Fic! Fic! Fic!
It's been waaaay too long. Here's my first foray into The Vampire Diaries fandom.
Title: And The Abyss Gazed Back (1/2)
Author: Anna (bite_or_avoid)
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Word Count: 2,656
Rating: R
Spoilers: Everything through 5x13
Author's Notes: I own nothing except my student debt. Thank you to the amazing tempertemper77 for the beta
Summary: She finds him after.
She finds him after.
There's a lot that happens in between, but she's not there for any of it. Not really.
She's not there when Enzo calls Stefan and gives him all the reason he needs, all the reason he's looking for, to go after his brother. Or for the nights that Katherine, wearing her body like the latest in couture fashion, spends in cheap motels with the other vampire, doing things Elena doesn't want to know about. Or for the sight of Damon tearing Enzo to pieces just as they reach him. For the quiet desperation on Stefan's face at the realization that his brother is worse than a Ripper; worse than anything that's ever existed in the history of vampires, really, because even Mikael didn't enjoy the utter horror of it quite this much.
It's Katherine who helps Stefan track Wes. Katherine, who stands poised and ready to snap the good doctor's neck after Stefan force-feeds him vampire blood.
Under threat of becoming the victim of his own creation, Wes makes the antidote.
And when Damon (vervained, injected, cured) twists off the doctor's head like a screw-top, turns on his heel and walks away without so much as a thank you, it's Katherine who watches.
Elena finds him after, not knowing all the ways in which he is truly lost.
***
In the end, it is neither brother who comes to her rescue.
Maybe it's because Damon walks away, and Stefan is too busy mourning Damon. Maybe it's because, for a while there, they were all seeing what they wanted to see.
So it's probably not totally surprising that when Katherine settles back into Elena's life at Whitmore, the only person who realizes that something isn't right is Caroline.
It's the little things that start to tip her off. Like how Elena suddenly likes her coffee black and her hair curly. That she goes ballistic over a sale at Neiman Marcus, but doesn't bat an eyelash over flunking her sociology midterm. It makes the blonde vampire look back on the preceding weeks and how her friend seemed to care about keeping Stefan close just a little too much, and about Damon taking a header into the deep end just not enough.
"Sounds like someone needs another session with big, bad Klaus," Elena (Katherine) says while Caroline is on one of her Tyler rants.
It comes off like a friendly suggestion really, but suddenly everything clicks into place.
Caroline tells Bonnie, who tells Jeremy, who can't find Matt, and by the time it's all said and done Nadia is locked in a cell at the Boarding House and Elena has a dagger in her gut.
She stands there, blinking.
The last thing she remembers is running to him, the relief, the knowledge that he would make everything okay...
Damon.
When Stefan finally fills in the blanks, ducking his head in an effort to avoid her gaze, she has an overwhelming urge to resurrect Katherine Pierce just so she can kill her again.
***
"We have to find him, Stefan."
"We will."
She trusts the strength of his conviction, if only because it's the first time he can seem to look her in the eye.
***
"He's my brother," Stefan keeps saying. But it's only because he can't say the other thing. The real reason.
She wonders if either of the Salvatores has ever said it to the other. If either of them really knows, really understands.
She does, though. She understands.
He's done horrible things. His path of unbridled destruction should have been a wake-up call; an everlasting reminder of what he will always be capable of. Of what happens when he doesn't get his way.
He tore Aaron's throat out. He nearly got Jeremy killed. Again. He didn't care that she got staked.
It doesn't matter nearly as much as it should.
Despite Stefan's initial righteous indignation on her behalf, nothing changes.
He's still Damon, and they still love him.
At this point, she doesn't think anything he ever does will make her stop.
***
She finds him in a dive bar outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. She and Stefan had split up to cover more ground, and she ended up here on pure instinct.
She can admit to herself now that her instincts have always led right to Damon.
It was everything else that got in the way.
She feels him before she sees him, that familiar twisting ache somewhere deep that never really went the way of the sire bond. And then he's there, sitting at the bar, nursing his drink.
She stares at the side of his face, perfect and impassive. A smudge of blood on his cheek mars the otherwise flawless complexion.
"Damon." The merest whisper of his name, and her throat is suddenly parched with the effort.
He looks at her, through her. His eyes are blue ice.
