This is Our Something – And it Burns

Disclaimer: Don't own – just playing.

A/N: This is a "what if" story of how Elena might find out about the Jessica incident that occurred at the end of episode 2:12 - so spoilers for that and slight speculative spoilers for upcoming episode 2:13. I should also point out that while I adore Damon's character and like Elena I'm pretty ambivalent about the two of them as a pairing.

Elena Gilbert stands in the threshold of a doorway she has only passed through once before and doesn't know what she wants. She hesitates upon that threshold as if she is the vampire and cannot enter without invitation. She peers into the room and feels like she is standing on the treacherous edge of a precipice, staring down at the long, long fall into darkness. She feels stupid and asks herself for the hundredth time why she is even here.

She would rather be anywhere – absolutely anywhere in the world – than where she is right now, standing in Damon Salvatore's bedroom doorway. Yet here she is and she can barely figure out why even in her own mind.

He does not even look at her, though he damn well knows she's there. He is just sprawled on his ridiculously over-sized bed with a bottle of bourbon, bed-hair and a dark shirt hanging from his shoulders more like an afterthought than actual clothing. He's the poster boy for debauched self-destruction and he's deliberately ignoring her.

Elena takes a breath and shifts her weight from one socked foot to the other. She thinks again about how monumentally stupid it is that she's here in the boarding house alone with him. Stefan is out with Caroline and Elena doesn't think they'll be back for hours yet. She spares a moment to allow her heart to twist at the thought of Caroline then; Caroline doesn't deserve any of the horrible things that have happened to her, starting with her death and ending with what she has suffered at the werewolves' hands. Elena can only hope that Stefan will work his usual magic so that her friend's beautiful heart doesn't break.

Elena doesn't think she can cope with any more broken people in her life.

She almost laughs out loud at her own thoughts, because really isn't that what all this chaos is about? She's spent weeks staring down the shot-gun barrel of fate somehow trying to live with the reality that the biggest badass vampire in existence wants to sacrifice her in the name of a freaking Aztec curse while her vampire ancestress turns into a blood starved mummy in a tomb and every single one of her friends and family risk their lives, pretty much on a daily basis, to safeguard hers. Yet somehow what it all boils down to is nothing more than a bunch of broken people who are all looking to her to save them in someway.

Still none of that explains why she's here now, standing in his doorway. She wants to take charge of her own destiny? Well this is not the way to do it. She knows for damn sure that her future does not lie with this vampire. There is absolutely nothing she can do here – nothing she can fix, nothing of value to be salvaged. Yet here she is, just waiting for an invitation to tumble over that edge anyhow.

She thinks that maybe what she wants is to fall from grace – if she's no longer perfect in the eyes of those she loves maybe they won't die trying to save her? Or maybe she just doesn't want to try anymore? If that's true then maybe she has come to the right place – she doesn't think there is anyone in existence who knows how to crash and burn like Damon can.

"…Enough with the empathy already," the words lilt lazily on the air like mocking molasses and Elena catches her breath as heavy-lidded nearly colourless eyes stab through her.

"What?" The word is choked and she can already feel her heart speed up, beating out a rapid tattoo that sounds like stupid, stupid, stupid in her ears. She watches the wide sloppy grin stretch over his face and she knows that he can read her like a book. The quiver of his eyebrows, the half-mast deception in his eyes and the indifference of his limbs tell her that yes, she is stupid. These are not the words he says however because that's not how they play this game.

"Don't get me wrong, Elena," he purrs negligently waving around one hand for no real reason other than he's Damon and talking with words alone just doesn't seem to cut it. "I mean the whole doe-eyed stalker thing is cute. I'm touched, really. But all the 'I'm deeply concerned about your emotional state' compassion waves you're beaming at me from the doorway are really screwing with my TV reception." Scooping up his liquor from the pillow beside him Damon points the bottle at the screen of his massive TV. He turns his head to face her directly, widening his disturbing eyes in a parody of his usual underlying psychosis. "So quit it already. Oprah's on and I get cranky when I miss my Oprah."

