Oh hey guys. It's good to be back. It's been a busy year full of much writing and excitement, but I've missed you. So! Here we are with a little spin on Season 4. After all, the sire bond made no sense on the show, so why not play with it to meet our ends? Some portions will be canon, some will be new, and hopefully we'll have some fun together.
Thanks to my wonderful, brilliant, talented beta readers. Thank you to JWAB for giving me encouragement and ass kicking in just the right measures, and to latbfan for always pushing me to think harder and dig deeper. Go read their stuff. Seriously.
It started with our choice of beverages, of all the damn things in the world. She started drinking bourbon; I started drinking tea. Chamomile, which I always though tasted like lawn clippings. But to her, it was calming, which she said I could use. So I tried it, just to humor her.
It didn't taste like lawn clippings anymore. It reminded me of the way the gardens out behind the slave cabins smelled when the wind blew through them and ruffled the herbs and flowers whose names I never bothered to learn. It was calming, and I needed a fuckload of calm. So I snuck into her tea canisters while she snuck into my bourbon decanters.
By the way, chamomile tea with bourbon? Don't try it. Trust me.
The beverage divide got deeper when it came to blood. I brilliantly insisted that Elena's weird doppelganger body could only tolerate blood straight from the vein.
"I'm not going to hurt people, Damon," she exclaimed for the fifty-eighth time.
"It doesn't hurt them," I said, also for the fifty-eighth time. "Some people even get their rocks off on it, and even if they don't, they won't remember," I said.
"But I will," Elena said, all sad brown eyes and quivering lower lip. I probably would've caved if I'd believed there was any other option but warm, real hemoglobin straight from a jugular.
I switched tactics instead. "You will. And you'll love it. It's like having sex while drinking champagne and eating a really great hamburger all at the same time." I paused, trying to imagine the mechanics of that. "That's a terrible analogy. Scratch that. It's more like-"
"I don't want to hear about it, Damon. Stefan lived for more than a hundred years on animal blood, and he was-"
"A psychotic killer who ripped people apart. I think that's slightly worse than giving someone a few days of anemia. You've just got to get over it and eat somebody," I said. I'd run out of patience when it came to teaching Elena that the sky was blue, the grass was green, and yes, vampires eat people.
"No, you need to learn that not everyone belongs to you. Drinking from a blood bag for a few days wouldn't kill you," she said, right before she flounced off to channel her inner Pocahontas with Stefan.
It sounds stupid, I know, but I did start drinking exclusively from blood bags. I told myself it was because I'd been so busy with Elena—you know, bringing her fresh clothes after she puked all over herself and keeping her from being murdered by psychopaths with C4. But deep down, in that part of myself I ignore whenever possible, I knew it was something different. It just felt wrong to go after those poor saps. What right did I have to snatch, feed, erase? Wasn't that taking away their choice, like Stefan had done to me all those years ago?
I drank more tea. I drank more cold, unsatisfying bagged blood. I lied to myself about why.
After a few days, I went back to the vein. She did, too. Just as I predicted, she loved it. I stupidly assumed it was because she was a vampire, and vampire plus blood equals good times. Seeing her stained with blood, dancing through a roomful of people who were all her potential victims, not worrying about who they were or whether she should kiss their boo-boos and make them feel better, was sheer ecstasy for me. She looked happy. She looked free.
Isn't life fucking funny?
The sire bond continued to spool out in ways big and small. She killed a man on my say-so; I didn't kill various assorted people for her. She took to wearing more black, including this one button down shirt where the first button was just above her bra so that her tits were served up on a silver platter, while I took to wearing that blue she said matched my eyes, even though it was two shades darker than my eyes and I thought it made me look soft. Weak.
All of the bullshit came to a head the night of Miss Mystic Falls. Only appropriate, since that's where I realized, to my shock and horror, that I loved her. I loved this child who looked exactly like Katherine and who, oh yeah, thought I was the biggest dick in a five-state area and who was madly in love with my brother. I sure know how to pick 'em.
Sure, she liked the dress I liked for that girl (what was her name, anyway?), but I don't care about that. What I did—what I do care about—is the way she came up to me after, dressed in black, and told me, softly, that I was what had come between her and Stefan. That it was all my fault. Only this time, it wasn't an accusation. It was...an apology, a promise, an impossible hope.
That night, we danced. My favorite thing (okay, second favorite thing) in the world, with my favorite girl. That would have been enough. Already my shriveled, blackened heart wanted to explode from sheer joy just because she chose to dance with me, touch me, be with me. There was no threat that night, no reason for her to look to me for comfort. It was just us reliving a memory and creating a new one.
But it didn't end there. We...the English language really sucks at words for sex. We've got lots of them (ask me to list them sometime when you've got a few hours), but nothing really describes what happens when two people who think they're in love just collide. Bodies and hearts and minds and all that other bullshit just slam together until you can't tell where one person ends and the other begins.
