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Blood is dry on your lips and you hear the shower running. Your gums ache, but you know you're not hungry yet. Not when your focus is so easily stolen by the running water, away from the consistent pain heavy in your gut. A permanent cinderblock inside of you, an entire life nothing but a stain on your lips, thick in your throat, and all you can think about is the running shower, and who's in it.
Damon came back to you, decades after he promised you a life of misery. Showering in your shower like he belongs there. And maybe he does. God knows you won't deny him that. You won't deny him anything, short of death, itself. You listen hard for every sound his lips make, every vibration that crawls up his throat, every exhaled breath. You think he's not breathing to spite you. All you can hear is flesh groping soap over flesh, and you figure maybe that's okay too.
Damon is slow a lot of the time. Human slow, just because he can be so much more than that. He relishes in doing the mediocre. You remember trying to explain that to father, because this is the way your brother has always been. He didn't understand. You didn't understand either, dutifully spitting out words Damon had said, things he'd done, attempting to explain a person you didn't understand for a benefit that only benefited you. Defending him, he didn't need that, but you did. Damon transcended comprehension. He was the only thing you couldn't figure out, the only thing that had pieces leading to nowhere and parts that just didn't work with no explanation at all, no meaning at all. Or so you told yourself, just to ease the sting that being left in the dark - after so many years - you were left with.
Damon pads into the room barefoot, and bare-chested, damp hair plastered across his forehead, and you look up at him from the couch you're sprawled across, because you can't not look. You could never not look at Damon. He knew that. He'd always known that. Your breath stutters and you let it go, because breathing takes too much effort, and right now you can't focus on anything but Damon. He's so consuming, you can't remember how you survived so many years without him in sight.
He moves closer and his lips move and you latch onto the sound. But he keeps moving closer and you think maybe you should be listening to the words too. "You have blood on your lips," he tells you, as he crawled over you. His sheer radiance pushes you back down, back into the cushions, and you let it. His tongue swipes over your lips, the pressure wetting and removing the blood from your lips. His lips curl into a smile, but he's hungry. His eyes have darkened, not with mischief or sorrow. He has different shades of dark, because dark is all that makes him up.
"Thanks."
He laughs, small exhales of breathe pressing against your lips, as firm as his tongue had been before. His laugh sounds heavy and weightless at the same time and you want to know how he does that. How does he laugh with so much freedom, a freedom that is always tied down with iron weights, that crushes you even as it makes you smile in that twitchy unsure way. "Are you hungry, little brother?"
You don't like how he says brother. You know he's claiming you just to spite you. You think you deserve that. Let him spite you, you've damned him to hell. You nod, your nod matching your twitchy, unsure smile, and he laughs again. "I'm thinking nurse this time. They taste so much richer than doctors. Must be all that wasted potential and building rage inside of them. It has a spiky tang, don't you think?" He speaks about humans like they're food, discusses them like they're on a menu and just haven't realized it yet. They're lobsters, inside a tank on display, there for the taking. And Damon takes them. He watches them and picks which one looks tastiest, and then he removes them, eats them, kills them and discards them; like empty shells, he just leaves there to waste away.
You don't like it. Your humanity is beginning to eat away at that switch you've found inside of you. Little things are beginning to eat at you, little things seem more wrong now than they had in life. You don't like eating people. You don't like how he talks about them. You don't like how this switch inside of Damon has made him; he isn't the Damon you remember, and you mourn for your loss, even as you cling to this other-Damon, because he's all you have now.
You don't say anything. Yes, they do have a spiky tang, but you don't say anything. And he knows how you feel, like he can taste your disapproval and that makes him laugh too. You think he laughs just to keep from crying. You hope he laughs just to keep from crying. You hope he exaggerates and overacts everything he does, just so he can feel something. You hope he's just faking it, and you wish you could believe in your hope.
"Come on, little brother," he's saying, but he hasn't really gotten off of you. He's still perched over your submissively still body, laughing in your face and smiling like he isn't the abomination he is because of you.
You want to apologize.
He knows you do too, because you've already tried it.
He laughed at you, when you did. Told you, you had nothing to be sorry for. Katherine was dead and he was alive, and god was he was alive. And he had you and your selfish discontent to thank for that, but he never really thanked you. You don't expect him to, because you know he isn't really thankful, even though he doesn't seem as upset as he had before. You know he's still upset with you.
"Okay." You say it willingly, like you had a choice in the first place. You were going to drain away somebody else's life just to sustain the life you had with your brother. It seemed worth it. He smiles, and you want to believe it. When he smiles like that, he looks so young, so human, pleased at having gotten his way. Pleased. But he's been faking so much for so long that you're not sure what's real anymore.
