Love had always been a tricky, fickle subject for Damon Salvatore.

He had been in love with Katherine, which had been nothing short of a disaster.

He had loved (loves?) Elena, but no matter how the pretty blonde loved to flirt with him, he knows that in the end she will still love Stefan.

He thinks that maybe he loves the little red bird, Bonnie. She’s not hard to love. She’s too sweet, too trusting. When he first saw her, he thought that maybe she would have been a fun past time while trying to woo Elena. She would have been so easy to play with and corrupt and eventually break.

But then he actually got to know her and somehow, someway, came to care for her. He protects her, watches over her.

In his mind, that made her his.

One day, he sees her drop her purse, the contents spilling all over the floor. He’s bemused to see a huge stack of flowers, some fairly fresh, some old and wilted.

She picks them up, her face flushed and almost matching her hair.

“Forget-me-nots,” she explains to him quietly. “There’s an entire field of them not too far from her. I’d go and pick some every day when you were…gone.”

Gone. As in dead. She actually went and picked flowers every day while he was dead.

He can’t help but feel touched at the gesture even though normally he would have found it stupid and pointless.

He likes knowing she thought about him every day even though he was dead. That she remembered him every day.

“Meredith always thought it was so ridiculous and pointless and stupid, but she couldn’t get me to stop or throw any of them away even when they were dead and all dried up and wilted away…I sometimes even forgot to take them out of my purse.” She waves the bouquet around for emphasis.

Damon is rarely ever speechless, but he is in that moment. He knows that the meaning of forget-me-nots (besides the obvious) was true love and he can’t help but wonder if Bonnie also knew that. He also can’t help but think again that he might be in love with Bonnie, but he quickly pushes that thought down and watches as she walks away after making a hasty excuse to leave.

That night, he finds himself just outside her window, a forget-me-not in his hand. She’s always looked even smaller and more peaceful in her sleep, her delicate face half-smashed into her pillow while her pale eyelids flutter, a sign of her dreaming.

He leaves the small flower on the windowsill and disappears into the night.

The next morning, he’s there just in time to see her find the little flower and watch her delicate heart-shaped face light up in happiness.

Every night afterwards, he leaves her a forget-me-not. Occasionally, he gets creative and will also leave a white rose to represent purity, innocence, secrecy, and heaven or baby’s breath for happiness or an aster for love and daintiness or an anemone for unfading love. It’s almost like a strange game of how many different flowers he can find to get his meaning across.

Every morning, his little bird finds the flowers and her big brown eyes flash in happiness and a small, content little smile spreads across her soft cupid-bow shaped lips.

One night, she’s waiting for him and catches him in the act and he feels almost as awkward and embarrassed as she did when all those forget-me-nots spilled out of her purse that one day.

It was ridiculous, really, that this tiny little girl—this maiden—could make him, a vampire who was over five hundred years old, feel like a bumbling seventeen year old mortal.

“Damon,” she breathes softly, a small smile curling at her sweet lips. She leans out of the window and into the cool night air to softly press her lips to his in a sweet kiss.

“I love you, too,” she tells him, still smiling.