"Well, if it isn't Little Miss Sunshine. Did my brother let you out for good behavior?"
There is no teasing lilt in his tone. No scorn or anger or jealousy. Just the mechanics of sound, laced with that hint of danger so familiar to her.
Everything about him is so familiar to her.
"No one let me do anything, Damon. I had to see you. I had to explain..."
"Me, me, I... You're starting to sound just like Katherine."
"I was Katherine!"
He narrows his eyes at that, but all she can read in him is genuine interest. "I'm listening."
"She took over my body, Damon. She wore me around like a cheap suit, messing with my life."
Damon lets out a bark of laughter. It echoes strangely in the space between them, settling in the pit of her stomach like lead. "Sounds about right. Katherine Pierce, Body Snatcher Extraordinaire."
Elena shakes her head, willing him to understand. "You're not listening to me. Everything that happened, everything you think I said... it wasn't me. It was Katherine."
"So?"
He's not angry, or relieved, or anything at all really, and there's ice water in her veins. "What's wrong with you?"
He leans in close, conspiratorial. He smells like bourbon and leather and Damon, and for a moment she can almost believe that it's all an act. But then he speaks, and that niggling sense of dread blooms into a terrible understanding.
"For the first time in years, absolutely nothing."
"You didn't," she chokes out. "You couldn't have."
"Why not? My brother did. And anything he can do, I can do better. You should know that by now, Elena." Her name is a drawn out breath, wicked and knowing, and so, so cold.
She wants to grab him, shake him, to cry and scream and slap him and kiss him and make him feel something, anything. But she knows, better than anyone, that it won't turn his humanity back on.
She must look how she feels. Raw and gaping, hollowed out by the emptiness in him. He sees it, knows.
There is no pity in him anymore.
Damon looks at her again, that crystalline blue devoid of any spark. "Your boyfriend's gone, sweetheart. Deal with it."
***
Stefan returns to a trashed hotel room and an enraged ex-girlfriend.
"Of all the idiotic... why did he have to be so... so... him."
Clearly, she catapulted over denial and right into anger.
The older vampire just lets her vent and then goes off to try his luck. He comes back forty minutes later with a rebar through his gut.
"Usually he stakes you. Is that progress?" Elena asks hopefully.
A muscle in his jaw ticks as she pulls out the offending piece of metal. She can't stand the sympathy oozing from his every pore.
"I know how this works, Stefan. I've been there, remember? We can't force him. Nothing will flip his switch back on until he wants it on."
The green eyes that are nothing like his brother's fix on her earnestly. "What if he never does?"
It's the first time in her life that she's ever hated Stefan.
***
She dreams about the night of Homecoming.
About that moment of realization and despair, when Damon had needed his brother more than she had.
We're never getting Stefan back. You know that don't you?
With him laid bare before her, she knew without a shadow of a doubt the potential of her feelings for him.
Then we'll let him go. Ok? We'll have to let him go.
She doesn't know if she can offer Stefan the same comfort.
(She doesn't think she can let Damon go.)
***
The next time she sees him is in an alley.
It's behind a night club called Pulse, and the only reason she's there is they ran out of blood and there's no hospital for miles. Stefan took to the woods, but she's exhausted both emotionally and physically, and much too raw to settle for anything less than her nature demands.
She picks that club because she likes the name.
Sometimes she's more like Damon than she wants to admit.
She rounds the corner and is about to head inside when a sound reaches her ears. It's a gasp, or a moan, and she follows it, already knowing what she'll find.
He's feeding from a girl, hand wrapped around flowing red hair to tilt her neck for better access. Her pink mouth is agape, caught somewhere between horror and rapture. She flails her hands about his arms and shoulders, tries to reel him in. Elena watches in stunned silence.
This isn't like him. At all.
There's no finesse to this.
His stance, his pace, the distance between them... This feed is almost perfunctory.
And she can tell, because there is that distance, because she knows his body as well as she does, that Damon, whose dick reacts every time the wind blows, is not even aroused.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's the flailing that spurs her into motion. Because that girl isn't trying to pull him closer now; she's trying to push him away.
Damon doesn't look like he has any intention of letting her live.
Elena rips him away and gives the girl a hard shove towards the street.
"Excuse you, rude much?" His voice is hard, but there's little fire behind it.
"Uh, what the hell was that?"
