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There is the phantom touch of a hand in her hair, fingers on the flesh of her jaw, and an ocean waiting to pour itself drop by drop from the corners of her leaking eyes.
'Please don't leave me,' Elena begs into the emptiness, that phantom hand still lingering against her face, or so she may be forcing herself to believe.
The ocean is rougher, a storm is brewing behind her eyes, the waves are roiling, and the winds are cold. In her mind are the shapes of words, the contours of a face, and the tilt of a head.
Elena will be told later she imagined it, and after, she may believe it, but at this moment, she knows words are leaving his mouth, from lips she called home but will never find sanctuary again.
Elema doesn't know what they are, but she might if she tried.
‘Please, come back to me,' she pleads. Her voice is broken; in barely reflects the way her heart feels flesh being rendered from the bone within in her chest.
Elena wants to reach out and show her ghost she won't give up; she'll reach for him in this world and the next, but she can not bring her hand to leave her own side. Elena feels like she has failed again because she wants him to know—needs him to know—and she can't do it.
She can't.
When she turns, she turns with a bright flare of hope.
Maybe. Maybe.
Because this cannot be her reality, not after everything, not after all these years, not after all this time of living and dying and trying to find a future that people had told her was impossible and out of reach.
And any hope she might have foolishly harboured is dashed because the man behind her is not the one she had hoped for, but he's one she needs.
'He's gone,’ says Elena.
Alaric can see the ocean in her eyes and how her boat has capsized, and he pulls her to him and lets her unleash the tides upon his shoulder. Elena only wishes it were enough for her.
Nothing will ever be enough.
They could harness her the powers of the sun, and she could smite a thousand men, but it will never be enough.
There will be an emptiness inside of her that can never be filled no matter who tries and how hard. Her soul will yearn, her heart will yield to grief, and she will be the husk of the woman she could have been with him beside her.
Alaric is warmth and resurrection pressed against her, and he reminds her not only of a safer place but also of him, and it only serves to make Elena push her face into Alaric’s neck harder, let the waves become tidal and crash upon them with little grace.
'BONNIE.’
Elena hears it, and she knows the voice. She recognises the urgency. Her body starts to sing with the animalistic senses that her vampire self was born and bred with, it picks up on the panic and the fear, and she tears herself from Alaric's shoulder to look at him questioningly.
He doesn't have the answer.
It aches to leave the place where she knows her ghost last was, but she walks up, and she walks away because she is Elena Gilbert, and she has to carry on.
Her brother's voice is ripping through the forest, and she can hear his blood pumping in his veins, and she can sense the urgency in his footfalls, almost as fast as his heartbeat.
'BONNIE!’
Elena steps out into the body of the forest and the bodies of her friends, sharing looks of what and who and then Jeremy is bursting through to them, but he has no eyes for his sister, friends, or the resurrected.
Jeremy stares across the gates, and Elena feels her heart break all over again as her eyes slide the distance over to where Bonnie is standing, alone in the clearing.
Elena thinks, please don't have to do this alone.
Then Bonnie is gone, and Elena hears her brother's anguished cry.
The world is spinning, and Elena can't take it—she physically can not take it any more—but she does. She steels herself, and she goes to where Jeremy has dropped to his knees, and she wraps herself around him and holds him tight because she is his sister and she will be there until the end, and for Jeremy, it feels like the end, and nothing anyone can say will make him think otherwise.
He sobs into her chest like he did when he was five and she was eight, and she'd held him then, and she'll hold him now, but his tears burn holes in her skin, and the wretched sounds from his throat make her lose her breath, so she keeps him tighter.
Her first step back into the Boarding House nearly makes her vomit.
Sickness curls in her gut, and it takes Alaric's firm hand on her shoulder to steady her, but then Stefan is behind her, and she hears the catch in his breath.
She takes a deep breath. Once more, Elena, you weren't the only one to lose a loved one.
Elem turns, ready to hold Stefan, but Caroline is there, her hands around his neck and her forehead pressed against his. Elena doesn't even care when the realisation comes.
She just thinks, oh, and walks toward the stairs.
Each step is lead. Her body feels weak, everywhere through the house she is reminded of him, and every step feels a little closer to Hell, and then she pushes open his bedroom door and almost groans at the gnawing ache of loss in her chest. Elena resists the press of her face to the pillows and the inhaling of bedsheets.
