Author's Note: I do not own the Vampire Diaries show or books, but I lifted some dialogue for this scene from 5x18 and started to change it as soon as Elena started acting like a brain dead bimbo. You can thank me later ;)

Dear Goldnox: thank you for the world's best hypothetical coffee cup collection, and teaching me how to make pot roast and for making fun of my "triceratops" words. But please stop making me stay up too late cackling at beta comments: I'm worried that Mr. Trogdor's face is going to stick in that long-suffering Yes-Goldnox-is-very-amusing-please-turn-off-the-light-now expression.

Chapter 3: Tinkerbell Smiles

Damon

Earlier tonight, I figured Markos and Enzo were enough punishment to pay the bill for any sinner. But when I mount the stairs and catch the faint scent of Elena's perfume drifting down from my room, I know that somebody didn't agree with me. And that someone has tiny wings and a wrath as big as the Red Sea.

I climb anyway, because I'm an idiot and I've rarely been strong enough to turn the other way when I knew Elena was near.

When I turn into the bedroom, the shape of her silhouette is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and it hits me like the grill of a Mack truck. It seems like every time I see her lately, I can't help but wonder if it'll be the last time.

I clamp my arms across my chest to hide the trembling of my hands, but my knees aren't as strong as they need to be, either. I lean against the doorframe instead, playing it safe, but not safe enough, just like she did earlier.

I swallow roughly and remind myself that I don't have to do this. I don't have to keep letting her shred me.

"I think we need some rules here," I say and my voice is as torched as the inside of my chest, but I don't have a scrap of sarcasm left to cover up the damage she's done. "Because if I'm not allowed to drive you home, I definitely don't think you're allowed to ambush me in my bedroom." The last word is a dirty trick and it bruises my tongue to say it when we're standing on either side of the bed where we made what she called "mistakes."

She turns around and the sight of her face is even more dangerous than her back, because for an instant, she looks happy to see me, and I'm walking closer before I can consider how stupid that is.

"I just…I just wanted to say thank you. Whatever you did, it worked," she offers with the ghost of a smile that's as tired as I am.

Damon Salvatore, villain to the rescue. Happy to lie, cheat, steal and murder if it will get rid of your sweet dreams of my virtuous brother. Though in this case, all I had to do was bluff my way through My Big Fat Gypsy Town Takeover while a bunch of body snatchers chanted it up in the square and I pretended to know what the fuck was going on.

"Well, I'm sorry to tear you away from paradise," I hear myself say, and because today's been a bitch, I give myself full points for effort and ignore my only partial success at pretending I'm not a bitterly jealous ex-boyfriend.

"It was paradise, actually," she says ruefully, and with just a hint of bitterness to match my own.

The word snaps my resolve back into place and my hands tighten as I seethe, "I told you, I don't want to know."

"But you need to know," she insists, and my breath comes hissing out from between my teeth in irritated resignation because I know it's not the painfully empathetic Elena talking: it's a God who is pissed as hell at me for being an non-believer, and for failing to bend over and take my punishment like a good little boy. But even now, I don't want to take any part of that out on Elena, so she begins to outline my favorite nightmare before I can think of a way to stop her that doesn't involve breaking her beautiful neck.

"I saw a perfect life. Stefan and I were married and we had kids. It was everything that we wanted."

I close my eyes, very briefly, because what the fuck did I expect? I knew damned good and well that those were the paper dolls that starred in her happiest daydreams and I ought to be man enough to be able to listen to her say it. And how goddamn sad is it that when she talks about being happy, she sounds surprised? If that's the grade on my Good Boyfriend Report Card, it's no fucking wonder she fired me.

"Well, we can always ask Markos to put it back," I tell her tiredly, because I'm not enough of a masochist to state the obvious. The other genie who can grant all her wishes lives right across the house and he's just as much of a sucker for her doe eyes as I am.

"But it's not real." My gaze rips back to her face supernaturally fast, and dammit, she's looking at me that way again. Like she did on the porch. Like we're a team and she's sharing her secrets with me. Just me. "You and I?" she says, tilting her head closer. "We're messy, and complicated, but we're real."

Her present tense is killing me.

There is no we anymore and she knows it. She agreed to that, and she reminded me of it every time I tried to give her an out to a decision I thought we both hated. Why is she wavering today, when the thought of her with my brother is scouring the inside of my head with every small-minded and selfish and shameful emotion I've ever had?

"And really bad for each other," I hurl at her, because if I don't, she will. Sooner or later, she always does. "Did you forget that part?"

