A/N: This is a little something (a good deal of fluff) that just popped into my brain. As always, please forgive me for any silly mistakes, I try to smooth things out so it's perfect, but after all I'm only human! I really hope you enjoy this - it's just a conversation that I would find idyllic for them to have, and whilst they are locked up together, there wouldn't be a better opportunity.

Balanced

"Why'd you turn it back on?" Elena asked softly, surveying Damon carefully as he dropped to the floor beside her, his left shoulder leaning against the bars that separated them.

For a long time, Damon didn't answer. Elena actually began to wonder if he had even heard her question, until he cleared his throat. The sound and movement was laboured, as if it were a physical struggle for him to swallow and get his words out. All Elena wanted to do was force her way through the cold bars that kept them apart and hold him. As he slowly raised his impossibly blue eyes from where they had been settled on the floor, Elena found that they couldn't quite meet her own. Instead, they lingered uncertainly on her face, occasionally flitting a little from left to right as if he didn't know what to do with himself.

"It wasn't a... concious decision," Damon finally began, his voice oddly croaky in the silence of the cells. He paused uncomfortably. Elena waited patiently. Opening up had always been a struggle for Damon, and as much as she wished she could obliterate that barrier, she understood. Instead of rushing him with an answer, she remained quiet, allowing him to figure out the words in his own time. "I don't know how to explain!" Damon burst out, his voice bouncing off the stone walls and returning back to Elena's ears. His jaw tightened in frustration as words failed him.

Hesitantly, Elena gently probed further. "Was it because... you had a-a feeling that, I-I don't know -"

Damon's eyebrows twitched upward. "No, Elena. It wasn't because I had some sudden epiphany where I realised how wrong the things I was doing were. I liked not caring." Damon licked his lips, cocking his head to one side, seemingly considering his words. "It was more like my switch was broken. I would try to keep it off, but it was always only a matter of time before it sprung back and slammed into me like a brick wall.

"Believe me, if I'd have been able to keep it off, I would have. I would've have never let myself experience the pain of feeling again. I wouldn't have worried about the monster I was becoming, because I just wouldn't have been able to care."

"How did you learn to cope?" Elena whispered, her voice hoarse with emotion as she stared into the bottomless eyes of the man she loved. "How did you not break every time you started to feel again?"

"I focused on the bad parts of myself. I let myself be hateful, seeking revenge on everyone who had been someone to hurt me. Every threat, I tried to eliminate." A faraway look seized Damon, making the colour of his eyes look even richer. As another silence grew, Elena watched the look deepen as he cast himself back into the past. For a moment, he was utterly still. In the stillness, it was easy to look at him and believe he was a picture of perfection, a motionless statue built of flesh and blood that was completely unfaultable. He was only half lit by a candle flame that flickered and danced in the corridor beyond their cell bars, so near, yet so out of reach.

All of a sudden, the misty, deep look in his eyes cleared. For the first time since Elena had plucked up the courage to ask him the question that had played on her mind the most, ice blue met doe brown. "That was why I hated you. You were a living copy of the only thing I wanted and the only thing that I couldn't have. Just by you being there, a constant reminder, you hurt me. I wanted to remove that pain. But being around you... it transformed me. It woke me up."

There was a tenderness in his voice, a husky softness that brushed across Elena's skin, drawing her closer to the bars that separated them. "Being near you, Elena, was like looking into a mirror. You were the parts of me that I was so out of touch with, the bits that I had left behind through fear. Your existence made me look at myself, showed me what I was doing wrong, made me acknowledge what I needed to fix."

Forcing her hand through the uncomfortable tight space between the bars that kept them apart, Elena's fingers laced through Damon's. Recognition had never been so sweet. The revelation of what she had before her, the intensity of the love that roared through her body like a burning flame was something that Elena never wanted to let go of. Because what she was for Damon, he was for her. He had opened her eyes to the importance of self value, the need for life, the fun of new experiences. He had put her back in touch with the fiery part of her soul, the engulfing, roaring beacon of life and passion that Elena had been before she lost her way.

They had put each other back together, piece by piece. When Damon next spoke, Elena could only squeeze his hand tightly in answer, her touch confirming that she felt exactly the same.

"And I could never be without you, because that would mean living without the other part of my soul."