Damon is seven years old. He has been ordered to his room, but still he can hear the shrieks echoing around the house, and he tries to cover his ears with his hands, but even this doesn't make a difference. His mother has been in confinement for weeks now, and he has missed her, but he supposes she has grown too fat to fit her dresses and must therefore hide in her room. It has been three months since there was a party at the Salvatore estate, and nobody will tell him why. When he had asked his nurse, Mary, who had probably raised him more than his mother had, she had said, "Don' ask those questions, child. Ain't men's business."
He had known better than to protest that he was a boy, not a man.
Now, he carefully pulls open the door of his room, peering through the crack. He sees Mary's daughter Nan, who plays with him when she doesn't have chores, carrying clean rags down the hall to his mother's bedroom. Mary emerges from the bedroom, carrying an armful of sheets, soaked in red. They drip on the floor. Every time his mother's door opens, he can hear her sobs and shrieks louder. It seems to go on forever. The floor has sticky footprints on it, after a while.
Finally Nan comes to his door, smiles when she sees him huddling behind it being slightly open, and knocks ceremoniously. He opens it, because it's her. He doesn't think he would have opened it for his father.
"Master Damon, you got a new baby brother," Nan tells him in a low voice. "You can't see him yet. But they're gonna call him Stefan."
"Stefan," Damon repeats. "When can I see Stefan?"
Soon, Nan promises. But he doesn't seem him soon. The next day, Damon's mother dies, and Mary dresses Damon in a stiff too-tight suit for the funeral. Nobody will explain what has happened. They only tell him that he should be seen and not heard. He is told to throw a handful of soil on the box in the ground that holds his mother, and he tells himself that one day, he will make sure he is always seen and heard.
Stefan goes away to Mary's other daughter, who just had a baby, and the house is silent. Damon's father stays in his study and drinks, and the household runs quietly but meals are on time.
When Damon sees his baby brother for the first time, a month later, Mary lets him hold Stefan. Damon is a skinny child and finds it hard to cradle a baby, but somehow he manages to hold the giant armful of his brother. It makes him remember Mary carrying armfuls of red soaked sheets from his mother's room, but he doesn't know why. "Stefan," he says, and the baby grins. "You're my baby brother. And I'm never going to leave you."
It is an important responsibility to be a big brother.
Damon is thirteen years old. He is up in the pecan tree trying to shake down nuts for Stefan to catch. When he jumps down, they'll smash the shells off and make themselves too full to eat supper.
In fact, what happens is he jumps, and stumbles, and falls hard on his left knee. He can hear his trousers ripping, and groans. Damon rolls to the side to survey the damage.
"It's bleeding," says Stefan, who has run over and crouched beside his brother.
"I can see that," says Damon. "What I'm wondering is if Nan can get these washed and mended before Father sees and tans my hide. Blast," he swears, something else his father would tan his hide for.
There is a strip of his trousers hanging loose. And there is a strip of his knee bloodied and raw. There's dirt in it, and it hurts like the dickens, but he pokes it anyway. His finger comes away with a drop of blood on it, and Stefan looks up at him with something like wonder. "That looks awful," says Stefan, awed. "Does it hurt?"
"Not a lot," Damon lies. He pushes himself to his feet, holding the fabric of his trousers away from the blood and heading for the back of the house. Stefan trots beside him. "I can barely feel it."
He can feel the sharp sting in his knee just fine, but stronger than that, he feels… happy. There is blood running down his leg and his little brother thinks that Damon is a hero. Adoration, in exchange for a little blood.
The look in Stefan's eyes even makes Damon forget about his ruined trousers.
Damon is twenty-three years old when the War breaks out. He dons his grey wool uniform with pride, because he is defending the Commonwealth of Virginia and his home. He pulls the cap over his unruly dark hair, and finally, his father looks proud of him.
Giuseppe Salvatore is friends with the governor, and it would not look good for his oldest son to shirk his duties to the Confederacy. Stefan is only sixteen, and just barely missed being called for duty himself. Damon will miss his birthday.
Damon leaves his home behind, to sleep in a tent, to walk through the woods, to line up for battle and watch men in blue fire at men in grey. They all look the same, to him. Scared men, who are fighting because someone told them to. They are white and black and some were told to go to war; those he meets from Tennessee are proudly volunteers. He meets men who fight to keep Yankee soldiers from occupying their homes; he meets men who fight for pride and ownership; he meets men who fight for abolition of slavery.
Damon has never thought very much about abolition before; he has always thought that the men and women who work in his house were just there, with shelter and food and shouts from his father under his roof just as he has received. He sees no reason why Mary and Nan and all the others should be a different class of people because they are dark; maybe he, too, would be an abolitionist. If he ever really had been forced to think about it. But he never has, because everyone really does look the same to him.
Everybody especially looks the same when covered in blood.
He is circling the camp on guard duty one night when he hears a noise out in the woods, the soft tread on leaves and pine needles and the occasional crack of a branch. He can see a man there, in silhouette, and thinks that this must be a Yankee scout, finding the way to attack their camp by night. None of his brothers in grey should be this far out in the woods.
