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Imagine : Damon Salvatore was smiling like a man who had absolutely no idea the world was about to shatter around him.
He swirled the amber liquid, watching the smoky light catch the glass. Elena. Her name was a prayer and a promise in his head. She was back home, waiting. She'd said she needed time—time to heal, time to remember who she was without the constant chaos. And like a fool in love, he'd given it to her. He'd left town with a dramatic speech and a leather jacket, convinced that absence would make her heart grow fonder .Delusional. Absolutely, tragically delusional.
Delusional. Absolutely, tragically delusional.
The bartender, a grizzled man with eyes that had seen too much, slid another pour without asking. "Heard you're passing through," the man said, his voice low. "Heard you come from Mystic Falls."
Damon didn't look up. "Heard a lot of things, have you?"
"Town like this?" The bartender nodded toward the door, toward the rain-slicked streets beyond. "We hear everything. Especially about them."
Damon's fingers tightened. Them.
"The Mikaelsons," the bartender continued, wiping the same spot on the counter over and over. "The Originals. They come and go like storms. But lately..." He leaned in, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial hush. "Lately, the whispers are different. No one's talking about war or daggers anymore. They're talking about a crib."
Damon finally lifted his head, his smirk flickering. "I'm not in the market for baby gifts."
"You might want to be." The bartender's eyes were almost pitying. "Elijah Mikaelson is going to be a father."
The world didn't stop. The jukebox still played its sad country song. The rain still tapped against the window. But inside Damon's chest, something cracked clean in two.
He forced a laugh. "Elijah? The guy in the suits? Please. That fossil couldn't—who's the lucky vampire, then? Some French countess from the 1700s?"
The bartender just looked at him. Behind Damon, a pair of women at a corner table stopped pretending not to listen. One of them—a brunette with sharp eyes—spoke up, her voice cutting through the bar's haze.
"It's not a countess," she said. "We know who it is. Everyone knows."
Damon turned slowly on his stool. "Enlighten me."
The woman exchanged a glance with her friend, then looked back at him with something that might have been a warning. "The doppelgänger. The one everyone died for. Elena Gilbert."
The name hit him like a stake.
"You're lying," Damon breathed.
"Am I?" The woman shrugged. "She's been with him the whole time, darling. The whole time you've been gone, playing martyr and drinking yourself stupid in dive bars, thinking she's at home writing in her little diary and waiting for you to come save her." She took a long sip of her wine. "She never left his side. Not once. The minute your taillights disappeared, she was in his bed."
