While You Sleep
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Summary: You'd think it would be easier going on without the love of your life knowing the goodbye isn't forever. It isn't, as Damon Salvatore discovers. Spoilers for season 7.
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When you fall in love with someone, you don't just keep them in your heart like a jewel.
You merge into one, and not in the creepy, sci-fi kind of way, but in the kind of way that tells you that falling apart isn't an option. You merge the way your hands do when falling asleep, that kind of lazy motion that cements a silent bond the world can never destroy. Your souls entwine in the same enduring way ivy can cover a house; a motion so slow, it takes decades to build up. When you fall, and fall hard, you join your heart, mind and soul with another's in a way no other act on earth can replicate.
Separation, then, is out of the question. Death is the only agent that can come between that bond, and even then the motion isn't callous, or cruel, or even unexpected.
It's just how the world works.
So, if anyone ever threw the argument in Damon Salvatore's face that at least he'd been separated by mere magic, and time, from the love of his life, he might've been fully justified in removing their heart from their chest.
Because time is the cruellest of all agents working in the world. Many things can change during its long and auspicious reign; it stands still for no one, and refuses to move anywhere but forward. On and upwards, to an unknown destination, trudging at its own pace, sweeping up the world and everyone in it along for the ride.
What no one remembers to tell you when you nurse a broken heart - or maybe they do remember, they just figure it's more merciful not to tell you - is that time can often be the salt on the wound itself. As you move forward, you're forced to endure watching the world move on with you, as if the moments you experienced before the savage breaking between two souls were meaningless, as if they were just tiny blips on the radar of the universe, if that.
For one beautiful girl, time appears to stand still even as it races past her, taunting her as it flies by.
You'll never catch me.
But it constantly circles around her all the same, agitated it cannot drag her physically alongside it, so that she rests in what feels like an eternal slumber, never aging, never waking.
Instead, it punishes her counterpart, by forcing him to endure reminders of her every day. Little reminders blossom from the strangest of places.
The curl of an autumn leaf reminds him of the red curls in her hair, during her wilderness months where she transitioned from uncertain new vampire to confident young woman.
The French flick he dragged Alaric to during their tour of Europe to get over both of their heartbreaks brings to mind their first date, when he made the immature move to flick popcorn at all the young, pretentious lovers in the audience. She'd tried half-heartedly to stop him on three occasions before giving in and joining him. Absent-mindedly, he wonders if the lifelong ban at the cinema would still hold if he went there now and displayed his pathetic self sans Elena. They might take pity and let him back in, but it wouldn't be the same.
He struggles on, and he keeps his woes to himself because no one will understand.
Not Stefan, with his newly blossoming relationship with Caroline.
Not Bonnie, even though each and every one of her romantic encounters has lasted the lifespan of a fly, or so it seems.
Not even Alaric, even though in one cruel fell swoop he lost his entire family.
In death, there is a certainty, a finality that eventually brings closure, even if it takes forever to accept.
Waiting for one life to end, only for another to restart, is an agony nothing can match, particularly when there is no certainty it will even happen. A trickster, and an overall sociopathic deceiver, like Kai could've certainly put a final twist in place whereupon even after Bonnie's demise, Elena remains sleeping without any hope or cause of every waking her. Damon wouldn't put it past him at all, and it's a fear that gnaws at him every day.
He doesn't pine though.
Damon Salvatore is not a piner (though his history with Katherine would suggest otherwise).
He is a drinker, a lover, a fighter; he is impulsive, reckless, and selfish, but he does not pine. Not for a second.
He just falls into abysses the way people fall into love.
Heavily, and not without consequence.
But he soldiers on, and carries Alaric with him, and they plunder through Europe - and alcohol - all the while trying - and failing - to forget why they are even out here, and not with their other halves.
Damon loves Alaric like a brother, but he will never be enough to fill the void in his heart where Elena lies, and likewise he knows his company will never ease the pain for Alaric of losing his twins and Jo. Grief is a deep wound that only those inflicted can heal. To say time is a healer is an insult to the human spirit. Time is a genderless, faceless, emotionless concept that does nothing except exist.
He hates it all the same.
Eventually, he comes to his breaking point, and that's when he hallucinates the love of his life burning away before him at his hands. Even when the truth emerges, and he realises he hasn't done the unthinkable, it doesn't make him feel any better.
It's at that point, he decides he cannot fight against time anymore. Each day is a battle, and he is fed up of being the casualty each and every time. Nobody else seems to want to talk about her, and he has to believe it's because everyone else is struggling too, although everyone has another outlet, another source, to comfort them whilst they wait for her to awake.
He has no one.
The cold truth of that pours over him.
Maybe if he'd spent a little less time burning bridges, and building friends, he might not be in this situation. Hell, he'd still be miserable, but he would feel a little less alone.
Bonnie is the only one who understands, and she has the horrible fate of never being able to see her again, and so maybe that's why he clings to her more than he should. She has an inkling of understanding of what he's enduring, and maybe - he has to grudgingly concede - she has it worse off.
With maybe the exception of Alaric, who may well be in his grave before Elena has chance to see him again, Bonnie's goodbye to Elena had a finality to it that no one else's had. Jeremy may be on his last legs, as will Matt, but they should still be kicking by the time sixty, seventy years roll by.
