Disclaimer: I don't own "Vampire Diaries," but this what-if has been dancing around in my head and I just had to get it down. Marie Duplessis was an actual person. Do you know which great work of literature she inspired?
Where No One Knows My Name
New Orleans, 1880.
She had always loved Lizst.
She loved his music better now, since her improved ear could appreciate each pitch and timbre. The music didn't simply capture her for one moment, but each note resonated within her, made her heart tremble and her breath catch. She did not only hear it, but she felt it.
Was this living? Was this what it should have been in her lifetime, feeling things so deeply that she discovered parts of herself within that she had never known, that she finally saw what it was to see everything and actively seek it out, only for the pleasure of seeing it?
She didn't know.
But still…she still loved the theater, but even more now. Yet sometimes, it made her sad. Sadder than she should be, she supposed; there were so many times in her lifetime when she had felt sadder over greater things. But it was all amplified, she had been told after she had been turned. The person she had been-truly been underneath the mask of coquettishness and lightness-had been amplified.
She shivered against the warm night air, remembering that night. Remembering the sweats and the chills and coughing up blood, and the pain, the terrible pain…
And then the Russian. Her maid had ushered a well-dressed, handsome man into the room, the room that smelled of blood and anguish and impending death.
He had come to her bedside, passing his hand over her cold, sweat-beaded forehead, and then he had whispered into her ear, "Tell me, does it hurt?"
And through parched lips she croaked out, "Yes!"
"Do you want me to make it go away? Do you want to live?"
The thought of no more pain, of a blessed release, meant the world to her. She consented. But then rationality pierced through her laudanum-clouded mind. "I didn't know they had a cure for…"
And then the searing pain in her neck, and the rush of something being drained from her veins, and then the Russian thrusting his wrist in front of her mouth. "Drink!" he commanded urgently, and drink she did, weakly, slightly revolted at the salty, coppery taste of it.
Blood.
Vasili had taught her well. Just drink enough to satisfy your thirst, not to kill, because if you actually killed, you lost a part of what made you human. "It is important," he told her. "It is important that you remember."
She remembered. And it was so easy, so very easy, posing as a lady of the night and luring some drunk dandy or boatman into an alley and taking just what she needed. And then compelling him to forget.
She would do the same tonight, she reasoned, only she would go to the theater to see the new play in town. The new play that was actually an old play, an old play that she had never desired to see until now. It would be just like it had been in her lifetime, going to the Comédie and more or less waiting for the young men to approach her. But tonight she wasn't sure if she wanted anyone to approach her. She may want to be left alone with her memories and the emptiness which would sometimes creep up on her as it had in her lifetime, and she wanted to weep for it all in the solace of her rooms. If she had to forgo blood for just one night, then so be it. She could always wear the lapis pendant and journey out in the daytime to feed.
It touched her heart. It resonated within her, as a note struck by a piano key on a string resonated throughout an entire piano. She remembered coming upon the poem a few years ago, a poem published in a book, a poem about quarrels and fevered kisses and closed windows. He had loved her, and she had loved him, but there had been no way for it to work. And it had been better that he had left, or that she had sent him away, however one might think of it.
And most of all, it touched her that he had added the camellia. That he had remembered her-or the fictional version of her-in such a way. That she would always be remembered in such a way.
She did not leave the theater a distraught woman, but instead a woman saddened by the passage of years and time. While she remained as she was, the world around her changed and grew, and people lived and died, and here she was, just here. Here for what? Here because some mad Russian had thought that she deserved to live and not die-not die completely, really. Here because her laudanum-addled mind had not grasped the meaning of his question. Here, really, because she wanted to be.
She drew a resolute breath, and she quickened her pace and let the thought swirl about in her head. There were still so many things to see, she thought, not only here, but around the world. Why not go see them? Why not experience them? After all, she had so long: she had lifetimes, she had an eternity…
"Katherine?"
The voice of a young man calling to her stopped her in her tracks. She whirled around to see him crossing the street, as quickly as one of them would, and she knew, she knew…
"Katherine." His voice was more decisive now, and when he came to a halt a few paces in front of her, she saw his face fall in disappointment, saw his eyes grow dim with a sort of melancholy. "You're not Katherine." And then she was certain: they were of one and the same kind.
