As it turns out, vampirism is more like True Blood than Twilight, at least when it comes to some things, or one thing in particular really.
'Makers' and 'bonds' are real, crazy real.
She wakes and feels him underneath her skin, her ex sort-of boyfriend and she feels other people too (Katherine and somebody who later she'll find out is a woman called Isobel who is actually Elena's mother and Katherine's descendant and no wonder they're all so crazy with everybody related to everybody in some way, through blood or like, blood)
She's terrified Katherine is inside her in the beginning, the same way Damon is. Damon will eventually tell her it's because Katherine is his maker not because she killed Caroline herself since a vampire's maker is created through blood not suffocation.
Thank god, right?
She wonders when 'Damon' became synonymous with 'safety'.
Probably around the time she awoke from dying and remembered he told her he'd kill her, and it was a fact then and a fact now but it's also a promise, an assurance.
Only Damon would kill her.
(and she holds onto that when he tells her later she's dead but alive and it'll stay that way until he decides otherwise, she holds onto the fact she literally has forever now, or at least until Damon gets sick of her and offs her because it's reassuring in a way she can't even begin to describe, the fact her life is in his hands)
She both loves and loathes him in equal measure, she tells Elena wryly over cake and peppermint hot chocolate one day as they wait for Bonnie to arrive (they're trying to mend their friendship and return to their pre- doppelganger/vampire/witch life and this is the best way for them, with chocolate and confessions and lots of tears).
"How can you feel both?" The other girl questions with a serious look on her seriously beautiful face and Caroline knows she's wondering, honestly and not without good cause, how Caroline can feel more of the former than the latter for somebody like Damon Salvatore.
"Well clearly you've never been in love." She answers knowingly.
(and a little hopefully because if anybody has the power to take Damon away from her, from their weird little family, it would probably be Elena Gilbert whether she wants to or not)
Bonnie arrives and she tries to explain it to them, the fact she's dead but she's not, so really she's still Caroline.
(friend, daughter, third grade hopscotch champion, mean girl, etc.)
She doesn't suppose they entirely believe her, but it's Damon who later arrives at her house after Bonnie and Elena have gone and shortly after she'd showered (she suspects maybe he timed it so she'd be in a towel when he got here), and when she asks tells her she's not a monster.
Not in the tradition way, at least.
"Even if you turn it off," he said as she got him a glass of orange juice once dressed again (she's still only seventeen and her mum is four years sober so there's no alcohol in their house, though Damon protests constantly), "You'll not be a monster. You'll just be. . ." And he drifts off as he contemplates how to tell her she'll just be a robot, basically.
"You'll be a survivor, in the worst way."
(You'll kill indiscriminately, you'll abandon your friends, your life, and you'll be a strange sort of terrified about changing that situation back because without emotions you'll not really be terrified, but you still won't want to do it. Again, complicated.)
He takes the glass from her, taking a swig (wrinkles his nose in contempt and mutters something about adding vodka to it, making a screwdriver because orange juice without alcohol is just plain wrong evidently) as he maintains eye contact, "Or the best, depending on how you look at it, because crazy killing sprees can be fun too. Don't let Stefan tell you otherwise, to each their own, yeah?"
She gets it.
More and more each day.
Damon does something stupid.
And kind of evil.
She sits on his bed as he tortures the werewolf, covering her ears with her hands as she tucks her body into a ball. She doesn't understand what's going on, not really, but Damon sent her upstairs when he arrived with an unconscious Mason to see her sitting on his couch watching Toddlers and Tiara's and she listened. Now she's kind of just scared to move.
So she sits trembling on his bedspread, crying silently as she listens to the man she used to perve on in middle school screaming in agony. Damon asks about something called a moonstone and she's completely lost, he asks about Katherine and she wants to vomit.
She hears his heart stop, then squish and she really does vomit.
Damon makes fun of her, but at least she made it to his ensuite, she snaps back, because that was fucking gross and really? I eat in that room.
Later, Damon and Stefan tell her people are after revenge, no, not people.
Werewolves.
("They're after me technically, but they don't know that so they'll take you, no regrets." Damon says seriously, "They have no problem killing you. So don't fuck about alone."
"Be careful, Care." Stefan adds.)
