Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Tell me something,” Enzo says, ensconced snugly in the bed. There’s a bottle held loosely in his hand, but it’s empty, so he lets it drop to the floor with a muffled thump.

The world is buzzing, warm and blurred, everything made softly out of focus from the alcohol. Not only is the world soft, so is the bed, the pillows, the thick blanket. Soft and nicely smelling and oh-so comfortable. He wants to melt into it, wants to burrow like an animal, build a den and never leave.

“Something,” Damon says, stripping off first his shirt, then his pants. American pants. Not pants pants.

Actually—

Bemused, Enzo realizes the man’s not wearing any pants, American or otherwise.

Damon clambers onto the bed, yanks a pillow out from the pile Enzo’s claimed. Fair. It is his bed. They are his pillows.

“Why’re you naked?” he asks, not really caring. It’s not as though the sight is new, or particularly displeasing.

The explanation is short. “Hate sleeping in clothes.”

“Mm, why?” Enzo’s slept in clothes since—forever. He doesn’t think he’s ever slept naked. On purpose. By choice. Pants at the very least.

“It’s uncomfortable,” Damon says, lying on his side, stolen pillow apparently adequately arranged. He’s atop the covers, which means Enzo has a very good view of—everything. The moonlight shining in from the open balcony doors is making the man look closer to marble than someone who was dancing around not even an hour ago, laughing like a loon when he’d spilled his drink on himself. If marble was dusted with soft, dark hair. “And inconvenient.”

Enzo laughs, he thinks. Makes some kind of amused sound. Intoxication is rather nice, when one can choose it. Even nicer safe, warm, with a friend.

“What do you want to know?” Damon asks. He’s got one arm over his head, the other lying on the bed between them.

“Anything,” Enzo says, thinking of that hand, outstretched. He wants to take it, but can’t quite move to extract himself from the covers. “So long as it’s true.”

There’s such a long moment of silence, he’s sure Damon has fallen asleep. But—

“I think I’m—wrong.”

Frequently, Enzo almost jokes, but does not. Not with the way Damon is watching him, carefully, like he is waiting for Enzo to turn from him, to declare him and this and everything as wrong as he proclaims himself to be.

“Or,” Damon continues, voice gone brittle, good mood worn off, energy to keep the never ending doubts at bay fled, and tongue loosened by drink, by quiet, by the shelter of night, “I’m just—not worth it. Unworthy. Unlovable.”

“Something true, Damon.” He manages to untangle an arm, then. Takes his hand. Squeezes carefully, lest anything crack. “You are lovable.”

Like seeing the ocean for the first time. Standing on a cliff’s edge with nothing between you and the drop. Like velvet squirreled away, too soft to be out in the open, too soft to remain untouched; a line of a song you can’t help but sing when you hear it.

“It’s easy,” he says, mind on things like friendship and forgiveness and hope. On the first time he’d heard the man laugh so hard he snorted. “Harder not too. Now tell me something true.”

There is an even longer stretch of silence, until:

Damon squeezes back. And says, “I, uh. Had a pet crow for a while.”

“Yeah?”

He falls asleep halfway through a story about a bird a little too smart for her own good, and who would fight squirrels for bird feeder privileges.

It starts out innocently enough:

All he wanted was a coffee.

But now Enzo is eavesdropping, ducked into the pantry and trying very hard to be as silent as the can of peas he’s eye level with.

It’s just—well, he didn’t think he’d have company and, generally speaking, for a very large portion of his life, being half or even a little naked in front of women was indecent beyond measure. Criminal, in some cases. Most cases.

And he is more than just half or a little naked. The only thing he’s got on is pants—not American—and skimpy ones too, considering he’d spilled some kind of liquor on his clothes by virtue of one of the bed bottles being not empty and just borrowed a pair of Damon’s. Who, when he deigns to wear anything, prefers a closer fit, on top of being a touch more slender.

He’s gotten over the old fashioned manners now, is better about not sticking out in this new, giant modern world.

But that doesn’t mean he’s prepared to admit his folly and jump out of the pantry.

So. Here he is. Listening to Bonnie and Elena talk about the record Bonnie said she’s here to borrow from Damon, and has, in fact already picked it up and is now raiding the kitchen for the teas he’d bought her from that little shop five or six towns over that she likes.

Enzo’d gone with, on that trip. The shop had been a tiny establishment, smack between a laundromat and a pizza place, crowded with shelves and displays and homemade posters. Cute, if a little dusty. Damon had been in and out, knowing exactly what he was looking for and exactly where to find it. He’d explained it away as them having the exact same setup since the nineties, which, obviously, Enzo’d had to have taken his word for. He and Bonnie had driven out there a few times, he’d told him, when staying in a desolate ghost town grew a bit too much.

“You could have just gotten your own,” Elena is saying. It is a minor miracle that she hasn’t picked up on his presence, though he had put on music before he’d come downstairs. Maybe that’s disguising his heartbeat. It had disguised their approach, right up until the front door opened. “Or—I could have! Christmas present, right there.”

“It’s not anywhere near Christmas,” Bonnie points out. The fridge door opens, then closes. If he pays close enough attention, he can hear the twist of a bottle cap. “And I don’t think they even make these anymore. I couldn’t even find this band on YouTube.”

“Since when are you and Damon close enough to borrow albums, anyway?” Elena asks. She sounds annoyed by the very notion.

Enzo makes intense eye contact with the peas. Perhaps, he does not suggest, because he is hiding in a closet, less shamed by the lack of clothing than by shutting himself in a closet in the first place, they had grown close during the prolonged stretch of forced proximity, during which it was them against an empty, uncaring world.

“Prison world,” Bonnie says, vindicatingly. There’s a sigh. “Elena, you didn’t have to come.”

“I wasn’t going to let you go alone,” Elena retorts. “I know you think you’re friends now or something, but, Bon. It’s not going to be the same now that he doesn’t need you to escape anymore.”

The worst part, Enzo thinks, is that she sounds a little pitying. Poor witch. Left alone with the evil vampire, driven mad by the isolation until up was down and Damon didn’t seem so bad. Because being fed befanged pancakes and given lessons on driving stick—not an euphemism, he’d asked—and generally running around trying to find something to fill the hours with when not searching for an escape is torture on par with a few hundred volts.

Honestly, it sounds rather nice, prison world. He’d get bored eventually, a world without people, but it would take a while. Especially if a friend was there with him. Not that he has many friends to choose from. Guess it’d have to be Damon.

“He’s not even here,” Bonnie very rightfully reminds her.

He’s not sure where Damon is, actually, or what he’s doing. He imagines it involves staring down at a little picture depicting some once sweet now bitter moment whilst standing next a moonlit pond or some such, a single tear rolling down his cheek.

Never mind that it’s high noon.

Or that Damon had mumbled something about more booze while rolling off the bed, then again when he’d hauled himself off the floor.

Enzo’d been a bit preoccupied trying to pull the blanket back on top of the bed to pay much attention. He’d waved as Damon left, before sinking back into the frankly indecently comfortable mattress. Yes, he had been sharing it with more than one bottle, and the alcohol smell was beginning to overpower the shampoo-cologne-Damon, but all the same.

Anyway, he’s sure there was some amount of lovelorn sulking involved in the trip. Hanging around Damon sober has been depressing, recently, what with his girlfriend willingly lobotomizing herself rather than mourn him and all, just to have Damon (and Bonnie, brillant witch she is) return victoriously from the dead. Too late to stop Elena from remembering him as anything but a monster.

The story is a depressing one. No Colleen Bawn or anything, but. Depressing. Man’s got a real case of the morbs.

“Still,” Elena is saying, sounding—well, a little like she’s the only sane person left on the planet, everyone else descending into Damon Salvatore tolerating (or worse, liking) madness.

Enzo hasn’t spoken to her much—especially after the compulsion where she erased every good aspect of his best and only friend because mourning him was too much for her, despite her not being alone in missing—

He realizes that he’s glaring at the can of peas. Blinks.

Point is, he doesn’t understand her. Doesn’t particularly want to. Maybe before, when what he knew of her was through all of Damon’s rose-tint, but sorting through the lovesick still left the impression of a woman he’d be interested in knowing, a survivor, protective of family and friends, with an interesting habit of hanging around graveyards because she thinks them peaceful.

But. Not now.

Every time he looks at her now, he sees yet another person who decided Damon was too much.

If the man hadn’t already had a complex, this would have given him one.

Breaking him from his thoughts—he’s scowling at the peas again—Bonnie sighs.

He nearly echoes her. He tried to judge not and all that rot—and wouldn’t the parish be so pleased that some of their rhetoric stuck; right alongside the way he loathes wasting food even after it stopped doing anything for him—and he understands bad decisions born of a grief too strong to think straight. Has made more than a few himself.

He just—doesn’t understand that.

Having someone rewrite your life for you. Give you a happy ending about as real as what you can find on a television screen.

If someone handed him a blade, or a bloody magic button that—at no cost, no pain to himself—would erase every horror in his long, miserable life, he would not use it. But he has spent a long, long time with only his self to his name, only his personality and memories, both kept under the constant, jealous guard of a mind fraying around the edges. Violating that seems… anathema.

But he is not a young woman who has lost loved one after loved one, thrown into a supernatural world less by her own actions and more by twist of fate, only to keep losing people; ending up forever trapped in the world she’d been dragged into.

Differing perspectives and all that.

Or so he keeps reminding himself, every time Damon goes a little too quiet for a little too long.

A cabinet opens. Closes. Another door creaks. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, Elena,” Bonnie says, not delicately, but not without thought. “But—you had something once. And, right now, you only have half the story.”

“I have enough of the story,” Elena rebukes, firm. He doesn’t understand that either. She knows she’s compelled. Knows she’s missing pieces. But seems perfectly content living her life without them.

“Look—“

“What did we even have, Bonnie? How did I get past—? No. That’s not even—look, even if Damon wasn’t a literal monster—he’s still a horrible person.”

“He can be,” Bonnie says neutrally. But that’s not all he is, Enzo finishes for her.

“He is,” says Elena, eliminating room for anything else. “He’s selfish and rude and spiteful. Even if he was human—he’s a lonely alcoholic whose hobbies are booze and sex. It’s creepy, that he thinks he loves me. Maybe he does, in his own way, but Bonnie. It’s more like obsession than love.“

She’s not wrong, is the thing—except for all the things she’s missing. Damon’s selfish, except when he’s not. Rude and spiteful and disrespectful and hilarious. Stubborn and clever and a romantic at heart. Surprisingly gentle, when he thinks he can get away with it. He likes his drink because it makes his world go quiet and he loves touch in a way that makes Enzo think he craves it as much as he does blood. Sex is a part of that but not the sum. And obsession? Call Enzo strange, but he’d always fancied the storybook kind of love. The kind that ends worlds and changes lives and slays dragons.

“He’s not even that hot,” Elena finishes and—

Enzo… hadn’t thought the compulsion affected her vision. Memories, yes. Possibly her personality, given how closely the two are entwined. But she’s seen Damon since his and Bonnie’s return.

Unless the compulsion is warping her perception?

He’s so stuck on the idea of Elena going through life with the compulsion twisting even what she sees—and feeling vaguely pitying about it—that he’s almost surprised when Bonnie says, “The prison world reset. Every day.”

“Yeah,” Elena says, much softer. “You told me that.”

Bonnie soldiers on. “It was driving me—it was hell, Elena. It felt like nothing I did mattered, nothing I’ve ever done mattered, that I didn’t matter. I wasn’t even sure any of you were alive. That the spell worked. It started to get to me. Never having to do dishes because they’d be clean the next morning, nothing growing, nothing changing. The only thing that made it bearable was—”

“Damon,” Elena finishes. “But that’s just—”

“He’s an ass—you know me, I’ve never denied it. But. He grows on you.” Bonnie sighs. “Like a fungus. A really, really annoying fungus.”

“Oh. Did you two…?” Elena asks, sounding like she’s trying not to show disgust.

“No,” Bonnie denies, immediately. If Enzo had to put money on it, he’d say she’s trying not to show hurt. “You’re my best friend, Elena. And you might not remember it, but that guy is gone for you. All I’m saying is that you don’t have to give him another chance. No one is going to make you. But you don’t have the whole story. You made a decision out of pain and grief and no one blames you for it” —Enzo resists the urge to cough; hate to interrupt their moment— “but Elena. I’m worried about you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re under a compulsion no one can remove.”

“I’m fine, Bon.” A pause. “I’m going to go wait in the car.” Footsteps sound, then stop. “But, Bonnie. People keep telling me how much I loved him. So much that I couldn’t live without him. Except—losing you hurt, too. A lot.”

“I’m sorry,” Bonnie starts to say, but Elena interrupts.

“I didn’t erase you. I wouldn’t do that to someone I loved. I think you all have it wrong. I think I just… wanted a reset. A fresh start. So, I’m going to take it. I did this for a reason." Elena hesitates. He doesn't think she believes her own words, when she says, "Maybe Damon isn’t as bad as I think, but... you see something there. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Christ, he’s suddenly glad Damon isn’t here to hear this. It’d reinforce everything he believes about himself.

With that, Elena leaves.

Bonnie doesn’t make a sound for another minute. Then she sighs. A cabinet opens, then shuts. “Where did he put that stupid box?”

Actually. Wasn’t Enzo the one that put that away? He stuck it in the—?

Enzo looks behind him, spots Bonnie’s tea sitting on a shelf.

Ah.

Just as he realizes this piece of information, the pantry door swings open.

He meets Bonnie’s eyes.

Her supremely unimpressed expression does nothing to disguise the way her eyes dip down, down, then lower again, only to flick back up just in time to catch the beginnings of his best aren’t-I-darling? smile.

She frowns.

He grins.

She sighs—she’s been doing that a lot recently—and holds out a hand.

He gropes behind him, then drops the box of tea into it.

The door shuts in his face.

“How do you feel about tequila?” Damon asks, walking into the den with brown paper bags in his arms.

Enzo doesn’t reply. Just stares. Damon’s hair is a mess, at least by his own standards. He’s wearing Enzo’s shirt, actually, and the trousers he’d had on yesterday. It’s not the bottles in those bags that is making the alcohol smell intensify. They’ve been drinking for—what’s today? Saturday?—three days straight.

“Poker,” Enzo decides. He’d dressed earlier, into clean clothing and his favorite jacket. The one he may or may not have pulled off a corpse, but it’s very warm and has just the right amount of pockets.

Damon blinks at him. Squints. “Did you get started without me?”

“Go shower and get changed,” Enzo tells him, resisting the urge to tug at a stray strand of hair. He busies his hands taking the bags away instead.

“What?”

“Shower. Clean clothes. We’re going out.”

“Why?”

Enzo inspects a few of the bottles before setting them onto a table. “Mind your own business.”

Damon makes an offended sound.

Elena won’t believe Damon has more depth than a cartoonishly villainous puddle before she sees it? Alright. In the interest of making Damon happy, he'll help her see it.

Step one: Getting Damon out of the house in a context that doesn’t involve copious amounts of alcohol. Well. Maybe a little alcohol.

Chapter Text

The poker game was a success only in the sense that it got Damon out of the house.

Half utilizing the instincts of someone who’d been paid pennies to haul luggage to and from inns and houses and gambling halls as a boy, and therefore well acquainted spotting all manner of such establishments—and half taking advantage of the wonders of the Internet at his fingertips, even if he does need to get someone (Damon) to explain things like search history and cookies to him again at some point—Enzo’d sniffed out a game at some bar out of town, half an hour down the highway. It was a lively place, chit-chat friendly, even the heckling, pool tables clacking, music loud enough to be heard without being loud enough to necessitate yelling to be heard. Unlike the Grill, there were no familiar faces and friendly (or dismayed) greetings, but that suited the both of them just fine for their purposes.

Their purposes being: Damon, to sulk, preferably while heavily intoxicated and pretending distraction. And Enzo, to distract him in truth, hopefully with a tad less alcohol than usual.

The game itself was fine.

It was the after, when they’d been accused of cheating—which, they were, or at least Enzo was, but there was absolutely no actual proof, so the accusations were absurd and baseless—that the trouble started. Not the fight that broke out, that was fine. He and Damon handily and soundly defeated their drunken opponents before the bouncer even made it across the floor. The fight was a bit too brief to be fun, but nothing’s perfect.

