Chapter Text
Elena startles bolt upright in bed, her skin unusually pale and a sheen of sweat painting her face as she pants for air. The images of her dream fade too slowly for her liking; the sight of her childhood home as it used to be, her standing just where her mother used to, and the sound of children’s laughter echoing from the living room into the kitchen. It’s familiar, yet utterly alien; a sort of sick parody of her memory of herself and Jeremy as kids. She knows that she has never seen those children’s faces, but worse than that, she knows without a doubt that they are both hers. She isn’t sure how she knows there are exactly two of them; it’s just a fact that takes too long to blur back into reality. As she thinks about it, her reaction confuses her. The contents of the dream were idyllic, nothing there to evoke this response of pure terror in her, and yet her heart is pounding as if she has been running for her life. Every detail is almost too benign as it clings to her, and she wants to climb into the shower to scrub away the feeling of it all.
The thing that sticks with her the longest, though, over all the other sickly-saccharine imagery, is the happiness on her husband’s face, and the way his hands felt settled on her waist, his chest pressed up to her back so casually. It’s only as she really processes the dream that she realises that face belongs to Stefan, and that sets her pulse racing again. It’s not in excitement as it might have been even just a year ago, though.
She hasn’t been so physically close to him in months; it would be weird, given that they broke up at the start of the summer. She wants to blame her one poor judgement call for the ending of their relationship. That one choice haunts her —haunts them, had haunted their whole relationship even before it had happened— but deep down she knows there was far more to their ending than that one moment.
Even so, she still isn’t sure what possessed her to kiss Damon.
She is certain, however, that she won’t be repeating that mistake again. She almost wishes that it hadn’t been her choice, that she had been even a little reluctant to pull him into her arms and press her lips to his, but the days of Damon trying to physically force himself onto her are far in the distant past, back before she learned what vervain was. He’s smarter about it now.
Even if it hadn’t hurt Stefan the way it did —the way that she had known it would, even as she did it— she’s really tired of being Damon’s moral compass, and it seems like the more time she spends with him, the more that everyone around them expects her to be just that. He’s old enough to have developed one of his own, and the burden of being responsible for his actions has been weighing heavily on her for too long.
Damon, of course, is still yet to get the message. It seems that, to the Salvatores, the only logical choice for her is to date Damon if she’s not dating Stefan. As much as she hates to admit it, she’s starting to empathise with Katherine; faking her own death and avoiding the pair of them for over a century is becoming more and more appealing. The longer she is immersed in the world of the supernatural, the more parallels she is able to draw between herself and her ancestor, although she never admits this aloud. She still loves them both, of course, which she doesn’t believe Katherine can claim truthfully, but she just doesn’t feel in-love with either of them anymore. Still though, she clings to the fact that she cares about them at all; her caring and compassion is one final barrier to her absolute indistinction from her vampire doppelganger.
Regardless of her feelings in the waking world, the dream version of Elena was in love with Stefan. The easy way that he held her, not demanding, just casually intimate, reminds her of how her parents had been on those lazy mornings when her dad didn’t have to work, and she would slap her hand over her eyes in exaggerated disgust at the sight of them, Jeremy giggling at her display as they both fled to a room free of parental PDA.
In the dream, the touch had felt right, the intimacy natural; they had felt right. Elena-and-Stefan. Stefan-and-Elena.
Now that she’s awake, the concept makes her feel slightly ill. Okay, maybe more than slightly. She’s downright nauseous at the picture it paints.
It’s not that she’s opposed to the idea of settling down one day, but Caroline’s the one who’s had all of their weddings planned from the age of seven, and Elena has always just been the one to nod along, never wanting to let down her best friends’ expectations. She’s pretty sure that Caroline still has a binder for each of their little group —at least, Caroline, Elena, and Bonnie have a binder each, and the boys have a few scraps of paper in a plastic wallet as an afterthought— that she’s never stopped adding to, even after being turned into a vampire a couple of years ago. It’s one of the habits that first proved to Elena that Vampire-Caroline was the same as Human-Caroline, once you got past the fangs and the blood-drinking.
Sometimes, Elena thinks that the only reason she’ll ever actually get married is so that she doesn’t deprive Caroline of the chance to plan the party.
In her imagination, the man Elena marries is still an amorphous blur.
