the low road // 04 prey
Title: the low road // 04 prey
Author: that_treason
Rating: M overall (M this chapter)
Length: around 3700 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.”
// 04 PREY
This hotel is the best they could find, because Damon is tired of motel filth and Elena is tired of listening to him whine. As soon as they're in the room, Elena claims the bathroom (happily furnished with towels that are soft instead of crunchy) leaving Damon to sprawl on the bed and wait, lulled by the sound of the shower.
She loves the heat of the water on her skin, but more she relishes the time alone. For two years she's handled life with various Damons (rash Damon, angry Damon, love-sick Damon, foolish Damon, even heroic Damon) but somehow patient Damon wears on her nerves the most. And patient Damon is the only Damon around right now; all the other ones are off in hiding. It's like he's afraid to push her in any way, afraid he'll break this peace they've built between them. Afraid of bumps, and other metaphors from Life Before.
She snorts when she catches herself: she came in here for time away from him and somehow he's still with her in every thought.
So Elena shrugs him off - washes the thought of him from her hair and skin with a washcloth and bar of hotel soap. Focuses instead on the feeling of the water rolling down. On the feel of herself, inside and out.
There's a hole inside her, a wide circle from her navel to the top of her chest. She's certain that if someone were to cut her open to look beneath her skin they'd find a vast hollow place, with her heart crushed down tight in the middle. Nothing more than a pinprick of switch took it all away and bound it up tight - her anger, fear, guilt, love.
Base amusement seems unaffected, so she still laughs and smiles and moans, but it's almost an animal state of being - less emotion than chemical reaction. Rage, too, seems unaffected, more a property of fight or flight than any higher process.
Everything more complex is just an act - playing pretend through all the moments of her life.
No humanity is in theory the ultimate freedom. Do what you want without guilt or remorse. Plan and plot without anger or love to cloud your judgement. Act as you will, when you will, how you will. Be and do, and let guilt go to rot.
And it was freedom at first. Freedom to get rid of the Cure, to keep herself a vampire forever - without compassion or grief or love slowing her down. She could think and fight and do whatever needed to be done, while Damon and Rebekah squabbled behind her.
Since they left Katherine's town she's less sure of things. That ragged emptiness inside is always there, waiting for her. Feeding lets her forget it for a while. Sex too, when she lets herself go. But nothing is quite as good as those few days spent hunting down the Cure.
Maybe this insatiable need for blood - to drink and drink and drink without end - is really just an attempt to fill the emptiness that's taken up residence in her chest. Emotion used to drive her, back in the time before the switch and the hole. She remembers emotion, remembers drive, remembers how they gave her purpose.
Switched off, everything is simple: blood and control. But the simplicity is a deception: she wants to want more than that. She wants to want other things than blood.
And there's no answer for that from the hole in her chest.
Twenty minutes go by as she goes round and round between the head and the hole, looking for answers, before she reluctantly shuts off the water and steps from the bathroom with a second towel to her wet hair. Damon's eyes flick from the tattered paperback in his hands to her pale and perfect body, still damp from the shower. She just rubs her hair, undisturbed by his gaze.
"I'm hungry."
"Ugh, you're always hungry." The annoyance in his voice is affected; he's being dramatic for show.
"So are you. I know you are." She fumbles through a gym bag packed with clothes, all newly acquired from high end boutiques in Kansas City.
"Sure, but I'm less whiney about it. What'll it be? Room service? Lure someone up from the bar?"
A tight blue dress goes over her head while she thinks.
"Would you have stopped me?" she asks abruptly.
"Stopped you...?" he replies, confused. Not the turn of conversation he was expecting, too busy noting the distinct lack of panties under her dress.
"A few days ago. At the diner. With the cook." She continues to search through her bag, never looking his way. "I could have killed him if I'd wanted. You could have stopped me, physically pulled me off him, if I hadn't stopped myself. But I'm curious whether you would have."
"I did warn you when it was close."
"Not the same thing. Would you have stopped me?"
He looks at her, wet hair already curling around her shoulders in a dark wave, tanned skin glowing next to the vibrant blue of the dress. His head cocks to the side.