He gets to his feet so quickly that you don't even try to follow his movement with your eyes. And he pulls you to your feet with his unyielding strength. And you know now that he's pleased, you can feel it humming through his body. He has your hand in his and he's tugging you out of the room, toward your own bedroom - your bed is disheveled, and you know this is where he'd slept last night. He throws open your wardrobe and riffles through it for a suitable outfit.
Nothing is blurred after that. You remember him practically stripping you, and then redressing you, like he used to do when you were younger and incapable of dressing within the appropriate amount of time given. He'd help you, even when you were nine years old, just so you could escape your father's angry voice. You remember him dragging you out of the apartment, rolling his eyes irritably when you insist on locking the door after you, and then resuming his quick and insistent tug to the front doors, and then outside. He's bouncing with barely contained energy and you don't think he's faking it. You think he might actually be letting you in, letting you see this, and it's contagious. He wants to walk, because your feet are faster and more reliant than any horse drawn carriage, and you humor him.
He finds a nurse for himself, compels her into believing him, just like he's compelled you. And then he goes out of his way to find a homeless teenager for you. He knows how you like them, even if you deny it to yourself. He knows. You like them chock-full of drugs and half crazy, eager and willing and greedy for the softest of touches. You like them young and male and quiet. And he finds you one, he finds you one so quickly and so easily. And he guides this boy into your hands and you know he hasn't compelled him, because he knows you like them when they're aware. You like them moaning and gasping in your ear, and he knows that.
Damon feeds like an animal. He bites into his nurse, teeth gnashing deep enough to tear skin and muscle and crunch bone. The boy is terrified and tries to run away because you took too long to bite him. You press him back against the alley wall, as the nurse gurgles and chokes on her own blood behind you. Damon is making a deep throaty purring sound and it's hard to concentrate. You stroke the boy's face, look into his eyes to establish a pseudo-connection, and tell him to relax; if he'd just relax you can make him feel real good. Like a drug. You know that's what he wants to hear and he listens to you, because nobody's ever spoken to him like that before, soft and gentle and so very giving. You know that too. Your lips touch his dirty neck, and then pierce his skin and he tenses in pain. But then he relaxes and you can taste the pleasure singing through his dirty blood. Behind you, the nurse crumbles to the ground, spent and discarded.
There are traces of heroin and opium and tobacco in his blood, and you drink it down. You feel fingers on your back, and know they're Damon's, because the human's fingers are twisted in your shirt at your shoulder, and your hair. Weak, feeble, twisting and churning and clinging to you as if his life depended on it, while you drain him dry. His hands fall away when they become too heavy for his own strength and Damon's fingers replace the fingers in your hair. He impatiently tugs your head back so sharply bits of the boy's skin gets caught in your teeth.
His tongue catches every wasted drop of the foul blood, meticulously removing the remaining blood from your lips, before his tongue ventures into your mouth, to swipe at the blood there. It dissolves into a heated, crushing kiss, the utterly empty human slipping from your grasp and crashing bonelessly to the ground. Damon's fingers are painfully tight in your hair, pulling at the roots, holding your head back at that painful angle, as his mouth ravishes yours. He tastes like nurse, and he tastes like you, and you like the taste of yourself in his mouth.
You stop him when he has you pressed against the cold stone of the alley wall, pushing your shirt up your abdomen with crystal clear intent. You ask him if he's fucking serious and he laughs. His laughter is more breathless this time, deeper and darker and more real. "As vervain," he assures you, his eyes still laughing, and he tugs your shirt off over your head. The movement leaves very little room for argument, and you don't really care to argue, so you don't. You don't have to do anything you don't care to do. Not anymore.
There are dead people on the ground at your feet, but Damon's fingers on your stomach is all you can think about. You think, maybe, your priorities are a bit screwy. Because they're all about Damon.
He undresses you as quickly and eagerly as before. He touches you as if he doesn't know you, as if your body is new to him and there's so much to explore. You think this might be the one thing he never fakes, his eager need for your body. For you. He coaxes you to the ground, on your back, right beside the already paling nurse, close enough to touch her and feel her cold flesh against your bare skin. He's laughing again, as he peels off his clothes and you watch him. He laughs when he kisses you, though he isn't making any noise anymore, but you can still hear him. You can hear his laughter ringing in your head.
He's always laughing and you wish you could hear him sob, just once. Just to confirm that he's still feeling. That everything isn't just a joke to him. You want to see Damon Salvatore cry, so you give him everything he wants. But Damon leaves you before the laughter leaves his eyes. When you wake up in the morning, in your bed, beneath your blankets, Damon is gone. And you remember how you survived so long without him. Your body goes numb and you don't feel anything, that switch inside of you kicks in, full force. You survived by feeling nothing, because only Damon can make you feel.