Title: Dead But Breathing

Author: Claddagh Ring

Disclaimer: I do not own The Vampire Diaries, the song "Dead But Breathing" by Lesley Roy or anything else recognizable in this story.

Dark AU following 2.18 – The Last Dance

POV: Damon Salvatore

AN: This kind of jumps around from thought to thought – I was halfway experimenting with the whole stream-of-consciousness thing – so it may seem a little random, but I assure you, I meant to do that.

AN2: This is not a Damon or Delena bashing story. It's dark and not happy, quite depressing actually, but it is not bashing. This was written with the intent of exploring a possibility of what could happen to Elena if she loses everyone she cares about. Damon was the most natural point of view to write from and made the most sense. If these things were to happy and Elena had a massive free fall into nothingness, I think he would feel rather guilty about it. Not that it would necessarily be warranted, but...

"I don't mind being the bad guy. I'll make all the life and death decisions, while you're busy worrying about collateral damage. And I'll even let her hate me for it. But at the end of the day, I'll be the one to keep her alive."
- Damon Salvatore

She's been broken for years now, and she never lets me forget it.

She doesn't cry anymore.

She cried at her brother's funeral as she clutched his ring in her hand, the silver edge biting into her palm and bleeding into the ground as they lowered him into the earth. For two days, she held him, pleading with him to wake up, begging him to breathe. His cuts were vertical – wrist to elbow – and deep. He made sure he wouldn't be saved. At least he did it right this time; he never stood a chance. Magic rings don't work on suicides. It didn't matter anyway, he'd stopped wearing it.

Maybe he was lucky, to have figured it out so quickly. Life isn't much to cheer about when the people you love are gone and she was kind of his last attempt at living and she had been a dead witch walking for weeks before her body finally gave out. Channeling all that power, I expected her to die. I didn't expect to feel regret over it. When we found her, she was unbelievably shattered, staring blankly at the ceiling. The only light in her eyes came from the dimming fluorescent overheads; they used to glimmer like that when gave me those annoying aneurysms. But the witch was a choice I had to make to save her, and I would always choose her.

She didn't understand how I could let her best friend die for her and all the grand reasons I had in my mind to justify my decision didn't seem to hold up in light of her anger. That was the beginning of the end, I think. Her rage tore her apart, a wildfire that raged until her skin blistered and peeled away, leaving her hardened.

She barely flinched the day her aunt passed on. She didn't even show up for the werewolf's memorial and when we found the Sheriff trying to dispose of her vampire daughter's body, she didn't blink. Just walked on by as the rest of her world crumbled down around her, all the while knowing that I could have stopped it all. I could have – I knew about it all, but it always came down to her and she was the most important thing in my life, the only thing I ever wanted.

And now I have her, but we're missing most of the pieces.

She used to talk about becoming a vampire. She wanted me to change her but it was never for the reasons I wanted. She wanted to turn off her heart, to not feel. She wanted to be me and I didn't know how to tell her that she was already colder than I had ever been. She never said it was because she wanted to be with me forever. It wasn't a romantic notion to her at all. I figured out it was the only way she thought she could truly die. I knew she didn't want to live anymore. I didn't know how to tell her she had died years before. She stopped caring enough to ask.

I think she knew it too, she knew she was losing herself and all the things that made her beautiful and bright and alive. She looked in the mirror and saw a wraith,a twisted soulless version of a girl who was once so loved, her entire kingdom took up arms to protect her. They crumbled at her feet just to feel closer to her and she drifted away in the night, drowning in the abandoned remains.

The day I wondered why she didn't just end it all was the same day I nearly took my ring off myself. But I won't leave her. I made her this way.

We are very good at getting lost in each others bodies. She pants and moans and cries my name and I can hardly handle it sometimes. Her skin is hot to touch, her breathe so quick, her pulse pounding and it's all so very much alive that I can fool myself into thinking that she will come back to life, if only she'll stay with me in this moment. But I look in her eyes and underneath the cloudy haze of lust, there is emptiness there and she's further away than ever. And it's so infuriating, because I know that I can't make her see who she used to be.

I don't know how to love her anymore.

I think it hurt her to see herself in his eyes. He never looked at her with anything but the love he held for her. He saw her broken, shattered, and irreparable but it never changed the way he loved her. She just didn't know how to handle that. The person who loved him was gone. The feelings weren't, those were never gone, but the woman who knew how to feel was. For the longest time, he was the one thing that kept her spirit tethered to her body but in the end, the pain was all she felt and she got tired of feeling anything. She let him go. That was her last bit of strength.

He never left. He stayed in the house, in plain sight, on the edge of the periphery. Never saying the words but always telling her he would be there for her if she ever needed him, even if she never wanted him. Because he loved her as her. Not as an idea or a meaning, but as her. He loved her the way I loved her, but the man that loved the woman who loved him, lost her when she stopped loving him and that man was lost with her.

It didn't surprise me when she drove the stake through his heart.

The look of acceptance on his face still haunts me.

It's like she's punishing me. She stays with me because I'm all she has left, the last one standing. There is no one else to go to. I used to dream of the day that she would choose me the way I chose her. But it was never supposed to be like this. Because this... this is nothing. And it will kill me.

"I feel like I am dead by breathing,
I know because my heart is beating.
Just let me go..."
- Dead But Breathing, Lesley Roy

AN3: This is probably not my best work, but it's been plaguing me ever since "The Last Dance" and frankly, I'm glad to be rid of it... also, it's really hard to write without using names, so I hope you figured out who/what/huh? happened up there but in case you missed it"

- Bonnie died fighting Klaus
- Jeremy committed suicide soon after
- Caroline's mom staked her.
- Everyone else died somehow.
- Elena staked Stefan

PLEASE REVIEW because "I'm basically an insecure, neurotic control freak... on crack."

and seriously, don't flame because it means nothing to me and will just be deleted.