The night Alaric and Elena died was the coldest night of Damon's life.
He'd never felt this cold before.
The kind of cold that made his fingertips numb, an uncomfortable tingle running up his limbs.
Shock. He wasn't cold. He was in shock.
He struggled to breathe, holding the side of his body that Ric had kicked repeatedly, urging Damon to fight back. His ribs were broken and his phone was buzzing.
"She's dead, she's dead, she's dead," Stefan's muffled sobs filled his ear.
Damon hung up.
He already knew.
He knew that if he lived until the seas ran dry he'd never forget the moment Alaric stopped fighting, the moment he stopped trying to kill Damon and instead became a hollow vessel, life forever gone. Ric's lifeless weight in Damon's arms meant that somewhere Elena's life had ended.
Damon held the shell of his once best friend closely, saying goodbye and praying that Elena was being held too. He hoped that wherever Elena was that she wasn't afraid. That whatever her last thoughts had been, he hoped she knew Damon would have scorched the earth to prevent this outcome for her.
It's always going to be Stefan
He wished he hadn't said that to her on the phone earlier.
"I mean, maybe if you and I had met first…," Elena had cried out quietly.
The white oak stake Ric had used to kill Klaus had fallen from his hand. Ric's final, desperate gasps for air had been drowned out by Damon's choked you're not dead, you're not dead, you're not dead. A chant that became an incantation. He willed the spirits of worlds unknown to bring Elena back. The spirits listened to Bonnie, they might listen to him too.
But no one answered.
And he was so cold.
Damon focused on breathing while he waited, waited for death or for his body to fix the broken pieces inside of him. Klaus claimed to be the sire of Damon's bloodline. With Klaus dead, there was nothing to do but wait for death. He recited the names of the constellations above him like a prayer, urging the cosmos to listen to his ragged breath and answer his final request.
Still no one answered.
Damon would wait for death alone, not for the first time, surrounded by silence and cold.
He coughed and felt his ribs shift into place, he wasn't dying.
He was healing.
Klaus had lied.
A familiar ache persisted, it was his back, just beyond where he could reach.
It had been with him since 1864: the bullet wounds that had ended Damon's human life.
The wooden bullets his father had soaked in vervain, designed to shatter inside the flesh and kill slowly.
Sometimes they ached when he was cold or out of breath.
He didn't want to think about his father.
He wanted to think about the first time he saw Elena Gilbert.
"I've heard about you. The crazy, impulsive vampire, in love with his brother's girl," Klaus had said the night he met Damon.
But Elena hadn't been his brother's girl the night they met.
And now Klaus was dead.
Damon was back in Mystic Falls for the first time in over a decade the first time he saw Elena.
A celestial event had brought him back.
Damon had been studying the stars for over a century, waiting for the comet that would free Katherine. She was trapped in the tomb under the church and he was going to save her.
It was his fault she was in there. He'd been unable to stop his father and the rest of the council from rounding up the vampires that night.
The night he died.
Damon was going to save Katherine and they would finally start to live.
He was on his back in the middle of the street, hidden in plain sight.
The fog hid the stars he wanted to see.
He had tracked them for so long, he wanted to thank them for being his companions.
And that was when he felt her .
He felt her before he heard her.
Damon believed in all things supernatural but not in soulmates .
Soulmates were created for selling romance novels to lovestruck teenagers and lonely women.
Until he felt her.
He looked up and his heart stopped: Katherine.
She looked like Katherine.
But she wasn't Katherine.
Katherine was under the tomb, he was sure of it.
Damon could feel the woman's heartbeat on his skin, human .
He sensed her coming closer the same way he could feel rain clouds moving across mountain ranges in the distance.
Her presence was identical to the whisper of a mist only he could hear.
She was close enough to see him now, she was talking on the phone.
He stood up and walked over to her.
She looked at him, putting her cell phone away, and electricity ignited in every vein of his body, it stemmed from his very soul.
He looked at her with wonder and fear.
He wanted to tell her, this all too familiar stranger, he wanted to tell her that he could feel her.
He could feel her heartbeat exactly the way he could feel rain falling through the leaves in the trees on a quiet Sunday morning.
Hundreds of raindrops, hundreds of beats per minute, he could feel them all landing quietly around them, in between blades of grass, meeting the earth.
He was the earth and she was the rain.
No, this creature couldn't be Katherine.
"I'm Elena," she had said.
She's dead, she's dead, she's dead
Damon would never get a chance to tell Elena about the night they first met.
He'd wanted to tell her so many times.
On the evenings she sat on the kitchen counter watching him cook.
On the nights she fell asleep by the fireplace, waiting for him to come home from a night out with Ric.
He'd wanted to tell her so many times, but he had taken the moment from her before it could become a memory.
The ancient splinters in his body grazed his heart and lungs as he stood up.
His painful keepsakes for the rest of his unnatural life.
He would figure out what to do about Ric and Klaus' bodies tomorrow. Or never.
He just wanted to sleep and not focus on the ache between his shoulder blades.
The reminder that Damon had been the epitome of disappointment and disgrace to his father:
A war deserter.
Sympathizer of all things occult and forbidden.
Bewitched by a vampire.
A fool in love.
"A mysterious stranger who has all the answers ," Elena had called him the night they met.
Damon's phone was buzzing again.
It was Meredith calling from the hospital. She probably needed someone to sign the paperwork for Alaric and Elena's death. He cursed Stefan for making him have to be the one to take this on. Why wasn't Damon allowed the time to grieve, to sleep, to breathe ?
His phone buzzed again.
"What?" He barked.
"Damon, listen to me," Meredith started. "When Jeremy brought Elena in here earlier tonight her injuries were worse than I let on. It wasn't a concussion. It was a cerebral hemorrhage. Bleeding in the brain."
"What are you saying?"
"Jeremy was so worried, I didn't want to tell him. I helped her. She needed my help," Meredith said defensively.
"You what ?" Damon gasped.
Cool air filled his lungs as he breathed without pain and something like electricity burned in his chest.
