Alaric died, and now, Damon is a mess. A right mess. Ric's ghost watches as his lover is going from one pit of hell to another, and he can't do anything. That is, for now.

Of course, while Damon is a mess, and is making a mess of things as a consequence, others are also making a mess in Mystic Falls.


See? I told you. Sometime in January. Well. There it is. I'm not a liar.

*go hide in a hole*

If you kill me, you won't know what happens next.


set after 4x01
Have to add some days between 4x01 and 4x02


One world apart, part 1: Eternity to fall apart

Damon stayed there for what seemed like hours, Alaric's body in his arms. Surely it was only a few minutes, but it felt like hours nonetheless.

After a while, he laughed shakily. Now every single instant of his life would feel like that. Hours for an instant. Eternity for a minute. Eternities, until he'd die, killed by a hunter, another vampire, or maybe even by himself.

It wasn't the same thing as when he had lost Katherine, all those years ago. With Katherine, he had been bitter, because he knew that despite his unwavering love, she loved Stefan more than she loved him. Back then, he hadn't known how true it was, and he had hopped she loved him still, even if less than his brother. And he had known that in the end, he would get her back.

Waiting a few decades wasn't easy, and he had been bitter, but waiting was nothing to a vampire. Even if he had been young, back then, he had known it was only a matter of time before he got her back. He had done horrors to keep the frustration of the wait away, he had killed, slaughtered, and bathed in blood at times. But he had been able to wait.

Ice-blue eyes fell on the dead body in his arms.

This time, there was no waiting to do, no hope to have. Alaric was dead, and he wouldn't come back. Ever.

Without a word, Damon let the body on the floor to stand up. He checked he was still alone, not that he expected anyone to come to their locker unit in the middle of the night. He didn't want to have to explain why there was a half-burned corpse with open eyes in a coffin, nor why there was another corpse that wasn't in a coffin on the floor. Yes, he could have simply compelled anyone who would come and ask. But with the state he was in, he wasn't certain he could pull it all just right.

Glancing one last time at Ric's lifeless form, he wiped away the tears that were obstructing his sight.

He had to clean up this mess.

The coffin, the body, everything in the car. He'd cry later. He had cried already, and he would cry later, but not now. He had to go back to Mystic Falls, and to know what had happened for Alaric to die like that.

Damon knew there was only one explanation, but he didn't want to believe, not yet, not ever, that in spite of having lost Ric, he had just lost Elena too. He might not be obsessed with her anymore, he still cared for her. Actually, he now saw her as something as a sister. A true sister, not some sister-in-law bullshit because she was going out with his brother. She could be just as annoying as a sister.

The vampire didn't want to lose a sister on top of his lover.

Before driving off, direction Mystic Falls, Damon allowed himself a whole minute, sitting with his back against Klaus' coffin, so that he wouldn't see Alaric's corpse, which was laid on the other side.

"You're doing it wrong, man. As a human you kept on dying, and just when you became immortal and nearly unkillable, you went away for good."

Of course, he wasn't speaking to Klaus.

Then he sprang into action, finding it easier to just ignore what had happened and drive like a crazy vampire all the way back to Mystic Falls. He had eternity to fall apart, after all. He could spare a few hours to learn if he really had more than one reason to end his life right now, right there.

Alaric wouldn't have wanted him to give up and kill himself.

That is, the true Ric wouldn't have wanted him to. Ric-the-Psycho, on the other end... But Ric-the-Psycho was no more. As was the true Ric...

Ignore the pain. Ignore the tears. Ignore the gloom.

Drive.

Fail to register the pain, the tears, and the gloom. Do it on purpose. He would allow himself to break down, only once he'll know how many reasons he had to do so. He would cry, and be hurt, but not for now. Not that it didn't hurt yet. It did. But he would ignore it.

Why?

Because he had to.

Because if he didn't, he would just go into a bloodbath. He had to wait, so that he'd take it easier afterwards, and not start to slaughter anyone. Alaric wouldn't have wanted him to slaughter anyone without a reason.

What happened when Damon got back to the boarding house was... unexpected.

Though he was a bit relieved that Elena wasn't dead-dead.

It didn't make him any less sad, but it at least didn't make him sadder. Her death would have made him sadder.

After that... Well. Most of the Council got blown up. It wasn't him, he swore. He was too busy moping about the unfairness of life to murder anyone, lately.

Two days, and Damon moved into Ric's appartment. Thanks to compulsion, no one asked anything.

Stefan raised an eyebrow at his decision, but said nothing. Elena tried to know if he was doing alright, even if she knew he wouldn't possibly answer "yes". She wanted to help him, and he appreciated her willingness to support him, but she had enough going on with her new life as an undead girl who should definitely not drain her brother or her schoolmates of their blood. Stefan was determined to make her follow his diet, and Damon was feeling too down to be sarcastic.

He stayed there for a while, locked into Ric's loft, filling his nose with the faint scent of the man he had loved, staring at the clothes the hunter wouldn't wear anymore, glaring at the mirror in the bathroom because it wasn't his reflection that should be there, but Alaric's.

Stefan was bringing him blood bags, and always asked if he planned to come out at some point, less exasperated than worried for his brother. Damon could hear it in the younger vampire's voice.

After one week, Stefan finally got the courage to speak about it.

It. The thing that would possibly set Damon's off.

"What do we do about Alaric, Damon?"

The older brother stared at the younger vampire quite dumbly.

"What about Ric?"