"I wanted to see what you'd do. I nudged you once, but after that, well...Roger was in your hands."
There's a comb in her hands now, sliding workmanlike in and out of her hair. Damon drops his book on the bed and pops over to where she stands, taking the comb from her. Elena's fingers let it go without a fight; she turns her body around to offer him a better angle. Loves the soft scrape of the comb on her scalp and the slight tug as it glides through her hair. So much more gentle than she ever is with herself.
The pink streaks weave in and out of the rest.
"I understand the cut," he says after a minute or so of silence. "New outlook, vast lifestyle changes - completely natural that you'd want it different. Not sure I get the pink though, seems like teenage rebellion that you're a thousand times too mature for."
"I was rebellious and immature once. You didn't know me then - or I guess you did, but only for a second. Then my parents died and everything changed. And Jenna died and everything changed. Alaric died. Jeremy died." She says these things in a monotone, not even faking an emotional bent to her voice. "Everything changes. I used to be a wild kid. Then I was a serious one. Now I'm whatever this is."
The air is full of the smell of the lavender scented conditioner she used in her hair. He continues to comb it out, far past the point of necessity.
"So this is some desperate attempt to reclaim lost youth? You're a couple decades early, might be better to pace yourself - save it up for the inevitable 150-year-old existential crisis."
"No," she says simply. "You were right the first time - I wanted a change. I couldn't stand the pin straight hair anymore - it belonged to someone else, two lifetimes ago. But the curls...too easy to look like Katherine. I'm not her either.
"Something for which I am eternally grateful."
"I wanted something to differentiate us," she says quietly. "The color is a compromise until I figure out a more permanent change. I could cut it all off short or shave my head or something - and I might still if nothing else seems reasonable."
She pauses to think for a moment, before she continues, "Can't scar anymore, so that's out."
Elena turns around as he finishes one stroke, catches his wrist before he has the chance to start another. Her hand falls to his arm, where she rubs her thumb along the tiny letters just inside his elbow. "I don't get how the two of you managed to keep your tattoos. Why doesn't the ink heal out of your skin?"
"Eh, witches," he says too fast, with a calculated shrug. "Story for another time. I thought you were hungry."
It's an obvious diversion - one of many he's thrown at her over the course of the trip. Lately he's always trying to soothe her or direct her or distract her - perhaps to regain some measure of control while he follows her around.
She briefly toys with the thought of provoking him into revealing more - mostly for the fun of an uncontrolled Damon outburst (any Damon but this patient one would be such a relief) - but instead she lets him have it. Decides to start saving up these little mysteries he dangles in front of her. Some day she'll need it for her own distraction.
She turns instead to consider her hunger and decides that fulfilling simple need isn't enough.
"I am hungry, but it can wait a bit," she says, and then pauses for effect. "First, I want something from you."
There's suspicion on his face, but his voice is amused when he asks, "And that would be?"
"I want to watch you hunt."
"Pfft," he says, waving a hand in the air, "Easy. You've seen me feed plenty of times. If that's what gets you off then-"
"No. Not feed. Hunt. I want to watch you stalk and chase and catch. Not in a club either, with a hundred people standing around. Somewhere more private."
She can't tell what he's thinking. The live-wire smugness that usually pervades him has drained away, leaving a face like a mask behind.
"You used to hunt, remember?" she continues, unsure how best to convince him. She covers her unsteadiness with callous words, trying to push him to react. "Remember before blood bags? Before be the better man? When we first met you were leaving bodies all over Mystic Falls - in the woods, at the football games."
She grabs at the collar of his shirt, to pull him close and whisper in his ear.
"I want to see you dangerous again."
###
Earlier in the day when they'd driven past Elena hadn't looked twice at the woman hanging clothes up to line dry in the late afternoon sun, but when she asked Damon to hunt for her it was the first suggestion out of his mouth. A rundown farmhouse out in the country, with weeds in the flower beds and a single vehicle parked out front.
