Disclaimer: I unfortunately don't own Vampire Diaries, because if I did, then Elena would just choose already and let Damon be with Caroline. And Damon would start being, oh yeah, a vampire again. Really, he needs to stop with Elena-doormat impression. Honestly. *huffs* Sorry. Anyway, yeah, I don't own VD, torture me already. Just not with vervain. Can't stand the stuff.

A/N: Meant to be a drabble, just like my last one. Um. Still isn't. Damn, I'm bad at those. Oh, well. Enjoy.

Pairing: Daroline. My dream pairing.

Rating: T - tentatively because it sort of mentions sex, but I didn't go into detail, and besides, you guys are big kids, right? You should be if you're watching VD, I mean, honestly, why else would you be reading this?

Summary: It's easier to think that she's just a bubble-headed blond that means nothing to him because he's just using her, and her eyes aren't that pretty, right? / He can't help feeling like, by walking away, he's saying goodbye to her and to love forever.

Warning: Angsty. Um. Enough said.

A sleepy kisser, a pretty war

With feelings hid

You know she begs me not to miss her.

It starts like this:

a glance exchanged at a bar, and a smile, a cockiness, and ending up between her sheets and in her mouth and praying (at least on her part) that her mother won't find out (he'd like to get caught, just to see her blush).

It begins with compulsion and bad decisions and using her to replace the mirror image of his beloved Katherine, the woman he's loved for over a century and a half. It begins with her using him, in her own way, to get over feelings she has for some football player she tells him about, some guy that Katherine's replacement (he refuses to say her name just yet) used to date.

("They were, like, best friends, and so so perfect for each other, then her parents died and she got all broody and different and dumped him. Hey, hey! Quit groping me. I'm telling a story, Damon. So, then, she like left him in the dirt, you know, and now he's all depressed and won't quit staring at her—stop it, Damon!—and it's just not right. I mean, I know why she dumped him and all, but… He deserves better than to just get abandoned like that.")

He tries not to think that that applies to him as well, tries to forget about Katherine abandoning him. This football player sounds innocent and gag-worthy nice, probably someone that this girl deserves. Sure, she's an airhead, but she needs somebody to take care of her. Somebody to care about her, which he sure as hell won't bother doing. She's a mindless fuck. That's what he tells himself. Somebody to use.

Slowly, as the days tick by and they spend more time together in the sheets than not, he learns more about her. That she puts cinnamon on her toast and doesn't like cereal ("Ew, Damon, gross. I don't like soggy food. Just ew.") and walks around the house in nothing but a lacy bra and a thong. At least, she does when he's around. He learns that she loves her mom but that they don't get along simply because that's the way that it's always been. He learns that her dad left her mom for another guy with a daughter, and that she likes the boyfriend but not the daughter. He learns that she's afraid that she's ("like, kiddie pool") shallow. (He knows that one day he'll use that against her. Maybe it won't hurt her as much as he suspects it will. For her, not him, of course.)

He finds out that she likes to wake him up by kissing him, and he likes to think that, for once, she's doing that out of affection and not out of compulsion. That she's not like the other girls that he mindlessly took over.

He discovers that often, she'll hit the snooze button at least twice during the weekends, and that when he gets up to leave, she kisses him sleepily and then lets him go with a lingering hand on his arm as he pulls away. He learns that she props herself up on his elbow and waves goodbye, eyes still half closed, and tries not to think that that's rather cute. (Damon Salvatore does not think things like cute or adorable. Not even with Caroline fucking Forbes around there to disprove that very theory.)

Days later, he finds out the turmoil that she lives in on a daily basis when he finds her trying not to cry in her room. She mostly succeeds, save for a tear or two that she brushes away angrily, and tells him about her frustrations when he asks. (He convinces himself that he only asks because if he doesn't, then she'll whine about lack of communication later, most likely—damn it all—during sex. Easier just to ask now, and have uninterrupted sex later.)

