A/N: There were four failed attempts before this; I seemed to have lost my mojo and I'm hoping that pushing and powering through will somehow allow me to get it back. Operative word there being hoping. This fic follows pretty much on from where episode 4x05 left off. I don't follow the promo/synopsis exactly because doing that in the past left me with…well, four failed attempts, haha.

Enjoy and I'm sorry there has been such a delay!

It wasn't the first day that he met her or the twenty second; he can't remember the exact moment, he can't recall what season it was or what he had been doing though probably, he was doing something with her. But somewhere, sometime, someday, he realized that he wanted to be with her for the rest of his life.

When he was a boy and he dreamed of big ships and jungles to explore, there were windows and doors. There were chances and opportunities. His father had always told him that he could be anything, as long as he had the right mind to fight for it. As a vampire, in the beginning, his dreams were solely based on self-preservation. About getting from point A to point B. About being able to get through the day.

That stopped when he met her. When he met Elena, the doors and the windows returned in his dreams. They returned long before he realized that through those doors and out those windows, those dreams extended, prolonged and never ended.

He wrote a thesis on love once. When he was just 86 and he decided to bum around Europe with nothing but a backpack and a lonely heart. He researched, he read poetry, he witnessed love on the sidewalks of Paris and attempted to match the love he had felt once for a girl that only turned out to be a monster. The thesis went unpublished, unfinished. Because for as much as he wrote and researched, he couldn't quite grasp it. The concept. What love really was, how you got it, what it meant when you did.

Stefan lies awake on his bed, staring up at the wooden frames that make up the ceiling of his bedroom; his phone is clutched in one hand and the other is lone and spread, palm down against his chest. Against the placement of his heart.

He couldn't understand love until he knew it. Until the day he realized that love meant time. That love meant space, the space left empty when not filled and the space taken up when two people are so pressed together, they don't care to ever be separated. He's fallen in love with her skin and the freckles below her eyes. He's fallen in love with her smile and the way he feels it every time she pressed her cheek to his. He's fallen in love with her spirit and her care of and for people. Her protective need to protect love, to protect the people she did love, the people who could love, who had love. Who wanted love. He fell in love with her.

Her name is a staple in which he will carry and never forget.

He lies there and he thinks of the thesis that didn't even remotely come close to encapsulating the way he felt, what they had. What love was. Why it was so important. Why, so easily, it could be corrupted. Lost. Fallen. Mistaken.

"I'm fine with her either way."

The words from his brother linger in his ears and he stares and stares up at the ceiling, feeling so tired, he cannot move. He's not fine with her stuck in-between, thrashing and thrashing against being a monster she doesn't and never wanted to be. The monster he is. The monster he never wanted to be.

In his dreams, he gives her his doors and his windows.

He's not fine with her either way. He's fine with her living the way she is meant to. Happily. Freely. Full of spirit and life and soul.

He's fine, he thinks, pressing his hand down against his chest to stop whatever compression he can feel building there, with that.

In his dreams, his doors and her windows meet.

She doesn't sleep but stays tucked in a ball on her bed. Her breathing so unstable, it pushes against the walls of the room and she's surprised her brother hasn't come in to check and see what the noise was.

After the visions of blood in the bathroom and on the mirror, she had scrubbed and showered four times. She had broken out the bleach and the soap, cleaning a floor that was already spotless. Wiping down a mirror that reflected perfectly.

Yesterday, she would have called him. If this had happened yesterday, he would already be there. Yesterday, things would have seemed chaotic but fixable.

Yesterday, feels like a century ago.

She's angry with him and at him and knows logically, that her anger has been exposed to a degree of something he does not deserve. And though she does not wish to blame it on her emotions, she is. She has to. Her anger pulsating around her body; it's completely different than her anger for Rebekah. It's different because it's him. It's different because he asked her to trust him and she couldn't and doesn't.

Not completely. Not anymore.

Elena shakes in her ball and breaths hard and heavy in her ball, wanting nothing more than to fall into a deep sleep. But she stays alert, awake. Energy screaming through her body. For the hours it takes to become day again, she rocks and hyperventilates and only sees blood.

Help me, she thinks. And won't let herself see his face, crave him. Want him. Need him.

She doesn't need anyone. Anyone but her brother.

Help me, please.

But the hours betray her; it's during them and through them that she'll moan out his name. Wanting only him.

"Stefan."

The information about Elena's hallucinations splits them up; Stefan leaves her with Bonnie and Damon and follows Klaus. It's a necessary parting and he gives Damon a look loaded with only one plea; watch her.

Damon nods curtly and doesn't react anymore than turning around and walking back into the house.

