AU after family ties. (1X4)
She smiles and it's beautiful- something so pure, she lights up and just gives and gives and gives- her light touches all those around her. Suddenly, her gaze falls on him at the bar; sitting in his usual seat and it's like looking into a supernova.
She makes her way over, wading through admirers and friends, acquaintances (everyone wants a moment of her time) and sidles up to the bar, all confidence and pretty pink curving lips.
"Hey." She greets simply, yet he reads a thousand things in her smile and the way her fingers twitch at her side, restrained from reaching for him by an owner who knows simply a touch will never be enough.
That need electrified his very being every second of every day and he took- knowing it would never be enough and uncaring. She was pulled to his body and he drank from her lips like a dying man.
"Caroline." It's pathetic, he knows, but he refuses to care and every time her name passes his lips he can't help but give it the inflection of a dying man gifted a final breath.
"Damon…" It helps that his name echoes the sentiment though. Finally, she pulls away only long enough to pepper short, open mouth kisses along his jaw and throat before moving up to whisper against his lips as his fingers encircle the ring on her fourth.
"Happy Anniversary Mr Salvatore."
The ghost of Caroline Forbes, the girl he never really knew stares back at him on nights like this.
He sits at the bar, the space beside him habitually empty as the grill drones in a dull, monotonous manner around him, and remembers a time when he had a choice.
"…I am so over you now…"
He remembers leaving her there as her blood spilt across the dewy earth and somehow, hoping in some deep repressed part of him that someone would find her before it was too late.
They didn't.
But still, she leans against the bar like she owns the place, like she bends reality on a fucking whim and by now he's grown used to it- to this reflection of a girl as he imagines her- constantly growing and evolving the more he learns of the girl she once was, the woman she could have become.
"She was going to become Miss Mystic Falls..." Elena tells him on the eve of her own crowning.
"Be Positive." He hears Bonnie whisper to herself through the tears, standing at the foot of an unremarkable stone slab that he thinks has a severe, terminal absence of yellow.
Sometimes, he concocts her the life as he thinks she might have lived it- Matt, Tyler, Klaus, Stefan, a million different faceless men who were sweet and cherished her and loved her in a way he hadn't been able to but mostly, he pictures this.
A young rebellious type comes to town- all leather jackets and bad attitude.
He's burned by love but she wriggled her way under his skin, somehow, and he reacts without thinking, rejects her warmth because he doesn't know how to be cared about anymore.
They struggle- he's all snark and she's just finding her feet but he's always nursing a soft spot- he'd kill for her.
Eventually, they find their way and it's perfect in a way real life can't be- but it's the only thing he can give her anymore so he imagines a house with a view and an energetic dog with a coat as shiny and golden as her own hair and friends that never age so she'll never be alone and himself-
In these dreams he gives her all of himself.
His eyes settle on the empty space next to him as he methodically downs his drink.
Caroline Forbes' blue eyes stare back at him, a reminder that she never got that fairy-tale- she died alone and cold, struggling to cover all sorts of scars.
"Happy Anniversary, Mr Salvatore."