But by the time Enzo was done compelling the bouncer to not kick the two vampires out—he’d hoped for another game or at least another drink—Damon was gone.

He finds him outside, sitting on the curb. The sun has set by now, but the amount of cars jammed near head to tail up along the highway beyond the parking lot do a more than adequate job lighting things up with brightly impatient headlights.

He sits beside him, takes a moment to listen to the distant blare of a horn and the rumble of engines. There’s more than one song playing, strands of music floating out of rolled down windows, a few easier to pick out over others. “Needed some air?”

“You took my car keys,” Damon halfheartedly accuses.

Enzo doesn’t reach to touch the keys sitting in his jacket. He’d snagged them while they were getting drinks, Damon too busy flirting with the bartender by rote instead of actual interest to notice a few stray fingers. “Planning on leaving me here?”

Damon’s silence is its own answer.

He doesn’t bother sighing. “Least you stayed for your car, even if you wouldn’t stay for me.”

He means it as a joke. Mostly.

It is not received as one. “You know the way home,” Damon near sneers, breath reeking of whiskey and violence. “Find a ride.”

Enzo smirks, perfunctory. Pats at his pocket. Metal clinks. “Got one, don’t I?”

Traffic shifts and light shifts with it, headlights passing over Damon’s face just to illuminate the snarl. “Fuck. Off.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Enzo says lightly. He drops the levity a second later and is distantly pleased to notice that Damon is paying closer attention now. Still hurting and angry for it, but less reflexive lashing out. “How many times do I have to say it? You’re not all that scary, mate.”

Damon is pale under the LED lights. Eyes bright, expression dark. He is, Enzo thinks, very deliberately stretching out his legs in a show of relaxed boredom, very obviously itching for a fight. There’s still blood on his knuckles, from punching one of the men still inside the bar. “Or you’re just too dumb to be scared,” he suggests, smirk calculated in just the right way to show off his teeth.

“Didn’t leave you alone when you were all ready to rip off my head and eat me, not going to leave just because you’re in a mood.” It’s never space Damon wants. It’s someone to chase after him. Enzo’ll be that person however long he needs to be.

At the reminder of the virus, Damon doesn’t flinch. Still too angry for the theatrical wince he’d normally make, for the joking imitation of apology slid across the bar or top of a pool table like its existence is enough to convey that there is real regret there, only it is too tender and too delicate to be shown. “Why did you drag me out here?”

“Because I wanted to play poker?”

“Yeah, yeah, and I’m the only friend you have. Have you considered that you could make other friends?” Traffic moves again and light cuts across his face like a knife. He wields his next words like one too. “Or maybe you can’t. Or maybe” —his eyes widen, like the thought just occurred to him; a bit of pure theatricality, just to drive his point home— “you’re scared to. Can’t deal with the real world, so you cling to me. That’s it, right? I’m just ‘the only thing you have left?’ Don’t you think it’s time to let go of the apron strings?”

There’s a spark of anger, then. He smothers it, because that’s what Damon wants. To make him angry. To make him leave. It’ll satisfy his sad little faith in his own self-worth. Good enough for a good time. Not good enough to make anyone stay. “Do not,” he says, measured as strychnine, “tell me what I feel. I could have left. I could have left as soon as I got out—or as soon as you disappeared off the face of the earth. It was my choice to stay. Not out of fear or lack of better options. I’ve made my life over more than once. I can do it again. I stayed, Damon,” he leans in, Damon doesn’t lean back and his edge isn’t gone nor even diminished, “because I wanted to.”

It’s a choice he made, it’s a choice he’s still making and no one gets to undermine that. Enzo has choices now, more than if he’ll try not to scream today or not.

“Damon,” he says, and if Damon is going for cutting, then he is going for blunt force damage, “have you ever considered that I enjoy spending time with you?”

He probably could have broken out into song and have gotten less of a there-and-gone look of sheer surprise.

He presses on. “Because I do. Enjoy spending time with you. Even if you’re being a git.”

Damon watches him for a long moment. Long enough that cars pass, taking their music and laughter and impatient swearing with them, just to be replaced by new ones with the same sounds in different measurements. Whatever it is he reads from Enzo—pure stubbornness, probably—makes him look away. His jaw unclenches. So do his fists.

Enzo joins him in looking out at the road. They watch traffic for a while, ignoring and being ignored by the bar patrons going in and out, who surely think them both drunks waiting for a ride. The men they’d gotten into a fight with limp out of the bar eventually. One of them notices where Damon and Enzo sit, but Enzo silently convinces him that a rematch isn’t worth it. Picking a fight with two vampires is one thing. Doing it at night right next to an alley without security cameras is another. The human doesn’t know that of course, but some instinct tells him it’d be a bad idea anyway and he stays silent even when his friends begin to complain of being kicked out because of a pair of asshole cheaters. The group leaves, taking the smell of beer and blood and their whinging with them.

“I wasn’t going to punch him,” Damon says, so quietly that Enzo almost thinks he’d been one of the car radios.

When Enzo glances at him from the corner of his eye, it’s to find him looking at his hands again, instead of the direction the men had walked off in like he’d half expected. The blood has dried. Some of it has begun to flake. There’s no blood on Enzo’s, but only because he went for the ribs instead of the face. “Then why did you?”

Damon shrugs. Sighs through his nose. “I just… wanted to break something. Didn’t really care what. A glass. A wall. Some guy’s face.”

“He did call your mum a bitch.”

Damon snorts. He lifts a shoulder in an uncaring sort of shrug. “Eh.”

Enzo leans to the side, presses his shoulder against Damon’s. After being in the night air for so long, the other vampire is nearly hot to touch. Damon presses back, just briefly. “I liked the one who called me a, what was it?”

“Red coated tea bag sucking pissant?” Damon provides, smiling slightly.

“That. Never wore a fucking red coat, but I’ll give him points for not just defaulting to motherfucker like the others.”

“Seventy percent sure one of them actually said motherfudger.”

“What, really?”

“Seventy percent. It happened right as that one guy started screaming that I broke his nose. I didn’t even break his nose!”

“Just bloodied it.” Enzo chuckles.

But Damon doesn’t laugh. “I wasn’t even angry.” Quieter again. Withdrawn. “He was just… there. And I had an excuse. So I did. I do that sometimes. Just. Blank out and boom. Someone’s face is broken. Or,” more sardonically, a dark joke he’s aimed at himself, “someone’s neck.”

They fall silent. Then both startle as a scream erupts from one of the cars. It’s quickly followed by a chorus of giggles, so someone’s unlikely to have just died. Enzo looks at Damon from the corner of his eye. Midnight has come and gone and the whole adventure seems to have done more damage than anything. The other vampire is staring out at the car the scream came from with a raised eyebrow, head tilted like he’s listening in to whatever’s going on. Enzo doesn’t bother. He can’t bring himself to care. If it’s interesting, Damon’ll tell him on the ride home.

Odd word, home. But one Enzo has come to enjoy saying. He says it now. “Do you want to go home?”

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.” Damon stands. Traffic’s cleared up a bit. He watches the cars go past for only a moment, before turning back to Enzo and extending a hand.

Enzo takes it, lets Damon haul him up. Then freezes when he pulls him in close. Damon’s still a grip on his arm and this isn’t a hug, but they’re close enough that it might as well be and—

Damon finishes fishing his car keys out of Enzo’s jacket. “I’m driving.”

The next day, bright and early, Enzo pulls open the curtains of Damon’s room.

His room is one in the same wing, but a few doors down. He also has a place actually in town that he’s stepped foot in maybe thrice since Damon’s return to the land of the living, but given that he spends no time there, he should probably stop paying to house the quarter of his wardrobe that had stayed behind.

From his place on the bed—oh, he’d actually slept; the bottles lined neatly beside the bed make it clear as to why—Damon blinks up at him, squinting at the sudden bright light and seemingly struck dumb. It’s quite a look, the bed head and the wide eyes. Takes off half a decade—or maybe just some of the polish he uses to cover up the fact that he’s forever a man who can’t grow a full beard.

(No razors in Augustine. The other vampire looked like a spottily shorn sheep at some points.)

“Hello,” Enzo says, sing-song, just to be as annoying about things as possible.

“What?” Damon says.

“I’ve booked us a rage room. We’ve two hours to get there, but I figured we’d grab breakfast first.”

“What?”

“You want to break things,” Enzo says, moving to stand by the bed. Damon’s face falls out of his is-this-some-strange-nightmare squint and into blankness. Even that falls away and back into confusion when Enzo continues cheerily with: “And, for some reason, you don’t want it to be people. Hence: rage room. Full of inanimate stuff just waiting to be smashed into a wall.”

He unceremoniously yanks off Damon’s blankets. Damon tries to yank them back, but Enzo dances back out of reach. That leaves the other vampire still laying in bed, naked and pissed.

“Enzo, what the hell?”

Enzo drops the blankets. “We won’t go if you really don’t want to” —mostly because it is difficult to transport an angry vampire without resorting to chains and vervain— “but, Damon—”

Damon glares.

Your constant alcohol-soaked sulking is not conducive to my plan of getting you your girl back.

I worry about you.

I want you to be happy.

All true. All probably a bit much to say straight to the face of Damon’s fragile, fragile ego so early in the morning.

“—I’ve already booked it and there’s no refunds. So, get up.”

The rage room is a hit.

After a few waivers, they’re left alone with a baseball bat, a fire axe, and a pile of junk. They don’t talk much, but they do take turns throwing things at each other and smashing them with the bat. Enzo ends up putting it through the wall at one point, which resulted in them both breaking into laughter and having to compel the room’s staff into not thinking sinking an entire bat through a wall was odd.

Enzo walks out whistling. Damon walks out missing some of the tension he’s carried around with him for months. It’s no quick fix or anything, but it wasn’t time wasted either.

It was fun.

Simple, easy fun, that didn’t involve pain or drinking it away.

When Enzo says something about doing it again sometime. Damon makes some pithy sentence about them running out of stuff to break, which really just means yes, but he doesn’t want to admit it.

They stick around the city for a while, wandering in and out of shops as things catch their eye. Mostly Enzo, who still isn’t quite over all the new things he’s constantly stumbling across. Old news to most, but not to someone who’d been trapped in a basement. He’s more used to things now, having been free for enough time to get used to life now. But he still occasionally runs across things he’s never seen before.

At one point, Enzo may have started a twenty minute dialogue with a bored but passionate pet store employee about tarantula care; Damon ditching him to go off somewhere where the words ‘egg sacks’ and ‘molting’ weren’t being thrown around. Enzo’d not been able to keep from smiling when he overheard Damon talking to the cats at the other end of the store. He’s sure he looked like a loon, given there’s no way a human could’ve overheard Damon speaking, but the person he was talking to didn’t seem to notice, too busy going on about proper enclosures for arachnids.

After leaving the pet store, Damon accidentally-on-purpose knocks into his shoulder.

“Yes?” says Enzo, shoving him back.

“I like hanging out with you too.” A slight pause. “I’m never saying that again, B.T. W. Not after you made me listen to someone rant about the mating habits of spiders in captivity.”

Animals, he decides next. Or rather, the world decides for him, one rainy evening.

It is raining and Enzo is covered in muck—and also a teensy bit of blood, but that’s fine, both tiny little punctures have healed ages ago.

He opens the Boarding House’s front door, after noting the extra cars parked out front. Bonnie’s and Caroline’s. He, by virtue of basically living here, instead of just spending a good chunk of free time as the others do, gets to park around back. He’s going to have to clean it later. The passenger seat is a bit… filthy. Given the mud. And worse.

“How was—?” Damon starts, as Enzo makes his way into the den. He’s not tracking mud, he’d kicked off his shoes by the door, but Damon still stops and stares at him like he is anyway. “Why are you soaked?”

“Rain,” Enzo explains, nodding at Caroline and Bonnie. Stefan is glanced at. “Hold out your hands.”

“No. Why?” Damon asks, still, notably, doing as asked.

“Cat,” Enzo summarizes.

“Wha—?”

Enzo scoops the kitten out of his pocket, it waking as he does so, and then plops it into Damon’s outstretched hands.

“Cat,” he says again, just as the thing starts to cry at being exposed to the cold, cold air and the scrutiny of three vampires and a witch.

He nods once. Then leaves to go warm up in a shower.

And to wash off the cat piss.

By the time he makes it downstairs again, the kitten is clean, dry, and warm, and Damon has a very small bottle held up to the thing’s mouth, which it seems happy to suck on.

“You work fast,” Enzo notes. There’s an empty plastic bag laying discarded by a chair. No one bothers looking at him except Stefan, who seems oddly constipated for a vampire. Not a fan of kittens, maybe?

“Tomorrow?” Caroline is saying into her phone. “What about today? Oh, you’re booked? And you don’t accept—? Okay! Thanks anyway!”

“Another one?” Bonnie asks, one finger hovering near the kitten like she wants to stroke it. Or lay a curse.

Caroline scowls in a manner that leaves Enzo reminiscing about assassinations in Atlanta. “Another one! I’m going to have to bump out our radius. Again. How is there not a single vet in this town that’s open today?” She mumbles something about compulsion and appointments and notably, no one argues against her.

“Enzo,” says Damon, doing a terrible job of sounding annoyed. “Cat?”

Enzo, clean and mostly dry, plops down next to him on the couch. It puts him within arm's length of Bonnie, who is on Damon’s other side and is as close as possible without squishing vampire or feline. “What did you want me to do, leave it in a gutter?”

“Surprised you didn’t,” Stefan says, too evenly to be anything but snide.

“Some of us consider small animals cute, rather than snacks,” Enzo says, smiling at him. Somehow, this seems to make the man angry, because he glares. It’d possibly be more intimidating if Enzo cared. At all.

“Shush,” says Caroline, typing away at her phone. “You’re going to scare the baby.” This seems to be the final word, because Stefan stops glaring, though Enzo reckons it’s more out of self preservation than sudden lack of irritability.

“How old do you think it is?” Bonnie asks.

Damon shrugs carefully. The kitten is making happy little squeaks, or possibly it needs to pee again. “Not old enough to be on its own.” He eyes it for a second. “Four weeks?”

“It’s a baby baby,” Bonnie says, delicately touching the tip of the thing’s little fuzzy tail.

Caroline puts down her phone. At the look on her face, Enzo instinctively straightens in his seat. “Right,” she says, sounding as though she’s laying out a battle plan, “this is what we need to do…”

The kitten is given the best of care four vampires and a witch can muster through the night then is driven to the veterinarian in the morning. Given a check up, some new kitten formula, and a few medications, the kitten is taken in by Caroline, who swears she’s going to find it the best possible forever home.

“She’s going to end up keeping it,” Damon says unblinking. He sends Enzo a mildly accusing look. Enzo, who had done his time on kitten duty just the same as he had, opens his hands in a ‘guilty’ gesture.

Beside him, Bonnie just nods. “I’ll bet you she ends up teaching it tricks.”

“No bet,” says Stefan, setting a bag of ‘totally temporary’ cat toys and cat furniture down onto the table, to be transported to Caroline’s house later.

Chapter Text

The cat, maybe, perhaps, played the part of a small, fluffy herald. Or harbinger. Omen, even.

That is to say, Enzo did in fact notice that Damon grumbled and groaned and took very good care of the little kitten and had been wholly present and gentle whenever he had it in hand.

So, he, maybe, might’ve, done his best to see such again.

Some attempts went over better than others.

“Enzo, why the fuck is there a snapping turtle in my living room?”

“Is that what it’s called? Apt. Almost took a chunk out of me.” Or two. Or six.

Damon, just returned home from his day out—also known as warming a barstool from open to close at the Mystic Grill, addresses the turtle on the floor: “Why are you in my house?”

The turtle does not answer, nor even seems to register the other vampire’s presence. Just keeps glaring at Enzo with a malice one would think would be reserved for hares. Or was that tortoises with the grudge?

Given the turtle’s not likely to answer, Enzo does it: “It was in the road.” He’d thought it trash until it began moving. “Didn’t think it could beat a car in a fight, so I moved it. Though, now that I’m thinking of it, it is built a bit like a tank.” He very briefly pictures it on the march, infantry and lighter artillery around it. It’d probably eat them.

