Okay, so look, I wasn't sure if I wanted to do an entire chapter from Damon's POV because we definitely have enough narratives favoring him already, including the show itself (it probably doesn't need to be said but just in case, we do NOT stan Julie Plec in this house), but I had to get these retcons and background in somehow. You could likely just skim to get the relevant info, if you want.
Also, I initially didn't have this story tagged as angst, with the intention of it being a pretty lighthearted teasing fic, but is TVD even TVD (or is Bamon even Bamon) without at least a little angst? It'll all pay off though, I promise. And most of the teasing itself is still yet to come, so don't feel discouraged.
Song/title: RY X – "Love Like This"
He watches the glowing green digital clock tick from 12:59 to 1:00 a.m. for no particular reason, celebrating this pathetic milestone by finishing his glass of bourbon. Spread on the coffee table before him are the countless sheets of paper on which Rayna, after they frantically talked her down from eviscerating all of them for disturbing her nap, scrawled a haphazard array of names, locations, and random details that were sometimes useful but usually irrelevant. He keeps looking it over as if there's any more to be done, but he's planned it out as much as they can right now, calling up everyone to split into teams to take different regions, and now everyone's asleep while he fidgets on this infuriatingly comfortable couch, his well of distractions run dry.
The flicker of a two-year-old General Hospital episode bathes the living room in a sickly white-blue light, and he can't help but think of Augustine, of...
He can hear them. He couldn't, can't stop himself from listening in as they stole away together, showering one after another, putting their pajamas on, easing into bed, whispering warm nothings to each other and then kissing, touching, fucking soft and slow and quiet "so he won't hear" as he turns up the TV volume so they'll think he's occupied or at least drowning them out.
It's not like sleep is really an option. The montage of scenes and half-distorted memories that flash through his mind every single night only grows longer and longer with time, but for the past week or so, a few in particular have been like fine needlepoints piercing the sanctum of whatever semblance of inner peace he has left, preventing rest from ever being just rest, joy from ever being just joy.
He can see Jessica's face, tear-soaked and mascara-smeared, wide eyes full of fear and confusion as he tells her the secret he's never told anyone, never even said aloud.
"Are you gonna hurt me?" she whimpers, one more in a chorus of voices embedded in his subconscious: necks he's torn into, souls he's stolen, lives he's ripped away.
He's so drunk he can barely keep himself on his feet. "I'm not sure. Because you are my existential crisis. Do I kill you? Or do I not kill you?"
Jessica shakes her head vigorously. "Please don't."
He grabs onto her, whether for balance or for comfort he doesn't know. "But I have to, Jessica. Because I'm not human. And I miss it. I miss it more than anything in the world!" His throat aches, a thousand knives slice through his stomach; he's never felt the hunger like this. "That is my secret." Rose's face flits across his brain, then Elena's, and he winces, the pain so intense it makes his voice raw and raspy. "But there is only so much hurt a man can take."
"Please, don't," the poor girl repeats, hugging herself tightly, every molecule straining against the supernatural command not to move.
She can't be more than 25. She's probably still in school. She has a family, a lover, people who will miss her. His own tears stream down his face now as he looks her directly in the eyes and tells her what he wants so badly to believe. "Okay. You're free to go."
And she runs, and he feeds, and he knows that no matter what, he will never be human again.
He can see Elena's face on the evening of the wedding, framed by her hair straightened flat like it always used to be, so sleek the lateral rays of dusk refract off it like glass, her beautiful dusty pink dress soft against his hands as he holds her waist, her beautiful brown eyes narrowing in bewilderment and then anger as he tells her what she should have been saying all along.
"So when your mom told you she'd destroy the Cure and you let her, thinking I'd never find out, telling me you wanted to take it with me was, what, a bluff? You covering your ass?"
No, he wants to answer, with every ounce of his being. "Yes," he says quietly.
Elena steps back, away from him. "And the plans you made? The apartment above the bar in Washington?"
