to the ring - once, twice, and then the click of the connection.
When he comes on the line he chirps at her like some customer service rep. "Damon Salvatore here, how can I help?"
"I'm in, it's done."
"Hellooo Elena, what a pleasant surprise, I was just about to come looking for you." There's a pause before he continues; Elena can hear the faint noises that accompany the phone pulling away from his face as he checks his screen for the caller ID. "Can't help but notice that you're calling from house number three. Did the kid in house one scare you that much?"
"You never said anything about going in order, just that I had to get inside each house."
"Fair enough. Third house though...I was expecting that one to take a while." He pauses again and she hears the faint sound of liquid sloshing in a glass. "Do you know the trick with that one?"
"You told them I was a vampire. Compelled them to believe it. Set everything up for these two - a woman and a man, living together - to try to defend themselves against me."
"Excellent work. So are we looking at a major cleanup operation over there or what? I figure, double Van Helsing plus vampire with no humanity equals death and destruction. Tell me I'm wrong."
"You're wrong."
"Really?" He's incredulous, suspicious, and then nervous - she can hear him, almost picture it in her mind, how the cycles of his emotions play across his voice and face. "How am I wrong?"
"You know, I'd love to get into all the details with you, but I'm working with a deadline and I've still got all these other houses I have to break into. Talk to you soon, Damon."
She disconnects the call with a flick of her finger and lets the handset fall to the floor. It lands with a solid thunk, empty dial tone blaring from the speaker end. The man on the floor starts to twitch and stir and then he's sitting up, eyes open and darting around the room, hands rushing to his neck to feel his injury closing up.
"Sun will be down in half an hour," she says and the man visibly starts, looking up at her with eyes wide with awe. "Gives you plenty of time to get changed into something more presentable for the neighbors."
Out of the corner of her eye, Elena sees the slightest movement behind the man, in the doorway to the kitchen where another body is on the floor. The wife is waking up, but trying to be subtle about it, trying to find another way out.
"Actually," Elena says, pulling a vicious grin across her face, "maybe we should take care of one other mess first and then we'll get you changed."
The man follows the path of Elena's eyes to the place where his wife huddles on the floor.
###
Damon hears from her once more that night, a little after nine. It's another terse and vague phone call, this time from the second house. The conversation lasts no longer than two minutes and she hangs up on him in the middle of a sentence, when he starts to ask about the voices he can hear in the background.
He knows that she's up to something, knows that something is not quite right with how this is going. He'd intended the whole thing sortof like an obstacle course - figured she'd take it one step at a time. Of course he should have known better. When Elena threw her switch she became a creature of unpredictable actions and inscrutable thoughts.
But so far, so good. She claims that the houses aren't piling up with corpses. Maybe there really is nothing to worry about - maybe she's just picking her battles one by one.
Hours go by with no further contact. The sun comes up and crosses the sky. Damon passes the time on the couch, drinking bourbon and texting with Rebekah. As the afternoon wanders by he gets more and more confident that everything is going to be fine. Obviously Elena got lucky with the first two houses, but the third one is giving her trouble.
The sun through the windows creeps along the walls.
His phone bleats and shakes in his limp hands and he wakes with a start. He's fallen asleep on the couch, phone still in his hands. The glass he's been drinking from has rolled off the couch and onto the floor, spilling the last of an expensive bottle out onto the carpet. Damon rubs his eyes and looks around, taking in the empty bottles on the side table through the darkness. Somewhere between the seventh and eighth emptied bottle not even snarking at Rebekah could keep him from dozing off on the couch. Too much alcohol and too little to do but wait.
The sun's been gone for hours while he slept, the room gone dark - lit only by the rising gibbous moon. The phone in his hands keeps on ringing.
" 'lo?" he says, trying to hide the grogginess in his voice.
"Third house done." She sounds distracted, but doesn't fail to notice the dazed note to his voice. "Were you asleep? Since when did you start sleeping in the middle of the day, Grandma?"