Exasperated blue eyes do their best to pin Enzo into place. “None of that explains why there is a reptile getting dirt on my floors.”

“I’m taking it to the lake later. The internet tells me they do best in—wait, where are you going?”

Damon has turned on his heel and is walking away. “A bar!”

“You just got back from the—”

The door closes.

Enzo frowns down at where the turtle is doing its best to charge his boots. “I was going to ask if he’d wanted to go with us.”

Damon walks back in ten minutes later, just as Enzo is coming to a close on peace negotiations with the turtle. They had been a failure. He’d retreated to sit cross legged on the coffee table and watching it very obviously trying to figure out the best way to bite him. Who knew turtles could be so aggressive?

“How was the bar?” Enzo asks, knowing full well the man never left the driveway.

“Shut up and get off my goddamn coffee table.” Without hesitation, he bends down and scoops the scaly tyrant up.

Enzo expects it to bite him—it’d been quite a feat getting the thing safely inside the house—but when the turtle extends its neck and tries, it’s unable to reach where Damon is holding it near the back of its shell.

“Oh, nice,” says Enzo, flexing his fingers. None had come off, but it had been close. He really wasn’t expecting a turtle of all things to be so hostile. Suppose it’s fair. Enzo’d bite a giant that had picked him up too.

The turtle is deposited into the lake outside of town with no further casualties.

“That’s my good deed of the year,” Damon says, sitting on the dock and watching as the ripples smooth away.

Sitting next to him, Enzo looks out over the water, taking a moment to enjoy the way the last rays of the day’s sunlight hit it. The wood underneath him is still sun warm, even as the breeze cools. The air is thick with the scents and sounds of nature. It’s oddly peaceful, the lap of water and distant call of birds. There are worse places for a turtle to be. “Think it’ll do alright?”

Enzo catches the look Damon gives him from the corner of his eyes. In a tone that is absolutely mocking, he says, “I’m sure it’s fine. Probably already terrorizing all the fish.” He scoffs. “I can’t believe we drove all the way out here for a turtle.”

“Did you have something better to do?” Enzo asks him.

That hits. Damon huffs a ghost of a laugh. “Guess not.”

“We should come back some time.”

“Are you on some kind of nature kick?”

“No.” He thinks about the walks he’s been taking, early in the mornings, through the woods and away from people—and Stefan, who sometimes leaves at the same time Enzo does to hunt. He likes the quiet. Not usually. Usually he can’t stand it, and prefers conversation or music to distract him from his thoughts, but it’s different, somehow, out in the open, no walls, no roof. It’s not as though the woods are ever truly quiet, anyway. Always some bird or animal or insect making some kind of noise, if one listens. “Maybe. God, I’m turning into a naturalist.”

He did quite enjoy Civil Disobedience. He’d read it as a human. Far, far after it’d been published, of course. It’d been—sometime after he’d begun working for the factory. He’d been renting a room with some of the other workers and had kept the manuscript under his bunk. It’d been hard to read; the copy had been handwritten and the writing was uneven and smudged and it’s not as though they had sprung for a room with windows, so he’d had to read it outside on his days off. When he had days off and wasn’t picking up work by the docks. He’d had to sound out more than one word—his reading still shaky at that point, though he’d been bribing a scribe down the street with hand pies from his favorite stall to give him the occasional lesson. Something about it had stuck. What a concept to a workhouse boy—who’d grown up with piety and gratefulness and his place drilled into him all his life. He’d laughed at it, of course. Once he’d understood what the author was trying to say. The very idea of just—saying no, I shouldn’t be chucked into a gaol for the crime of daring to look poor while out on the street or refusing to wear that godawful workhouse uniform or speaking out in earnest when his one time employers accused him of thievery because he’d been the youngest and poorest working for them and he’d escaped prison time by the skin of his teeth and the candlesticks turning up in the hands of a estranged relative instead before they could put him to trial. He’d have been clobbered for lip.

Breaking him from his thoughts, Damon elbows him. “Okay, Where’s Walden, get up. It’s time to go.”

“We just got here.” Not quite accurate. The sun had gone down while Enzo was lost in thought.

Damon stands, stretches, and makes a face that means he’s dearly missing a bottle. “Yeah, well, I’m too sober for eighteenth century philosophy.”

Enzo glances across the lake one last time and half imagines he can see the head of that turtle poking out of the water, watching them go with beady little eyes. “Fair.”

“Okay, you know you can’t keep it, right?”

Enzo watches, entranced, as the little fawn wobbles after Damon, hooves slipping on the hardwood before it makes it to the safety of carpet. It’s all limbs and ears and big eyes.

Damon stops in front of him, ignoring the little spotted deer swinging its head around to take in the living room from a view of knee height.

“I know,” he says, looking away one he realizes his attention is making the thing nervous. “But I found it laying out back under a bush and we both heard coyotes last night. Didn’t want to leave it.”

“You kill people but you want to save Bambi?”

Enzo shrugs, then nods.

The deer takes a tentative step closer and bleats quietly. Damon doesn’t acknowledge it. Except for the way his eyes dart down and he very quickly checks that it hasn’t fallen. The deer trots one step closer to him. “I don’t think you’ve thought this through.“

“Yes, I have. Checked the internet. This one’s old enough to eat solid foods, so I don’t need to worry about goat milk. There’s the salad stuff you have for Bonnie in the fridge—which,” he adds at Damon’s raised eyebrow, “I will replace. Once the coyotes move on, or I scare them off if they take too long, I’ll put it back where I found it. Its mother picks it back up. Everyone’s happy.”

“Uh huh.” Damon smirks. “Except the coyotes.”

“Except the coyotes,” Enzo concedes.

Damon hums, considering him for a moment. “You know, Stefan is going to be home soon. And then you’ll have more to worry about than coyotes.”

Enzo very slowly looks towards the door.

“You can’t kick me out of my own house!” Stefan calls from outside.

“Can, have, did,” Enzo calls back. “Kip somewhere else!”

There’s a frustrated noise and what sounds a lot like a boot against a door.

“He didn’t have his keys?” Damon asks quietly. Whether to prevent his brother from overhearing or to keep from further spooking the fawn, Enzo’s not sure.

“Stefan never takes his keys when he goes out hunting in the afternoons,” Enzo says distractedly, phone ringing. And ringing. And ringing out... “Bit of a security issue, honestly.”

He dials again.

“This is kind of fun,” Damon says.

Enzo doesn’t need to look at him to know that he’s smiling in that mean-looking way that just means he’s honestly amused. He looks anyway. Just because. Damon’s on the couch, the fawn curled at his feet and occasionally reaching out for a bite of the greenery piled in front of it. A tarp had been put down, then an older rug overtop of that once the little thing had begun sliding again. Maybe Enzo should’ve brought him a panther instead of a baby deer. Something sleek and carnivorous. It would match that languid stretch, the smile, glint of teeth that is half lazy-threat, half-entertained.

“What is?” The phone rings out again and Enzo turns to stare down at it, curses running through his mind.

“Watching you panic.”

His finger pauses before he can hit redial. “Panic?”

“Panic.” It’s said with bone-picking relish.

“I don’t panic.”

Guns don’t make him panic. Bombs don’t make him panic. The sight of his own small intestine doesn’t make him panic. One animal eating vampire certainly isn’t going to manage. It’s just common sense. First thing you do when you have cargo. Secure the area. If that means locking Stefan out of the house, then so be it.

“You flipped out and locked Stefan outside because…?”

“Didn’t save the thing from coyotes just to have your brother eat it, did I?” Something occurs to him. “God, he probably ate Bambi’s mother.”

This realization is punctuated by a leafy crunch. There’s a moment’s commiseration with a fellow orphan before he shakes it off.

He gets Caroline on the phone after another try. He has to promise a favor—no time limit, no questions asked—but he does manage to arrange to have her call Stefan and invite him over for the night. He suggests faking an emergency. She laughs at him and hangs up.

There’s another bang at the door. The fawn flinches, curling up into itself.

“Stefan,” Damon says calmly, barely raising his voice. “If you kick that door one more time, I’m going to take every scuff mark out on your knick-knack collection.”

The noises stop.

“What. Is wrong with you?” Stefan sounds like he dearly wishes to know the answer.

He’d returned from Caroline’s the next day, cat hair on his trouser legs and in a suspiciously good mood for someone who was so angry over being—justifiably—kicked out of his house. Even if he most likely wouldn’t have eaten the deer, his face would probably have scared the poor thing. Enzo’s certainly never seen him without a scowl or a carefully neutral but distinctively disapproving expression.

The coyotes had been scared off, the fawn had made it back to its mother, Damon had spent the entire time silently laughing at him, but everything turned out alright in the end.

And he’d found another cat out on one of his walks.

(Damon had started making jokes about it—called him Thoreau. That had lasted about as long as it’d taken Enzo to start making tree puns. Damon stopped after the fifth iteration of leaf it be.)

Enzo hauls the kitten up closer to his chest. It’d been trying to sniff at the couch. It’s an energetic, curious little thing, a bit larger than the last one. All stripes and spots and snarl. “Aside from seven-ish decades of constant suffering?”

“No, there’s something else,” Stefan says without missing a beat. “Can’t quite put my finger on it. But it’s probably your face.”

Enzo watches him for a moment, until the man is just the littlest bit visibly uncomfortable.

“Why are you staring at me?”

“No reason.” Enzo smiles. Stefan’s face goes guarded at the sight of it. “Only, has anyone told you you sound a bit like your brother when you’re annoyed?” It’s the tone. The same hint of impatient annoyance, like it’s their burden to inform you of how much a failure of a human being you are and they resent that they have to spend their energy doing it.

For a split second, Stefan’s eyes round and the scowl falls away. It makes him look his physical age, for once. Or younger than. The youthfulness disappears a second later, walls slammed back up, eyebrows bunched and lips downturned and pulled thin. “You do know you’re holding a bobcat?”

“A—?” Enzo looks down at the kitten. It bats at his face. “Hm.”

Stefan’s entire face twitches. “Just… put it back where you found it. Before its mother tracks it down.”

Bringing home wild animals hadn’t turned out as he’d hoped, so he turned to domestic ones.

“That is a rat. Why do you have a rat?”

“He’s a handsome fellow, isn’t he?”

“You don’t even like rats,” Damon points out, like he’s not sure why Enzo has forgotten this fact.

“I like them fine outside of trenches, ships, graveyards, and so long as I’m not immobile.” He hadn’t had that nightmare in a while, actually. Probably be due for it soon. “This little man belongs to Danny—“

“Who the fuck is Danny?”

“The librarian? How long have you lived here? Do you just not talk to people? No, never mind I already know the answer to that one—Danny is going to Maine for a wedding and needed someone to watch him.“

“You're babysitting a rodent?”

“Rodentsitting, if you would. Lestat is a grown rat.”

“Le—? No.”

“I know.” There is providence, then there is Enzo’s acquaintance having a pet named for a vampire. He’d requested introduction not a moment after learning of it. “Could’ve just named him Lestrat and it would’ve been much funnier, and Danny agreed with me, but Lestat’s already used to his name. Said it seemed cruel to change it for a joke.”

“A pun would not improve things. Wait, what’re you—? Why are you bringing it here?”

“Look! He does tricks.”

Lestat the Rat, he of the white splotched face and perpetually sleepy demeanor, extends a small paw to shake upon prompting. Enzo’s seen plenty of street shows, but Lestat is by far the most charming little actor he’s ever seen.

Damon looks down at it. Up at Enzo. Down again. He reluctantly shakes the rat's paw, immediately wiping his hands on his jeans as soon as he finishes. Rude. Lestat is quite a clean creature. No mange, no fleas, both ears intact. “How long is it going to be in the house?”

Enzo gives Lestat a bit of cereal in appreciation of him playing along. “Only two days.”

He’s set the cage up in the room he uses and was given a truly astonishing amount of supplies for a mere two days. It’s a small enough favor, though, given Danny doesn’t mind Enzo’s occasional haunting of the library. And for teaching him how to properly use search engines—that alone is worth a discreet murder or two, rat sitting is nothing.

“Right.” A sigh. A glare. A squeak. “Stay away from my books.”

“Lestat has a great respect for books,” Enzo informs Damon’s retreating back. “He assists in storytime on Thursdays.”

Two days later, as promised, Lestat is returned to Danny hale, whole, and in good spirits. Good spirits as far as Enzo could tell. The critter had spent much of his time asleep or digging through the bedding of his enclosure. Enzo had read to him for a while, to help him feel at home, but he’s not sure the rat had much taste for A Mermaid Princess’ Perfect Pearl.

Enzo is also in good spirits, incidentally, mostly because his plan had worked. After enough extolling of Lestat’s many virtues—or possibly in effort of trying to get him to shut up—Damon gave in and held the rat. Who is very used to being passed around between strangers, including children during group reading days, and therefore was impressively calm throughout Damon’s griping.

He’d even cracked a small smile—Damon, not Lestat—though he’d wiped it off his face as soon as he realized Enzo was looking at him.

On the second night, with Lestat snug in his cage, Damon had taken one look at Enzo standing at his bedroom doorway and had wordlessly offered him one of the bottles he’d been drinking from.

Holding a rat is one thing. Apparently sleeping in the same room as one is a step too far. He’d woken in a cold sweat from a nightmare. Trapped in a coffin, vermin scurrying and nibbling over and at him while being transported in some Burke and Hare business dealing, the coffin lid opening to show Dr. Whitmore waxy face.

He hadn’t said the word nightmare. No doubt it’d been written on his face, in the lines of askew clothes, the messy state of his hair. But he hadn’t said it. They never say it. Those nights one or the other or the both of them can’t sleep. Sometimes they drink. Sometimes they just sit in the same room. Occasionally they leave the house and spend their time surrounded by a crowd, just to prove they can. The word nightmare never passes between them, but sometimes they fall asleep in the same bed, body next to them proof enough for subconscious minds to calm.

One more perk of having Damon back. Enzo is getting much more restful sleep these days.

“Danny, huh?” Damon says idly, once Enzo had bunkered down next to him. He’d pulled his favorite blanket from the closet, the thick woolen one that somehow always smells fresh. “A librarian. Gettin’ freaky in the stacks?”

That would probably be a better answer than the one he has. He goes for the truth, anyways, just because he can. “No. Danny’s a… friend.”

Damon tosses his bottle down, now empty. It clatters off the others. None break, but Enzo wouldn’t be surprised if there was broken glass wedged in a floorboard or under the bed somewhere. “A friend?” And it must be a bad night, because his voice is flat instead of teasing. “That mean I can stop being the one that’s dragged out on turtle rescue missions?”

Arranging his blanket just so, Enzo laughs quietly. “No, you’re not escaping that easy.”

Damon exhales. “Damn.”

He rolls over in bed to face Enzo. Damon’s lips quirk up, eyes on the way he’s all but bundled himself up in his blanket. “What are you doing at the library so often, if you’re not banging the librarian? All your shitty smut novels are here. And we’ve got plenty of other books if you want something better to read.”

“Firstly,” Enzo says, kicking at him. “Fuck you.”

Damon kicks back and Enzo’s too well blanketed to dodge. Enzo kicks him again anyway, which ends with them both ruffled and shoving at each other, Enzo having extracted his arms from the blanket to better wrestle. He ends up on top of Damon, whose struggle is mostly just for show by this point.

Pinning him to the covers—Damon could kick him, could throw him clear across the room, could lean up and bite out his throat, but he doesn’t, he just lays there looking put upon and tragic, it’s a talent, really—Enzo says: “Those books are literary treasures. Where else am I supposed to find dialogue like ‘She flopped on the bed in ecstasy, half like a fish, half like a woman, like she is?’”

“Stop talking. Please.”

No mercy, Enzo continues. “Or, ‘Melody sank in despair, like a stone or a rock or something heavy in the sparklingly clear water she called home, even her bosom was no longer so perky’—unf.”

Damon had shoved him off. Enzo lands on his back on the bed.

“Never talk to me again,” Damon tells him. They’d somehow ended up swapping places, so he makes himself at home in Enzo’s blanket, the bastard.

