oh god, would you just save me?
a/n: the song is DLZ, by TV on the Radio.
part one – this is beginning to feel like the long-winded blues of the never
She enters the Grill just as he starts clearing table number sixteen. The way the light spills through the door and illuminates her for a moment that passes all too quickly makes his breath catch. If he makes a sound a mix of awe and love, it's easily overridden by the white noise of the dishes clinking together.
He reaches towards her with a smile that travels the twenty feet all by itself. It takes her a few moments to locate him (and, somewhere deep, deep down, there's a two-second flame of resentment that, really, it takes that long for her to see him?) and she smiles and waves in that soul-lifting way only she, sweet Caroline, owns.
But then it's like the moon went and flitted over the sun, a shadow racing against the light. Damon – he thinks that's his name, and he bristles over the fact that he even knows it -, an epic figure in black, intercepts his girlfriend and all he can do is stand, scrubbing the wood with a wet cloth, and watch the first signs (or maybe they already hit the middle of whatever their thing is; he feels silly for thinking they had a thing in the first place but then he remembers and it's like an oh-wait-oops moment and he suddenly can't do anything else but stare). Because it's just kind of inevitable, he thinks about how suave and cool Damon looks in his stupid-oh-you-think-you're-so-cool leather jacket and looks down at himself, at his dirty blue apron and rolled up cowboy sleeves. He sighs.
He pretends not to watch Caroline but anyone with half a rat's brain can tell. He thinks he catches a look of annoyance, a second of pain, a minute of fear and confusion, but he can't ever be sure because Damon stands between them and isn't that quite poetic and wouldn't his English teacher be so delighted.
That's not the word he's looking for but he can't find the energy to search for the right one (and anyway, he's perfectly fine with wrong ones) when Caroline takes a minute, four, five to roll her eyes at Damon and brush past him. It takes even longer for her eyes to finally meet his and when they do, they're missing the Caroline in them and he sees a Damon-white-washed world. It makes him angry but then she touches his arm (it's feather-light, soft, he defends) and he smiles down at her and she knows him too well to know that it's not fake.
"It's nothing," she says, because she knows the burning question on his mind.
And his eyes narrow slightly when she turns away to sit down, because he knows it's nothing. What's not nothing is that she felt she had to assure him, which actually does nothing for it.
But then she smiles up at him and it's like the sun's coming out of her hair and he can't help but smile back.
part two – but this is beginning to feel like the dog's lost her lead
He walks out of the Gym alone (Tyler's gone ahead) and the first thing he sees is his girlfriend with that Damon dude and it's like a train slammed straight into his guts.
In the five seconds before the Gym doors swing shut and creak against their hinges and Caroline looks up, beaming for him, he thinks it's just his luck to have his very own tornado, taunting the walls of his stomach. His teeth grind seeing his girl and her ex standing together in a place that almost feels like his territory; his fists clench at the sick sense of humour fate has to have them standing in a doorway to the sun that catches the light that Caroline only seems to have around that bad boy. It's like a fucking Disney fairytale and he half-expects grass of the greenest variety to pop out through the cracks in the floor and blue birds chirping the Wedding March to fly in from nowhere and should he just fast-forward to the ending so he doesn't puke?
But the glimpse he catches of the ending is enough to make him blanch. The dull black and white tints are beginning to inch onto his high-definition, Technicolor world and he hates it like he's never hated anything before.
Then the five seconds are over and she's beaming at him and his hands don't ball up as tightly as before and he thinks – she really has to stop smiling like that.
He tries to avert his gaze but he still catches the smirk Damon sends his way and he still sees the heartbreaking difference in her when she turns back to him, just a slight change in the slope of her lips, an almost undetectable variation in the lilt of her voice as she says –
"I have to go."
He hopes he's just imagining the reluctance, he hopes that the quiet hesitance isn't there, and it's moments like this that he wishes he didn't know Caroline so well.
And Damon agrees, but in a way that makes it known to everyone who's listening that yeah, no, haha, I don't, and Caroline doesn't narrow her eyes at him quite as successfully as Matt wants her to and then they say some more but he can't really hear them, all he hears is that annoying tune of some devil's warning but he doesn't want to be that guy, he can't be, so he tunes it out and then she's walking towards him and he's mustering up a smile and she can see it because she sees everything, except maybe not this time, and she rubs his shoulder, wrinkles of worry on her too youthful face.
"He's just Damon."
But it's a step up from "It's nothing" but because he won't be that guy, he doesn't say anything, doesn't say a word at all, and then she's looping her arm around his and it almost feels like the way it was before.