"Too much booze and not enough to do," he answers sharply, already recovering. "You're really done? What time is it-"
"I'll be back soon. Loose ends here that need tying up."
He hears the click and the phone goes dead.
"Huh," he mutters to himself.
###
It's midnight when Elena finally returns - only about a day-and-a-half into her three days.
She's also filthy, with dried brown smudges across her nose and deep rust stains on her shirt. She reaches for the handle of the front door of their temporary house, but the knob pulls away from her before she can grasp it. It's Damon, opening the door just as she arrives.
"So?" he asks as she brushes past him towards the downstairs bathroom. The water's running in sink by the time he wanders over, bourbon in hand, to lean against the doorframe. Elena just ignores him, too intent on scrubbing the blood from her face and hair.
"Details?" he asks with mild irritation and takes a sip. "I was promised details once you were finished - or was it someone else I was having cryptic conversations with?"
She splashes water on her face a final time and looks up at him in the mirror. "What do you want to know?" she asks, looking around for a towel to dry off with. When it becomes apparent that the house was left furnished, but not entirely livable, she leans over and dries her face on his shirt.
It's worth it for the look he gives her - real aggravation that he's been used as a towel.
She turns and wanders back to the living room space, taking in the side table covered in empty bottles. He drifts along in her wake, stopping for a moment to refill his glass from one of the few that still contains liquor.
"Just the little things - how did you get into each house. How many people died in the process. I want the story of how it went."
"Not really that much to tell. Vampires need an invitation to enter a house that has people living in it. No more living people, no more invitation needed."
"So you did end up killing them all," he says and rolls his eyes. "Well that experiment ended well."
"Relax," she says, face breaking out in a smile. "They're all still walking around."
Damon stops dead with his glass halfway to his lips. "You turned them."
"Yep."
"All of them."
"Yep. Seven people over three houses. Would have been eight but Mrs. Brinkley's daughter won't be home for the summer till next week. I'm guessing she technically lives at school now, so she doesn't count as far as invitations are concerned."
"Are you insane?"
Damon looks genuinely surprised for once and Elena finds it terrifically gratifying. She's beaten his game, faster and somehow outside the bounds of Damon's plans.
"What did you expect me to do with them?" she giggles at him through a forced smile. Tilts her head all coy, and shrugs, daring him to lash out at her. "You made them into traps and then left me to figure out how to disarm them. No living people means no invitation needed. You said to minimize the deaths and I did- Yes, I know they're alltechnically dead, but only a little and then they practically got better."
"I thought you'd score an invite - deliver them a pizza or send someone flowers or something. There were plenty of loopholes in my compulsions you could have used.
"I did use a loophole to start, anyway," she says. "That last house - you compelled them all to know and believe I was a vampire. Not my fault the husband had a vampire fetish. He practically threw himself at me when I knocked at the door. And he was positively thrilled to help me get invites to the other two houses, but he didn't want to turn without his wife and then it all sorta rolled downhill from there. Ended up being so much easier than sneaking around and lying and figuring out a way around all your complex compulsions."
"But that was the point, this was meant to be-"
"A challenge for the 'most important weapon in my arsenal.' " She mimics his over eager voice from yesterday, before sweetening her tones to mock innocence. "Did I cheat?
"No, b-"
She cuts him off. "Did I break or bend your rules?"
"No." He gives his head a sharp shake.
"Then what's the problem?"
"It's not a problem, it's just - you turned them all."
She can tell from the look on his face that he's frustrated by her inability to understand. Any second now, she bets herself, he'll boil over and then it's just a question of how much furniture they break.
"Says the man who's almost single-handedly infested Mystic Falls with vampires."
"That was not my fault!" he shouts, but the look of incredulity on her face stops him from protesting further. "Ok, fine, mostly not my fault."
"You're taking this way more seriously than I thought you would. You turned Vicki because you were bored."
