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She never intends to be knee-deep in love with Damon Salvatore. Elena likes the brother who radiates warmth, even though broodiness draped on his shoulders like a weighted steel blanket.
He’s in love with a ghost who wears her face, with an elegance that she doesn’t have, with a talent for luring men into her orbit.
Elena Gilbert is not Katherine Pierce.
Nor she wants to be.
But he bulldozes his way into her existence, dangerously dogged, with a caustic smirk, wounded ice-eyed gaze, and sarcastic wit that only the forlorn are adept at wielding. Elena’s resolution falters a little.
—
Katerina Petrova’s path haunts Elena at every corner she turns. Being doppelgangers have tied them together, strangled them tighter, whenever she tries to run.
It’s Stefan. It’s always been Stefan, she tells him. Much like Katherine did.
She has no eye for escaping harrowing situations.
Spurned, he kills her brother, on a whim. Spends weeks later, carving regret into his handsome features.
She almost believed him.
Elena closes her eyes, silences her ears, and believes harder in the notion that there are good in everyone, she needs to give them time and a chance. Bonding with Damon becomes easier with each menace resolved. Each time, she extends her hand to his iron-talons, and lets him pull her down.
—
Elena Gilbert is in love with the Salvatore brothers, and it’s okay to choose one.
—
She dies, with Damon’s blood flowing in her veins.
She lives, with Damon’s blood nourishing her dead heart.
—
There’s a hunger pulsating deep in her belly, in her throat and it burns her mind, blazes her compassion to cinders, leaving her a husk with a horrendous bloodlust. Soon, everything she touches are shrouded in destruction. His fingerprints are smudged on each piece—she dedicated the ruined things to him, her only one.
He teaches her how to be a vampire.
She hates his lessons. He’s only misguided because he cares about her too much. She can hear his mind echoes, Elena, Elena, Elena, like rattled loose coins in a ceramic bowl.
She almost kills Matt.
Matt who has been nothing but kind, loyal, understanding.
She doesn’t like the Elena she has become.
—
Damon loves Elena deeply, devastatingly, and vows to be better, be good. Like an eager Doberman frightened of letting its master down. He places his morality in her hands. He’s a noble on the guillotine laid helplessly before his executioner, his judge. He is hers to bear, to keep in check, to make sure the monster he once was, never came out again.
She always did like the bad boys.
She’s sure Caroline said that once. Or was it Bonie. No, it might have been Vicki, glass-eyed, half-draining her third ginger ale, peering at her and Matt doing their algebra homework in the Donovan’s living room.
Elena Gilbert likes bad boys. That statement rings hollow in her ears.
—
Damon hangs on her every word, like it’s well-written gospel and she is the paragon of sacred love.
Though it’s Elena who is irrevocably sired to him.
He breaks their sirebond—but it’s too late, because she’s been bounded to Damon, at seventeen, when he split his chest open for her to see his love for Katherine, before erasing that from her memories, but not from her bones—and she knows she has to say “I love you.”
She’d seen true love in her parents, and that’s not what she saw in them.
He has sacrificed a lot, and will sacrifice more—more blood spilled, more deaths reaped—because she’s paramount above everyone else. More so than his beloved brother. How can she say anything else after that level of devotion.
—
She fell for his spell. Must have been that latent Traveler’s heritage somewhere up the Salvatore tree, because she easily trades her love for some hell. Even as she sinks into his thorned embrace, she wishes him well.
He crushes her heart as much as she breaks his.
—
Even when she doesn’t remember him. Her body remembers every promise made, every declaration of love, every treaty to bind them together, and sometimes Elena shudders without reason.
Damon springs out “I love you”, right before telling her to go on new adventures.
His voice, taut with ache and misery, wraps steel chains around her ankles. Culls her determination for a fresh start away, replacing it with a familiar padlock.
—
She takes the cure, becomes human.
Damon tells her that he’ll take the cure with her, not wanting to lose Elena again—and she doesn’t believe him this time. She doesn’t know why. She just does. But Elena can’t find it in her to say, “You’re better off as a vampire.”
—
Slowly, she wakes up. Sees the devastation she’d caused—they had caused together—and she flinches. His love has repercussions and it’s time for those consequences to punish her, him, them.
Caroline dies, being killed by the witch twins that aren’t her own, from within.
Bonnie and Stefan manage two years of domestic bliss, before he’s dead, hunted by people who mistaken him for the undead. Bonnie is buried next to him, months later, leaving a sandy-haired, green-eyed son behind.
Jeremy disappears after months of backpacking through Romania.
Somehow, Damon survives.
—
She can’t believe she’s pulling a Katherine Pierce move. But she does. Executes her plan without a kink. Surely Katerina would begrudgingly approve, had she lived to see how eerily similar they’re becoming.
She doesn’t fake her death. Not too drastic.
Elena writes a heartfelt letter to Damon, and no one else. There is no one left. The letter is simple, honest, and short. She releases him this time, because it’s always Damon who lets her go and reels her back in.
Matt buys her a one-way ticket.
Romance as theirs, are meant to be enjoyed by naïve youths. But she’s not young anymore. Damon is eternally twenty-six.
—
Elena seeks out for Matt’s sweaty, warm hand, as they watch the sun rising over the Balkan mountaintops.