A/N: Apology after apology for the wait, I've been lazy, busy etc etc etc but! Finally something has decided to spur from my brain. I've changed show canon here just slightly in that when Damon appears at the hospital to find Elena and Stefan, Elena is still unconscious. Doesn't include any current spoilers either (mainly because there mostly bs anyway, hee). Enjoy!

He can't look at her. Not when he's dragging her to the surface, not when he's planting his mouth over hers, breathing for her, breathing in life for her, breathing and breathing and breathing, just, for her. He doesn't look at her face; he allows his eyes to sit in the safer places: the curve of her neck, her hands and her feet. There is no life without her he thinks as he pumps her chest, over and over with two palms.

He tries but fails to think of the last thing he had said to her.

There is no life without her.

When the compressions stop and he stops, dropping his hands away from her chest, he slides an arm beneath her back and lifts her up. Ignoring how cold she was, ignoring how limp she felt. Ignoring that she had been under for far too long for any of her organs to still be pumping blood to her heart. Ignoring her face and that he was crying, ignoring and ignoring until he's at the hospital and someone has taken her out of his arms without him so much as putting up a fight.

He should've fought for her months ago. He should've fought to stay with her, not leave and forget and ignore, daily, weekly, monthly that he was in love with her and would be always.

As Meredith is finally talking to him, explaining what she had done, it seems to be having the opposite affect than she probably hoped it would. He sags against the metal stool in the morgue, almost missing it completely.

He can't look at her face.

When he comes for her, Damon shakes him hard, signs of tears, obvious tears on his cheeks. He shakes his brother and Stefan lets him because he can't feel the ground, moving so motionlessly that the violent shakes to his body feel like bare, minimum strokes. Damon drops his hands, drops back, practically drops to the ground.

"She could've died."

It's a soft accusation that Stefan has been quietly screaming. He moves his head in a nod and as though it's been stuck and the motion has unpinned it, Stefan quickly turns, finding the corner waste bin and vomits into it. There's nothing but tears and salvia. There's nothing but his lungs and his heart, caught at his feet like hooks because she could've died.

"Elena." He allows himself to breathe, closing his eyes and it stills him momentarily. The room stops spinning and her eyes, he hears, as though she's heard him, suddenly open.

Damon hovers over her, which Stefan realizes is a mistake even before she starts to scream.

She screams because she can't talk. She screams and Damon muffles it with his arm, trying to cradle her but it's pointless and there's no possible way to control her in this state, Stefan knew. He knew and watches her cry, his legs fastened to the ground; he can't move.

I'm so sorry, he thinks and closes his eyes. Her face so vivid across his mind that it's disarming. He reopens his eyes, trying desperately to find her across the room, just a glimpse, her eyes, her cheeks, her nose. Anything, he wants, just to see. He wants to drink her in and hold her and mould her and fix this, fix her.

Why had it been impossible to forget her but not possible to stop loving her?

Damon eventually, not accepting his inability to calm her, moves to scoop her up but it's like the snap of a light as he's bending his knees, ready to run with her when she stops almost immediately, so suddenly quiet it's more jarring to Stefan than any sound she's made.

"Elena?" Damon tries.

Stefan takes an unbearably too small a step towards her. Some of the tears from her cheeks are meeting the metal slab of the table and the sound they make go off like thuds in his ears.

Elena moves just her eyes and they flick around the room until they hit him and that hold of air he's been clutching onto, tightly, desperately, seeps out of him and he sways and wills himself to do anything but fall right to his knees.

He can hear her voice before he can see her lips moving.

"Thank you."

This future memory, he thinks as he's falling, skin meeting the ground long after his brother and Elena have left, was one made of iron and steal.

He sleeps beside her; she hasn't spoken, hasn't moved from her bed in 24 hours and he can practically feel the way her skin was rubbing against the nails that her insides were becoming without blood.

She was starving herself.

It took him far longer than it should've to realize that it was what her game plan had been all along. Her unwillingness to communicate with anyone let alone him made it difficult, hard to reason with, to get her to see but he realized that first night. He realized that she was done before she even had the chance to begin.

"Don't do this to me." He whispered through a fog he still manages to see her through, staring at the small of her back wrapped in blankets.

It took hours, the early morning light peaking through her curtains that had been fastened permanently closed, but she turned, her body stiff and heavy and had reached for his cheek without opening her eyes. Falling asleep like that. Pretending to sleep like that.

Stefan kissed her palm and the words in sickness and in health seemed to float across his mind.

He knew he had wanted to marry her. He knew it and yet he hadn't asked. They were too young for marriage; it was too soon for marriage. But as he's lying there, staring at her body that is betraying her, giving up faster than they had time for, he's thinking of the words, of the question, over and over again.

