He barely raises his head to look at her. He's covered in cold sweat and blood; the smell of it makes her sick to her stomach.

His arms are stretched toward the ceiling, kept up by snares that bite into his wrists with rusty iron teeth. She can see trickles of blood hugging his forearms like snakes and, from the opened blue shirt, cuts so deep on his chest that she catches the white of his bones and the surrounding flesh appears yellowed and spongy.

Damon looks at her and pushes on his feet like he wants to stand up straight, like a kid who's been waiting for someone to pick him up and take him away; like he's trying his hardest to find a way to not fall against her petite body when she'll free him from the chains and the pain. Because she will, except that she won't. She knows she won't.

His misty blue eyes look at her from under a curtain of thick, black lashes – with every last ounce of will he possesses he is trying not to lose sight of her face as his vision fades. There's an alien emotion in his once mocking eyes, something akin to hope and she feels her stomach turn and her throat hurt. On weak legs she turns away from him but she can't seem to get the sight of him out of her head. His legs giving away under him, the iron teeth biting deeper into his wrists tearing apart his flesh with no mercy. His eyes dull.

She tries to summon that angry voice; tries her hardest to listen to that voice and tell herself that he deserves this and worse. She urges herself to believe that she will feel relieved to be freed from his presence. The more she tries to will herself to relish in his pain the more desperate she feels. Because she just can't save him. She's stuck between the heaviness of the legacy she inherited from her family, the loyalty she vowed to Elena, the love she still feels for Jeremy and the need she feels to save the one person whom she spent the last three years threatening to kill. The only thing she can do while her heart falls, and her body along with it, is fight for air that refuses to enter her lungs.

Damon is alone and lost and she wants to curse at him and yet she only manages to scream and cry. This is how she wakes up, screaming and crying. Like the night before, and the one before that and so on. And everything becomes more vivid and haunting night after night; she's gone from pushing thoughts of him from her head and splashing cold water on her face to the now constant feeling of these thoughts and dreams weighing her down. She dreads going to sleep because she knows she cannot save him.

Bonnie feels breathless and trapped. She doesn't think while she pushes her legs into her jeans and pulls on the first sweater she can find; doesn't think as she gets into her car and drives. Her knuckles are almost white when she knocks on the mansion's door with clenched fists.

Her only coherent thought is that she's going to suffocate and so he needs to open that damn door. It doesn't hit her, how disjointed her thought processes have become, she just feels like crying and hitting that door that won't open.

When it does open - seconds after she started knocking even though it had felt like an age - Damon looks at her with his confused blue eyes. His lips are wet from the scotch he was drinking when he had first become aware of her presence, not through her pounding on the door but from her erratic heartbeat that gave away her heightened state of unrest.

"Witch-" she doesn't give him time to talk before making one blood vessel explode, and then another, and another.

Damon is kneeling right in front of her, holding his head with both hands and gritting his teeth.

"Did I miss something?" he cries out in pain but she doesn't answer, she keeps her mind on the task of making him suffer the way she had been, until he screams again "Bonnie!"

She snaps out of her state and he falls to the floor, taking a deep breath more out of habit than necessity. Damon looks at her, irritated, and yet he keeps calm as he slowly gets to his feet and brushes off some invisible lint from his shirt.

Bonnie seems out of breath, her chest rises and falls quickly and he doesn't know if it's because of the power she consumed to make a creme-brule out of his brain or because of that smell he can distinguish so strongly; she smells like honey and guilt and fear. She has dark shadows under her eyes, and she is slightly trembling, he realizes. He would ask her if she's cold, if she needs to come in and sit in front of the fireplace for a minute, except that it's not like he does care for her one bit, or that he's worried she'll catch her death standing there at half past three in the morning in the cold wind with only a sweater. Really.

"I really enjoy a dramatic entry but-"

"I have every right to hate you and leave your sorry ass to die in the most painful way a human mind can conceive!" she begins, out of the blue.

"Well, y-" he tries to cut in, perplexed but she just won't let him.

"You've been killing and torturing people for the most part of your miserable life and you deserve everything that's coming to you!"

This time he doesn't even try to stop her from doing whatever it is she's doing, aside from the obvious, because she's fighting something right now and he's not really sure it's him.

"I can hate you!" she screams like she's telling herself to do it.

"Everything I had, you took it away from me!" she says, trembling from head to toe "The moment you came to Mystic Falls my life became a living hell!" she accused, even if the rational part of her knew it wasn't entirely true "You killed the only family member I had that recognized I was alive and cared about me! You made a vampire out of my mother! She was nothing more than collateral damage and you expected me to accept it because you decided so."

"It was for-"

"Elena, I know!" she screams into his face "I know! And everyday I have to choose between her life and someone else's. Between her life and mine, and I hate to care so little about mine! I should matter too but I don't. But why did you bring my mom into this? Why? Why did you have to snatch it away from me just when I was so close? I just wanted it for awhile. I just- I just-." Damon struggles to keep up with her fast pace of thinking. "She was still my mother... there was something left for me after all..." she adds with a weak voice, like she's realizing only now the full meaning of her words.

She shakes her head, like she's telling herself to not remember those things anymore: don't remember your mother's turned back, your father's meaningless post-it on the fridge, your grandma's voice which you can't recall anymore. Don't remember Jeremy's betrayal. Don't remember that you are just a tool to use into a war that doesn't feel yours. Just don't, she tells herself closing her eyes just a moment.

She then turns and leaves the Salvatore's patio. Leaves Damon stunned, standing and relatively unharmed, with eyes very blue and very much alive, which makes her feel better, strangely relived.

Her head and her legs are light, hollow, while she reaches for her car, which blurs in front of her. It doesn't really matter, because suddenly darkness is wrapped all around her like a blanket and she finds herself falling. There is this vague feeling that she will fall and fall, forever, but she doesn't really care.

When Damon's arms stop her body from hitting the ground she's already into oblivion.

He looks at her unconscious form, head lolling. She's so light into his arms, so very fragile - if he just applied a little pressure now, around her thorax, her chest would shatter, and splinters of bone would pierce her heart. He would smell the sweetness of her blood, the spicy fragrance of her power flowing out of her along with her life. Except that she's already broken, and her heart is already pierced, and he doesn't feel like he can really add up to her damage. He doesn't feel like he wants to.

Instead he keeps her up against his chest, making sure her head rest against his shoulder, and he walks toward the open door of his mansion. He can feel her breathing at the base of his throat, her steady heartbeat against his chest like the echo of a distant memory, and the sky that's about to become coral above them.