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“Damon? Damon, are you okay?”
“…no…” he mumbled woozily. He rocked slightly on the concrete, trying to shift his body into a new position, but the numerous broken bones made this impossible. “Where’s…” He pushed pathetically at her leg. “Go.”
She didn’t have time to savor what he meant as a protective gesture. “Don’t worry, he’s gone,” Daisy assured him briskly.
“Wha…?” Damon tried to look around for his assailant, but he was half blind from the gasoline in his eyes.
“I need to get you cleaned up, okay?” she explained to him. “This might hurt a little.” She turned the hose on the lowest setting she could and blasted him with the cold water, trying to rinse the gasoline off him. After a few initial gasps of pain he gritted his teeth and fought the drenching, forcing his eyes open to flush them.
When she’d done what she could Daisy dropped to her knees on the wet concrete and pulled his head into her lap. “How do you feel?” she asked, knowing the answer wouldn’t be good.
“Why’d it have to be gasoline?” he complained. “I hate that smell.” The dousing seemed to have revived him somewhat, though. He straightened out his leg with a painful-sounding crack, then glanced around the empty backlot. “Where’d he go?”
Daisy gave a dismissive little shrug. “Don’t worry about him. He’s gone.”
“Did you disintegrate him?” Damon asked. “Is he a little pile of flaky black crystals around here?” He sounded vaguely mocking.
“He was going to kill you,” Daisy pointed out, with some irritation. “I’d think you would welcome my intervention.”
“Are you gonna kill everyone who wants to kill me?”
“That’s a pretty long list.”
“No kidding.”
Daisy looked at his doleful expression, then started to stand. “Well, fine. I’m just gonna leave you here to die in a little puddle of self-pity and guilt,” she declared.
Damon grabbed her hand. “Wait a minute! What the—“
“If I hadn’t come along, you would be a smudge on the ground right now,” she told him angrily.
“I know,” Damon acknowledged in bewilderment, tugging her back down to his side. “That’s the definition of you saving me.”
“Well I didn’t see you fighting very hard to save yourself,” she informed him sharply.
“He—ambushed me,” Damon tried to protest indignantly. “I mean, J---s C----t, he hit me with a lead pipe—“
“You’re older than him, and that means stronger,” Daisy countered. The words echoed what Lexi had said to him when she ordered him not to spoil her time with Stefan. “But you let your guilt get the better of you, and you were ready to lay down and die.”
Damon wasn’t sure what he wanted to object to first—but at this point he realized he didn’t find it very pleasant lying in Daisy’s arms and pushed himself away painfully. “What do you care?” he finally muttered.
She sighed. “I care,” she replied. “But not unconditionally,” she warned. “If you’re going to do stupid things, you can do them by yourself.”
“Well I’m glad you hold me to such a high standard,” he snapped. “I’m sure other people would be glad to know I could actually feel bad about something.” Without actually admitting that he had, of course.
Daisy moved to sit down beside him. “If you feel bad about something,” she suggested, “then act differently in the future. Or try to make it up to people. Don’t just—roll over and give up.”
Damon let out a long sigh and allowed Daisy to tip him back down into her lap. “Lexi was my friend,” he started.
“No, she wasn’t,” Daisy countered, scoffing at his attempt at sentiment. “You couldn’t stand each other. You killed her to buy time for you and Stefan, and it worked.”
“You’re so evil,” he commented, and it didn’t sound like a compliment the way it usually did.
“Actually, I just want you to take responsibility for your actions,” she corrected dryly.
“Well—“ He waved his hand vaguely, encompassing the whole recent situation.
“You knew Lexi had friends,” Daisy laid out for him. “You knew they would hear about her death and want revenge. In fact, you knew her friends were here, at this bar. There’s no need to deny that they have a valid point. But if you just let yourself be killed for this—what was even the purpose of her death? Are you ready to give up or do you want to fulfill your plan?” He didn’t answer. “You knew it wouldn’t be easy, you knew people would get hurt. If you can’t accept that, change the plan.”
“I can’t believe you’re encouraging me to do this,” he said after a long moment.
“I’m not,” she countered. “Freeing Katherine is a stupid idea. But I’m not your conscience.” She leaned closer, pinning his gaze. “But if you want me to stick around to save your a-s, make your own decisions. Don’t let them just—ambush you.”
He smiled slightly. “Your point is strange and twisted, but I see it,” he told her.
“Good. You want some blood?”
“Thought you’d never offer,” he agreed quickly, and she let him bite into her wrist. He groaned and kicked involuntarily but held onto her arm tightly, until she had to pry it away. Then he continued to twitch for a little bit longer as the many injuries—already rapidly healing—knitted even faster than he was used to. It was not a painless process. But when his eyes snapped open, they were the bright blue Daisy recognized, full of energy and determination.
He jumped to his feet and pulled her up, slightly giddy with the sudden mobility. He kissed her impulsively but she drew back with a grimace. “Gasoline.”
He frowned in understanding. “I’ll go kill Bree, and then I’ll clean up more,” he promised.
Daisy nodded at this sequence of events. “You want me to come with you?”
Damon shook his head. “She’s not very powerful,” he confided. “I think she was always too afraid to really explore her powers.”
“Let that be a lesson to you,” Daisy noted, and he grinned.
