entrancelogs | + Your imagination can't hurt you! +

Damon's body is tense before she touches him. Every muscle ready to tear apart the world. She pulls him in, and some part of him unwinds. A shudder claims him. His hand wraps around her elbow, fingertips digging in. His arm hooks around her waist, locking in around her.

He studies her for injury, for answers.

With every breath, his chest presses against her own. Her heartbeat like an echo in his head, trying to drown out the other sounds. The first test he'd been terrified for her, and it stayed through all of it even as a low murmur in the back of his head.

"Elena."

His voice sounds like the sharp, jagged edges of those cans. "Are you okay?"

"I think so."

Her answer is breathed upon his neck. She blinks through tears that threatened to fall all evening, dampness collecting in her lashes and clumping them together. Her heart is tired, body worn down to its bones, but Elena is okay. Alive.

That's the barometer right now, isn't it?

With reluctance, she draws away to take in the sight of him. Her hands brush past his neck and find a resting place on the solid of his chest. Heartbeat against palm. Elena could volley the question back at him, but she isn't sure she needs to. "Damon?"

His thumb curves over her cheekbone at the sight of those tears. It slides down and then taps gently against her jaw. Fingers spear back into the strands of her hair, tethering himself to this moment. Keeping the edges at bay.

He breathes in against her hands. Eyes close. The rattling returns to his chest.

"I need a drink."

He moves by her to the closet and pulls out a bottle of alcohol, tearing off the cap and gulping down a portion of it. His stomach jolts and twists and turns as the alcohol tries to crawl back up his throat, and he throws the bottle against the wall.

It shatters. He shakes. Forgets how to breathe. Doesn't need to.

Damon's shoulder bumps into her as he goes, Elena left stunned and breathless in his wake. A memory surfaces: Mikael's early demise, their plan dashed to pieces, and Damon's misery unleashed in front of a similar fireplace. It's the last time she saw Damon unravel, his frame trembling with it. She is ready to confront these terrible depths again.

Her quickened steps precede her voice, halting only for a moment when glass connects to brick.

"Hey."

Elena curls her hand around his wrist and tugs, neither afraid nor resigned. "Whatever happened, whatever you saw, it wasn't real, Damon. It's over and it can't hurt us anymore."

Damon wrenches his hand out of her own, pulling away. His back hits the wall with a loud thud. Ringing returns to his head to match the rattling. His body language resembles a caged animal (and isn't that ironic?).

"It was real." The sound is sharp edges and anger, but beneath it all, shakiness winds around it like a vine. "My own personal hell from decades ago dredged up and recreated by Wonderland, and for what?"

So Caroline could see that he too had been hurt before?

So he could make the right choice today when he didn't before, turning off his emotions to survive when he could have died in a fire instead? He still lives with the guilt of walking away.

Elena mashes down the urge to reach for him again.

Damon isn't making sense to her, if her bewildered expression is anything to go by, and she must choose between worry and confusion. Silence follows Damon's outburst, and all she can hear is the crackling of the fire. His breathing.

The things she would be saying, if she knew how.

It's not his anger that stills her. It's his fear.

A whisper. "What are you talking about?"

The worst five years of his life are torn open again as if he never escaped them (he never did. can he? if he saw an Augustine here today, he'd still kill them. Doesn't matter.

Doesn't).

"Oh, just a society of people who decided capturing, experimenting, and torturing vampires was a good cause to dedicate their lives to."

It sounds wrong leaving him in that way. His shoulders slump. He slides down the wall until he hits the floor.

"No one knew before today." He growls even though he is on the floor as if the growl locks him into what he's more comfortable being especially when talking about this. "It's not an excuse."

Edited 2016-11-17 20:43 (UTC)

Her gaze follows his descent.

If she'd been still before, she turns to marble now, and just as cold.

"You were — " Experimented on and tortured? For being a vampire?

The blistering realization shoves every other question from her mind. She doesn't ask how on earth Stefan didn't know. She doesn't ask who found out, and someone must've: the mazes thought in pairs.

"How long?"

Nausea crawls up his throat.

Shoulders tense. Limbs feel like rocks, weighted, wrong.

"Five years."

