[ fic ] we're miles adrift, we're inches apart ; elena/stefan, the vampire diaries
Written for the prompt "i see signs now all the time" by softly_me at The Vampire Diaries Free-For-All Comment Ficathon: Part 3. Originally posted here.
we're miles adrift, we're inches apart » the vampire diaries. elena/stefan. pg-13. 620 words.
While Stefan is gone, Elena clings to the belief that she will see him again, and Stefan tries his best not to think of Elena at all. warnings: mild gore/violence, ripper!Stefan. I own nothing of TVD.
Stefan does not imagine Elena when he is gone.
Not when he has blood dripping down his chin, some pretty girl's limb in hand, and her in pieces on the floor - and Klaus over his shoulder, always over his shoulder.
He keeps Elena farthest from his mind in these moments, would remove her from it entirely if he could. He can't even reconcile the image of her, or a single memory of them, with the blood on his hands (and his arms, and his face).
So no, he does not think of Elena at all, not even when he notices the colour of a girl's hair, eyes, lips.
(But now, he's just lying to himself.)
Elena imagines Stefan.
When she's lying in bed, before it's truly light out, she remembers other mornings in this room, when she had less space in her bed but could breathe better for it - and she is so barely awake it could all be dream, but that thought alone scares her into consciousness.
She refuses to let memories twist into fabrication. She believes in the reality of it, all of it. She believes that she will save him, and on another morning unlike this one, he will lie beside her again and she will breathe and she will be okay.
(This is the part she tells herself so she can get out bed.)
But she can't keep out the bitter reflection that they never even got summer together.
He sees her in the closet and thinks he has been pushed to hallucination; he is not so good at not-imagining her after all.
She smiles. Smiles against a backdrop of every person he's ever killed, and Stefan nearly gives it all away, would take her in her arms just for the reassurance of tangibility, just to feel.
Instead, he is terrified, turns away as if she's not there as long as he can't see her.
If his heart still beat, he thinks it would be hammering. But it's not, and he leaves the room with Klaus calmly.
He'll let her heart beat for them both, he thinks, wildly.
(Hasn't that always been the case?)
It fails. (She fails.)
Stefan doesn't want to be saved.
And she wouldn't hate him for it if she didn't know the feeling so well.
(Maybe that's their problem. Maybe they both have a martyr complex. Maybe neither of them will ever be saved, so long as they'd rather suffer in the place of anyone else. Maybe, maybe, maybe.)
She curls her fingers around the necklace at her throat, and all the way home does her best not to think that one day it will be all she has left to know anything was real.
Worries that even then, maybe she'll have trouble.
He's tense from head to toe when he strides back into the bar. And then-- flash of brunette hair to his left, and he grabs at her arm, tight.
Wrong girl.
Not Elena. Elena left, left because he told her to leave, left because her brilliant plan didn't work out after all. It's better that she left.
She spent her summer figuring the ways to save him from Klaus, he thinks, laughs at the absurdity and sinks down into a chair.
Maybe he should have warned her. He doesn't need saving from Klaus. Only himself, and she can't do that. She can't piece him back together like one of his victims, even if that's what he is.
(Or maybe she could, and that's why he told her to leave; he tells himself it lies only in his hands, and he's not capable of saving himself either, but - at this point -
He's not sure he would, anyway.)