“You read Twilight. You recommended it to me.” Enzo had read it to see what it was about and because knowing what the popular culture says about vampires is always interesting. And because Damon had made a face like Enzo had whacked him in the face with a fish the first time he’d made a joke about it.

“Twilight is not weird mermaid porn!” Damon then seemingly realizes that he’s defending a novel where the love interest is just a shinier, redheaded version of his younger brother.

“Twilight wishes it was weird mermaid porn,” Enzo shoots back, yanking his blanket out from under Damon while he’s thinking hard about his life choices.

Damon doesn’t respond, just keeps staring up at the ceiling in despair. He’s sprawled out on his back—like a starfish with bed head and a bad attitude.

“Computer lessons, if you must know,” Enzo says, re-tucking himself in.

Damon doesn’t even look at him. “Enz, you’re doing that thing again. You’ve got to say the whole sentence out loud—I can’t read your mind.”

“Thank god,” Enzo says without missing a beat, “then you’d realize how many more thoughts I have in comparison and get all mopey about it—no, grumpy, Danny’s teaching me how to use a computer.”

“Oh.”

“Should’ve done it sooner, but“ —he’d been a bit busy running around trying to dig up ways to get Damon back; focusing on the arcane instead of technology— “I never found the time.”

He is seventy percent sure Danny thinks he’d escaped from some underground cult, actually. Which is… close enough that Enzo lets the matter lie. It’s a good explanation for his confusion in the face of some modern things, the way he occasionally drifts off mid-conversation. The way he has days where he can’t quite stand being too close to people.

“Oh,” Damon says quieter. “I could have…”

“Not your job to hold my hand,” Enzo tells him, stretching comfortably. Coincidence knocks his ankle into Damon’s. He doesn’t bother to move it. “Doubt you want to rehash seventy years of history via wikipedia anyway.” Or the hours he’s spent looking up native wildlife after the snapping turtle incident.

“Wouldn’t be the worst thing ever.” Damon lets out a low self deprecating noise. “It’s not like I have anything else to do right now.”

Enzo rolls his eyes and pats blindly at the man. He ends up petting at Damon’s chest. “You let me live in your home, inflict you with my literature, and drag you into rehoming angry turtles. Don’t act like you never do anything for me.”

At some point, Damon corners him.

Literally.

Herds him right up against the kitchen counter while he’s trying some of that new coffee Damon’s ordered him, making fun of the instant stuff Enzo was drinking all the while. Enzo used to get coffee in the early mornings from a corner stall, bitter and hot against London’s chill. Then from army mess, when they had it. Importing coffee beans specifically from some small farm out in the world somewhere seems ridiculously self indulgent.

Good news: Ridiculously self indulgent is the name of the game these days. He’s a new lease on his former lab rat life. May as well enjoy it.

Hands flat on the counter, Enzo resists the urge to lean back a little even as Damon leans in, eyes intense. “Lorenzo.” A little thrill goes through him. Damon never uses his full name. ”Do you want a pet?”

It takes an embarrassingly long time for him to realize that Damon means an animal and isn’t, in fact, asking Enzo if he’d like to be pet.

“No?” He wants to try that coffee. It smells delicious in the pot.

Damon leans in closer. “What’s with all the strays?”

To make you smile, he does not say, because he values things like being able to drink his stupidly expensive coffee without Damon pouting at him. Not to say he dislikes Damon pouting at him. It’s just if the man figures out Enzo finds his sulking even remotely close to cute, there’s a good chance some manner of revenge will be unleashed. Actually. That could be fun. He shelves the thought for a rainy day.

“I like animals?” he tries.

Damon makes a noise like a buzzer. “Nuh-uh. Try again.”

Okay, so Enzo isn’t an ardent fan of pet ownership—pets in general, yes, sure, fine. He would never begrudge a man his dog. Or a woman her dog. Or either their cats. Point being, he understands companionship and he understands the comradery between an overworked mule and the boy freezing his tits off to break ice for it to drink. He just. Never particularly wanted a pet of his own. Too much work to feed another soul, when he was a boy. Didn’t really want to end up with any mutt he could have had in a stewpot. Couldn’t keep it and keep his bed in the workhouse anyway. He’d worked beside plenty of animals; cabbie horses and working dogs, and mail pigeons. Lived beside street cats and dogs and all of London’s beasts. Butchered more than a fair few creatures, when he worked for the butcher’s shop. Then he was too busy working to do more than feed the occasional stray. Then he was a vampire, taming his bloodlust best he was able. Then he was in the army, flying planes instead of mounting calvary. Out for a few years, but he never did more than pet a few dogs. Army again. And then—

He could have one now, he supposes.

So long as no one out there decides to post his pet to him in the mail.

The thought settles in, sitting a little oddly at first: he could get a pet now, if he wanted. He’s… not sure he does. What he does know is that it’s nice to have the option.

“I do like animals, actually,” Enzo says, shifting a bit so he’s sitting on the counter instead of it digging into his back.

What would he even get? Something furry? Something with scales? He’d say something useful, a horse or a hound or a ratter, but… he’s no use for any of those things. He doesn’t ride or hunt or herd. The Boarding House is free of vermin. A guard dog would only get in the way. No point in getting chickens or goats or a cow when they’d be decoration instead of necessity. Except, that’s not the question, was it; those would be working animals or livestock, not something to dote on, there solely for companionship.

He tries to picture himself with a dog. A small one, to sit on his lap? A big one? Something to take on walks with him, except all he can see is that same dog, blurry and headless and stuffed into a mailbox.

Damon steps in closer, still looking at him intently, like he’s watched all the thoughts Enzo’s had flicker through his eyes and is cataloguing each one. “You like learning weird facts about animals. But now you keep bringing home forest critters and reading rats or whatever. Enzo, if you want a pet… we can make that happen.”

The same little zing goes through him when Damon says we as when he’d called him by full name. “I don’t—” He frowns.

“Doesn’t have to be now,” Damon says, somehow knowing the way Enzo’s thoughts are chasing themselves in circles.

“I’ll think about it,” he says softly.

“Okay. And, in the meantime,” Damon’s grin is a flash of light, “stop bringing home bobcat kittens?”

Chapter Text

It’s a little funny how busy his life is now. The days seem fuller.

He takes walks in the mornings and thinks about—everything and nothing; cloud patterns to dog breeds to dredging up names from history and wondering if he’ll be able to track them down on the internet later at the library. See how they lived and died and maybe if any of them ever wondered the same of him.

When he’s at the library, he reads. Books occasionally. Usually it’s on the computer. Watching current news or old news or consuming article after article about whatever catches his interest. Having so much information at his fingertips is exciting—and daunting, at times. All the things he’s missed, all the things he has to catch up on. He could study a century and still have things to learn. Global weather shifting, disasters and diseases and climate change. Animals discovered and driven extinct. Even the maps are different now, highways cutting across the country; on world maps, nation’s borders have changed. There has been invention after invention after innovation. Space flight. He spent an entire two days on space flight. Then there are the books and movies and music and seventy years of history. He missed the Civil Rights Movement and the AIDs epidemic and more than one war and so many other things—in relation to just one country. He’s sticking with recent American history for now, as it’s immediately more relevant, given his geographical location, but considering how international politics influence everything, he’s still learning about everywhere. He meanders between topics and decades and takes breaks to go say hello to Danny—and Lestat in his cage behind the front desk—to have something to do that isn’t bombarding himself with it all written out, black and white and overwhelming. Danny bears Enzo’s interruptions with grace and will often offer new facts or angles to the things he brings up. He learns how to work a printer. Something that’s easier and more complicated than he’d thought it’d be and Danny swears the finicky old thing likes him better, because it’s never jammed on Enzo.

He drags Damon out of the house every couple of days.

An afternoon drive on Tuesday, taking advantage of the sunshine, windows down and music louder than the wind. Enzo’s fond of his car—red and sleek and responsive under his hands—but is fonder of the way the road stretches on under the cloudless sky. They don’t speak much, but that’s fine. Damon’s eyes are half closed and he mouths along to the words like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it.

Thursday, Enzo signs them up for a pottery class—citing interest in the arts as a reason when pressed. He made a vase. Damon a mug. Neither are the prettiest in the room, but Enzo’s is only minimally lopsided and Damon painted World’s Okayest Brother on his, with a little squirrel sitting underneath the words, one with prominent, angry eyebrows.

Sunday and he coaxes Damon to the park. It begins to rain, so they have the place nearly to themselves and Enzo spends an hour on the swings, enjoying the weightlessness and Damon’s bitching about being wet in equal measure. They talk about space exploration and zero gravity and Enzo laughs too loudly when Damon smirks and wonders cheekily if sex is better or worse on the moon. The sun had come back out eventually, and they’d walked the way home, Damon not wanting to get his car interior damp and Enzo not quite wanting to be in anything with walls.

Damon still drinks like he’s at constant war with a vampire’s tolerance and goes quiet for hours and hours at a time—and some days he doesn’t get out of bed at all, or leaves the house and doesn’t return until the next day or even the next, but—he plays along. That’s all Enzo can really ask for.

He never asks where Damon goes those nights he’s not home; he can guess. And he never asks why Damon indulges him so, even on the days where it’s clear he’d rather the world be blunted by alcohol than live in it. He thinks it has something to do with the long stretches of dark, soul-eating quiet, the way Damon sometimes seems to forget that the world exists outside of his misery. Or maybe wants to forget. Maybe he likes that Enzo drags him out into the light. His brother seems content to leave him be, and so do the others, provided Damon causes no trouble, but Enzo’s less content with the dull look in his eyes, like something has been blown out; sputtering candle in the windows of his soul or some such trite, tired poetry. Everytime he sees it—or, worse, the way Damon tries to act normal, like nothing hurts, donning a mask that’s long begun to crack as if he just does it often enough no one will notice the missing pieces; or, perhaps, he’s relying on no one wanting to break anything further—it strengthens his resolve to do something about it.

“How do you feel about glass making?” Enzo asks one day, checking the address on his phone. Bit of a drive, a state away, but it’s not as though either of them have somewhere else to be. He imagines it’s something like welding. He’s done that before. Maybe it’s like welding and pottery combined. The more he thinks about it, the more curious he is to try it.

“Where do you even find these places?” Damon asks, laid out on the couch with a book face down on his chest.

He’s been going through his phone for the past half hour—when Enzo’d walked behind him to take his phone off the charger, he’d discovered that Damon was going through a photo album. Damon and Elena’s pixelated visages had looked happy, squished together to get into the shot, Elena grinning at the camera and Damon looking at her instead, like he’d found something precious. It’d been nauseatingly sweet. Damon seemed to think so too, because he’d looked a little sick, face tight and jaw set like he was trying not to vomit up his broken heart.

“The internet. Or the paper. Or, and I know this is a foreign concept to you, conversing with people on the street.” He’d found an excellent coffee shop that way, speaking to an old woman at the park who’d been walking her dog in the rain. Not as good as the stuff he has at home, but the coffee shop is quaint and cozy and has people with excellent literature recommendations.

“I talk to people,” says Damon, who hasn’t left the house since they’d gone to that park, four days ago, and who hadn’t known the names of his closest neighbors until Enzo informed him. Barry and Marla. They keep chickens. There’s a case of eggs in the kitchen now that Enzo has to find something to do with.

“Meals are only half points,” says Enzo, distracted by the small video on the website of molten glass being pulled into shapes. He pauses the video. “Actually, when’s the last time you ate?”

The fact that Damon has to think about it…. “Yesterday?” The guess is apathetic. “Or the day before. It’s fine. I’ll grab a blood bag or something later.”

Enzo stares at him for a solid three seconds. Damon stares back, not quite challenging. Enzo’s eyes narrow briefly. “Morning class or evening?”

“Evening,” Damon says without breaking eye contact. “What kind of self respecting vampire signs up for morning classes?”

“You didn’t complain about the pottery class,” Enzo points out, making the mental note to throw a blood bag or two at Damon later. Hardy vampires may be, they can’t subsist off whiskey alone. Three blood bags, he decides, unpausing the video but discreetly keeping his attention on the other vampire instead. He looks paler than he should, and there are bags under his eyes.

“I thought it was going to be one of those wine things. Booze and art, or whatever they’re called. Should’ve figured it wasn’t, since it was at nine in the morning.” The words are said with a sneer that doesn’t quite match up with the way Damon’s yet to brush his hair this morning.

Enzo chuckles. “That why you snuck in a flask?” Sneaking sips of whiskey and trying not to get the clay in their mouths with it had been surprisingly fun.

Damon picks his book back up. “Maybe.”

One afternoon, Enzo returns to the house after a walk that had gone on longer than the usual—he’d found a skeleton out in the woods, poorly buried and exposed by the recent rain. He’d fished bones out of a muddy bed and reburied the poor bastard into a deeper grave.

He uses the back door, kicking off his boots on his way inside. He’ll have to go back over his trail with a broom later, because he’s sure he’s shedding dirt. Or maybe he should leave it. Give Damon something to huff about. If he notices.

Passing by the kitchen, he stops at the sounds of voices. It’s seldom there are visitors. Even Stefan, who nominally lives here, spends most of his time elsewhere, coming back to hunt and change clothes before leaving again. It's been a handful of days since Enzo’s last seen him.

“You stopped picking up my calls,” Bonnie says, neutral and disappointed all at once.

That, Enzo thinks, folding his arms and leaning back against a wall, would explain the lack of her presence. Back in the beginning, when they’d first gotten back, she’d drop by every so often—often enough that she had drinks in the fridge and snacks in the cupboards. Her visits had tapered off—he’d assumed she’d gotten busy, getting back into the swing of having her life back, but if Damon had been pushing her away….

He can’t see her face, but he does his best to picture it. Would she be stoic? Determined? Have a disappointed cast or an angry one? She doesn’t sound angry, but he bets there’s something of it in her eyes. He would be.

“I was” —there’s a pause, like Damon is thinking over what he’s about to say or, more likely, knocking back a swig of something— “busy.”

“Uh huh.” And now Bonnie just sounds unimpressed. “Busy doing what? Drinking and stalking Elena?”

“I’m not—“

“Don’t. Don’t pretend this isn’t—“

“I just—I wanted to make sure she was okay!” The noise of a glass on the table, harsh in the silence. “And she was. So. I stopped. She’s fine. Safe and healthy and fine without me. And I couldn’t stand it, so yeah, Bonnie, I stopped picking up your calls and I stopped picking up Ric’s calls and Stef avoids me anyway—!”

“Stefan’s not avoiding you, Damon.”

“Seriously? He lives here and I've spoken to him twice since you guys’ little intervention—“ Damon stops. Enzo hears him swallow and wonders if it’s bourbon or vodka or the tequila they never drank. An intervention would explain the day he’d found them all sitting in the den. Guess he’d derailed that via kitten.

“That wasn’t my idea.” Bonnie breathes in deep. “I told him—look, he just… doesn’t want to push you. This sounds bad, but he doesn’t want to set you off.”

Damon’s laugh is—it’s like something maimed. Enzo’s heard men in front of firing squads sound similar and the comparison makes him want to step in. Drag Damon somewhere with sun and noise and—

He doesn’t. Just stands in the hallway, shedding dirt and bonedust.

“Way to make me sound like a stick of dynamite,” says Damon, darkly amused. “Strike a match and watch me go.”

”Damon, he just got you back. Caroline said he was—“

“All broken up about it?” It. Two letters. Doesn’t quite encapsulate him disappearing into thin air, without even a trace. Enzo’s hands flex. He has dirt under his nails. It’s starting to itch. ”Yeah. I heard.”

Straight into No Man’s, Bonnie presses on, land mines or no. “We came back from the dead, to them. We were dead, Damon.”

“Except we weren’t.”

“It felt like it!” Bonnie bursts out.

There is an end table in the hallway. Dark wood. Clawed feet. A vase sitting on it, dried flowers in the vase. The vase is floating. Enzo catches it when it stops, gently depositing it back onto its table.

The kitchen is quiet. In the same way that grave had been. Birdsong and river burble; electric hum and a fan. A certain stillness regardless.

“Bon….”

“It felt like it. And I’ve been—“ Dead before, Enzo fills in. “But not like—do you ever feel like we should have—?”

“No, no, hey,” and Damon’s voice is soft now, glass traded in for crushed velvet, “hey, what’s—where’s this coming from?”

