Work Text:
All she felt was tired.
The latest Big Bad was dead, and they were safe, and all she wanted to do was curl up on the floor and sleep for days. She didn’t feel strong or powerful or triumphant. She felt drained, done, dead. Her clothes were bloodied from battle. An ugly red circle stained the front of her shirt where she’d taken a branch in the gut, missing her heart but fucking with her spleen a little for a minute there.
Vampire wounds heal, but only in body. As long as the blood and dirt covered her in the reminder, she was still covered in scrapes and bruises and a wound so profound it went all the way through. He’d taken hits too, red lines of blood drawn all over his arms and ripping through his clothes, but she’d taken the worst of it. He hadn’t gotten there in time, and the look on his face when he saw her impaled might be the worst thing she’d ever seen. It was a little beautiful, the way his features twisted, but she never wanted to see it again.
They didn’t say a word. He plodded to the stairs and she followed, hollowed, and she couldn’t bring herself to lift her foot to climb the first step. She had barely made it up the front walk, and the stairs looked like the most punishing of challenges.
He made it halfway up before he realized the padding footsteps behind him wouldn’t resume, and he turned around without hesitation and walked back down, not breaking the rhythm of his steps. He scooped her up like it was nothing and she went limp in his hold, not even thinking to drape herself around him. Her head fell against his shoulder of its own accord, and before she could think her tears were joining the crusted dirt and sweat and blood on his shirt. Weak tears, silent, not a powerful wail or sob, because her power was thoroughly, utterly sapped, so she just limply leaked as he buried his face in her hair, whispering things she didn’t make any sense of. They might not have been words. He walked slowly with his weighty cargo and she closed her eyes, losing orientation, rocking gently up and down as they traveled up carpeted steps.
His steps leveled out and thudded down the hall to his room, and still she couldn’t tense her muscles to lighten his load. He carried her into the bathroom and sat her on the hard tile, less comfortable than the bed but close enough that he could keep her in view when he went to turn on the hot water. Steam started to billow and the sound of the water joined his sibilant nothings, and she collapsed against the sink, tears drawing lines through the dirt on her face.
He crouched beside her, ran fingers through her hair, and softly kissed the top of her head. She could barely move, but she let her head rock towards him, rolling along the doors of the cabinets under the sink. She bowed into him and he held her for a second, letting her listen to his very real heartbeat. Letting her see how real he still was, how solid, how present. Real and full of flesh and blood, some of which he would give to her as soon as she was in a position to drink it. She’d fed already to recover, but blood couldn’t heal bone-weariness, the weariness of terror and adrenaline and unceasing violence. So he couldn’t give her his blood, and he couldn’t give her a different life, and he couldn’t give her a clean slate, so instead he stopped whispering and started removing clothes crusted with gore.
He returned her head to the support of the cabinet and eased the hem of her shirt up her stomach, her arms limply rising with the fabric. He folded it without thinking, and she stared at the folded pink long-sleeved tee in his hands, stained with blood and mud. It was so absurd; she would have laughed if it weren’t for the fact that she couldn’t speak, let alone move enough air to produce a laugh. So she closed her eyes to the scene and felt him instead—felt the light kiss he placed on her wet cheek, felt him tilt his forehead against the side of her aching skull. Elena felt his soft lips kiss closeness into her hair, her bare shoulder, her shaking arm, and then, as tenderly as he’d ever touched her, he pressed his lips against the smoothed skin in the center of the bloody circle emblazoned on her abdomen. His kiss was so light, so lovely, so full of his fear and his misery and shame, his apology. And all she could do was weep. Suddenly the tears came harder and faster, and a drained drag at the air vocalized in her lungs, and she melted against the cold floor and dropped her head and cried, the force of her shuddering sobs pushing her up and down against the cabinets. Elena didn’t think. She was a blank conduit for sheer exhaustion and Damon kissed her and kissed her, kissed every cell that had mended itself. He couldn’t make her move to let him slide her pants down her splayed legs, so he took them apart at the seams instead, ripping down along the side of her thigh as she sat utterly unresponsive, making no move to help. He destroyed one leg, then the other, and lifted the front half of her jeans off so she was just left sitting on the back half, nude but still swathed in dirt.
Suddenly Elena was moving through space again, eyes still closed; she was rising off the floor, head lolling back, bouncing ever so slightly. She heard the shower door slide open and Damon stepped carefully into the falling water, keeping her firmly aloft. Opening her eyes in surprise, she gripped at his shirt and tensed a little, and he let her slide down to touch her feet to the tiles. She wasn’t really standing—he was still supporting her, firmly holding her torso, and she held him for support as tiny spots darkened his shirt, melding quickly into a full soaking swath of wet. She used her last remaining energy to tilt her head up to his face. The way he looked at her—it was a little beautiful, but she couldn’t look anymore, and she collapsed against him.
Carefully he kept one hand on her, holding her up, and cleaned the residue from her skin in wide circles. Occasional sobs moved the planes of water aside as they sluiced across her back. Other than that, though, the only sound was the pounding water, and she let herself feel it washing the day off her. Some things wouldn’t wash out, they just wouldn’t, but she tightened her fingers into his shirt and had a final thought before her brain shut down completely.
She was overcome with the conviction that she’d never have to wash her own wounds again, not if she didn’t have the energy. That Damon would carry her if she couldn’t carry herself. That it didn’t matter what it said about her. It was just the way it was.
As final thoughts go, it wasn’t a bad one, and she slipped out of consciousness with a measure of peace.