Almost.
part three – but this is beginning to feel like the bolt busted loose from the lever
They're walking around the lake at sunset, whatever sand seems to be there tickling his toes.
Damon's name should just be re-written as 'demon' or 'o, damn' because that's exactly what he thinks whenever he sees the two of them together. He's spotted them four times alone in that week and even though she does eventually see him and goes from 'o, damn' to her guy, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, one day it might not be enough and if it isn't, what will he be, what will be left?
Soft words leave her mouth to float on an open breeze and he's listening and he's not at the same time. He's sort of imagining, sort of not, that she's thinking of 'o, damn' when she sighs happily, when she says "today was fun" (but mostly because I hung out with 'o, damn'), when she says "I missed you yesterday" (but not enough because I had 'o, damn' with me), and he knows he's got to stop thinking like this, whatever this is, if he doesn't want to blow this relationship and, god, he'd always figured that if they were to end, it'd be Care's doing and shit, there, he's guilty and angry at himself and GRR.
"Is something wrong?" she asks. He shakes his head almost absent-mindedly, pulling her closer to him. Her warmth at his side is almost enough to get him to stop thinking about 'o, damn' and, lol, if Tyler could hear his thoughts, he'd be rolling on the floor, participating in lmao-ing and talking shit about him being gay, and the thought just makes him itchy with hate for himself, for his situation, at 'o, damn', at Caroline and GAH.
His sentences do seem to end in exasperation, don't they? (sigh)
Is he not enough? It's irrational but maybe it's because it's irrational that he has to think it. Is he, just being who he is, not enough to hold onto to her? 'O, damn' in his cool leather jacket just keeps on popping into his mind and it sucks (the visual's annoying him to no end). He twitches and Caroline peers up at him, alarmed, asking him what's wrong, telling him I'm here to listen, looking so WTF is going on.
Maybe she'll go back to 'o, damn' now that she's seen the side of him that isn't perfect and there, damn, he's stuck in a rut. He wants to stop thinking because it's driving a blade into his forehead every time.
"I'm fine."
"Really…? Because you don't look so well."
"Really, Care, I'm okay."
"Matt, you're sweating."
"What, am I not allowed to sweat?"
"No, it's just that it's cold out here, you know. It's kind of weird."
"You know what? Maybe I am sick. Let's go."
She pouts, mind three miles away (he can see it in her eyes), and he knows he's got to do something to pull her back in or else they're dead.
This is all 'o, damn''s fault.
He knows 'o, damn' would probably smile if he heard that.
part four – you force your fire and then you falsify your deeds
He buys a leather jacket from some expensive brand thirty miles outside Mystic Falls and it burns a big blue-black hole in his five-dollar-jeans pocket. He just walks into the store, trying to look cooler than he feels, and he's wearing an ironed shirt (maybe it'd look more pressed if Vicky was still around…) to make it look like he's the kind of guy to buy anything, something, leather. He strolls awkwardly up to the fifty-buck rack but it's not until he hits the two-hundred-dollar pile, with a mouth wide open and catching flies, that he finds the first leather jacket.
"It's leather, dude. Get over it," the sales assistant, name tag reading "Jennifer" (and he thinks there should be two more words attached after – 'the bitch'), drawls. She's the stereotypical bubble-gum-popping, short-skirt, dumb blonde.
"There's no way I'm buying this!" he says, eyes bulging, but it's barely ten steps before he's turned around, wallet out, heart bleeding. "Do you take cash?" (Pfft, like he's rich enough to own a debit card, a credit card, any kind of card besides a library card.)
The sales assistant Jennifer, smirks as she counts the green bills.
That night, he shows up, looking all too proud of himself, at her door step. She opens the door, eyes widening in a would-be-comical way if it was anybody but him.
"What are you wearing?"
"What does it look like?" he jokes, sweating once again even though it's early January and, oh, god, this is ridiculous, and as if to make it even more stupid, it's just started snowing lightly again. When would weather reports ever be accurate?
She gets a thoughtful, far-away look on her face and he's thinking, oh, please, no, please no, and she says, giggling a bit, you remind me of someone.
You remind me of someone?!
He wants to smash his head into the wall.
Plan A: Epic fail.
Comments: no comment.
part five – never you mind, death professor
He's cooking up plans to keep her wanting him as the days pass, because the looks she throws at the older Salvatore are getting even more obvious and if he doesn't do something, he'll explode, he just knows it. He's thought of day spa (he looks sadly down at his wallet and imagines a fly chugging out, half dizzy, like in a 1990s cartoon), road trip to Florida (uh, never mind), arcade day (he yells lame, lame, lame!) and oh my god, ask her to get married, but then his cheeks are bright red, it looks like some misguided kid took a maroon crayon and went crazy, and he wishes so hard he hadn't just thought that. Still, his mind runs away to more embarrassing pastures (he wonders if she'll accept a ring made of recycled paper; he shakes his head, eyes closed – of course not, she's Caroline).
