Smile, Though Your Heart Is Aching
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Summary: AU take on 4x23, whereby Bonnie doesn't succeed with the spell to bring Jeremy back, and so closes the veil. Damon faces his first obstacle as Elena's boyfriend as he tries to help her come to terms with the loss of her brother. Rated M for smut.
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There's an invincible quality to being in love, a side effect of feeling like nothing can break you. It swells inside you, consumes every part of you, and resides inside your lungs, so that every breath you take, and every breath you expel, you're essentially sharing it with the world.
Damon drinks in this feeling, devours it with an appetite even he had no clue he possessed. Starve a man of food for a month and he forgets the taste of it, making that first bite infinitely better than he could ever describe, and it's the same with love. Deprive a man of it for a long time and he forgets the feel of it, forgets how it can both lift you up and break you down. He forgets how it can touch the gloomiest of days, providing even just a ray of sunshine to colour the day, or how it can be the breath your lungs need to start working again.
One such man deprived of love now lies in the comfort of his own bed, aware it's now occupied by another body. He turns, in an accidentally-on-purpose manoeuvre designed to wake her, bumping shoulders with her so that she has no choice but to stir. He can barely recall the previous night - it's all a colourful, wonderful blur- only that it consisted of heartfelt speeches, followed by a clumsy journey towards the bedroom as two bodies became almost frantic to unite. All he knows is he's basking in the remnants of last night's activities and he honestly cannot wipe the smile off of his face.
She turns, her eyes opening slowly, curiosity in the glare refracted from her eyes. Her fingers reach out to touch his skin, sprawling on his bare chest, tracing lazy patterns in a way that has his eyes near enough rolling towards the back of his head.
"Morning," she says, with a lazy smile which reaches his cold black heart and squeezes it into life. "Now what was it you once said would be more fun if we were naked?"
He growls, turned on just by her words, the memory of that sexually charged moment she describes so playfully spurring him on to just revel in this moment.
Without giving her a response to her teasing question, he attacks her skin with his lips, trailing them down her body, reaching the spot between her legs which instantly has her seizing with pleasure. First, he teases, promising nirvana but never delivering, and then he inches closer with his fingers, circling the area around her clit but never touching it, and she makes a noise halfway between a grunt and a frustrated yelp.
One impatient hand fists his hair and shakes him violently, and it mentally takes him back to the days when his father had done the very same action, only it had been a scolding on a very different matter entirely.
"Damon!" she hisses, snapping him back to the present.
He peers up, mischief glinting in his eyes.
"Yes?" he asks innocently.
"You want to finish what you started?" she demands, looking less than impressed, her features twisted with pleasure he is currently withholding on delivering in its entirety.
"Maybe..." he toys with her once again, his fingers skilfully managing to caress every area but the one she's yearning for him to pay attention. "What's in it for me?"
She doesn't reply, but her body bucks, and then he decides the teasing is kind of cruel, particularly when last night she – finally – gave herself to him – all of herself. It's an incomparable moment in his mind, because he could conjure up a thousand memories involving Katherine, moments where he'd been blissfully happy, and they would not compare to the moment when the girl he'd loved – really loved, without a shadow of a doubt that it had been compelled from him – confessed she was in love with him. There are few joys greater than hearing the reciprocation of love from the mouth of someone you'd yearned for with every fibre in your body for so long.
Right now, even in the midst of what they are doing, he takes a moment to study her, and his eyes flood with a mixture of lust and absolute love.
But of course he takes too long, and then she flips him onto his back, impatient, and slides down his body, grinding against him, taking the pleasure he'd neglected to give her for herself. He groans, letting his head fall back, realising now teasing isn't nice on the other foot, but god damn it he can't help himself.
Foreplay is off the table, and soon she's grasping him, inserting his length into her, taking control over every action, determining for herself how fast or slow to take things, which he finds unbelievably sexy. Face flushed, eyes rolled back, she starts to ride him, her hips rolling slowly at first to find their ideal rhythm, and then she's off, moaning and letting out breathless syllables he supposes are her feeble attempts at muttering his name, but all she can really get out is, "Da – Da –" followed by the occasional, "Oh god."
He has no need to guide her; even after having spent the night together that intimately the once, she already knows what he likes, how she can get them both at that point, sometimes mutually, but usually within seconds of one other. He shoots up at one point, just to lock lips with her, and she throws her arm around his neck, the intimacy and love in that one movement enough to send them both spiralling, and shortly after that, she comes undone, and he's not long after her, sweat glistening on their bodies, as they collapse back down.