Elena feels the breath she had been holding whoosh out of her lungs in something that really shouldn't be relief but is. Rolling her eyes she steps over the threshold that had previously felt like an insurmountable obstacle and finds herself standing beside his bed, arms folded and expression of concerned reproach writ large upon her face in less time than she really wants to think about.

"You threatened Uncle John." She says throwing out the accusation into the conversation they are only sort of not having. Because Elena might not want to admit it – she might even hate it - but Damon wasn't as completely wrong as she wants him to think he was when he said that they had something.

"I threaten everyone Elena; it's my thing. It's what I do." He rolls his eyes and within the dark current of self-reproach she can't not hear in his voice she senses the important things he isn't saying, "Also dear Uncle Daddy did try and kill me not so long ago. Can't let the guy think I'm gonna just write that one off." His blue eyes burn her as he looks right into her soul as he stares at her in open challenge.

"I'm not angry." She tells him because she's not; John Gilbert isn't exactly her favourite person, paternity notwithstanding. "And I know you won't hurt him." She adds, not because she believes that (because she knows just how dangerous Damon is when he's desperate – and he's almost always desperate for something). Instead she says the words like a challenge as she makes herself sit down on the bed beside him swinging her legs up onto the coverlet so that they are side by side in some twisted illusion of intimacy.

"Oh really?" Damon's gone still on his side of the bed and if Elena wasn't so horribly clued in to the dual language of Damon Salvatore she might not recognise that stillness and intensity for what it really is. Fear.

"Really," She turns her head so that they are eye to eye, despite the fact that his sheer proximity makes her skin creep. "I know you won't make the same mistake twice."

It's hard, really hard, to stop from flinching in shame as she degrades the murder of her own brother to nothing more than a mistake. Even thinking about that night makes her heart clench and bile rise in her throat. If she allows herself to think about the fact that she's sitting side by side in bed with the man who snapped Jeremy's neck in a jealous snit she thinks she might start screaming and not stop. Yet she has to do this, because this is it. This is the something between them. This is their game, the twisted vicious game of How to tame the deranged vampire who thinks he loves me so that I can keep everyone I really love alive and safe. Elena doesn't like the game, in fact she hates it like she hates the nightmare her life has become, but that doesn't mean she can't play it to the bone.

"Oh nice Elena, you just couldn't resist bringing that up again could you?" Beside her Damon shifts on the bed, ostensibly so he can pour more booze down his gullet but Elena doesn't miss how the movement shifts his body just a fraction of an inch away from her. If she was any more like a certain Petrova ancestor of hers she might smile. Elena doesn't have to like the power she has over him to use it, after all.

"It's called consequence, Damon. Get used to it."

He sighs theatrical and fake. "I've killed a lot of people. I don't know why you think repeatedly bringing up that little neck snap thing with Jeremy, who by the way didn't even stay dead for long, is going to have some profound impact on me." He rakes his eyes over her face like claws. "Anyway, we're friends again now - you said so; which means…" He drawls meditatively while a vicious smile cuts across his face and Elena tenses imperceptibly, "that a little thing like me killing your relatives really isn't gonna affect our friendship all that much."

"Damon…" she warns him even as anger and disgust lodge in her throat and strangle any further words. This is war between them, always has been, a war that they mock and call friendship even as the word leaves them both bitter and unsatisfied. "I'm…trying to forgive you for Jeremy. I want to be your friend…but if you push me…"

"I'll lose you forever. Yep," He interrupts smug and self-satisfied as he reclaims that half inch of space so he can lazily trace a pattern over the knee of her jeans with one finger. He rolls his eyes around in their sockets and nuzzles his cheek against her shin, "I've heard that one before." There is absolutely nothing human in his smile when goes so far as to nip with blunt teeth at her denim covered thigh. "I guess forever just isn't that damn long these days; or maybe…" Elena can't react at all as Damon surges upright again in the bed and moves so fast that she can't track him until his hot breath is scalding her neck and his lips are brushing her ear. "Maybe you've finally given up lying? Maybe – shock, horror – you think I'm worth ignoring the occasional homicidal rampage for, is that it Elena?"

She shoves her palms flat against his cool flesh and pushes him back when he won't give ground. "Don't." Her voice is steel even as her stomach flips over on itself. "You are better than this."