He was mostly quiet on the trip back to the house from the hotel - so strange to Elena after the past week of almost constant chatter. He broke his silence only to give her a few simple instructions: if she wanted to watch, she had to climb somewhere high, like the roof of the building - both for a better view and to avoid tipping the woman off to their presence.
Other than that he'd kept to himself in the passenger seat of the car.
It's country dark on the road, a solid blankness so thick it presses against her eyes. She brings the car around one shapeless corner after another until it pops from nowhere: piercing brightness that outlines the vague sketch of an old, old farmhouse.
She pulls to the side when they see it and lets him off. Takes the car further up the road and around yet another bend to the edge of a deeper darkness, a mass of trees that stretches on a little ways. She gets out of the car and starts to walk in the direction of the house, keys still in the ignition and doors unlocked.
The stars swirl overhead, bright with no moon to shut them out of the sky. Insects click and twitter in the grass, early-hatched harbingers of the coming summer. The air is warm for spring and still heavy with moisture despite the rain of the past few days. Off in the distance thunder rolls, but there's no sign of paired lighting yet - only the beginnings of a cooler, storm-driven breeze from the same direction.
An earlier version of herself might have missed all this - the look of the stars, the feel of the rough grass on her bare legs - too wrapped up in emotions to let herself go. Now there's nothing to remove her from the physicality of the world and she revels in all the heightened levels of her senses.
From her angle of approach the house is a dark silhouette - no light from the front porch or driveway, just edges of brightness from a flood lamp around back. The details resolve out of the darkness as she gets closer: paint peeling on the sagging porch; a beaten down truck, with a broken taillight and cardboard taped over the side window, parked in the driveway.
When she reaches the garage she hesitates, trying to decide the best way to get onto the roof. Increased speed and strength aren't quite second nature to her yet - she can manage when needed, but never with Damon's grace. In the end she just flings herself wildly into the air and lands awkwardly on the roof above the porch.
The tarpaper tiles scratch at her palms as she makes her way along, up and over the peak of the roof. She continues to crawl along until she has a clear view of the backyard, in the shadow of an attic window that thrusts up from the main roof. Down below she can see the woman they drove by earlier, brown hair in a messy bun, pulling sheets down off the long laundry lines.
There's no sign of Damon - not a whisper or scent or shadow. After several minutes concentrating all her senses, she gives up trying to guess Damon's plan of attack and lets herself relax and follow the show. She hugs her knees into her chest and tucks her curls behind her ears to keep them from her face as the storm-bringing breeze picks up.
The woman makes her way methodically down the line, pulling one sheet down at a time. She shakes each out before folding it carefully, over and over, and slipping it down into her cracked plastic laundry basket. The third sheet is down and flapping in her hands when her head snaps around towards the darkness away from the house. Elena's eyes follow along, searching for whatever caught the woman's attention, but not bothering to really stretch her vision past what the human eye can see. The woman stares a minute more before shaking her head and turning back to folding the sheet in her hands.
A moment later she freezes, white folds billowing in the breeze around her arms. She never turns her face, just stares down at the piled sheet. Her frozen posture puzzles Elena, but then she realizes: the woman must be listening rather than looking.
The woman sets the wadded up sheet down into the basket. "Somebody out there?" she calls. Her voice is deep and rough, calm despite her apparent apprehension.
"Why don't you come out and we can talk about this like reasonable folk? No need to be standing out in a field, eh?"
The woman makes her way along the sheets, heading away from the house, weaving in and out of the fabric that blocks her view of one side of the yard or another. Elena thinks she sees a smudge of deeper darkness streak past to one side, there and gone again, but it was so fast it could have been her imagination.
The woman obviously notices something though, out away from the light. She turns and walks back towards the house, never running, but definitely not taking her time. As she nears the edge of the back porch, Elena leans over to get a better view. She doesn't know what Damon's plan might be, but she doubts it involves letting the woman get back into her house, where neither one of them has been invited. He must be somewhere close, waiting for the right moment to snatch her up.
Then everything happens fast, and there isn't time to think, only to react.
