Chapter One

Sylvia Gilbert inhaled, holding the smooth, bitter smoke in her mouth for a moment before releasing a white cloud in a long sigh. She hated that she had picked up smoking again. The dilapidated cigarette rested smugly between her first and middle fingers, almost taunting her with its addictive nicotine and cell-killing chemicals. She sneered down at it. Cigarettes. What did they know anyway?

Her head rested gently against the pale red wall of her bedroom and one foot hung loosely off the side of the halfway-deflated air mattress that served as her bed. Her pillow scrunched uncomfortably beneath her as she slid from her sitting position onto her back, the smoke from her cigarette going straight up her nostrils burning away her olfactory senses. A long drag completed the connection between the ash and the filter, and she drilled the butt into the ashtray lying next to her on the floor, scowling as it tipped over, spilling dirty ash onto the hardwood. Seeing that it wasn't going to catch the room ablaze, she let it go. Certainly she'd clean it up later. Right?

She laid her arm across her stomach and closed her eyes, the fingers of her left hand picking out chords on an imagined guitar – an old habit. The rosy walls were nauseating at the moment. Combine the disgusting color with the haze of smoke being lazily pushed around the room by the ceiling fan and it was enough to overwhelm even her dulled senses on this dreary, oppressively contemplative evening. Why had she ever thought rosewould make a decent color? Her lips twisted into a frown. What a load of bollocks. She knew exactly why she had picked that color. Blood had been too dark, so she had chosen the next best thing. How foolish she could be.

As she lay there on her mattress, the quiet of the apartment nearly overwhelming her, her mind began to wander to all the places it wasn't supposed to go. Brief flashes of the past months ricocheted around inside her brain, several of the more painful ones repeating in earnest. She closed her eyes shut tighter and focused on picking each memory up and tossing it into a trashcan where tiny metal teeth gnashed and destroyed each shred of pain until it was eradicated completely from existence in her mind. She didn't need that. Not right now. Her mood was dim enough without recalling the past weeks of depression, angst and utter loneliness.

It took several minutes of concentration, but she could finally sit in the quiet without thinking. It really was quiet, she suddenly noticed, eerily so. Her ears were popping with the silence that was only broken by the occasional creak from the old fan as it labored to cool off the room.

These were the moments where, in the movies, something would happen. Just when everything was quiet, a loud, booming noise would disrupt everything. Something crazy. Something destructive. She held her breath as every nerve ending tensed in anticipation for some calamity. She waited…she hoped…she may have even prayed a little, but the walls stayed in tact, the air remained pregnant with smoke, and the monotony of the ceiling fan droned on unabated. She sighed and pulled her arm off her abdomen and swung it onto the top of the radio beside her, feeling around blindly for the FM switch. A click, and the smooth, wave-like notes seemed to diffuse directly from the speakers and flow around her, filling her chest and twining around her hands before joining the smoke's circular parade around the room:

"Once upon a time I was falling in love
Now, I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart"

The words stuck in her mind, as if some sort of diplomat had slammed his seal in wax onto her brain, forever imprinting the lyrics there. She opened her eyes, only to have hisface swim into her view. She blinked furiously in an attempt to dissipate the image. Her open palm slapped against the wall, hard; that single act filled with the frustration and anger that usually lay dormant underneath her sadness and despair. She immediately regretted it as shock waves of pain spiraled up her arm and culminated in her shoulder.

"Turn around bright eyes
Every now and then I fall apart"

Rolling her shoulder in circles she raised herself up off the mattress. Her bare feet padded quietly across the old wooden floor through the hallway. A peal of thunder shook the house and she stopped, listening hard to the first poundings of rain falling heavily on the roof. She could already smell the freshness of the new drops bringing life back to this over-cooked land, causing the lushness of all the greenery to brighten noticeably. Her hands traced lightly over the molding of the hallway walls as the whole apartment lit up with a sudden flash of light. The radio still continuing its song was barely audible above the howling, lonely winds rattling the shudders; invisible hands reaching past the window pane in an attempt to fill the rooms with their sighs, their desires. Asleep on the antique, bedraggled couch in the living room, she found her cat, his tufted fur standing up in odd places and his paws outstretched before him in pursuit of a dream mouse.