Damon wants to stop feeling sorry for himself; he's not normally this pathetic. When you fall helplessly, hopelessly and recklessly in love, however, you have to pay some sort of price for it. Nothing comes for free, not even something as inimitable as love. If he'd known the price he'd pay for it would be soul crushing agony, he might've skipped the whole thing altogether.
Then again, you only get one chance at loving Elena Gilbert, and it's a love that you'd pay any price for. He has fought for it tooth and nail, and to be honest it's involved a lot of waiting - the waiting never seems to stop - and it's been worth it, but now he's ready for the happily ever after part of the story. He's not naive to think that won't come at a price too, but he likes to think that price is something not as...supernatural, like enduring fights over trivial things, or saying adios to Mystic Falls forever in search of a better place to live and, years down the line, sacrificing precious hours of sleep taking care of a newborn.
Now those are prices worth paying in the name of love.
When he makes the decision to lock himself away and give himself over to desiccation, he makes excuses to every single one of his friends in the letters he leaves behind - and every single one is a lie. He tells Stefan the world is better off without an Elena-less Damon, and that he's trying to do the noble thing and stay out of the world's way, (although his brother will smell the lie in that a thousand miles away). To Alaric, he comes a little closer to the truth, yet omits certain details, saying that he is miserable without the love of his life, and that he'd rather live with the pain of desiccation semi-consciously for decades than remain awake for the same amount of time trying to live with the pain of living without Elena by his side. To Bonnie, he just apologises, and states he is weak (not altogether a lie) and says he holds no resentment for her part in Elena's fate (it's the biggest lie he's ever told, yet he wants to be the good guy and make it true but he just can't) but all the same he's tired of pretending he is okay.
The real truth is he's a coward.
He has seen a glimpse of what an Elena-less world looks like, and it sucks. Every morning he wakes up without her in his arms is a morning he wakes up drinking. (It's five o'clock somewhere, after all). Every time he sees a woman looking him up and down appreciatively, he fights the urge to snap their neck. They haven't earned the right to look at him that way, and frankly he's a hundred percent done with the shallow population of women who just want a nice man on their arm to prove something to their friends.
It's amazing how once you have had the taste of true love, how easily you can spot the false love in everyone else.
Looking back now, he deeply regrets all the times he pushed Elena away because he believed he wasn't good enough.
He knows that he'll never be good enough for her, but at least he could've had more time with her regardless.
As he lays down in his coffin to rest, he reflects on every decision that has lead him to this momentous decision. Despite his apathetic nature regarding the citizens of Mystic Falls - and, at times, his brother - he does feel a slight sting of guilt that he's electing the easy way out and desiccating until he reunites with Elena - and she'll have a thing or two to say on the matter as well - but not enough to stop him.
He wonders what she's endured so far, whether she's been trapped in a pleasant memory, or whether she's just wandering in her own subconscious, lost and alone. Is time present there, or is she just making her own reality? Whatever she's facing, Damon can bet she's making the best of it because that's who she is.
Elena Gilbert is a survivor, and although arguably you could say she doesn't always go about surviving the right way, she has the heart of a warrior, and the compassion of a saint. Loving him is the best gift she could've ever given him, and he cannot wait to see her again so he can tell her the countless ways he loves her, and the countless ways he doesn't deserve her, and the countless futures he wants them to have.
Slowly, he closes his eyes, and already he starts to feel the burn of starvation settle in as he stopped his intake of blood late last night in preparation. His breathing so far is regular, controlled, and he selects some of his happier memories to play on a loop to keep every part of him focused and ready for this long sleep.
See you on the other side, he thinks, craning his neck subconsciously as if every part of his body is instinctively drawn to where her own body lies.
They mirror each other even in the realms of unconsciousness.
Fingers twitch, pretending their interlocking with hers; his heart slows to a sluggish beat as time dissipates before him. Memories flash before him as he surrenders, at last, to sleep.
"I'm not sorry that I'm in love with you. I love you, Damon."
"Promise me this is forever." "I promise."
"I stand by my choice."
"I thought you wanted to start over? Because FYI this is exactly where we left off."
"So if the past is a place where you and I aren't together... then stop living in it."
"I love you, Damon Salvatore."
"I love you too."
He says this last part aloud, as if he expects it to wheel them back to that moment, as if she'll wake up at the sound of his voice and run to stop him making a stupid mistake, as if his desperation to see her again will somehow break the spell and bring the girl he loves back into his open arms again.
He waits a pause, and allows the silence to propel his still beating heart into silence.
And the silence only breaks once.
It comes from the coffin adjacent to his.
A lone sigh, pulled from the lips of a girl frozen in time, at the same time a tear trails down her cheeks.
And he is too far gone to hear it.
A/n: I get the feeling that a lot of people haven't really watched season 7 because of the lack of Delena/Elena which is fair enough, but I will say as one of the few Delena fans still watching that despite the lack of Nina on screen, the show has produced some really brilliant scenes that are definitely fanfic worthy. It's a bit quiet in the fanfiction world so gonna try and liven it up with the odd one shot here and there whilst I work on my other multi-chaptered stories. Please feel free to tell me what you think