That's what's going to haunt me. For as long as I live, I'll never get over the fact that our collision was fake. Not just that her feelings weren't real—though that was awful enough. No, the cherry on the shit sundae was that it was just as fake for me. Of course I loved her, but I'd been manipulated by the sire bond as surely as she had, jumping into bed with her while she still smelled faintly of Stefan.
I will always be pissed that I couldn't love her just as myself, that the magical mumbo-jumbo of the sire bond made that night much more and so, so much less than it should have been. I was just as much of a puppet as she was. But that night and the morning that followed? I was happy. I was loved.
Until the phone rang.
"I don't have to hurt people anymore!" Elena threw her arms around me, which was impressive since I was shrinking, shrinking until I was about two inches tall.
Every second since she'd turned, I'd been manipulating Elena, making her into something that wasn't her, that wasn't the girl I loved. This fucking sire bond was robbing me of the woman I wanted by giving me the woman it thought I wanted.
All along, she just wanted not to hurt people. I clearly don't subscribe to that school of thought, but she does. Did. It's complicated. So even while she was one hundred percent justified killing Connor and munching on Matt, those things should be her call. It's one thing not to listen to the idiotic girl who wants to drown; it's another to force her to think she never wanted to drown at all.
"Damon?" Elena asked, confused about why I wasn't jumping up and down in glee like she was. "What's wrong? You should be happy right now."
A smile forced its way across my face. It felt like it had been stapled on. Something inside of me stirred sullenly, some little germ of grudging happiness. This was what she wanted, after all. Now that I knew she was sired to me, I could avoid it. I could—would have to—avoid her. "Nothing. I'm happy. Not nearly as happy as Donovan's going to be, though."
She pulled away, brow furrowing in a gesture that was way too Stefan-like for my tastes. "No, something's wrong."
"Drop it. You need to finish your lunch and get back to class. I'll come by your place tonight, okay?" I turned to leave, to figure out what the hell my game plan was going to be. Skip town, I guess. Should I tell her? No. I should just leave so she wouldn't have to deal with the fact that she slept with me against her will, that we fucked in seven positions that would make a yogini blush and it was all because of some weird vampire blood quirk.
"I'm not going to drop it. Tell me what's wrong—don't walk away!" she commanded.
I had one foot over the threshold of the empty classroom, but I stopped. There wasn't a physical force preventing me from leaving, but suddenly I needed to stay and tell her everything. I needed her to know why I was so confused and pissed off and that it wasn't her fault, it was all mine, every second of it, except-
"Elena, I'm going to tell you everything," I said through gritted teeth, stifling the urge to tell her every single thing that was wrong in my life at that second. We didn't have time for that; the list was too long. "But first, order me to do something. Anything. Jump on one foot, do a cartwheel, something."
"Damon, you're scaring me. Is this Klaus? Or Rebekah? Did they compel you?" Elena stepped forward, peering into my eyes like she could see the compulsion lurking there.
"No. It's—well, it's kinda like that, but will you just do it? I would really, really like it if you would tell me to do something," I said, immediately biting my tongue to stop myself from babbling out the one word that would change everything.
"Fine, okay. Just...I don't know, take your shirt off."
Great. The one time in my life that nudity wouldn't be welcomed. But I was fine. There was none of that pathetic, puppy-dog need to do what she said. "Okay. I was wrong." We were still fucked, but at least we hadn't broken new and weird ground in vampire-on-vampire biology.
She folded her arms over her chest and gave the patented Elena Gilbert half-pout, half-scowl. "Good. Glad you had fun playing Simon Says. Now will you tell me what's going on?"
A hundred lies danced through my mind, followed by a thousand smartass remarks. But all of them seemed wrong. I couldn't tell her the whole truth—I never told her that—but I could at least tell her part of it. "Just trying to figure out why you couldn't drink the bagged stuff in the first place. Besides that fact that it's cold and gross, that is."
"And what did that have to do with me ordering you to do something?" she asked, eying me skeptically.
This time, the lie came easily. "Sometimes I like it when you order me around," I said, waggling my eyebrows for all they were worth.
She gave an exasperated sigh, but she was smiling. "If you're going to scare me like that, you really should take your shirt off. As a consolation prize." She tugged at the hem of the deep blue t-shirt. "Go ahead. Take it off."
I grinned and covered her hand with my own, starting to give her the strip tease she'd earned. Nevermind what I had to do, nevermind that this would be the last time I'd ever see her again. I could have one last, perfect moment with her. No heavy goodbyes, no lingering looks, just fun with the girl who knew how to laugh. All she wanted was for me to take my shirt off. I could give her that, and besides, I wanted to-
No. No I didn't. But she wanted me to, so I did. Not in the way she wanted me too, though: I ripped the t-shirt over my head and as soon as it was clear, I jammed it back on, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process.
My hands shook. My head buzzed. I'd been compelled more times than I could count, but this was worse than any of them. I'd believed it was my idea, believed it was really something I wanted to do, just because she wanted me to do it. And I almost hadn't realized it at all.
"Something is really wrong with you," Elena said. "What-"
"You're sired to me," I said. "And fuck if I'm not sired to you, too."