Naturally, Harold was oblivious to the anxiety permeating the rental that late summer evening. The feeling pushed down on Sylvia heavily, though, almost forcing her thoughts into one another forming a long, seam-less muse – thoughts she really shouldn't be thinking at all. Quiet as she could, she creaked the door open and crept outside. Harold was one exasperating cat when he wanted to go outside, and once he got out, she'd have to chase him all over the neighborhood to bring him back in. She loved that fuzzy cat, but she was not in the right spirit to go chasing him around in a storm that looked to be in the beginning throws of a serious rage.

Under the safety of the outreaching metal lip of the gutter above her door, Sylvia held a hand out feeling a few splashes of rain on her fingers. She loved how summer rains were always so warm, had even written a song about it, but she took no joy in the feeling now. The wind was refusing to go along with the rain's lead in temperature; it blew chilly gusts through the trees, causing them to swing dangerously against the darkening sky, then continued its angry path into her hair tossing it this way and that, pushing it in front of her eyes before whipping it back over her shoulder. Even the water in the pond across the street was suffering from the moody disposition of the weather, the surface so disrupted, the ducks did not dare attempt a swim; instead, they all cowered under trees and in the midst of bushes.

Looking about her at the subtle, graceful beauty of Richmond, Sylvia reaffirmed herself in her decision to move from Mystic Falls. It was rough most days, being removed from her friends, but her brother and his wife lived only a few minutes away from her new flat, and anything was better than staying in that old town. She had loved the antiquity of it when she first arrived, a naïve fourteen-year-old girl who thought she knew everything about the world, but now, at twenty-five, she was ready to move on. Too many bad things had happened there; too many people had died, for her to want to stick around any longer.

When her Aunt had mysteriously disappeared, she had inherited her house in Mystic Falls. Sylvia had never quite gotten over that loss. She had been extremely close with her Aunt Elena. Her father, Jeremy Gilbert, had been devastated, his sister being the only living relative he had had left. He had refused to keep his sister's house and had urged Sylvia to sell it immediately, a nice property like that was sure to bring in some decent money, but Sylvia had denied his request. If Aunt Elena had meant Sylvia to have it, she would keep it.

That had been before the weird things started happening.

Sylvia, barely sixteen at the time of her Aunt's dissapearance, began to look more and more like her deceased relative every day. Her hair had the same shade of brown, though it fell in waves down her back instead of the unnaturally straight character of Elena's. She was tall and thin. Her nose was the same length, her lips the same full pout, and her eyes the exact shade, as if someone had made a carbon copy of her Aunt. It was eerie, to Sylvia, the way several people of the town, especially her Aunt's friends, stared at her as she passed. They were related, true, but none of her friends looked so very much like their relatives. They could have easily passed as twins, save the differences age wrought.

On her eighteenth birthday, Sylvia began to feel like she was being watched. When she related to her father the cold that radiated down her spine so often, he panicked. He began to rant and rave irrationally about creatures of the night and evil in the town, but could never tell Sylvia exactly what he was so afraid of.

Sylvia had chalked his behavior up to the beginning of Alzheimer's. It was no secret that some kind of crazy ran in her family. When he began to tear the house apart looking for some box of journals he said were hidden there, Sylvia had called a nursing home nearby, but her father would have none of that. He submitted to testing, but was found perfectly capable, mentally and physically, of taking care of himself. If that had been the end of everything, she might have stayed the rest of her life in that sleepy little town. As it was, however, there was a string of disappearances in all the cities immediately surrounding that town, and some internal warning system set Sylvia's hair on end nearly all the time.

When a local boy was found murdered, Jeremy Gilbert moved away; left the town and all his misery and fears behind him, to New York, of all places. How he thrived in a city so different from the small, homey feeling of Mystic Falls, Sylvia would never know, but thrive he did. She visited her old man once or twice a month since he vowed to never set foot in Virginia again. Thankfully, Sylvia's younger brother, Jackson, and his wife May, remained in the state. They had been the ones who told her about the apartment she was now living in. She had left not too long after her father. It was just too sad in Mystic Falls with all of her family gone, and too weird with the disappearances that were so like her own Aunt's.