"You ruining dinner?"
"You were going to kill her!"
"And you care because?"
She wants to say, Because you're better than this. But that's not really true anymore.
Maybe it never was.
So she settles for, "That looked weird."
He shrugs, wipes a hand across his bloodstained mouth. "I do not welcome criticism. Now scram."
"I'm serious. What's going on?"
There is nothing in his gaze but a wall of silence.
"Damon."
"It's not your responsibility anymore, Elena. Just go home, fuck my brother, and don't worry about the casualties. That's what you wanted anyway."
She flinches. He may as well have slapped her. "You can't possibly use what she said against me. You have to know... how could you believe I would say that to you? Do that to you?"
"So Katherine's a bitch, alert the media."
"That's not the point, Damon."
"Oh, but it is. Because she wasn't wrong." He says it strangely, rolling the 'r' and stretching the last syllable in that singsong way. "Was she, Elena?"
He doesn't stick around to hear her answer.
***
They take turns doing the stalking thing.
She doesn't know what happens between the brothers, or if Stefan is having any more luck than she is. He doesn't offer details, and she doesn't ask.
What she does know is that he comes back shrouded in desperation. More often than not, she has to dig sharp pointy things out of his body. He shakes his head and covers her hand and looks at her with such anguish that her eyes well with tears.
There are one hundred and forty eight years of complicated etched onto his skin and she wishes it didn't still hurt so damn much.
Then we'll let him go. Ok? We'll have to let him go.
There is blood in her mouth before she realizes how hard she's biting her tongue.
She can't find the grace to tell him they should stop.
***
This isn't love, she thinks sometimes.
There's something selfish in it, something greedy.
Because hasn't she endured enough to have this one thing; to have it be hers simply because she wants it?
Deep in her marrow, she aches for him.
Like he's written on her DNA.
You are my life.
It consumes her, just like she knew it would. (Feared it would. Hoped it would.)
This isn't love.
This is something far more permanent.
***
"We really need to stop meeting like this."
She's loitering outside the motel they trailed him to just a few hours before. She falls into step beside him and he allows it; allows her this small reprieve.
Maybe he just thinks the inevitable rejection will be that much sweeter for it.
"There's something wrong with you. Aside from the obvious, I mean. I can feel it." It tumbles out without preamble, but she's never minced words with him. If there's one thing that was ever pure, it was the truth that flowed between them.
"Says the vampire stalking her ex-boyfriend. Do I need to worry about boiling bunnies when I come back?"
"I mean it. If you're really switched off, then why not just tell me the rest?"
"Because it's not a caring sharing kind of day."
She stops walking, reaches out to touch his arm, but he pulls away from her grasp.
"You never gave up on me, Damon. Or on Stefan. What makes you think we'd give up on you?"
He steps into her, close, in a way that's meant to be threatening, but instead brings her a strange sort of comfort. He's always enjoyed pushing her buttons, gotten off on it actually, and the fact that he's trying to do it now is oddly reassuring.
It's the first sign she's had that any part of him is still in there at all.
"Has my baby bro been breathing sanctimonious nothings in your ear again? Stop trying to save me, little girl." He hisses the word, save; spits it at her as if it were something vile. She tilts her chin up anyway.
"I'm not trying to save you. I just want you back. I want us back."
She catches the predatory gleam in his eyes a second too late.
Then there's no space between them.
He has her pinned against the wall, one hand against her breast and the other inside her jeans.
"Is this what you want?" he growls as he curls his fingers inside her.
She can only gasp.
For a moment, Denver flickers across her memory. But she sees nothing in him now from that night.
There is no tenderness here.
It's hard and fast and brutal. As if he actually felt enough to want to punish her.
He brings her off with sure, swift fingers that know her every secret and don't care about a single one.
She stares at him unflinchingly as she comes; watches his nostrils flare and his jaw clench and feels the full hard length of him pressed against her leg.
It's satisfying to know that she can still affect him like this, at least.
And then his hand is gone with a nearly physical pain.
He levels her with a hard, blank stare. "You got what you came for. No pun intended. Now, if you don't back off, I'm going to get annoyed. You remember what happens then, don't you?"
Elena leans back against the wall and tells him the only thing she knows.
"I still love you, Damon."
"That sucks for you. Really."
And it so, so does. Because even like this, even shut off, he feels like home.