She's got this inner war going on. Some kind of private competition with Elena Gilbert—the girl his brother is dating, and the girl that looks exactly like Katerina Petrova, and the girl that he is not falling in love with (except if he's not falling for her, then he must be falling for this Caroline girl, because these feelings are definitely there, but it can't be Caroline because, God, it just can't be)—and some inner battle where she's convinced that she's second best to everyone. And she hides all of these feelings and tries to make up for it by arranging school activities and being productive and trying to get in people's good graces. She hides her internal confrontation because, even though she hates herself, she hates pity more.

But she tells him because he asks nicely, and because she does whatever he wants her to do.

("I'm Bonnie's second choice after Elena, I'm Matt's Elena backup because he uses me to get to talk to her, I'm my mother's second choice because God knows I'll never be good enough for her, and my dad never even wanted me at all, and Elena—")

He shuts her up with a kiss after that because she can definitely be fucking annoying after a while. And then they have amazing, thankfully-uninterrupted sex.

Sometimes he lifts the compulsion long enough to see what's really there: she's this pretty girl with a bright future, because she does have her smart moments, don't let that blond hair fool you, but inside she's fighting herself, struggling against years of being chosen second that dictate to her that she will always be never-the-best.

(Then he puts the compulsion back on, because it's easier to think that she's just a bubble-headed blond that means nothing to him because he's just using her and her eyes aren't that pretty, right?)

It ends like this:

her being hung up on wolf-boy, and him firmly convincing himself that he's madly, deeply in love with Elena, and him getting drunk after it's all over and she chooses Stefan, and her standing behind him with a hand on his shoulder and trying to make him feel the tiniest bit better, and him pretending not to care that there's a ring on her finger that shines in the moonlight when he looks out of the corner of his eye, and him pretending that her hand doesn't feel heavier on his shoulder because of it.

It concludes with a wedding and a huge fucking dress and him deciding to leave Mystic Falls. It stops with him turning back around when he's only three miles away, and him ripping up his plane ticket to Prague, and coming back to watch her marry Captain John Dunbar. Fucking Dances With Wolves-esque.

He watches as she enters with her big fucking flowing white dress (noting somewhere in the back of his mind that the dress actually isn't that big) and she smiles at Stefan as he gives her away, and stands next to wolf-boy. He avoids looking at Elena, who stands across from Stefan and next to Bonnie, and instead just gazes at the bride like he's supposed to.

(Imagine that, Damon doing what he's supposed to be doing. Stefan and Bonnie and Elena and—really, well, everybody, except maybe her because she always understood—would fucking die of shock.)

For a moment, he imagines what it would be like to be married to Vampire Barbie. Just for a second, he pities Lockwood. (He brushes away the lingering feeling of jealousy, convinces himself it's just a lingering bit of pity for pathetic wolf-boy.)

He thinks that there would be a lot of shopping, and a lot of listening to her talking his ear off, and a lot of traveling because she's never even gotten three states away from this stupid small town, and a whole bunch of romantic crap like candlelit, by-moonlight dates that she would insist on.

But he also (honestly) thinks that she would kiss him nicely and listen to him talk when he would need her to, and be passionate when one of them needed it, and never cheat on him, and always tell him the truth, and never leave him hanging like Elena. He thinks that she would go wherever he wanted her to go, and be whatever he needed her to be, and never abandon him, and take him for what he was and not what Elena wanted him to be. And encourage him to be all that he could be.

He thinks that it wouldn't be so bad, married to Vampire Barbie.

(But he convinces himself that her nagging would do him in, driving him to stake himself. And that that would suck, because honestly, if an Original couldn't kill him, what would his reputation become if Blondie indirectly did?)

Then she looks at Lockwood, and there's so much damn emotion coming out of her eyes that he practically vomits. Her eyes flit away from her husband-to-be, and she catches his gaze, and he's caught by surprise by how blue her eyes are. (It was always just common knowledge: he's a vampire, Katherine's a bitch, and Blondie's eyes are blue. But now they're really blue. I-never-knew-and-no-that-can't-make-a-difference-because-she's-marrying-wolf-boy-anyway-and-I-can't-love-her-so-there blue.)

