I Will Never Leave You

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

“My dear brother was just reminding me of something I already knew, and that you seem intent on ignoring. I’m a monster, plain and simple. There is nothing good about me and the longer you try to convince yourself otherwise the more disappointed you will be. He thinks I don’t care, that I am completely empty of all emotion, and maybe he is right.”

His eyes were like empty chasms and his tone matched his expression, cold. Neither had an emotion or depth and his voice was harshly clipped. She wanted to pull him back, pull him away from the edge he was on, but there was nothing for her to grab onto. There was just nothing.

She tried to hide the desperate edge to her voice as she said softly, “that’s not true Damon and you know it. You care and I know you have emotions, I’ve seen them. A monster would not have held my hand yesterday and been able to make me feel even the tiniest bit better on what was the worst day of my life.” As she spoke she gently raised her hand until she was able to stroke his cheek but the second her hand made contact with his skin he batted it away and took a long step back so that he was out of her reach.

Damon sounded just as cold and detached as he said, “don’t touch me Elena, and don’t search for something that’s not there. My brother is right, for once in my miserable existence I need to do the right thing.

Elena just stood there, completely frozen. Her hand was still stretched out towards him slightly and her eyes were locked onto his. She tried to show him everything she was feeling through her eyes, tried to convey to him that he wasn’t what he thought he was, wasn’t a monster, at least not to her. These were things she couldn’t say, there was no way to find the right words, no way to really make him believe her.

She let her hand drop uselessly to her side as she asked, “and what is the right thing?” She asked although she was certain that she already knew the answer.

“Do you know how easily I could hurt you? If I lost control at any moment you would be dead, gone forever. And guess what? I would move on and probably never even think about you again.”

He had always been a master at turning his words into weapons and now they were like knives he was throwing at her. She wiped the tears that were welling up in the bottom of her eyes with the back of her sleeve. If he was trying to hurt her then it was definitely working.

He continued on either ignoring how his words were affecting her, not caring or not noticing. As emotionless as he was it was impossible to tell.

“I am a monster, I don’t care if you can’t see that about me right now because whether you see it or not it is the truth. You can’t change something like that no matter how hard you try. And Elena you deserved someone so much better, you shouldn’t have to be with someone like me. You deserve to be with someone as good as you are.”

For the briefest moment she saw something besides and blank slate and heard something but an impassive voice that was almost foreign to her despite its familiarity. When he spoke about her deserving better he sounded sad. It was that more than anything that threatened to tear her heart from her chest because it told her that no matter what he said about how he would be able to move on he would mourn if he lost her. It told her that this was paining him just as much as it was her.

It made her want to wrap her arms around him and never let him go, never let him be sad again. But at the same time she wanted to scream at him how he was wrong. How it didn’t matter how good she was and what he thought she deserved because all she wanted was him.

Despite how he sounded and the slight frown that had added some expression to his face his eyes still held the same emptiness. They were like empty chasms, no matter how long you looked you still didn’t see anything.