Elena

Her words rolled off him and down his shoulders like oil and water, barely touching him before he brushed them off. She’d promised she wouldn’t vanish and she had, and he’d never been told why. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to call her either, and had ended up leaving enough voicemails to fill her inbox. She’d never returned his calls or hell, written him a note or even sent Chase to tell him why she’d up and vanished. Everyone always left but he’d believed she would be different. He’d latched on to it after her presence had indirectly gotten his father murdered in front of him and his head toyed with by her younger brother. So now to have her coming back and making these promises again just felt as empty as it sounded.

He heard her moving toward him and shifted away, though the reaction was too far delayed for what it ought to have been. He shook his head, trying to clear it. He hadn’t had to deal with anything that required his full attention in weeks, and the situation at hand required even more than that. It required emotional control which wasn’t something he remotely had or knew how to find buried beneath the haze of pills, so his words were just dully snapped in her direction rather than spoken as calmly as they otherwise might have been. Stefan wasn’t himself, and hadn’t been since she’d left, and frankly he couldn’t be fucked to care about it.

“We’re moving,” he said flatly, his words bordering on cold. “I’m flunking out of school again and Enzo thought it would be better to go somewhere else.” He didn’t mention that he’d have to go through rehab soon before he was anywhere near ready for school. He hated rehab, and he didn’t want a fresh start. He wanted to stay here and be in his shitty home town with his two friends and his bad memories because he knew it and it was familiar to him. He didn’t want to start over in a new place where no one knew his “tragic” history, as he’d heard Enzo call it the other night to his brother. He didn’t want it at all. “Boarding house is opening back up, and once it’s running, we’re leaving town.”

Elena could practically see her words touching down on his skin and rolling back off again. She could sense how much he hated her in that moment. She hadn’t expected a big warm welcome where he rushed to her side and scooped her into his arms but she also hadn’t been expecting, well, this. If she hadn’t been so emotional about it she might have been able to put two and two together to realize what was going on with him. 

“Moving? What? Where? You- Why?” Elena felt like she was losing her mind only shortly after getting it back. She’d fought through her binge, Chase had locked her up in the vervain room just like he had done plenty of times before and the only thing that kept her from fighting it was Stefan. And now here she was, not exactly cured as a vampire could never be fully cured of their lust for blood but she was okay. And only to find out that the one person who’s memory got her through it was leaving. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to let Stefan know why she wasn’t around. She had wanted him to know but Damon had made her promise to leave the second things got bad without a word.

They both knew Stefan would try to find her in means of helping but it would only be putting him in danger. Now she was paying for that action which she had been entirely against in the beginning. She could have leveraged Chase to tell Stefan where she was or what was going on but she hadn’t in hopes of keeping Stefan at bay. She didn’t want him to see her strung out on blood and ready to kill anything with a pulse. 

“You know, I figured that one out on my own, thanks.”

His voice was sluggish just like the rest of him was. All his movements made him feel like he was swimming in soup, but now he was drawn out of his thoughts and his drug haze by her presence and it made it both easier and more difficult to pretend he wasn’t stoned half out of his mind. He moved the mop and even remembered to dunk it back in the bucket to wet its tattered ends before attempting to clean the floor again.

Boxes were stacked everywhere, his and his brother’s belongings piled inside some of them rather haphazardly, and his parents’ possessions in another to be unpack and rearranged to make the place presentable again. He was handling the brunt of the work on his own, or was at least attempting to, since Damon couldn’t be here and Enzo tended to stay wherever his brother was. The two of them were joined at the hip, and he couldn’t blame them really, but it didn’t make it easier. Neither of them had noticed he’d slipped back in to his old habits yet.

He hadn’t meant to, but with the sudden extreme changes in his life and his usual network of people lost to him for the foreseeable future, he hadn’t known where else to go, and drugs had always been there to help pick up the slack of his tattered and miserable life. It only made sense he’d get back to them now. 

“What are you doing here, Elena?” It was harder than he’d thought to come up with the words, and they weren’t as accusatory as he’d meant to make them sound. He was bitter and hurt that she’d left without word or trace after promising him she’d stay, and he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see her now, though that could just have easily been his drugged out mood swings as much as it was himself. “You shouldn’t have come back here.”

She flinched slightly at the sting his words left on her. Like he was a snake who had just clenched down on her arm and seeped venom into her veins. She shuffled her foot nervously before taking a few steps closer to him. She knew he’d be hurt at first, she didn’t blame him and she expected it but at the same time she needed him to be willing to hear her out. And right now it didn’t seem like that was going to be the case. 

“Stefan- I had to leave. It was for your own safety I swear. But I’m back now, I’m here and I’m not leaving. I’ll never leave you again.” She knew her words would be empty to him as she’d already promised him once before that she wouldn’t leave like everyone else did. He just needed to understand why she left. 

Things had not been easy for Stefan since his girlfriend up and vanished without a word. Lexi had been occupied with her family problems, and Damon…. well that was complicated all on its own. His affliction was getting better, it seemed like, the longer he was out of the boarding house and the longer Enzo was with him. But it wasn’t easy to think about what they had to do from here. 

Damon had suggested re-opening the boarding house and leaving it to someone else to manage, probably Lexi and her family to give her some reasonable life in Mystic Falls where she could raise her brother and still do something better than a minimum wage small town lifer job, but it still wasn’t Stefan’s favorite. He hated the house since it had witnessed his mother’s death and his father’s murder and he wanted out as much as anyone, but opening it up like this and moving away wasn’t what he had in mind. Hell, moving out west wasn’t what he wanted at all, but he wasn’t being given much say.

He was cleaning as best he could while strung out on the drugs he still had, though he’d mopped the same part of the floor for a quarter of an hour before he realized something wasn’t right. 

He looked up when he heard someone come in, and he had to check the label on the bottle of pills he’d taken to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. He looked from it to her and back again before he realized that, chances were, she was real. He shoved the bottle in his pocket and turned his back, moving his mop to an actual dirty part of the floor.

She’d thought it would be better if she left without saying anything. If Stefan knew that he had been the catalyst she knew he wouldn’t forgive himself until he helped her overcome it and it was too dangerous for her to be near him. She finally had it back under control and her visitation rights had been restored by Chase. Stefan was quite literally the only person she wanted to see, and while Damon wouldn’t be happy that she’d gone to see Stefan before Damon could ensure she wasn’t dangerous, she honestly didn’t care.

When she stepped into the Salvatore house she spotted Stefan aimlessly mopping the floor. She immediately heard the slow pulsing of his veins which seemed odd considering he was standing up and engaging in some sort of physical activity. When he looked at her she didn’t get the same feeling she used to. There was no spark in his eyes to light the fire behind her own, and that caused her pain but she knew it was to be expected.