"No I'm not," he sounds like a child, a petulant hurt little boy and Elena experiences yet another seismic shift in attitude, going from repulsed and almost scared to feeling just plain tired.

"Yes you are," she repeats vaguely recalling reading something in one of Aunt Jenna's psych books about positive reinforcement, "you just don't want to try, or you give up as soon as it's difficult."

Dealing with Damon is so much easier when she can write him off as nothing more than an undead bi-polar psycho with so many festering emotional wounds criss-crossing his mind and soul that the San Andreas Fault seems tame in comparison. The trouble is that for some reason she's always been able to see the person Damon should have been, the man who used to be Stefan's best friend as well as his big brother, the person who couldn't stop shaking after ending Rose's suffering and can't bare the thought of letting anyone know how much he hurts inside. Sometimes Elena thinks she hates that Damon, the ghost of his human side, more than the manic monster Katherine's blood made him into. Because now she's seen that ghost she can't stop chasing after him.

All the same she feels like she's betraying every decent moral and human atom of her being when she reaches out to him again, touching him gently where moments ago she shoved him away.

"Damon – what happened with Rose…it's okay to be hurt; it's okay to be angry. It's even okay to feel guilty. It's normal to feel. You cared about Rose; she was your friend and she died and you feel it. That's…that's not a bad thing. But you have to learn to deal with what you're feeling instead of always running away just because it hurts."

At some point in her awkward speech Damon's head had swivelled back to face her and blue eyes now stare at her unblinking. Yet all she can focus on are the twin gaping black holes that bore back through his skull to the soul she thinks he gave up to Katherine for nothing more than a lie. She can't stand it, looking at something so broken, so she finds herself tracing the thin, angry line of his mouth with her eyes instead.

"Okay I get it." He huffs more acerbic than sardonic now that she's pushed him just a little bit more than he wanted to be pushed. "Dead friend bad, feelings good; murderous mayhem not allowed." He tosses his head like a startled colt and his eyes are bouncing around in their sockets like he's suffering some kind of seizure. "Are we done with the agony aunt bit now?"

Elena sighs smothering the futile desire to strangle him and began to wriggle off the bed. "I don't know why I bother." She scowls back at him over her shoulder. "We're here for you Damon. Both me and Stefan, but we can't help you if you won't let us."

Damon grins, all false cheer and brittle bravado. "Are you volunteering to be my life coach, Elena? That's sweet. Pointless, but sweet. Not to mention a little self-serving, but who am I to judge."

Poised on the very edge of his bed ready to bolt for the door Elena froze and twisted around to stare. "Self-serving; I'm trying to be your friend, despite all the horrible things you do – how is that self-serving?"

Damon looks anything but broken and needy when he shifts in one impossibly fluid movement that positions him right behind Elena with one arm locked around her waist and his chin notched comfortably on her shoulder. She can feel the sharp bite of his grin as he turns his face into her hair, "Nuh-uh, no bullshit between us. That's not how we roll." The arm twinned around her waist will not budge when she tries to pry him off and he moves with her when squirms against his hold. Chuckling into her hair he presses up against her back even more, "Oooh do that again. I like it."

"Damon let go." She uses her firm voice, the one that hides her fear. All the while berating herself for ever setting foot inside his room. This was such a spectacularly bad idea. She knows that she's not in control of this game, not really. How can she be? She's playing Damon after all, and now, somehow, she's overplayed her hand and fallen straight into his trap.

"Bad puppy; down boy!" Damon mocks her, imitating her tone perfectly and proving, as his arm tightens almost painfully around her waist, that he understands very well the true nature of their relationship. "Sorry Elena but Lassie doesn't feel like saving the kids from the well today. Not when we both know this whole 'I'll be your friend thing' is nothing but a lie."

His breath heats a certain patch of her hair and she feels it to her scalp; her skin crawls and she tries to jerk her head away, but Damon follows her using his free hand to catch her chin and tilt her head so she has no choice but to watch the bitter smile lance over his face as he calls her on all her lies.