She holds his stare steadily for a second, but then she blinks back something (tears? No, of course not, he gave up her right to care about him a long time ago, he signed it away without a thought, and no, he doesn't regret it, definitely not, so fuck off) and looks away, returning her eyes to the minister as he quietly asks them to repeat their vows.

He wonders why she didn't insist on them writing their own vows, but then remembers that wolf-boy isn't so good with words. This was just easier. This whole damn thing is easier. It's easier for her to marry Lockwood because he loves her with everything that he can and because he's not some bloodsucking vampire that will only ever hurt her.

They say their vows and look so happy, and he almost gags. The vows have been changed from till death do us part to as long as we both shall live, but it's still so sappily romantic that he can't help but feel revolted by their smiles.

(The minister says speak now or forever hold your peace, but it's an outside wedding and everybody's standing up, so there will be no dramatic moment of standing up and striding to the altar, no do-or-die, nothing, and God knows he's always been too dramatic for his own good, so if he can't have that little moment of hope, of catching everybody's horrified stare, of making her choose like he made Elena choose, then he won't do it. Besides, he can't bear to be chosen second again, not this soon. It's funny, they're both like that, both terrified of being chosen second, both with a record of it. Maybe that's why she chose Lockwood, because he was easier, and why he won't ask to be put in last place again.)

So he says nothing when asked, and she—Caroline, he reminds himself, he should have no problem saying her name and it's fucking Caroline—beams up at wolf-boy.

You may kiss the bride.

In another lifetime, he would do just that. Steal a kiss from Blondie and pull her into his car and take her to Paris. Do more for her than wolf-boy ever could.

(But she gave in to Lockwood, and he gave up on love, and besides, he doesn't love her. Can't. Won't. Never. Right?)

So he watches wolf-boy and Vampire Barbie kiss, and maybe they're not quite as conventional as expected, but it's more easily received than Vampire Barbie and Badass Vampire would ever be. He knows for a fact that Elena wouldn't come to their wedding. Bonnie probably wouldn't either. Stefan might. He knows that her marrying Lockwood is easier, and that she'll be in a love-filled relationship and happier all the time—but he asks himself, what's worth more? A life of mediocre happiness, or an at-times-hard relationship with just a few precious moments of utter bliss?—and, most importantly, she won't be stuck choosing between her friends and her guy.

(It doesn't make it any easier to watch.)

He watches as her arms wrap themselves around Lockwood's neck, and as wolf-boy effectively ruins her hair with his fingers—which she'll yell at him later for, he knows (he never would have touched her hair, he knows the wrath Vampire Barbie is capable of in that matter)—and as everyone he knows starts cheering. Stefan and Elena are holding hands now, and Bonnie is beaming, and everyone looks happy. Including her.

They head to the reception—it's a small wedding, with not even twenty people present including him, and he wasn't even officially invited (well, she invited him weeks ago, but he turned it down, so, technically…)—which is under a white tent. It's a bright, sunny day, and he thinks ironically to himself, reflecting on the sunlight, that now she has to wear two rings forever.

She pops open the first bottle of wine and sprays it intentionally in Lockwood's face, and Damon almost smiles before he sees that she's laughing as wolf-boy sputters. Then a grin comes over Lockwood's face, and Damon can't find the energy or the heart to smirk anymore. Lockwood gets her to help him cut the cake, and then he smashes the first piece in her face. (He'll pay for that one. Ruining her hair and her dress? There's no way he'll get by that unscathed.)

Then she gets up and gives a speech, thanking everybody for coming (and is it just him, or does she emphasize everybody and look in his direction?) and talking about how happy she is to be here. She talks about adoption and building a home and living in this wonderful little community—after, of course, a honeymoon that involves traveling across the world, except she doesn't mention Prague, and he feels vaguely empty—and neverending connections. She says that marriage lasts because of friendship, and he thinks that she looks at him, and that she will never stop loving Tyler Lockwood, and that she's happy to be Mrs. Lockwood for the rest of her life.

