Note: Many of you have probably already noticed that I'm blocked with my writing, so today, after watching my second TVD episode since the beginning of the show, I jumped at the first sign of inspiration and wrote this. I had already the story in mind since before the end of season six but I had no clue as to how approach it. I hope it's good enough, let me know what you think. The song I used at the end of the chapter is "I will crumble" by Mike Vogel. The title of this story means "The Heart Elsewhere". As always, thanks to Syeira Lei for her help, I'd be lost without her.
Four years from now.
"Alexander Graham Bell, to see Miss Marron," Kevin Costner says on his TV screen before he can turn the thing off. The corner of Damon's mouth turns up into a grin and he lowers the hand holding the remote control, letting it rest on his thigh. The grave, dramatic voiceover announces that a bodyguard lives by three rules: never let your guard down, never let her out of your sight, never fall in love; and that the movie itself will air next Wednesday.
He can hear Bonnie's voice demanding that they watch it, though it's been barely two months since the last time they did. He knows most of the dialogue by heart, can tell exactly in which moments Bonnie will alternatively sigh, hold her breath, chew on her lower lip, let herself fall against the cushions of the sofa or the pillows of his king sized bed.
He had half-heartedly planned to go back to his coffin, to avoid once again the bother of living without Elena and the insult of seeing his best friend mingle with a regurgitation of the human kind like Enzo, but he supposes he can push back his plans.
He pushed them back three times already. The first time she got a flu so bad she wobbled on her knees every time she needed to move from her bedroom, so he thought that sticking around to nurse her and snap photos of her poor state to decorate her walls and tease her would be a nice gesture. The coffin and the perpetual sleep weren't going anywhere after all.
The second time she had a fight with Enzo two hours before he had decided to say his goodbye to the world, and he would have never passed up on the opportunity to spend a night insulting that asshole of friend that wasn't worth the scum under the sole of her shoes on his best day. Who could blame him for rescheduling his beauty sleep?
The third time he forgot he had to go back to the storehouse and his bedding of cherry wood and satin because Bonnie had picked a very horrid color to paint the walls with, and he'd be damned if he let her do that to her bedroom, which is right next to his.
Now Damon is as eager to skip on the Elena-less years that await him as ever, mind you, but since the air is impregnated with the sweet smell of dumping that dead weight that is Enzo, and The Bodyguard is going to be on in five days he supposes there's no rush.
He turns his head to look at the pendulum clock and he sighs, bored. Bonnie is colossally late and he hopes it's due to the fact that she is busy getting rid of her shameful excuse for a boyfriend, otherwise he's going to be a very devoted pain in her ass all day long. He surely is not going to assemble her new closet without her doing her part, otherwise, before he knows he'll be painting her toenails for her; which would probably turn him on. And he definitely can't have that.
Bonnie is great, and generally having a best friend that smells always so damn nice and never burps is amazing, but there's the downside to it, too. He caught himself twice right before nibbling at her shoulder as he woke up in the middle of the night pressed against her back after they watched a movie – a conditioned response he blames on his alert body and her atrocious softness.
The smell of her shampoo and the way she curls her fingers around the sheets during a romantic scene does nothing to fight the boner that decides to punctually visit him. And when she's in a good mood and he touches her and her hugs linger for a few seconds longer than necessary his hands start to itch for the need to pin her down on the floor or press her up against the wall, and the whole point of having such a reliable, ever-present best friend to keep him faithful to his sleeping girlfriend gets screwed.
But Bonnie is his best friend, and he knows better than to confuse one kind of love with another. A kind of love that won't grant her his help with her new furniture if she doesn't show up in the next five minutes with a decent excuse for her delay and enough breath to flatter him for at least the next six hours.
Damon takes a beer from the fridge in his kitchen, stares at the half empty inside and lets it close so that he can look at the shopping list scribbled on the yellow post-it kept up by a witch's hat magnet. They need more beer, and they are almost out of that horrid Greek yogurt Bonnie likes so much. There's a pen abandoned on the table, the cap is lightly chewed which is a clear indication of its owner's identity, and of the fact that the trick of using bitter nail polish for children to cover it up and stop this nervous habit of hers is actually working; he jots down the items under the list, blue ink under a column in black.