Part 2
Title: And The Abyss Gazed Back (1/2)
Author: Anna (bite_or_avoid)
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Characters/Pairings: Damon/Elena
Word Count: 2,656
Rating: R
Spoilers: Everything through 5x13
Author's Notes: I own nothing except my student debt. Thank you to the amazing tempertemper77 for the beta
Summary: She finds him after.
She finds him after.
There's a lot that happens in between, but she's not there for any of it. Not really.
She's not there when Enzo calls Stefan and gives him all the reason he needs, all the reason he's looking for, to go after his brother. Or for the nights that Katherine, wearing her body like the latest in couture fashion, spends in cheap motels with the other vampire, doing things Elena doesn't want to know about. Or for the sight of Damon tearing Enzo to pieces just as they reach him. For the quiet desperation on Stefan's face at the realization that his brother is worse than a Ripper; worse than anything that's ever existed in the history of vampires, really, because even Mikael didn't enjoy the utter horror of it quite this much.
It's Katherine who helps Stefan track Wes. Katherine, who stands poised and ready to snap the good doctor's neck after Stefan force-feeds him vampire blood.
Under threat of becoming the victim of his own creation, Wes makes the antidote.
And when Damon (vervained, injected, cured) twists off the doctor's head like a screw-top, turns on his heel and walks away without so much as a thank you, it's Katherine who watches.
Elena finds him after, not knowing all the ways in which he is truly lost.
***
In the end, it is neither brother who comes to her rescue.
Maybe it's because Damon walks away, and Stefan is too busy mourning Damon. Maybe it's because, for a while there, they were all seeing what they wanted to see.
So it's probably not totally surprising that when Katherine settles back into Elena's life at Whitmore, the only person who realizes that something isn't right is Caroline.
It's the little things that start to tip her off. Like how Elena suddenly likes her coffee black and her hair curly. That she goes ballistic over a sale at Neiman Marcus, but doesn't bat an eyelash over flunking her sociology midterm. It makes the blonde vampire look back on the preceding weeks and how her friend seemed to care about keeping Stefan close just a little too much, and about Damon taking a header into the deep end just not enough.
"Sounds like someone needs another session with big, bad Klaus," Elena (Katherine) says while Caroline is on one of her Tyler rants.
It comes off like a friendly suggestion really, but suddenly everything clicks into place.
Caroline tells Bonnie, who tells Jeremy, who can't find Matt, and by the time it's all said and done Nadia is locked in a cell at the Boarding House and Elena has a dagger in her gut.
She stands there, blinking.
The last thing she remembers is running to him, the relief, the knowledge that he would make everything okay...
Damon.
When Stefan finally fills in the blanks, ducking his head in an effort to avoid her gaze, she has an overwhelming urge to resurrect Katherine Pierce just so she can kill her again.
***
"We have to find him, Stefan."
"We will."
She trusts the strength of his conviction, if only because it's the first time he can seem to look her in the eye.
***
"He's my brother," Stefan keeps saying. But it's only because he can't say the other thing. The real reason.
She wonders if either of the Salvatores has ever said it to the other. If either of them really knows, really understands.
She does, though. She understands.
He's done horrible things. His path of unbridled destruction should have been a wake-up call; an everlasting reminder of what he will always be capable of. Of what happens when he doesn't get his way.
He tore Aaron's throat out. He nearly got Jeremy killed. Again. He didn't care that she got staked.
It doesn't matter nearly as much as it should.
Despite Stefan's initial righteous indignation on her behalf, nothing changes.
He's still Damon, and they still love him.
At this point, she doesn't think anything he ever does will make her stop.
***
She finds him in a dive bar outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. She and Stefan had split up to cover more ground, and she ended up here on pure instinct.
She can admit to herself now that her instincts have always led right to Damon.
It was everything else that got in the way.
She feels him before she sees him, that familiar twisting ache somewhere deep that never really went the way of the sire bond. And then he's there, sitting at the bar, nursing his drink.
She stares at the side of his face, perfect and impassive. A smudge of blood on his cheek mars the otherwise flawless complexion.
"Damon." The merest whisper of his name, and her throat is suddenly parched with the effort.
He looks at her, through her. His eyes are blue ice.
"Well, if it isn't Little Miss Sunshine. Did my brother let you out for good behavior?"
