Belong to me
I can't have you, no
Like you have me
I can't steal you, no
Like you stole me
- You, The Pretty Reckless
She stares at the mirror, eyes focused on her neck. It's a great sleek expanse of mostly pearly white under the flickering light but for a gruesome scar marring the base of the curve leading to her shoulder. Water drips from the leaky faucet as she stands in the middle of the cold tiles, one hand clutching a towel around her body. Slowly, with haunting hesitance, her free hand seems to lift on its own accord, drifting over to delicately touch the bloody obvious flaw.
It's been a while.
It's faded to stark, seashell white, defined to a sweeping curve and two pinpricks. She'd say it was an eternal smiley face bled into her skin but she doesn't want to make it sound like it's a good thing, this scar. Because it's not.
But it could be.
When her memories started flooding back, it was not unlike rain smashing the still surface of a lake at the beginning of the storm of a century. Before things started coming back to her, her life was hazy, listless; she'd merely floated through it, a ghost of herself before the night he decided to lean against her car and seduce her.
I want you to remember everything, he said softly, his eyes keeping hers a prisoner. She stared back, feeling dizzy. Everything I took from your mind – take it back.
Two weeks later, she's standing outside his door, fist poised to knock. Whether she could actually muster the strength to knock, she never found out. He took that chance from her.
"Why?" she asked, trembling. He moved onto the porch, forcing her backwards.
"I was hungry, you were there. Simple as that."
"No," she argued, taking a deep breath, "Why did you make them come back?"
His eyes became abysses and she felt herself drowning even though she could see she was on dry land.
"Why?" she whimpered, gravel in her voice, tears threatening freedom. "I didn't want them."
They were silent for a long time. For the first time in her life, she saw his true vulnerability.
"I wanted it to be real." And then, he closed up, a shell of the person he had become around her. His eyes hardened. His shoulders stiffened.
She didn't care. For once, she was going to think about herself, not about the things she would go to the ends of the world for, for him.
She ran when he needed her.
Yeah, that's a good word. He persuaded her to have sex. It wasn't like she hadn't already been dying to fuck him.
Now, she can remember why she lost her memories. It had been so easy, too easy, to fall into his endless gaze of electric blue, rapidly darkening blue, hypnotizing blue. She just continued to fall; if there were hooks and ledges along the way to catch onto to halt the tumble, she didn't notice and didn't care. It was delirious, exciting, scary. She never wants it to happen again.
Except, she does.
Trapped in that hold, she'd been forced – no, no, just convinced – to do things she wouldn't have done. She wouldn't have washed the damn dishes, for one. A sliver of anger flares up but quickly dies before she can latch onto the emotion. She wouldn't have invited him to the Founder's Party to steal that stupid jewel and then promptly attempt to kill her in the shadows of the trees as everyone else laughed and smiled while drinking to wine. Irrationally, she feels like they were toasting to her death.
She's annoyed by the turn of her thoughts now so she wraps the towel tighter around her and slips out of the bathroom. Her room is a dark hole; if she stared, it'd burrow further in and take her with it. Reaching for the light switch, she suddenly takes a breath as the lightest of breaths caresses the scar on her neck. Spinning around, eyes open wide, she expects to see Da – someone, but there's no one there. Oddly, she feels disappointment.
But it's really not that odd.
The light flickers to life then. The hair on her arm rising – after all, she couldn't have turned it on –, she bites her lip as she clamps her eyes shut for a split second before slowly turning around. She lets out a surprised yelp, even though she'd expected to see him.
"Damon," she breathes.
He'll never admit it out loud but his name on her lips pulls at something he thought had long ago been lost and never found.
He's lounging on her bed, completely relaxed, clad in his usual black attire. The grace of his form rips her breath from her mouth. She hadn't seen him for four months and so his presence sort of overwhelms her, in a wonderful, giddy way. For some reason, a relieved giggle is begging to burst forth but she places a firm cap on it. It's at that moment that she realizes that in the months of his absence, she'd been wound tightly up, something missing, and now that he is back she is delirious. Because he was what had been missing. No matter all the bad he'd put into her life.
He's staring at her, face strangely blank. Her gaze devours his appearance, the disheveled hair, the dark blue eyes, the delectable, smooth lips…
A million thoughts are flying through her mind right now. Why is he back? Why now? How did he find her? When did he get here?