She's nodding in tiny little jerks but every other piece of her body shouts of denial, like this is nothing she's ever heard before, like she hasn't said it herself.

"Yeah…" she fumbles, and then finishes weakly, "but I still need you in my life."

Fury rises up in me and I have to stop, my eyes flaring as I fight against the curse that wants to rip out of my helpless mouth in protest.

Fuck this.

Okay, so maybe there are rules for this screwed up world that I've been rattling around in for so long. Commandments even. And okay, maybe I've broken them all enough times that it can only be expressed with exponents. But I'm not Stefan and I don't care if I have earned it, I'm through lying down and taking whatever shit the universe wants to throw at me.

"As friends, right?"

My sarcastic laugh has no sound, and pain echoes in her eyes like it hurts her anyway.

"No." I say it to her, and I say it to God, and I say it to myself, because temptation is a steeply slippery slope for an old sinner like me. "No, Elena, I can't be your friend. It's too damn hard."

And fuck punishment, because I've been good to her. Maybe I haven't been good for her but I have never mistreated my girl and I don't deserve the kind of pain she can inflict on me. I start to turn away.

"Damon…"

Her voice is tiny and I dig deep for the balls I used to have before I met her. I can't die, so I can't afford to let my life hurt this much because I will do unforgivable things, be unforgivable things and no one on this earth needs the kind of destruction I know I'm perfectly capable of wreaking.

"No, I'm serious, Elena. I can't see you anymore. I don't want to hear your voice, I don't want to talk to you, and I sure as hell don't want to be your friend." It feels better than it should to say that, to take the twisted, painful pleasure I get from seeing her and cut myself off from it, once and for all, like an addict flushing their stash down the toilet in their last, desperate moment of sanity before the withdrawals take over.

She's staring at me, her mouth slightly open but no breath entering or exiting her body and it feels like I'd have to tear my eyeballs out not to care about that.

But not caring is exactly what I'm going to have to learn to do.

The air breaks and slips out of her lungs, her eyes dropping to the floor as her mouth quirks in a rueful little twist that is nothing like a smile. "Stefan was right," she says, almost to herself.

Something bursts inside my head and I whirl, throwing my arms out so hard that if anything had been in my way, the force would have shattered it to dust.

"Of fucking course he was! He's your white knight, the hero of your happy little Traveler fairy tale, right? Well, go, Elena." I'm turning back to her like my body is a magnet and whoever is controlling it, it is sure as fuck isn't me, because I'm out of here. "Go!" I half-roar. "Run back into his arms. It's not like I'm standing in your way. Not anymore." My voice slips on the last word and crumbles into something dry and ruined and I should be humiliated that she heard that, but I can't fucking help it anymore.

Elena flinches, and I see her legs tense, but she holds her ground, looking so small that I could almost feel like a bastard for yelling at her but I don't, I won't. I've tried to be the hero for her, I've tried to be the villain. I've tried God damned everything and now there is nothing but empty space between us that will only get bigger with every breath.

"Stefan said that you can be in love with someone, or you can be friends with them," she says, and peeks up at me. Her eyes are afraid but her lips form a smile, something warm and almost fond. "Stefan," she says firmly, "is my friend."

Shock runs through me, leaving me rooted in place though I couldn't have said why. There's something about her voice but I can't-

"Bully for him," I finally manage to mutter.

She takes a step forward, her heel touching the floor before her toes because this time, she's not testing the path that lies in front of her before she takes it. My ears register the change in the sound of her progress but my mind refuses to name it.

Hope is the trap of a cruel God and I'm done falling for that one.

"I stood in this room and asked you to love me enough to let me go," she says, fresh tears glittering in the rich brown of her eyes. "And you did." Her voice breaks, and I almost break with it.

I lock my knees so I won't go to her, so I won't try to comfort her with an embrace that she doesn't want.

"But I love you too much to let you go, Damon," she says, the words so tormented by tears that I have to run them through my mind three times before I'm sure, absolutely sure that I heard her right.

"Elena…" I warn, the syllables wavering dangerously but she doesn't let me scare her off.

She collides with my chest, knocking all the air out of me and fuck me, but I don't want it back. My foolish arms lock around her tiny body and my idiot cheek drops to press itself against her hair and my rock stupid cock is hurling itself against my zipper like a wild animal stuck in the world's smallest cage.

"Don't do the right thing," she rushes out. "Please."

"Is that your print-it-on-a-coffee mug life advice, Gilbert?" I growl. "Because it could use a beta pass."