“Nothing—nothing. Nowhere,” says Bonnie, voice drawn thin. Enzo is suddenly very aware that he’s eavesdropping. He remains rooted in place. “I just. Sometimes it hits me.”

“What does?”

“How much life I’ve missed. Everyone… moved on.”

“Except us,” Damon says, softly.

“Except us.”

For a long moment, the house is silent.

“So, uh.” Bonnie sniffs and Enzo realizes she’s been crying. Silently. What a thing, to cry in front of a friend and still refuse to make noise. “How’ve you been? Other than….”

“Drinking away my problems and trying not to go full stalker on my girl—ex-girlfriend?” Damon asks wryly. At least he’s self aware.

“Yeah. Other than that.”

“I made a mug.”

“You… what?”

“Yeah. Thought it was going to be one of those drink and pretend to do art things, but it was actually a pottery class.”

“You signed up for a pottery class?” Bonnie sounds as though she took a left turn at confusion and kept on going.

“Enzo signed us up for a pottery class. He’s on some kind of art kick. Not to be confused with the nature thing he’s got going on.”

Only a little watery, Bonnie chuckles. “I heard something about a bobcat?”

On that note—namely Stefan’s loose lips—Enzo finally creeps away. Damon and Bonnie continue to talk on lighter topics and he listens to them all the way upstairs, until he turns on the shower and it drowns them out.

—cried the Deep Mer King, a terrible noise that shook the very cavern.

Melody snatched the crown where it had begun to float towards the sea floor and swam away, tail beating, heart racing from more than just fright. She dodged rocks and the sea monster bones that jut from the floor and nearly hit her fins on the cave exit on her way out.

The King of the Deep, with his abyssal gaze and gruesome teeth, had nearly kissed her. She’d nearly let him!

Finding Melody’s escape from the villain’s lair a good stopping point, Enzo looks away from his reading and at his bedroom door.

Damon, who fills the entryway and who has been a silent, half-clad spector for the last ten minutes, keeps watching him. He speaks just as Enzo’s about to start the next chapter, eyes dipping down to the teal book cover and its lurid art of a mermaid just barely made decent by strategically positioned strands of hair. “Please tell me that’s not a sequel to your mermaid smut.”

“It’s not a sequel,” says Enzo, quite truthfully. “It’s the end of the trilogy.”

“There’s three?” Damon asks, sounding faintly aghast and amused all at once.

“There’s eight,” Enzo tells him with great delight, thumbing at the little inked bubbles that ensconce the page numbers. It’s a whimsical touch. He likes it. “Two trilogies and two companion novellas, one in the point of view of the villainous King of the Deep. I’m saving that one for last.”

He’s got to have practiced it in a mirror somewhere, that delicate look of distaste. It makes his nose wrinkle, just a bit. “Eight,” Damon mutters, then: “Scoot over.”

Enzo does not scoot over. He doesn’t need to. The bed is more than big enough for the both of them and two more besides. Damon makes himself comfortable, tossing aside a few pillows to make space.

“My room is freezing,” he says, when he catches Enzo watching him.

“It’s almost as though you leave your windows open all night,” Enzo shoots back. Neither mention that this is a boarding house, defunct or no, and there are more than enough beds to choose from. Or that sleeping with a window open won’t cause a vampire to catch cold.

“Shut your face,” grumps Damon, yanking the book away. The lamplight glints off his ring.

Enzo lets him take it, angling himself so he can shove his leg against Damon’s, preempting the man ambushing him with freezing toes. Damon makes a derisive noise as he leafs through the book, past the point where Enzo has read to, and wriggles his feet under Enzo’s calf.

Then he stops. His eyebrows arch, lifting like wings. “Huh,” he says, tilting his head to the side, as if that’s ever made reading any easier. “Huh,” he says again, a little more contemplating. He turns a page.

“Don’t tell me,” Enzo says to him. He can very much guess where the plot is going—straight into the arms of the deep sea monarch and his shark teeth, but that doesn’t mean he wants to know the details beforehand.

Damon doesn’t appear to have heard him. “I don’t—“ His eyebrows furrow. “I don't think fish do that. I know humans don’t. But there’s no way this is accurate.”

“You don’t think the novel about mermaids is scientifically accurate?” Enzo asks him, smirking.

Damon scans the page again, then fixes Enzo with a searching look. There’s a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth, but mostly he’s feigning concern. “Enz. Are you into this? You can be honest with me—no judgement. Okay, a little judgement, but that’s only because the author used mourned instead of moaned twice in the same sentence. I’m not kink shaming—“

Enzo steals his book back. “No spoilers.”

Damon snorts and shakes his head, but mines zipping his lips.

“Thank you,” says Enzo, all pomp and ceremony as he places the book just so on the nightstand. He catches Damon’s eye roll from his peripheral.

Just as he’s considering asking how it went with Bonnie: “Come back at nine tomorrow.”

“You’re kicking me out for the whole day?” Enzo asks, wondering if Damon’s finally hit his limit for his company. Polite of him to warn him beforehand and not just disappear or slam the door in his face, he supposes.

“AM,” Damon says dryly. “Nine in the morning. Nine hundred hours.”

“Oh.” Enzo’s usually out a bit longer in the mornings, but he could be back by nine. “Do I get to know why?”

Damon pointedly doesn’t answer, just shoves icy fingers into Enzo’s ribcage.

Chapter Text

“You’re late,” says Damon in conversational tones, as Enzo makes his way into the house.

Yes, that’d be because he’d lost time watching two songbirds scrap over some food and by the time he’d realized he needed to head back, he’d been running late. By about two minutes, as of when he’d made it through the door, but apparently that’s enough to call him out on. He can’t see Damon—the man had spoken from further inside the house as Enzo was shutting the back door—but he’s no trouble imagining the mock frown twisting his lips. Perhaps he’s even tapping at his wrist, just for effect.

“You’re—“ He rounds the corner into the kitchen and doesn’t even recall what he was originally going to say once he catches sight of Damon’s face. “Covered in flour?”

Covered is a strong word, it’s just a dab, right by his nose, but Damon’s eyes widen. He turns to Bonnie, who is sitting at the table, a syrup-smeared plate in front of her. He points an accusatory finger. “You said I got it all.”

“I lied,” the witch says, utterly unrepentant. She turns to Enzo. “Hi.”

“Hello,” Enzo greets. The both of them ignore Damon zipping out of the room, no doubt to find a more truthful mirror.

Bonnie nods at the table. “Pancake?”

Enzo meets her eyes for a beat. “Why not?”

He takes a seat, taking in the table’s array of breakfast foods. Pancakes, yes. Also sliced fruit and juice and coffee. There’s a canister of whipped cream beside Bonnie’s plate. “It’s been a while, Bonnie Bennett,” he says, grabbing an empty plate that had been laid out. He hasn’t seen her since the kitten affair—and the time she’d caught him half naked in a closet before that. His eavesdropping on her and Damon yesterday doesn’t count.

“Yeah,” she says, “I guess it has been. How’ve you been?” She makes a face as she says it, just a little, like she finds the idea of exchanging pleasantries over breakfast just as bemusing as he does. It is very much a change from how they met and from that frantic scramble to stop the Travelers. How far they’ve come.

“Today?“ Let’s see, he’d woken after five hours of sleep—which may be a personal best—had left Damon in bed after making surreptitiously sure he was there, breathing, and not a figment of Enzo’s imagination, then had gotten dressed and ready for a dawn-lit walk under the sleepy scrutiny of blue eyes. During which he’d spent some uncountable minutes entertained by two birds taking turns scolding each other shrilly over who had the right to the food they’d found. “Well enough. In general? Life as a whole has vastly improved since, oh, this time last year. And yourself?”

“Yeah,” she says, a touch quiet. “It has.” She clears her throat. “Good. I’m doing good.”

She’s a good liar. There’s nothing of her breakdown yesterday in this very kitchen on her face. “That’s…” Enzo pauses deliberately, smirking a bit, “good.”

“Wow,” says Damon, re-entering the kitchen with a cleaner face. “This is the most interesting conversation this side of the Atlantic.” He drops down into the seat between them and slides a plate of pancakes in Enzo’s direction, then a mug of coffee. “Eat something and stop being awkward.”

He meets Bonnie’s eyes across the table and raises his eyebrows at Damon’s imperiousness. Her smile is small, but there. “Bossy, isn’t he?” he asks, taking a pancake or two and accepting the mug. They’ve gone cold, but the coffee is still hot and Enzo’s put a lot worse things in his mouth than homemade food.

“So much,” Bonnie says as Enzo takes a bite, over Damon’s protests of being the least bossy person at the table.

They’re good, cold or no. Wonder how difficult it’d be to convince Damon to make more for him? Or what they’d taste like with blood drizzled overtop. Fresh. Not bagged. Can’t imagine ruining good food with anticoagulants. He’d eat it anyway, of course, but if he has the choice….

“These are delicious. You did a good job,” Enzo tells him honestly.

Damon shuts up for a single second, wide eyed like he hadn’t expected the compliment. He must have had blood this morning, because his face is less pale than it has been recently. There’s even some hint of a flush across his cheeks. “Of course I did,” he says, expression falling into a sneer, as if Enzo liking his pancakes is somehow offensive, “they’re pancakes—it’s not hard.”

Pancakes he made from scratch, judging by the flour—with sides prepared and drinks he must have bought today, as none of this had been in the house when Enzo had left at sunrise.

“I’ve definitely had worse pancakes,” Bonnie chips in, looking between Enzo and Damon.

Damon turns to her, and, with a smile that appears only slightly forced, says, “So. About that guy. Do you want me to kill him for you, or…?”

“What, no!” Bonnie laughs, even as Enzo asks, “Oh, spot of murder along with breakfast?”

“No murder,” Bonnie tells him, and Damon makes a disappointed noise.

“But there is a guy…?” Enzo says leadingly.

“There’s no guy.”

“There’s a guy,” Damon says, apparently having decided to drop the antipathy. He pours Bonnie more orange juice from the pitcher on the table and Enzo is suddenly struck by the knowledge that he’s the outsider here. This is a well established routine. Bonnie hadn’t even blinked at Damon’s actions. It had fallen to the wayside, obviously, but the patterns are all there—the ghost of something being resurrected right before his eyes.

“There’s no guy.” Bonnie’s eyes roll. Her entire face says she finds this conversation ridiculous. “It was one date. If you could call that a date. We met for coffee,” she tells Enzo. “And he… spent every minute we were there talking about his ex. And his car. But mostly his ex.”

“And thus we circle back to killing him,” says Damon, sounding very excited to be planning a murder for a man who was upset about a bar fight a few weeks ago.

If Enzo felt like psychoanalyzing him over pancakes this fine morning, he’d say it’s because Damon hadn’t liked losing control and smashing in that bar patron’s face—therefore exhibiting the mindlessly violent behavior Elena currently expects from him and getting all mopey about picturing her reaction—but ‘jokingly‘ defending Bonnie’s honor—as if the woman who can boil someone’s blood with a look can’t do it herself—is acceptable. But he keeps his mouth shut. There’s sunlight streaming through the window and Damon and Bonnie seem comfortable with each other as they fall into a playful debate over what counts as murder. The very air seems warm and friendly with the scents of pancakes and coffee. Damon keeps suggesting cartoon-esque scenarios for the death of Bonnie’s failed suitor, such as ‘anvil falling from the sky—aka thrown by a vampire’ or ‘falling into a manhole—aka pushed by a vampire.’ Bonnie keeps reminding him that arranging someone’s death does count as murder, but then gets caught up in the best way to use magic to create an illusion of a tunnel on the side of a bridge, then make it disappear just before a car collides into it. The music playing softly is pleasant accompaniment to the conversation; even if, perhaps, the woman singing about love like Sundays is a tad incongruous with the murder talk.

Enzo finishes his pancakes and listens. He suspects they’ve forgotten he’s still there, right up until Damon turns to him and says, “Enzo! Back me up here.”

“You cannot kill someone for being a bad date,” Bonnie tells them, sounding serious. Or she would, maybe, if she could stop smiling.

“I don’t know,” Enzo says, drawling out his words. “You’re telling me he went on a date with a beautiful woman and ignored her the entire time? That’s worth a little murder.”

“See! Two votes,” Damon says, standing and beginning to clear off the table.

“No votes,” Bonnie says, automatically following suit. “Because this isn’t a vote, and even if it was, you wouldn’t get one.”

The dishes are stacked in the sink, juice back in the fridge, and Bonnie and Damon argue the whole while, moving around each other easily as they do so, like they don’t have to think about where the other person will be, they already know.

“Is this what it was like?” It takes Enzo a moment to realize he’d spoken aloud. He presses on anyway, under two sets of eyes. “In the Prison World?”

Damon and Bonnie look at each other, seemingly just realizing how close they’re standing and how easily they’d fallen into routine. As one, they both look out the windows and—

“No eclipse,” Bonnie says, sounding relieved.

“No eclipse,” Damon agrees. He turns his attention back to Enzo and says, “Well, you weren’t there. And neither of us are wearing the best of the nineties. So. Not at all.”

Enzo takes a sip of his coffee. Then eyes the canister still on the table. He takes it and—ignoring the noise Damon makes when he does—adds whipped cream to his mug. It melts quickly and tastes cloyingly sweet.

Yanking the whipped cream off the table, Damon puts it in the fridge like he’s afraid Enzo’s going to further defile his coffee right in front of him. Joke’s on him, the whipped cream to coffee ratio is perfect and he doesn’t need any more.

“This is good,” he says, pleased with himself for thinking of it. He’s tried a few of the more sugary options at the cafe before, but he hadn’t thought of adding things to his coffee at home. He may have to look into that.

“So,” says Bonnie, reclaiming her seat. “Damon said you’re into art now?”

Actually, he’s into activities and tasks that require Damon to pay attention to what he’s doing and therefore give him less time to marinate in his own depression, but— “Guess I am. It’s interesting, making things instead of simply destroying them. Not to say destroying things isn’t fun too.” He sends a sly grin at Damon, who smirks back.

It has been quite some time since he’d last made anything, but especially anything useless and just for fun. He used to sketch, he remembers abruptly. Little things. Charcoals and scrap paper, when he could get his hands on it. He’d never called himself an artist and certainly never sold anything, but it had been fun, once upon a time. He’d stopped when he got too busy to have spare time to sleep, let alone devote time to a hobby that would never turn any profit. Then the sickness had made him too ill to use a pencil with any kind of grace. And he never picked it back up; not really, not with the same simple pleasure.

Bonnie nods. “I get that. All magic is” —she waves a hand in a gesture he takes to mean art-life-the never ending cycle of destruction and creation— “but there’s a difference between a spell to call fire and a spell to lay down wards.”

“Is there?” says Enzo, who has heard some on the topic when he was going up and down the country tracking down leads on the Other Side’s collapse, but only enough to give him more questions. Witches can be very secretive, even while being charmed by handsome vampires. Perhaps especially then.

“Yeah,” Bonnie says, then begins to speak of wards and bubble spells and power sources, all interspersed with complaints of shoddy translations of Greek, Latin, or Old Norse, because all the good spells are old ones and were made and transcribed in the contemporary language.

It’s easy, to fall into conversation with her. She knows what she’s talking about and doesn’t mind him asking questions. In fact, she seems to gain enthusiasm with every question he asks, until they are spiritedly and—mostly—playfully debating the merits of barrier spells. He maintains that while they are useful—and bothersome—they are not more useful than being able to rain fire on your foes. Or a well placed bullet. Bonnie tells him to come back when he can trap a thousand year old vampire in a house—and then calls him out for getting trapped in one himself. He brings up that once you put down a barrier, that it’s stuck there and you can’t move or adjust it lest you release your no-doubt even more murderous enemies. Then he concedes in the same breath that if one really wanted to be thorough about things, they could use the barrier spell, then deploy fire, until all is ash and dust. Bonnie rolls her eyes at him and starts on barrier spells being multi-purpose because they don’t necessitate the immediate dispatching of people you may not want to kill.

