I imagine Elena's conscious to be very flashback heavy following Damon's death. I feel like if any loss would drive her to live in her memories just to attempt to survive it would be his. And since we never got to see their amazing summer together I will be drawing the flashbacks from how I imagine it was.
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Cheers m'dears.
Chapter One: Chilled To The Bone
"Memories might keep him alive, but they might kill me."
I awaken to the smoky smell of bourbon and the feel of the most luxurious cotton. The sun is poring through two magnificent floor to ceiling windows, the thick velvet curtains only slightly drawn against the force of the early morning light. I keep my eyes closed and simply enjoy the comforting atmosphere that surrounds me.
The only sound in the room is the gentle breathing of the man sleeping behind me, his left arm tucked firmly and protectively around my waist, the cool metal of his ring just grazing the skin on my right hip. My chest seems to rise and fall with his every quiet exhalation against the back of my neck.
I keep very still, careful not to rouse him from his slumber. He exerts so much natural energy throughout the day that I always feel it's important not to wake him before he's ready.
Unfortunately he seems to have some subconscious awareness of the slightest fluctuation in my breathing or movement. So even though I am typically the first to rise, he's never long after me, like he feels the need to be up and alert when I am.
Almost like clockwork I feel him shift a bit and pull me closer, his voice soft with the vestiges of sleep but no less teasingly amused as he whispers, "Morning sunshine."
I smile and open my eyes, moving my left hand from underneath my cheek and reaching down to drag the tips of my fingers along the side of his forearm. I feel him stroke his thumb across my hipbone in response and press a kiss to the crest of my shoulder.
"Morning," I sigh happily.
"How did you sleep?" he murmurs along the top of my spine, his voice vibrating straight down to my toes.
I take my right hand and move my wild brown waves over my right shoulder so the hair won't hinder his perusal of my upper back. The fingers of his left hand start to drag slowly across my lower stomach as his lips shift a little further down my spine.
"Okay," I finally answer in a near whisper, careful not to disturb the shroud of solitude that presently envelops us.
"Hmmm, only okay?" he questions in an equally quiet voice, his mouth forming a pout as he aligns with my shoulder blades, like the idea of my sleep being less than absolutely stellar brings him the utmost displeasure.
His fingers reach my left hip, his hand curling around it quite possessively, but still just as gently.
"Only okay. It was a late night after all," I tell him with a touch of sarcasm.
I feel his lips curve into his telltale smirk as his right hand moves under my side and curls around my other hip.
"Yes it was. My fault I suppose," his voice is riddled with innuendo and I can picture his eyebrows doing their dance of flirtation and seduction.
"You suppose? It's completely your fault." I respond with as much accusation and indignation as I can muster. It isn't much. He's welcome to keep me up all night, every night, for the rest of the summer. I'd never complain.
Not that I'm going to tell him that.
Suddenly I'm on my stomach, his thighs straddling the back of mine, his hands still curled around my hips, his lips at my ear.
"I won't make apologies for our… bedroom activities Elena. If you want nights of long, uninterrupted sleep you should be living with Barbie. But you're not. You're living with me. Which was your idea if I remember correctly."
He says all of this in the sassiest of low voices imaginable, his hands skimming down the backs of my thighs so slowly I erupt in delightful shivers. I feel his lips move behind my ear, not quite kissing but not quite nuzzling the shockingly sensitive line where my hair meets the skin of my neck.
He's right, of course. Moving in with him was my idea. I never even considered living with one of my friends. As soon as being in my childhood home was no longer an option my mind immediately went to the boarding house.
This place had always felt like a second home anyway. I'd certainly spent enough time here.
But he's being so infuriatingly and accurately assumptive about my choice to live with him that I can't bring myself to be placating and agree with him. So I opt for stubbornness instead.
"My idea? I don't recall you offering up any alternatives. You didn't even hesitate to move me into your room. Maybe it was part of your master plan to hold me hostage in your bed. And I fell right into the trap." I'm being cheeky and I know it but he started it.
And apparently he's prepared to finish it because the next thing I know I'm on my back looking into teasing ocean blue eyes with my hands pinned on either side of my head. I feel a thrill I can't suppress, a smile fighting its way onto my lips as I watch him watch me like he's deciding what to do with me next.
Suddenly the waves of his irises seem to rise up like the tide, as though he's had the most ingenious idea ever. A pleasant swirl of metal butterflies begins to flutter in my stomach in earnest as I see the left corner of his mouth quirk up.
His smirk is positively dangerous. And fucking sexy.
In a flash his hands are digging into my sides and his face is buried in my neck with teasing urgency and I'm gasping and sputtering and laughing uncontrollably.
I love waking up with him. He's so different in the early morning than any other time of day. It's a side of him that I'm positive no one besides me has ever seen before.
Rather than being typically flirty or playful or seductive or obnoxious or any of his other public personality defaults, he morphs into a combination of them all tempered by sweet serenity. The kind you only get from genuine, unwavering happiness.
He's beautiful like this. Cuddly and frisky and strangely adorable. Which is not a word I'd ever have used to describe him in the past.
I feel like this is the only time he's comfortable letting all his walls down. It's a safe time in a safe place. With someone he trusts. Someone he loves.
Someone who loves him back.
When his hands migrate to the devilishly ticklish spot behind my knees I shriek at him in surprise and outrage and closeted exuberance.
