Aestas Estas
Disclaimer: The Vampire Diaries TV show and characters do not belong to me.
Warnings: Vague hints of slash and incest.
There are numbers, locations, dates and memories hidden behind their eyes and under their skin. A history built of blood, liquor and compelling misdirections.
"I rarely lie about anything important." Damon cajoles, but perhaps he means unimportant.
At age twenty-four, 1864, Mystic Falls, Damon Salvatore dies exactly seven-hundred and forty-three metres away from a church full of vampires and innocents. Exactly eight bullets are fired from the weapon which kills him.
It is Giuseppe Salvatore's favourite firearm.
Damon's earliest memories of it are the heat of the August summer and his father's practised hands as he disassembles and cleans it. His mother smiles warmly, and the slope of her pregnant stomach is accentuated by her European royal blue summer dress. French is her first language and Damon speaks it fluently by his sixth birthday.
He is recently seven years old and all of Mother's acquaintances comment on how very beautiful her son is, and how very much he looks like her. The resemblance is in fact, quite striking.
Too striking perhaps, Damon thinks, while Mary Salvatore's coffin is lowered into the ground and Giuseppe cannot stand to look at his eldest son. Stefan is silent at his nursemaid's side and does not cry. His features are Giuseppe's entirely.
Damon thinks of Father's favourite rifle and how it was Mother who taught him how to shoot. He wonders if it will be Giuseppe or he who teaches Stefan. He does not breathe a word of French at home and he does not cry.
In 1864, eight bullets are fired from Giuseppe's favourite firearm. Three are for Stefan, and five are for Damon. Damon never mentions it to Stefan.
Damon Salvatore dies tasting metal and Autumn on his tongue, and there is exactly eleven inches of space between him and his younger brother.
It's 1942, and Damon suspects that his brother is too drunk to see straight, vampiric metabolism be damned.
"-but you never liked Father-" Stefan is saying, words slurred and mouth soft around the edges. Lexi is nowhere to be seen and Damon is grateful for small mercies.
"And then you ate him." Damon replies smoothly. It doesn't sound like condemnation, or even a mild reprimand, Stefan notes somewhat indistinctly.
Damon tastes expensive dry vermouth and blood on his tongue, and thinks it might be Stefan's.
It's 1977 and sometime in between the heady combination of alcohol and drugs and rich young blood, Damon thinks he can still taste the bullets and feel the beat of Stefan's pulse behind his eyes.
Damon wants-
-wants to-
It's 1977, and amidst the euphoric rush of drugs and vermilion-tinted absinthe, Damon takes a depraved sort of pleasure in seducing Lexi and leaving her out on the rooftop in New York's unforgiving July heat. Vampires don't scar, but he can imagine the way the sun must have burned.
Decades later, he sort of enjoys the look of surprise on her face when he kills her.
He wonders, occasionally, what he might have done had Stefan sought him out himself. They could have had fun. And in 1977, New York with Damon Salvatore, humanity isn't nearly entertaining enough until there's a body count.
It's decades later, Damon loses track of the year every now and then, and he's pinning Stefan to the crumbling stone somewhere in the mess of tunnels underneath Mystic Falls.
His daylight ring is somewhere, Stefan having taken it again, and Damon idly wonders if perhaps at some point this entire town won't simply collapse in on itself, tunnels and estates and schools and town halls, the supernatural having taken it's toll.
His fingers are pressing down past his younger brother's ribs and into his chest, and Damon allows a perverse thrill at the way Stefan writhes against him, heart fluttering wildly in his chest and against Damon's fingers. Effortlessly, Damon grinds him harder up against the wall, Stefan gasps becoming more frantic as Damon considers.
-He wants-
-Damon could-
There's something terribly villainous or erotic about the way Damon caresses Stefan's pounding heart as he releases him. Stefan is half-unsure which, when Damon's other hand flattens against his heaving chest, feeling skin and muscle knitting beneath his palm.
There is a nearly imperceptible fine tremor running through Stefan's shoulders when Damon releases him and bares his teeth in a brutal half-savage grin.
-Stefan would-
Damon Salvatore speaks aristocratic French and Stefan does not recall where he learnt it. Damon's eyes are a too-bright royal blue in the flickering half-light of their parlour, and Stefan wants to-
Damon's mouth is red in the dim light, and Stefan thinks it vaguely ironic that Damon was the summer-born child.
Author's note: According to the books linked to the TV series, the Salvatores' mother's name was Mary, and she was a Frenchwoman.