Title: Wallowing, Wading, Whispering, Wanting.
Part One of Four: Wallowing
Author: Roguie/ SunSpecOps
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Characters: Damon Salvatore, Elena Gilbert, Damon/ Elena
Rating: M – violence, torture, A- class coarse language, and if you're very good, a little dash of smut to wrap it all up.
Spoilers: Everything up to 4x18 – AU at 4x19.
Disclaimer: The Vampire Diaries doesn't belong to me. I just like to borrow the characters and mutate their inner voices. What can I say, it's fun. Please don't sue, my house is small, my car is useless and my dogs are pains in the arse, but they're all I have.
Summary: Sight and sound is a powerful trigger to a mind already laden with layers of guilt he can never express. Twenty four hours can change two lives, fix two hearts, and set them to burn like they've never burned before.
A/N: So, I've been struggling with this fic, not for the content because sometimes I love the darker stuff and it seems Angry!Damon has hijacked the first part of this fic, but because it seems with my plot line, I've hit a little too close to home for the series. I considered abandoning the fic entirely, or cutting it down to a one shot so I didn't dance too heavy in what's soon to be canon, but I've been convinced to carry on with it. Ideas are ideas, right? And sometimes muses just can't be stopped. I'll take it as sharing the same wavelength as the show and go from there, although I intend to have the entire fic posted long before the episode in question has aired. This fic has been in the works for a week and was written prior to Pictures of You airing, so that will be my point of reference in spinning it AU.
A/N2: I promise, Angry!Damon is only a part of this fiction… okay, two parts of this fiction. Either way, all four parts are not his drunken ass wallowing in self-pity. Stick with me because it's all scripted out, and my heart only beats for Damon/ Elena. Don't let my muse fool you into thinking otherwise.
A/N3: Reviews are gold, and I'm just a poor girl. Don't forget to donate. :)
~~~Wallowing~~~
Damon Salvatore was no child. A century and a half on Earth had taught him many things from propriety to cruelness, and thanks to a pair of chocolate brown eyes, he was no stranger to heartbreak.
On a normal night, he'd have laughed off her rejection, whatever, right? It's not like those eyes, that face, that voice had never shattered him before. Mortal, immortal, in lust or in love, he'd moved on more times than he cared to count.
Oh, he could wallow with the best of them at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey a hundred years younger than him, in a bar, more recently in a graveyard, wherever he felt the need to smother the side of him that ached without apology. Hell, he could give his own damned brother pointers on brooding if he'd ever take the time to sit down and think about it.
He usually just wasn't stupid enough to think.
Her cruel words rang through his mind, entwining with the burned in image of her dancing with the great Saint Stefan. Together, they waged war over the shattered pieces of his heart. It was his own fault, he supposed, falling in love with a Petrova doppelganger not once, but twice in his miserable existence. Nothing good ever came from repeating one's worst mistakes.
His exit from the dance went largely unnoticed by the woman in question, her arms firmly wrapped around his brother, the only betrayal he could imagine that could honestly sever the bond between them. He couldn't deny the pain, but focussing on it before he'd spent every cent he had on him on unending bottles of hard liquor meant he had to feel it.
He never should have believed her, it was too good to be true. In all his life, no one had ever chosen him over Stefan. He was always second best to the boy that could do no wrong. So soft, so loving, so pure, so fucking insane that people would fall to pieces at his feet and so fucking repentant they'd forgive him as they died. Not Damon, the monster who frightened them, who laughed as they cried, who left them in a daze of fog as they walked away from him, but goddamn it, at least they walked away. It became so easy for people to assume he was heartless, soulless, and incapable of humanity because he didn't openly drown himself in guilt while feeding. Most humans don't cry over the animals they slaughter to consume, why the hell should he shed a tear over a little terror when most of his meals wake up the next day, none the worse for wear? Who was the monster in this equation when you really stop to think about it?
Still, when she'd started leaning towards him, he should have forced a good scare into her, sent the little doppelganger packing, let Saint Stefan be the knight in shining fucking armor and got the hell outta dodge. The shame of it was that he couldn't. Stefan kept slipping, the supernatural kept coming, and Elena fucking Gilbert kept dying.
His heart wrenched painfully as his thoughts turned to the times he'd nearly lost her, and he cursed softly under his breath as he considered burning Wickery Bridge to ash for the pain it had caused in their lives. Three times she'd nearly died there, and once she had.
He snorted softly, making his way through the graveyard, a bottle in each hand as he sat in the dirt, his back to his best friend's tombstone.
"Go on, just say it," he muttered to the empty space around him. "I fucked up. I fucked up and now we don't even have baby Gilbert here for you to tell me as much."
Fuck it hurt, sitting there, the dead talking to the dead, having left his girl in his psychotic brother's arms, but he knew worse pain than this, that was for sure.