She washes her face in the new sink and refuses to look in the mirror. She ties up her hair, changes her shirt, and then drags herself back down the stairs again.
Alaric is stoking a fire that no one cares about, and Jeremy and Matt are nowhere in sight. Stefan is hunched over a glass, and Caroline is beside him. Tyler is holding the bottle.
'Where are you going?' Alaric asks as soon as he looks up.
Elena stares listlessly into the flames. 'I can't leave him there,' she whispers, and images of burnt bodies and the acrid smell of flesh singes through her senses. 'I won't leave him there.'
She doesn't know what she expects.
Resistance, perhaps? But none comes.
They all silently get to their feet, Jeremy and Matt appear from around the corner, and they follow her out the front door.
'I love you,' Elena says as she drops beside the burnt corpse.
Her tears drop onto the blackened skin, and her hands hover over tattered leather and denim. 'God, I love you.'
Elena knows she's talking to nothing but a husk—a remnant of the man who owns her heart—and when she looks up into the unrecognisable features, Elena unleashes a sound she didn't know she was capable of making and throws herself onto the body; face buried into burned leather and singed flesh.
Eventually, she quiets.
Stefan covers and hoists him up, and when Elena shares a look with him, she sees the echoing storm in his own eyes, and he leaves the Grill with his brother's body over his shoulder.
'Mom?'
'Caroline.'
Elena shifts to watch Caroline rip apart rubble to get to her mother, staggering out on shaking legs.
'You weren't supposed to be in here! You could have died. You wouldn't have come back, mom.' Caroline says as she pulls Liz to her, pressing careful kisses into blonde hair.
Caroline sobs and holds her mother tight before tearing at the skin of her wrist and healing Liz's aches and burns.
Elena turns on her heel and leaves the wreckage. She lingers by the Camaro, has fleeting thoughts of repair, and then stares at where her burnt corpse had been earlier.
'Come on, Elena.'
Alaric is at her side again, hand gentle pressure on her back, and Elena thinks, thank God for Alaric Saltzman.
She sleeps for an age.
She buries herself in his sheets, remembering when his was theirs and cries the ocean into the pillows.
People come.
Voices drift in and out like waves on the shore. Hands linger on her shoulders, and Elena turns away.
She turns it all off, lying there at night and wondering what would happen if she did turn it off. What if she just flipped the switch and let it go because it would be easier than having to deal with this—having to feel this every day for the rest of her life.
Somewhere between dreams and dusk and dawn, Elena rolls over and sees his face, sombre and silent in the space next to her.
She fears blinking because he'll be gone—that's how it works, right?—so she stares into the brevity of the mirage until exhaustion shuts her eyes for her, and he is lost to her again.
'He'd want to be free,' says Stefan quietly when they're alone on a morning.
It is not even dawn. He and Elena are the only ones up. Surprisingly. They are nursing glasses and loss, huddled together on the porch, eyes vacant and bodies cold.
'I know,' she says in reply.
Elena squeezes her eyes shut because she doesn't want to think of Damon as nothing but moon dust, even though what's left is near nothing, sad remains of greatness. Still, she knows what Stefan means and what Stefan wants, so she nods and says I know again, over and over until she isn't sure if she really knows anything or nothing.
They talk about what to do with the ashes.
'Mystic Falls was his home,' says Elena. 'But would he want to be here forever?'
Stefan shrugs. 'He'd want to be wherever you are.'
She feels the ocean behind her eyes again.
She tells Stefan to do what he thinks is right.
One afternoon he comes back and asks for her hand. She gives it to him tiredly. He places Damon's daylight ring in it, and Elena stares desolately down at it before Stefan closes her fingers and kisses her forehead.
Elena doesn't know what she wants to do more: Throw it across the room or squeeze it so hard it brings blood from her skin.
Elena is taking a shower, feeling the steam burn rivulets into her skin, a heavy reminder of their suicide run, eyes shut and teeth clenched as she scratches hard at her skin just to feel. She stays beneath the water longer every day, wishing she didn't know what it would be like to die by drowning, to feel her lungs filled with water.
Tragically poetic, Elena muses, as she turns off the water and steps out; she has died by fire and ice.
She wipes the condensation from the mirror and sees him standing behind her.
She whirls so fast the world blurs, but there is nothing but an empty bathroom filled with steam, so she falls to the floor and cries into her wet knees, clutching the ring on a silver chain around her neck like it just might make a difference.