"I turned Vicki because I felt sorry for her-" Again the look Elena flashes at him stops him short. "-and fine, yes, I was bored and I wanted to cause trouble for Stefan and a ton of other stupid reasons. But I didn't turn everyone on her block. It was just me and her, for better or worse. Mostly worse in her case."
"Fine, I'll accept that you at least had a reason with Vicki - whatever. But you're trying to tell me that you were always that careful about all the people you turned."
"I've turned loads of people. For all kinds of reasons," he says, voice rising back into a shout. "But never a whole neighborhood."
"You know, I never would have guessed," she teases him, "Damon Salvatore thinks turning is some sort of sacred act."
"It's not sacred...this is just...distasteful. Mass turning like that... it's something Klaus does-"
Again she cuts him off. She remembers the last time that Klaus turned a whole room of people into vampire weapons, at a country bar near a lake house vacation home. She remembers why he turned them, remembers who he sent them against. And it's the last thing she wants to discuss.
"Or someone with no reason to care - like say, a vampire with no humanity?"
"Even when I was switched off I had standards, Elena. This is just-"
"Practical? Logical? When you take away the moral aspect, it's perfectly sane."
"Nope," he pops at her. "Even from a practical perspective this was idiotic. We're leaving behind an hours-old nest of newbie vampires, all of 'em hungry and stupid. They're the exact opposite of staying under the radar."
"I'm not suggesting we take them with us. I gave them enough information to fend for themselves. We'll be long gone before they get to be a problem."
"Sure - for now. But it some of them somehow survive the early hunger and rage and villagers with pitchforks, they're going to remember us, Elena. We changed everything. One instant they're alive, the next they're dead. We're burned into their brains. We're trauma. Maybe they thank you for it now, while everything is still shiny and new, but you have no idea what they'll think a hundred years from now - particularly when they know, for a fact, that they were turned as part of some game."
She looks down and the curtain of her hair falls across her face. There are twinges in her chest, some strange ache rolling around the empty spaces. She still doesn't care about the people she turned - still thinks it was the most practical choice given the circumstances. No, it's something else, something in his voice that's causing this to seep through her control.
Suddenly this conversation isn't a game anymore and all the pleasure she was getting from the look on Damon's face drains away.
"Lesson learned," she says, voice gone dull.
Damon crosses the room, gait full of agitation, to pour himself a double shot of bourbon.
"It's still weird to me that this was your plan," he says, punctuating his words with a deep swallow of alcohol. "I expect a lot of things from Humanity Free Elena - clinical thinking, brutal honesty, guilt-free meals - but this?" He pauses, tilts his head to look at her with sudden scrutiny. "This I don't understand. It's weird and out of proportion and-"
"Maybe..." she says quietly, looking around the room, anywhere but directly at him. "Maybe I was curious."
"Curious."
"Never turned anyone before," she says, with more than necessary nonchalance and a too high shoulder shrug. "I thought...after what happened with us-"
Now it's his turn to cut her off. "That was the sire bond, remember? You should be fucking thankful you don't have that connection with these people." He waves his hand around, still holding the glass, sloshing the dark liquid close to the rim. "Imagine all of them following us around, all scrambling to carry your bags and getting you snacks. Ugh, the worst."
"I'm not talking about the sire bond. I guess I was just expecting - at least with the first one - something... between him and me...just some small a connection...because I turned him..."
He tilts his head, eyes widening. "You wanted to feel something for them?"
For a second she doesn't know how to answer him. Wishes they could drop the whole topic. Wishes it had never come up in the first place. So she switches tactics, changing from dull to forceful.
"I just wanted to know what it was like to turn someone. Fleeting curiosity. And now it's done, I know what it's like, I know it's no big deal. Draining that kid in the diner was far more interesting. This was just nothing. An experiment. Let it go, Damon."
