The mansion had been drowned in darkness since early morning. Every curtain was tightly shut, every window covered, and even the smallest ray of sunlight trying to slip inside ended with sharp burning pain across your skin. The night before, you had been hit with a vervain dart, and the effects were far worse than you wanted to admit. It wasn’t only weakness anymore. Fever burned through your body from the inside, nausea twisted your stomach, and your powers had practically stopped working. Worst of all, your daylight ring had completely failed. Sunlight hurt you even through glass.

Every contact with light ended with new burns.

You lay motionless on the couch in the living room with a thin blanket over your shoulders, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in your skin. Burns stretched from your neck down to your hands, red and in some places almost charred, while the vervain in your system practically prevented any vampire healing. You felt more like an exhausted human on the edge of collapse than an immortal vampire.

Damon had been sitting beside you for a long time, unusually quiet for once. In his hand was some burn cream he had probably stolen from a pharmacy or from Stefan, and he carefully spread it over your skin. Surprisingly gently. His cold fingers moved slowly across the burned areas so he wouldn’t cause more pain.

“If you wanted to nearly die next time, sweetheart, you could’ve just said so. Would’ve saved me the dramatic atmosphere in the house,” he muttered quietly without even looking up from your shoulder.

But despite the sarcasm, he didn’t leave your side for even a moment.

When you hissed softly from the pain, his hand immediately slowed, and with the other he instinctively adjusted the blanket over your legs. The vervain was still poisoning your system, preventing your body from healing properly, and he had apparently already accepted that the next few days would be spent making sure you didn’t accidentally burn your skin from a single ray of sunlight.

That was his way of taking care of someone.

No grand words. No soft confessions. He simply stayed beside you in the dark living room, treating your burns and checking every few minutes to make sure you were still breathing.