"Damon!"
I jolt awake, my heart racing, my lungs fighting for air, tears streaming down my cheeks. My skin is flushed pink but still just as cold as ever.
Not again.
Sleep should be a reprieve shouldn't it? I should be able to escape from the cold and the sorrow and the emptiness in sleep. I'm unconscious after all. Unaware of my surroundings, no thoughts, no feelings, just the supposedly comforting haven of incognizance.
But it seems I'm not even granted that small grace. I'm cursed to feel this pain, this frigid agony always, with no end in sight.
It's been the same since that first morning after he died. I was broken and inconsolable the entire night, unable to find any peace from the proffered support of Caroline, Matt and Ric. I spent as much time as I could focusing on my brother and his despair to keep my mind occupied, but eventually the icy grip of nightmarish misery threatened to suffocate me. So I retired to my room at the family lake house.
I didn't bother to shower or change clothes. I removed my shoes and climbed into bed underneath every cover I could get my hands on. I curled into a ball, shoving my frostbitten hands into my jacket, resting my forehead against the tops of my knees.
I'd never been so cold before. I couldn't seem to hide from it.
Burrowed under blankets and comforters, still dressed in jeans and a jacket and socks, wrapped completely around myself, I couldn't get warm. All I could do was shiver, a prisoner to my ice slicked skin.
The cold wasn't in the air. It wasn't being forced on me by something else.
It was in me. Hollowed in what remains of my heart, it pumped sluggishly through my veins, replaced the marrow of my bones and sinews of my muscles with crystalline liquid, frosted the tips of my fingers and toes like an Antarctic blizzard.
I didn't really notice it that first night. Once I was alone - really alone, away from the worried gazes of others - the tears I'd been holding back for hours made their presence known again with force.
In all the grief I've experienced in my life I know I've never cried as much or as long as I did that night. It was never-ending, a constant outpour of vicious sobs that made breathing and thinking impossible. I made no attempt to chase sleep, knowing I'd never catch it until my body and mind were too exhausted to stay awake.
So instead I drowned in my tears and pulled at my hair and tried to breathe around the vice of cold despair that held my lungs captive.
I fell into a horrible sleep once my eyes dried out. I was drained physically, mentally and emotionally, yet I found no respite.
Because while I ached from the loss of him in consciousness, he haunted my dreams in unconsciousness.
He assaulted my sleep, invading what was left of my sanity with his overwhelming presence in my past. Every single second we had ever spent together over the last three years was determined to play out in my head while I tried to escape from the fresh hell of my waking life.
Every night it was a new memory. They didn't seem to adhere to any rhyme or reason, instead deciding to pop up out of order to remind me of how far we had come together.
I was forced to watch us fall in love all over again in my dreams.
They weren't even like normal dreams where something always appears a little off, that way you can't mistake it for anything real.
They were more like flashbacks. Like my unconscious mind was making a conscious effort to remember our time together in explicit detail, to ensure that I would never forget him.
As if such a thing was even in the realm of possibility. I could never forget him.
He was everywhere. In me and around me, his heart and soul eternally a part of me, his influence surrounding me, his absence destroying me from the inside out.
The destruction isn't even kind enough to happen all at once. It's chosen to draw itself out, to slowly and torturously ruin me a little more everyday in increasingly more inventive ways.
It started with the cold, which made it's presence known as soon as his absence did.
Because I felt Damon leave the earth. Not just leave me or the crypt or the cemetery or the outskirts of Mystic Falls, but the earth.
I felt him move on. Where, I have no idea. But I know the moment he passed completely out of my reach.
It was only one second. It all happened so quickly. Like a starkly abstract portrait of 'before and after.'
One second I could feel his touch from the Other Side and his ghostly presence in the crypt, and then the cemetery. I was bawling and pleading with him not to go and shaking from the purest form of desolation I've ever encountered in almost twenty years on this earth.
The next I was numb. Numb from emptiness. Numb from loneliness. Numb from fear and sorrow.
But mostly numb from cold.
It was a bizarre sensation. Not like having your switch flipped and burying emotion. More like feeling too much at once and short circuiting at the basest level.
I feel nothing now. The cold erodes all physical sensation. The emptiness and loneliness eclipses all emotion beyond those I'd rather not feel. The fear and sorrow keeps me from thinking of anything other than him. And how he isn't here with me.
My destruction is obviously some layered plot devised by the universe to confine me in the deepest circle of hell on earth for the rest of my immortal existence.
At some point the cold and I developed an understanding. I recognized it wasn't going anywhere, that it was one of many things he left behind when he died.
Or perhaps it was more because of what he took with him. His warmth, his passion and protection, his love, his strength.
His fire.
No matter how bad things seemed to be between us there had always been fire. Warmth. He naturally infused my world with heat and light of every kind, mysterious and confusing as it might have been at times.
And now he's gone. Now the sun and moon and stars have burnt out, the light of the world fading into obscurity in the wake of his unprecedented and unacceptable disappearance.
Now I'm frozen to the core, terrified and alone and chilled to the bone for all time.
I'll never be safe again. I'll never be happy again. I'll never be warm again.
I'll never love again.
And even though he never will be again, all I want is for him to be here with me when I wake up from these accursed dreams of our passionate life together.
All I want is for him to hold me.