Honestly, I have no idea if this is any good or not. I don't even know if it makes sense to anyone who isn't me. It's late at night, and I probably shouldn't publish this, but I'm going too. Constructive criticism is welcome. :)

This story was written right after the season 3 finale. I was angry at the writers, I was angry at Elena, I was angry at Stefan... I felt like Elena didn't deserve Damon, and this story was born from that. She's going to keep hurting him because she loves them both, and he just can't let go. It's a depressing story. There isn't much redemption.

Disclaimer: TVD isn't mine.

Fading in, fading out... she has lost the will to fight.

She's slowly losing her hold on reality. Piece by piece, memory by memory, she's methodically unraveling the fabric of what makes up Elena Gilbert.

It starts with the day she loses her parents—the day she starts the transformation from a slightly spoiled, slightly shallow teenager girl whose biggest worry is her boyfriend into a grieving girl, far more mature than her years.

At first she does fight it. Most of the time it's just a dull ache of pain and emptiness—like someone carved out part of her heart and forgot to replace it. She can deal with that. But sometimes… Sometimes it hurts-a stabbing pain that threatens to tear her apart.

She never thought she'd reach a level of pain anywhere close to what she'd felt after the accident. But with everyone she has lost hanging over her she can feel herself falling into that pit, and she is desperate to hang onto the edge for as long as she can. She knows she will fall, but she continually reminds herself that she doesn't have to fall yet. She can hang on just one more day.

Then, that night in the woods, everything is dark and forbidding. They finally kill Klaus, and it's over. Thank God it's over. She thinks she might finally have turned a corner, but then they find Alaric's body and Stefan heads for the hills, still in Ripper mode. And everything is so, so wrong, but it's OK without Stefan. Somehow in the past few months she learned to function without him. It is when she realizes she has lost Ric, too. That tips her over the edge.

She tries to process that he is gone, and she feels the brutal pain building inside of her once again, tearing her apart with each passing inch, but she doesn't scream or cry. She clenches her teeth and holds it in, desperate to shut it out. Her entire body shakes with the overwhelming effort it takes to breathe in and breathe out, and her blurry vision grows that much worse as her eyes fill with tears.

She doesn't know what the fuck is the matter with her but she's hurling a glass across the room, watching it shatter against the wall.

Glass is scattered everywhere, forming a pretty yet deadly pattern on her floor. She deliriously thinks that it probably resembles her on the inside. What an ugly, broken girl she is.

Suddenly she feels his arms encircle her, pulling her to his body, and they mourn together. In his own way, Elena knows that Damon loved Ric, too. She knows that he understands this pain she is feeling. She knows that right now he's strong enough to handle it, to handle her, in a way that Stefan isn't.

Mystic Falls holds too many memories, for her and Damon, so eventually they leave. She knows that by going with him she has picked him, and she's OK with that. She loves him, and in his own way, she knows he loves her, too. Besides, she's too screwed up and broken to be with someone else.

At first he is romantic, making grand gestures of taking her to London, Paris, Cannes and Milan. There are romantic picnics, candlelit dinners, moonlit walks… Everything a girl could want.

And she tries to appreciate it, she really does. In another life, this would have been her dream come true. Now it's all she can do to smile and laugh and pretend for a few hours. Eventually he just stops trying to be grand and romantic, choosing instead to let her take the lead in where they go and what they do.

At first they stay in the same places for weeks, maybe even a few months, before moving on. Once she takes over they never stay in one place for more than a few days. Not because he doesn't want to. He wants nothing more than for them to settle down wherever she wants, so they can just be. She's the one who wants to keep moving. She's running from the past, from the memories that haunt her dreams. Even though she knows she can't truly run from them, she keeps trying. Eventually it gets the point where she is just dragging him aimlessly around the globe, from town to town as the fancy takes her.

That's when the fights start.

"Why can't we just stay here a little longer, Elena?" He demands when she announces they're moving on. They've been in Strasbourg for only two days, and that's on top of three months of never staying in the same place for more than a week.