He stares at the broken glass. Her shock fills the room. He doesn't know what Elena feels. He doesn't know what he wants her to feel. It never would have come out right, would it? People ask him about the fifties, and he shrugs and makes a light comment as if the 50s didn't feel like a hundred or so years crammed into five, as if those five years didn't change the rest.

Edited 2016-11-17 20:48 (UTC)

An ache sticks in her throat.

Elena strains under the weight of his refusal. She lowers herself down to her knees, limbs overwhelmed and the rest of her just as affected. The thought of him caged like an animal makes her sick.

She looks sick. "Damon ..."

What can she say? What could possibly encompass how horrified she feels right now? Nothing he has ever done would make her believe he deserved this. "It's not an excuse to acknowledge you were tortured for five years."

Damon's jaw locks hard, hands clenching as his gaze darts back to her. He does not deserve her compassion, either. Her worry. She aches on his behalf. He reads it written in her expression, and she should be free from him.

"It's an excuse if people use it to explain your behavior. It's an excuse if people start to see more when they have every goddamn right to their hate. Who do you think re-lived it with me?"

One of the last people who ever should have.

One of his victims because he is not only a victim who was tortured. He became the monster.

Have you forgotten the things that he's done to us? To me?

The truth is cruel: Elena failed to remember. It sits in the far back of her mind, and only Caroline's hurt yanked it all back to the surface. She's held Caroline's scared, shaking body, all because Damon decided to use her as his own personal juice box in his war against Stefan. Damon's made terrible choices, and he didn't care who he destroyed in the process. She'd hated him for it.

A flinch grasps hold of her blanched face.

"Caroline."

She should flinch, shouldn't she? She shouldn't forget. His heart breaks at the sight regardless.

Every word leaves him in a burst of self-loathing.

"I was tortured. So what? I made an escape plan with a fellow tortured, trapped friend. I turned off my emotions so I could leave that friend behind, and I left them off and have destroyed everything and everyone in my path since!"

He shoves his fists into the floor.

"I am not good for anyone."

Elena inhales sharply, holding the ache of that breath in.

Is it terrible that she can't, won't, let him go despite knowing what she knows? Is it terrible that she doesn't care what he had to do to survive within those walls, because failing to do so means he would not be here? His friend is a nameless face that can't reach her.

Caroline is not. And still.

Still.

She can sense where this is going, the sharpness of that breath reaching her eyes with a sting.

"Don't do this."

"I have to." The first words are harsh as the rest and then his head drops down low. They come out strangled from his mouth. "I have to do right by you."

The lesson shoves itself into him over and over again. He has to learn.

He has to learn before he drags her down into the fire, too. If he closes his eyes, he still feels the fire tearing away his skin bit by bit by bit. Hears the echoes of his own screams mingling with all the screams of everyone he's ever killed.

Damon shakes as he stands, shakes as he walks by her. Again.

The cocktail has returned in its full force, ringing around in his head.

Elena bites the inside of her cheek in frustration, hard enough to draw blood.

This isn't what he's supposed to learn.

Plenty of people have told her that Damon is bad for her, that choosing to be with him is dangerous. She's felt her fair share of guilt and shame for it in the past. But she didn't expect Damon to join the crowd. Not after everything they've been through in Wonderland. Not after she stood her ground with Stefan and Caroline. Not when only she can make that choice. She feels irrationally betrayed by him, even with the understanding that she can't fix this by hugging it away or asking him to feel his pain. Everything she has given has been given freely.

He's never had to earn it.

She wants to fight him. She wants to press until he caves, so he doesn't have to carry this alone. He's too raw to listen. It's funny in all the ways that it isn't: he's also the second Salvatore, within the week, to make it clear she is to be nowhere around him.

She needs to check on Caroline. To be the friend her loved ones deserve, instead of continuously falling short.

"This isn't right for either of us."

The door shuts behind her.

Caroline is pretty easy to find.

She never wants anyone to see her dealing, and so after parting with Damon, she goes back to her room to be alone. While she's emotionally exhausted, her mind won't let her sleep, so that option is out, so she does what every well adjusted vampire would do in this situation.

The blonde is sitting on her perfectly made bed, knees pull up and hugged against her chest as she stares at the far wall when she hears a knock at the door.