Eventually, Enzo takes a sip from his mug and realizes that his coffee has gone cold and Bonnie’s phone has buzzed no less than three times. The conversation comes to a pause—but not an end, as they’d both begun to discuss the best way to make a barrier spell mobile, therefore more flexible in use—and while Bonnie begins to gather her things to leave, Enzo turns to find Damon, sitting on the counter, a glass of something that looks a lot like bourbon in hand, and watching the both of them with—not a smile, but something content regardless.

After that, when Enzo comes back to the Boarding House in the mornings, sometimes Bonnie is there for breakfast. Or sometimes she drops by in the afternoons. Or sometimes Damon has plans with her and suddenly can’t accompany him on outings. After the first time that happens, Enzo starts notifying him in advance and making sure he isn’t going to be busy with the witch instead of simply prying him from the bed or the couch or the bathtub. At one point, there is a tense negotiation over who gets Damon for the evening—except then Bonnie just laughs, startlingly delightful even over the phone, and invites him over to watch the movie she had planned, and he gets to sit between them on her couch, sneaking popcorn from the bowl on Bonnie’s lap and listening half to the movie, half to Damon’s running commentary.

Later, back at the Boarding House and the both of them in the den, waiting for Damon to finish attempting to turn himself into vampire soup—man likes his baths scalding—Enzo brings up something he’d been wondering, the fourth time he’s come home to find the witch’s car in the driveway and Bonnie herself in the house.

“It’s not like I’m taking classes right now,” Bonnie says, a bit wry, when he asks why she’s there so often.

Not to say he doesn’t enjoy her company—he does—or that her more frequent appearances don’t have a positive effect on Damon—they do; he’s less prone to staying in bed until Enzo rouses him out of it and hasn’t even had to drive three towns over to clear out another liquor store within the last days—only he’d expected her to have some sort of social obligations preventing her from spending so much of her time with them.

“Really? Not even the—ah, what was it called? Occult class? Seems right up your alley. Not to mention the in with the teacher.” Interesting man, that hunter-turned-Original-Vampire-turned-human. Odd contacts and a knack for finding things. Useful to know, if not quite Enzo’s bosom companion. Alaric certainly likes him much less than he likes Damon. And, when Enzo’s feeling unforgiving, he wonders how much the man really does like Damon, in the end. It’s not as though he is dropping by the Boarding House to check up on his friend. Too busy with his own life, now that Damon is safe and sound, back from the Other Side and Alaric’s guilt has been alleviated.

She studies him for a heartbeat, then says, “I don’t really have—anything to do. It’s the middle of the semester, I can’t enroll and… I’m still figuring out how to untangle being legally dead. No one bought the house, thank god, or I’d have to deal with that, but I’m pretty sure the bank hates my guts right now and I don’t….” She sighs, looking for a second as though all the world and the next one too are bearing down on her shoulders; then she straightens, used to the burden. “It’s just. Weird? Nice, but weird to not have some kind of disaster to worry about or research or fight. Which sounds kind of horrible, because I don’t want something to go wrong. It’s just….”

“Weird?” Enzo suggests, smiling when she frowns at him. Her face shutters and even her posture withdraws, sitting straighter on the couch, limbs pulling in. He drops the smile. “No, no, I understand—it’s,” he twirls a finger, encapsulating the room and its windows and the doorway he’s perfectly free and able to walk through whenever he likes, “an adjustment.”

“Something like that,” she says.

“I used to sleep with a knife under my pillow,” the words trip out of his mouth almost before he can really consider what he’s saying, but—they’re true, and he thinks it’s what she needs to hear. “When I was human. Couldn’t do without it. Bit of an odd choice for a teddy bear, I suppose.”

Not that he ever had a cuddly toy as a child. Would have gotten in the way of the match tray.

A knife under his pillow as a man, a hammer by the side of the bed he time-shared when he worked at the factory, a long, slightly bent nail when he was a child, smuggled in under his cap and hidden like treasure. He’s slept more often with a weapon than a person.

“But it made you feel safe.”

“No,” Enzo says, laughing a little at the thought. “It didn’t. Safer, maybe. Better prepared, for sure. It gave me the illusion of—having a way to fight back. Enough peace of mind to sleep.” The way Damon does now. A thought that makes him laugh again, Damon being compared even tangentially to a soft toy.

He leans in, holding her gaze. “You’re waiting for something to go wrong. The shoe to fall, the bomb to drop. And the longer it doesn’t, the more convinced you are that it will.”

“Are you suggesting I start sleeping with a knife?” Bonnie asks him, eyebrow arched and fingers wriggling like she’s reminding him that two words and he’d be across the room.

“No,” he leans back into the couch, kicking a leg up onto the coffee table, “I’m saying you need to find something that gives you that measure of peace. Doesn’t need to be a knife. Or a weapon. Or a college class. Just something to hold on to when the shadows get too deep.”

They fall into silence, then, the both of them in their own thoughts. It’s not a disagreeable one, nor uncomfortable. Merely thoughtful.

“What made you stop?” she asks softly, after some moments.

“Woke up a vampire,” he says, grinning with fangs on display. “Didn’t need to sleep with a knife, after that.”

She snorts.

Chapter Text

He wakes to the sound of the door creaking open. Not loudly, but just enough to rouse him from light sleep. When he opens his eyes, it’s to find Damon, back to him and across the room at the open closet. It's a fair turnabout, given how often Enzo invades his room, so he doesn’t say anything, just lays back on his pillow and watches.

It feels a little like a dream, actually. A familiar movie with the sound turned off, silence pressing in comfortably; maybe a black and white one, to match the moonlight on the walls, the shadows ever accompanying it. The light coming in from the window is more than enough to see that the other vampire is going through his closet, making approving or disapproving faces depending on what he finds, with no apparent care that Enzo is awake. Or maybe he doesn’t realize. A few shirts get approving nods, if not particularly enthusiastic ones. A few more get disdainful looks. One—the one he’d gotten on a whim that says I Bite across it in glitter—receives some mutant cross between disbelief and amusement.

Proving he’d known he had an audience and just hadn’t cared, Damon looks at him, holding up the shirt on its hanger. Really? that particular quirk of eyebrows says.

Enzo lifts his eyebrows back. Completely accurate advertising, if anyone asks him. He makes a mental note to wear it more, preferably around people who would get the joke.

With a roll of his eyes, Damon shoves the shirt back into the closet and goes back to rifling through everything.

Figuring he may as well be awake, Enzo stretches, then sits up. The blanket pools around his waist. When he checks the time, he finds that it’s very solidly four in the morning, which explains the moonlight coming in through the window. He sits his phone back onto the nightstand. Should probably charge it at some point.

Damon breaks the silence, holding up Enzo’s favorite jacket. “Didn’t you get this off a corpse?”

“He wasn’t using it.”

“Yeah,” Damon says, hanging the jacket back. “Because you killed him.”

“Recycling,” Enzo says succinctly. He hadn’t killed the man for the jacket. That’d just been a bonus.

Damon waves a hand in concession.

“Is there a reason for this?” Enzo wonders.

It’s not the strangest thing he’s seen the man do in the small hours of the morning—that had been when he’d wandered downstairs to find Damon drunkenly rearranging the library. Or drunkenly cleaning. Or rearranging the furniture, only to not like it and put it all back in its exact original location. Enzo had been very explicitly disinvited to help with each of these tasks, Damon distractedly telling him with two books that had looked exactly the same in each hand, that he’d do it wrong.

Enzo’d watched instead. Bit like storm chasing, he’d imagined. Only the storms brandish feather dusters and pick up the couch while you’re on it.

“How do you not have any good clothes?” Damon asks him, impressively irritated about the matter given he’s the one who had decided to, uninvited, go through Enzo’s things.

And he hasn’t any good clothes because he had only brought over the clothes he regularly wears—he still needs to do something about that townhouse; he hasn’t seen the inside of it in a month and it’s a waste of perfectly good space, not being used—and that hadn’t included tailored shirts, hundreds dollar jeans, and leather boots specifically made by a cobbler five states to the west. Like Damon is wearing, right now. He looks ready for a night—early morning?—out on the town.

“My clothing is more than good enough,” he says, tossing aside the blanket and swinging his legs off the bed. “For instance, that one shirt….” He chomps at the air, then grins with all his teeth. “Can't say it's wrong.”

Damon stares at him for a solid second or two. Then blinks, slowly, like he’s doing Enzo a favor by pretending he hadn’t just seen that and wants him to know it.

Prick. The thought is a bit too fond for being woken up at four in the morning.

“You need better clothes,” Damon informs him. He looks Enzo up and down, obviously judging his pajamas. The top has a hole at the neck—no idea how that happened, but it’s still plenty comfortable and it’s not as though he wears it out—but the briefs he wore to bed are fine. Bright red with pink hearts, and devastatingly comfortable. So are the matching socks. Enzo wriggles his toes, just to watch Damon’s face.

“Who even wears socks to bed?” the other vampire mutters lowly, as if this isn’t a thing that he knows and complains about every time.

“I do,” Enzo says, standing. The floor’s a bit chilly, but, luckily, he has on socks. “Can’t go wrong with a good pair of socks.” He considers this. “Well, actually, you very much can, if you forget to change them out. Seen that a few too many times.” The smell had been the worst part. Wet rotting flesh is its own horror.

“It’s four in the morning, why are you bringing up trench foot?”

“It’s four in the morning,” Enzo echoes, ambling over to Damon and poking the man in the chest. It is a nice shirt he’s wearing. Soft to the touch. “Why are you assessing my wardrobe?”

Damon bats his finger away. “We’re leaving in an hour. Wear something nice.”

Staring him dead in the eye, Enzo reaches past him and grabs the I Bite shirt.

It takes Enzo approximately half an hour into the drive to figure out they’re going to Richmond. It takes Damon parking and then leading him to the front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to figure out what it is that they’re doing. It’s so early morning there’s barely any people here, though the day is shaping up so be a nice one. For the people that are out on the streets, he recognizes the faraway looks of people on their daily slog to work. Some have coffee in hand. Most have only a grim determination to get through the day while creating the least amount of memories possible.

“An art museum?” Enzo asks, as Damon holds the door open.

Pushing his sunglasses up, Damon squints inside. “Is that what this place is?”

Enzo pulls him into the building.

They spend two hours in the museum, bouncing from exhibit to exhibit. Some of the stuff here is older than Enzo. And Damon. Or the both of them combined. Always impressive, just what makes it through the ages. Other things are new, brand new, and Enzo flits around each display feeling like a moth in a room full of lamps.

Damon picks up a print from the gift shop on their way out. For Bonnie, he says.

“Surprised she hadn’t come,” Enzo tells him, eyes on the little leather sketchbooks. He picks one up to find the paper is good quality, in addition to the leather being well stitched.

“She said something about a field trip and maybe still being banned?” Damon shrugs. “Couldn’t talk her into it, but she’s the one who said you might like to go.”

Enzo puts the sketchbook down. “Tell me you know the story.”

He’ll have to remember to thank her, when they get home. Maybe they can pick up some more of that tea she likes, on the way back. If he’s remembering correctly, it’s not even much of a detour. Getting Damon out of the house all day without even a flask with him; Enzo had known she was a miracle worker already, but this is on par with defying the forces of nature and death itself.

“I’m working on it.” He takes the sunglasses that had migrated down to his shirt collar and puts them back on his face. Enzo’s reflection smirks at him. “I’m going to go pay. Go get the car?”

“I’m stopping by that ice cream place we passed,” Enzo warns.

Damon waves as he leaves.

Damon is sitting on the steps of the museum, bag with Bonnie’s print by his feet. There’s a trio of women all staring at him like he’s a steak, giggling and talking loudly enough for a human to hear—if just barely—about how likely it is that he’s a model. And how likely it is that he’s single. Enzo sends them a wave and a grin as the whispering intensifies when they spot him.

The sky’s so bright a blue it’s near painful to look at for too long. There’s not a cloud in sight. The chill is because of the wind, full of city sounds and smells, but the sun beats against his skin like it’s trying to get past the daylight enchantment and is only managing a less punishing warmth. He’d eaten his ice cream on the way to the car—salted caramel and rum sauce—and had had to find a restroom to wash his hands in before touching the wheel, because it had melted sticky and sweet and running down his wrist. It’d tasted just as good as the cone.

“How long can it take to get ice cream?” Damon asks as he gets closer. His face says unimpressed. The easy way he extends a hand and lets Enzo haul him up says he hadn’t minded the wait.

“About five minutes,” Enzo answers him, yanking him a bit closer, just because. Damon oofs into him and Enzo lets go before he gets shoved down the stairs. “But it takes a bit longer to do the whole ‘snatch, eat, erase’ deal. Though, I suppose it takes just as long to hide a body, so….”

“We should time it one day,” Damon suggests. Enzo thinks he’s joking. Maybe.

“Did you have breakfast before you decided to rummage through my closet like a fashion-conscious raccoon or are we stopping somewhere on the way back?” he asks, stuck on the idea of timing themselves to see which is faster. Sounds fun. Could break out a few fancy stopwatches.

“Fashion-conscious raccoon,” Damon repeats incredulously. “I ate. Which is good, because we have a busy day.”

“We do?”

“Do you have any idea how many museums there are in this city?”

They go to three different museums—the science museum and Poe’s, in addition to the art museum—two public gardens, follow around an evening ghost tour of the city, and make it home long past sunset. They might have made it back sooner, but Enzo had seen a diner advertising chocolate dipped pecan pie.

On the way in, they run into Stefan, who is on the way out the door. He’s a duffle bag in one hand. Clothes. He’d put money on it.

“Hey,” he says, barely looking at Enzo. Most of his attention is on his brother, and he seems surprised to find him upright and sober.

As if he’s the one who had watched Damon throw up nothing but liquor more than once, who had found him on the floor with his daylight ring beside him and dawn an hour away, as if he’s the one who helped him up and into a bath and made sure his ring was on his finger, who stayed the night and next morning and had to watch him act as though nothing had happened—when pressed, because like hell was Enzo letting him leave his sight without an explanation, Damon had said something about being drunk and the feel of the metal bothering him. He must have passed out before he could put it back on. The explanation had been accompanied by a shrug, new bottle in hand already. That had been back at the beginning. Enzo hadn’t let him drink alone for weeks afterwards, though he’d never said as much. Damon had noticed, though never acknowledged it. It'd also been the start of them passing out in the same bed.

“Hey,” Damon echoes, touch of teeth to it, except it sounds like he’s trying not to sound pissed. Failing a bit, but Enzo will give him points for effort. “How’s it hanging? Split diet still working out?”

“Hunting animals lets me redirect my instincts in a way eating just blood bags doesn’t,” Stefan replies automatically. He’s looking between the two of them and the bags from their day out in their hands. Bonnie’s print that Damon has been jealously guarding, citing needing the brownie points. Two books from the science museum, both about fossils—one for Danny. A wind chime set from the gardens, colored glass and solar lights, so it glows at night. A little brown paper bag that holds the tea for Bonnie that they'd stopped for; the shop had been just as little and dusty as their last visit. Stefan is acting as though he expects them stuffed full of body parts instead.

Which would be stupid. The bags are paper. They’d leak. Unless the body parts were wrapped in plastic film….

“I know, Stef,” Damon says. “You’ve only explained it six times. Animals in the morning, blood bag to chase it down.”

“Because you keep bringing it up?” Stefan crosses his arms. “I don’t interrogate you about your feeding habits.” He looks between them again, face going stony at Enzo. “Do I need to?”

“Worried we’re on a killing spree?” Damon asks, breezing past him.

Stefan smiles tightly. “You mean another one?”

Damon turns, face a mask of dark amusement. Stefan’s shoulders square. They really have no better way to communicate, these Salvatore boys. It’s all challenge and redirect right up until they can’t anymore. Cock fight, but slightly less feathers.

“That does sound fun,” Enzo chimes in, elbowing past Stefan. If it’s harder than it needs to be, neither let on. Stefan doesn’t make a sound, even though Enzo’d held little back. He moves to stand beside Damon, arms brushing, and blathers on like he isn’t picking up the sparks in the air; like he can’t feel Stefan’s stare prickling at his skin. Like he doesn’t want to gouge out his eyes for it. “But, alas, no murder sprees. Lately. I don’t think Damon here has had anything but blood bags this week.”

More than a week. Sparingly, at that.

It hits harder. Without blood. Things like vervain. Sedatives. Other drugs.