She's on her way home when she's tapped on the shoulder by a stranger, and strangers in Mystic Falls are not something that's usual or all-together safe so she's polite but dismissive, just like her mother taught her to be during her self-defence lessons all that time ago. She turns back to her car before she's tapped on the shoulder again, she turns (ready to rant, ready to bitekillmaim, just like Damon taught her during their own self-defence lessons held every Wednesday afternoon) when she's shot.
In the head.
When she wakes the first thing she does is scream out for Damon ("Damon!" She half screeches, half sobs as soon as her eyes open and she realises she's in a freaking cage). If he was here, if only he was here then she'd be okay, she knows it.
He needs to be here.
(she cannot die unless he kills her and it hurts, oh god, it hurts so bad)
The man in the corner chuckles, "He's not gonna come." He says and he sounds so sure.
So sure that she can be so easily abandoned and she sobs harder because she's not entirely sure she isn't.
She is sure, however, that Damon wouldn't leave her to this, because she's his.
Anybody but him, probably.
"Yeah," she glares weakly even as she's panting for unnecessary oxygen, "He will." She promises.
And then she's shot again.
She can feel the bullet just sitting there as her brain heals around it, before her body realises there's like, a foreign object in it and slowly pushes it out, through newly healed brain matter.
She wonders if it wouldn't hurt less if the bullet went all the way through and the only thing that had to heal was the gaping hole in the back of her skull, unobstructed by metal bullets.
She wonders if that's even possible.
She wonders.
She waits.
And through it all she cries and screams and "Why are you doing this to me?" Because she doesn't understand that part, like, at all. She knows they're werewolves, (wonders briefly whether Tyler knows them but then thinks how stupid that thought is because it's not like vampires have one another's' numbers or Facebook's so why would werewolves?), knows they're 'natural enemies' (like Superman and Lex Luther or like Hitler and well, everybody) but honestly she didn't think Damon had been telling the truth about werewolves.
She wishes she'd listened.
It's hours later when she's finally out, because apparently Tyler did know the wolves and did know she was there and knowing all of this it still took him so long to help and rather belatedly be the one who lets her out.
She's not grateful.
Like, at all.
She crawls from the cage, scrambling to get through the door before Tyler changes his mind, decides his little pack is the team to be on, and keeps her there forever to be tortured and teased and oh god, Tyler, where have you been?
(oh god, Damon, where are you?)
He's there when she steps outside shakily, it's his feet she falls down at and then she's crying some more because she wants to stand, so badly, because he might be a cross between her dad and like, her brother and husband or something (even the semi-correct terminology of their relationship would blow your mind, seriously) but weakness should not be shown in front of Damon.
Not because he'd exploit it (not at all, even he has limits to his asshole-ness, this she knows), but she's been trying to prove she's strong and capable and deserving of his respect. Falling at his feet is like, the opposite of that. He probably would have got a kick out of it though, she thinks.
Only, her legs don't seem to work (there's something wrong with them, specifically the right one, its burning) and she's shaking because she needs blood so badly, she needs to heal properly and the only way to do that is with a warm bath and lots of non-bunny blood.
Only she's crying so hard she thinks she might puke so she's focusing on keeping that in, because not puking on Damon's shoes is more important than standing on her own two feet, right?
Only, without hesitation he lifts her into his arms, making soft shushing sounds as she wraps her own skinny limbs around him in return as she sobs into his neck ("I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I tried to get out, I swear, I just couldn't." She tries to explain, tries to get him to understand she wanted to do him proud, really, only she was also being shot in the head, like, continuously). She sees the others from over Damon's shoulder, among body parts and blood and other things she can't quite make out through her tears.
Stefan looks shocked.
Tyler looks terrified.
She's buried her face into Damon's neck and so can't see his face without moving her own, doesn't even know what she expects or wants to see. She just wants to go home.
And so he takes her.
(only he takes her to the boarding house instead of her home and she can't complain because this feels like they're taking a giant step in a good direction.)
She gets her bath and then her non-bunny blood, much to Stefan's annoyance, once she's safely tucked into Damon's bed. Stefan wanted to call Elena and Bonnie for some girl-talk and crying (and isn't that such a guy thing to do?), but Damon vetoed that idea straight away and she didn't complain overly much.
It's as she's being wrapped in one of Damon's own huge, fluffy white towels they both notice it.
