Elena Gilbert is not a pale person. Bright, shining eyes and that beautiful olive skin, thick, glossy hair and most importantly the wicked, intelligent tongue that keeps Alaric on his toes all the fucking time and has now for months; she’s not a pale person. But the woman lying on the bed, with tubes in her nose and her mouth and snaking under her gown and feeding glucose and drugs into her arm – she is so pale Alaric can just barely see the pattern of her veins underneath her skin.
He shouldn’t have stayed away so long. He reaches up with one finger to press against the split in his lip. Hurts, but mostly he’s humiliated. Jeremy Gilbert, big damn hero fire fighter, had to track him down and point out that going on a revenge kick while Elena lay in hospital was idiotic and selfish and beneath them both.
Alaric is generally not a coward. But to sit in the hospital room without a clear course of action scares the shit out of him. Couldn’t say that so instead he’d snarled back that there was nothing he could do for Elena right then and she wouldn’t even know that he wasn’t there.
And Jeremy had punched him in the mouth.
“’m sorry,” he says, taking Elena’s hand in his own as he takes a seat on the visitor’s chair. “I shouldn’t have left you here. I swear, Gilbert, I can’t… you can’t die on me. Not now. Not when we…”
Maybe he’s a coward in more than one way. Because has he ever just opened his mouth and said, ‘I love you, Dr. Gilbert’? No, he hasn’t. They skirt around the edges of these things, try to keep it simple, but Alaric doesn’t think it’s been simple since the moment he started teasing her about little green men and she’d primly corrected him, reminding him that they were gray.
He holds Elena’s knuckles to his lips and kisses them and tries five times to convince himself that she squeezes feebly back, but that doesn’t make it any more true.
“Just wake up, Gilbert. Just wake up and I swear, things will be different. I won’t wake you up at three in the morning to drive to Virginia to investigate lights. I’ll… I’ll put another desk in the basement, I swear, with your own desktop computer so you don’t have to get by on that laptop all the time. I’ll beat up whoever I need to beat up to get you a better parking space. I’ll take you on a holiday to somewhere there has never been an alien sighting. Bermuda sound alright to you?”
Lame joke. But Elena would laugh, if she was awake.
He’s not going to tell Elena’s sleeping body he loves her. But. “I need you, Gilbert. I need you. Wake up.”