Alcohol.

“Oh,” Stefan says, and the man has the gall to look surprised. If he paid the slightest amount of attention, he’d know his brother who he once professed to miss so much hasn’t sunk his teeth into a neck since he’d gotten back. “I hadn’t realized…”

“Don’t much, do you?” Enzo smiles, deliberately mimicking Caroline’s at her perkiest.

Stefan makes a face, unsettled without realizing why.

Case. Point.

Damon knocks the back of his hand against his, and Enzo dials down the hostility when he recalls Damon wants his brother around for some reason.

He switches gears. “You should stay a while. Join us for dinner. I was thinking pizza.” He turns to Damon. Pizza and he’ll make sure Damon gets some blood in him tonight. “What’d you say?”

“Yeah, nobody delivers here,” Damon informs him, swinging the bags in hand. “But we can go get something if you really want pizza.”

Enzo looks back at Stefan. “Well?”

Stefan sounds wrong footed, when he says, “No. I’m good. I’ve got to go. I’m meeting Caroline at—“ He stops like a cleaver into butcher block, looking a lot like his sentence was about to have the word Elena in it. They all do that. Avoid saying her name too many times near Damon. Bonnie had said Stefan hadn’t wanted to make things worse. Wonder when he decided it’d be easier to avoid him entirely. He finishes the sentence awkwardly; amputation gone wrong. “I can’t stay.”

“Shame,” Enzo says, even managing to half mean it.

His eyebrows scrunch as he looks between Enzo and Damon. The only blip in his square-jawed evaluation is when he notices the words scrawled across Enzo’s chest. “What are you—?”

He shakes his head, then, with one last look at them, he says his goodbyes and leaves.

Damon watches him go.

Enzo watches Damon’s hands clench.

There’s a sketchbook on his pillow, the one from the museum he’d been admiring earlier. Enzo picks it up, traces a finger across the cover.

Right, he resolves. Time to do something about Stefan.

Chapter Text

“Could I borrow your phone? Broke mine.” It’s even true. Enzo had. One clench of his fist and he was picking screen shards out of his palm for half an hour. Should've used a hammer. Hindsight is twenty less shards of plastic and glass in your skin, as they say.

An arm rises from the blankets on the bed and points vaguely in the direction of the armchair and the jacket thrown across it.

“Ta, mate,” Enzo says to the lump of blankets. The blankets do not respond. He stops on his way out the door, Damon’s phone in hand. He thinks of saying something, anything, maybe something along the lines of eat something while I’m gone? Or you haven’t moved from your bed in twelve hours or I was reading about how shark skin is basically interlocking teeth and if a shark were a vampire would its skin sprout fangs? just to see if Damon will argue with him about it.

Instead of any of that, he says, “If Bonnie drops by, could you tell her the books she wanted are in my room?”

In the end, it’s easy to set up.

The old woodshed out in the forest, miles and miles away from anyone.

One case of vervain darts.

A frantic text from Damon’s phone asking for help, cut off part way through as though the situation really was dire.

And that is how Enzo ends up with an unconscious vampire tied to a chair with the scratchiest rope he could procure under short notice.

He watches dustmotes float in the sun slanting in through the boarded up window and waits for Stefan to wake up. It takes a while. Enzo probably shouldn’t have stuck him with all those extra darts.

“I’m pleasantly surprised that it worked,” Enzo mentions to the unconscious body in the room. “Thought it’d be harder. That and I do believe I’m impressed with your response time. Only took you fifteen minutes to arrive.”

And less than a minute to be ambushed, but—

Stefan doesn’t so much as stir.

He ends up leaning against a wall to wait, vaguely wishing he had a cigarette to compliment the touch of nostalgia he’s getting from standing guard. No uniform, no gun, no war, but it’s there anyway, dusty as the room. The shed is more of a shack. It’s missing half of the eastern wall, boards and cement blocks and rusty iron rods crumbled to expose a hole big enough to walk through. Half the floor is wood planks, gritty and rough, the other dirt, as if someone had pried some up and quit before finishing. The inside smells of animal bodies and a dry kind of neglect.

He likes it, he thinks. The air of it. It’s been something once, built for a use. Storage? Larder? Moonshine cache? Whatever it had been, now it belongs to the forest. The trees are closing in, saplings already finding their way between bricks and boards, further disguising the original structure. Bit like a memorial, bit like a tomb, a bit like a new start.

Stefan does wake eventually, heartbeat and breathing changing as he realizes what’s going on.

“You can stop pretending to be asleep,” Enzo tells him, once he gets bored of watching him subtly test the ropes. They wouldn’t be hard to break and Enzo tied them well, but not particularly tightly. Stefan’s probably retained sensation in his hands and everything.

“Why did you kidnap me?” Stefan asks, eyes opening.

Straight to the chase, then.

“Wanted a chat,” Enzo says, pushing off the wall and stepping closer. Stefan tenses as he draws near. More out of anger than fear. “Hence,” he gestures to the backwood shack, “the kidnapping.”

“Yeah, did you think of, I don't know, calling? Like a normal person?”

“I did,” he says, watching Stefan struggle to put the pieces together. The ropes aren’t secure—not for a vampire. The vervain is still in play, but that’s fading, even if Stefan won’t be fully recovered until he gets some untainted blood circulating through his system. “But I’d no guarantee you’d pay me any mind, did I? Now I do.”

“You wanted to chat? You tied me up,” Stefan points out, as if Enzo somehow hadn't realized he'd done so.

“Not much of a kidnapping without rope, is it? If I really wanted to restrain you,” Enzo informs him with a cheerful veneer, “I’d have threaded wire through your joints.”

Break the section of spine that dictates sensation in the limbs so he won’t wake from the pain even through the vervain stupor, then use surgical wire to make it so moving would slice the tendons and render the limb useless even if he does regain control of them. It doesn’t even need to be surgical wire. Barbed would work just as well, if not as easy to put in, and there’s even a pile of the stuff in the corner. Rusty and tangled, but maybe still serviceable.

Rope is nothing. Enzo might as well have used fairy floss. It’s not even good rope.

Stefan doesn’t blanch. Say what you want about him—and Enzo does, frequently, to his face—but he’s not cowardly. A poor excuse for a brother and poorer friend, but no coward. At least, not when it comes to bodily harm. “Well,” he says, chin tilted up, as if he’s not the one tied. “You wanted to talk? What about?”

“Dinner,” Enzo says.

“Dinner?” Stefan repeats flatly. They both pretend that the noise of ropes creaking isn’t filling the shack.

“Tuesday,” Enzo says without blinking. “Sometime in the evening, I’ll let you know when. Invite Caroline, if you’d like, I haven’t seen her in a while.” A tragedy, really. She’s so entertaining. It’s like watching a constant one woman crusade against the world—and she’s winning. Shame her need for a stand-in sounding board had been fixed when Stefan dragged his carcass back home.

The rope noises stop for a solid second. “You kidnapped me,” Stefan says slowly, “to invite me and Caroline to dinner?”

“I was thinking curry,” Enzo says, mentally running through the ingredients list. He’ll need to pick up some things. “Unless you had a preference?” He hadn’t wanted pizza, but who doesn’t like a good curry?

He’d put some thought into this; and not just the food selection. Brute force won’t get him very far—he doesn’t have enough blackmail or threat to get Stefan to jump right into playing happy family and that route has other consequences besides. Namely, Damon finding out. But dinner is a small, easy step in the right direction. Maybe after that, Stefan will see that his brother isn’t actually a glass vase and he’s not got to handle him with kid gloves. Or maybe Enzo will need to find some threat or blackmail to incite the man to spend time with his only close relation.

But first, Tuesday.

“No, what?” Stefan says, confusedly.

“Not a fan of curry?”

“Curry is fine—this could have been a phone call.”

“My phone is broken.” Because Enzo broke it to borrow Damon’s, but Stefan doesn’t need to know that.

“You lured me out into the woods, shot me with vervain darts, and tied me to a chair, because your phone is broken? You texted me from a phone.” The ropes finally snap.

When Enzo has no reaction and makes no move to remedy his kidnap victim breaking free, Stefan stands from the chair, flexing his wrists and fingers. They’re a little raw, but nothing serious. Most of the skin is still there and everything.

“This is about Damon,” he says, as if this is a realization.

“I didn’t use that much vervain,” Enzo mutters to himself. Louder, “Yes? You think I invited you to dinner because I so dearly missed your company?”

“Of course it’s about Damon,” he says when Stefan just keeps staring at him. Honestly, as if Enzo would waste his time staging a kidnapping just for Stefan’s benefit—though it was a bit fun, mostly the ambush portion. He could see himself indulging in some light kidnapping for Caroline‘s sake, even. Stefan, though? On his own merits? “He wants you around, for some reason. You don’t want to push things, which is stupid, and, since you needed a sign,” Enzo sweeps an arm across the tiny room with its dirty rotten floorboards and piles of barbed wire and debris, “consider this your sign.”

Stefan blinks like he hadn’t expected Enzo to come out and say it. He’d thought about just implying that he expects Stefan to either do a better job or finally crawl back under the rock he’d been so proud of hiding under, no more of haunting the edges of things like some uninspired, judgmental spectre, but decided to make things clear instead. And remove one of the options. He may take him up on it, after all, and Stefan disappearing wouldn’t help Damon any, and may result in Caroline crying again—and then Enzo would have to spend his time tracking him down and systematically relieving him of his skin, and that’s a lot of work.

“Have I ever told you that your obsession with my brother is creepy?” Stefan asks him, eyes sliding to the open door. It’s open because it’s currently off its hinges and in pieces on the other side of the room. “Because it is.”

“You have mentioned something similar before, yes,” Enzo says, waving a hand and not quibbling; given how quick Stefan is to give up on people, any amount of care probably does look like obsession to him. “Now. Tuesday?”

Stefan watches him for a long moment, in a way that makes Enzo think of someone watching a bug in its natural habitat and finding themselves bemused by its little insectoid habits, then says, “Sure. Why not? Tuesday,” with the air of a man agreeing to lend the aforementioned bug his copy of the morning’s paper, even though he’d previously been convinced of the illiteracy of insects in general.

“Excellent,” Enzo says, clapping his hands together. Quicker than he thought it’d be—he’d planned for there to be more threatening, but this just means he’ll be able to get home before dark.

When he turns to leave, job done, there is a noise from behind him.

The world goes black.

He wakes on the floor, face down and neck aching. He pushes himself up and shakes off the disorientation. He’s been down long enough that everything is tinted with sunset colors and the air has grown colder.

Stefan is long gone but written in the dust beside where he’d been laying: See you Tuesday.

Enzo very briefly considers putting another hole in the wall.

He gets home after dark, one side of him streaked with dust and dirt. His hair, too, where he’d gone to run a hand through it before realizing.

“Hi?” says Bonnie from where she sits on the couch. Damon has his legs across her lap and she’s using them as a table for her book. They look quite cozy, surrounded by blankets and snacks on the coffee table in front of them. There’s even a TV, no doubt dragged down from upstairs and sitting on its own table, also relocated and repurposed just to hold it.

“Find them, then?” he asks, recognizing the book in her hand.

“Yeah,” she says, eyebrow raised. “Two questions, where did you get so many books about magic and why do you look like that?”

He raises a finger. “Started a collection while traveling up and down the coast quite literally on a witch hunt—some are trash, I know, but at least one’s the real deal. And” —he raises another finger and smirks— “won the genetic lottery, thank you for noticing.”

Damon looks him up and down, in a manner Enzo recognizes. He spreads his arms. No missing parts, see?

Once having determined Enzo is in possession of every organ, limb, and phalange, Damon says, “We’re watching the Blair Witch Project and going through tomes. Go shower before you get whatever that shit is on the couch.”

Enzo tosses him his phone and snaps a salute.

Eyes fixed to the screen, Enzo shoves another handful of popcorn into his mouth. It’s gone cold, but the remnants of heat live on in the taste of salt and butter, so he keeps eating it. It’d be a waste otherwise. No one else is.

There’s half a dozen notebooks scattered on the table, pens littering it like fallen soldiers, who had each perished in the battle for sorting witch-fact from mortal-fiction. One of the notebooks is a color-coded, sticky-note covered compilation of Caroline’s research on barrier spells. Bonnie had said something peer-review.

“You’re dropping popcorn,” Damon says, quietly, in deference to the witch passed out between them. She’d nodded off sometime after the second movie and the third grimoire—the first two being about as useful as a sham match.

Figures. The amount of times he’d been turned or chased away, most of the books he did manage to get a hold of were distractions or fake, just to mislead any nosy vampires sniffing around for dimension piercing magic. The genuine one he’d known was real, right off the bat, because he’d quite literally pried it from a witch’s cold, dead hands. Or, no, what do you call the male ones? Warlocks? Dead in any case. He hadn’t been expecting Enzo to be able to think past the sensation of having his blood go ice cold, let alone stumble his way into ripping out his lungs. He’d been aiming for the heart, actually, but missed.

Still did the job.

“I’ll clean it,” he promises.

On screen, a character screams. The volume’s on low, because Bonnie, but Enzo can hear everything more than fine—respect to the actors, they’re doing a swell job of portraying genuine gut-wrenching, bowel-freezing terror. Even more respect to whoever came up with the monster. It’s genuinely unnerving. He likes the shape of it, that horrendous amalgamation of limbs and malice. Don’t know what he’ll do if he ever runs into anything similar, but he suspects fire will be involved.

“Where did you go today?” Damon asks. When Enzo looks at him, his attention is on the TV. His eyes are pale as the snow on screen and just as cooly indifferent.

“Let’s see… cafe, library, to return a book, an agricultural supply store” —for the rope— “and then a walk in the woods,” Enzo sums up. “Why?”

Pinning him with a look, Damon holds up his phone, text log on screen. “Because I don’t remember doing this.”

“Ah. That.” He’d been planning to inform Damon of his successful social arrangement tomorrow, but tonight works too.

“Yuh-huh. Explain.”

“I—mildly—kidnapped your brother.”

Someone dies on screen.

“Why?” Damon asks. He sounds… tired. More than anything.

Enzo stops paying any attention to the movie. “You want him around more.”

Much like his brother, Damon looks at Enzo like he can’t believe he just said that, right in front of the popcorn and everyone. “I don’t—“ Jaw clenched, a muscle in his cheek jumps. Damon can lie to a lot of people, Damon can lie to himself. But right here, right now, in the light of the TV, Bonnie snoring softly between them, he can't seem to bring himself to.

“You do.” Enzo tips his head and pulls a face; acknowledgement of the state of things and tease all at once. “No idea why, but…”

Damon flicks an annoyed glance to the side. Another scream comes from the TV, a bugling roar accompanying it. “Get to explaining the kidnapping part.”

“Your brother has a nasty habit of ignoring what I say,” Enzo explains. It’s infuriating, in truth.

“So you kidnapped him?”

“I didn’t even use good rope.”

Damon snorts. “Yeah, that’s still kidnapping, Enz, it still counts.”

”It barely counts.”

“Horseshoes, hand grenades, kidnapping.”

“Yes, yes, whatever. But he’s coming over for dinner on Tuesday.”

“You kidnapped my brother so he’ll spend time with me?” Damon laughs. It’s an ugly noise. Bonnie stirs at the sound of it and he stops. “That’s,” quieter now, smile making his face pull strangely, “that’s pathetic. Have I been that bad?”

Enzo frowns. Yes, but— “No, shut up. It’s not—this isn’t pity. I don’t pity you. You’re my friend—this is a thing I can do for you, so I did it. Don’t get the two confused.”

He thinks he’s annoyed, actually. Does Damon think so little of him? It is not pity that motivates him—he wants him to be happy. That is a basic component of friendship. Helping when you can, because you care enough to put in the effort. It’s not—he knows the reason Damon is letting him drag him into so many activities and outings is because he thinks it makes Enzo happy, even when he’d rather rot in bed. And it does. He enjoys spending time with Damon. He especially likes that Damon cares enough to not just—tell Enzo to fuck off, or tell him to leave the house or the town or his life.

The movie ends, the credits roll, Damon doesn’t take his eyes off of Enzo. It’s a piercing kind of stare, like he’s weighing up how likely it is he’s lying. Enzo keeps his gaze and, eventually, Damon passes judgement. Not guilty, says the widening of his eyes.

