"Bad day?"
The voice was so familiar that Damon didn't even bother turning his head to see who it was. That was the way it was with Katherine now. Because he had known her for such a long time, such a ridiculously, pathetically long time, it was almost like he was inside her head. He knew what she would do before she did it; he could read every single emotion that crossed her face. He could recount a thousand other memories of times when she had made that exact expression. He had known Katherine back when his body was still fresh and new, back when it wasn't a cage for a mind that had long since passed its prime, a brain that had witnessed emotions and everyday situations way too many times for them to actually have an effect on him now.
Immortality was supposed to be a gift, a blessing from the heavens. But it was nothing but a trap. Damon was far above human life, he was a thousand humans put together. And it was torture.
Katherine had been with him ever since he could remember. Though he was smarter than the average man, simply since he had had so much time to absorb everything, his memory of the older days wasn't crystal clear. But he did, very vaguely, remember feeling attracted to Katherine at one point in his life.
A couple decades ago they had been posing at a high society event as a couple, looking for dirt on the latest vampire hunter they were avoiding.
"You have a beautiful wife." Damon remembered a middle aged man saying to him.
It had been a strange experience, as Damon swiveled around in his chair and looked at Katherine. He did not know if she was beautiful or not. Looking at her face, he might as well have been looking at a blank sheet of paper. Everything about her was too familiar, her eyes, her cheekbones, her lips did nothing for him anymore. His mind had wrapped around her so many times that her presence had no effect on his brain. How strange it had been, to think that this man was looking at her for the first time, taking in her features as he never had before.
An icy wind brought Damon back to present day, and he could feel the weight of his thousand year old mind, the stiff feeling in his back of his spine holding up years and years of rotting cell and bone. He turned and stared at Katherine, trying to look at her as if it was the first time. Nope. Nothing but a blank wall.
"Bad century." He mumbled in response to her words. He was about to turn and continue walking down the dimly lit street, when suddenly something caught in his mind.
It was a memory, not an old one, but something much more recent and fresh.
Stefan, Stefan was there. He stood in the Salvatore mansion, in the living room. But it was not Stefan alone. He was accompanied by someone, someone who was so familiar, but so different. She was small, the same size as the vampire that now stood next to Damon, yet they were not the same. If Katherine was a block of ice, which she certainly was, this creature was a flower petal. The way she stood, her stance, was nonthreatening. Her shoulders slumped slightly, her lower lip puffed out in an innocent way. And that face. So familiar, but so different. It was the eyes, Damon decided. They did not carry billions of memories; they didn't hold that unconscious sadness that someone acquires after killing, biting into flesh, for years upon years. And the lips, they were unburdened with the invisible remains of blood, innocent human blood. The pallor on her face was natural; it was not because she had been frozen over ages ago by an undoable bite.
It was Katherine, but it wasn't.
Elena.
Damon looked at the real Katherine again, he truly looked at her. There was something really twisted about her face that he was just noticing now. Slowly, she lowered her eyelids, and he could see that upon them too lay the memories of hundreds of screams, thousands of struggles, millions of mangled corpses lying in the dust.
He clenched his fist and took another step forward. By the time he had reached the end of the street, it was all gone.