Elena is drowning herself in bourbon in the early morning hours, glass forgone for the bottle, staring at the dying embers of the once-blazing fire that Alaric had started hours ago. She swallows her sorrows in the bottle's swigs and enjoys how it hurts her throat. Any feeling is something these days, any feeling that isn't a loss, that is.
She can hear him in this room.
I will never leave you again.
She can see herself in another.
You lied.
She gets up and throws the bottle at the fire. It smashes against the mantle, and glass sprays across the floor.
Elena.
Her head turns, and she sees him, out of the corner of her eye, a shadow dancing along the edges. She turns her whole body and chases that shadow on the edge of her vision until she's spinning in circles.
Then she's on the floor, clutching her head in her hands and crying out for somebody, anybody, to help her, and when hands curl around her shoulders, she doesn't know who they belong to her, but she trusts in them enough to let herself go, and she blacks out.
'I think I'm going crazy,' she tells Jeremy.
They are sitting in her car on Wickery Bridge, the sun is behind the clouds, and the air is still, and Elena thinks she may be losing her mind.
Jeremy grimaces sympathetically. ‘We all feel that way.’
'No,' says Elena, resting her head on the steering wheel. 'I think I'm actually going crazy, Jer.' She pulls back to look at them, hating how his eyes narrow in pity but finding comfort in the understanding she sees there. 'I'm seeing him everywhere.'
The admittance makes her almost giddy.
'I know,' says Jeremy, and Elena's eyes widen as she stares at him. 'I see Bonnie everywhere, too.'
Elena lets out a choked sound. 'You do?'
Jeremy leans his head back against the seat. 'Of course, I do. I loved her. She's in this town. She's everywhere. She's in everyone. Of course, I see her.'
'No,' says Elena brokenly. 'That's not what I meant. I see him, Jer. I literally see him.'
Jeremy reaches over and puts his hand on hers. 'It'll pass, Elena.'
Alaric is driving past the Grill, restored to its somewhat former glory by the generous donation of the Salvatore account, while Elena stares resolutely out the windscreen. She can not bring herself to look just yet, can't bring herself to go in, because her dreams are haunted by Camaros and flames, and the words I know are repeated repeatedly until she wants to throw them all up and destroy them from her vocabulary.
Elena is staring resolutely out the windscreen when she sees a flash of black jacket and black hair from the corner of her eye, and she almost breaks her neck when she shifts in her chair to look back.
'Stop the car.'
Alaric says, 'what' but Elena yanks on the hand break.
They pitch forward in their seats, and Alaric swears, but Elena hasn't taken her eyes off the man standing on the pavement outside the Grill. She rips off her seatbelt and ignores the furious response from other drivers, skirting around cars and paying no attention to Alaric while he staggers out of the driver's side.
'I can see you,' she says, and a waitress carrying a tray of drinks passes between them, and there's nothing.
Elena's eyes widen, and she stumbles onto the pavement. 'No, no, no, no.'
She whirls around, eyes searching frantically, ignorant of the people staring and whispering.
'Where are you?' she hisses around the tables, and then Alaric snatches her from the sidewalk and out of her panic.
'Who can you see, Elena?' he asks pressingly, his fingers digging into the flesh of her arms as he forces her to look at him.
She can not meet his eyes, too busy searching the streets. 'I saw him. I know I saw him.'
'Elena.'
Elena knows that tone. She tears herself from him because she knows it's absurd and insane, but this is how she feels, and Elena can't get him out of her head.
I can't take this. Please, God, make it stop. Please make it stop.
They all know.
Elena can feel the tension when she enters the room. She can feel their eyes on her. She wants to rip them all apart, and she wants to cry herself to sleep. She doesn't know how to handle it any more. She spends more time with her hand on the chain around her throat, considering that maybe what she's doing is killing herself by wearing it.
She wants to take it off, but she can never do it.
It's a part of her, the only part of him left. The only part that isn't dust and memory. It is not the slick slide of his voice down her spine when they're in the throws of lust, nor is it the warmth of his cheek upon hers when she requires comfort, but it is something, even though it is not enough.
Sometimes Elena wishes it will stop.
She doesn’t see him around every corner—in every mirror, in the reflection of her glass or in the shine of a vase—but she desperately does want to see him, and that's the problem.