And, why her?
Without realizing it, she's taken a stumbling step forward. A slight crease in his eyebrows lets her know that he hadn't expected her to want to be closer to him.
"Don't leave," she whispers, because that's all her voice can handle at the moment. She doesn't know why but she's so cold and scared that he'll suddenly disappear and leave all her questions unanswered.
But also because she wants to touch him and know he's real, he's really here. She wants to keep him, even though she knows she can't because he isn't hers to keep. He never was.
A slight frown adorns his face now, at her admission. She takes another step forward, now just standing three feet away from him.
"Say something." She can't understand for the life of her why he's just sitting there.
"How do you like New York?"
He's beating around the bush. She knows it. But she also knows there is some genuine interest in that question; for a reason she can't even begin to fathom, he actually wants to know her answer. That doesn't mean he deserves it.
"What are you doing here?" She's grateful to finally have found her voice.
He stares at her and she can tell that he's tempted to do that mind control thing on her. Don't ask her how she knows that. Somewhere in the middle of knowing him, she's developed the ability to feel his intentions, and actions before they happen, like they were actually tangible.
"Don't you dare take the easy way out," she warns. She imagines a flicker of surprise dashing across his face but when she looks again, it's gone.
He gets up, moving sensually, moving slowly. Her eyes track his every movement as he pushes closer. Without realizing it, she's stepped back and he now has her trapped against the wall. His fingers hook through his belt loops and he releases her from his gaze. With the simple action, a sudden longing to keep on staring into his eyes erupts within her. He's so different from the other guys; he's in a totally other league.
"I want things to go back to the way they were."
And, just like that, they are. In that instant, she forgets everything he is and everything she wants to be; she just gives in. She can fight all she wants, cry all she wants, but the end result is still the same. She'll be drawn back in like the insipid school girl she once was and she'll let her heart get broken again if that means she can spend another night with him. Feel his warm skin against hers and meet his gaze with her own without feeling afraid like she usually does around him.
So, yes, maybe she feels weak and desperate for harbouring those feelings. But she feels the antithesis too. At the end of the day, she's the one with this unbelievably beautiful man. She's the one making him moan. She's the one he's kissing, the one he wants. And that makes her feel so damn powerful.
It's a different story in the morning. When the dark isn't there anymore to cover your mistakes, your lies.
In the wake of the destruction, with the gray sunlight filtering through the shades, he's never looked so beautiful. She traces the line of his cheek with heartbreaking tenderness. He watches her silently.
The reason she hates him is not because of all the sick, sadistic things he's done in his life. If it were anyone else, she'd hate them, be scared to the shit bone of them, she thinks mournfully.
No. The reason she hates him so much is because he makes her want him when she knows she can't. The reason she's so scared of him is because he holds her heart and all she wants is to get it back.
They can't be together. She'll grow old and he'll be stuck in the youth fountain and then their love, if it even exists, will become burden and pain, the kind you'd gladly die to get rid of.
Not that it isn't pain already.
Still, she hopes he comes back tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.
Once you've been pulled in, it's too hard to pull back, even if you've done it before a million times and one. It never stops hurting. And, as he kisses her lightly on her nose before disappearing out the window, she knows the pain will stay with her, become a part of her, until the day she dies. Her vision blurs as she pulls the comfortable around her, hugging herself as tightly as she can to squeeze away the pain.
He was never hers to own.
But all she wants is for him to belong to her. It isn't fair when she belongs to him.
The funny thing is, though he'd never admit it, he feels the same way. She stole his heart when he'd been keeping it so guarded, so walled up. He belongs to her, even if she doesn't want him. He can feel that that is the truth.
When he looks at her, he feels like the soldier he was back in the day. The man who'd seen all the bad in the world and been touched by it, seen cruelty and been cruel (though never as cruel as he can be now) in the name of good and came home, worn, drained, to see his beautiful girl, like an ethereal angel. He'll never deserve her.
He would say he doesn't want to but he'd be lying.
She thinks he didn't come the next night but he's leaning by the window, watching her toss and turn in fretful sleep. Maybe he'll hold her later.
Maybe.
"So... how do you like New York?"
"It's wonderful."
- Fin.