“You’re always so surprised,” Enzo says lowly, “when I want to do things for you. Have I given you cause to doubt me?” They’ve their rough patches, more than their fair share, but Enzo’s thought them past it. There are no strings here. He wanted to do this. So he did.

“No,” Damon says slowly, like he’s not quite sure the words fit right, or maybe is just surprised to find them true, “you haven’t. I don’t. I just—“

“Don’t expect it?”

“Yeah. That.”

Enzo lets out a short hum. He’s not going to stop. If there is anything worth running roughshod over, it is Damon’s certainty that the only reason someone would be kind to him is because they need something.

Carefully not looking at him, Damon leans his head back into the couch. With one hand, he reaches out over Bonnie and sharply probs Enzo in the shoulder. “You’re such a busybody.” Thanks.

Enzo grabs his hand before it can withdraw and squeezes. You're welcome.

Chapter Text

“What,” Bonnie asks, walking into the kitchen, drink in one hand, bag in the other, “are you doing?”

“I’m not doing anything,” Damon says from his place laid out on the kitchen table like it’s a sacrificial altar. He’s on his back, legs dangling off the edge. Once it became clear he wasn’t going to move, ingredients and utensils lay scattered around him like offerings.

Bonnie nods, unphased at finding him draped like a grumpy tablecloth. “Yeah. I can see that. I mostly meant him.”

“This is harder than I thought it would be,” Enzo confides from his place by the kitchen counter, on his second batch of lemon bars and not confident these are going to turn out any better than the first attempt. That batch is edible, certainly, if a bit…more like custard than it should be. Lucky thing he’s plenty of eggs. Should drop off a batch for Barry and Marla—should one turn out well.

“What is?” Bonnie puts her drink beside Damon’s knee and her bag in a chair. “Are you… baking? I didn’t know you could bake.”

“He can’t,” Damon interjects, then makes a displeased sound when Enzo flicks sugar at him.

“Thought I’d try it out,” Enzo answers, brushing sugar off his fingers and onto the black apron he’d found in a drawer. Tilting his head down at the recipe, he tries to figure out where he went wrong. Maybe he hadn’t whisked it long enough? It had said two minutes, so that’s what he’d done, but obviously something went wrong in the process.

“Is this for the dinner thing Caroline told me about?” Bonnie asks, measured as the shortbread ingredients still in their bowl. Somewhere underneath that sentence lies the silent inquiry of: Did you really kidnap Stefan to invite him to dinner?

Enzo grabs a lemon from the bag on the counter and rescues the zester he had to dig through the kitchen to find before Damon succeeds in nudging it off the table. “You should come over Tuesday evening. Curry, company, we may even have lemon bars by then.”

Damon scoffs.

Enzo pokes him with the end of the zester and dodges the lazy swipe before it lands. Damon eyes him for a moment, torn obviously between vengeance and not wanting to move. Sloth defeats wrath and he stretches instead, sending two measuring spoons clattering to the floor. Bonnie’s drink, Enzo doesn’t fail to notice, remains perfectly intact.

“Sounds fun,” Bonnie agrees, in the same manner one would use while watching an oncoming disaster.

Ignoring the tone, Enzo smiles at her. Then frowns down at the lemon in his hands and the now empty bag it emerged from. He’s going to need more lemons.

One trip to the store, the re-reading of a flour smudged recipe, and a movie and a half later—

“It tastes good,” says Bonnie, all consolation, after trying a spoonful of what should have been lemon bar and not lemon pudding.

Again.

She’s sitting at the table, bowl in front of her, the yellow mess vexingly jiggly.

Leaning against the kitchen counter, scent of lemon peel etched into his nose and under his fingernails, Enzo looks over the recipe for what is starting to feel like the hundredth time. The urge to set it aflame has only grown with every reread. “I had it in the oven exactly as long as the recipe told me to. It baked. It sat. It chilled. Why is it goop?”

“Maybe you just suck at baking,” Damon suggests. He’d refused to even try Enzo’s concoction, turning up his nose like he hadn’t been sneaking tastes of the shortbread mix.

He frowns. “It can’t be harder than making explosives.” A little more plaintively, “Can it?”

Bonnie sets her spoon down carefully. “Excuse me?”

“I can do that fine,” he tells her, because he's capable of that, even if desserts seem beyond him.

“You can—?” She takes a breath and nods. “Okay. Uh, no. I don’t think this is supposed to be harder than making bombs.”

Damon, from his place beside her, in a chair instead on the table this time, stands and strolls over to yank the recipe out of Enzo’s hands. Enzo yanks it back before he can, which just means Damon tries again. Then again. Then is successful after hooking an ankle around Enzo’s so that he nearly trips when he tries to move backwards. Prize in hand, Damon saunters over back to Bonnie. Enzo manfully resists the urge to upend the flour into his hair. It’d be such a good contrast. Damon would also probably try to drown him in the sink.

“Enz,” says Damon. “What kind of website did you pull this from?”

“A recipe blog.” He’d enjoyed the short story prefacing the recipe about struggling to find and pick the perfect lemons from an orchard. “Why?”

“It’s in French.”

“Yes?” Enzo will never speak French in a way that doesn’t offend a native upon hearing it—though he suspects he could achieve technical perfection and that fact would remain true—but he’s able enough to read a simple recipe. “So?”

“So, I’m pretty sure you mistranslated this part.”

Enzo zips to his side and reads the line Damon is pointing at again. On second look…

“Ah.”

The lemon bars, once done and dusted with enough powdered sugar to cover their sins, are delicious. Over the course of another movie, Bonnie eats three. Damon deigns to try one and, ignoring Enzo’s grin, reaches for another when the first is gone. An untouched batch sits in the fridge to chill, to be sugar-dusted and delivered to the neighbors in a more polite time in the morning. He’s already half-formed plans on dragging Damon along with him in the name of community spirit—say it with enough pep and he could probably even make the man chase him out the door; out of rage instead of excitement, but whatever works.

“That’s not right,” says Enzo, staring at the main character of the movie and her gorgeous but uncannily modern dress for the setting she’s purported to live in. He’s the remnants of his first botched attempt in his lap, spoon leaning against the dish’s side.

“Take your shot and shut up,” Damon says, nudging a glass in his direction.

“She’s not even got a bonnet,” Enzo mutters, trading in his empty lemon-themed delicious failure for his shot. It tastes of bitter vindication. “None of them have hats. Her hair is….”

“Yeah,” Damon agrees. “She’s also not wearing anything under those stays, which is hot, but uncomfortable. Those things are not made to go against skin.”

Turning away from the screen that shows a scene just familiar enough for nostalgia and just wrong enough to set his teeth on edge, Enzo sends a curious look to where Damon is leaning against the couch’s arm. Yes, Damon’s plenty reason to be acquainted with women’s undergarments—but that had sounded almost as if…. “Is that the voice of personal experience speaking?”

Damon slides a look his way. “Huh. Guess you were passed out for that story. I never was sure.” He returns to looking at the TV, leaving Enzo with a slurry of whiskey-and-lemon-tasting questions. “Now be quiet about historical inaccuracy and let us enjoy sexy ladies killing Victorian Era zombies in peace.”

For once, Enzo does as told, remaining quiet in his spot between Damon and Bonnie on the couch. They’ve gotten tired of dragging a TV down to the living room for movies, so he’d arranged one of the empty upstairs bedrooms into a small theater. Bonnie commandeered his favorite blanket, but she’s been drifting in and out of sleep for the past half hour, so he’ll not fight her for it. Though he had been tempted to. He just might lose, is all. Maybe. Perhaps. Most likely. It’s difficult to keep up with a woman you’ve personally seen overturn the very veil of the world.

Right up until: “That gun wasn’t invented until—umph!”

Damon holds the pillow up again. “Don’t test me.”

Eyes narrowing, Enzo sneers around the taste of fabric from being smacked in the face with a throw pillow. “Want a fight, Salvatore?”

Bonnie he may be unable to do much against without surprise, extensive planning, or heavy artillery, but Damon is a much easier target in comparison. Still tricky, but easier.

“No, not really,” Damon absolutely lies, grin tooth and grudge baring. “But I will if you keep talking during the movie.”

Enzo reaches for his own pillow and holds it like it’s loaded.

He loses it in the next second, because, suddenly, he’s lost his grip on gravity, or gravity has lost it on him, either way, he’s hovering a foot above the couch. He does not squeak, though Damon makes a noise that has more in common with a startled bird than a vampire.

Grumpily, Bonnie blinks blearily at the both of them. “No,” is all she says before they both drop back onto the couch. She’s back to dreamland within the next second.

Quietly, Damon accuses, “Look what you did.”

Whispering, Enzo says, “What I—?!”

Bonnie’s breathing shifts. They both fall silent.

We duel at dawn, Enzo mouths.

Damon gives him a perfectly haughty look, which briefly inspires the urge to throw a pillow at him and damn the consequences. You’re on.

Their duel is put on hold as dawn comes and goes, both of them caught up in watching the movie’s equally terrible sequel. Bonnie is fast asleep, wrapped in Enzo’s blanket and curled around one of the pillows.

“Cannons don’t do that,” Damon says blankly, staring at the screen, where a wave of molten slag is running across the battlefield like lava. “I mean. They melt, yeah, but—”

“Never mind the cannon,” Enzo whispers furiously, “what’s with that formation? What am I saying, there is no formation. This isn’t a mad dash through no man’s, there should be a goddamn plan. Their opponents are zombies—why do I not see a single palisade! They don’t take that long to put up with enough manpower and they have that. They don’t even have ditches!”

“God, I hated digging ditches,” Damon doesn’t look away from the inept massacre on screen, “and then when you're done, fifteen blisters later, it starts raining and the mud slides right back in.”

“Poor baby,” Enzo croons, then curses and points a finger at the TV. “No! Do not break rank now you’ve finally got one! An-nd, he’s dead. Shocking.”

“Are you guys having fun?”

He and Damon stiffen.

“Did we wake you, love?” Enzo asks, over gentle morning light and the sounds of men getting eaten alive by the undead.

“No.” Bonnie stretches, sitting up. “I just woke up sometime around the rant about how their uniforms were shit.”

“They were,” Enzo says, retroactively annoyed by the lack of coherence in the regiments' dress. Half of them were in cavalry coats despite the glaring lack of horses.

“Uh huh.” Bonnie nods indulgently. “Hey, what happened to waking me up so I could go home?”

“You threatened to set us on fire if we woke you up again,” Damon answers, shrugging.

“Only our eyebrows,” Enzo corrects.

Damon waves him off. “Whatever. Why would you want to go home anyway? Your house is boring, Bon-Bon.”

“My stuff is there?” she provides. She does not dispute the boring allegations. It's not, particularly. It's a house as any other. It's made interesting by the simple virtue of being Bonnie's. 

“You’ve got stuff here.” Damon's words petulant, but true. Bonnie's got books from their witch study sessions and jackets from various days, forgotten and meant to be taken home and forgotten again, favorite snacks in the cupboards next to her preferred tea and food in the fridge that's just for her.

“My bed is there. This couch is super comfortable, but it’s not my bed.”

“Easily fixed.” Damon makes a gesture that encompasses all the extra unused rooms he’s collecting dust in. “What size mattress do you want?” He grins toothily. “Or you could share mine.”

“It’s quite comfortable,” Enzo throws in. It very much is, even if he suspects he just finds Damon’s company comfortable. Though the mattress certainly doesn’t hurt.

One eyebrow lifted, Bonnie gives them both a look. “I’m going to ignore that for now. My mail gets delivered there.”

“It’s harder than it should be to compel postmen,” eager to join in on the game, Enzo leans closer, “but not impossible.”

Approvingly, Damon nods at him. “See? Problem solved.”

“I—…” She frowns at them. “Are you trying to get me to move in with you at,” she pats around for her phone and fishes it out between the couch cushions, “six in the morning?”

He and Damon look at each other.

Are they? Damon’s raised eyebrow asks.

Why not? says Enzo’s shrug.

They turn back to Bonnie. “Yes.”

She laughs like they’re joking. She stops laughing when they continue to extol the virtues of just moving into the Boarding House, but there's mirth in her eyes as she calls them both ridiculous. 

The morning of the dinner party passes pleasantly. For him. Bonnie had gone home to her own house, which made Damon Enzo’s sole—and mutinous—company on his way to take Barry and Marla their repayment for the eggs.

“I think you’re lying to me,” Enzo’s grumpy companion complains, hands in his pockets as they walk down the long gravel path to the farmhouse. They’d parked closer to the road, but Enzo enjoys the walk down, so they’d left the car.

“You have neighbors,” Enzo rejoins, droll. “They exist.” A good few miles away, and then a good few more, but existent.

“I’ve never seen them.” Damon kicks a rock that dared stand out from the rest off the path and into a tree.

“Unsurprising. You don’t talk to people.”

“I talk to people. Do you have any idea the number of people in this town that I’ve slept with?”

Enzo eyes him. “How many people do you have conversations with that you aren't already invested in or want something from?”

Damon remains silent for a solid minute. “I talk to…”

Enzo very politely gives him a moment. When nothing is forthcoming, he asks, “Can’t remember the name?”

“Shut up.” Damon kicks another rock. This one embeds itself into a trunk off to the right. A startled squirrel zips to another, less dangerous tree. “The bartender at the Grill. You know, the one who works there when Busboy is too busy doing… whatever it is he does.”

“You mean Gabriel?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know Gabriel’s name?” Enzo had been teasing him earlier, but— “You spend most of your time at his bar.”

“Shut up.”

“I know his name,” Enzo continues on, truly bewildered. “I even know his dog’s name. I haven’t spent half as much time in this town as you. A quarter, even. An eighth.”

“Shut. Up.”

“I’m not sure Gabriel even counts for your talking to people quota, as you’re paying him.”

Damon in lieu of answer, snags a good sized rock from the path, shoulders tight. Before any more forest creatures can be frightened out of their fur, Enzo snags Damon’s wrist. He doesn’t release his hold, even as Damon sends him a truly electric look when he does; it’s a loose grip anyway, he can pull away if he really wants to.

“There's me.” Honesty is blunter weapon than even stone and Enzo does not truly mean it as weapon at all. It seems to be one anyway.

Damon’s eyes widen, then narrow, as if the truth-telling has pissed him off further. “Sure you count, for my quota?”

Ignoring the pissy vampire—or, rather, ignoring the way Damon’s knuckles are white across the back and he’s clutching his rock like Cain may have had once—Enzo tilts his head to the side. “No. Suppose not. Neither does Bonnie. Or your hunter. Or your Sheriff."

Damon is invested in them, after all. Shed blood for, from, and by. It’s no passing acquaintance that binds any of them.

Under bright sun, on a dusty gravel road, surrounded by green life and the living things that call it home, Damon is a piece from a different puzzle. There is nothing living about the blood pooling in the veins under his eyes, dark as rot. Nothing of life in the sharp fangs he flashes, except maybe its end. “What is your point?”

Enzo lets go of his hand. Damon tosses the rock aside—possibly because he prefers a more hands on approach, one that may involve literal heartstrings—but does not move when, unafraid, Enzo leans in, places a hand to Damon’s cheek, heedless of the fangs, the danger, aside from an absentminded admiration of them, and smiles. “I don’t have one, I think. Other than pointing out that you can be an introverted man, aside from those you hold interest in.”

He knows Damon is capable of charm—has seen it turned on many a person, has seen many a person give into it, to their detriment or not. He also knows that Damon takes shallow interest in people otherwise; not many hold passion for him. He feels at such depth, but reserves it for few. How lucky, to be one of them.

He takes Damon’s hand again, not by the wrist this time. When the other vampire does not protest, he leads them further down the path.

In his other hand swings a small grey cooler. It's no covered wicker basket, but hopefully the contents make up for the presentation.

“Neither of us is wearing red,” Enzo mentions, as the farmhouse comes into view. They are, just this once, not the wolves either. No red, not wolves, definitely not heroic hunters. Guess this means their roles are up to them.

It takes Damon a second to respond. There are no fangs when he does. “Enzo, if you see a wolf in these woods, do not try to bring it home.”