So, she had moved to Richmond, started writing songs again, got a job at a local pizza parlor, and within a few years signed on with a small local record label.

That's when she had met Damon Salvatore.

Frowning as his memory once again popped into her mind, Sylvia stepped back inside, pulling her hoodie off the coat rack by the door, her keys jingling inside the pocket. She would treat herself to some ice cream.

Damon Salvatore, indeed.

After locking the front door, Sylvia walked slowly down the metal staircase of the apartment complex to the ground below. Very conscious of the cold dampness creeping up her blue jeans as she stepped through the wet grass, she hurried her steps. Naturally, when she tried the keys, the lock stuck. Some days she wished she could just throw her car in a ditch for all the trouble it caused her. After her shirt had gotten thoroughly soaked through and she had just about given up hopes of getting the lock unstuck, a satisfying click told her that the key had decided to do its job after all. She opened the door and jumped inside, shutting herself in against the rain that was now falling more heavily. Of course, she hadn't had time to replace the windshield wipers, yet, as the plexi-glass/ductape window combination was her first priority. The constant squeak of the wipers fighting the rain in a losing battle accompanied the roar of the engine as she began backing her boat of an Oldsmobile out of the driveway. Her poor car…

Honestly, Sylvia hated driving in the rain, especially when the sky looked as if it had been terribly wronged, but if her brain was going to insist on traipsing down Memory Lane all night, she needed some therapy food.

She slowed to a careful stop at the red light down the road. Waiting for her turn to maneuver onto the highway, she beat a rhythm on the steering wheel and hummed rather tunelessly. She desperately needed to write a new song soon or she'd likely be out of a job. Her manager wasn't too fond of her sitting on her ass, doing nothing. It wasn't like she hadn't been trying; it was hard to write when you didn't know how you'd feel from one day to the next, and not every song should be depressing and heart-broken, full of lament and confusion. That did not make for a good album.

The green light reflected eerily off the soaked road and Sylvia pressed down on the gas pedal. Right as she began to cross the darkened street, a jolt of motion flashed across her field of vision. She screamed and slammed her foot on the break, sliding across the rest of the road and bumping against the guardrail on the other side. Her fingers were bone white against the dark green of the wheel and she labored to catch her breath. What the hell had just happened?!

She fingered the lock on the door, double-checking it, before she peered out the windows into the deep blue of the dying evening light. It was impossible to see very far; certainly not weather she should be driving in, she thought sardonically. The rain fell in earnest and it was twilight – the most difficult time to see – when all the shades of blue melded together and perception became tricky. Still, she searched. The "open" sign in the window of the little fresh market down the highway blinked feebly, just enough to distort things even more with its red glow. The streetlights were on, but their orange globes didn't do much to dispel the darkening night, either. Fervently hoping it wasn't him, Sylvia shook herself and pulled back onto the road. There was no sense in getting out and looking at her car. She hadn't hit the guardrail hard, and her car couldn't be in much worse shape than it already was. Besides, if there really was someone out there, if she hadn't just imagined that, she didn't want to see him anyway… She didn't.

The drive to the ice cream parlor, though only a few minutes, felt like an hour. She was on edge now, the constant thunder only making her more jumpy as she searched every shadow for movement. She sat in her car for a moment after parking, looking about her very carefully before jumping out of the car, not bothering to lock it behind her, and making a beeline for the parlor door. The parking lot was empty save for the employee's cars, and no wonder. All the sane people would stay safe and dry at home on this night. All Virginia needed was another hurricane.

"Sylvia! What are you doing here?" Cole's astonished voice sounded loud in the quiet of the small parlor as Sylvia leaned gratefully against the door, the fluorescent lighting unusually comforting.

Forcing a smile and a light-hearted laugh, Sylvia replied, "You know me! I'm a sucker for a cruise in such gorgeous weather." She made her way across the tiled floor to the counter where Cole was leaning, his shaggy brown hair in its usual disarray around his heart-shaped face. Sylvia noticed his hazel eyes brighten and fought down feelings of discomfort. She knew Cole fancied her; he had for a while now, though she never indicated any reciprocity of feeling. He seemed to think, maddeningly, that every time she smiled or said something even remotely funny that she was flirting with him. She'd find another ice cream parlor, surely, if this one wasn't so close – and cheap.