Then he takes a glass of wine from some random human—probably a relative of wolf-boy's—and drinks it and wishes for his bourbon. He walks up to the bride and groom and says a curt congratulations, and meets her eyes and wishes immediately that he didn't because he'd forgotten how damn blue her eyes have gotten, and then she looks away first (she always looks away first), and Lockwood says a polite but forced thank you. Then she says, "Damon," and he says nothing but he gives her one last smirk and then he walks away.

He leaves without saying hello to anyone else, and can't help feeling like, by walking away, he's saying goodbye to her and to love forever.

He gets back in his car and buys another plane ticket to Prague, knowing that at least he won't have to worry about running into her on her honeymoon. Prague is safe. Prague is reliable. (Prague is fucking nothing without her, but he's fucking nothing too, so it's not okay, but it's still slightly bearable.)

A few decades later he runs into Stefan and instantly wishes that he hadn't. He looks happier and tanner with ring matching Elena's on his finger. They're in Paris, and Stefan explains that Elena's in the shop across the street and he's just getting them some good old Parisian coffee. There's an odd concerned look in his eyes as he asks about his wellbeing ("You doing okay, Damon?"), which shouldn't be there, because, damn, didn't they rip each other apart for Elena? And Stefan won. He always won. ("I'm fine, little brother, don't worry your pretty little forehead-dominated head about it. Say, how's Vampire Barbie lately?")

He learns from Stefan that Barbie—Caroline—and wolf-boy ended up adopting a little girl with black hair and deep, frozen, icy blue eyes, named Diana. (He somehow thinks that Barbie chose her because of him and his looks, but then immediately pushes that out of his mind. Wishful thinking gets you fucking nowhere, that's where.)

He learns that Blondie—Mrs. Lockwood—ended up getting killed protecting Lockwood a year ago, and that wolf-boy ended it a few days later, after the funeral. She died with a stake in the heart and all that, leaving Diana to be raised by Bonnie like it said in the will until she turned eighteen, which is a few months from now. ("They had moved away, but Caroline wanted to be buried in Mystic Falls, it said so in her will, so that's where they are now. I wanted to tell you as soon as it happened, Damon, but I couldn't find you. I know that you guys got kind of closer in the end, and I'm sor—")

He leaves before Stefan finishes his sentence, gone in a blur, and then he's in a French bar, ordering a bourbon along with her favorite drink, purely out of habit—and he refuses to admit that he cries when he sees the drink come next to his steady old friend the bourbon, because all he can think of is her, but Salvatores don't cry, dammit—and then he drinks himself to the point where a normal human would be dead by now. And then he finds a pretty girl (one with wavy blond hair and deep, pretty blue eyes—but not nearly as pretty as hers, because nothing can be as pretty as hers are, um, were, dammit, Salvatore, God, stop crying, be a man—and good fashion sense and big heels) and drinks her dry, noting that she tastes not nearly as good as she did when she was human.

Now she's dead. Over fucking Lockwood. And he can't fucking believe this.

He goes to another bar and makes an unconscious, purely drunken decision (not inspired by love at all, no sir) to visit her grave. He goes to Mystic Falls the next day and finds her headstone. There are still fresh lilies and fucking morning glories on her grave—and he remembers, somewhere in the back of his mind, that she once told him when they were together and she was his little toy, that she hated roses, thought they were cliché, but those were the things Lockwood gave her when he proposed. (He would never have given her roses.)

Of all the things that he never gave her, the I need you echoing in his head feels like the biggest fuckup of all. He messed up a lot, but this was his biggest mistake, because those three words—along with another set of three words that he will never get to say to her—are not leaving him alone.

He whispers to her grave the other three dreaded words—"Love you, Blondie"—and walks away, and wonders if a vampire can drink himself to death.

(Goodbye, Barbie.)

Well, he might not be the first vampire to try, but if one can, then he will be the first to succeed. He starts at the Grill, with the bourbon, and when he empties their stock of bourbon, he goes after her favorite drink, those stupid little girly alcoholic martinis and daiquiris and other fruity shit. They taste a little like her, minus the vanilla lip gloss and the cinnamon toast and, later, the sweet sweet sweet taste of blood, much sweeter than ever before on his lips.