Weeks had passed since the accident, time enough for humans to move on, but Damon? Damon felt as if it had only just happened. Watching Alaric desiccate in his arms, the intrinsic knowledge that his best friend's life depended on the life of the thing he loved most in the world, that was the worst pain he'd ever stumbled upon. So much worse than anything his life of torturers had ever bestowed upon him. So much worse than a broken heart.
Even now he wanted to throw back his head and howl like a wounded wolf, the pain was so visceral. He couldn't forget the slow clutching of his wounded heart, how the sickening feeling of ice began in his brain, spreading its razor tendrils through his thickened blood stream, freezing his traitorous organs as the most powerful of them threatened to shatter, the shrapnel enough to shred him from the inside out as a single solitary thought slammed home.
Elena was dead.
There was no doubt in his mind as his numb fingers held Ric while he fought against everything he was to not flip the switch that sat there, taunting him with its promise of peace.
He gathered his best friend with as much care as he was capable, ignoring the absolute terror that brought bloody bile to his lips, and together they returned to Mystic Falls to face truths that Damon was sure he should have stopped, could have stopped, would have stopped because fuck what Elena wanted. He would have never let her die in that piss poor excuse for a lake that constantly tried to rip her from his existence.
Damon sighed, taking a deep swig from his bottle, calming the rage that threatened to overwhelm him.
"Should have been me, Ric," he mumbled, quietly, leaning back and resting a hand over his eyes, shading them from the light of the moon. "I shouldn't have left her. I never should have left her."
The bad always happened when he was off doing something good, something, anything to make her turn those chocolate brown eyes on him, her lips curve up, that calmness that would overtake her entire body that bled belief that this was the Damon she could see herself falling for, the guy who, no matter what, always fucking tried. For her.
He had to go and try to save Barbie and her mutt. Honestly, what possessed him to do something so incredibly stupid? Nearly got him killed, and did get Elena killed, however briefly. Anyway he looked at it, Elena and the kid lost two more parents, while he accomplished nothing but a different kind of heartbreak.
Don't get him started on the next Scooby Doo adventure catastrophe. He kept leaving her and she kept stepping into shit she had no business being all up inside, and all it fucking got them was her body on a metal slab in a morgue with too many people touching her, crying over her, looking at her than she could have handled.
When she'd opened those pretty eyes of hers it should have been the absolute greatest moment of Damon's entire existence. Instead? Instead he wanted to rip the throat from his brother's neck. While everyone insisted she hate what she'd become, while everyone insisted that she eat Bambi and never even look at a human being, while everyone fucking insisted that she live in a world of guilt and regret, it was Damon that kept her sane. Damon taught her to have fun, to enjoy the hunt, to relish the control that no one thought she could handle. It was always Damon that put the pieces of Elena back together, that kept her together when no one else could get past her shell.
Of course it couldn't possibly be true, her feelings for him. Of course she couldn't possibly love him, her personal guardian of the night. Not even when she writhed beneath him, bodies drenched in sweat, locked together, her breath coming in harsh gasps, his name echoing off his bedroom walls when she screamed, not even then could it be real.
Fucking Elena. Fucking sire bond. Fucking Stefan and his high and mighty attitude, forcing his hand, making him understand that he could never touch her again, not the way he wanted, not the way he needed. Not that she was making it at all easy on him, her eyes turning to liquid heat every time she stepped within ten feet of him, red lips whispering I love you when he had no defenses left to withstand. Every breath he took burned for her, every beat of his heart sounded for her, every whisper that passed his lips screamed for her, and he knew the moment Silas ripped the life from Jeremy that he couldn't face her. He was a fucking coward and used Bonnie as an excuse to not be there when Elena finally snapped. He even failed at that. The second she saw him, she broke, shattered, heart and soul imploding in a cloud of grief so dense that it engulfed Damon in its venomous flames.
He did the only thing he could as she screamed in his arms, her sobs dissecting him from the inside out as sure as a razor could part folds of flesh. Okay, yeah, so it was a mistake. A huge mistake. A mistake of epic fucking proportion, but it was all he could offer to give her peace. If he went his entire life without ever knowing the brush of her warm lips against his again, he'd burn in the sun knowing that even in his failure, he saved her some semblance of pain.
The bottle emptied down his throat and he climbed to his feet, wobbling slightly as he placed the second bottle on Alaric's grave.
"Cheers, buddy," he mumbled softly, before stumbling quietly down the dark path, heading back to the road.
This was way too much introspection for one night. If he stuck around any longer, he was at risk of the spirits mistaking him for Stefan and with the amount of blood on that boy's hands, he figured it was safer being himself.
Time to find a little distraction.
~~~TBC~~~