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There’s no right way to say goodbye.
There’s no right way to honor someone who used to be real. Who used to be yours, in his way. Who used to sneeze and laugh and wash the dishes and make your heart hurt when he looked at you just so.
And in any case, if there were a right way, lanterns wouldn’t be it.
*
It might be irrational, but Damon’s furious. Shaking with (what he hopes is) rage, knuckles white around the bottle that he lifts periodically as he warms the cemetery bench.
Lanterns aren’t comforting or beautiful. They’re fucking insulting.
Damon figures getting blind-drunk is more dignified. The bottle of bourbon at least has a little gravitas to it, weighs down against his hand as he lifts the liquid to his mouth. He opens his mouth to the neck of it and pours a long burn into redundant flesh, flesh that’s hung around too long. About a century too long, he figures. Then he reaches out a tremorous hand and pours some over the flesh that didn’t hang around long enough. The bourbon glitters on the ground for a second before it sinks into the soil, and Damon watches it with an absent stare.
He doesn’t try to think of ways to fix it. Damon’s a realist—you can’t put something back together when half the pieces are gone. Instead he plays a drinking game with himself, drinking every time it hurts, and he doesn’t know if he wins or loses but either way he drinks a lot, and isn’t that the point of drinking games? Cheap shit, the kind Alaric got for every day. Not the special occasion label. It’s not a special occasion, not by a long shot. Death isn’t special, it just happens, and then someone who was so real suddenly isn’t anymore.
He talks.
“We’re not Japanese,” and a lot of other words that don’t matter, and a lot more drinking. He’s still coherent, much too coherent, and he’s afraid he might throw up, and he won’t yet be able to blame the swill he’s choking down.
Another twenty minutes and he’s a little less coherent. Better.
Damon talks to Ric because he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to, not really, not about this. They’re all letting their grief float away on the wind, and he’s stuck down here crushed under his.
And so he talks.
When he’s done talking about the kids, he talks about that morning when he suddenly missed Alaric so bad it knocked the wind out of him, even though it had only been an hour since he’d left Ric’s loft.
He tells Alaric how close he came three months after that to showing up at the high school, shy-eyed and quipping to cover himself; how he wishes he would have pulled Ric into some janitor’s closet to lay another claim on the one he’d already scarred on his hip the night before. How he hates himself for being too scared.
The word “miss” chokes him and he can’t quite get it out the first time, but he tries again, “I miss you,” and he doesn’t know if he wins or loses but the bottle gets a lot lighter.
He hates himself for imagining that the presence at his side is anything more than the breeze.
*
When his words run dry he hauls his body up awkwardly, doesn’t work that hard to steady himself as he walks away. Ric’s not there, not really. Damon doesn’t feel like looking at a carved-up rock anymore.
What he feels like doing is draining a fleet of coeds, come to think of it.
What he does, though, is weave his way to Ric’s loft, unable to bear the thought of seeing a concerned face looking cautiously at him. Ric never treated him like something to be handled, something to be managed. Sure, Ric yelled at him, but he never scolded him like a toddler who’d misbehaved, or handled him delicately like a bomb that might go off. He didn’t have a lot of patience for dancing around the issue. It was refreshing.
And he saw Damon for what he was, which was also refreshing. Saw him for all that he was. He knew Damon was a monster and he knew Damon would always be a monster, and he also knew that Damon loved him and would always love him, and the monster thing wasn’t great but man, that second thing. That was something.
The loft is locked. And then it isn’t, because it’s hard to lock a door when the door’s been removed from its hinges by a blind-drunk vampire.
Ric didn’t change his sheets as compulsively as Damon, and Damon thanks him silently for being such a slob. Damon’s not really one for symbolic gestures or tokens or keepsakes, but when he curls up in crumpled linens he lets himself inhale a memory and he gets it, a little. Gets why Stefan hoards his pictures and why Elena keeps that stupid teddy bear. He tucks his face into the pillow and feels Ric roll over next to him with a frown and fucked hair and horrible morning breath, muttering something incoherent as he throws a hand at the beeping alarm clock. He closes his eyes and feels Ric’s arms around him, their sweaty skin slicked together. He breathes deep and when he breathes out he hears himself make a noise he doesn’t recognize. It’s muffled by the pillow, but it sounds like choking, and he supposes that’s about right.
*
Eventually, everything disappears. If you wait long enough every object on Earth will cease to exist, replaced by other useless objects that will be replaced in turn. Forever is a long time.
Damon keeps the sheets anyway. For now.