For JWAB. You showed me it was possible, offered asskicking and encouragement in equal measures. You always knew when I needed cheering up and could always say just the right thing or send just the right link. This is entirely for you. This thanks is inadequate, but it's all I've got. Thank you.

The rest of you? Hi! Everything I know about classical music is from Wikipedia and YouTube, so forgive any mistakes. Enjoy.

I've been trying all morning, but I can't find the right words for what Elena and I did last night. Fucking is obviously out, though I want to personally thank the Indian swami who invented yoga and enabled Elena to flip both feet over her head. Making love seems too soft, too frilly. Everything walked right on the knife's edge; hot and hard but tender and so very, very right.

Fuck it, I give up. Doesn't matter, anyway. Whatever it is we did tangled in my sheets? That was fantastic. Superlative. But this unfamiliar happiness ricocheting off my every synapse isn't because of that. Not really.

It's because she danced with me. Because we shared a drink and she smiled and just enjoyed being with me. Because she chose me. Because maybe, possibly, perhaps she might even be considering loving me. If she could find a way to feel even a fraction of what I feel for her...yeah. That'd be enough to make the last wasted century and a half worthwhile.

I should be crowing from the rooftops. I should be off de-murderfying Jeremy and shaking down Professor Shane and making sure Stefan hasn't taken a long stroll in the sunshine without his ring.

Instead, here I am sitting at the piano like a gigantic pussy.

Elena's smell is still thick on my skin, peaches and cream and crisp cotton sheets, with undercurrents of B-negative and some scent I can't place, something familiar but just out of reach. When she squirmed out of my arms this morning, I pulled out every trick in the book to convince her to stay. I told her to blow off school; I told her she shouldn't be anywhere near Jeremy. I pouted and cajoled. I initiated acts which are illegal in fourteen states, including Virginia. But Elena looked at me, a look meant just for me, and said, "Damon, we have forever. We have all the time we need. I have to go. I promise I'll be back."

I melted into a quasi-sentient puddle of goo at that point, and needless to say, she got her way. Off she tromped to pretend to learn something at school while I sit here bumbling my way through Debussy's Second Arabesque. The finger work is tricky, twinkly and bright. I'm cocking it up, but I resolutely don't care.

I learned to play in those miserable months after I turned. I was a pissy, tortured eunuch pining over the cunt who had snipped off my balls. While Stefan had the time of his unlife, I had three lifetimes yawning before me until the comet blistered across the sky and I could rescue my lost love from her dastardly fate.

Ha.

The piano had sat in our parlor for years, though none of us played. Classic Father: He had the monstrous Babcock shipped down from Boston in pieces and meticulously re-assembled, all so he could show how cultured he was. It was so important to convince the neighbors he wasn't some dumb guinea, but a real Southern slave-owning fuckhead like the rest of them. Nevermind that he hated any music except bawdy tavern ditties.

The monument to father's desperate need to assimilate sat, another piece of furniture for the slaves to dust. I never gave the thing a second glance, except when the odd eligible bachelorette tried to show her own sophistication by mangling Mozart.

But after I turned, the instrument took on a life of its own. I could hear the faint strum of the strings as sultry breezes stirred through the house, hear the settling of the hammers when I walked past. It seemed alive, more alive than I was. Late one interminable night, I found the instructional booklets they'd sent with the piano and played my first chords. The piano was miserably out of tune and I was too timid and terrified to compel anyone to fix it, so every note was strangled and wrong. But I kept playing.

I still can't fully explain why that piano became a lifeline, but...Stefan's got his journal, right? He fills libraries with his tortured, oh-so-deep ramblings. But me? I'm not good with words. I'd sooner eat a plate of frog's intestines than talk about my feelings. And in those days, I had a lot of feelings. Hunger, horniness, rage, loss, moony romantic love, betrayal, you name it, I felt it with vampiric clarity. I couldn't find the words to express them all, and even if I could, who was I gonna tell? But I could pound my feelings out, just me and the keys. No words required.

Once I'd fumbled through the basics of chords and scales and arpeggios, I turned to nocturnes, because of course I turned to nocturnes. Those pieces understood my tormented soul, the eternal night through which I walked. But lo-! The sun would rise one day and Katherine would return.

I want to puke just thinking about that guy.

Every now and then, when Stefan was out eating Fells and the house was still, when I found just the right song and my fingers found just the right notes, I could forget who I was. Forget what I had lost. Forget all my failings and just be. Fingers on the keys, feet on the pedals, vibrations humming in every cell of my body, I'd reach the end of the piece without knowing how, missing pockets of time and stolen seconds of peace, or something like it.

I plinked and plunked away at those books, focusing on them with a stupid level of concentration while the world caved in on me. Stefan spun out of control while I clung to control like a life raft.

Then one day I came home and found a girl at the piano—my piano. Skin flapped loosely from both wrists. More blood pooled on the ivory with every note, each one stilted and zombified through her compulsion haze. "If you don't pick up the tempo, you'll lose your head," Stefan snarled.

I was so tired. So tired of him and his bender, me and my...everything. If I was going to have any kind of life while I waited for Katherine, it couldn't be here. Couldn't be with him. If he wanted to die, let him do it alone.

Not proud of that. But in those days, I had something Stefan didn't: a reason to live. I had Katherine, but he only had blood. I left him to his love while I waited for mine.

But not before I wiped the blood from the keys

I didn't play for years; I was busy. Learning to be a vampire is hard, gruesome work. No matter how good or how controlled you are, you're going to leave a few bodies behind, as I keep trying to tell everyone. When I fucked up every now and then and had a body on my hands, it meant a shallow grave and a quick retreat from town. Pianos aren't exactly portable. It was the Belle Epoque before I played again.