But it will never be enough.

But the middle goes like this:

the middle, he likes to think when he looks back on it, is still before she is a vampire, is still when she is under his compulsion and mindlessly happy. (In his mind, he knows that it's probably, more realistically anyway, somewhere more along the lines of him fighting tooth and nail for Elena and wasting his time and her falling for Lockwood, but his heart says fuck that and goes back to simpler times and calls it the fucking middle of it all.)

The middle of it all is her falling asleep in his arms and covering up bite wounds with a scarf and telling him she loves him under compulsion. He knows that it's a lie, but he still can't help but feel oddly exhilarated by those three simple but inconceivably complex words. The middle is her still being friends with Bonnie, and being utterly clueless about vampires and death and pain, and being late for cheerleading practice. The middle is him finding himself smiling at her antics, and somehow taking her shopping when she begs and not understanding why he gave in so easily, and getting on Elena's bad side. The middle is breaking it off with her because he thinks that he's falling for Katherine's doppelganger.

The end of the middle is her becoming a vampire and shoving him against a wall with strength he never expected from her and telling him that he sucks, and not just in the literal sense when it comes to blood bags and straws. In the sense that he lied to her and manipulated her, and hurt her.

And then she stops being clueless and fucking gets a clue about vampires and death and pain, and he knows that it was partly him that got her involved in this, because Katherine's a fucking bitch from hell and did this to spite all of them, including him.

Then they somehow resolve their issues, get past it to help Elena, and he remembers one happy memory of them, when he was playing Pictionary with them. ("Puppy! Puppy with a tutu!") He never knows if she really forgave him at that moment, or if she was just playing along with tipsy Jenna and Alaric and Mason Lockwood in the room.

They help Elena, as they always will, and then she falls for Lockwood and he fights for Elena fucking Gilbert, the girl who can never choose.

But the very very very end of the middle is one night of weakness for both of them, when Elena spurns him yet again and Lockwood fucks it up bad. They're both hurt and angry and throbbing in their own separate but similar pain, and they turn to each other.

He ends up back where he began, in her sheets, in her mouth, except this time he's also praying that Liz won't come up because he actually likes Liz now—imagine that, huh?—and then they carry it over to his house, to his room. He drinks his bourbon and discovers her like for girly alcoholic drinks, and tells her that he could never like those. (They become his main sustenance, in the end, when bourbon runs out and he can't help but think of her and mourn.)

They fall in each other's arms and forget everything. They remember nothing else but memories of where she likes his tongue to be and where he likes for her to touch, and when they go to sleep, he wonders why he never forgot a single feature in her body. He remembers every little bone, every feature, every bit of unblemished skin. And he wonders why he never did forget. (It's not like he's waiting for her. No, sir.)

He wakes up first in the morning, his thoughts still lingering in that direction, and the sun hits them and he twists the ring on her finger, knowing that she depends on that thing more than he does, what with her social life and all. (Not quite as much as he depends on her. Though he'll never admit it.)

She wakes up when the sunlight hits her face, and for one terrified moment thinks that she's still human and that he abuses her. "Please, Damon, don't hurt me!" she says, begging, and he notices the petrified look on her face. He almost comforts her, but then remembers that that isn't his thing.

Then she remembers who she is and what she is and what they're doing there. So he graciously (in his mind) invites her to shower with him, and then ungraciously (in anyone's mind) kicks her out when she says no. She gets up on her elbow and waves at him as he gets up for the shower, her incredibly blue eyes still half-closed, and he remembers her doing that a long time ago, back when she had a pulse and blood running in her veins. Then she gathers up her clothes and walks up, rather dignified and certainly not what he was expecting, and then she approaches him, wearing only a thong and a black bra (and he's reminded of her doing this in her own house, crunching on a piece of cinnamon toast and gagging as he stole her mother's cereal) and carrying her jeans and black tank top, and kisses him. He reacts, just a little, kisses her back and notices the way that their lips fit perfectly together, doing and feeling all the right things, and then she pulls away. He nearly follows her, chasing her lips with his own, but then gets that she's trying to stop, and then she smiles knowingly, almost smirking, and he ignores that. Her smirk becomes a genuine smile, and she takes his hand.

