Chapter 10

(My thanks to all of my readers. It has been such a pleasure to write this story and to share it with you. I think it's done now. I have a new one ready to post in the next few days – "Make Me Forget" – and I'm working on more. I might even be interested in a D/E-centered request or prompt, who knows? Stay tuned and stay in touch.)

On the way back from the airport, Damon worked out scene after scene, trying to envision what he might find when he got home. Would she be angry? He could handle her aggression. Would she be hungry, still unsure about her new vampire urges? He knew how to guide her. Would she even be there at all? He could find her. He could convince her to come back.

He would make it up to her. It might take time, but he would make up for this.

But when he got out of the car, she was standing in the doorway, her eyes red and tired from crying, her hands limp at her sides. It crushed his already too sore heart. "Damon," she croaked as she reached her arms up to enfold him. He clutched her close. He hadn't realized how desperately he had needed her arms around him, needed to drown in her sweet, lavender scent. He should have guessed that the best antidote for the pain of Stefan's departure was Elena.

Her tears moistened his cheek as she pressed her face against his. Stefan would never have hurt her like this, he thought, the familiar combination of jealousy and self-loathing cutting into his fragile calm. But she was there, finding his hand, silently tugging him to the couch, dragging her fingertips along his arm as she left the room with a wistful smile.

The house felt emptier now that Stefan was gone.

Elena brought him a glass of blood and sat beside him, stretching out her long legs to reach his lap. He let his left hand fall protectively over them.

"I didn't want to let him go, Elena." It was almost an apology; it was an explanation, at least.

"But you came back without him."

"Bringing him back would have been selfish."

She leaned forward, turning his face toward hers with an open palm. He knew from her slight pout and a faint squint in her eyes that she understood him. Of course she did. She missed Stefan, too. She gave him a gentle kiss, lightly stroking the side of his face.

He let his hand glide up and down her shin and, when she let him go, downed the blood she had brought. He could use about twelve more bags but now wasn't the time. Now was the time to make up for leaving her. Now was the time to begin to earn the trust she had given him.

Now, after a year of quiet mornings and fevered nights, of yelling and comfort, of two fierce hearts fighting to stay together, Elena's face bore no reminder at all of Katherine or his past. (Well, maybe Stefan, a little.) Now, Elena was his future.

He hated to wake her this morning. It was a secret pleasure of his to sit back against the headboard and watch her sleep after the sun rose in the morning. Even after a full night's sleep, with tangled hair and creases pressed into her face, her beauty stunned him.

But today he would forego his morning vigil. "Elena, wake up," he whispered in her ear.

She pulled the pillow over her head.

"I have a surprise for you," he sang.

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

He dropped the airplane ticket on her bare stomach. "Paper."

Damon introduced Elena to the strange, beautiful city of Florence and she fell in love with it, just as he had when he first visited as a young vampire. The charming dissonance of ancient and modern, young and eternal felt like home to him. She felt it too.

On the morning of their last day there, Damon arranged – compelled – a private viewing of the Uffizi art gallery. It was still distracting for Elena to be around so many people in one place and he wanted her to really enjoy everything the gallery had to offer. She was immediately drawn to the enormous Titian canvases.

But he couldn't enjoy them with her. "I need to take care of something today. Alone."

"What is it?"

He knew she trusted him, knew he should keep this secret from her. He flashed his most flirtatious smirk as he lifted her hand to meet his lips, kissing the pearl on her ring. "I'll meet you tonight on the Ponte Vecchio. You'll love it."

Damon drove along back roads, the once familiar route unfolding slowly in his mind. Flat plains gave way to rolling hills. New homes built to resemble the old Tuscan villas he remembered dotted the landscape; large family estates he had visited in their prime stood old and decaying. Returning was never easy for a vampire.

Elena would love it here. Someday he would bring her. But not this time. Not yet.