She gasps a sob into my shirt and punches me in the side without really letting me go and okay, yeah, I probably deserved that and if I still had an inch of synaptic space upstairs that wasn't hanging up its "Out Of Order" sign, I'd be shutting my fucking mouth and devouring this moment like the last meal that it is.

"Don't let me go," she begs and my throat clogs up until I can't even swallow against the mix of hope and terror that's pinning my head to Tinkerbell's chopping block. "Because I don't think it's you I've been running from."

She pulls back so she can see me, her eyes like pure voltage through every nerve in my body.

"I think you're the only one who can handle me."

The words slap me with a sound that rings in my ears like laughter and I let her go, forcing a step back.

"Handle you?" I scoff. "You must be kidding me. You've been doing exactly as you damn well pleased every moment since I met you."

"I know," she says, dead pale, and the words the barest wisp of sound. I fight the urge to close my door so she'll have privacy for whatever it is she has to say. If my brother's in the house, he'll hear it anyway and the last fucking thing I need is enforced alone time with a hundred and fifteen pounds of my own personal Kryptonite. "I've been lying," she says. "To everyone."

She catches both my hands and I wish I would have shut the door when I had a chance because then no one else could see that I'm too weak to even pretend to push her away.

"I told Stefan I didn't want to be a vampire," she says desperately. "I told him I wanted kids, wanted to be a mother, wanted to be normal because after my parents died that's all I could think about." She shakes her head, her shiny hair tangling as it rubs over the soft cotton of her shirt and I want to smooth it through my fingers, let it waterfall across my chest and I force myself to focus because frolicking in fantasyland isn't going to do me any favors right now. "But it wasn't really being normal that I missed. It was being okay."

My gaze catch hers, and as if the simple eye contact plants a picture in my head, I suddenly know exactly what she means. It is the quiet of my father reading and my mother knitting while I listened to the crackling of the fire and built little cabins on the rug in front of the hearth with the kindling. It is the small breath Elena lets out when she drops her head onto one of my feather pillows. It is Stefan's quietest smile, when he's giving me one of his irritatingly knowing looks. It is the emptiness of the basement cell.

"I never actually wanted to be normal," she says like she's confessing something terrible. "I wanted to be fast, and strong, not someone who had to be protected all the time. I wanted to be special." She squeezes my hands, almost wincing. "Like you and Stefan. And I didn't want to die."

"Well no shit," I say bluntly, and then try to soften my voice. "After all the graves you've seen… But that doesn't mean you have to be happy about being a vampire, doesn't mean you didn't still want kids. It's okay to admit that," I tell her, because no one else will and I may only be her asshole ex-boyfriend but she needs someone right now and I'm not going to leave her like this.

But she's already shaking her head. "There was a look…a kind of gentle smile that my mom had when she looked at Jeremy and me. That's what I wanted about motherhood. But come on, Damon." Her eyes nail mine. "Let's not pretend, okay? Because I had a chance to be a mom. No, I had the responsibility to be one, for Jeremy, and what did I do? I went to college. I ignored him and I did exactly what I wanted." Her fingers tense in mine even as her thumbs smooth almost apologetically over my knuckles. "I acted like breaking up with you was what was best for Jeremy, even though you're the only one since Ric died who ever gave him any boundaries, any real guidance at all."

My eyebrows pop because I don't know what to say to that. Elena's never given me any reason to think that when I laid it down to Jeremy, she thought it was anything but me being an ass.

She tilts her head, tears shimmering damply on her cheeks where they've fallen and she's completely ignored them in favor of watching me. Something primitive swells in my chest at the sight of that, but I keep my damn mouth clamped shut.

"What I was really doing is punishing myself," she says softly, "for not being who I thought I needed to be. But I'm through with that, because I can't stand the way it's hurting you. And the truth, Damon–" She half-laughs, the sound so forceful that it's like she's choking on the relief of it. "The truthis that I'm not ashamed of who you are. And I want to stop being ashamed of who I am."

My hands tighten in hers until I must be hurting her but she doesn't flinch. I feel like my body can't hold the tension that's rattling through every space inside of me so I open my mouth and say, "I killed Aaron Whitmore."

She doesn't blink. "I know," she says, "and Damon, I want him to be alive again. I want him to have a second chance at building a family, the same as I had. But I don't want to keep pretending that I don't get it."

My face twists. "Get it?" I sneer. "Get what? The mindset of an unrepentant sociopath? Sorry, Elena, but I think you ditched too many of your psych classes first semester to even start to get a toehold on that one."

I'm still holding her hands because I can't make myself let go and right now, I feel every inch of the insane that I'm trying to convince her that I am.