There is no teasing lilt in his tone. No scorn or anger or jealousy. Just the mechanics of sound, laced with that hint of danger so familiar to her.
Everything about him is so familiar to her.
"No one let me do anything, Damon. I had to see you. I had to explain..."
"Me, me, I... You're starting to sound just like Katherine."
"I was Katherine!"
He narrows his eyes at that, but all she can read in him is genuine interest. "I'm listening."
"She took over my body, Damon. She wore me around like a cheap suit, messing with my life."
Damon lets out a bark of laughter. It echoes strangely in the space between them, settling in the pit of her stomach like lead. "Sounds about right. Katherine Pierce, Body Snatcher Extraordinaire."
Elena shakes her head, willing him to understand. "You're not listening to me. Everything that happened, everything you think I said... it wasn't me. It was Katherine."
"So?"
He's not angry, or relieved, or anything at all really, and there's ice water in her veins. "What's wrong with you?"
He leans in close, conspiratorial. He smells like bourbon and leather and Damon, and for a moment she can almost believe that it's all an act. But then he speaks, and that niggling sense of dread blooms into a terrible understanding.
"For the first time in years, absolutely nothing."
"You didn't," she chokes out. "You couldn't have."
"Why not? My brother did. And anything he can do, I can do better. You should know that by now, Elena." Her name is a drawn out breath, wicked and knowing, and so, so cold.
She wants to grab him, shake him, to cry and scream and slap him and kiss him and make him feel something, anything. But she knows, better than anyone, that it won't turn his humanity back on.
She must look how she feels. Raw and gaping, hollowed out by the emptiness in him. He sees it, knows.
There is no pity in him anymore.
Damon looks at her again, that crystalline blue devoid of any spark. "Your boyfriend's gone, sweetheart. Deal with it."
***
Stefan returns to a trashed hotel room and an enraged ex-girlfriend.
"Of all the idiotic... why did he have to be so... so... him."
Clearly, she catapulted over denial and right into anger.
The older vampire just lets her vent and then goes off to try his luck. He comes back forty minutes later with a rebar through his gut.
"Usually he stakes you. Is that progress?" Elena asks hopefully.
A muscle in his jaw ticks as she pulls out the offending piece of metal. She can't stand the sympathy oozing from his every pore.
"I know how this works, Stefan. I've been there, remember? We can't force him. Nothing will flip his switch back on until he wants it on."
The green eyes that are nothing like his brother's fix on her earnestly. "What if he never does?"
It's the first time in her life that she's ever hated Stefan.
***
She dreams about the night of Homecoming.
About that moment of realization and despair, when Damon had needed his brother more than she had.
We're never getting Stefan back. You know that don't you?
With him laid bare before her, she knew without a shadow of a doubt the potential of her feelings for him.
Then we'll let him go. Ok? We'll have to let him go.
She doesn't know if she can offer Stefan the same comfort.
(She doesn't think she can let Damon go.)
***
The next time she sees him is in an alley.
It's behind a night club called Pulse, and the only reason she's there is they ran out of blood and there's no hospital for miles. Stefan took to the woods, but she's exhausted both emotionally and physically, and much too raw to settle for anything less than her nature demands.
She picks that club because she likes the name.
Sometimes she's more like Damon than she wants to admit.
She rounds the corner and is about to head inside when a sound reaches her ears. It's a gasp, or a moan, and she follows it, already knowing what she'll find.
He's feeding from a girl, hand wrapped around flowing red hair to tilt her neck for better access. Her pink mouth is agape, caught somewhere between horror and rapture. She flails her hands about his arms and shoulders, tries to reel him in. Elena watches in stunned silence.
This isn't like him. At all.
There's no finesse to this.
His stance, his pace, the distance between them... This feed is almost perfunctory.
And she can tell, because there is that distance, because she knows his body as well as she does, that Damon, whose dick reacts every time the wind blows, is not even aroused.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's the flailing that spurs her into motion. Because that girl isn't trying to pull him closer now; she's trying to push him away.
Damon doesn't look like he has any intention of letting her live.
Elena rips him away and gives the girl a hard shove towards the street.
"Excuse you, rude much?" His voice is hard, but there's little fire behind it.
"Uh, what the hell was that?"
"You ruining dinner?"
