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“Elena, please,” Stefan balked. Face laden with heavy guilt, his desire for her ringing deep in his eyes. “You don’t understand, this is all happening wrong,” he shook his head. This wasn’t the way he wanted to come back to Mystic Falls for her. The plan was already falling apart and of course, that was down to Damon.
“What, Stefan? What was I wrong about?” Exasperated, Elena waited in the doorway, mustering more patience than she intended to. She didn’t mean to keep giving him all of these second chances, she wasn’t the kind of girl to offer her heart up for the breaking so often. But Stefan’s eyes were open with her now, and that made her even more dangerously curious.
“Nothing, you weren’t wrong, it’s just-” shaking his head again, Stefan straightened. “I never would have come back here, if I thought Damon would put you in danger; I just want to protect you, from him, and I thought the best way to do that was to keep you in the dark,” he admitted. Lying to her had never been comfortable, but for awhile it seemed like the situation demanded it. Now that she knew the truth, Stefan wasn’t sure what that meant for them.
“So you lied to me, to protect me?” Elena blinked, waiting for him to explain himself in a way that actually made her feel better. “I think you lied to me to protect you ,” she confronted him, setting her jaw. “You could have told me what Damon was, why I shouldn’t let him in, but because your secrets are so joined, you chose to protect yourself instead,” she huffed a sigh. This wasn’t going to go anywhere fast. It was still early days with Stefan, if this was the honeymoon period, Elena was sure she didn’t want it.
Stefan swallowed, hard. Elena made a great argument, but Stefan wasn’t ready to call it quits.
“And what if I had? What if I had told you everything, that first day, out at the cemetery. In the men’s room! What would you have said?” His eyes flicked to hers, and he saw her soften a degree or two.
“I would’ve said, get the hell away from me, you crazy person,” she admitted, with a wince. “Now I’m just saying, get the hell away from me, you vampire. Is that somehow better? I’ve invited you into my home, I put my brother at risk and if you would’ve told me from the beginning, I never would’ve done that. You may have some issues with your brother but I don’t want to get mine killed,” Elena faltered. Jeremy was at the heart of what was left of her family. Her baby brother. She needed him, despite all the mess he made for her. “I’m sorry,” she added, shaking her head. “I can’t risk your family killing mine,” reaching for the door of the house, Elena made her decision. She was done listening to Stefan Salvatore. He was going to have to take his hundreds of years of conflict with Damon someplace else. “We can’t do this to each other,” she watched his gaze fall from hers as she closed the door behind herself. She was sure Stefan had more to say, but she knew it wouldn’t change her mind.
Stefan may have been a good vampire, a vegan vampire, a vampire-lite, but from where Elena was sitting that just meant she was even more compromised with him. If the primal urge for human blood was so strong she’d seen it flash across his face a few times, how long could he really hold himself off of her? She eyed the necklace still hanging from her neck.
I gave it to you, to protect you from Damon, he’d said, and… to protect you from me.
Didn’t that say it all?