Barely A Memory

Chapter 22

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The ride back to Mystic Falls was anything but silent. Elena wished more than anything that she could have just walked the four hundred miles. She wanted to curl up into herself and stay like that forever. The worst was Stefan. He had so many questions. Too many.

"Why does my chest hurt so much?" he said aloud, placing his hand over his heart as if to make sure it was still there. Elena knew the feeling, but said nothing.

"Elysia said the link takes a good twenty four hours to break," Damon said coolly, hand hardly on the steering wheel and eyes on the road. Elena's heart dropped to her stomach. When she had explained this to Damon yesterday, didn't she warn him that she hadn't told Stefan about this yet? She had, hadn't she? She quickly went back to the conversation they had had yesterday when she and Stefan returned from their kidnapping.

"He's had way too many head injuries," Damon whispered to both Elena and Katherine once Stefan was asleep. He seemed to be doing a lot of that lately now, being a teenage boy. "Do these vampires not realize that my brother's head is not an egg?"

Katherine chuckled humorlessly, something Elena quickly learned to be her main defense mechanism. "We've put that thing back together way too many times for them to think that."

Neither Damon nor Elena found that very funny. Katherine shrugged her shoulders and sauntered over to the bedside, taking a seat by Stefan and carefully running her fingertips along the back of his neck to his hair, much like a mother would to a sick child. Elena tensed, but when she recognized a rare twinge of sympathy in the vampire's eyes, her anger faded.

"Well, might as well point out the elephant in the room," Damon stated, arms crossed over his chest. "You're not dead."

"I guess something scared them off," she lied. Her heart might as well have been ripped out of her chest. The link was broken. She was leaving. Dead or alive, she would have to end up leaving Stefan. "There's no way to put the link back together?" Maybe, just maybe if her and Stefan remained linked, she'd be able to survive whatever was to come with these vampires she'd be leaving with. If she carried a part of him with her.

"No. It's gone." Damon's voice was flat, sad almost. Almost.

Elena exhaled deeply, the uncomfortable chill of gooseflesh creeping up on her skin. "Well, I'm going to go to sleep now. Let's go home. There's no point in running anymore if they always find us."

Body tensing up, heart in her throat, Elena gained the courage to look over at Stefan, whose face –at first glance—seemed blanker than a canvas. She caught a quick flurry of confusion, sadness, and above all, betrayal, in his eyes before he glanced out the window again and hid behind an all too familiar wall of feigned nonchalance. Instead of asking further questions, the youngest Salvatore simply said, "Oh," and went right back to typing on his phone. Elena decided it was the worst thing he could have done.

Let me explain, she wanted to scream. I can explain.

She said nothing. She really couldn't explain, after all. She'd screwed up. Badly. Her breaking of the link had been unnecessary. Completely, totally unnecessary! The vampires hadn't killed her, after all. And oh, how she should have just told Stefan!

Maybe all of this –her leaving in two days—would be easier if he hated her, resented her, for the poor decision she had made.

Stefan did not look up for the rest of the trip.

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Mystic Falls no longer felt the same. Homey, yes, but not home. Not Elena's home. Not anymore.