The buzzing in Damon's head is unbearable.
Alaric is dead. Therefore, Elena is dead.
Before, when he felt even the slightest bit like this, he'd find a distraction, find a bottle of ridiculously expensive bourbon, find some beautiful, empty headed girl and fuck her senseless before he drained her dry. He'd hunt like the animal he was, fuck like the playboy everyone believed him to be, and he would just not be for a while. He'd own the buzzing in his head, fill it with another buzz of lust and murder and alcohol.
Now, Damon can think of nothing but getting to her, holding her limp ragdoll body in his arms, kissing her cold, dry lips. He can think only of getting to her before Stefan does, because if he walks into the morgue and Stefan is holding her, Damon thinks he might kill him. He thinks he might not be able to help himself. He loves his brother, but the idea of Stefan having her now, holding her now, after he's had her all this time...it makes him want to howl. Damon remembers her body molded to his, her soft, warm tongue in his mouth. Stefan had Elena for a year. That should seem like such a brief time to a vampire, but to Damon, it felt like a lifetime. Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. She had been Damon's that brief, brief instant at the hotel, and she would be his now. In death, she should be his.
The trip back is long and hard. Damon feels her death in him like a thousand beehives, feel his black, dead heart pounding and pounding with unsaid, unfelt grief. He is struggling for breath, rolling down all the windows for dry, dead air that seems to have had all the oxygen sucked out of it.
At the hospital, everyone stares at him. He knows he looks wild eyed and frightening, knows he looks like a predator that has been kicked and abused and backed into a corner, and they are right to be afraid. He'll murder anyone who stands between him and the sweet, dead girl he had so loved.
The doctor, Meredith, poor Alaric's girl of the week, is telling him something, telling him as if it's important, as if anything's important now that Elena is gone, and her words barely penetrate the beehive in his head.
"...helped her," He hears, and it snaps him back to the world.
Suddenly, his heart fills with hope so quickly that he feels it might explode from his chest, and he places a hand on the doctor's shoulder for support.
"Thank God," he bursts out hoarsely, without even knowing he was saying it, maybe believing in God for the first time in a century, because Elena isn't gone. Not quite alive, maybe, but walking and talking and smiling, and he is so grateful that he wants to get down on his knees and kiss Meredith's sensible white shoes.
"I thought you might want to wait for Stefan," she says, quietly, and Damon shakes his head violently, dropping his hand from her shoulder.
"I want to see her right now. I'd suggest you not try to stop me."
Meredith nods, in defeat, and gives him a room number.
He is walking away before she finishes giving him the last digit, and he is at Elena's bedside in moments, maybe seconds.
Her eyes are closed, of course, her eyelashes fanned out over her high, perfect cheekbones, and he watches her for what seems like hours. Meredith comes in once, but only tells him Stefan is on his way. Damon nods, waves her away, impatiently, because he can't take his eyes off Elena's too-still face. He's waiting for her to open those honey brown eyes, to look at him with fear or disgust, because he couldn't care less what she thought when she woke up, only that she did wake up. Part of him is still afraid that she won't, that she hadn't gotten enough vampire blood, that she'll just lie there, dead and still. If that was the case, Damon is sure he will sit there with her for days, until Stefan comes in and tries to drag him away, and then Damon would fight tooth and nail to stay, maybe force his brother to stake him. Damon will not move from this spot until Elena takes her first breath as an undead.
FInally, an eternity later, Elena wakes, struggling for breath, vaulting up on the bed, and Damon stands, hovers above her for a moment, waiting until her brown eyes lock on his blue ones, waiting for the spark of recognition.
Warmth and light flow over her death-muddled eyes and Damon's breath stops when she smiles at him. His heart stutters in his chest, and he thinks he might pass out until her little hand gropes out for his. At the touch of her skin, clammy and cold but still baby soft, still Elena, he takes in a deep, lung burning breath and leans over her, placing an unsteady hand on her face.
Elena smiles at him again, places her other hand over his on her cheek, and laughs. "Damon," she says, her voice hoarse but achingly, wonderfully familiar, "you're shaking all over. I was the one who drowned, not you!"
Damon tries to make some flippant comment, tries to give her a nonchalant smile, but the last few hours have been too much. He can no longer pretend he's holding it together. His legs give out and he sits down hard on the hospital chair beside her bed, still holding her hand in a death grip, and for the first time in what seems like a century, he begins to cry.