Stefan follows after Klaus without pausing to take a breath. To close his eyes and let her go, let her leave his mind just so he can focus and figure this thing out, find this cure. And though he doesn't want to know, he needs to and asks Klaus anyway.

"These hallucinations that she's having, do they form from her current fears or from her subconscious bringing them there?"

Klaus' smirk comes effortlessly, like he had known. Like he envisioned this very question to come from Stefan's lips before it had even entered Stefan's mind.

"They come when they need to come. When her guard is mercifully down or when her desperation is delightfully up."

They're one in the same, Stefan thinks but doesn't say anything. Numb as he climbs into the car. Numb, as the car pulls away from the curb, further and further away from her.

Damon pours her a glass of water, sitting it on the counter delicately; it's all Elena can do not to laugh. He was never one to master the technique of a good bedside manner nor poker face. This careful behavior was unusual for him.

"I'm having hallucinations…it's not like I'm going to snap and go crazy."

Damon raises an eyebrow, now sliding the glass over abruptly, "Yeah, you're just going to break out into hallucinations that make you see blood all over the walls. There's no snapping about it."

She makes a face at him and drinks down the water; it feels like it's lining her stomach with acid. It was her body's way of repelling anything that wasn't blood, needing it; she hadn't drunk from anyone in almost a day.

"Damon?" She asks, partly to distract herself and partly because she had the question spinning and spinning about in her mind.

"Why haven't you told Stefan yourself? About the other night? Used it over him?"

Damon's face changes from agitation to something almost of a mystery; it lasts only a second but that's all Elena needs and it dawns on her.

"Because you know how much it would hurt him or you know how much it would hurt me?"

That's when it happens, as he opens his mouth to speak, the walls fade and slide; blood comes and not just in drops, it gushes violently down the walls. Jenna appears, standing before it, her feet almost completely covered. Run Elena, she screams.

"No!" Elena turns, breaking out into a run.

"Elena." Damon yells and moves after her but she's disappeared faster than he's able to catch her and he's soon left moving through roads and side streets, trying to keep up with her scent. He loses it just as he gets to a crossroad, coming to a stop sign, swearing loudly.

Stefan was going to kill him, knowing as he stands there and contemplates whether telling his brother he had lost his vaguely psychotic girlfriend via text message was appropriate; that it wasn't the former or the latter. Knowing that he hadn't told his brother not because he hadn't wanted to but because the line had blurred between who he cared for more.

Her mind is being maliciously played with and Jenna turns into Damon who turns into Katherine, the blood still a constant companion with whoever had morphed into who.

She's in a building that's unfamiliar, falling over chairs, smacking her knee against the concrete ground. She has no idea how she got there, it feels like a steeple but the Mystic Falls church was built with wood and brick, not with cement.

Katherine comes sulking towards her just as Elena rises from the floor, forming her body into a pounce like position though the pain from her knee is making it hard for her to keep her weight solid on her feet.

"Get away from me." She pants, holding out her hands. The Katherine before her grins and tosses her head back; like this were only a game she was about to play.

"You miss me?" Katherine asks and walks closer; Elena shrinks backwards.

Before her eyes, Katherine turns into Stefan. The blood has disappeared but somehow, this is worse.

"Elena, let me help you."

Elena pushes her hands out in front of her even more, determined, "Don't touch me."

Stefan doesn't move and the visions are no longer splitting or shifting; he's constant. She shakes her head, looking around the room, sweat matting her hair to her neck; there's salvia on her chin, tears on her cheeks. She's a mess and he's still standing there, calmly. Waiting calmly, breathing calmly.

All of this only revolts her more and she grasps her head with her hands, wanting the visions to change. Wanting them to stop. Wanting everything just to stop. She screams out Jeremy's name and Stefan suddenly starts towards her.

"Elena, it's okay."

Elena falls to the floor, unable to remain standing; Stefan doesn't fade like she keeps expecting him too; he is only solid and real. Solid and real before her.

"It's okay." He hushes and comes to the floor, reaching out his hand. His fingers touch her ankle and Elena shuts her eyes; the resistance gone, the wall broken in.

"Please, please, please, just make it stop." She begs him, "Please, please, please." She begs and begs, her throat raw, her body exhausted, slumped against the floor. He's just touching her ankle and that's enough; he's just touching her ankle and she can feel the heat already. She can feel the normalcy and the blood has gone and the visions have gone and it's just him. It's just him and her, in an abandoned building and she's breathing and a mess and he's touching her ankle and not going anywhere.

"It's okay." He repeats and she finally, finally believes it.