Stefan's eyes went to the coffin that was still next to the bed. That had been there for one week. And that, if he let Damon do as he wanted, would stay there even once it'd start to smell.

Stefan wasn't sure that having the decaying body of his lover next to his bed would really help Damon to get over it. He was quite sure of the contrary, actually. And it wasn't the only problem.

The younger Salvatore looked back at his brother, trying to sound as cool as possible.

"You can't keep him here, Damon. And we have to come up with an explanation as to why he suddenly disappeared. The school is asking where its history teacher went, this time, and the sheriff can't just..."

"Tell them he's got some family business to attend to. I don't know, maybe his mother is dying, and he won't be able to come back. But he's staying there."

Stefan frowned, slighty irritated.

"We have to bury him at the very least."

Damon moved a bit, to stand between the coffin and his brother.

"I'm not letting him go."

"Damnit, open your eyes, Damon! Alaric wouldn't want you to destroy yourself over his death. If you really can't stand his death, kill yourself, but don't wait for the madness of grieving to get to you and make you do things we both know you'd fall back into, and that are exactly what he liked the least about vampires. Don't go and prove him he was wrong about who he had come to see you as, and right about who he first thought you were!"

Damon took a step towards his brother and grabbed him by the collar, but no words would pass his lips. He knew Stefan wasn't completely wrong, and he knew that keeping his lover's body in an apartment that wasn't even his but the said lover's was everything but healthy.

He just couldn't let go of the coffin.

When he saw it every morning as he woke up, it did two things: first, it forced him to remember that Alaric was dead; second, it made him feel as if the hunter was still by his side.

And Damon simply couldn't give up on this.

He let go of Stefan's shirt, and went to sit at the dining table. Stefan joined him, a glass of blood in his hand. Damon took it gratefully, and emptied it before saying anything.

"Very well. We'll get him buried next week, but you deal with the formalities. I want a grave to go and cry upon, but not his name on it. He's gone out of town, he went back to Boston, to his family. I won't have everyone in Mystic Falls know he's dead, and I refuse to see the pitying looks on anyone's face. They might not have known we were together, it was still pretty obvious he was my best friend."

Stefan sighed in relief.

"We can't have him 'go back to his family', Damon. Magdalena has been asking about him, and she'll know we're lying."

Damon squinted at the mention of 'Magdalena'. With Ric's death his brain had almost shut itself off, and now he was completely oblivious to what wasn't about his dead boyfriend, a bottle of alcohol, or a blood bag.

Stefan rolled his eyes, unable to believe that his brother was so deconnected from reality. Aparently, he had been waiting for a good reason to do that for quite some time.

"Magdalena Haguenhauer. Red headed. Deadly. A lawyer. And a bloody Falkenbach."

Damon's eyes lit up for a second, before going back to a darkened state that had been theirs since the hunter's death.

"Right. Well, find something else. He moved out for no-one-know-what-reasons, and he isn't coming back. He told no one where he was going. Just don't make him... dead."

His voice was strangled as he said the last word, but Damon said it nonetheless.

It hurt as much as the first time, if not more.

"Just... do it."

Stefan nodded, and walked to the door. He turned around one last time, as if intending to say something, but he eventually kept quiet. Damon wasn't yet ready to hear any kind of speech about how Alaric would have wanted him to go on without him. It was so obvious someone could have written it on his forehead with a permanent marker.

Once alone again, Damon went to fetch a new bottle of bourbon in the kitchen part of Ric's loft, and he gulped down two mouthfuls in a blink, wincing slightly as the taste of alcohol overlapped the taste of blood already present in his mouth.

His cellphone rang, but he didn't bother to answer. Either it was one of the supernatural gang of Mystic Falls, or it was Liz Forbes, hoping to know beforehand if his grief was likely to end up with him gruesomely murdering someone tonight.

Alright, he might be a bit harsh on them. They were worried about him. Most of them. Maybe not Bonnie, and certainly not Tyler. Oh wait. Tyler was dead with Klaus. Right. That only left Bonnie. Strangely enough, the witch didn't like him. Wonder why. It wasn't as if he had killed her mother and her boyfriend. Oh wait. He had. But they hadn't stayed dead.

Then again, Alaric had tried to murder him a couple of times, and he still loved him more than anything. Even if he wasn't much of a fan of the twisted version of Ric who had taken over the very peaceful-if-deadly-when-needed history-teacher.

No matter. What they didn't know couldn't hurt them. It wasn't as if anyone could tell he was inwardly harsh with the people who were worried about him right now.

Damon put the bottle back on the cupboard it came from. He walked slowly to the bed that had been Ric's, and let himself fall on his face onto it.

His nostrils flared as he smelled the faint scent the hunter had left onto the sheets. It was becoming fainter by the day, disappearing slowly as Damon slept in the bed, replaced by his own scent. But for now, it was still there. And somehow, it was enough for him to calm down a bit. Just enough for him to fall asleep.

As he dreamed, Damon found himself still lying on the bed, but resting on his back.

And the other person on the bed with him was blond, with blue eyes.

"You're hopeless, you know that?"

Alaric was lying on is stomach, his chin in his hands.

"You're supposed to be alive, Damon, or at least undead. What's the point in brooding like you do? There's none! I can't honestly say I'm not happy that you care enough about me to grieve, but this is too much. You're only ignoring the problem, as if it would disappear one day."

Then Damon drifted into a dreamless sleep. Next to him, a ghost sighed, exasperated.