A/N: Hey, guys, this is my fiftieth story! Omg, guys, guys, guys! How exciting is that! My fiftieth story, my fiftieth! I feel like I have grown so much since I joined, both as a writer and a person, and I would like to thank all of you for your love, your criticism, your devotion, your kindness, and your ability to withstand me on my worst and best days (sometimes the two are indistinguishable). You guys have been here for me even when my life has taken turns I could not comprehend, and I am so glad you have all stood by me. Prepare for the tears, the waterworks are about to begin. Just kidding, I'm not gonna cry about all this. But I would like to thank all you, especially my religious reviewers, who have always brightened my day! Happy holidays!

Rating: T

Pairing: Damon/Caroline

Summary: Her eyes are the last thing that he sees. He wants to stay. / She feels the pull of him on her, drawing her to him helplessly and hopefully.

Disclaimer: Don't own, sorry. If I did, I'd take all the fan mail in the world :)

a bittersweet victory, loving the ghost in front of me – Sugarland, "Keep You"

He dies on a Sunday twilight, when the sky is more silver than blue and the sun has set but the moon hasn't risen yet. And Bonnie is there, standing a few feet away and looking ever so tall from his flat-on-his-back position, chanting, and her nose is bleeding and her eyebrows are furrowed furiously like she's trying to figure something out because this isn't working. And Elena is there, and her hand is pressed to her mouth, and she is trying not to look but she can't tear her eyes away (he knows this just by looking at her) and her eyes are oh-so-human as they fill with tears. (God, she's so predictable, and that's part of what he used to love about her.)

Stefan is there, too, crying and on his knees by Damon's side and praying and pulling the stake out of his heart and telling him that he needs him, he loves him, we're brothers, I'm sorry, please oh please oh god don't go Damon I need you.

(He wants to stay, but he can't form the words to tell that to Stefan. His voice won't work, though he suspects that his mouth is still moving wordlessly, like a fucking fish out of water or something.)

And she is there, holding his hand and saying nothing because he always tells her to shut up (one of many lessons from him that she should never take to heart, he thinks desperately, because her voice is like softness and sunlight) and her eyes are full of tears. (And God, he doesn't deserve her tears—he tortured her, for God's sake.) Her hair is down and curled and beautiful, and he looks at her wet eyes and sees the true, loving, already-grieving, selfless, forgiving beauty in those ocean blue orbs. He mouths Stefan's name, then hers, then I'm sorry, and Stefan chokes on a sob and Caroline says something, something that he cannot understand because there is a rushing in his ears that he can't explain.

Her eyes are the last thing that he sees, big and blue and beautiful and overflowing.

He turns gray right in front of her, and she gasps.

Please don't go, Damon. Stay, for me, she'd said. Please, Damon, please stay. I'm sorry too. Stay forever for me, Damon.

And he'd gone.

He's gone, damn it.

Stefan collapses, and his face is dry now but it speaks of unbearable pain. And Elena is holding onto him, keeping back tears of her own, and Bonnie looks grim and angry—at herself, at Damon, even at God, maybe at everyone, who knows.

And Caroline is holding back her own breathless sobs, her breath hitching and chest just slightly heaving, but her face stays dry. She almost retches at the sudden emptiness inside of her. Her hand grips his, even in true death, and then she closes her eyes, just once. Long enough to compose herself. She reopens them, having kept them closed for just enough time for one or two or twenty blinks, and looks down at the dead vampire she's facing. Even gray and ashy and dead, he's beautiful. He's Damon. He's the man who made her everything that she is now. He's Damon. He shouldn't be dead, can't be dead. But he is. And she has to be strong, at least for now. Just for twenty minutes. Then she can go home and curl up into a ball and remember him even though she doesn't want to, she shouldn't have to—but, God, she needs to.

"Elena, take Stefan home," she says, and her voice doesn't reflect the emptiness and nausea coiling up and growing inside of her. Instead, she sounds strong and sure of herself. So untrue. "Bonnie, I need for you to go and convince the proper people that everything's okay—and tell the right group of people the truth. Okay?" Bonnie is the one that has always hated what Damon is or what he's stood for, and she's probably the one least connected to him now, emotionally. She can handle this better than anyone else ever could. Bonnie nods obediently, because Caroline is using her listen-to-me-now HBIC voice, and nobody ever knows how to deny her in that voice for very long.

"No," Stefan rasps, "I need to—"

"You shouldn't have to see this," she interrupts. "Please, Stefan. Go home. We'll have a funeral later. But I should bury him first." She makes sure not to say his name, makes sure not to break Stefan completely, because she's afraid that she'll break too. And God, she can't cry for the guy that used to torture her. Not publicly, anyway.

After a moment of torturous indecision and reluctance and silence, Stefan blinks and nods only once, and Elena helps him to his feet and they walk back to the nearby truck as he leans against her.

They're in the middle of the forest and the moonlight is shining now on Damon's young gray should-have-been-eternal face. And she hurts, deep inside where she shouldn't be hurting because Damon was never supposed to die. (And she was never supposed to care this much about him.)