She's in a field, lying on her back and looking up at the sun. The sun is warm but not blinding and she finds herself staring at it. Endlessly staring. There's no direction, there's nobody else there but her and this sun. Eventually though, the sun begins to fade and she remains lying there, staring up at what has turned into an opening that looks vaguely like the opening to a vast, wide and welcoming window.

It's a long time before she wakes up. Longer than it took her to fully wake up during her transition. He doesn't leave her house, Damon comes and Damon goes. Bonnie and Caroline see her briefly. But in the early hours of the morning, it's just him and Jeremy.

When she wakes up, when she takes a breath, he opens his eyes and he takes a breath too. Almost like his first, almost like he was waiting for her to just, take a breath.

Jeremy comes awake beside her, camping out the whole night by her bed.

Stefan pays no attention to what they say to one another, it did not belong to him and he did not want any ownership of it. But Jeremy eventually comes downstairs, looking tired but at ease and tells him that Elena was asking for him.

That's a little like taking his first breath too.

He comes into the room and she's sitting there against her bed, just on the edge. When she looks up, they meet eyes. They look and don't say anything but things happen, everything happens during and in-between. He's sorry and she knows he's hiding something. She's angry and he's telling her that he should've known keeping anything from her never worked. He didn't want it to ever work.

When he makes it all the way into the room, he sits beside her, close, maybe too close but he doesn't care because he needs to be close to her right now.

"I thought I was past it. I thought it had eased and that I was okay, with trust. With trusting you."

Stefan nods, feeling as though the very action of doing so would make his entire break right apart. He takes her hand, clasps it, squeezes it.

"I want to tell you. I want to tell you more than anything but telling you will mean giving you something that could be taken away leaving you with something that will only cripple you. I won't cripple you, Elena."

She turns her head and leans against his shoulder; they're inseparable, two bodies, side-by-side, hand to hand, hip to hip, pain to pain, love to love. Life to life.

"I saw my mother, as a hallucination. I saw her and she told me the things I had feared she would be thinking if she were alive."

Stefan closes his eyes and pushes against the knowledge, the facts and the details. That he wants to cure her for reasons that are right and true, for reasons that would mean her being whole again. But also for reasons that make him feel as though his life with her eternally couldn't amount to the life with her as a human.

"Tell me what she said."

And Elena turns her head up, moves away from his shoulder so she can see him a little better. For a moment, she's worried she'll begin to cry and won't be able to stop but the sharp edge of her breathing against her throat eases slightly when he squeezes her hand again.

"She told me that I was better to her dead than I was alive. As a vampire."

"Hallucinations tell you what your subconscious fears."

Elena only nods, stiffly, with effort.

"I can't trust you, not if you don't tell me."

Stefan only nods, stiffly, with effort.

"I know."

They find places on the bed without speaking, lying side by side without touching. They look at one another. She has tears in her eyes but they don't fall and he feels the way he's sinking even though the bed is solid beneath his body.

"I wasn't completely honest with you. About the trip with Bonnie. When I had blood, I didn't lose control. I had it. I had it with Damon and I was with him in ways I shouldn't have been. In ways, I liked even though I knew they didn't belong to me."

He lies very still, sinking and sinking, he lies very still. Letting himself, just, sink.

"You belong to you, Elena. You're a vampire now. Not human."

She hears something in his words she hadn't before. Something in there that she recognizes because she's heard it in her own voice when talking to Caroline. Damon. To him.

Acceptance.

"I'm sorry." She whispers, unable to speak any louder.

And in a way that isn't anything other than gently cautious, gently trying, gently wanting something more, he reaches his head forward and kisses her cheek. Softly. And he leaves it there, he rests there, he hides there. I want to tell you more than anything, he breathes.

Elena begins to curl his hair behind his ear, stroking him, resting with him.

"More than anything." She repeats. Thinking these moments were more real than anything she had felt, touched, held, smelled in all the time she had been reborn as a vampire.

"What do you want? More than anything?"

She stops stroking his hair and he untucks himself and leans back, resting back on the pillow, waiting for an answer he knows might break his heart.

But she answers him in a way that both surprises him though breaks his heart anyway. Peeling off her shirt and then her bra, wriggling her pants over her hips. He peels too, he peels until they're both naked and they've rolled to meet in the middle.

They make love in a way that feels finite, in a way that feels endless. In many ways, they're together and pressed and he's inside her. In many ways, they're so separated; they don't recognize who they're touching. In many ways, as she wraps her arms around him, knotting her legs around his waist, there are windows and doors. There are lifetimes. There's the way she loves him and the way he loves her. There's that and nothing more.

A/N: Well, there is something more. Hopefully more writing but considering my track record, I wouldn't hold your breath. Unless you're a vampire…I'm not funny.