He presses his face against the cold surface of the bus window (his truck broke down, and now he has definite proof the gods are against him) and moans in loud lament. The girl sitting next to him looks at him weirdly.
He just wants Caroline to look at him the way she looks at that older boy. (Isn't he like forty or something?)
He thinks angrily that he shouldn't even have to wish.
part six – this is beginning to feel like it's curling up slowly and finding a throat to choke
It's getting even more confusing.
He feels her curl up even more tightly against his chest and so he feels a strange obligation to stroke her sun-burned hair with simple caresses. She smiles gently in her sleep, mumbling garble he can't make out.
He stood one witness of many to a loud argument she'd gotten into that day with 'o, damn' (it's starting to irritate, rather than satisfy, him that he has to call that Damon dude some mean name to make himself feel better) in the school hallway. They (Caroline and Damon… not Caroline and Matt – he frowns deeply) were standing too close, way too close, to each other for ex-es. She was shouting these words at him, words that shouldn't be in his precious, pure, innocent Caroline's vocabulary (but he knows deep down that she's never really been innocent) and the older Salvatore was just standing there, smirking, sinking under her skin.
In one of those clichéd, oh-god-make-it-stop moments, time seemed to slow down and a flurry of emotions and thoughts crowded through his head as he watched everything in progress.
He has her body, her adoration – who else does she allow to touch her like she lets him? Who else does she whisper sweet assurances when alone? What he lacks, what he wants, are her fury, her distress, her fear. It maddens him that he should be lost without the brighter fire in her but nevertheless it's true. If she's so willing to give him the goodness in her, he wants her to feel, to need, to give him the badness in her too. He can take it; for god's sake, he wants it.
Damon – he's given up on the petty name-calling, finally -, on the other hand, has her love in a different form. He knows it in an icy, skin-chilling way. That mind-numbing, skin-crawling fear only Damon manages to bring out in her was never something he thought he'd envy. It's not really that he wants to scare her; it's just that he wants to fit in all the places of her heart, 'cause he's selfish like that, and it's just that he can't, because Damon was there first and holds a place in her heart he can never take, no matter the lengths he goes to.
The present zooms back to heart-rending focus and he has to give up.
He can't keep fighting in a losing game. It doesn't work that way.
It's a sudden break in the near-silence of the night when he discerns a single word in the garble. It makes him want to cry a little.
When he breaks up with her the next day (that's not me, it's just not. That's not my name) and she cries tears he knows aren't entirely real, nor fake, he feels that familiar tug at his chest, and when she's walking away, out of his life, he wants so badly to call her back, hold her in his arms, see her smile at him like the sun's in her mouth.
But he doesn't. Because he's become that guy, the guy he feared being for so long, and this has become something it wasn't before and he thinks he knows why they went wrong, were wrong from the beginning, and it might have never really been her fault.
part seven – eternalized.
It's Friday night and the lights in the Mystic Grill are dim, but not dim enough, and he curses loudly enough for an old couple two tables away to give him the stink-eye. Even though he broke up with her, it's still kind of painful in that empty, I-don't-know-what-is-going-on way. Just – couldn't she have brought him to a different restaurant? Was that so much to ask?
"Matt, table number sixteen."
He freezes. He feels like it might have always been destined to end this way.
OH GOD, WOULD YOU JUST SAVE ME?
"Hi, how may I help you?"
Their hands are clasped under the table and he knows this because they used to clasp their hands under the table when they were together, and when she looks up, her eyes go comically wide and her mouth forms a cute 'o' for 'o, damn'. 'O, damn' studies them with his head tilted.
"Matt! I thought you were off on Fridays." Her eyes shift to his replacement, or really his forerunner, and she's biting her lips. He thinks, looking like he's just been slapped, and hard, she didn't see me?
"Had to take over for someone," he mumbles.
"Oh, Matt… You know what, we'll just leave."
'O, damn' raises an eyebrow and Caroline looks at him like she's never looked at Matt and his shoulders fall.
When she walks away, staring awkwardly at the floor, trying to keep at least an inch of distance from her new boyfriend (or old boyfriend; really, does it matter?) until they're out the door and can't be seen so clearly through the frosted glass, he breathes a sigh of relief.
Thank God.
- Fin.