That had been the reason she had first doubted her relationship with Matt; he had been planning their whole future together, and she couldn’t even picture standing beside him at their wedding, let alone having a house together, or kids. When she started dating Stefan, she had done her best to staple his face onto that blurry silhouette, but the discovery of his vampirism had shaken that quickly enough. Really, the final nail in the coffin was that weekend at the lakehouse when he had found out she was going to walk willingly to her own death. The way he had planned out this whole future for them —for her— without her just reminded her of Matt, and she had spent the rest of their relationship outrunning that feeling. It had been easier to do when they were constantly fighting one threat after another, but once it all slowed down, the feeling of being trapped came seeping back in at the edges, and then …
And then there was Damon. She hadn’t even been dating Stefan seriously yet when she had first met him, and she had turned down his advances. It feels like both the Salvatore brothers —and most of her friends, if she’s honest— have forgotten that small fact. Sure, he was attractive —he still is attractive— but she didn’t want to date him then, and she really doesn’t want to now. She can’t deny that when she was dating Stefan, and feeling stuck, freedom looked like dark hair and piercing blue eyes. He was everything that Stefan wasn’t when it came to passion, excitement, danger … He was all-consuming when compared to Stefan’s careful restraint and constant fear of slipping and hurting her. Damon was a promise of something different.
The moment she had left Stefan, though, it was like the bubble burst, and the appeal of Damon paled in comparison to the appeal of living for herself. That alone has been enough to keep her from caving to Stefan’s pleas that they try again, and that he forgives her, he understands, he loves her. She almost fears that going back to Stefan would put her back in that box again, and that she might end up stringing along Damon again just to escape it.
With the dream still floating around her mind, refusing to disappear from the backs of her eyelids, she forces herself out of bed and gets in the shower. The hot water beating against her skin turns it a harsh shade of pink, but that doesn’t stop her from scrubbing herself all over until she feels almost raw. She eyes her fingernails once she stops the water, realising too late that she should have cut them before her shower, because thin lines are raised on her arms and legs where she scratched herself in her frenzy, and she’s even drawn blood in a few places where the skin is its thinnest. She sits on the edge of the tub, skin tingling, and clips each one, —first her fingers, then her toes— but even that doesn’t help her feel clean. She winces as she takes the nail scissors a little too close to the skin, and draws blood on her clumsier left hand. She ignores the irony of it being her ring finger that she injures, just stemming the tiny droplet of blood with some tissue and looking anywhere but at her hands.
Now that the faucet has been shut off, there’s only the occasional dripping sound as the last drops hit the shower floor; the rest of the house is as silent as death. Of course, that’s the usual state of the house these days. Jeremy is in Denver, refusing to come home with her after witnessing her kiss with Damon. Alaric is back at his apartment. Everyone else who has ever lived there is dead. No, she corrects herself, everyone who has ever lived here has died. She, Jeremy and Alaric were just the lucky ones who had someone or something to bring them back. She still feels dead, sometimes.
It’s not often, nowadays, that she lingers on her grief, because when she does it all gets too overwhelming, and she spirals, and forgets that everyone else in her life has lost people too. None of them have lost quite as much as she has, though, and that knowledge always sits bitterly on her tongue when she tries to verbalise it. Her determination to not linger on the past, and the deaths of everyone in her family, usually keeps the house from feeling the way it does now. Like Death is making itself a home downstairs, and she should make sure she doesn’t disturb it. Her mother’s lectures on hospitality prompt a racing thought that she ought to offer it a blanket and make it comfortable.
On top of that, though, there’s another feeling. The dream is still stuck in her head, playing in perfect clarity over and over again, and a growing part of her fears that if she goes downstairs she might just find that it’s true. For some reason, she’s more afraid of discovering a house full of a marriage to Stefan and two-and-a-half kids than she is of finding it to be as devastatingly empty as it always is these days.
She decides to face neither, and instead crawls into Jeremy’s bed. There’s still a hint of him left behind; he packed so quickly that he only took the barest essentials, and that almost makes things harder for her. Maybe if it was just an empty room, like she had been left with after Jenna’s death, or when Alaric moved out, then she wouldn’t feel so twisted up about his decision to stay away. As it is, she can see that he was planning on coming back, and it only makes it sting more that the compulsion is broken. He could come back any time, but he doesn’t want to.
She pulls his comforter over her, blocking out the cold air of the house she only heats sparingly, and finally lets herself fall asleep again. Maybe it’s something supernatural, or maybe something psychological, but in the safety of Jeremy’s room, she sleeps without dreams.