"I can't, OK? I just can't!" She snaps, flipping through a travel guide absentmindedly and trying to decide where to go next. Germany looks promising…

"Why not? It's because of Stefan, isn't it? You're trying to run from his memory, because you can never get him back. You can never get the one you truly love back."

He hurls the words at her like knives, and it takes a moment for her to process what he has just said.

"That's not true!" She screams back, tears springing to her eyes. She just wants to escape, that's all she wants, all she ever wanted.

"The hell it's not! I know that you pretend I'm him! I'm not stupid, Elena. I'm a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them."

There it is. It is the first time either of them has ever said it out loud. It is the first time they have acknowledged the ugly truth that lies between them, forever tainting their relationship.

"I never said you were stupid." She murmurs, the tears sliding down her cheeks as she looks at him.

"You don't have to! You're always telling me to be more like Stefan. You're trying to turn me into some kind of Stefan substitute or something, and you know it. God, Elena… Why am I not enough for you? I've given you everything. Everything! And I'm not enough, I'm never enough…" His voice breaks and tears pool in his piercing blue eyes; eyes that have seen and felt enough pain for several more life times than he has lived.

She never meant to hurt him.

"No, Damon…" She runs across the room and hurls herself into his arms, kissing him desperately. She can't deny what he says, because they know it's true. The least she can do is try to fix it; try to prove to him that she loves him, too. He must know that she loves him.

They shed clothes, moving towards the bedroom of whatever housing they're staying in—she's too caught up to remember her own name, let alone where they are. He plants feather light kisses along her neck, paying extra attention to the spot at the base of her neck and her shoulder that causes her to shiver with anticipation.

She flips them and kisses up and down the flat planes of his stomach, loving the way he shudders under her touch. He is the only boy she has ever truly understood, both emotionally and physically, and this is the one place where they both work perfectly.

As he joins them she can't help but wish they could stay like this forever—in this place where she loves him and he loves her, and that is all that matters. In this place where she doesn't have to think, she just had to live in the moment and the moment is Damon.

After it's over she lies there feeling numb and guilty and he leaves. Hours later he returns, completely wasted and murmuring about how much it hurts.

That's when he truly breaks her heart, seeing him so hopeless and vulnerable, and knowing she has done this.

The pain she's causing him causes her more pain than anything else ever has. When that pain rears up, blinding her and threatening to drag her under, that's when she buries herself in Damon's bourbon and tries to forget. That's when she'll do anything, anything at all, to make the pain dull even for just a moment.

She knows she's destroying Damon, as well as herself. She knows exactly what she's doing him. She knows it kills him when he comes home and finds her drunk, or when she lies in his arms and pretends he's Stefan. She hates herself for it. She hates herself so much, and she can't understand why he doesn't leave her. She is a horrible person, and the fact that he's so sweet and loyal about it only makes her hate herself more.

It's not that she doesn't love him, she does. She loves him so much, and that's the whole problem, because she loves Stefan, too. She feels horribly guilty when she kisses Damon and likes it, because she feels like she's betraying Stefan. On the other hand, she feels horribly guilty when she pretends Damon is Stefan, because that is betraying Damon.

She keeps thinking that, someday, it will get better. It has to get better.

It doesn't.

If anything, it only gets worse. Somehow, that fact fails to surprise her. Every time she has ever thought her life could only improve, it had proved her wrong and gotten worse.

She knows that Damon deserves better than her, but she can't seem to stop herself. She's sure as hell not strong enough to stop for herself—some days she just wants to curl up in a ball and die, just so the pain will stop. Some days it feels like she might be strong enough to stop for him, but most days…she can't. She just can't.

In her strongest moments she tries to push him away, because she knows that's what he needs. He needs to just give her up as a lost cause. He needs to leave her and go find someone else—someone who isn't as sick and twisted and broken as she is.

He seems hell bent on destroying himself along with her, though, so eventually she gives up and lets him. It's easier than being strong.

"Here," he says unexpectedly, awkwardly shoving something at her. "I found this, and I thought you might like to have it."