"You were going to kill her!"
"And you care because?"
She wants to say, Because you're better than this. But that's not really true anymore.
Maybe it never was.
So she settles for, "That looked weird."
He shrugs, wipes a hand across his bloodstained mouth. "I do not welcome criticism. Now scram."
"I'm serious. What's going on?"
There is nothing in his gaze but a wall of silence.
"Damon."
"It's not your responsibility anymore, Elena. Just go home, fuck my brother, and don't worry about the casualties. That's what you wanted anyway."
She flinches. He may as well have slapped her. "You can't possibly use what she said against me. You have to know... how could you believe I would say that to you? Do that to you?"
"So Katherine's a bitch, alert the media."
"That's not the point, Damon."
"Oh, but it is. Because she wasn't wrong." He says it strangely, rolling the 'r' and stretching the last syllable in that singsong way. "Was she, Elena?"
He doesn't stick around to hear her answer.
***
They take turns doing the stalking thing.
She doesn't know what happens between the brothers, or if Stefan is having any more luck than she is. He doesn't offer details, and she doesn't ask.
What she does know is that he comes back shrouded in desperation. More often than not, she has to dig sharp pointy things out of his body. He shakes his head and covers her hand and looks at her with such anguish that her eyes well with tears.
There are one hundred and forty eight years of complicated etched onto his skin and she wishes it didn't still hurt so damn much.
Then we'll let him go. Ok? We'll have to let him go.
There is blood in her mouth before she realizes how hard she's biting her tongue.
She can't find the grace to tell him they should stop.
***
This isn't love, she thinks sometimes.
There's something selfish in it, something greedy.
Because hasn't she endured enough to have this one thing; to have it be hers simply because she wants it?
Deep in her marrow, she aches for him.
Like he's written on her DNA.
You are my life.
It consumes her, just like she knew it would. (Feared it would. Hoped it would.)
This isn't love.
This is something far more permanent.
***
"We really need to stop meeting like this."
She's loitering outside the motel they trailed him to just a few hours before. She falls into step beside him and he allows it; allows her this small reprieve.
Maybe he just thinks the inevitable rejection will be that much sweeter for it.
"There's something wrong with you. Aside from the obvious, I mean. I can feel it." It tumbles out without preamble, but she's never minced words with him. If there's one thing that was ever pure, it was the truth that flowed between them.
"Says the vampire stalking her ex-boyfriend. Do I need to worry about boiling bunnies when I come back?"
"I mean it. If you're really switched off, then why not just tell me the rest?"
"Because it's not a caring sharing kind of day."
She stops walking, reaches out to touch his arm, but he pulls away from her grasp.
"You never gave up on me, Damon. Or on Stefan. What makes you think we'd give up on you?"
He steps into her, close, in a way that's meant to be threatening, but instead brings her a strange sort of comfort. He's always enjoyed pushing her buttons, gotten off on it actually, and the fact that he's trying to do it now is oddly reassuring.
It's the first sign she's had that any part of him is still in there at all.
"Has my baby bro been breathing sanctimonious nothings in your ear again? Stop trying to save me, little girl." He hisses the word, save; spits it at her as if it were something vile. She tilts her chin up anyway.
"I'm not trying to save you. I just want you back. I want us back."
She catches the predatory gleam in his eyes a second too late.
Then there's no space between them.
He has her pinned against the wall, one hand against her breast and the other inside her jeans.
"Is this what you want?" he growls as he curls his fingers inside her.
She can only gasp.
For a moment, Denver flickers across her memory. But she sees nothing in him now from that night.
There is no tenderness here.
It's hard and fast and brutal. As if he actually felt enough to want to punish her.
He brings her off with sure, swift fingers that know her every secret and don't care about a single one.
She stares at him unflinchingly as she comes; watches his nostrils flare and his jaw clench and feels the full hard length of him pressed against her leg.
It's satisfying to know that she can still affect him like this, at least.
And then his hand is gone with a nearly physical pain.
He levels her with a hard, blank stare. "You got what you came for. No pun intended. Now, if you don't back off, I'm going to get annoyed. You remember what happens then, don't you?"
Elena leans back against the wall and tells him the only thing she knows.
"I still love you, Damon."
"That sucks for you. Really."
And it so, so does. Because even like this, even shut off, he feels like home.
Part 2