Damon and Stefan's father had told them about a sprawling vineyard and imposing villa in Tuscany that had belonged to their family many generations before they were born. It was their mother's dream to buy it back and restore it, but she died too young to make even the first attempt. So Damon had taken it upon himself to recover the Salvatore villa early in the twentieth century. He even did some of the work himself, traveling across Italy to find a perfect slab of marble, carting back hundreds of old tomes from dusty archives to fill the library. The villa became his refuge. And during one of their short, fraught periods of camaraderie, he invited Stefan to share it with him.

On the back balcony, overlooking fields of grapevines, Stefan was waiting. His baby brother looked good, actually. Healthy. Grounded.

Stefan's face lit up when he saw him. He handed Damon a wineglass half full of deep red liquid. Anyone else would have assumed it was the local vintage. In a way, it probably was. "Welcome back, brother."

"Always love coming back to the old family compound," Damon said, accepting the glass and taking in the familiar view. "Tuscany agrees with you."

"Yup," Stefan nodded, his eyes returning to the rolling hills surrounding them.

"I can't stay long."

"I figured. But it's good to see you again. I really missed you."

Damon stared intently at the blood in his glass. "Yup." Why was it so hard to say? "Me too." That was close, anyway. He couldn't lift his eyes but he just knew Stefan was grinning.

"How is she?"

"She's good," he responded quickly, hoping that would satisfy him.

"I want to know."

Damon leaned against the iron railing and took a swig of blood. "She's wonderful, Stefan," he began, defeated on Stefan's behalf. "She's happy, carefree, loving. Being a vampire suits her."

Stefan maintained eye contact, seemingly by force of will. "Good. Good for her. Good for you."

"See, this is why I didn't want to -"

"No, it's fine," Stefan interrupted, joining him at the railing. "I don't want you to worry about me. I'm fine. Of course I miss her, Damon. I still wonder what it would have been like if things had been different. But it's okay. I'm okay now."

Damon breathed in the warm Tuscan air, scented with lavender. Now the scent was inseparable from thoughts of Elena. The memory overwhelmed him suddenly of the scent of lavender from Elena's wet hair in Nebraska. That was the beginning. By all rights, he should have told Stefan about Klaus's plan and allowed him to save the day. He knew what he was doing. Damon may have kept her away from Klaus at a critical moment, but he had really stolen Elena from Stefan, and they all knew it.

Damon had one more thing to do before he left. The hardest thing of all. Do it, he chided himself. It's why you came. Just tell him. It won't kill you. "Stefan, I'm sorry." He didn't need to say for what. Stefan could take his pick.

They stood side by side, sharing the weight of a century and a half of brotherhood and rivalry.

"I forgive you, Damon." And what did Stefan forgive him for? It didn't matter. All of it.

He held his mostly empty glass up and Damon clinked it.

Elena was waiting in the small piazza on the Ponte Vecchio, just as Damon had suggested. Between the streetlamps hung strings of peach-colored lights. It was late, but Florence only woke up at night. A trio of folk musicians played well-worn instruments in the corner, under an old, twisted tree.

She leaned back against the short stone wall that lined the edge of the unique bridge's square, swaying to the music. The flowing shadows over her long, white linen dress appeared pink in the light. The light breeze danced with a few strands of her hair.

He resisted the magnetic pull toward her, watching her from the edge of the old bridge, letting pedestrians stroll between them, arm in arm. He was just settling in to wax poetic about hope and forgiveness and home when she saw him and her smile made his stone heart flip in his chest. She skipped and danced over to him, beaming. "You're back! The Uffizi today – Damon, you shouldn't have. It was incredible." She dragged him back to the piazza and onto a makeshift dance floor already occupied by several older couples.

He swept her up in a kiss.

Her smile was tender, compassionate. "How was it?" They both knew she meant 'he.'

"It was good. Next time, would you come along?"

"Next time."

They swayed to the music. He gazed around them at the old couples, hands intertwined, gently holding each other, and still in love after fifty, sixty years. It was comforting to see love last, even on the devastatingly short scale of a human life. Elena watched him watching them. "What is it?"

"They've loved each other for a long time."

"Yeah, we'll beat 'em."

"We sure will," he said, spinning her into the night.

The end.