She picks him up, one arm under his knees and the other supporting his neck like he's still alive, and he's lighter than she would have expected—she's a vampire, so she's strong, of course, but still. She doubts he reaches (reached) much over one hundred fifty, if anything near it. I mean, my God, she thinks. The man is—was, damn it all—slim. She cradles him, and uses the hand nearer to his face to shut his eyes gently. She memorizes those dark midnight blue eyes (again) like they don't already haunt her in her sleep (oh, how they do, and not in the nightmarish way). Such dark, mysterious, attractive beauty lies in them, even in death. He's always held a strange sort of power over her, one that he should never have been able to have after she turned vampire and the sire bond wasn't strong enough for that, but he does…he did, technically, but somehow she still feels the pull of him on her like a hook in her navel, drawing her to him helplessly and hopefully.

She takes him to a deeper part of the forest, to the old Salvatore mansion ruins. She's been here before, once, hunting with Stefan. Stefan had made some by-the-way, downplayed comment about this once being their home, and she'd hardly paid any attention. But she thinks…she thinks he'll be okay here. Maybe here, he can be free. Maybe here, he can be happy.

And it's stupid, because she's never believed in an afterlife before, but Jeremy sees fucking ghosts and all that so maybe Damon's soul or spirit or whatever can be happy here—here, where he was once human; here, where he lived and played and grew; here, where he had everything before it was lost.

Here, where he was probably kind and happy at the same time, once.

Maybe he will be happy here again.

She buries him where the house once was, near the remains of the library—it looks like the place that Damon would have hidden in during his moments of needing solitude, which she suspects he had even as a human. "Please be happy here, Damon," she whispers as she covers the last bit of dirt over his face. He's only about three feet under, but the animals won't go after him. Animals never go after vampires, they are too unnatural and their meat tastes too wrong to carnivores. This she knows from another casual comment from Stefan, months ago.

Besides, this way she can dig him up soon if, for some godforsaken reason, they need the body. And she'll need to dig him up soon anyway, if only to put him in a proper coffin. This temporary situation is just for safety's sake, so some jogger doesn't see the body (she swallows hard at that word in her mind) and freak out and start another vampire hunt from the Council. It's just for the time being.

Maybe Bonnie will find a way to save him, to bring him back from the dead and into their lives once more. This she hopes for.

It's two days after Damon, and they have had a solemn ceremony at midnight for him (she had to carry him again because Stefan refused to do it), and Stefan has not left his room since then. Elena sits there with him and strokes his hair and says all the right things, but there is only so much that she can do. He wants his big brother back, and nobody can blame him. Caroline doesn't offer to help, because even though Stefan saved her and mentored her, they've never had a very strong relationship. He's just a friend, that's all, and if Elena can't help him then no one can.

Bonnie says nothing about it; she was never close to Damon, anyway, and she only ever helped him to save Elena and vice versa. She's probably the least affected out of all of them, because for the longest time she hated him.

She ignores Tyler's calls, mostly because they broke up several weeks ago but also because she does not want company. She just wants to be alone. So she sits in her room and plays a CD she stole from Damon's room yesterday while, downstairs, Stefan reluctantly slept (due to threats from Elena)—she stole a lot of things, including books, clothes, photos, and even a painting or two, and more, everything that made her think of Damon—and listens to it.

It sounds sad. It sounds like Damon. And because she identifies that—"sad"—as Damon-like, she spends far too much time crying over the fact that he was so sad. Though she'll never admit that she cries over him and it for once doesn't involve her human memories of him and his teeth and the scars shining silver on her shoulder. It's not crying for what he did to her once long ago, but for what he felt. It involves his pain, and that's why she'll deny it if anyone ever asks. (She never thought she'd see him as sad or vulnerable before.)

She is curled up in her bed, chin tucked between her knees and arms over her legs, her hair hanging like a curtain that protects her from prying eyes at the window or the open door of her bedroom (who knows when Liz will get home), and her head is bent down as she quietly lets the tears fall where they may.

"Crying over me, Barbie?" she hears, in that despicable (lovable), sneering (gorgeous), smirking (familiar), infuriating (wonderful), arrogant (sexy) voice.

She looks up and sees Damon sitting on the bed beside her.

A/N: Oh god, what happens next? Lol, I have no idea. I don't even have an outline for this yet. This just accomplished my desire to publish my fiftieth story on Christmas, yay! I'm probably going to upload a Christmas-y Doctor Who fic soon. It will probably have nothing to do with Christmas, knowing me. But, um, I hope you all enjoyed this, and please consider leaving a review! I do so love reviews :)

I'm working on the next chapter of never let your fear decide your fate...who knows, it'll probably be my New Year's gift to you all! Yay! Also, this will be updated eventually. I hope so. This is probably an overdone plot, but I totally and completely don't care. I just hope you all liked it, and please give me some feedback on whether or not I should continue it. It's going to be a happy Daroline fic eventually, I think (I hope). I'm also working on a sequel series to your kingdom is crumbling, you're a tragedy, to everyone who requested a sequel to that.

Happy holidays to everyone, and I'll see you all again soon. Thank you, truly, for everything you have all done for me, and I love you all!