It's a perfect moment... only spoilt by one fragment of reality he can't help but observe as they bask in the afterglow of their orgasms.
There are tears in the corner of her eyes, ones he can't label as being ones of joy, and just as he tries to fathom why her mood has dropped, he blinks and they're gone, and she's plastered on a sated smile, her hands lazily caressing his chest.
She might be able to blink back the tears, and cover up her momentary look of sadness with a smile, but there's no hiding the way her body shakes, or the way she clings to him tighter than usual, and it throws him, because he doesn't do comforting people. He's tried with her, but it feels out of character, and even a little strange because he's never had the need to comfort people before, so he's never pushed himself to be the comforter; that role he's always happily let Stefan covet.
But he holds her tightly all the same, hoping ripples of comfort will find their way to her.
He could be reading the signs wrong – maybe this bout of sex just rocked her world particularly hard, and he's hoping that's what it boils down to – but when it comes to her, he's always had an intuition that's never been proven wrong. When you love someone, you don't have to be psychic to know when they're hurting, nor do you have to be empathetic to feel the waves of sadness behind the guard they put up to stop you feeling it too.
You just have to know them, period.
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Damon starts to catch on when Elena does little things she thinks no one notices, small every day activities that are run-of-the-mill for most people, and yet they are, for her, out of the ordinary, and he feels a flash of guilt when he realises she's not had much chance to be a teenager recently, regardless of her new vampire status.
It starts off with her phone, which she'd taken with her out of everything else her house had contained, when she checks her voicemail, and one voicemail in particular catches her breath.
"Yo, Elena – pick up your damn phone. It's kind of important."
The message is that brief and it also sounds curt to Damon's keen ears, and to anyone else it wouldn't have been something to think twice about. Just a standard message from one family member to another.
But in this context, it's someone's last words – that is to say, the last words Elena will ever hear from her brother, and there's nothing profound or meaningful about them.
The effect, however, is staggering.
She covers her mouth, laughs, and then lets out a noise that sounds like a strangled cry. It's then she registers him standing there, and then she laughs again. He wonders if she checked her voicemail for this purpose, or whether it's just a habit she can't quit even as a vampire. It doesn't matter; the fact is he walked in on her doing it, caught the message, and is now watching her try and recover from a surprising blow.
"It's – "she swallows, and then tries again, "- it's from my brother."
He doesn't know why she pretends he didn't hear it, only that it's important for her in this moment to explain why she's almost in tears, like if she doesn't he might assume he's the cause of her pain.
"Elena." His gaze softens. "You don't have to pretend you're okay. Not with me."
"It's just the last thing I'll ever hear him say," she sniffs. "I got to say goodbye... why am I still hurting?"
Damon has mixed feelings on how Jeremy left, because the weasel had left Elena a letter rather than have the courage to face the onslaught of emotions by saying goodbye to her in person. He's pissed, but he understands, because if the shoe had been on the other foot he would've preferred to disappear quietly rather than look at Elena's devastated face as she told him goodbye.
"You just got your emotions back. It's gonna sound cliché, and like something out of Stefan's How-To-Be-A-Vampire-For-Idiots manual, but everything is heightened. When you switch off, make yourself numb to everything, when you turn it back on, it feels like you've just turned all over again," he explains, closing the gap between them, catching a tear with his thumb. "Jeremy's death is gonna hit you like a freight train, Elena. You're gonna fall all over again but I'll catch you." He kisses her forehead. "And this time you're free to handle it however you want to. I'll still be here.""
She folds into his embrace.
"Even if I feel like turning it off?" she murmurs against his chest.
He stiffens, hoping against hope she's bluffing.
"Even then," he reassures her, lying through his teeth because he can't see her go through that again.
"Good, because I don't want to do that," she says, shaking her head. "It hurts so much, but I need the pain to remind me I might be a vampire, but I'm still human. At least deep inside anyway."
"That's my girl," he murmurs against the top of her head, closing his eyes in relief.
He also observes her walking out of the house, intent on going for a walk.
It's a normal activity, nothing odd to observe there, except for one tiny detail anyone with untrained eyes would miss completely.
She clenches her fist.
Again, not an unusual gesture, but he knows this to be a trait of hers signifying her need to cry. She clenches her fists, and this is usually followed by an obligatory form of exercise – usually running – and then she finds a quiet place – usually the cemetery – to let it all go. But he knows if she goes to the cemetery, if she sees her parents' graves, and the graves of John and Jenna, she will lose it completely, because that is her family in its entirety, buried six feet under where she can't reach them.
So he drives alongside her in the Camaro, maintaining a slow pace, careful not to break the spell she's under, until she eventually sighs and then climbs into the car, holding back more tears.