Last week was Caroline's turn to go grocery shopping, which means this week it's his. He can drag Bonnie along by promising her a reward in ice-cream. There were times when the ice-cream had a more noble use, like covering a hot body to lick to his heart's content, but that was before. When he told his best friend she just rolled her eyes, luckily for him missing the unspoken invitation he was entirely not making. Because he really wasn't making any. Truly. Cross my heart and hope to die.
A little voice in the back of his head is doing a countdown for her to finally arrive and save him from lonely boredom when he hears the doorbell ring. His ears strain and he can hear a familiar heartbeat he doesn't indulge on before letting the smile curl his mouth. It's not been long since she started living with them, and sometimes Bonnie still forgets she's supposed to use her own key and when she remembers, it's too late, and she has already pressed down on the button outside their front door.
Damon shakes his head, leaving the beer bottle on the table before jogging to the door.
"You're in trouble, Missy…" he spells, knowing how she hates to be called such, like she's still a kid, making sure she hears him from the other side as he turns the doorknob, "You know how long I've been waiting for you?" he asks as the door opens to show him Elena's face.
Damon's smile freezes, his breath catches in his throat and his heart starts to beat frantically. His doe-eyed, supposedly deep in a magical coma, girlfriend is looking at him with a smile so big it almost splits her face in two.
"I hoped you were," she says, taking one step before launching herself in his arms. It feels amazing to have her in his arms, again, his brain tries to tell him. She makes a giggling sound while Damon slips his arms around her, holding her so tight he might accidentally break a bone.
She's happy and he's happy and for a moment everything is perfect.
Then his heart seems to sink in his stomach, bumping a few internal organs on the way down.
The dreading feeling seems to make his blood flow away and his eyes lower like he's looking for the sign of his bleeding on the doormat, rivulets of red to adorn the walkways with vivid squiggles. His arms lose strength and he can't make out the words she's saying, because his hearing is muffled like someone is holding his head underwater.
Elena is so alive and so happy and he should kiss her now but his chest is hollowing out, slowly and irremediably, though he can't understand why. Why? He tries asking himself, forcing his lungs to move, grab air, keep it in, push it out. Suddenly breathing is like an alien process he can't master up. Why? He asks again. His thought are scattered, confused, he needs to peel the words off the cells of his brain and find the order in which they are supposed to be.
It seems an eternity but it's barely three fucking seconds. And he knows that Elena is alive, and therefore Bonnie is dead, and if he could think straight he'd know that he doesn't need to bother with her new closet anymore, and he should cross out the Greek yogurt from the shopping list, and he'd remember that he was really tired of that fucking movie anyway.
He'd remember to be happy now because Elena is finally back, if only he could think about anything else but the fact that Bonnie died and he never allowed her to go and do that.
#
Two months from the linking spell.
He stares at her through the mirror in front of him. His fingertips trap the scotch glass on the counter as he traces with his eyes the faint green vein that travels along her long neck. He slowly moves the glass back and forth on the surface of the counter, listening intently to the scratching of its bottom on the lacquered wood that mixes up with the black girl's words and the music in the background.
Her voice is a little annoying but he is ready to keep an open mind with regard to her taste. The moment he'll sink his teeth into her jugular she won't be able to do much more then moan once, maybe more if he makes it good for her. But why should he make it good for her?
"I know what you're thinking," Bonnie says, making him blink to find her leaning against the counter, to his right.
Damon barely grunts, busies his mouth with a sip of the amber colored liquid in his glass. He doesn't bother to contradict her because she probably does know what he's thinking. Maybe a little part of him was actually counting on her knowing, on her stopping him, he realizes with a grin looking at the dry bottom of his, now empty, glass.
"But I don't see why you should settle for a look-alike."
