#diarystarter

I am not drunk enough for this--for the lame pick up lines. 

Airiana hung limply over the leather couch in the grand living room as rain poured just outside the window. She wasn't drunk, or even buzzed really, she was just bored. And asking Elena questions about Vampirism seemed to occupy their time at least a little while they drank and watched the rain.

"So do you ever like bump into things when you run that fast? Because like maybe you do, just humans never see it because we're slower. Do you just constantly bang into stuff all the time?" The human asked, a perplexed expression clouding her features.

I'm not going back to Boston, or to Mystic Falls. I've already graduated early and I have absolutely no reason to go back to either.

This feels good.

Your phone number, do I look like the kind of girl who calls a guy first?

It all starts with bribing bar tenders and obtaining a History major. Before you know it I'll be looking after a bunch of supernaturals and drowning my sorrows legally.

Elena Gilbert is dead.

It should seem more surprising--she should be furious or devastated. Instead, she is blind and unmoving. Instead, she is nothing, and everything, all at once. Her hands can't be felt on his skin, and that is how she knows. Her right hand is on the side of his face and he doesn't know. He never will again.

Finding him doesn't require much thought. Somehow, she's certain that she could find him anywhere; she knows Damon Salvatore better than the back of her hand, and there are only so many places he could be, only so many places he would search out solace or revenge. She's right on the first try.

Home.

In the end, Damon always returns home. Like the comet; even if it takes him a century. He is the comet; he's been travelling across a moonless night for decades, all alone.

She thinks, in the end, he is simply a ball of snow and ice, trapped on a path he can't escape. Maybe that's all she is, too. Lost. Metaphorically, existentially... lost. 

Elena isn't sure what she expects. Violins playing, flowers dying, everyone she loves in the same room, reminding her that this is her best. This is what she does. This is what comes of her blood. This is what comes of her fight. She will never be selfless enough to leave. And she will never, ever, be selfish enough to stay. Never before had she cared to filter her thoughts--they were just thoughts, right? The only person she could possibly hurt with them was herself.

There was no room for them outside of her own head. "I'm dying," she doesn't say, because Damon has promised to never again lie to her, and she can't possibly expect him to confirm what she's so readily trying to deny. "I don't want to die anymore" seems pointless through clenched, bloody, dirtied, teeth that remind her of all the blood she's spilled that hasn't been her own (she'd never meant for that to happen, but God has deemed only her blood valuable, and this is precisely the reason why she can no longer find it within herself to believe in Him.) Fate. How silly, how fickle it seems, now, when she's dead at only nineteen. 

Now she knows what they mean when they call it a rib cage. That's all she is--blood and fight and misplaced loyalty, trapped inside a body; even her own heart is trapped behind bones that break way too easily. Human, she's only human, after all. (Except she isn't, but even vampire blood can't save her now.) She feels strangely naked like this, nothing but decay and promise (promises she can no longer keep.) Whose hands are these? The hands on his face? Whose lips? The lips on the top if his head, missing the smooth raven locks that she can no longer feel? She doesn't know. She isn't sure she ever wants to know, much less ever will again.

It doesn't take long to lie down beside him. It never has. He is Damon, and she knows Damon better than she knows her own name. Her arms have wrapped around his frame, around his legs, his arms, any part she can find among the ruin, and only now does she realize that he does not feel the same. He feels like air and dust; leaves dried up in the wind. The cloth that clothes him and the callous that protects his fingers is unrecognizable. When he whispers her name, just once, soft against the walls of a cell she can't imagine him in, her only thought is that he must really miss this girl--Elena Gilbert. The girl with laugh lines and warm face. The name doesn't feel like hers, but he does. He is hers. He always has been.

The way his breaths come in sharp stabs and eyebrows clench in a fashion she vows to never remember (but she will; what's another promise to break?) kills her, literally kills her, and God, she hates them, hates what they've done (hates Elena Gilbert, hates herself.) Elena imagines that they both are seeing similar things; blood and dirt, a mix of both. She hears her own screams in the back of her mind and it's the first time she's hated for herself--she hated Katherine for Jeremy, hated Klaus for Jenna, Esther for Alaric, and now, she hates Marcel and Rebekah and every damn person who had anything to do with this for her, for Elena, the seventeen year old girl who'd wanted to grow up, start a family, grow old.. who'd wanted a lifetime of those choices. More than that, she hates them for the nineteen year old monster girl with blood on her hands and weights on her feet. It's almost refreshing, and for a split second, she feels powerful.

Then she remembers that she will never be powerful again.

She almost wishes that she'd died on a bridge instead, lost in the water. She can imagine it, now, imagine the jolt and the crash, the clean and quick snap of her spine breaking before she passes out. There's no screaming, no blood, not even a mess. It's a nice final thought to have, loud and sharp like a bang, a good way to go. Here lies Elena Gilbert.

She liked the shirt she was wearing, but that's okay; it reminds her of a time when her biggest worries were breaking up with Matt and failing another geometry test. At least now she's better with numbers.

Three minutes was how long it took Marcel to stick the needle in her back and the drive was probably around twenty minutes long, give or take a few STOP signs that he'd failed to yield to. Damon found them in another twenty; he's quick like that, and she'd had a ten minute conversation with him on the woes of dying before she'd screamed like she'd just been lit up like a roman candle and threw her hands into the dirt like her life depended on it. That lasted the longest of all, or maybe that was her low pain threshold kicking in (what a joke that was; they had no idea how much pain she could take.) Five seconds of sheer relief in Damon's arms, a dream that lasted only a little bit longer, and then she'd coughed up every decayed body and drop of blood she'd laid eyes on, including her own. And then, just like that, she'd died before she'd had a chance to close her eyes (no one had closed Jenna's, and once you desiccated and essentially became rock, it was out of the realm of possibility. Jenna stared lifelessly at the sky, even now.) 

It's all very anti-climatic, and Damon laying her body in the ground is the only thing that makes any sense at all. He's strong, and he's sure, but his hands shake (he's human, only human, after all--except he isn't, and not even the ghost of girl he loved can save him now). Enzo's there with him in the background, beating the ground to bury the girls Damon has loved and lost. Elena can only be glad. Six feet is a long way to go with one shovel, and Damon's buried far too many people alone (how foolish of her, to think that she has some sort of claim to the graveyard when she's only dug one hole and laid several people to rest there. Gloomy graveyard boy and girl--what a nice title.) She should be sad she isn't buried with her parents, but only relief comes--she can’t be close to them the way she wants to be now, not when she's all teeth and lost innocence,  a monster girl at best. Maybe the best part of her is buried there, like Isobel. The part that's human. The girl with the laugh lines and cheerleading uniform. It's best that way.

She's sure she's crying, and she's certain she's screaming, but he can't feel her cheek against his own, and neither can she. Her voice is hoarse from the sound and her lungs are screaming, but she can't feel them, and it isn't okay; it will never be okay again. The graveyard girl has been laid to rest.

Here lies Elena Gilbert. 

And Damon couldn't even hear the goodbye on her lips, or the stories she tells him, or the promises she asks him to keep. There's a villian,  a hero, and never a happy ending. It's a shame, because she knows from the way he kissed her on her porch that night that Damon likes a good story, full with a beginning, middle,  and end. He'll never hear hers,  and it's terribly sad, because they were all about him.