He grasps her by the shoulders and for a blind second she's not sure what he's going to do. His face is unreadable, his posture betrays nothing. So Elena braces herself for impact - for whatever comes in the next battle that Damon has in mind. But impact never comes. He just looks at her and then, after a long moment, leans down to press a kiss to her forehead.
"You drive me crazy," he whispers.
"And yet," she replies, "here you are."
He lifts her chin with a gentle touch and brings his lips down to meet hers. All his wildness is gone. She doesn't understand his sudden tenderness, pulls back away from him to look at him, eyes full of questions.
There's nothing left to say, though, so he picks her up and zips them both up the stairs, to the room they've been sharing since they got here. He lays her down on the bed as though she was made of glass, with soft and liquid movement. She can't help but stare up at him with wide eyes, confused by the turn of events.
"The reason I'm still here is something you can't understand," he says.
###
It's late when the text comes in.
Elena's asleep in the bed next to him, but Damon's still awake and restless. He's ready to leave this place as soon as possible, but knows that it would be better to wait until dawn. Knows that they need to leave as little trail as possible for the cul-de-sac vampires to follow. Since they'll be stuck in their houses all throughout the day, it'll give Damon and Elena the perfect opportunity to put hundreds of sun soaked miles behind them.
So instead he passes the time reading by the light of a small bedside lamp. When his phone rattles on the wood of the nightstand, he curses softly to himself and scrambles to grab it. Elena starts to mutter and stir, but finally settles again when the noise is gone from the air.
It isn't Rebekah this time, writing to him with another misunderstanding or question or comment on modern life - it's Stefan, texting from the east coast where the hour is even later and the sun is already heading for the horizon.
S: Heard anything from Rebekah?
Damon stares at the screen for a long moment. Rubs his face with his hands and thinks before typing back an answer. This is the first time Stefan's asked him anything about Rebekah in weeks, not since Damon first explained what happened to the Cure.
D: who wants to know?
S: Not a game Damon. We think she's in danger. Silas.
D: what's silas want with her?
S: Silas wants the cure so he can die.
D: old news
He sends the message and then pauses to think, puzzled by what Silas could want with her now that the Cure is gone.
D: revenge?
S: Loophole.
"Fuck." Damon mutters to himself. There's always a goddamn loophole.
D: ?
S: It's complicated.
D: short and sweet version?
S: The Cure keeps Rebekah human. It's in her blood.
Ah, he thinks and rolls his eyes. Loophole you could drive a truck through.
D: so Bex blood = cure. not complicated. problem?
S: We think he needs all of it for it to work.
D: all?
S: All her blood. He has to drain her. Kill her.
Damon stares at the phone for a long moment, until the screen dims to save power. Then he rubs his face again with his hand and looks over at Elena. Her hair is strewn across the pillow every which way and her mouth hangs open just the tiniest fraction. You could never tell from her face everything that's happened to her in the past few weeks. She looks so open, almost fragile, with none of the strength she's always shown. And certainly none of the cruelty.
The phone buzzes in his hand again. Damon doesn't bother to look at the message, just swings his feet over the edge of the bed and pads silently over to where his clothes are neatly folded on the dresser. He pulls on pants and shirt, only bothering with a third of the buttons, and zips away in silence - down the stairs and out the front door.
The concrete of the sidewalk is cold and rough beneath his bare feet, but he walks at a normal pace once he's outside. The nearing-full moon is high in the night sky and it would be irritating to have someone catch him speeding by - particularly in this neighborhood, so recently consumed by the undead.
He walks until he reaches the lamp posted at the corner, where this street crosses another. Steps into the grass and leans on the poll, swimming in a pool of light - dark hair disheveled from bed and clothes hanging loose. It doesn't take more than a few seconds to pull up the number, one of only two listed in his favorites (the other good only for calling a phone that's dead at the bottom of a river).
He hits the call button and listens to the ring. It barely makes it through two before the call connects.
"Damon?
"Hello, brother."