Strong hands wrap around Elena's face and throat, pulling her back from the edge. Shock runs through her, even if there's no accompanying fear. She bites down on the fingers covering her mouth and tastes copper and cinnamon and fire. No human blood tastes like that, full of power and lust - Damon's on the roof with her, arms wrapped around her neck, not down in the dark.
She doesn't even attempt to fight back against his pull, just pushes herself forward with all her strength, rolling them both off the roof. Damon is so intent on her capture, teeth scrambling for her neck, he doesn't realize what's happening until it's too late to stop.
They fall from the roof, twisted up together, to land in the mud three stories down.
Damon pushes himself up to lean over her and laughs as he wipes mud from his face to flick at her with his fingertips. "Nice save, pushing us off the roof like that."
"What the hell, Damon?" Elena replies. The attack and the fall shook her up, brought something light up from the depths of her. She acts without questioning her changed mood, grabbing fistfuls of mud to chuck it at him. He throws up two hands to try to defend himself, but one sails up and over to land on his ear and slide down his neck, into the collar of his mud ruined shirt.
He wipes at the mud on his face with the less dirty sleeve, grinning at her all the while. "You were so serious back at the hotel, I couldn't help myself. I want to see you dangerous again." He mimics her monotone perfectly and earns another chunk of mud in his hair for his trouble.
"I figured I'd let you get the up-close-and-personal version of dangerous Damon one last time." He flashes his eyes at her, grin fading into a look more akin to longing, as he whispers, "Besides: you were always my favorite prey."
Sarcasm is ready on her lips, but instead her mouth twists into a howl and her fists press to her temples. She feels Damon's arms tighten around her, but only distantly compared to the popping, bubbling fire in her brain.
When the pain finally recedes seconds or minutes or hours later, Elena looks up along the barrel of the shotgun to the brown haired woman's face. Sheets snap in the breeze behind her, but otherwise the world is hushed and waiting.
"Vampires, listen up!" the woman hollers at them. "You're gonna get the fuck off my property immediately - do you understand me?"
Damon pops up from the mud at vampire speed, wrenching Elena along with him, but makes no move to get closer to the woman.
"And you plan to make that happen how, witchy?" There's no humor in his voice as his snarls at her, eyes wide and angry. "I'm pretty sure, based on the performance you just gave, you're strong enough to take down maybe one little baby vampire - but you sure as shit can't manage that on me. Try it again and I'll have you on the ground in a second."
Elena rubs at her hair, annoyed at the residual pain in her head and Damon's 'baby vampire' comment, but rattled enough not to put herself in harm's way.
"Fucking cocky vampires, never leave well enough alone," the brown-haired woman mutters to herself, as if they can't hear every word.
She raises her voice to address them again. "Sure, I could attack you and you could attack me. I'd shoot you both full of these wooden bullets, maybe take one of you out, and still get ate dead, no question." She nods as she talks, no fear in her voice, like she's discussing a change in the weather rather than her own impending death.
"But then the rest of my 'witchy' friends - already on their way here, just so you know - would likely be inclined to end both of you permanently. So how 'bout instead the two of you take your weird little mud wrestle to someone else's garden, save us all the trouble, eh?"
Elena doesn't wait for Damon to respond with another threat or actual violence, just pushes at him with one muddy arm and shakes her head. She feels nothing for this woman, living or dead. But she does care very much about a pack of witches chasing them down - and she won't hesitate to fight Damon over it, even if he is on the edge of exploding.
"This isn't worth it, Damon. Get over the anger and think."
Damon turns rage filled eyes to her; Elena just stares back at him, her own eyes narrow and her mouth tight, not willing to give any ground. For a moment the three of them are very still, all waiting to see what he'll do. They make a strange scene, the two of them staring at each other, muscles tensed and jaws set, while the woman holds them at gunpoint.
To Elena's surprise, Damon breaks first, with a strained laugh and shake of his head. Elena knows that sound when she hears it: anger and frustration and a million reasons to be wary.
All he says is, "Fair enough," before turning and walking away.
The woman keeps the shotgun trained on them as they move into the darkness away from the bright lights of the house.