I want a life with you, he thinks.

Her hand slips, slow and gentle, from his skin.

It's day two. She doesn't have long and Stefan has moved himself, a shell of a man, a shell of a corpse, downstairs, as far away from her as he can possibly get without leaving this house completely.

Everyone else is begging for her to stay. To drink. To feed. To complete the transition and just get it over and done with. Everyone else keeps trying, some getting angrier than others. He could hear Jeremy yelling at her one night when he had been outside, hunched over the back porch steps, feeling as though his own body was failing him.

Caroline finds him like this, his hands curled around a bottle of scotch that he's too tired to open. She sits down, the summer night mercifully cool around them.

"Do you think it's possible to love a person too much?" He asks her.

"No." She answers quickly like she had been expecting the very question.

It sounds like she's been crying and he wonders if it had been her to see Elena before Jeremy.

"Why not?" He finds himself whispering.

Caroline looks at him without saying anything, so long that he eventually brings his eyes to meet hers in question. She's smiling softly and looking so much like his old friend that it makes his chest ache in a way it hasn't in a long while.

"Because why put a limit to something that isn't containable."

Stefan turns his head away, letting his grip of the bottle go. It's the first time in days he's been able to feel something other than fear. It takes him a couple hours, long after Caroline has moved to be inside, to attribute the feeling to something he thought was impossible and out of reach.

Hope.

Damon, at first ignoring him, starts to antagonize him because Stefan has stopped trying, he has stopped begging and pleading and it's not comprehensible to his brother in the least.

"Have you tried?" Stefan asks him in retort after they've bickered, back and forth and Damon has blamed him again, vicious with his language and his words, hating Matt.

Damon almost looks scared but quickly tightens the features on his face, the features that will protect him the most.

"No." He says.

And Stefan can't bring himself to ask why.

He hears Damon climb the stairs a few hours later and lets himself, just this once, leave. Running without stopping, through woods and across highways until he's reached this patch of dirt at the end of one forest. He's at least three states away because he can, just faintly, smell the ocean. He drops to the ground and a sob breaks out of him that is unapologetically disgusting and brutal and terrifying. But he's alone. He's all alone for miles so no one will hear him.

But as he cries, he wonders why is it then, that he can still hear her.

Damon is nowhere to be found when Stefan comes back, early in the morning. But he finds a group there in the kitchen; they've formed a circle of sorts. It's dark except for a few candles someone has lit and put in the centre of the table and all of them are either cradling photographs or staring at them scattered around the room.

It is, he realizes like he's crawling over and through glass, a memorial for the dying.

He glares at Bonnie when she looks up at him and leaves the room, so angry he's afraid he'll hit something but he finds himself climbing the stairs two at time and coming around the banister until he's rushing into her room, swinging open the door.

It's terrifying how alike she is to Katherine; as she sits on her bed, feet slung over and onto the floor. She stares at him with eyes that can hardly open with a body that can only just keep itself upright.

"My mother." She can barely whisper, "I want my mother."

He's panting, standing there, staring at her, out of breath with his resolve to scream at her now sliding down into his stomach, forming a tight ache against his throat instead.

Elena goes to stand but can't and he just manages to catch her before she slips, bringing her back into bed.

"Did you ever think about it? Not following through. Letting yourself die?" She asks quietly after a moment, staring at the ceiling. She has her hands clasped over her stomach and the image is too similar to that of her in the hospital morgue that he has to look away.

"Yes." He answers honestly because there was no more time left for hiding the truth with a lie.

And the silence is almost her justification until he realizes it and looks at her, hating that she was crying. Hating that he was too. Hating that when he held her it felt like nothing but her bones pushed against skin.

"But I didn't have you." He manages and moves to be against her stomach and her hands have come to rest against the back of his neck, "I didn't have you." He repeats, over and over until he can no longer get the words out.

"How long do I have?"

Hours, he thinks, lifting his head. You have hours.

"You have time." He tells her.

She's smiling in a way that isn't quite human; a bitter line she's trying to pass off as indifference.

"You once told me to fight. You once told me that we must live with the choices we make. You once told me that you would never give up, that you knew, " He begins and finds that the longer he looks her in the eye, the less and less he feels like she's fading beneath him, "I'm telling you now to fight and to live. That it'll be hard and you'll sometimes hate me, wishing you were dead. That you might try to end your life, knowing the fight to end others isn't worth it but you'll live at the end of the day. For your parents, for Jeremy. For Jenna and for Alaric. For your friends, For Damon. For me. You will, Elena."

He climbs off her bed in what feels like prolonged stages but eventually he's at the door and he stops, clutches for the frame of it, for something, anything that will keep him from lying against the floor.