So he rests his rifle against his shoulder, aims at the silhouette, and fires.
The crack of the rifle is the loudest thing he thinks he has ever heard, and the shadow drops.
Damon rushes forward, trampling the underbrush to reach the man he has struck. In the darkness, he cannot tell what color uniform he wears. He is gasping for air, and while Damon cannot see much, he can tell the wound is ugly and he can smell the overwhelming hot-copper scent of blood and the foul smell of shit. Groping around, he accidentally feels the spongy rubber of the man's guts, spilling out.
"Make… make it stop…" the dying man rasps.
There is no doctor who can fix this wound. There is no one with the power to take the pain away. Damon pulls out his knife, squinting in the dark. He has killed men before, he knows, but that was at the opposite end of a field. He draws the blade across the man's throat, pushing harder than he thought he'd have to in order to sever the arteries there. It is a ragged, unclean cut, but the man breathes out a grateful sigh, and is gone.
Damon sits back a moment, his knees close to his chest, and presses his closed eyes against his kneecaps until he sees flashes in the darkness behind his eyelids. Without the pressure, that darkness does not flash; it is just red.
He wipes his knife clean on the soldier's sleeve and stops at a nearby stream to wash the gore from his hands before resuming his nighttime patrol.
Damon does not know if he has cleaned all the blood from his hands as he continues walking, and he never finds out what side the man he shot fought for.
Damon is twenty-four when he returns home on leave from the War and comes home to Stefan's affectionate grip, his father's proud handshake, the green of the lawn and the white of the house. He relishes the food, the comfort, the freedom to avoid wearing boiled grey wool. Stefan follows him like a puppy, telling him of everything that has happened in the town as if the whole country weren't in the process of tearing itself apart. Damon enjoys the inanity: there is something beautiful in it. Damon is twenty-four when Katherine Pierce, the woman who leaves fires behind her wherever she goes, sedately drives into his life.
It is no time before they are in love. Stefan loves Katherine too, of course; he has always loved what his older brother loves, but he is not yet eighteen and what he thinks is love is just those first stirrings of the possibility of fulfilled lust. When Stefan kisses Katherine's knuckles, Damon is waiting in her room to give her the kisses she has been waiting for. He is no blushing virgin, and neither is she: when they are done, the sheets are white and unbloodied. And then he is back in his room, like it had all been a dream. There were many things like that with Katherine, dreamlike. But he knows she is real: his dreams are all filled with smoke and screams, and he wakes with shaking hands, and he never talks about it. The blood under his skin pulses with every memory he has ever had and it is all too much.
When he discovers that Katherine is life and death, blood and beauty, all wrapped up in one, and that she can quiet the blood in his veins, it is like everything coming together. He is expected to return to the War, but he doesn't. At his house, there is love and Katherine and Stefan and peace, and he cannot leave that. Katherine has her fangs in him, and will not let him go; he won't let her go, either, and she promises him eternity together. He is repelled the first time he kisses her with her mouth full of blood; he thinks of the bloody sheets coming out of his mother's bedroom, he thinks of the grateful gasp of the dying soldier. Then, he kisses her fully, and the blood is a healing balm. It fills his throat, burning and salty and purifying. It clears out everything blocking what he has never been allowed to say.
"I love you, Katherine," he says.
"I know," she replies, and her dimples are visible even through the mess of her face.
Damon is twenty-four years old and will be twenty-four years old forever when he is shot (by the father who was never proud of his deserter son: they shoot deserters, you know) and wakes up again, and the sun does not warm the chill of death he cannot shake. (It is a chill he thinks he has always carried with him, and has only now been made aware of it.) Katherine is lost, brought into his life by fire and torn from it in the same manner. Without her, and in his new state, everything is too raw and intense. The blood of his past and present shows red behind his eyelids when he tilts his face to the sun. He does not want a future overflowing with all that blood.
In the present, his baby brother Stefan follows him still, until he refuses annihilation and is reborn in blood instead. Damon has the curious feeling he is watching his life backwards, to the beginning, to pools with sticky red footprints on the floor.
He never wanted Stefan to follow him here.
When Stefan brings back a girl and presses her to Damon, he looks in her dull eyes and knows that there is no reason she will not die in war, or marry and die in her second childbirth. There is no reason to life, or death, and no reason that she should not die now.
As the blood surges down his throat and through his stiffening arteries, he watches Stefan, whose eyes are shining with new life and the joy of sharing it with his big brother. Does it hurt? Damon remembers him saying, once upon a time.
It hurts. It will always hurt. He had lied then.
He still has Stefan's adoration, all in exchange for a little blood, and somewhere inside him he will always be the little boy with the bloodied knee, the one who helped a soldier die. He is forever the boy that Stefan didn't have to be.
And he will never forgive Stefan for taking part in the cure Stefan never needed.
Damon drops the girl, and turns his back on his baby brother. It is time Stefan stopped following him.
It is long past time, but then, Damon had never known he and his brother would have eternity.