Chapter Text
Damon doesn’t remember how he knew. He barely remembers the night at all, to be honest. His junior year of high school was all smuggling alcohol from Locker 42 and getting drunk with Enzo under the bleachers of the football field-the whole year is really a haze.
But that night….it’s a haze in a different way.
What he does remember is the night he met her, his brother’s little Sophomore friend with the big eyes and the wavy, chocolate brown hair. He remembers Stefan introducing them at Tina Fell’s Fall Party, her smile sweet and the excitement in her voice. He remembers that she matched his wit and sarcasm and didn’t fall at his feet like other girls. He remembers the way she got so animated over a conversation about something as stupid as the Fall Starbucks lattes. He remembers her smile as she and the sheriff’s daughter danced around the fire pit, a knitted scarf around her neck loosely as the sparks lit her eyes up like fireflies.
Damon remembers that she was magic.
After that, she’s on his mind always. Maybe Damon barely knows her, but it feels like he’s had a lifetime of being with her, and it still isn’t close to enough. And he sees her a lot too, hanging around with Mr. Saltzman before his history class, talking to his cousin Sarah in the school library. She was like an Angel, the way she looked at him.
Still, their interactions, at least to everyone around them, were so few, that it seems irrational for it to hurt so bad. But that’s because no one else knows about the stolen kisses and the late nights sneaking out to sit under the stars and watch the leaves turn red, then gold, then brown as they fall. The talks they had about anything and everything on their minds. How she loves Fall and he loves Halloween and how he loves the sky at midnight when the moon is out, but how she loves the sunsets when the sky is painted red and gold and pink and orange and yellow.
But how could anyone else know? Because they weren’t hands held in the hallways, they were stolen glances across crowded rooms. They weren’t dances at Founding Events, they were the couple hidden in the yard, slow dancing to music muffled through walls, living only on the faraway ambience from the ballroom full of people who don’t know.
Because it’s easier to love someone when there’s no one to tell you that you shouldn’t.
And that doesn’t matter now anyways. Because he somehow knew before it happened. Seconds before the news interruption on Tv, and way before the vigil at school the next day.
He feels it in his heart, the way it suddenly constricts and cuts off his bloodstream. He can almost hear the gunshot in his ears and her sobs in his mind, making his own eyes water.
Yes, Damon knew Elena was dead before she herself might’ve even known. He felt it in the way that time froze and the way that everything got darker and colder. But he tried so hard to ignore it, to pretend that he was insane instead. Even though she won’t pick up her phone and Jeremy says she isn’t home and Caroline and Bonnie don’t know where she might be.
Sheriff Forbes reports that it was a carjacking on the news, less than ten minutes later. One that went wrong, and led to a dead girl and an abandoned car. Stefan and Sarah are horrified, his mother sympathetic for her family, and his Uncle Zach is still; unmoving. But Damon is gone. He feels detached from the world, his mind trying to zero in on the last thing he said to her; and her to him. To remember the feeling of her fingers lacing through his as he held her tightly to his chest in a passing period between classes, wishing he could run away with her.
Thinking back on it, Damon wishes they had. Because the next day at school, there’s flowers on her locker and Caroline’s sobbing and Jeremy looks stoned again for the first time in months and Tyler Lockwood is hiding his tears as his girlfriend Liv holds him. Stefan leaves a rose for her and Sarah a note, but Damon just stares. He hears someone say that she was “too young” and he almost laughs.
She wasn’t just too young. She was too trusting. Too innocent, loving and naive. It could’ve been any person in the world that the criminals happened upon; a killer, a cheater, a liar. But instead it’s Elena Gilbert, with the bright eyes and the smile that lights up rooms and the compassionate heart that could look past even his faults. She was the kind of candle that you’d get from Yankee Candles, the kind that burned bright and smelled like everything good in the world; like comfort and home. The kind that were supposed to burn long, but someone came around and snuffed the flame between their thumb and their forefinger with a sinister, satisfied smirk.
Elena was everything he could ever imagine needing in life. And she was dead. And he stands in the crowd at her vigil, watching the candles light and illuminate the photos of her: snippets of her smiling or laughing or singing and just being Elena. The sunset is red-gold, and the remaining leaves are just as bright and colorful.
Orange LED’s hang from tree branches and house porches, Halloween decorations sitting all tacky-looking in the front lawns. And he knows Elena would love it. She’d gush about costumes with Bonnie and handing out candy with Jenna and movies with Jeremy and parties with Caroline and joking with Alaric. She’d talk about Matt and Vicki and Tyler and Liv and Rebekah and Enzo. And she’d smile mischievously at him and say that she’d save him a dance at the school’s annual Halloween dance, as if they could be seen together. But it’s a nice dream.
He knows that on days when they had the Boarding House to themselves, they’d sit on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and watch the Scream movies. She’d jump at the slightest sound and he had to hold the popcorn so she wouldn’t spill it. And her head would rest on his shoulder and she’d bury her face in his neck and she smells-smelled-like pumpkin spice and cinnamon and fireplaces and candy apples.
Damon lets his eyes close as the breeze ruffles his hair. The flame on the candle in his hand flickers slightly, but remains, and he tunes out the sounds of his weeping classmates, losing himself in a deep well of memories that still burn bright in his mind, and he knows they’ll start to fade one day, but he doesn’t ever want to forget her.
The way she wore her hair or the music she liked or the movies she’d quote or that she loved the Outsiders or that Fall was her favorite season, just like him. That that was the first thing they had in common.
That she taught him to love Pumpkin Spice and red-gold sunsets and that they said “I love you” for the first time on the first New Year’s Eve they ever spent together, or that she always sat on his shoulders to put the star on the top of the tree. That she ran away on Valentine’s Day to have lunch with him in the Grill, laughing as they hid their faces behind menus.
Or that they snuck a dance at homecoming and that she helped him with his homework on Friday nights and that she liked dancing in the rain and going to concerts and screaming the song lyrics at the top of her lungs.
Damon smiles, trying not to laugh. He knows it’s the exact wrong time, but even when she’s gone, Elena lights up his day.