"We're not friends Elena. We'll never be friends. I repulse you and you use me. That's our deal. All the emo-comfort hugs in the world won't change the truth –and we both know it." He takes a sharp breath and she watches a compression of emotion she doesn't have a name for streak across his face. "You need me to be the monster Stefan doesn't have the balls to be, because you're not stupid, and you know it's going to take more than Olympic grade moralising and a hugely furrowed brow to fight Klaus." He sounds angry now but she thinks he's mostly just trying to convince himself that what he says is real.

"Can you blame me?" She asks him softly but with definite heat. He's right and she won't deny it, but that doesn't mean she has to capitulate. "You've hurt people I love Damon. You've hurt me. I don't owe you anything."

Taking a deep breath Elena finds that his hold has loosened just enough to let her turn her body so she ends up almost sitting in his lap. She places her hands on his shoulders for balance it occurs to Elena that at certain angles, to certain eyes, the way they are seated with his arm around her, their eyes locked and her body curled into his, they might seem like lovers embracing.

"You owe me." She tells him voice shaking and anger welling inside her because she hates that he can make her feel guilty when she has no damn reason to care if she hurts him or not. "You have done terrible things Damon. You should do something to help others for once."

He smiles and it's painfully human this time. Human and so very, very tired. "Maybe," he concedes in a nearly tender tone of voice. "But you're right about one thing. You don't owe me anything Elena." He uses the hand that had turned her chin to cup her cheek and brush the pad of his thumb across her skin. Elena has no idea why she lets him get away with taking these liberties. Except for the fact that…

"I still care." She whispers. "I do care about you Damon." And that's the sickest thing about this game - the part where she's not entirely sure it is a game.

"Careful Elena," he warns her pulling back a little and letting his hand drop from her cheek, "you don't want to go saying things like that. I'm unstable and liable to go and do something crazy like hope."

The way his face twists in something that could never be a smile makes her feel ill and in that moment, quite abruptly, Elena finds herself wishing that Damon Salvatore had never existed because then she wouldn't have to be here fighting with herself because she doesn't love him, won't ever love him, doesn't even want to love him, but despite everything she knows that she's somehow responsible for him. The universe has played this sick joke on both of them and now here they are both stuck in this weird limbo of broken not-quite trust, not-quite friendship – but bound together all the same. She opens her mouth to say something - anything – because this silence is too painful but Damon stops her.

"Don't Elena. We have an understanding. I play the neutered bad boy vamp for you and you throw me a pity party every now and then. Changing the rules right now would be…bad; very bad."

"Damon?"

There is something furtive and dark skittering around behind his eyes that sends a bolt of pure fear through her bloodstream. She's cold all over when he pulls away from her climbing off the bed and fumbling to pull his shirt closed as he moves to leave the room. Her mind ricochets back to the aftermath of Rose's death, the walled off devastation she had glimpsed in him before he'd sent her home and suddenly she knows. Horror explodes like a nail bomb in her gut and she almost chokes. "Oh god Damon...what did you do?"

Damon stops right at the threshold of his doorway and the hallway and turns to fling her a look she can't decipher over his shoulder. "Don't ask, Elena. I mean it. You really don't want to know."

"You killed someone," her throat is dry as she forcefully ejects the words from between her lips. "You killed someone the night Rose died."

"Her name was Jessica." He tells her easily, letting those three syllables trip innocently off his tongue as if they mean nothing, as if he doesn't have any concept of shame and guilt. "She begged me not to, but I ripped her throat out anyway." He shrugs, "Nothing I haven't done a hundred times before."

Hot tears skip down her cheeks, the same cheeks he had stroked so tenderly only moments before. "Why?" She asks and deep down she knows she should be screaming or running for a syringe of vervain and a stake – doing just about anything but near begging him to give her an excuse she can use to make this somehow alright.

He turns around then and faces her full on, "Because I'm a vampire and eating people is what I do. It's what I'm supposed to do – and you know what, in the end it doesn't matter. Nothing matters except Klaus and the moonstone and keeping you alive."

Elena can only gape at him, almost too sickened to speak for a moment. "You're wrong – how can you even think that it doesn't matter? You killed an innocent person for no reason Damon!"

No, no, no – this can't be happening. How could she have forgotten that he's more animal than man at heart; how could she have become so wrapped up in the game that she forgot what sort of creature she's been playing against?