The purple, veiny, bruise-like mark on her leg, and Damon tells her calmly as she stares dispassionately down at her thigh, it's a bullet that didn't come out by itself.
He whispers reassurances even as he pokes fun at her (but his insults are not nearly up to his usual standards so she's a bit worried) watching as she scratches at the skin covering that very last bullet, because it's in her thigh and wooden and so he needs to dig it out himself, he tells her, and it'll hurt like a bitch.
(fact: wooden bullets do not push themselves out. in lieu of you know, not being tortured, should you ever get taken by vampire-hating assholes, always hope for some sort of metal bullets instead, trust me)
He'd sent Stefan away, told him to not come back until tomorrow, if you know, he has to come back at all and then he squeezed her hand and kissed her forehead. "It's just us here." He said as he held a knife blade over a candle, "It's just us so when I tell you, you scream."
Don't stop 'till you want to, he said as he walked over to her spot on his bed. Don't you dare.
She looked at him, wide eyed and totally scared out of her freaking mind because he had a knife in his hands, a knife that's about to go in her leg, but all the while so very unquestioning of what he's doing because this is Damon and he might be an asshole, but he takes care of her.
She's only seventeen, she's young and scared and he's like, a billion (like, nearly two hundred years old so kind of a billion) and she feels so young and scared but she's his like he's hers and they're the same blood and Damon got over his masochist phase sometime in the sixties.
He knows it'll hurt, isn't looking forward to being the one who hurts her.
Again.
And when he tells her to scream she does.
And she doesn't stop for hours, not until she wants to.
There are times when she almost forgets she's a vampire; those times she's surrounded by a crowd of people whose harsh breathing and sweating and all around human-ness melts into a sort of tempo, a song she knows the words to like the back of her hand because its familiar, this state of being she's no longer technically a part of. Enough bodies that their heartbeats meld together and she can imagine, quite easily, that one of those heartbeats is hers.
And then there are those times she's surrounded by those same bodies, those same harsh breaths and all she can think is kill, kill, drink, drink, ohmygod kill them all.
She doesn't know which she likes more.
It's one of the latter times tonight when they're in the next town over from Mystic Falls. Damon and his new friend Alaric (who was married to Isobel who is her kind-of sister and Elena's actual mother and Katherine's descendant but he apparently forgives Damon for all that so there's lots of bourbon and laughing and sarcastic remarks from them both and she smiles fondly from the other side of the room before going back to flirting with a guy she thinks is kind of cute) have taken her to a bar and grill not unlike The Grill and it's as she's dancing to some Foreigner she loses it.
Completely.
Extremely.
He's the one who pulls her away from the humans, tells Ric that it's been fun, they should do this again sometime, but he's got a rabid Barbie to deal with so catch you later, bro.
("NO!" She screams as he pulls her off the terrified out of his mind bartender, "No! I want him." She struggles to get out of his arms, wriggling and scratching and almost sobbing at how much she wants to kill the handsome bartender already dying in front of her. "Let me have him, Damon, please. I want him."
"I know you do," He replies, "I know, I'm sorry."
And he sounds it too; he sounds so sorry even as he holds her arms tightly to her body and refuses to let her attack anymore innocent people, or maybe because of that. He might be sorry she wants them at all or he might be sorry he won't just give them to her, it doesn't matter because she just wants the blood that's pumping through the veins of people she kind of wishes she could be like.)
"Nobody'll love you like I do", she mumbles sleepily as he puts her to bed later that night. "Nobody ever will."
I know, he says as he pulls the covers up to her chin. Because he does, and its true and she's had a bad night and she deserves at least some acknowledgment and maybe, hopefully she'll totally forget he even said that tomorrow.
(I try and try and try so hard, she'd said so long ago. Why can't it be enough for you?
"Because you're not who I want." He'd replied and then watched as her entire face fell as tears filled her eyes. And in that moment he'd hated himself.
And it was months later, after he gave her his blood and she was killed by his own maker, he was awoken by a new presence in his blood. When she woke he was there, next to her bed holding a bloodbag, having decided in the hours it took for her to wake to her new life, to always look after her, if only to make up for the whole 'you're not good enough' thing.
Especially considering, you know, maybe he didn't really mean it.
Not entirely at least.)