She finds herself chasing those shadows in the corners of her eyes with no regard for anybody else. Whether they be in the middle of a conversation or a sermon at church, it won’t matter; a glimpse of his face and Elena will take off after it without a second thought; despite every search ending empty-handed.
Their friend group tries to do something normal.
It is for all their benefit but primarily for Elena’s.
Movies, blood bags, sweet food, blankets, and their bodies are a pile of warmth as they come together in the Boarding House.
When Elena lies down on the couch with her head in Alaric's lap and her feet on Tyler's, she feels more exhausted than she had ever thought possible. Alaric pets her hair gently and later, Tyler throws a blanket over her legs, and she falls quickly to sleep.
She dreams the same dreams. Blue eyes and blue cars. Fire and gas. Broken bones and burning heat. I know. Please come back to me.
Elena opens her eyes, and the room is quiet. The television has been turned off, and the lights are out. The fire is almost done. Tyler is not by her feet, and Alaric is not beneath her head, but the blanket is wrapped tight around her. She stares into the darkness, waiting to see him, knowing that it is times like this that he will come to her, but there is nothing.
She squeezes her eyes shut and wishes because she just wants to see his face. She just needs him. She just—
Elena.
She keeps her eyes shut tight and feels the hot slide of tears on her cheeks, wetting her mouth and hair.
Elena.
There is the phantom touch of a hand in her hair, fingers on the flesh of her jaw, and an ocean waiting to pour itself drop by drop from the corners of her leaking eyes.
'Please come back to me,' she begs brokenly to the empty air.
The touch fades, and she opens her eyes.
She is still alone.
'I need your help.'
Live laughs, choking on blood. 'Why would I -'
Elena moves her hands around Luke's head so that his neck twists past the point of pain, 'I'll kill him, and there's no way he's coming back this time.'
Liv looks like she's weighing up her options.
'You wouldn't,' she says, but she lacks fire, and Elena's eyes are cold and determined. 'What do you want?'
'Answers.' Elena doesn't let go of Luke. 'When the other side went down—I need to know—can you come back from that?'
Liv's eyes narrow. 'Elena, I don't know if you could bring back someone from oblivion. I'm a witch, not a fucking angel of the lord.'
'I don't appreciate your tone,’ frowns Elena with a movement that makes Luke gasp in pain. 'I'll let you in on a little secret,' she says to the woman bound to the chair in front of her. 'I'm seeing someone who's supposed to be dead everywhere. I'm going crazy and don't know how much longer I can take it. I am at my breaking point, and I need help.'
Liv eyes her warily. 'You think you can see…'
'I know I can,' says Elena with a voice like ice. 'But I don't know how.'
'The world is filled with magic that is raw and untapped that we don't even know about yet. In this world that we live in, anything is possible.' Live bows her head, and her brother whimpers.
She looks back up and meets Elena's eyes; there is something in them that Elena can't place.
Liv looks at her intuitively. 'You know yourself more than anybody.'
Elena scowls. ‘What does that mean?'
Liv shakes her head. 'If you believe in something or someone, you don't give up on them; I've seen it. It's a crucial part of who you are.'
Elena feels her fingers itch with the urge to kill, to scent blood in the air. She throws Luke to the ground so hard that he is knocked unconscious.
'I would kill him to have you know pain,’ says Elena, her face void of emotion. She surges forward into Liv's face, teeth sharp and breath hot on the witch's face. 'But I would not wish this on anyone.'
Elena is driving home, taking solace in the stars and the silence of the empty streets while the midnight hour thrives.
Absently, she checks her rear vision mirror. Her breath catches.
'I don't know what's happening any more,' she admits slowly as she looks back to the road. 'I don't know what's real and what's not.' Her fingers tighten on the steering wheel. Her knuckles go white. 'I don't know if I can keep doing this. I don't know if I want it to stop.'
The road is clear in front of her.
Elena is coming up to Wickery Bridge.
'I could end it,' she says quietly. 'We could be together. Is that how it works? Would I meet you there?'
Elena presses down harder on the accelerator and watches the needle rise as the view whips past the windows faster and faster.
'This would stop, though, right? I'd stop second-guessing myself?' The bridge draws closer. She swallows thickly and stares straight ahead.
The wheels hit the bridge.
'Third time's a charm, right?'
There is breath. Hot and warm breathing down her neck.
No, Elena.