"Whatever Elena," Damon tosses his head as if shaking off the phantom vestiges of human decency he never did wear all that well. "I'm not planning on doing it again, so there's really no point in staging an intervention."

Shivering with too much emotion to quantify Elena can only think of one thing to say, "You really are a monster."

"Well d'uh." He smirks, something flat and shark-like in his normally expressive eyes and she thinks she can see it break - that invisible leash of domesticity she had used to control him up until now.

"I should have let Bonnie burn you." She whispers.

He just nods. "Probably; but remember Elena I'm your monster. I'd do just about anything for you." His eyes burn into her hard and merciless and she feels the crushing weight of his sincerity pressing down on her. It is perhaps the most hideous truth she has ever had to face. "Think about it," he continues almost tiredly as if this whole matter is just so pointless. "I killed some girl for no reason. I'm a monster, I should suffer blah, blah, blah...but if you sic Judgy on me who's gonna be Johnny on the spot to make sure dear saint Stefan doesn't die trying to save you, huh?"

Elena's lips part soundlessly, her heart suddenly hammering against the roof of her mouth. As much as she tries not to her mind immediately throws up images of Stefan dying - of Jeremy and Bonnie and Caroline dead, of Jenna and Alaric ripped to shreds by a vengeful millennia old vampire. Shaking her head violently Elena rejects these all too real nightmare images and throws her anger outward towards the one who deserves it.

"Don't you dare use Stefan to justify what you've done," she spits out and then, because she can't help herself and because the Petrova fire burns just as cold and calculating in her as it does Katherine she adds, "It's not like you have any more hope of beating Klaus than Stefan does."

Damon laughs at that, a harsh barking rasp of explosive sound which is not remotely humorous. "Come off it Elena, we both know I'm not talking about beating Klaus."

Elena's heart dies then or at least it feels like it, but lying has become habit so she pretends she doesn't understand, "Then what is the point Damon? What..."

"Someone's going to die when doppel-geddon kicks off," Damon speaks over her his voice sharp and succinct and somehow Elena has no choice but to shut up and listen, "And I've watched my Disney, Elena. I know that the monster always dies first – and the prince and the princess run off into the sunset to live happily ever after."

Suddenly he blurs back into the room and Elena rears back, heart back in her throat because Damon is right in front of her, leaning down so his face is inches from hers and his husky-pale eyes are filling her world. "Don't pretend you don't know this was always how things would end. I'm the expendable Salvatore, the inferior model. Katherine knew it, that's why she wanted to turn me –so she could use me. Now it's your turn."

Elena swallowed hard, "You're insane."

"Obviously," he scoffs and with his face this close to her it's almost dizzying when he quirks his brows and rolls his eyes at rapid fire speed. "But I'm still right and you know it."

He squats down beside her and once again there's an almost tranquil softness to his features that in the present context seems more monstrous than if he'd gone all vamp-faced on her. Helpless to stop him, so trapped in the spell of his madness, Elena just watches numbly as Damon gathers her hands in his, thumbs rubbing circles over her palms. "There's always been something between us. We've always had an understanding, some weird connection. This is it. This is our something Elena: I'm going to die for you – and you won't care, because I'm just another monster."

"...No..." She jerks her hands out of his grip as if his touch is toxic to her. His words echo in her mind, resonating, and for just a moment Elena entertains the notion he has presented to her. She thinks about how neat and simple things would be for her and Stefan if Damon was gone. She thinks also about how easy it would be to forgive him all his sins and transgressions if he died saving the people she loves and she feels sick to her soul. Shaking her head Elena squeezes closed her eyes but she can't stop her mind from painting pictures of a Damon-free world.

"No you're wrong. That's not what I want." She lies forcing open her eyes again – only to realise that's she's speaking to an empty room. Damon is gone and Elena is left alone trying to convince herself in the silence he has left in his wake that death and sacrifice are not exactly what she wants from him. But she can't because he's right, like he is so often right about her - he's right and she wants him dead. She wants him gone because she doesn't want him at all.

This is their something; this is their understanding...and it burns like fire and hurts like hell but she wouldn't have it any other way.