That makes his eyes snap up and he turns to look at her. Bonnie is all soft curves, covered in honey skin and a smell that would make any other man spend his days with his nose buried in her hair, in the crook of her neck, in the sweet recess between her legs. She's looking at a particular table, and it takes him barely a peek to see that she's looking at the same girl he was aiming at.
It's strange how she doesn't look disgusted at the picture in her mind, how she knows him well enough to know and still not run in the opposite direction. Well, it is actually more surprising that he's not on his knees, trying to tear off his own head from his neck while she declaims her dear commandments on how to be a decent vampire with that persistence that makes her similar to a kicking mule.
Instead she presses her pretty lips into a thin line and shrugs.
"You think I want to kill you?" he asks, his voice so dripping with sarcasm he would have no trouble believing it himself.
"Don't you?" she asks, irking him so much he feels his gums itching and his tongue easily finds the canine sliding out. He turns again so he won't have to look at her, uses his finger to point at the empty glass which the waiter promptly fills.
He doesn't.
In the last two hours he thought about killing an asshole that had cut in front of his Camaro, he thought about killing Kai – again, he thought about killing that black girl with the long neck, he thought about killing himself to skip ahead to the moment Elena will open her eyes again. But he never, for any reason, contemplated the idea of killing her. Which is exactly why he's there, with a never-ending thirst he can't placate, getting irritated at his best friend for thinking that he could want her dead. Because what does it say about him that he can't do what he must to bring the love of his life back? Once, he would have jumped at the chance, and Bonnie's life would have been one drop in an ocean of blood he would happily bathe in.
Had he met a man that needed only to kill one single, insignificant person in order to have his happiness granted forever he would have called him a coward, a spineless excuse for a man, with water in the place of blood, had that man barely hesitated. He would have thought the love he claimed to feel was empty and useless, because love is not a walk in the park. So now Damon deserves to be called a coward, a spineless excuse for a man, and probably no amount of blood to suck can make up for what he lacks, but whoever might call him that, they obviously never met Bonnie, or they would know why he can't lose her. Even if sometimes he misses Elena so much he wants to crash his head into the nearest wall, he just can't.
"Wanna make a toast?" Bonnie asks, stealing his glass from his loose fingers. He turns his eyes on her when she takes a sip. She doesn't grimace at the taste; she's learned to appreciate alcohol while they were stuck in their little, private loop on the other side. Her newly discovered appreciation for intoxicating beverages, and that nice leather jacket she often sports, and the way she drives his car when she pesters him enough that he would let her do anything if only she would only shut up for five minutes, even the way she's learned to pester him, they're all talents he helped her develop, which makes her a little bit his.
"Not that she is getting any older, but it seems right to celebrate her," she says and he chooses to look at her thin fingers around the glass instead of her large eyes. He doesn't want her to read the guilt, to know what an unworthy boyfriend he has proved to be.
He can't really celebrate the birthday of the girl he misses, with the girl he can't bear to miss, can he? So, he looks away, fakes a smile which comes out more like a pained grimace.
Bonnie's voice is suddenly soft as she slides against the counter to come closer, but still not close enough to touch.
"I miss her, too," she says.
Suddenly he thinks that maybe she reconsidered and she wants to teach him a lesson after all, though trying to kill him in public won't help her, because her arms slip around his neck while she abandons the weight of her against his back. Damon thinks for a moment that she's about to strangle him because of what she thinks he was thinking, and he's about to tell her that she doesn't know the first thing about choking someone because she's doing it totally wrong; only, her chin settles on his shoulder and she's so warm and fragrant against his back and he can hear her swallowing, holding back a whimper. Raising his eyes to the mirror in front of him he can see her, petite and appallingly pretty, a little bit sad and so open.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs.
"Me too," he says back, one hand wrapping around one elbow. He never explains that he is sorry for not being brave enough to tell her that he is happy she is alive and with him.
If you should sink I don't want to swim
If you lock the door I'll beg to come in
If you should sing I won't make a sound
If you should fly I'll curse the ground
And if you should ever leave me I will crumble