All of Europe was awash in music, and even though I should have been focusing on the can-can girls and their fantastic lack of underwear (I didn't touch, but I sure looked), all I could hear in the Parisian music halls was the tinkling of keys. Everyone in Paris was trying to lose themselves-some with absinthe, some with poppies, some with art. I tried all three, but it was always the music that worked best. I snuck into those halls by day and picked out poor imitations of Ravel and Satie, looking for even a second when I could forget Katherine, Stefan, myself. Maybe one day out of a hundred, I succeeded. But man, I kept trying.

In Berlin, I befriended a cabaret singer. Scratch that, she befriended me. I didn't have friends; I had victims. But Gabriele was something special. They called her Nachtigall, the nightingale. You know that trick where if you sing at just the right frequency, you can shatter glass? Gab could do that. It nearly made my ears bleed, those crazy dog-whistle notes of hers, but she got my attention. I came back to the Überbrettl again and again, just to hear her croon.

One night after her set, she wiggled over to my table with her Aryan good looks and long, long cigarette holder. "You have been here every night this week, Herr...?"

"Salvatore."

"You are Italian?" She oozed onto my thigh. Turns out she took a page from the can-can dancer's handbook, if you catch my drift. "You know what they say about Italians-"

"By way of America," I said in my heavily accented German while steering her satin-gloved hand away from my crotch. "But I am spoken for." I think that's what I said, anyway; I may have said I speak Flemish. I never could get my mouth around those long German words, all consonants and throat clearing. Whatever I said, Gabriele threw her head back and laughed, revealing big, horsey teeth.

"Ah, America. That explains it all. We shall take it slow then, yeah? You may begin by buying me a drink." You couldn't say no to Gab. Even as angry and uptight as I was, I couldn't help but like her guileless face and confident swagger. She slid off my lap and I ordered a round of Schnapps.

We talked late into the night. Books, politics, but mostly music. Despite her current divey digs, she was a classically trained soprano. After the Kabarett closed, I would accompany her, playing thunderous bits from Wagner and Strauss or frothy Romberg arias. Mostly the songs were of love lost, but every now and then, love won. I would close my eyes and let my fingers fly and count the years until one day, I would be Siegfried, bringing Katherine safely out of the ring of fire and into our eternity.

In spite of my idiotic fidelity, I couldn't ignore Gabriele and her big, booming laugh or her big, booming tits. I couldn't ignore the low knot in my stomach when we played together, the way I lingered as I kissed her hand goodnight. It had been decades since I'd touched a woman with anything more than my fangs, and I wanted her. All of her. It helped that she was the anti-Katherine, with her bobbed blond hair, Rubenesque curves, and seeming inability to lie. And unlike Katherine's dainty perfection, everything about Gab was just a little too—too loud, too honest, too soft, too close. And that voice.

I could have fallen for Gab. Maybe could've even been happy with my face buried between her breasts, fingers buried between her thighs, making her sing a new kind of scale. She could've been an Andie. A Rose. A woman who wasn't the one, but who was someone. But no, I was too faithful. Too steadfast. I was the uber-pure and deathly boring Sir Gawain breaking the curse on his poor, poor Ragnelle.

I was a pathetic asswipe.

I left Berlin. No goodbye; I'm lousy at 'em. But I did leave her a parting gift: a train ticket to Paris and a letter of introduction to the manager at the Opera Populaire. He owed me one after I trounced him at poker and let him welch on the bet.

I never heard if she made it, if she became the leading diva she could've been. I should look that up. No rush; she's long dead now.

Then it was a long steamship back to America and another decade of gloom and self-flagellation until I met Sage and fucked up my brother and began my long slide into debauchery. With the exception of one wild night in Louisiana with Jerry Lee Lewis, I didn't play a single note for a hundred years. I didn't need to. I didn't have feelings any more. The piano was an affectation, a weakness, an outlet for something that didn't need letting out anymore.

Until I came home

I still don't know who put this piano in the boarding house. Zach? His dad? It theoretically could have been Stefan, but I doubt he even remembers that I play. He definitely wouldn't know that it means anything to me. Doesn't matter. I've got a fairly decent piano—at least it's in tune- and every now and then I'll sit at this bench. Not often, but when I need not to think. When I need to escape and booze and sex and blood won't do it anymore, the pounding of the notes, the vibration in my bones makes me feel almost alive.

The last few notes of Debussy tinkle out, and my left hand falls into the steady, monotonous thrum of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. That's what I need right now, not to think. Blank. Steady. If I think about what really happened last night, what it might mean, I might explode. Maybe literally; I don't even know anymore. But how can a man really hold in all this fucking joy? Can even a vampire be strong enough to contain all this without flying to pieces?

I want to write a song for her. That silent song we danced to in front of the fire, when our bodies swayed and dipped in perfect time, when we fit together in a way no one else could understand. I wish I could write that song. Our song. See what I mean? I am a giant fucking pussy. Luckily for everyone, I can't write music. Can't create anything. Destruction's my game. But for her, I would try. I'll write her sweeping, romantic concertos; I'll write her passionate boleros. Fuck it, I'll write her treacly pop songs complete with "ooo baby" lyrics, if that's what she wants.

The last notes of the sonata tremble in the air. I smile and vamp on a C-major chord before standing. There's time to write those songs for her. All the time we need, she said. Little by little, I can let her see this side of me, let her expect things from me. I'll play Liebesträume for her, let the sweetness of Liszt's dreams of love say the things I can't. I'll play Shostakovich sonatas and twine our bodies together while the piano still vibrates with the frantic torrent of notes.

Because now? Now we have forever.

Beta'd by the lovely and talented latbfan. This story is better because of you. Thanks!