Gift

3

A log cracked in the hearth, its grooves burned bright blood-orange. The heat from the fire warmed her tepid skin while the light emitted a soft glow casting objects into shadow. She felt partly entranced by the dancing flames, sparks shooting from the fiery tips like pale yellow moonbeams. Yet her mind, her entire being was focused on the vampire pacing from one end of the floorboards to the other.

"Look I understand it's your mother and her staying away hurt you far more than you're willing to admit, but Damon, come on."

"Come on, what, Elena? I have a million problems on my plate right now all vying for my attention. I don't have time to sit down and break bread with this chick when I have a brother who is one artery away from being a ripper once again. She said she's not going to help me with Stefan so I'm not going to indulge her Little House on the Prairie fantasy about the three of us having dinner."

Elena sighed and mentally flipped to the next item on the script she could use to get Damon to see reason. "Have you stopped to consider that you're lucky?"

Damon rolled his eyes already foreseeing where this was going. He shook his head. "Do you remember what it was like meeting Isobel for the first time and how much of a crushing disappointment she was?" he waited for her to answer. Elena merely compressed her lips together. "Mine is like that but maybe a thousand times worse because my mother is more concerned about her family of mummies than she is with her own living sons."

"But maybe," Elena stressed, "if we sat down together and have dinner you can air out your grievances, put the past behind you, and move forward. We all need to get to know each other."

Damon scoffed hard at that. "The only forward Lillian Salvatore is interested in...is freeing her family into this world." He inhaled an unnecessary breath and stared at Elena. What he wanted to add was: I made a promise to Bonnie that we weren't going back and they weren't getting out. I can't break that promise.

"I can understand but at the same time don't on why you won't compromise on this. She's not asking for an organ or a ridiculous sum of money. She just wants to sit down and have dinner. I want her to like me, Damon. And this may seem pointless, but I want her to approve of our relationship."

Perhaps if he told his meddling girlfriend that his mother could scarcely remember her name maybe she'd change her tune. Then again, that would probably be extra motivation for Elena to see this dinner come to fruition because if it was one thing she couldn't abide by it was someone treating her with indifference.

Damon, in the far recesses of his brain could admit to still being a tiny bit salty that Elena inserted herself on the trip to the 1903 prison world. Whether she had been joking about her outfit being "time appropriate" or not did little to ease Damon's nerves about seeing his mother for the first time since he had been seventeen. He hated being seen as anything less than formidable, and though vulnerability couldn't be helped at times, Damon liked to handpick those times. In short, he hadn't wanted Elena to tag along.

His sodium levels continued to rise when Elena mistakenly gushed over Stefan's baby picture thinking it was him, and his head nearly exploded when she made the comment of "meeting the mother of my two epic loves". The fuck? It may have been true but didn't need to be said. Damon had ignored it, excused it because he had an agenda—get Bonnie her revenge, get Lily and get out.

They were out now and Elena appeared to be more concerned with making a good impression on a woman who could give a rat's ass about her, and not the emotional turmoil it was doing to him though he was doing an excellent job of concealing it.

At that moment Damon wanted to talk to Bonnie. She had a sharp way of simplifying a situation that the answer almost seemed trite. But he hadn't seen or talked to Bonnie since spying on her at the B&B and caught her literally in action.