"No," she said quietly. "No, I'm not Katherine."
He studied her for a moment, his brow furrowing. He was what could be considered a handsome man, she supposed, perhaps not much older or younger than she had been when turned. But there was something to him-a sort of darkness-that she found both frightening and intriguing.
Darkness. He had killed, thousands of times, perhaps. Whatever had been there when he was human had left him long ago.
"Who are you, then?" he asked her, casually.
She told him her name.
He smiled, then laughed. "Well, of all the strange things I've ever seen, this has to be the strangest. Does Dumas fils know? Poor fellow, pining away after you, writing poems to you and stories about you while you were alive-or sort of alive-right under his nose…"
"Stop," she told him.
His brows lifted. "What did I say?"
She glared at him. "Everything," she hissed. "It was everything you said."
His smile deepened into a smirk. "Well, I'm sorry if I offended you, mademoiselle." He emphasized the word almost cruelly.
She remained cool. "I don't believe you are," she said, and picking up her skirts, she brushed past him. "Good night."
"Don't you want to know my name?" he called after her, and she stopped, turning to face him.
"It's Damon," he went on. "Damon Salvatore."
Damon. Damned. The play of words echoed through her head. "Good night, Monsieur Salvatore," she said coldly, and then she hurried to her rooms as quickly as she could.
She did not stay in New Orleans. By the next evening, she was on the next ship bound to London.
"It is good that you left," Vasili remarked as he filled the bowl of his pipe with strong tobacco. He put the tobacco box aside. "Those Salvatores, they are dangerous. And the creature who sired them…She was a dangerous one, too." He placed the pipe in his mouth and struck a match to light it.
"And they are dangerous to us?" she persisted, sipping at the claret once more and relishing the feeling of its warmth as it trailed down her gullet.
"Not only dangerous. Mad." Vasili's brows knitted. "He and his brother were both killers without compunction. There was no one there to guide them as I did you, as my sire did me, as all sires should train their fledglings. That makes them dangerous to not only humans, but to all other vampires in their area. Particularly us. Which is why it was best you left."
She leaned back in her chair and sighed. She was relieved to have left New Orleans when she did.
She did not want to know about what she might become should she choose to kill mercilessly as Damon Salvatore did.
Chicago, 2007.
Marie Duplessis killed for the first time in a very long time during the First World War. It had been a mercy killing; a young soldier, half-dead, caught in the wire in no-man's-land, begging for help. Please, please, please.
After she fed from him-not too much, so that he would fall into death gently-she closed his open, glassy eyes with her own two fingers and murmured a prayer for him. So it went during this war. Somehow her humanity remained intact.
During the Second World War, while holed up in occupied Paris, she killed a Nazi soldier. She had come upon him raping a French girl. After that, it became too easy, killing Nazis and collaborators. The Resistance didn't know how she killed them, and they didn't want to know. All they would have to do was smuggle the piece of paper with the name and location of the target written on it in a bag of bread, in a sack of potatoes left at the agreed spot, and in a few days, the deed would be done.
It hardened her, made her tougher. She didn't grow so sad and maudlin as much as she used to. The terrible memories of her old life were distant, fleeting, folded up in a drawer to be locked away and never looked at again.
She saw Damon Salvatore again in Chicago. She had just bought a condo on the lake there with the money from her investments. He had happened to walk into the same martini bar she had decided to try for the very first time one night, and when he saw her, he approached her with a grin.
"Marie Duplessis. You look like you've changed-for the better," he remarked.
She laughed humorlessly. "You look like you haven't." For the worse.
He shook his head after he ordered and paid for drinks for her and for himself. "No-I haven't. I haven't reformed or mended my ways. It would be like some terrible movie, wouldn't it, if I had reformed and you'd become like me?"
"Yeah, it would," she admitted.
"Besides," he went on, smirking devilishly, "I would be a really boring recovering killer. Which is why I don't want to reform."
"I'll keep that it mind," she said.
He took his drink, nodded at her, and then disappeared into the crowd, no doubt looking to feed.
She hurriedly drank her martini and paid her tab. It would be best to leave now, she decided, before she might bear witness to something unsavory.
Vasili was right. It was best to stay away from Damon Salvatore. Who knew what he might bring out in her?
There were other ways of obtaining blood. And she would do so until he left town.