"It is a beautiful evening," Cole said with a genuine laugh. "It's just…" he gestured out the window to the downpour. "You hate driving in the rain, Syl."

Sylvia nodded and tucked a stray strand of sopping wet hair behind her ear in an attempt to hide the wince at his familiar nickname. She hated when he called her that. "You know me well, Cole. I just really, really needed some ice cream."

"Moose Tracks, I'm assuming?" He chuckled and moved away from the counter, grabbing a cup and scooping a rather large scoop of ice cream into it, covering the top with an obscene amount of sprinkles and sticking a spoon into it. He presented the treat to her as if it was a diamond ring. "Drowning in sprinkles, for the lady." He grinned at his joke and Sylvia managed another laugh, barely. She would definitely need to find a new ice cream place.

"Thanks, Cole." She nodded her head towards a small stool by a window. "I'm just gonna sit over here. Go back to whatever it is you do around here." She softened her words with a smile and took her seat, staring out into the stormy night.

She couldn't deny that Cole was cute. His boyish looks were alluring in their own way, but she had never been attracted to boys. Unbidden, the image of his face came back to her view, all square jaw and rugged manliness. She took a deep steadying breath and dug into her ice cream with earnest. She would forget him. It had been four and a half months and he hadn't gotten in touch with her once. There had been no letters, no calls, no texts, no e-mails…nothing. Her brother, ever the psychologist, had said she was going through the five stages of grief, but Sylvia tried to stay in the anger phase. That was the safest. She could hide behind anger.

The first spoonful of ice cream in her mouth nearly made her moan. Nothing hit the spot in times of emotional turmoil like ice cream; particularly free ice cream – something she could count on Cole for, despite his creepy almost-come-on's. She dipped the spoon back into the paper cup but froze when the lightning flashed, illuminating the parking lot of the bar-b-q joint across the way. There had been someone standing there, she was sure of it…but that was absurd. No one would just stand around in a storm in the middle of an empty parking lot. Her imagination, her fear, perhaps even her longing, were all getting the best of her. Shaking her head, Sylvia tried to ignore the warning bells going off in her mind and just enjoy her ice cream. She'd be damned if Damon was going to take this simple pleasure away from her, too.

She couldn't deny, though, that it was becoming harder and harder to keep her mind off of him. What was wrong with her? Shouldn't the months of being ignored make her less inclined to see him, instead of more? Again, the horrible thoughts that something had happened to him tried to force their way between the cracks in her cortex and fester, but she was done with that. She couldn't afford to think like that.

She hurried through the rest of her treat, knowing that scarfing down all that ice cream so fast was going to give her hell later, tossed the trash in the waste bin at the back of the store, and quickly walked to the door. She'd just smoke a quick cigarette under the awning and then go back home. She could cuddle with Harold and listen to the storm from the safety of her bedroom. She nodded to herself. That was a safe and healthy plan. Well, the cigarette wasn't healthy, but she wasn't going to think about that right now.

Ignoring the hurt in Cole's eyes as she waved a quick goodbye, Sylvia pushed the door open and stepped out into the night, keeping her gaze trained away from that parking lot. She fished down into her pocket and pulled out her slightly crumpled pack of cigarettes and her bic. She was slightly embarrassed to find that her hands were shaking a little as she tried to get the lighter to catch. Come on! There was no way this thing was dead already. She did not want to have to go by the gas station just to smoke a cigarette. This was turning into one hellish night, that was certain. She held the betraying device up to her ear and shook it, but it was impossible to audibly tell if there was any lighter fluid left with the downpour going on all around her. Sighing heavily, she scanned the parking lot, preparing for a sprint to her car.

"Need a light?"

The deep voice seemed to come out of nowhere and Sylvia jumped and screamed, dropping her addiction and busted lighter. She closed her eyes, refusing to believe her senses, but she knew it was him. The lighter and cigarettes never made a splash; they had never hit the ground. It couldn't be anyone else. His scent, all masculine musk with a hint of clean peppermint and a dash of…other…swept its way up her nostrils, filling her.

