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He wasn’t there.
Damon wasn’t there and Enzo gets hurt, attacked by one of the packs of hybrids still hanging around town despite Damon’s best efforts to convince them Mystic Falls is the least hospitable place for Klaus’ renegade creations outside of maybe Pluto. Enzo gave as good as he got; better, even, considering the body sprawled across the lamplit, isolated parking lot Damon had ignored as he strode over cracked asphalt and barely-visible white paint.
He does not stop, does not pause, does not do anything more than get closer—too fast, maybe, given the noises he hears behind him, but Enzo does not flinch away and that’s all Damon cares about. He reaches out, motion so natural, to reach out to Enzo, that Damon does not realize that he has done so until he feels warm skin under his fingertips, alive and mostly-well before him.
Blood smears wet under Damon’s lips. Enzo’s, but also his own, welling from the puncture he’d bitten into his own tongue with the sharp point of a fang.
A vampire’s kind of kiss, he thinks with dark amusement, as he presses his blood to the ragged gash on Enzo’s cheek, where a hybrid had clawed skin through, until Enzo’s teeth had shown without him opening his mouth. Distantly, the term topical application comes to mind, but the faint taste of Enzo’s blood underneath his own wipes it away with the sting of vervain, burn of the herb tempered by Enzo’s own unique taste.
Enzo grasps Damon’s wrist, right below the hand Damon’d used to turn his face. It’s a loose hold, a touch for the sake of touching rather than restraint. He doesn’t say anything, but Damon still catches the half-formed sigh of relief at the back of his throat as Damon’s blood begins its work. Pain may be something Enzo’s well-versed in, but a hybrid half tearing his face off couldn’t have been pleasant by any stretch of the word.
Before Damon pulls away, he purses his lips into a kiss truer to the word. To make it better, he thinks with that same shadow-edged humor. Enzo catches the kiss and the joke too, because he squeezes Damon’s wrist before he lets go.
Damon lets go of Enzo’s chin. Skin knits back together under gore old and new, raw and bloody still, but no one can see clear through his face to the inside of his mouth anymore.
“‘Ta,” Enzo mutters, working his jaw. He stops when the motion pulls the healing wound.
Ignoring the stares prickling against his back because they are not alone, but Enzo will let him know if any of the others stray too close while Damon’s back is turned, he suggests softly, “Shut up?”
“Never,” Enzo grins, then immediately winces.
Damon sighs.