He can't even meet her eyes. "I thought that if I just went along with it, it would start to feel right. But it never did. I can't be anything else other than this, Elena. Even if I never kill anyone again, I'm still a killer. Some magic potion won't change that. I'm sorry."
Elena's lips purse; her fists clench. She steps away from him, her gaze surveying him with something worse than fury, or disgust, or disappointment.
With pity.
"No, I'm sorry," she seethes. "For letting you break my heart again . For believing you. For believing in you. Because all you do is lie. To me, to everyone else, but mostly to yourself."
"Elena, I love you. That hasn't changed. That will never change." He reaches out to touch her cheek, but she flinches away from him.
"I know, Damon. And I probably won't ever stop loving you, either. It's just one of the many things that's fucked up about us. And why we shouldn't be us."
He's about to apologize again, but decides against it, because what's the fucking point. "So that's it."
Elena looks at the ground. "Yeah, that's it." When she looks up at him, her eyes are dry, her jaw set. "Can we at least let Ric and Jo have their night? We don't need our drama ruining everyone else's fun again."
"Yeah, of course." His face softens. "And come on, it's not like I never want to see you again, Elena. We can be—"
"Don't say 'we can be friends.' Jesus Christ, Damon. You're a coward, you know that? You're a fucking coward."
As she storms away from him, he can't decide which of the mortal fractures in his heart hurts the most: the one deepened just this moment, full of the remorse for sins to which he could never confess; or the ones gouged by the pain of things that can never be, things that would only make the guilt even worse.
And he thinks now, as he thinks so, so often:
Why can't I ever just love one person at once?
And why can't one of them ever be me?
He can see Enzo's face, lit dimly but majestically by the wan gas light of the basement corridor, so close but so far through the window of the tiny grate separating their cells. He can see Enzo's face, lit dimly but majestically by the wan gas light of the basement corridor, so close but so far through the window of the tiny grate separating their cells. The best part is that he doesn't even need to see Enzo to see him; he can do that with his ears, listening intently to every word of every story about England, about the war, about Maggie. And he talks too, telling Enzo all about Katherine, Stefan, even his father. They while the minutes and hours and days away, folding the time between torturings in half so that it feels both shorter and longer, and even the torture itself is more bearable having something to look forward to.
But something about this moment is different. He can see it in Enzo's eyes, and he can definitely hear it in his voice. "Have you thought about what you want to do?" It's a barely audible rasp, every muscle in his body weakened by his abstinence from the blood rations. "Where you want to go, after we escape and burn this place to the ground tomorrow evening?"
"Of course I have," Damon replies absentmindedly, rising from his prone position to sit on the filthy concrete floor, tracing circles in the sooty grime with his index finger. "Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Budapest, Cape Town. Hell, why not Bangkok while I'm at it?"
He can hear Enzo smile. "What, have I not sold London as the paragon of human culture and civilization?"
He chuckles. "You have, you have. For king and country, and all that." He pauses. "What about you? Where will you go?"
Enzo's breath catches. "Wherever you go, mate."
Extra effort was put in to make it sound breezy and friendly, but he can still hear Enzo's true feelings buried beneath, because they're his feelings too, whether he wants them to be or not. When he pledged to wait for Katherine he knew there'd be others that could fill some of the void she left, and after he met Sage he learned to let himself explore, but this is different. Enzo knows things about him that not even Katherine ever knew, not even Stefan, and still cares about him. It's almost too much to bear.
"Ha. Swell joke," he responds with his own façade of levity. "Now give me your real answer."
"I'm serious," Enzo says quietly, and the already silent cell block seems to become even more so in acknowledgment. "Damon, the closest thing I've ever had to a— to a best friend was the bastard who stabbed me in the back and sentenced me to this fresh hell without a second thought. I— you're important to me. Sure, I have my bucket list, old Brixton haunts I'd love to pop into again, but I mean it. I'll follow you anywhere."
He doesn't know how long he just sits there without saying anything, staring into the darkest corner of this infernal cage, waiting for something to emerge from the shadows that will make this all make sense. It doesn't.