"Every person you've hurt since you met me," she says quietly, "was because you had your switch off, because you were protecting someone else, or because I hurt you so much that you couldn't handle it."

I open my mouth to argue and she strokes my knuckles so gently that I forget everything I was going to say.

"I understand," Elena says simply.

Awe spirals warmly from my scalp, down through the stiff muscles of my face, and opens up the hard space between my ribs until I feel myself start to breathe again.

I believe her.

She widens our hands and steps closer to me, closer than anyone is allowed to be these days, so all I can breathe is her scent and all I can see is her eyes and she must be my hell because the most exquisite torment always begins with pleasure.

Elena tilts her head back so that I can feel the whisper of her plea as the air carrying it brushes my lips.

"Please," she says, "give me a chance to stop hurting you."

When the pain comes, it roars like nothing I've ever felt, lighting every molecule in my body in glorious, infinite suffering. Her face blurs before me and I don't understand why until I feel the sharp edges of the knot that is drawing tight around my throat and I want to beg.

Please let me kill a hundred Jessicas, a thousand Lexis, and a million Aarons right now, rather than let Elena see me cry.

But like all my prayers, this one is met with utter silence. And then Elena touches my face, her palm so comfortable on the curve of my cheek that it is the cruelest thing I've ever felt.

Because I was never going to be able to say no.

I nod into the bursting silence that surrounds us and God, yes, she kisses me, her eyes falling shut and our tears rubbing slick and warm between our lips.

She kisses me like she never does when anyone is watching, her teeth as hot as her tongue in my mouth, the button on my pants surrendering to a sharp tug and release of defeated threads and every inch of our skin screaming when it collides.

Elena kisses me like she doesn't even know how to spell the word "friends."

I carry her to our bed and she flinches as her bottom hits the surface, hissing. I rear back in alarm, but she just rips off the bedspread that I brought home from Target–fucking Target –without even looking at it until I woke up with its starchy, weird scent in my nose the next morning.

She fucks me on the bare mattress, the fabric rubbing red burns into her bare knees and the flexing muscles in my thighs, my shoulder blades when she holds me down. I'll never be able to get rid of the scent of her now without throwing out the whole damn bed, but it doesn't matter anymore. Strands of her hair rip out by the roots when I pull her closer and my fangs prickle at the feeling of it tangled around my fingers like rings, like the knots of a commitment to each other that we cannot break.

Not with words or murders or all the good intentions in the world.

At some point, I realize vaguely that the door to the hallway stands wide open and I couldn't care less, even if Enzo returned from the bar and Stefan stopped by for a chat and Jeremy came over to grab a pair of jeans that he forgot and Ric popped in through the increasingly friable veil between here and Bonnie's little terrarium of supernatural souls. I don't give a shit who sees me with Elena, and I don't give half a damn what thought crosses their mind when they see it.

The only thing I care about, the only thing I've ever really cared about, is that when I explode and heat rushes out of my body and into hers, she gasps and her eyes go soft and satisfied like this is the moment she wanted.

Like this is her new "okay."

I come down from our sexual whirlwind into a world of her textures: satiny olive-toned skin and the velvet tangles of earthy brown, the tickle of her weightless breath on my chin as she whispers the same three words to me, over and over and over again like they've been pent up inside of her for her whole life. I want to say it back but language defeats me and my arms only tighten, my splayed hand rubbing clumsily up the long line of her lower back, adoring the firm flex of her shoulders and the elegant line of her neck.

All her weight rests on me and it is the lightest I have ever felt.

When she finally moves, I blink lazily and tuck a hand underneath my head, blowing the feather of a destroyed pillow away from my nose as I watch her slide off the bed. I expect her to head for the shower, but instead, she strolls stark naked into the hallway.

I smile, bemused but unconcerned, and a moment later she returns with a rich crimson blanket that I had on the bed this summer. She gives it a confident shake that settles it across the sprawl of my naked limbs, giving the bottom hem a tug when it fails to cover my toes to her liking.

I smirk crookedly. "Worried I'm going to start losing parts to frostbite?"

She retrieves a couple of undamaged pillows from the floor and crawls into bed beside me, ignoring my teasing.

"I don't really like spinach salad," she announces, which is news to me because I've seen her eat dozens of them at the Grill. "It tastes like lawn clippings and I know blueberries are supposed to be superfood, but they taste like Skittles dipped in facial toner."

"If this is your hint for me to go and get the ice cream, you're out of luck," I tell her, settling my head onto the pillow she hands me. "I stopped keeping it around when you moved out."

