And I'd Give All the World Tonight to be With you (for nota_rolemodel)

[prodigalsavior]

The moment she'd left, Damon wanted to call her back. He wasn't the good brother, after all. Everyone knew that. He was selfish, untrustworthy, prone to violence when not given what he wanted. How many times had Stefan, had she, told him that? He should have known it was too good to be true, when she told him she wanted him. She'd said, just weeks

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[nota_rolemodel]

Running around Mystic Falls with messages from the beyond wasn't really what that particular ghost had been spending most of his time doing. Screaming without being heard, reaching out without being felt, and watching without being able to do a damn thing to make a difference, he'd been doing a lot of. Watching Damon talk to a rock with the wrong birthday (and it was wrong), guard his stool at the Grill and order him drinks... He'd done more than a little of having his heart broken, too

[prodigalsavior]

Damon had been raising the glass to his lips for another drink when Ric's voice sounded. In response, he froze. There wasn't anything else he could do, with that, immediately. Ric's voice, in his ears, not his head. If it had been hard to draw in air all night, it was impossible to do so now. For what seemed like forever, he stayed as he was, frozen and not breathing and fairly certain he'd gone crazy.

When he did move, though, it was in an explosion, too fast to be tracked, up off the sofa, turned around toward the voice, halfway across the room toward the fire, all in seconds before he stopped, eyes wide and stared at Ric. The expression "like he'd seen a ghost" might have been completely accurate, but it wasn't at all adequate.

"...How drunk am I?"

Not at all what he wanted to say, or do, but perfectly valid for testing the state of his sanity, he figured. Because, clearly, he was hallucinating as badly as he had been when Tyler had bitten him.

[nota_rolemodel]

When Damon frozen, Ric closed his eyes in pure, unadulterated relief. It was a tiny thing, but it was a sign that he'd been heard. Confirmation that this was real.

When he felt, rather than saw or heard Damon move, his eyes opened again, found Damon against the firelight and quirked a faint, very sad, smile. "I don't know. All the way through one bottle, but barely into the second. Drunk, but not drunk enough to be seeing things. It won't be for long, but I am here."

[prodigalsavior]

Ric spoke again, and Damon still didn't know if he could move beyond that first instinctual burst. But the smile on his lips was real enough, if heartbreaking, to pull him slowly across the space without realizing it.

"I could be dreaming." Not arguing, not really--if anything, he was desperate to believe this was real, and he didn't know how to deal with it if he believed and then it wasn't. If he was dreaming, then he was dreaming. If he knew it, when he woke up it wouldn't hurt that much. "I do, sometimes, like this."

Convoluted around, perhaps--he didn't dream about drinking, but about Ric being there.

He stopped with the sofa between them, not daring to reach out.