She slams on the brakes, and the car skids ten metres before coming to a stop. She is shaken, entirely and utterly wrecked, heart pumping so fast it almost gives up on itself. It takes her a long moment to reach with a shaking hand to touch her neck and even longer to look up in the rear vision mirror.
He's gone from the back seat, the blue eyes that had burned into her nothing but a memory.
'I'm not crazy,' she tells them all, 'I tried to drive my car off Wickery Bridge, and he stopped me. I'm not crazy.'
She is expecting the chorus of incredulity, anger, confusion, and upset and ignores it.
'Elena…'
'No, Stefan,' she says and lifts her chin. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not seeing things. I know he's still here. He's not gone. He's not dead.'
She can see the pity in their eyes. 'We cremated—‘
'He. Isn't. Gone.' Elena’s voice wavers, but her resolve is firm. 'He fought for me, he's always fought for me, and I'm not going to stop fighting for him. Nothing any of you say or do will change that.'
She goes to bed that night and sleeps fitfully, painfully, throwing herself about the bed in sweats and whimpers. There is fire, flesh, and pain, and it licks up her spine and invades her mind, and she wishes for the ocean.
There is the phantom touch of a hand in her hair.
Elena opens her eyes to the first rays of dawn and the smile of the man she loves. She stares back for a long moment before blinking. He is still there.
'I know I'm not crazy,' she whispers into the small space between them.
His lips quirk.
'I know I'm not. I'm not giving up on us.' But she is tired and closes her eyes, but she knows it doesn't matter because she'll see him again.
She's sure of it.
Fingers on the flesh of her jaw.
Her eyes open again.
He is still there.
Elena thinks that this may be the cruellest of all visits yet. A tease, unobtainable and fleeting but lingering enough to cause her more grief. She feels the water rise behind her eyes; she feels the storm start up again.
A smile.
Fingers on the flesh of her jaw.
It feels so real.
It feels so real, and Elena sobs, pressing her face into the pillows and shaking as she cries because this will surely be her end. But if it means she gets to see his face and feel his touch, then she will take it. She will take it repeatedly because these fleeting, teasing moments are better than her overwhelming emptiness when he isn't there.
'Please come back to me,' she begs softly, 'come back to me.'
Fingers on the flesh of her jaw.
Elena.
She can't bring herself to open her eyes because this is ripping her apart, slowly, intimately, in all the ways it hurts the most.
'I love you,' she murmurs sadly, 'please come back to me.'
Elena.
'Come back to me.'
'Elena.'
Fingers on the flesh of her jaw.
'Please.'
'Elena.'
Elena doesn't know how long she cries for, she cries most days now anyway, but when the sunlight becomes brighter, she finally shifts and wipes at her eyes, blinking them open in expectation of an empty bed.
Damon’s smile is soft and kind.
'Elena.'
She feels her heart break again. 'Don't do this to me.’
He reaches out, and Elena's eyes map the skin of his arm, the veins she knows so well.
There is the touch of a hand in her hair.
She stills.
Damon's smile grows. 'Elena.'
Fingers on the flesh of her jaw.
'No,' she says, jerking back in reflex. She clutches at the sheets. 'No.' The tears start to spill again. 'Are you—'
Elena doesn't wait.
She throws herself across the bed, and when Damon catches her, she cries out and presses herself to him to feel his warmth and comfort, and his arms around her are safety and home and everything Elena has ever wished for in all her life.
'I love you,' she says with all the feeling she can muster, 'I love you -'
'I know,' says Damon, and his voice is a benediction.
Elena reaches up, cups his jaw, and kisses him, and when his tongue slides across her lower lip and into her mouth, she sees stars.
'I told you,' he says against her lips. 'I promised—‘
'You did,' she says, digging her fingers into his flesh. ' I knew you weren't...'
'I was.'
Elena stares, feeling the slow curl of dread as it starts to curl toxically through her haze of elation.
'It's not over, is it?' she asks softly, and he shakes his head. 'Bonnie.’
Damon nods. 'We've got some work to do.' He strokes her hair back off her face. 'It was you who kept me tethered here, though.' There's something in his eyes. 'You wouldn't give up on me.'
Elena kisses him again and tries to show him, 'I would never give up on you.' She searches his face, 'I love you, Damon.'
He smiles, the biggest one yet. 'I know, Elena.'
There is the touch of a hand in her hair, fingers on the flesh of her jaw, and an ocean waiting to pour itself drop by drop from the corners of her leaking eyes.