He wants to tell her that he loves her but doesn't and what seems to come out is a little more true anyway.

I'll follow you, everywhere, I'll follow you.

He walks down the steps, out through the door and away from that house. He can't be there, he can't. His heart is thin and he's weak and he's spineless because he can't.

She finds her father's eyes and her mother's mouth and studies them, copies them, tries to find the path of them but realizes after doing this that there was nothing to copy and nothing to find.

It takes her a minute. Maybe 10 but she gets up. She walks to her door and down the stairs.

Her father's eyes and her mother's mouth following her, belonging to her, embedded beneath her skin for forever.

Caroline gives her the blood in a cup, passing it over with a hand that is shaking so badly, she's afraid the cup will slip from her fingers and Elena will change her mind. But Elena takes the cup and brings her free hand to rest on Caroline's, holding it until it steadied.

"Drink it quickly."

Elena nods and doesn't hesitate as she swings back the glass and drinks the blood in full, without taking a moment to come up for air. She exhales when the cup is empty and brings it to the table.

"It wasn't so bad." She shrugs, like she had been drinking nothing but air.

They laugh together even though there is a lingering emptiness to it that they both ignore and won't bring to attention to.

"Where's Stefan?" Elena asks instead, feeling her limbs practically extending out of her body; she felt dizzy with a tremulous energy. An energy that felt uncontainable but was still somehow able to fit entirely in her body.

"Stefan?" She repeats when she gets no response and his name feels overwhelming; she's never felt more anxious to see him.

"He thought you were going to die, Elena. Do you know that?"

Her heart has stopped beating but she swears she can feel the lingering remnants of it pound against the lining of her chest.

Caroline's expression is morose and Elena begins to understand what Stefan had meant all those months ago when he had told her that your emotions as a vampire were constantly on the extreme and never on the medium; she had gone from feeling ecstatically energetic, to horny, to depressed and ready to drop to her knees in less than 30 seconds.

She's exhausted already even though there's so much blood running through her that energy feels as simple to expand out as it does to blink.

"Find him." Caroline tells her just as Elena turns and begins to run.

She watches him, listens to his quietness and sighs deep in her throat; it burns and she swallows her salvia. She's craving for something she knows is blood but as she stares at him through the open doorway to his bedroom, it's suppressed completely. Somehow.

"I'll follow you too." She says, tries to get out of her mouth as quietly as she possibly can but it sounds like she's yelling the words across the room at him in her head.

He seems to go tense and then relax all in the same breath; his back is to her and when she can hear his smile, the emotion she feels is something else entirely.

"Do they know? Does everyone know?" That you're alive, that you're here and you're alive.

She nods, watching his response to that, hearing him swallow. It was as though she had slid her limbs through a liquid cloak, the seams threading themselves through her skin, with this new mind and body. It was effortless, it seemed and that both scared and excited her.

He had never spoke of effortlessness when telling her of what he was.

"I can smell the flowers yards away, isn't that mind blowing?" She suddenly says without thinking.

"What else?" He asks to keep from turning, from letting his heart bloom and burst; from letting himself grab her and seam himself to her and love her; this shouldn't be so easy, he thinks faintly.

"I can hear the way you frown, the way you swallow, the way you can't keep still because you're terrified and angry and about a million others at me."

"Elena," He breathes and she's at his back, clawing at him to look at her, kissing against his skin, his neck and shoulders. Hearing his groan and feeling his fingers reach back for her because he has no self control, none at all, when it came to her.

"I'm here." She hears herself whisper and this time, it's as quiet as anything.

"Make love to me." He whispers even though her hands have him tied and she's got him turned, pressing her skin to his, their equal skins, equally beatless chests; matching and joining in ways he never wanted for her and thinks he doesn't deserve.

It's almost like they're feeling their way blindly and she thinks that they really were because it's different now, it's different this time; it's intoxicating on a level she cannot comprehend and cannot withhold, kissing him wherever, kissing him all over.

Somewhere in between she begins to cry and begs him not to stop.

He grips and slides his fingers through hers, entwining them against the pillows of his bed; their naked bodies bare and enwrapped; an ankle digging into his back, her belly pushed against his naval. Thighs and skin and beads of sweat that matt them together in newer ways, slower ways. She moans out his name so long, he can't stand it but can't wait to hear again.

"I want a life with you." He's telling her, just barely touching her cheek.

And she lifts her face, bashful and blushed, from where she had it pressed to his shoulder and smiles, small and quiet.

"We've been molded, made, put together, my love, our life has barely begun."

A/N: This is a one shot but I definitely, definitely will be writing more Vamp!Elena! in the future.