“Maybe you and Katherine will really get along,” he suggested hopefully.
Daisy sighed and shook her head. “I know you’ve got some very vivid ménage a trois fantasies going on”—and his expression said yes, he did indeed—“but after the way she treated you, she’d better come out with a personality transplant before I could even look at her,” Daisy warned.
“Hmm. If Katherine had a personality transplant, she’d be Elena,” Damon noted thoughtfully.
“Maybe what you really want is a harem,” Daisy guessed dryly.
He grinned. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. It’d be less work for you.”
“You hear me complaining about the amount of work?” Daisy asked suggestively, and Damon’s eyes flared with interest. “Not until you’ve had a thorough scrubbing,” she ordered, pushing him back a little.
He couldn’t argue with that. “Okay. I’ll go back to the bar and—you wait by the car. I’m sick of Georgia anyway.”
A few hours later they were sailing down the highway with the sky turning pink to the east, showered and changed. Damon seemed to be in an unusually good mood now—not the most obvious result of nearly being killed and then actually killing an old acquaintance, but Daisy was afraid she knew the reason behind it.
“Bree gave you a clue about how to open the tomb, didn’t she?”
Damon smirked as he sped down the road near the top of the speedometer. “Just a little one.”
“Witches are obsessive-compulsive and paranoid,” Daisy informed him, staring out the window blankly. “They write everything down and always leave a back door. Emily’s spell book will have a reversal spell in it to unseal the tomb.”
The car dropped to a normal speed that required little of Damon’s attention to control. “G‑‑‑‑‑‑‑t! Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he snapped in surprise.
“Because I don’t want you to get it open,” Daisy reminded him.
He growled under his breath. “So it was okay to let me drive all the way to Georgia and get my a-s beat, just to find out what you already knew.”
“Well, you did kill Lexi.”
“S—t. Are you the f-----g angel of divine retribution now?” he asked angrily.
“You asked me to come to Georgia with you,” Daisy reminded him shortly. “You didn’t tell me why you were going and you didn’t ask me about the tomb at all.”
“Oh, like you would’ve told me if I’d asked?” She gave him an ambiguous look. “Well do you know where this spell book is?” Damon ground out.
“I’m not a cosmic librarian,” Daisy told him coolly. “But I would start looking with Emily’s Mystic Falls descendents.” That is, Bonnie and her grandmother.
“Yeah, figured that one out,” he replied meanly. A frosty silence prevailed for a few miles before he was able to ask in a more civil tone, “If I get the book, can you work the spell?”
“I’m not a witch.”
“You are awfully good at telling me what you’re not,” Damon pointed out sharply.
“It would be like a layman trying to perform surgery with just an anatomy textbook as a guide,” Daisy claimed, though this didn’t exactly address his point. “You or I trying it would probably kill everyone inside the tomb. Which may not be such a bad outcome.” He didn’t like hearing that. “It’s twenty-six vampires with one-hundred-fifty years’ worth of fury built up,” she went on anyway. “If they get out, if Katherine comes back, people are going to die.”
“Well I’m trying to be a grown-up and accept that consequence,” Damon returned snidely.
Daisy shook her head sadly. “You think you can,” she judged, “but then you’ll see who’s taken.”
For the first time Damon seemed slightly troubled by his plan. “What do you mean? Who’s going to die?”
“I don’t have enough information right now to speculate,” Daisy deferred, distancing herself from the topic. “But with Katherine, I’m guessing the price will be just slightly higher than you’re willing to pay.” And Damon couldn’t deny that was probably true.
As he calmed down the car sped up again. “Getting beaten with a pipe and doused in gasoline was not a fun experience,” he said pointedly.
“Maybe being set on fire would’ve made the rest worth it.”
“Why are you p---y when I’m the one who almost got killed?” Damon wanted to know.
Daisy sighed. “Because I’m not very happy that you had to get beaten with a pipe and doused in gasoline to get the point that your actions have consequences.” He was about to object to that statement when she slid across the seat and wound her arm around his neck. “I’m sorry it had to happen.”
Her sudden reversal—or at least what sounded like one— mollified him somewhat. “Well—you could’ve said, ‘look out’ or something.”
“No, I couldn’t,” she replied sadly, and somehow he understood that. She leaned her head against his shoulder, curled up close to him, and he slowed the car a little bit to accommodate the position.
“At the bar, when Bree said I was a ‘walk-away Joe’—which is a ridiculous term, by the way,” Damon began, after several quiet minutes, “you said you were one, too.” He glanced over at Daisy. “What did you mean by that?”
She smiled a little, the mysterious little smile that drove him crazy. “I was just mad at her for saying that,” she asserted.
“It’s true, though,” he admitted. Bree, like most people, was only worth his time as long as she was useful to him, or at least interesting. Witch or not, when her usefulness hadn’t panned out, he’d left and not looked back.
“She didn’t have to say it to me,” Daisy shrugged. “She could have just insulted you in private.”
“Well that’s never as much fun.”
“She was angry and bitter,” Daisy judged. “Not just about you, but about many things in her life.” She shot him a little smirk. “I think she just didn’t know how to hold onto you.”
The note of sinister possessiveness in that statement appealed to him. “And you do?” he challenged.
“We’ll see,” Daisy replied. “We’ll see if you’re worth it.” And Damon wasn’t sure how he felt about that statement.