She shoves her hair back and rolls onto her stomach, propping her chin onto her hand so her bare breasts thrust forward in a way that should be filed under "d" for distracting as fuck. "Can you tell from a blood bag whether the blood comes from a boy or a girl?"

I blink and run those words through my brain again. "Um, no. Why?"

"I can," she says, and her chin lifts defensively. "I like the blood from men the best. It tastes…stronger."

My dick flexes beneath the cover of the blanket and I eye my girlfriend with a combination of curiosity and reluctant admiration. "How do you know you're right about which is which?"

"Because I remember the difference," she says, biting her lip briefly with just a flash of the trepidation of the old Elena. "From when we first practiced Snatch, Eat, Erase." She pushes the blanket away so she can wiggle her head up onto my stomach. "And I never liked Anna. I know everybody thought she was all innocent and sweet and just missed Pearl, but she was too intense with Jeremy. I think she would have gone all stalkery with him when he finally tried to break up with her."

She turns her head, her fingers toying idly with the line of hair leading down from my naval as she falls silent. My cock swells a little more below the concealing line of the blanket, hoping for her attention.

"If you're looking for a confessional, you might have taken a wrong turn at the brimstone," I say lightly, watching the dark back of her head as it rises and falls with my every breath. I love the way her body looks, stretched out and comfortable next to mine. I love it so fucking much it makes me feel a little sick.

She rolls over until she can see me again, her cheek landing softly on the skin just below my heart. "I've never said any of these things aloud," she admits quietly. "And I want to. Is that okay?"

My hand steals down to cup the back of her head securely and my thumb strokes over her hair, memorizing the texture of it. "It is," I promise her, "every kind of okay."

She smiles, a light coming slowly into her eyes that I could never get tired of seeing.

"So does this mean you've always secretly loved Quentin Tarantino movies?" I prompt. "And porn? Really dirty porn?"

She crinkles her nose. "Ew, no. Quentin Tarantino is a psychopath."

I waggle my eyebrows. "No protest to the porn? I have a really big…flatscreen."

She blushes, and I grin because I kind of like that this new, ballsy version of my girl still gets embarrassed when I say the "p" word.

She wriggles up my chest with a movement that sends all the blood in my body pumping hard in a southerly direction. "I never wanted to watch porn because I knew Stefan or Jeremy might hear," she whispers. "But if you rented us a hotel room…" she beams and I nearly go unconscious from blood loss to the brain when I see the look in her eyes. "You could bring all your favorite movies and I'd watch on the biggest screen you wanted."

I slide my hand down her back and cup the swell of her bottom, rocking her more tightly against me. "You want the romantic ones or the hard-core ones?" I purr into her ear, barely holding back a chuckle when she swallows audibly.

"Um…I'm not really sure," she admits.

I growl a groan and roll her underneath me, the soft fabric of the blanket rubbing sensually between our skin. "Tell you what," I offer, nibbling at her earlobe.

"Mm-hmm?" she squeaks breathlessly.

"I'll give you a demonstration of each and you can make up your mind after that. How does that sound?"

I drop my head, laying a single, chaste kiss in the hollow at the base of her throat and letting my lips linger until she can feel exactly how much they want to be there.

Her answer never makes it all the way into words, but I know exactly what it would be anyway, and in the end, I show her each of her options twice. Just for good measure.

This time when we finish, I'm too exquisitely exhausted to move but she curls up on my chest like a kitten and whispers to me all the secrets she's been keeping about herself. A few surprise me, but most of them don't, and not a single one of them changes a thing about how much I love her.

The only difference is that this time, neither of us thinks that's a problem.

Eventually, when her voice starts to slow and she begins to run out of new truths to share, I'm left almost wishing I had some to give to her. But Elena already knows me. She doesn't know everywhere I've been, or everything I've done, but she knows the result.

And yet as her eyes slip closed and I feel the blessing of her familiar warmth resting over my whole body, I think of one thing and I tuck her hair back from her ear so I can whisper it to her, this single new thought that has changed me today.

"I think I believe in Tinkerbell," I murmur to the love of my life. "But the bitch works in mysterious ways."

Author's Note: I think I might believe in Tinkerbell a little bit, too. Because a whim to start watching a vampire TV show has changed the entire path I want to take in life. Because fans like you were willing to love the way I wrote these fictional fanged creatures as much as you loved them onscreen.

I am completely, utterly humbled at the lengths some of you have gone to this week to help me with my original fiction, and silently floored at the idea that any of you would take time that you need for a hundred other things and spend it on writing a review that is really a wish for me to attain the biggest dream I've ever had in my life. None of you have ever met me, and you did that for me anyway. I will never, never forget that.