"This is not how I imagined we'd be starting our summer together," she admits quietly, her hands folded on her lap like she's a scolded schoolchild.
He gives her a sidelong glance.
"But you never imagined your brother dead either," he reminds her. "Can't always prepare for the things life throws at us, Elena." He risks a teasing comment. "Doesn't put me off you anyway, even if you have soaked ten of my best shirts with your tears."
She lets out a weak laugh, and he wants to punch the air with relief because this is the closest to alive she's looked since getting her humanity back. Even the merest hint of a smile on her face is enough to believe she'll be okay (not that he had any doubt).
Sometimes, though, she speeds off before he can catch up to her, but he'll inevitably find her in the same place: on the scorched area where her house used to be.
Elena will just stand there, lost in a memory he'll never be privy too. She takes a step sometimes, as if reliving walking inside, and then she stops, her foot hovering right where the door used to be. He isn't sure if this is because the fantasy dies before she can continue reliving it, or she's made it so realistic that, because she's a vampire, she's not allowed any further without an invite.
It makes him feel sick to watch her that way, and it's not as if she's lost touch with reality in general. She'll be engaged to a point and then it's like the agony just comes rushing past the floodgates, and she has to stop and let it drench her before she can move forward.
Initial diagnosis is that she's mourning Jeremy, but then he looks deeper and realises it's even more heartbreaking than that.
She's lost without a family – or the semblance of one at least.
He's aware she and Caroline have their differences regarding her new relationship status, and Bonnie is taking some needed time to clear her head after Shane's bout of Witch Manipulation one-oh-one, as well as the surprisingly underwhelming wrath of Silas, not to mention dealing with Jeremy's death on top of everything else. Matt is off around the world with Rebekah, of all people, and Stefan seems to be off the grid too.
Who does she have left then, really?
You.
He cringes at the pathetic nature of that answer.
I can't be all she has right now. That just isn't right.
After the third time of driving home with Elena after she left his radar to lose herself in memories old, Damon thinks about switching his tactics, because being there for her, waiting for her to break, just isn't going to cut it anymore. He doesn't want to give her tough love, and he doesn't want to mollycoddle her, but the problem with trying to be there for someone after they've suffered a tremendous loss is there is no in between those extremes. You either treat them like glass, or you treat them like stone.
I hate to admit it, he thinks to himself, but right now I could do with my brother's advice, no matter how sappy it might be.
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Three weeks pass, the days filled with equal parts utter joy as they are utter sadness.
When she's not lost in a world of pain he can't – and won't – touch, Elena is adamant about proving how much she's in love with him. When he wakes up, she's by his hips, caressing them softly, eyes twinkling with mischief, mouth curved into a half smirk, her proceeding actions enough to send his eyeballs pottering to the back of his head as if they were snooker balls.
The sex is amazing, but he's surprised by how much he loves the other stuff too. The cuddles on the couch by the roaring fire, the make out sessions which consist of them just locking lips and never releasing each other to breathe, the nights out at the Grill where she proves over and over how high her alcohol tolerance is...they all are just memories he treasures with every fibre of his being.
But of course she's lost her family, and there are moments when she hits her low, and turns to alcohol to numb the pain. He joins her, always raising a glass to the youngest Gilbert, because despite himself he was fond of that kid, even if he was a pain in the ass three quarters of the time. He liked him because he had spirit, and he had heart, and sometimes the way Elena looked at him was the way he would've liked Stefan to have looked at him – with such deep rooted affection, no one could mistake them for anything other than family.
Speaking of Stefan, Damon doesn't like to let on that he's worried that every phone call to his brother has gone straight to voicemail. Maybe their little chat on the doorstep of the Boarding House had been a goodbye of sorts, a final and ultimately successful attempt at putting aside their differences. Stefan had always been the bigger man than him in that department that he will always admit. Maybe his radio silence is a sign that they should just have space for a while.
Elena admits she's worried about him too, but he always brushes off her concerns with a teasing comment, well aware there's a selfish element to this particular action; if she dwells on Stefan too long, he fears she might remember she's made the worst choice of her life and go running after him, and he just wants a little longer with her before the inevitable reunion happens. It's selfish of him to want her like this, but he's never claimed to be anything other than the contrary.
He decides he needs to be cruel to be kind in order to help Elena, and to achieve that, he needs to bring her to the edge and break her, because she isn't made of glass, she's a goddamn stone that has been battered by the world's cruellest ocean, and yet she still remains relatively unscathed by the experience. She needs to finish the breakdown she'd started to have before he'd intervened and banished away her emotions and, this time, she needs to heal on her own terms, not his.