"Thank you," she says, "thank you, Damon. I really did love you once. So thank you."

Then she walks out.

Later, he will reflect and think that he could have done a million different things with that moment other than stand there and do his best impression of a fish, standing alone in the middle of a room in his boxers with a collapsed jaw. He could have said you're welcome, he could have thanked her back, he could have kissed her. He could have made her fall back in love with him, this time without the compulsion or the deception.

But instead, he does nothing.

He finds that that's what he always does when he's scared. When he's in love. For once, somebody chooses him over Stefan, doesn't even mention Stefan, and he does fucking nothing.

He sits in a bar in Prague, a picture in his hand that he stole from Liz's house of a woman and a wolf-man and their little girl. He almost wants to meet Diana, but then remembers that he is not the guy that tries to bond with his lost love's daughter. He doesn't do stuff like that. He ignores the little girl—who does look extraordinarily like him, but he disregards that, because Caroline would have never chosen her child based on her old vampire ex-boyfriend—and the wolf-man, because if Lockwood was stupid enough to let her die, then he's worth less than Damon originally thought, and focuses on Barbie.

Her hair is dyed black in the photo, and her makeup is dark and sexy, and her eyes are even bluer because of her hair and the contrast. And she's smiling, but he notices that the smile seems a little off-balance, and her eyes seem a little emptier than he remembers them after their one-night stand so many decades ago.

He pulls out of his pocket the other thing that he stole from Liz's house—a ring—and looks at it. He twisted that ring on her finger in bed so many years ago. He played with it while she slept and stared at it as she got married to Lockwood.

Sighing, he places the ring on his finger and orders another dry martini on the rocks. Add salt. (Not like he can taste it. Compared to the taste of her, nothing will ever taste good anyway.)

Dammit, Barbie. Why did I have to love you?

He downs it in one swallow, and puts the photo, bended back at the corners to show only her, in the middle of the happy little Lockwood family, in the left breast pocket of his black v-neck.

Why did she have to be so damn perfect? Even in death, she's become the center of his fucking universe.

He writes a letter to her daughter, Diana, and explains how much he loves her dead mother and to come for him with anything, because dammit, he will be the one that tries to bond with his lost love's daughter. Screw it.

He gets another letter back with more pictures of Barbie—Caroline—with dyed dark curly black hair and dark sexy eye makeup and a bright smile that used to be brighter before she married Lockwood, and eyes that didn't use to be quite so empty. The letter only says eleven little words:

She talked about you a lot. I think she loved you.

It's enough.

A sleepy kisser, a pretty war

With feelings hid

You know she begs me not to hit her.

A/N: Wow. Um. Angst. That was, um, quite a lot of it. In fact, I don't think I've ever written anything with more angst. But, alas, that is Daroline: angst, angst, angst, more angst, and finally a little romance. I hope.

Yes, I know it's probably rather unconventional. The ending is a little more vague than I'd hoped for, but beggars can't be choosers, and my muse is being a Vampire Diaries obsessed bitch lately.

The song is "She's A Jar" by Wilco. I don't actually know Wilco, and actually I don't even really know the song, but I thought the lyrics were nice and applied well.

I was quite interested in the fact that my subconscious brought out Diana. I might talk more about her later. I don't know. I'm not usually one for OCs. In fact, I normally don't like them at all because they usually end up being Mary Sues, but, who knows.

Sorry if this isn't good, but it's rather hard to be Damon-centric. I'm just now finding that out. My apologies if it sucks, but I always figured that Tyler was like a safer alternative to Damon for Caroline.

Now, if Damon would stop being such a doormat for Elena to walk all over, and if Caroline would gently let Tyler down (because I do like the poor guy, after all) and get together with Damon, then I would be happy. And I think my muse would be nicer. Sigh. Alas, such is life.

Wow. Long A/N. Sorry. Review if you wish, my lovelies!