The object is face down, but she thinks it's a picture. He disappears right after she takes it, before she can ask him. She thinks she sees tears in his eyes, and if she were a better person she'd go comfort him (she knows that he would comfort her). But she's not a better person, and she's too tired to try to be one.

So she looks at the picture he'd given her. Its edges are worn from constant handling, and the colors were beginning to fade. Tears well up in the corners of her eyes, because in that picture was something she thought she'd never see. It is a candid shot of all of them together: Matt, Caroline, Bonnie, Jeremy, Stefan, Damon and herself… And they are happy. They are smiling and laughing. It looks as if they have not a care in the world.

What hurt the most wasn't that they would never be like that again; what hurt the most was that she didn't remember them ever being like that in the first place. She cannot remember something that is not this endless cycle of hurt and loss and pain. She cannot remember a time when Caroline wasn't a vampire, Stefan wasn't a ripper, Jeremy wasn't out of her life (for his safety), when Bonnie didn't hate her for ruining their lives… she remembers none of it.

For a long time she just stands and stares at it, tears slipping down her cheeks. At some point in time Damon comes in and wraps his arms around her, and they cry together—his hands rubbing soft patterns on her back as she lets it all out.

"We're going to be OK, Elena; maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of our lives." He promises her.

"Do you really believe that?" She asks, pulling him closer, as if he can keep the demons away. She buries her head in his shoulder and he strokes her hair.

"I do." He says after a long pause. "I really do, Elena. Someday it has to get better." She takes that to mean "Someday you'll have to get better."

"I'm trying." She tells him. "It's so hard, Damon. It hurts so much…"

"I know, 'Lena. I know."

After that day she pushes him away again, and eventually he stops pretending like he cares what happens to either of them anymore. He still loves her, she knows that. But he doesn't look at her with love and adoration anymore—like she's the most precious thing in the world. When he looks at her, he mostly just looks tired and broken and sad.

It gets to the point where they barely speak anymore, except when they're fighting or when they're deciding where to go next. Mostly they fight, kiss, have sex, and then fall back into silence, until one of them initiates the whole process over again. It's painful, but it works, in a twisted way. At least, it works for her, and she's too selfish and broken and screwed up try and fix it for him.

"Why do you keep letting me hurt you?" She asks him one day. It's one of their good days, when neither of them is drunk and they aren't fighting. They've been in some little village in England for almost two weeks now, and things are better when she lets them stay in one place for a few weeks.
"I'm fucked up." He shrugs, and she nods, because she understands that. They are the very definition of fucked up.
But she loves him, and she knows he loves her, no matter how twisted their relationship is—or how fucked up they each are personally. And that's the only thing that keeps her going through the day.
"I'm trying, OK? For what it's worth... I'm trying."
"You say that a lot."
"it's all I have, Damon."
"That's not true. You have me."

That night she lies in outside and stares at the sky, searching desperately for answers. She closes her eyes and prays, begs, for release. If there is any mercy this will end.
She opens her eyes.
The stars mock her. She no longer burns brightly the way they do. She's tried to care, God she's tried, but she just just can't. Not anymore.

Staring up, the vastness of the universe only reminds her that she's not free. She is bound by her memories. Her past defines her present, and it will continue to define her future, because she doesn't know how to not let that happen. She is not free from her past-she's not even free to die. If the universe had had its way she would have died with her parents. But Stefan had saved her, and every time the universe tried to rectify that mistake, Stefan or Damon stepped in and saves her again, because they don't get it. If she died she wouldn't have to feel anymore. She would be nothing. Nothing is the road to peace, and peace is what she has sought for so long. Right now it's the only thing that matters.
Her laughter shifts to tears. She's not sure why. Surely she cried out all the tears she had to cry a long time ago?
She swipes at the tears angrily-she's so tired of crying. Her tears prove she still feels and she only feels sorry for herself.

At the end of the day, all she has is this endless cycle of pain and despair.

And Damon.

She still has Damon.

She always has.

She always will.

That has to count for something.

I know it got a little messy at the end. The intent was to try to depict Elena's slightly scrambled state of mind, and I'm not really sure if it worked. But that was the intent, in case you were wondering.