She can guess who it probably is.

"I'm fine."

The words sound somewhat hollow as they escape her, as if her thoughts are somewhere else, and she knows if she's right about who's here, that's not about to be enough of a deterrent.

Nothing ever deters the relentlessly stubborn Elena Gilbert.

At least, not as a general rule. Doors have been closing in her face left and right lately, though. There isn't a single person from home that she hasn't angered or driven away, and the harder she tries to sink her claws in, refusing to let go, the worse it gets.

"Caroline ..."

Her voice trails off, sad and tired but earnest. "I don't want you to be alone."

There's a heavy silence for a long moment, some bitter words involving the idea that Elena should be comforting Damon instead of her sticking to her throat, but she pushes it back before sighing.

"It's unlocked."

Upon opening the door and coming inside, Elena would find a partially empty bottle of whiskey and a glass on the nightstand next to her bed. (With her vampiric tolerance, it's just enough to dull her thoughts without totally falling over the sobriety edge.) There's also a drained blood bag on the same table, which she probably should have thrown away but didn't bother.

Elena's steps are soundless.

Closing the the door behind her with a quiet click, she appraises the room before her gaze can land on Caroline properly. Elena is clutching a pillow to her chest with one arm, her free hand holding a short-necked bottle of liquor. She thought about bringing other things that could distract her friend, but the closets can easily supply whatever they might need. "I see you started without me."

She loosens her grip on her knees, letting them stretch out a bit on the bed before looking over at her friend as she walks further into the room. A laugh escapes her mouth, but it's quiet and bitter and lacks any trace of actual humor.

"I didn't know I was supposed to wait for anyone."

She wasn't exactly going to go asking for a shoulder to cry on, and Damon had been the one to tell her to keep her mouth shut. Granted, he only said Stefan, but she and Elena hadn't actually been on the best terms lately.

"What did he tell you?"

Finding a spot at the foot of Caroline's bed, Elena's feeble attempt at a smile falters.

"Not everything, I'm guessing."

Damon doesn't trust easily, if at all. It's easier to push people away and lash out. Elena is arguably the person he is closest to, and there's a lot he doesn't share with her. "He mentioned a society that experiments on vampires. A society that captured him for five years." She still can't imagine it, and Damon never offered details. "I know you were there with him now. Nobody hurt you, did they?"

She nods her head a bit.

"There was a dungeon. Vervain on the bars. He said they kept the vampires weak, did experiments, paraded them around at parties. There was an exam room and a scalpel and..."

Her voice shakes a little as she trails off, but she finally shakes her head.

"No, not really. Nothing that I couldn't heal in a couple seconds, other than the vervain burns. But Damon..."

She's silent for a moment, reaching over to the nightstand for the still open bottle, taking a long sip out of it.

"...there was a fire and I was trapped. He was going on and on about not leaving me like some other person. Whatever he did, it got me out of there, but I don't know if he burned up or not. It took him longer to get out of there and the fire was everywhere."

Her heart climbs up to her throat.

Damon burned.

Don't ask how she knows with such certainty, but she does. Their entire conversation makes more sense now; the way he kept looking at the fireplace, like he wanted to jump out of his own skin. Elena doesn't confirm or deny. Caroline doesn't need more to worry about, and Damon is a sensitive topic as it is. (The thought of both of them there still makes her feel sick.)

"He made a friend there. His cellmate, I think. Their plan was to escape together, but Damon had to leave him behind and ..."

It's the first time he ever turned his humanity off. Elena didn't know that. She's only starting to realize how much she doesn't know. Shaking her head, she blinks through warm tears. Settles her hand on top of Caroline's. "I'm just glad you're okay."

"Well, he didn't leave me behind, and I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about that."

At first, she's tempted to tell Elena to just leave her alone. That she doesn't deserve her comfort for the things she's said, that she still doesn't want her to be with someone as destructive as Damon, and that it doesn't just have to do with her.

But it's not up to her, and he did save her. Even if it was for selfish reasons, it wasn't for him.

Her hand turns over so that her fingers can interlock with her friend's.

"I'm not." That much is clear by the confusion and unsettled emotions in her brain. She might be okay physically, but that was...a lot to take in at once. "But I will be."

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