Red or white? Or brown, caked in grave dirt?
Brown, like Jeremy's eyes. Eyes that are closed in sleep, safe and full of life, one room away. Life bought with death.
I close my eyes so I can't see my hands anymore. I need to stop playing Lady MacBeth. It's not going to help the problem. The problem is Stefan.
The problem is me. I'm broken, lost, but my body and my friends still hold my place in the world. I can't abandon those responsibilities even if my sanity is trying to abandon me.
So the problem has to be Stefan.
I need to figure out whose side he's actually on. I bet he thinks he's on ours, but if Klaus is involved, that is very unlikely to be true. And we all know that Stefan doesn't like to admit he's out of control even when the car is sailing toward the edge of the bridge, brakes screaming.
How ironic is it that while everything else has changed, it is still me and Damon against the world? Doing what needs to be done while I'm left wondering if I ever really knew Stefan at all.
I'd see it in his eyes if he was compelled. Klaus hasn't kidnapped any of us, and we know every terrible thing Stefan did while he was gone, so how can Klaus blackmail him? Unless maybe he cheated on me while he was gone, but what is sex with another girl compared to making a jigsaw puzzle out of one? No, if he's helping Klaus, he's doing it because he wants to.
I don't know what infuriates me the most: that he rescued Connor while Jeremy was still bleeding from the hole Connor shot in him, or that it was probably Stefan who compelled Jeremy. Yesterday. While pretending everything was fine. Dinner and a movie and eating burgers instead of bartenders because we're a happy, well-adjusted vampire couple. Ha freaking ha.
Even my thoughts are starting to sound like Damon. Was he like me when he was human? Is that why now that I'm a vampire we're starting to look like two sides of the same coin?
A coin as two-faced as my boyfriend.
Red threatens at the edges of my eyes, the color of the kind of fury that demands blood. Of course it does. Now that I'm Damonette I don't get yelling mad anymore. I get neck-snapping mad. Butchering mad.
The kind of mad that leaves my bathroom sprayed with someone else's blood, as it was a few minutes ago. I should be worried, I suppose, that my strained mind is starting to crack in a very visual way. It's not a good sign, unless you're trying to fill beds in a home for the criminally insane.
I roll my eyes, irritated. I never used to be sarcastic like this. Maybe sardonic cynicism comes along with the fangs. Just like the morality switch, it's a consolation prize for the fact that your new place in the silverware drawer is more steak knife than spoon, and you are designed to do things you never wanted to be capable of.
I don't even care that I'm seeing imaginary blood. I know exactly why it is happening.
My humanity is trying to remind the rest of me, with foot-tall letters on a mirror, of exactly what I am. Because I don't give a damn. Maybe that's because I'm a creature of the night pretending I'm still at home in the sunlight, but I don't think so.
When I caught Connor, I bit him. As Damon keeps reminding me, I'm a predator, and my teeth are my natural weapon. But I didn't drain Connor, barely even tasted him. I'm a brand-new vampire and I know damn good and well that I don't have the kind of control I need to stop drinking when I am as angry as I was in that moment.
Oh no, I didn't stop because I was in control of myself.
I stopped because supposedly being a vampire is all about the blood, but it isn't. It's about the hunt. It's the fact that now, when Connor tries to use my brother against me like my enemies always do, I can make him stop.
One tiny snap.
Done.
It's like the first moment when you tell your parents you don't want to eat your cereal and they finally listen to you. Now, I have power over my world, and in my world, nobody is going to threaten Jeremy. Not when all that stands between his death and his safety is one column of bone, so optional in my new hands.
That's why my humanity is putting the blood back under my newly-washed fingernails. To remind me that these aren't the hands I wanted and I should feel guilty that Connor is no longer an active resident of Mystic Falls.
When I was digging his grave, it kicked me right in the solar plexus. A life.
A person that had a mother who'd once changed his diapers, that maybe watched Law and Order and hated broccoli and sometimes forgot to clean the shower in his RV, but could build a venom and nails booby trap with the precision of an engineer.
He wasn't just a threat, he was a person. I don't ever want to be the reason a person doesn't exist anymore. I've never done anything to make me worth the loss of someone else's life. And my yet my life has already cost so much blood, mostly from my own family.
That's the crimson coating my hands. Jenna and John and Isobel and my parents who asked Stefan to save me first. All the vampires the Salvatores have killed to keep me safe, half a battalion of them. And now Connor.
People are too sacred for me to be happy being a creature whose survival depends on their sacrifice, but my humanity is playing paint by numbers on my hallucinatory tiles because it knows my secret.
That crisp snap is a sound I don't want to un-hear.
That's what I was thinking when I sobbed out my wrenching, imperfect remorse, knee deep in a grave with dried blood cracking on my chin because I should be stained by what I did. I was so upset, I couldn't even yell at Stefan, even though he betrayed us. Again.
So I turned my eyes to Damon instead, because he knows. He knows that playing the bad guy means using vampire strength to dig through ground too rocky for a human to shovel.
I can still see his lips impersonating a smirk, while his eyes tell me that it is the least funny thing in the world.
Please. Newbie vampire remorse? It's worse than a hangover.
Damon tells me everything I need to hear, if I ever managed to listen the right way.
We're a predatory species. We enjoy the hunt, the feed, and the kill.
He told me to kill Connor, because he knew it had to be done. My ring catches the light and I realize he did more than that. He's older, stronger. He could have taken my ring by force and gone after Connor himself.
My new hands are wrapped into steel fists, my strength testing my bones. Would I have let him? I was perfectly happy for Connor to die when someone else was doing the killing, when I could pass the burden onto another set of shoulders. Black leather disguises the weight so well.
I'd bet that Damon's boasting about how easy it would be to kill Connor meant he actually thought the hunter was seriously dangerous. But he would have only let me risk myself if he thought that I could win.
Damon even told me how to do it, not that I listened. If I'd kept talking and crept closer before Connor started counting, if I would have gone straight for the heart like Damon would have, Connor would have been dead before he shot Jeremy. Before Stefan could try to rescue him.
Damon knew what it would do to me. He was the one who taught me how to feed without killing, because he knew I didn't want to purchase my own life with others. And I saw his face through my tears at Connor's grave. Damon hurt for me, so much that he couldn't even muster a speech about how being a vampire was digging shallow graves in the woods and I should just get over it.
For somebody that doesn't want to be like me, you sure are good at it.
That is the last thing that should unclench my fists, but it does. He's right. Being a vampire means digging graves for the people that threaten your family, andI am a vampire.
I didn't tell Stefan, and I didn't write it in my diary, but it's written in Damon's sky-colored eyes every time he looks at me.
I hate being a vampire. The same way I hate Damon.
Author's Note: If you need some sweet Delena to console you for Season 4, check out my other stories, "Sanguine Veritas" and "Inevitable." Please leave a review because they make my day! I am happy to answer questions, and I'd love to hear what you liked or didn't like about this story. For those who are worrying, the last line was meant as hyperbole, not to be taken literally.