"...or not," Enzo mutters, and it's the last words they exchange before the blood spills and the fire burns and love shining in Enzo's eyes forces him to do the very thing he's spent the last near-century actively trying not to do, because if he loses the way he feels about Katherine, his plan, he might have nothing left.
But if he doesn't lose the way he feels about Enzo, either they both die right now, or...
He flips the switch for a lot of reasons, but that "or" most of all.
He can see her face, backlit by the industrial-strength lights of the storage yard, the tears he wanted so desperately to prevent now spilling from her eyes.
"Enzo told me you asked him for Elena's coffin. He told me what you were planning. I didn't believe him. I thought, if Damon desiccates until Elena wakes up, I'll never see him again."
This is exactly why he wrote the letter, sealed it up, and gave it to Stefan like the "fucking coward" Elena had told him he was, is, always will be. Now he's only going to make it worse, like clockwork.
"He'd never do that," she continues with mock certainty, the expression on her face rending his heart five different ways.
I'm scared, Bonnie, he wants to say. Not just of hurting you or anyone else. But of the possibility of finally being happy. But he knows that he needs to alienate her for good, as much as it will hurt. So he settles into asshole mode, a transition that's basically second nature at this point, and sets to work ruining the one thing that could save him.
"Look—" he begins.
"Are we friends?" she interrupts.
"Of course, Bonnie. We don't actively try and kill each other anymore."
"No. I'm not doing that. No insults. No jokes." She looks how he feels—broken—as she drags a shaky inhale of the musty air. "Are we... just friends?"
The answer—something between yes and no, beautiful with clipped wings—catches in his throat.
She angrily sticks her hands in her pockets. "For once in your life, be completely, totally honest. Look me in the eyes and tell me I'm wrong. Tell me that you don't feel something for me, something that scares you. Tell me there's nothing more to us than drinking buddies with history."
He sets his countenance like granite, finally pushing all the emotions away. "You're wrong. I'm sorry that you've misinterpreted things."
She looks like she's just been stabbed.
"But even then, I'm doing this for you. For all of you."
"No you aren't, Damon," she chokes. "Just like always, you're doing this for yourself."
He opens his mouth once more but she cuts him off again. "NO. No. You don't get to say goodbye."
Those six words echo in his head as he finally gives up on trying to doze off on the couch and storms out to the porch, stargazing absentmindedly as he finishes off the bottle and tries to find something, anything to distract him. When he focuses his ears he can hear scrabbling and rustling down in the storm cellar, indicating that their kill list distributor hasn't gotten any shut-eye either. Before he knows it he's unchaining the heavy, rusted doors and descending the staircase, and at the bottom he's met with a look that could be either irritation or bemusement, or both.
"Well well, if it isn't the third wheel."
"Well well, if it isn't the most inefficient vampire hunter who ever lived." Not exactly silver-tongued, but hey, it's two in the morning and he's sad.
Rayna rolls her eyes. "What do you want?"
He pauses for a bit before answering her. "I want you to give me a new list."
Her eyes narrow. "Why? I just gave you one."
"Sure, but it looks like you've been busy since then," he says, loosely gesturing to the mess of scribbled-on scrap paper surrounding her on the floor. "And I'll be taking this one on alone."
Now the look on Rayna's face is unmistakable; she is mischievously intrigued. "Oh? Watching two people you love deeply be happy without you getting a bit tiresome?"
He glares at her. "You don't know what I'm talking about."
"Sure I do. All three of you were in here earlier. You might be good at something, Damon, but whatever it is it's definitely not poker face. I could read yours like a book."
He rolls his eyes. "Quit the romance advice column bullshit and give me the damn list."
Rayna raises her eyebrows as she gathers the sheaf of pages together. "So testy. One might think I've hit a nerve." She looks at him more steadily as she hands over the bundle. "But genuinely, Damon. Take it from me—my greatest regret in all my lifetimes is letting a chance at true happiness slip away because I didn't want to risk it, and because I knew even if it did go well I wouldn't deserve it. Don't make the same mistake."
He turns and walks away abruptly so she can't see a single tear roll from his right eye.