He goes about this in a number of ways.
First, he drops Jeremy's name into every conversation he can without it seeming odd, but Elena doesn't flinch. She merely blinks, like he's just struck her, and then carries on with whatever she'd talking about at the time.
Second, he starts to ask about her childhood under the pretence that he actually gives a damn (although he's oddly fascinated by the idea of an Elena he's never known, one who hadn't as of yet been tainted by the supernatural world), and she takes the bait, telling stories that, oddly, touch him, and he finds himself getting to know her more and more, and in the process falling harder and harder until he realises there is no getting away from her. This is it for him, the one girl he will never be able to shake.
"You know," she suddenly recalls, chuckling slightly, "when he was born, he could fit in the palm of my dad's hand, he was that tiny." She holds her palm out flat, as if it makes it easier for her to manifest the image in her mind. "And when I was older, my mom told me that I might break a thousand promises in my life time, and if there was only one I could keep, it was the one to always look after my brother." Her demeanour cracks. "Guess I screwed up that one too."
"If it helps, my mom made the same promise to me on her deathbed," he offers, deciding opening up to her is worth it if he can help her heal her own pain, regardless of how painful it is to think about his own mother, even a century or so on. "She told me to look after Stefan and keep him out of trouble. Out of the two of us, which of us do you think made the bigger screw up?"
She hiccups, which disguises a broken laugh.
"I see what you're doing," she says softly. "You're trying to get me to break down so you can let me actually fix myself this time." She grabs his hand, caressing his knuckles softly. "Doesn't work that way. You feel guilty that you took away the worst of my grief when I needed to feel it most..."
"...and then I tortured you into feeling everything at once," he finishes, looking defeated. "I'm so bad for you, Elena, that I don't even know why we're having this conversation right now." He stands up, moves like he's going to leave, and then looks back at her, suddenly vulnerable. "How could you choose me after everything I've done? This wasn't the life you were supposed to have."
"No, it wasn't," she agrees, standing up and finding her way over to him, searching his eyes for god-knows-what. It won't be a hero she finds there, that much he knows, but suddenly she smiles, and he wonders what she's found. "But I chose you because in spite of all the bad you have done, and all the bad you are capable of doing, I love you. People will continue telling me all the ways you're wrong for me, but they won't matter. When you love someone, it doesn't have to make sense."
He rests his forehead against her, suddenly the vulnerable one out of the two of them, which he dislikes, but the closeness between them he relishes; he can feel her warmth, her light, her hope radiating through her like she's a firefly, and if he had to pick one reason out of the thousand as the primary reason as to why he loves her, it's that reason right there.
"I just want you to be happy," he says simply. "It hurts to see you hurt. Call me a sappy Stefan wannabe, but it's true."
She presses her lips against him once, twice, and then a third time, each time increasing the pressure as if to assure him of her love.
"I'll be fine," she tells him. "I'm not gonna lie and say I'll never miss my brother. I'm not gonna say that I'll stop crying over the fact that my baby brother died before me, and I won't ever get to tell him I love him anymore, or get to tell my parents how sorry I am that I broke the one promise I was supposed to keep. This is one wound I'll have to live with for the rest of my life, and I'm okay with it."
He raises an eyebrow. "You sure?"
"I have Bonnie and Caroline and Matt and you and Stefan," she says, smiling brightly. "Family isn't always about blood, you know."
He scrunches up his nose, pretending to look disgusted.
"I'd rather not regard you as family to be honest, Elena, because if we were, we've done some deeply incestuous stuff, and I'm gonna have to break up with you right away after hearing that confession, because even I can't get past that..." He shudders. "...you dirty woman!"
She laughs and then punches his arm.
"You ass!"
"There it is," he suddenly says, smiling widely.
"There's what?"
"That smile – the one that tells me you're going to be okay."
"I went through some heavy stuff this year," she says solemnly. "And I can't pretend I don't still wake up sometimes and want to cry because the world is so dark and cruel, but I can keep hoping that it'll hurt a little less with each day – and, you know what, it does." She looks up at him with earnest eyes. "It's because of you, you know. You get me through it every single day, and if you want a damn reason for why I love you, there it is."
Damon doesn't know what to say to that.
How do you respond to something that reaches into your very soul and warms it to the core? How do you even being to explain to the girl you love that she's the very reason your existence has even a fraction of meaning?
In the end, he doesn't.
He simply holds her tighter and wonders how a man with as dark a heart as he has managed to get so lucky to win the love of a girl with a heart as big as the world.