No, no, no! She did not want to see him. She couldn't handle it. Not when she was so close to convincing herself she didn't need him…

"Sylvia," her name sounded like a caress coming from his mouth. "Look at me."

She couldn't help it. She opened her eyes, and her heart, that glutton for punishment, went into double time as her gaze locked with his impossibly blue orbs. It felt like a fist was squeezing her chest and punching her in the gut at the same time. After a moment, she realized he was holding her cigarettes out to her, the pack open, one cigarette extended out farther than the rest. She took it, her fingers shaking more noticeably now. When she just stood there holding it numbly in her fingers, he reached out and grasped her wrist, bringing her own hand up to her mouth until she wrapped her lips around the cigarette. He then flicked his own fingers, the lighter he held lighting instantly, and brought the flame to the end of her tobacco. She inhaled, the tip igniting and glowing red.

His lips turned into a smirk as he took a cigarette for himself and lit it, puffing away in the night. That smirk…so, this really was happening. There was no way she could be imaging that smirk in such perfect, arousing detail. She stood there, her cigarette turning to ashes, and watched as he casually leaned against the soaked, brick wall of the building. It was then she noticed that he was even more rain drenched than she was.

"It was you!" she blurted out. His expression remained infuriatingly smug. "How…how dare you!" Yes, that was good. Hold on to that anger. "I could have died! You don't just flash by in front of someone who is driving in the rain! How dare you!" She threw her cigarette at his feet and stalked off towards her car, ignoring the rain beating down on her head. Ignoring her treacherous heart that was screaming at her to turn around. Ignoring her cynical brain that was telling her she should at least take the cigarettes with her. Her sole purpose in life now to get to her car.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't right that he could just show up after five months of nothing and expect her to just do whatever he wanted without so much as an explanation, to just stand there all smug and smirk without so much as an, "I'm sorry I broke your heart. Here's my nuts. Punch me." It wasn't fair that her heart felt like it was breaking even more as she walked away from him, but she couldn't stand looking at him any longer. She just had to get home.

She reached for her door but found her movement stopped by his hand on her arm. "Sylvia, wait." She held her breath, trying in vain to ignore the static waves of arousal radiating from her arm down her center. How was it possible that he could still make her feel like this? "Let me come over. Let's talk." She tried. She tried so hard to hold on to her anger, her indignation…and she failed. And he knew. Without even waiting for an audible answer, he opened her door, waited for her to climb in, and then sped around to the other side.

Steeling herself, Sylvia put the keys in the ignition and started the sure-to-be uncomfortable drive back to her apartment. She did not look at him, though she could feel his eyes on her. If she looked at him, she knew she would be unable to look away. His gaze on her, though, was like a fire hot brand on her skin, burning away all sense of who she was and turning her into something that belonged to him. The rest of her anger shed away from her heart, leaving nothing but a sense of betrayal and a longing so acute it was like a shard of glass in her chest.

When they gained her driveway and the roar of the engine died away, they sat there in her car, Sylvia afraid to move, afraid to look at him, completely unaware of what was going through his mind. When she simply couldn't stand it anymore, she pried her gaze from the night and looked beside her at the creature who belonged to it…Damon Salvatore.

Damon fucking Salvatore.

A/N: So, this is my first ever fanfiction based off of "The Vampire Diaries." I'm a huge sucker (pun-intended) for sexy vamps and that show definitely has them. I've always loved Damon, the bad guy/good guy drama. That's what I hope to capture in this story. If you follow the show, this is set way in the future since Sylvia is Elena's brother's daughter. I wanted to go off of what would happen if another doppelganger were to pop up later on the line and Damon was still around. Let me know what you think? I know this starts off a bit slow, maybe confusing if you're not in my head, but I promise the coming chapters will be easier to follow and flow a bit easier. I tend to have rough starts, but once I get in the groove of the story, I own it.

Read and review, please! That's what we authors love. ;)

-Running

P.S. - The song lyrics in italics are from "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler. A beautiful song if you've never heard it.